Lectures on Ventilation / Being a Course Delivered in the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia

by Lewis W. Leeds

You see, however, they shine very brightly, notwithstanding all the draught, but there, now, it is all closed up as snugly as the most fashionable church in town. See how quiet and peacefully they burn now.

Ah, there is one just gone to sleep. You must excuse him, he probably was up most of the night with a sick child. And there goes another. I think he must have been very busy for the last week settling up his last year's accounts. Just see, they are going to sleep so fast, I don't think we can pretend to give excuses for them all.

And, now, is not that a brilliant congregation to be preaching to? Everyone dead asleep excepting the preacher himself, and I suspect he feels stupid enough to go to sleep, but it would not look well; and he has to tax his energies so severely he will hardly get over it, so as to be good for anything for the balance of the week.

You may think this an exaggerated representation of the real facts. Do not deceive yourselves. A few months since I was requested by one of the congregation to visit a building within a few minutes' walk of this place, and see if there was not some defect in the ventilation. The gentleman stated to me that he sometimes attended the class-meeting, and would be glad to go oftener, but it was held in the basement story, and it was quite impossible for him to keep awake, as he had to get up and go out two or three times during the evening, to get a little fresh air, or he could not keep awake.

I examined it. The ceilings were low-only nine or ten feet;—then there were two old leaky portable furnaces, which were used as occasion required for heating the large room above, or the basement room when the class-meeting was held.

The only ventilation they had was to let off the surplus heat (if they had any, which was seldom) into the room above.

Now for fresh air. By a very careful and minute examination, I discovered a little pipe (I think it was about six inches in diameter) to each stove (both of which would not be over half as large as what I have to supply my own bedroom), for the supply of the fresh air for that whole congregation. Fresh air, did I say? Well, let us see where this fresh air comes from. The janitor, after taking us down and showing where he kept the ashes, wood, old benches, and all sorts of rubbish, was about going up, but said I, "Where is the part where you get the fresh air to the furnaces?" "Oh," he said, "he could not get to that, it was such a rough place, and there was a sewer or gutter (from the adjoining graveyard I suppose) running right across it." And from that place, too rough to be got at, with an open sewer running through, and too foul to go into, was where they got the fresh air (!) from for the whole of that congregation to breathe.

And do you suppose this is an exception? Let me tell you. During the first year of the late war I was called upon by the Sanitary Commission to examine the hospitals in Washington City with reference to their ventilation. A large number of the churches in that city were used for hospital purposes, and many of them were heated by hot-air furnaces, and in not one single instance had they fresh air boxes to them, neither had they any means for carrying off the foul air. The furnaces were generally placed in a hole excavated under the main part of the building, and all the ground around them left exposed, and the air was sucked in from the fermenting, decaying vegetable mould under the building. And this place around the furnace was the place where all the filth and old rubbish was thrown to get it out of the way, and it was thoroughly out of the way too, for the surgeon in charge or any inspector never got there to see it. In some cases I found this space around the furnace used as the dead house!

Did I say there was no attempt in any of those buildings for systematic ventilation? I ought to have made one exception.

I called one morning about ten o'clock at one of the finest new churches, which was then being occupied as a hospital, and asked for the surgeon in charge. He had not arrived. (They did not often venture in before eleven o'clock, the wards became so foul during the night it took till that time, with the windows up, to get them fit for the surgeon in charge to venture in.) I inquired of the wardmaster how the building was ventilated. "Oh, very well—very well, indeed—they had good ventilation," pointing up to a large, splendid ventilator in the ceiling. "Do you keep that always open?" I asked. "Oh, certainly," he replied. But I always have a great suspicion of those ceiling ventilators, as they are generally shut. So I walked around the ward, and when under it asked him again if he thought that was open. A smile came over his face as he discovered, for the first time, it was a handsome fresco painting on the solid wall. And this was the only practical systematic attempt at any ventilation in any of the church buildings used as hospitals in all Washington.