Warming and Ventilation : Part 1

American Woman's Home
by Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe

(Page 37 of 43)

There is no department of science, as applied to practical matters, which has so often baffled experimenters as the healthy mode of warming and ventilating houses. The British nation spent over a million on the House of Parliament for this end and failed. Our own government has spent half a million on the Capitol, with worse failure; and now it is proposed to spend a million more. The reason is, that the old open fireplace has been supplanted by less expensive modes of heating, destructive to health; and science has but just begun experiments to secure a remedy for the evil.

The open fire warms the person, the walls, the floors and the furniture by radiation and these, together with the fire, warm the air by convection. For the air resting on the heated surfaces is warmed by convection, rises and gives place to cooler particles, causing a constant heating of its particles by movement. Therefore in a room with an open fire, the person is warmed in part by radiation from the fire and the surrounding walls and furniture and in part by the warm air surrounding the body.

In regard to the warmth of air, the thermometer is not an exact index of its temperature. For all bodies are constantly radiating their heat to cooler adjacent surfaces until all come to the same temperature. This being so, the thermometer is radiating its heat to walls and surrounding objects, in addition to what is subtracted by the air that surrounds it and therefore the air is really several degrees warmer than the thermometer indicates. A room at 70 degrees by the thermometer is usually filled with air five or more degrees warmer than this.

Now, the cold air is denser than warm and therefore contains more oxygen. Consequently, the cooler the air inspired, the larger the supply of oxygen and of the vitality and vigor which it imparts. therefore, the great problem for economy of health is to warm the person as much as possible by radiated heat and supply the lungs with cool air. For when we breathe air at from 16 to 20 degrees, we take double the amount of oxygen that we do when we inhale it at 80 to 90 degrees and consequently can do double the amount of muscle and brain work.

Warming by an open fire is nearest to the natural mode of the Creator, who heats the earth and its furniture by the great central fire of heaven and sends cool breezes for our lungs. But open fires involve great destruction of fuel and expenditure of money and in consequence economic methods have been introduced to the great destruction of health and life.

Of these methods, the most popular is that by which radiated heat is banished and all warmth is gained by introducing heated air. This is the method employed in our national Capitol, where both warming and ventilation are attempted by means of fans worked by steam, which force in the heated air. This is an expensive mode, used only for large establishments and its entire failure at our capitol will probably prevent in future any very extensive use of it.

But the most common mode of warming is by heated air introduced from a furnace. The chief objection to this is the loss of all radiated heat and the consequent necessity of breathing air which is debilitating both from its heat and also from being usually deprived of the requisite moisture provided by the Creator in all out-door air. Another objection is the fact that it is important to health to preserve an equal circulation of the blood and the greatest impediment to this is a mode of heating which keeps the head in warmer air than the feet. This is especially deleterious in an age and country where active brains are constantly drawing blood from the extremities to the head. All furnace-heated rooms have coldest air at the feet and warmest around the head. It is also rarely the case that furnace-heated houses have proper arrangements for carrying off the vitiated air.

There are some recent scientific discoveries that relate to impure air which may properly be introduced here. It is shown by the microscope that fermentation is a process which generates extremely minute plants, that gradually increase till the whole mass is pervaded by this vegetation. The microscope also has revealed the fact that, in certain diseases, these microscopic plants are generated in the blood and other fluids of the body, in a mode similar to the ordinary process of fermentation.

And, what is very curious, each of these peculiar diseases generates diverse kinds of plants. Therefore in the typhoid fever, the microscope reveals in the fluids of the patient a plant that resembles in form some kinds of seaweed. In chills and fever, the microscopic plant has another form and in small-pox still another. A work has recently been published in Europe, in which representations of these various microscopic plants generated in the fluids of the diseased persons are exhibited, enlarged several hundred times by the microscope. All diseases that exhibit these microscopic plants are classed together and are called Zymotic, from a Greek word signifying to ferment.

These zymotic diseases sometimes have a local origin, as in the case of ague caused by miasma of swamps; and then they are named endemic. In other cases, they are caused by personal contact with the diseased body or its clothing, as the itch or small-pox; or else by effluvia from the sick, as in measles. Such are called contagious or infectious. In other cases, diseases result from some unknown cause in the atmosphere and affect numbers of people at the same time, as in influenza or scarlet fever and these are called epidemics.

It is now regarded as probable that most of these diseases are generated by the microscopic plants which float in an impure or miasmatic atmosphere and are taken into the blood by breathing.

Recent scientific investigations in Great Britain and other countries prove that the power of resisting these diseases depends upon the purity of the air which has been habitually inspired. The human body gradually accommodates itself to unhealthy circumstances, so that people can live a long time in bad air. But the "reserve power" of the body, that is, the power of resisting disease, is under such circumstances gradually destroyed and then an epidemic easily sweeps away those therefore enfeebled. The plague of London, that destroyed thousands every day, came immediately after a long period of damp, warm days, when there was no wind to carry off the miasma therefore generated; while the people, by long breathing of bad air, were all prepared, from having sunk into a low vitality, to fall before the pestilence.

About the Author

Catharine Esther Beecher (1800 - 1878) was a noted educator, renowned for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of a kindergarten into children's education.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896) was a white American abolitionist and novelist, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin attacked the cruelty of slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential, even in Britain.