Part 14

It is obvious that if only one of the flues be in use, it would moderately warm those next to it; and if the whole of the flues of a building were constructed on this plan, and two or three were in use, such a power would be obtained as would effectually ventilate every room; the action would be continuous and imperceptible, and a fire could be lighted in any one without the risk of return smoke from a cold or damp flue.

Thus the heat now wasted in the atmosphere by the action of the common flue, would be partly retained and turned to use, and the draught of the flue very much improved.

This tubing could be readily introduced into either old or new buildings, as the introduction does not involve taking down more than twelve feet of the brickwork, measuring from the top of the coping. The tubes could never become sufficiently heated to be dangerous, and less brickwork would be required.

They might be made either of zinc or earthenware; cast-iron would be objectionable on account of its weight. It will be seen that they admit a better mode of sweeping than that now practised, and they could easily have some kind of capping to prevent down-draughts.

These “stack flues” should commence from the attic or upper storey of a building, at about six feet from the floor; sweeping doors should be placed beneath them, so as to give the sweep command of the flue beneath as well as above.

Each flue should be composed of three separate forms of tubing, by which the various directions and turns necessary for the construction might be obtained.

Fig. 10 gives the representation of the three forms; 1, is the first; this is placed directly over the brick

flue, and gathers it up to a size having an internal dimension of 6 + 4½. It is 21 inches in height. 2, the second piece, is on a curve; the top and bottom lines, if carried on, would form an angle of 45°; it is about 18 inches in height, and internal size 6 + 4½. The third, 3, is a straight piece, internal size 6 + 4½, the lengths various. Fig. 11 gives a plan of four flues and an elevation of the commencement of two. The sweeping doors are shown below. The flue without a door is the ventilating flue for the basement. The ease with which this tubing can be grouped is shown in fig. 12. The stack consists of five flues; the tube, 2, connects them together below, and

separates them above. The stack above the roof is 4 feet 9 inches in length.

Fig. 13 shows, in the upper plan, how the flue wall could be reduced in thickness, made a brick and a half only, with a two-brick block at each end; it contains coupled and tripled sets of tubes.

The middle plan shows nine flues grouped together, the centre being that belonging to the kitchen. The last plan shows a group of six in a two-and-a-half-brick wall; by the side of this are two flues of the common construction, 14 inches by 9, made of this

size to enable a boy to get up to the top and place his head out of the chimney-pot.

The tube 1, fig. 12, can have its position reversed, as shown in fig. 14; six flues can thus be grouped together, as shown in the third plan, fig. 13. The elevation of this stack is given in fig. 15.

For a covering to these tubes figs. 16 to 20 show ornamental pots and their sections. The only merit

in these may be that they are of a more ornamental character than any that have ever been introduced; they are formed of zinc, supported by a stout dwarf iron railing. The intention is to permit the smoke to escape in any direction, either upwards, sideways, or downwards, sheltering it as far as possible from any action of the wind, and rendering of little consequence whether the stack is high, low, unsheltered or

otherwise. If any sudden gust of wind take place and the smoke be driven back, the capping provides larger outlets for its escape than the small aperture of the flue itself; in other words, it is easier for the smoke to pass in any direction rather than return down the flue.

The stack flues are only, in fact, tall-boys boxed up and not put out in the cold, and it is presumed they would be sufficiently powerful, from their warmth, to ensure a good passing off of the smoke, and secure ventilation to the building.

A forced ventilation to our dwellings, in ever so slight a degree, is a matter of importance. By the proper construction of these proposed stack flues it is presumed that any amount of ventilating power, self-acting and continuous, could be obtained. Their introduction alone would be beneficial; combined with the flue pedestal, to be described, the tubes could be led into one general upward shaft; by either plan we should have some command over the smoke, while the roofs of our buildings might be made ornamental and picturesque. It would be a treatment of bituminous coal alike artistic and novel, surprising to foreigners and creditable to ourselves.

It remains to show how the open character of the flue could be taken away (this forms its chief evil), and how a chimney-stack may be formed without chimney-pots. The late Lord Palmerston, when Home Secretary, proposed the abolition of chimney-stacks, and the use of only one chimney-stalk for each separate dwelling. In 1856, a commission was appointed to inquire into the best modes of warming and ventilating the apartments of dwelling-houses and barracks. Their report, given to the General Board of Health, was published in 1857, and it afforded a section illustrating “the principle on which it was proposed to construct dwelling-houses.” There was only to be

one flue, and this of metal 10 inches in diameter, enclosed in a large brick flue, which was to serve for ventilation. In the metal flue were to be inserted the flues of the several fireplaces; these were placed back to back, and if the register doors of the stoves were open, a person in one room might both see and converse with another in the next; the music of a pianoforte in one room could be heard in them all; this construction was taken up through four storeys, there being eight fireplaces. For one fireplace alone it would have been perfect, but the smoke from the two kitchen fires would have been sufficient to have choked

the flue and caused the smoke to enter into the whole of the eight rooms.

The chimney-stack might possibly be lowered, and it certainly could be constructed without chimney-pots, but each separate flue must have its own outlet. A design for this, one that should take away the open character of the flue, and fit the stack, possibly for the Mansard roof, is here given.

In fig. 21, _a_ _a_ are the flues, delivering their smoke into a large ventilating flue, _b_. The warm smoke would induce a current of air to enter at _c_: any current will have a tendency to draw another with it, so that the smoke leaving the flues _c_ _c_ would be taken out at _d_ by the current of air at _c_.

This is the principle upon which all the best ventilating chimney-pots, tall-boys, and cowls are made, and it is a very sure one. The jet of steam in the funnel of the locomotive, drawing the smoke from the fire, and creating a draught, is adopted on the same principle.

In scientific language, the established law both of pneumatics and hydraulics is that when two currents of fluid matter passing in the same direction, but in separate channels, arrive at any point of confluence, the stronger current draws the other along in its course, and with a considerable portion of its own velocity. Thus the force of the wind, which checks in other instances the action of a chimney-draught, is made to produce a stronger draught, exactly in proportion to the violence with which it blows.

Returning to fig. 21, a current of air, instead of coming in at the opening _c_, might come in at _d_. It would then have a tendency to blow down the flues _a_ _a_: to prevent this, the opening _d_ could be closed, and an upright stalk placed at _e_,--this should have a downward shaft, a place for soot, and a sweeping door.

There is still another mode of treatment; fig. 22 represents the flues grouped, each with a separate ventilating flue, the smoke delivered being at the side of each.

The stack might be covered with zinc in the ornamental style with which that metal is now treated.

It is probable that if a stack on this principle was placed parallel to the side of one of these Mansard roofs, it would be secure from the ill-effects of any wind returning against it. The author will not vouch for its success, but it is offered here to the attention of architects and builders as an experiment worthy of trial.

It has been affirmed that the smoke of towns, however disagreeable it may be to the inhabitants, neutralizes the poisonous effect of the gases caused by sewers, &c. If it was possible wholly to remove carbon evolved by smoke, our towns would almost be uninhabitable, and they represent that any scheme for getting rid of smoke must be combined with one for getting rid of the exhalations from sewers at the same time. If the two evils were brought together, they would neutralize each other, and both could then be got rid of at one operation. The best scheme for this is a matter of important consideration, but few have been proposed.

It may be asked, what has a work on Picturesque Architecture to do with either smoke or sewer gases? The author in reply considers that buildings never will look picturesque while they are covered with great patches of soot. An eminent sculptor once affirmed that the statues of London were improved by their soot covering, because it made them stand boldly out against the sky. But those beautiful decorated smoke towers which stand on the roof of the Houses of Parliament, and which are as black as Erebus, look anything but pleasing, standing amidst the whiter front of the rest of the building. Besides, tall-boys are beginning to make their appearance on the roof under the Victoria tower, and these certainly form no part of the architecture, but appear monstrously ugly; consequently smoke and its abolition are clearly questions to be considered in relation to Picturesque Architecture.

A plan for removing smoke from the atmosphere of towns, and at the same time ventilating buildings and sewers, was proposed in 1849 by Mr. Flockton, surveyor to the town trustees of Sheffield,[F] a town as much begrimed with sooty smoke, only in a smaller way, as the Metropolis.

The proposal was, that under the footways along the side of every street and lane, flues should be constructed of sufficient capacity to carry off all the smoke and other atmospheric impurities, these flues all converging, upon a general plan, to tall shafts or chimneys at some distance from the town, and supplied with furnaces. These, when the fires were once ignited, would give a fire produced by the combustion of the inflammable gases accompanying the smoke, and which would burn spontaneously in a similar manner to the combustion of foul air from old shafts connected with coal mines. The combustion might be assisted by jets of coal gas, in a fire of coke.

In very large towns it would be necessary, Mr. Flockton added, to divide the whole into districts, and to erect towers in the centre of each, to which all the flues should converge. He published a plate, showing two large dwelling-houses, with a street between, the common sewer in the middle of the carriage way, and the smoke flues on each side under the footpaths, also showing the connexion between the sewer and flue. The alteration proposed to houses already erected consisted in converting ascending into descending flues; turning the smoke from the chimney-top into the latter, and from thence into the street flue. This operation would have necessitated the pulling down and rebuilding of the flue walls. The street smoke flues, in order to carry off the smoke from a few thousand chimneys, would require to have been made of a size even larger than the sewer itself. Provision must have been made for clearing out the soot, for the smoke would have been cooled and the soot would accumulate in large quantities in them.

The same scheme, with similar constructions, was proposed by a foreign gentleman, who took out a patent for it in 1850 (No. 13,061). His plan was a very grand one; he did not propose alterations in existing buildings, but pulled them down and gave designs for a new city.

A more practical plan was proposed about 1851 by Mr. Devey, a surveyor of Furnival’s Inn. A model of his invention was in the Great Exhibition of 1851, and it is described and an engraving given of it in the illustrated volumes published by the Royal Exhibition Commissioners at the close of the Exhibition. The model is now in the Museum at South Kensington. Mr. Devey’s plan was to make only one descending flue to each building, to which the flues at the top could be either connected or not, at pleasure; the descending flue was carried to the sewer in the middle of the street, and the action of this was to be assisted by the heat of the kitchen fire. He says, “The smoke would be drawn down by the current produced by exhaustion in the sewer, the action being assisted by the kitchen fire.” Mr. Devey did not propose to have furnace shafts, but depended entirely upon the sewer acting as an exhaust.

In this scheme the objections were, that one descending flue was not sufficient to carry off the smoke from several chimneys, and the sewer certainly would not act as an exhaust without its being connected with upright furnaces. Our sewers generally have ventilating openings which permit their odours to ascend into our streets. Soot would no doubt neutralize these odours--this, a paper in a late _Quarterly Review_ (April, 1866) admits. First, speaking of the sewer gases, the reviewer says: “These offensive gases have often engendered formidable diseases, and have, in several instances of late, been clearly shown to have caused the outbreak both of typhoid fever and cholera.” Of this the author has had proof during the outbreak of cholera in London in 1849. He was superintending the construction of a mass of buildings in one of the worst dwelling districts in London. This builder, who had just finished the erection of Harrington House, a description of which is given in this volume, died the first night of the outbreak in the greatest agony; he was a strong robust man; from one to three deaths took place in every house in the locality; a black flag was put up in the streets, and the foul fiend reigned for a while supreme. A large mass of the worst buildings have been cleared away, and model lodging-houses erected, but a considerable portion of the rotten old structures remain, the sewers are untouched, and the visitation of the cholera forgotten.

The _Quarterly Review_ says there is no reason why ordinary sewers should not be made to serve the double purpose of carrying off smoke and sewage at the same time, provided they were connected here and there with high shafts rendered powerfully expansive by furnaces; and adds, “sewage would be improved for agricultural purposes by admixture with soot, which is an excellent manure, and the noxious qualities of the sewer gases would be destroyed.” Whether soot would increase the value of sewage or decrease it, is a question for chemists to decide; a generally increasing opinion is, that our method of using sewage by liquefaction and sending it away, is a mistake, and renders it quite worthless, and that the system of dry earth-closets is more conformable to Nature’s laws.

The subject was taken up in 1857 by Mr. Peter Spence, of Manchester, a large alum manufacturer.[G] This gentleman states that the “blacks,” the horror of the Londoner, are guiltless of any deleterious effect to human health, as carbon is one of the most anti-putrescent of bodies, and while floating in the atmosphere over everything, arrest and destroy noxious and miasmatic vapours. Perfect freedom from smoke would, if accomplished, only increase the evil arising from the purely gaseous results of combustion. He proposed a system of _atmospheric_ or _gaseous sewage_, and the complete removal of all their gases to a safe distance from our towns. He would combine this gaseous sewage in such a form with town drainage as would bring all the liquid sewage into contact with the gases from our furnaces and house fires, the liquid sewage being kept from all surface drainage. The same liquid and fœtid mass of sewage he would concentrate in an innoxious form, to be converted, in a convenient place, where it might with perfect safety be manufactured into manure more valuable than the richest guano.

For effecting this all the gases from our coal combustion would have to be conveyed along the same tunnel with the sewage to centralizing conduits converging to a point, where an immense chimney, 600 ft. high, should be erected, to discharge these gases into the atmosphere, the ascensive power being obtained either from the retained heat of the gases, which would probably be found quite sufficient, or if not, artificial heat could then be applied to effect the object. The chimney should be of the internal diameter of 100 ft. at the top, and 140 ft. external diameter at the bottom. This would take the smoke from 500 chimneys and every particle of foul emanation from the sewer, and every leak or opening to the upward air from these sewers would not then emit foul gases, but draw in fresh air with a pressure or suction of three and a half pounds per foot, and with a velocity of 40 feet per second. This gentleman says: “It is idle to talk of trapping, and thus confining gases evolved under ground; exit they must and will have, and when you imagine you have secured them in one place, you will find them pouring out in another.” He makes this plain by an illustration. He took an old-fashioned detached house; after entering into possession he found frequently very disagreeable smells, especially after rain, a change of wind, or a fall of the barometer; it may be remarked here that it was not necessary to take an old-fashioned house to find out this; in more modern built houses in London, after a fall in the barometer or rain, such a thing is repeatedly occurring. Mr. Spence, to cure the evil in his old mansion, exhausted all the remedies which the philosophy of London schemes acknowledges; he trapped all the exits from the sewer with the most approved patent girds; all slopstone pipes were cut and water-luted. But this was of no use, the smell came through the very walls and floors, and one bedroom on the first floor, which showed no connexion with the sewer, was quite uninhabitable. He adopted a plan which succeeded: a branch from the main sewer was brought right under the kitchen grate, from that a pipe of cast iron, four inches in diameter, was carried up through the brickwork, and the open top projected into the chimney a yard and a half behind the kitchen fire, above the fire. When this fire was again lighted, in a few hours the house was perfectly sweet, and the distant bedroom, uninhabitable before, has been slept in ever since. When this nuisance occurs in a London house the only remedy is to open the doors and windows to get rid of it, as we are not allowed to meddle with the sewers. Disagreeable effluvia in dwellings often occur, and baffle every endeavour to trace from where they proceed; in every case it is from choked-up drains or the sewer, and the decomposition of animal and vegetable matter therein retained.

As for Mr. Spence’s scheme, its grandeur almost stops its execution. It is well known that in all large manufactories, and in gas works, a tall chimney serves to draw out the smoke from the numerous fires, and it forms a smoke-outlet for them all. In most of these places the fuel is used up so completely that it is only the gases of combustion that are drawn away. Mr. Spence’s scheme has been successfully tried in its application to private residences, and also on a large scale to the new Assize Courts in Manchester. It was adopted by one of the architects in the competitive designs for the New Law Courts in London.

If these tall shafts and furnaces were applied in London, it may be questioned whether the smoke in cooling would not deposit the soot in the sewer, and this must be removed, if not run off by water. The flues connecting the house fires with the sewer would be partly horizontal, and these would certainly fill with soot, and no machines we have at present in use could clean out these flues from above. The operation must be performed from within the sewer, and then these flues being unsupplied with drain-eyes at their entrance to the sewer, would form so many open channels for the passage of the sewer gases into the houses. This would be the case in a very great degree where there were no fires in the stoves and their register doors were open. It would require an immense consumption of fuel in the high stalks to cause a current to prevent it, and the furnaces must be close together to lessen the cooling effects of cold currents of air from flues not in use.

As to the mere ventilation of the sewer itself, it could easily be effected by single drain pipes 6 inches in diameter, placed at intervals, from the sewer to the ash-pit of any neighbouring furnace. It would be probably to the advantage of the furnace itself, as even the tall stalks must sometimes make black smoke. A legislative enactment should require their owners to let them perform this service. It might require strong furnaces and plenty of them to effect it. A suggestion for getting rid of that “monster nuisance, London smoke” was made known in the _Builder_ about 1859, by Messrs. Bruce Neil. It is thus described: “The plan consists in placing small tanks containing water over the chimney (the chimney-pots being fixed inside the tanks, and made of a spiral and bent form). The chill of the water gradually condenses the smoke, which becomes decomposed and destroyed, being precipitated at the bottom of the tank in the form of mineral tar. The water is turned on and off daily. It will be here observed that in the event of a fire in the chimney the flames cannot spread, as they are immediately quenched by the water in the tank. According to Mr. Bruce Neil’s calculation, the smoke of 80 tons of coal, if collected, will yield upwards of 28 barrels of tar, of 2½ cwt. each. He proposes that the Legislature, or the Society of Arts, should offer a premium to the person who will undertake to rid us of this monster nuisance and convert the smoke into tar, so as to make it applicable to commercial purposes. In the adoption of the above plan a slight alteration in the mode of ventilating our apartments is all that is required, he tells us.

As to the possibility of converting smoke into tar by such means as are above described, some doubts might be expressed if it could really be done; the remedy would be worse even than the disease, every household using yearly 20 tons of coal would have in that time to remove 7 barrels or 17½ cwt. of tar from their roof. The _Builder_, in publishing this suggestion, did not give any diagram or sketch showing how the process was to be effected. Mr. Bruce Neil no doubt made one, as he speaks of the alteration required in the ventilation of our apartments; a drawing would at least have explained how the water was to collect the soot, and how it was to have access to the flue in case of its being on fire.