Abstract
BY means of a current of air passed through an ice closet or a closet otherwise reduced in temperature the air of living-rooms might be gauged to any temperature, but say 60° or 70° F. if we pleased. If the air were driven through a preliminary water chamber arranged on the principle of the hubble-bubble pipe, mosquitoes and other flying pests would be excluded absolutely. Imagine the comfort of sitting down to a meal whereat one's food should not be hidden by flying vermin, of reposing in a cool chamber wherein these intruders should be excluded absolutely. When I lay ill of fever in West Africa the atmosphere about me felt simply like the blast from a furnace. What an element of recovery, of possible health and physical wellbeing, would it not prove in hospitals when poor fellows languishing in disease should be surrounded by pure, cool, insectless air instead of air at a hundred degrees or even higher. People—some people—say doctors do not feel, but I say that a doctor's heart is rent with anguish when he enters a chamber wherein the air is pestilential, where the sores of wounded men are maggot-infested and the men themselves are eaten up with vermin. All this cooler air would prevent or tend to prevent. The festive hall, the school-room, the living-room, the barrack, the church, would all experience, the occupants regarded, commensurate relief. It would be just as available in ships as on shore. The Red Sea transit and the blazing oceans of the tropics need no longer be things of terror. In steamships a small percentage of steam power would suffice for driving the cool air current. Wind, water, hand, and steam power could also be rendered available. The vans employed to supply blast-furnaces should suffice for anything, but there is the winnowing van which horse or mule, indeed any animal, could work. Even the simple circular bellows would keep an apartment cool. In towns or in a contonment, a stationary engine with air-ducts leading to the different dwellings would satisfactorily replace apparatus adjusted to each separate house.
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MACCORMAC, H. Antihelios. Nature 28, 299 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/028299a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/028299a0
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