Domestic Heating

Abstract

LETTERS to NATURE have to be short, so every word should carry its full significance. I said in my letter in the issue of March 6 that the peculiar value in glowing coal fires “is either absent or very weak in radiation from anthracite stoves or gas and electric fires.” To a careful reader it would be obvious that I had tried the effects of radiation from a gas fire. Prof. Hill (April 3, p. 487) is incorrect in his assumption that I would have got “equally good effects from a glowing gas fire.” I did not get equally good effects from a glowing gas fire. On the contrary, I got markedly inferior effects. Even the best form of gas fire is positively irritating rather than healing to surfaces exposed to it.