A Practical Treatise on Gas and Ventilation; With Special Relation to Illuminating, Heating and Cooking by Gas. Including Scientific Helps to Engine (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1856 edition. Excerpt: ... valediction. Whether our present efforts are to receive the sanction of scientific readers, directors, and other officers of gas corporations, or be by them shelved, is a matter in which we are willing to admit we are a little interested. We have performed a duty we conceived from our position to be a moral obligation due from us to the public, and have exhibited, we hope, an unselfish feeling toward the corporate bodies. Of this, however, we are quite assured--the glaring injuries sustained and being sustained in London and other English cities and towns by the public health, are alike, in amount and in as grave results, existing in and entailed upon Washington, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and in every city in which gas-mains are laid, gas made, and gas consumed, and this state of things must quickly lead to reformatory measures at any cost. We respectfully conclude by inserting the following extract of a letter copied from the Times, London, England, January 14,1854: "We now have had the experience of fifty years. We have competition, we have gas used for every thing, in quantities hardly imagined by the sanguine inventors. We have thousands of miles of gas-pipes, and almost as many jets as there are lungs in the metropolis. It is time we should ask whether the system is perfect. Is our gas as good as it might be? Have we duly availed ourselves of the means discovered for its purification? We may also ask, Whether so great a boon is not necessarily attended with some drawbacks? "Nobody can have seen the paving of our streets disturbed, as it all is disturbed once or twice a year, without perceiving with dismay that the whole subsoil of the metropolis is thoroughly saturated with some black, stinking ingredient, of a...