Smoke is Waste

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 132, 7 June 1939, Page 4

Smoke is Waste

WHAT SCIENCE CAN DO Mankind is the most wasteful of animals. He has only just begun to realise how much he does waste. From a water in a dry country, allowed to reach the sea at a river's mouth is waste, unless it is fully used to carry ships; for it should be deflected over arid lands and be used to make deserts blossom. Every, noise made by traffic, or machinery, is waste, because it is the symptom of some useless strain on some useful material. Every grain of mud washed into a river is waste, and so serious a waste that fertile continents are in the act of becoming deserts. And all smoke is waste. Smoke is the raw material out of which medicines, antiseptics, anaesthetics, aspirin, creosote, paints, varnishes, tar, explosives, fertilisers, dyes, and benzo-e might have been made. Every time you see a smoking chimney you can say with accuracy: There go to waste a dozen things for which humanity has a use. And every time you find yourself in the smoke of a city you can say something even more depressing: lam breathing into my lungs several kind of poison especially tar and acid sulphur gases. Sir Frank Baines, who was once H.M. Director of Works, estimated that in 25 years about £60,000,00 damage had been done to England’s buildings by smoke alone. If that is what happens to stonework, it is not surprising that the human lungs are corroded and rotted by smoke. What is the remedy! The answer is scientific heating instead of the picturesque barbarism of the good old coal fire. Soft coal should never be burned in a domestic grate because, however pretty it may look, an open fire only uses 15 per cent, of the heat, and lets the rest out into the atmosphere and down your neighbours's throat in the form of poison. Instead of this coal should be converted at the pit into all the valuable substances which can be manufactured out of it. This could be done in a way ta eliminate mueh of the horrible torture which coal mining requires every miner to be subjected to in the course of his day's work. Anyone who knows the danger and the discomfort of a miners craft will recoil in horror at the idea of the wealth that he has created by his work going up tho chimney and polluting the earth. When w r e think of all the valuable chemicals hidden in a scuttle of coals we should not forget three liquids of a bio-chemical nature hidden there—human bloqd, sweat, and tears. The whole progress of coal from the seam to the scuttle is stained with these.

In Russia they are trying to do away with underground work. By burning the coal underground they convert itinto gas and oil—result, joiners do not have to descend into Ji®lJ, gmoke , does not make hell of big cities. In America- -they have shown that the work put into hand-digging of coal costs 150 times as much as the amount of work needed to produce the aamo quantity of usable energy in the form of electric current. In short, coal is wasted when burned, smoke or no smoke. It should be regarded as a vajjaable storehouse of chemicals rather thaa a gleans of heating houses. The smokeless gity o< the future will ■ *wii use a certain amount of coke afid anthracite, no doubt, but it will be warmed chiefly in other ways. Apart from electricity and gas, there is the possibility that whole towns will be centrally he&te£ with the waste steam fvom factories; Instead of pouring factory steam into the air it will be canalisetj. glong insulated pipes jftto our rooms. There are other ways in which the 1 smoke nuisance can be defeated. There . * r ® ftlrp&Qy bei&g tigs4 in America re * 1 versible heat engines which pump heat into tho -kouse in .wtetev and pump it out in summer. Such, engines cgm be mi* at less than: a quarter tfns cost of heating a house by fire pr furnace. According to Professor J. D. Bernal, lieatipg ig largely a quftntiVP- the materials used for building houses. At wa.ohoose ikese-#©. that they let the heat out. If we used proper insulating materials no heat would be required except that generated by the bodies of the inmates. In fact, ho says, sufficient heat is generated in this way to make it necessary to open tho window even in winter to let some of it out, if the house walls are properly inaulaWd. This, then, is likely to be the final

scientific revolution which will for evar banish smoke—first, proper heat-retain-ing material for house-building; second, wapte steam from factories or from a central steaming plant; third, when these peed supplementing, simple smokeless methods, such as gas stover laud electric stoves.