Gas Heating—A Healthful System.

Progress, Volume IV, Issue 7, 1 May 1909, Page 233

Gas Heating—A Healthful System.

Who has not heard of the objections to the usual gas stove? Who has not felt them from time to time with protest? Who has not desired to get something more comfortable, more cheerful, and less smelly? AH will be pleased to learn that this desire has now been fulfilled. During many years, about fifteen to be accurate, the improvement in gas lighting has been very great, a fact to which the good fight maintained by gas against electricity is mainly due. The scientific construction of the Welsbach Kern Burner is such that in actual practice the admixture of gas and air is exactly what is required by technical theory for complete combustion of gas without waste or by product. This end having been achieved, the application of the Welsbach Kern Burner to the science of gas heating became a natural step. The flame of this burner is extremely brilliant, and as there are no unburned products, the heat is purer considerably than under systems in which the conditions of combustion are less favourable. This pure heat is .applied in the Welsbach Kern Radiators to specially prepared perforated fireclay tubes, and the result is a bright red heat realising the universally admitted "need of a cheerful fire". Heat by Radiation is the ideal system of artificial heating, by which heat particles in encountering solid objects, impart their heat to them, and thus the heat of a radiating fire is communicated across space. The freshness or vitality of the air is in no way disturbed by the passage of the heat particles through it, therefore radiated heat is healthy heat, whereas the contrary method of heating produced by warming the air in contact with super-heated surface, has in the light of knowledge and experience come to be regarded to be as unhealthy as it is oppressive. For the Welsbach Kern Radiator three advantages are therefore claimed: namely correct admixture of gas with air, high heating efficiency, and the generation of nothing but radiated heat, the only really healthy form of heating. In actual practice these Radiators are furnished with patent gas regulators which ensure simplicity and convenience of working. Hence the collateral advantages of freedom from dirt, saving of labour, and the maintenance of any desired temperature. It is worth remembering that the Lancet which never allows anything good in the hygenic line to " escape its notice says of this invention many good things, this amongst the rest: "We doubt whether such an output of radiant heat has ever before been attained at so little cost, and so low an expenditure of gas."