The Smoking Auto.

Progress, Volume VI, Issue 3, 2 January 1911, Page 498

The Smoking Auto.

The familiar injunction “no smoking!” is now to be extended to the, public streets in New York, in application to the odoriferous automobile. The smoke-filter, invented in France and described recently in these columns, has apparently not yet crossed the Atlantic. Says Engineering News (New York, October 6) in an editorial on the subject: “An automobile emitting, as it passes, a cloud of disagreeable smoke is a familiar sight to any city dweller. In New York City this nuisance has been recently prohibited by the Board of Health in an amendment to the Sanitary Code. But it appears that little, if any, relief has resulted. In fact, an appeal which has just been made to the health commission by a committee of the National Highways Protective Society has brought out the information that in the three months elapsed since the amendment went into force, not a single conviction, nor even an arrest, has been made on the strength of it. And this in spite of the alleged fact that there has been in this city no noticeable diminution in the density and frequency of smoke from automobiles.

"In the gasoline engine, which supplies the motive power of by far the majority of automobiles in present use, the emission of smoke results from the combustion of lubricating oil in the cylinder. This burning of lubricating oil is not an essential feature of the regular operation, and in fact it has a somewhat deleterious effect on the engine. It is, however, a thing not always to be easily avoided, especially in the case of a comparatively new engine, which may require more than the normal amount of lubrication until its first stiffness has been softened by wear.

"There are, fortunately, mechanical considerations, such as the waste of oil and the fouling of piston-rings and spark-plugs with soot, which make the. prevention of smoke of direct benefit to the automobile owner. For this reason, the percentage of automobiles that emit objectionable quantites of smoke is small.

"Just what relation automobile smoke has to the public health and why its regulation should be delegated to the health authorities we leave to our readers.