Cottage building, or, Hints for improving the dwellings of the working classes and the labouring poor / by C. Bruce Allen ; with notes and additions by John Weale and other authors.

  • Allen, C. Bruce (Charles Bruce)
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cottage building, or, Hints for improving the dwellings of the working classes and the labouring poor / by C. Bruce Allen ; with notes and additions by John Weale and other authors. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    for ventilating the main sewers of a town, but none apparently with perfect success.* If any mode were adopted of thoroughly cleansing and cooling all the drains and sewers, the ventilation of the main sewers would be sufficient; and this might be readily effected by means of a high shaft or chimney, equal in superficial capacity to the opening of the sewer, a powerful draught being induced by means of a steam-jet or otherwise : the fresh air to be supplied through gratings at the head of the sewer, to insure a complete circulation; the gully shoots in this case being of course trapped. As before remarked, the air of a cottage or other house can never he kept pure unless the hell and water traps act per- fectly, which they seldom or ever do as at present constructed; for the bells of the traps in common use for sinks and other places are usually left loose for the convenience of cleaning them, as various matters find their way into the trap, and the escape becomes choked; and unless the bell is imme- diately replaced after the foreign matter is removed, the trap becomes of course useless. To remedy this defect, the bell is sometimes soldered down; when the trap, after a time, becomes filled up, and the bell is then forcibly removed and laid aside. A simple apparatus for cleansing the traps when the bells are soldered down, has been contrived by Mr. Hoskiug, and de- scribed by him, which would he perfectly effective if its careful * It lias been said, that “ among the many interesting objects of practi- cal science to he seen in London, there is none perhaps more striking than the mode of ventilating the main sewers; which is effected in the follow- ing simple and ingenious manner: open iron gratings are placed at certain distances along the line of the main sewers, so that the gases generated in them are simply conducted through these openings into the street itself.”—[This is a nuisance, and often pestilential to the house imme- diately contiguous. The ventilation should he effected by means of an iron column run up the wall of the adjacent house, above the chimney top, and trapping the iron gratings, as in the case of interior drain, ing.—J. W.]