Report to the honorable the Commissioners of Sewers of the City of London, upon the results of the experiment of applying charcoal to the sewer ventilators / by H. Letheby and W. Haywood.

  • Henry Letheby
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report to the honorable the Commissioners of Sewers of the City of London, upon the results of the experiment of applying charcoal to the sewer ventilators / by H. Letheby and W. Haywood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    19. Second. As to the duration of the powers of deodorization, we have hardly sufficient proof. 20. The charcoal appears to lose much of its power when saturated with water; and as the position in which the trays containing it are placed, is such, that leakage of water into them in times of rain is, to some extent, all but im- possible; and as moreover the atmosphere of the sewers is always very moist, the charcoal becomes so wet as to require removal, long before it has failed as a deodorizer. Upon an average the sieves have been re-charged about once in three months. Those which have been in very wet situa- tions have been re-filled much more frequently, and those in dry situations less. 21. If the situation of the ventilators could be so arranged as to keep the charcoal dry, we are of opinion that it would not require renewal more frequently than once in a year, perhaps not so often, but under existing circumstances many of them require to be changed not less often than once a month. Secure situations might, however, be obtained by enclosing the charcoal in the lower compartments of the lamp posts, and by other means which have been suggested in our previous reports, or by placing the ventilators against the sides of the houses, as in Philpot Lane. And here we may
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