Baths and wash-houses for the labouring classes.

  • Baly, Price Prichard.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Baths and wash-houses for the labouring classes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    heated, and then through the vast number of small channels necessary for separate drying-chambers; the loss of heat consequent upon its traversing those channels, and the difficulty of heating air (a bad conductor of heat) without a great waste of fuel, as well as the impossibility of preventing waste of heat in cooling that air (expensively heated) during the short time occupied in its passage through the drying-chamber. It is obvious that whatever quantity of heated air escapes without absorbing the quantity of moisture due to its temperature, or without being reduced to the temperature of the water held in the clothes to be dried, is wasted. All the experiments tried by the Committee proved that, for the purposes of these establishments, this plan of drying was too slow and too expensive. The second plan failed from the all but impossibility of heating the air which was admitted, to one uniform temperature; and though, by a very minute subdivision of the current and its careful distribution over a very large extent of heating surface, this was accomplished, still the cost of fuel, and the impossibility of using all the caloric so given to the air, rendered this mode almost as objectionable as the first. Great difficulty was experienced in both cases in maintaining a temperature sufficiently high to ensure the rapid drying, and the perfect purification of the clothes; and the consumption of fuel was found to be the same, or very nearly so, during the whole period of the apparatus being at work, no matter how many or how few clothes were drying. Both these plans were based on the principle of using a current of heated air as the means of drying the linen, and of exposing the linen to that current throughout its passage from the inlet to the outlet of the chamber. The air had first to be heated by an expensive process, and then rapidly cooled; both conditions difficult to realise with such a bad con- ductor of heat. The information obtained during the course of these experiments enabled me to arrange a drying-chamber in which all these sources of expense and waste are very nearly avoided, and the separation of the linen is accomplished. The plan adopted, is to prevent the free influx of air into the drying- chamber ; to place the wet linen in such a position in relation to the
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