[PARLIAMENT] REPORT FROM THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON STEAM ENGINES AND FURNACES,

PARLIAMENT REPORT FROM THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON STEAM ENGINES AND FURNACES,

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First Edition, 24pp., with 9 superb engraved plates, mostly extending, folio, recently bound in cloth with paper label on front cover, British Parliamentary Paper HC574, an excellent copy, London: House of Commons, 1819. *This is the very earliest scientific investigation of air pollution and the first Parliamentary Report on the subject. The Committee was appointed "to inquire how far it may be practicable to compel Persons using Steam Engines and Furnaces in their different Works, to erect them in a manner less prejudicial to Public health and Public comfort… [and] they confidently hope that the Nuisance so universally and so justly complained of, may at least be considerably diminished if not altogether removed." The Committee examined the inconvenience to the public from the great quantity of smoke discharged by the chimneys of coal-fired steam-engine furnaces and considered proposals for furnace improvements, with plans how this might be achieved. Witnesses describe the great increase in air-pollution; one such stating: "I am not aware of a more-unhealthy dwelling than one full of smoky chimnies; and I consider those nuisances in a large town in the same view as a smoky chimney to a dwelling… They appear to me to be daily increasing; in the town of Liverpool I may say they have altogether appeared in the last twenty years, as at that time any person standing on the hill in Toxteth Park could see over the town, the ships coming in round the Black Rock, but now the mouth of the harbour can scarcely be seen during the week…" The understanding of the chemical constituents of smoke was, at this stage, limited to its visual effects and densities. The very impressive engraved plates in this Report are largely on various mechanisms to suppress the visual smoke, mainly by heating it further (e.g. Smoke Consuming Furnace; Mechanical Smoke Burner) which actually required more coal to be used - thus, though reducing visual smoke, entirely defeating its objective for cleaner air. "At the time of the first Parliamentary report on steam engines in 1819, England had just emerged from a period of spectacular growth. The owners of mills and warehouses and the speculators in land had accumulated great wealth. By 1816 the population numbered twelve million; it had almost doubled since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Many people had moved from the country to the centres of the new industrial development, a movement that did not take place in an orderly way. Unregulated private enterprise had been covering the green fields with mile upon mile of squalid back-to-back cottages. The coal smoke of the multitude of steam engines spread layers of soot over the horizon; there was no authority to prevent nuisances. And there were thousands of people who lived underground in cellars describe temporary observers as nurseries of diseases. In addition, depressions of 1816 and 1819 made the need for reform urgent. - see: Ann Beck; Some Aspects of the History of Anti-Pollution Legislation in England, 1819-1954, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, October 1959, Vol. 14, No. 4 (October 1959), pp. 476ff., Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 25453

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Titel: [PARLIAMENT] REPORT FROM THE SELECT ...