HOW TO CLEAN OUR SKIES
" rpHE harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." The train of our malurban civilization approaches the long winter tunnel from which many of its occupants will never emerge to see the light of next spring. We have argued, protested, projected, procrastinated, but done nothing. It will be recorded that half a century passed, after the futile attempt of the otherwise great Public Health Act of 1875 to deal with our coal-smoke, and no new legislation was achieved. :There would seem, according to a recent official warning, to remain only the distressing hope that the truth about smoke abatement, to which the ordinary avenues of sense appear to be -blocked, may directly reach the political brain by the fall of fragments of the acid-rotten 'façade of the Houses of Parliament during tea on the terrace. That, and a promise from Mr. Neville Chamber- lain, are all the future offers us, and they will not save us nor our children this winter from the diseases of dark- nesses—or the skiapathies, if my plain English fails to convey an impression of knowledge.
In this article let us entirely omit any discussion of the value of sunlight, or of the effect of atmospheric pollution upon our lungs, or upon our public buildings. For the nonce let us assume that the case for the cleaning of our skies is proved, and let us consider how to do it. That is the subject of- the Smoke Abatement Conference, .which is being held (October 2nd to 5th) at Buxton, under the auspices of the Smoke .Abatement League of Great Britain.* Let us consider the problem : it is simple enough in essence.
We must have 'a stream of Power, from some source or other, flowing through our country for its life. After Many years of sttidy and much travel as 'a student of Urban hygiene, I am prepared to vote for waterfalls and hydro-electricity "every time." The theme is pleasing : it is not entirely irrelevant to our country ; its discussion would -evoke many happy memories, from Finland and Italy and Ontario and elsewhere : perhaps I may be allowed here some day to discuss this White Coal, as it is called in North America—not least worthy of admiration here beeause it all came out Of the brain of our Faraday. But we have no Niagara, nor can we contrive to plant any such' at suitable intervals in our country. Nor, to cut a short story shorter still, have we anything else but our coal. For ilk- it-is Coal -or nothing. . . . And were there no. choice but to use it as We do, we might well repine, and reproach our fate in that so Many otheilandi-need but put the Modern equivalent Of an Mill -wheel in a stream arid haAre all they *ant ; whilst - we must dig black and 'dirty massies out of the bowels of the 'earth and destroy ourselves ' in Using them. Heie is the stored-up sunlight of ilast ages, but in order to use it, seemingly, we .must burn the stuff,' and tin's obstruct the sunlight of the present. Inventors have tried to solVe this problem in terms of the burning e: coal, their devices are by no means negligible Until such time as we be wiser, as we shall see.
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* Office, 33 Blackfriars Street, Man'chester. The other body is The Coal Smoke Abatement Society (Secretary, . Mr. Lawrence W. Chubb), 25 Victoria Street, London, S.W. These societies are frinivilv co-opera' n'ts and their won., does not overlap
Two devices, in Pittsburgh, have been employed. They were discussed with me by the kindness of the Smoke Regulation Bureau when I visited the city a few years ago in the study of this subject, and I reported on them in evidence before Lord Newton's Committee. They are the Automatic stoker and powdered coal. The former serves the coal to the furnace as it is required and thus avoids the lowering of temperature and sudden emission of black smoke which results from hand-stoking at long intervals. This is not to say that the hand-stoker, especially if he be encouraged by rewards, might not often make less smoke than he does. But it cannot be doubted, after the experience of Pittsburgh and other places, that the automatic stoker serves better for fuel economy and smoke abatement. No more need, then, remains for by- laws permitting black smoke to be emitted for five or ten minutes every hour, as in some places in this country'. The second method is the pulverization of coal, which is thus rendered into a highly inflammable substance, supplied through pipes as if it were liquid, and requiring stringent regulations regarding the use of matches and so forth. This means that all the combustible part of the coal is burnt, with resultant fuel economy and smoke abatement. Under these systems a fine dust fills the urban atmosphere, for they do not and cannot deal with the incombustible parts of the coal. They are here men- tioned because they evidently should be ; but he would have a very shallow view of the subject who could com- mend them as in any way final, fundamental, or even approximately adequate solutions of our problem.
The true solution must depend upon the true view of the nature of coal. If some barbarians from the South, invading our country and finding it cold, should burn the contents of the Bodleian Library, which arc certainly combustible, we should reproach them for seeing nothing but fuel in such a priceless thesaurus. Our coal is, in the physical realm, no less precious a treasure-house, and to regard and use it as a fuel is no less barbaric and wasteful an act. It was made by Life, and is crowded with the incomparable products of that Master-Chemist. There is no end whatever to the versatility of these long-stored riches. Once we appreciate them, we cease to sigh for the cataracts of Finland or cascades of Switzerland, which are sources of power, but no more. Our coal is a vast source of power, but infinitely more ; and the chemist is not yet born, in a Berlin suburb or a Polish ghetto, who can construct for our needs all the rare and potent compounds made by the giant ferns of long ago whose bodies we call coal.
The answer to the question, How to Clean our Skies, is therefore, Cease to Burn Coal ; and in furnishing that answer we also solve a hundred other questions, thanks to what the coal yields us. In chemistry class, all but thirty years ago, I learnt, as anyone may, that one should not burn coal, and I have never bought an ounce of coal in my life. There is no real and ultimate solution in automatic stokers, powdered coal, devices for catching and consuming smoke ; there is nothing but a few trifles in Lord Onslow's Bill for Smoke Abatement, prepared for a recent Parliament; and there will be little more in the Bill promised us for next year by Mr. Neville Chamberlain. Of course we must say thank you for that Bill, because, after half a century, very small mercies must be accep- table. By all means let us delete the qualifying adjective "black," which was applied to the prohibited smoke in the Act of 1875, and has cost so many lives ever since. In New York and Pittsburgh they laughed in my face at the notion that anything could be done so long as that word was retained.. And let us enlarge the administrative areas, as Lord Newton's Committee recommended, so that Chief Offender may not be 'also the' chief magis- - trate and the appointer of the local inspector. But such as these are trifles ; we need more than a nugatory or merely negative policy now. The promised Bill assumes and accepts the burning of coal, and it does not even profess to touch the resultant problem in the domestic chimney.
. But the domestic chimney is worse than the industrial; if we look at the country as a whole, it produces far more than half the smoke, and that of the more objectionable kind, being produced at a lower temperature. There is no real remedy, but the radical one, to stop burning coal, and to distil it instead, like intelligent beings. Here the argument which has met me during twenty-three years of agitation on this subject is that we cannot recondition all our houses. We might use the energies of some of our unemployed to worse purpose, one would suppose. But at least we can and should build our new houses aright. Under recent legislation that is a. question for local authorities and not for the Ministry of Health. Many of them are doing their duty in this respect, as in the instance of that "Civic Lesson from Dundee," recently discussed here. Many are not.
They and the nation as a whole continue to acquiesce in the policy whereby, for instance, we waste most of the energy in our coal, destroy our sunlight, spread the dis- eases of darkness, and corrode our noblest national monuments by means of the sulphuric acid derived from the ammonium sulphate in our coal—" fixed nitrogen," a superlative fertilizer which should have gone into our soil .to grow fresh food, full of vitamins, for our crowded urban populations, now largely mal-fed on stale rubbish, which may stuff the stomach but stifles the life. Mean- while we are asked for a quarter of a million pounds to .restore Westminster Abbey—that happening to be the very sum extra paid annually by Manchester for laundry bills, as compared with Harrogate, as part of the price for her smoke. What wonder that the specialist, con- sulted by a Cabinet Minister as to whether an important engagement could be undertaken in his state of health, and learning that it was in that famous city, replied, "Cer- tainly not, no one is well enough to go to Manchester."
"But no means exist for doing without the combustion of coal," we may be told. "They may be invented to- morrow, by Bergius of Heidelberg or another, meanwhile . let us wait." It is false. I have just been through the Rhineland and seen for myself the contrast with our industrial North, commented on by Lord Newton and Mr. E. D. Simon (enlightened ex-Lord Mayor of Manches- ter), in their official report. The Germans make every- thing our cities make except the smoke—and the rickets.
Recently, it is true, a deputation of employers ap- proached the then Minister of Health--I forget his name they were being changed about once a week just then— and told him that they did not know how to conduct their industries without the production of smoke.
Of course they do not. Such assurances, from such .a source, may be unhesitatingly accepted. But the observer may ask what chance there is for our industries, in com- petition with other countries, if they are to remain without question under the control of the acephalous capitalism which is not merely a contradiction in terms, but a national menace of the most ominous. description. And yet, if we put our brains, wherever they may be found, into our coal, and really used all its priceless heritage, might there not be enough and to spare for Iife, of necessaries and more, for everybody ? "Thou, 0 God," said Leonardo da Vinci, " hast given all good things to man at the price of Labour." The _labour now needed is that proper to the status of him in whom, too often, and always after long years of success, the Godlike reason rusts unused.. .
CRUS_kRER,
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