THE FIREPLACE TO DISAPPEAR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 265, 18 March 1911, Page 9

THE FIREPLACE TO DISAPPEAR.

THE ADVANCE OF ELECTRICITY. Our old friend the fireplace, with all its cheery associations and memories of the family circle, is to go. So says Mr. W. W. Lackie, the chief engineer of the Electricity Department of the Glasgow Corporation. "The ideal house, business premises, or offices of the future," he says, "would have no chimneys. All the best modern systems of heating tended to dispense with the chimney, and the abolition of the chimney would of course render the' fireplace..unnecessary. It was sometimes objected that the newer forms of heating did not give the cheery comfort associated in tin l mind with the idea of a fireside. It might be a matter for regret, but he thought it was a fact that the institution they used to know as the fireside was or would very soon be defunct. That was one of the inevitable results of the general re-organisation which they saw proceeding on every hand. People no longer sat round a fire at night and passed the time as they used to do in conversation; they had games or some form of recreittion which kept the mind occupied and displaced the ruminative mood which had its centre of gravity in a glowing coal fire. "He advocated the use of one or more fans or flowers for introducing fresh air on the one side and expelling the foul air on the other. Air should not be allowed to find its way in or out of any room by means of the spaces below and around doors and windows; well-made doors and windows should have no such spaces. Proper air inlets should be provided, not incidentally and as an excuse for careless workmanship on the part of masons and joiners, but as on independent item in the construction properly specified. Electric lighting and heating minimised the need for ventilation, because electricity neither depleted the atmosphere nor threw off fumes. The need for fresh air from outside was reduced to at least one-half, and the amount of heat required to warm the air inside the room was correspondingly less. "Fog consisted of particles of sont or other solid matter suspended in globules of moisture, the floating grains of sooty matter acting as nuclei for the moisture. The best fog penetrator. therefore, was a volume of radiant heat, which, by evaporating the suspending globules of moisture, allowed the contained solid matter to fall to the ground. A good practical illustration of that was the beacon (ires on railway lines in foggy weather."