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888 ILLUSTRATED WORLD
An Underfeed Installation
This principle allows every particle of the coal to be burned—onlv
trace goes up the chimney as smoke.
of metals, injury to plant life, and the
general increased cost of household
cleaning, smoke has a marked effect upon
the ability of men and women to resist
certain diseases. When you entered this
world your lungs were as beautifully
pink as the tinted petals of a hot house
rose. Are they now? Tell us where
you have lived and we will tell you how
black your lungs are. Thousands upon
thousands of Chicago lungs, and especially
those that have been taken to the
center of business activities daily, are
black from carbon taken into them by
breathing smoke-polluted air.
That which we see and call
smoke, is in reality carbon.
Medical History tells us we can
live a number of days without
food; that we can live a number
of days without water, but if our
air supply is cut off, we pass to
the beyond in from three to four
minutes. From these facts then,
we believe we prefer our unconsumed
coal in the food we eat, or
the water we drink, for our
chances of living the allotted
three score and ten would then
be better.
Continued inhalation of coal
smoke produces a pulmonary affection
known to specialists as
anthracosis. Every city dweller
suffers from it to a certain extent.
Blackening your lungs
with carbon starts you on the
straight road that leads to bronchial
trouble, pneumonia, and
ofttimes tuberculosis. Sunlight
is one of our best germ killers,
but how can we get it if we are
enveloped in a curtain of smoke ?
Big business is hiding behind
clouds of smoke, only waiting
for Captains of Industry to discover
it. We burn every year in
the United States over four hundred
million tons of coal. Its
valuation is placed at over $460,-
000,000. Twenty per cent of
this amount floats away in
the smoke clouds of wasted wealth.
When the smoke nuisance was at its
worst in Pittsburgh the sulphur content
of the gases escaping from steel furnaces
was estimated at five hundred thousand
tons a year. Through chemical action
upon structural steel this amount would
be able to destroy totally 265,000 tons,
or about twenty-nine trains of fifty gondola
cars each. Besides this, it could
render useless scores of tons more.
The steel industry was until a few
years ago our most prolific waster of
wealth. At this time a series of experi-