Ventilation of Public Buildings
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VENTILATION OF PUBLIC BUILDINGS
Nothing conduces more to the success of any public exhibition than the [illegible] and comfort of the audience. Could we expect persons to appreciate an orator when shivering with cold, or a singer when suffering from heat? No! the thing is impossible—the audience must be comfortable to be well pleased.
There has requisites by which this complacency is to be obtained, and perhaps the most important of them is good ventilation
A hall sixty by forty and fifteen feet high contain 36,000 cubic feet of air. Such a hall will seat four hundred persons. Allowing ten cubic feet of air to each person per minute she air will be rendered unfit for respiration in nine minutes. If then there be no fresh supply of pure air, every minute after the nine have expired they will each inhale ten cubic feet of the exhalations from other persons, months and lungs. All the air in the room would have been breathed by others, each successive minute growing fouler and more vitiated.
This is a fact, although many of us might be inclined to doubt it. The thought of breathing what has already been in the mouth of another is sufficently offensive to any one.
How important is good ventilation in our public halls! Where windows can be conveniently opened from the top, they form an excellent mode of ventilation. But how often do we see them so tightly wedged from disuse as to make it almost impossible to open them. Besides this, the people who will not take the trouble to learn the importance of pure air cannot be induced to have them opened, as they are afraid of the unwholesome night air. Which would one suppose the most deleterious, the atmosphere of a crowded meeting room, replete with carbonic acid, (a deadly poison) and growing hotter and more vitiated at every breath we draw?