. . .
The amount of oxygen necessarily required for this purpose
is about one and one-fourth cubic inches for each breath. . . .
In place of the one and one-fourth cubic inches of oxygen
taken into the blood, a cubic inch of carbonic acid gas is given off,
and along with it are thrown off various other still more poisonous substances
which find a natural exit through the lungs. The amount of these
combined poisons thrown off with a single breath is sufficient to contaminate,
and render unfit to breathe, three cubic feet, or three-fourths of a barrel,
of air. Counting an average of twenty breaths a minute
for children and adults, the amount of air contaminated per minute would be
three times twenty or sixty cubic feet, or one cubic foot a second. . . .
Every one should become intelligent in relation to the matter of ventilation,
and should appreciate its importance. Vast and irreparable injury
frequently results from the confinement of several scores
or hundreds of people in a schoolroom, church, or lecture room,
without adequate means of removing the impurities thrown off
from their lungs and bodies. The same air being breathed over and over
becomes densely charged with poisons, which render the blood impure,
lessen the bodily resistance, and induce susceptibility to taking cold,
and to infection with the germs of pneumonia, consumption,
and other infectious diseases, which are always present
in a very crowded audience room. Suppose, for example,
a thousand persons are seated in a room forty feet in width,
sixty in length, and fifteen in height: how long a time would elapse
before the air of such a room would become unfit for further respiration?
Remembering that each person spoils one foot of air every second,
it is clear that one thousand cubic feet of air will be contaminated for
every second that the room is occupied.
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