Abstract
IN an article published originally in the United States, and reprinted in our contemporary, the Chemical News, Prof. Henry Morton has called attention to the risks to which property is exposed from the increasing employment of powerful currents of electricity for electric lighting. The caution and the remedies suggested are assuredly timely when preparations are being made on so many hands for a vast extension of electric lighting. No fewer than five times did fire break out in the late Paris Exhibition, and in each of these cases the Cause was the same, namely, defective insulation of the conducting wires. Prof. Morton divides the dangers into two kinds —those arising from the conductors, and those arising from the lamps. When naked wires are used as conductors, and when both are, as is sometimes the case, merely nailed or stapled to wall or floor side by side, there is a great chance that some stray scrap of wire, a falling nail or pin, may short-circuit the line and become red-hot in an instant. Loose wires are again a source of danger, as they may be momentarily short-circuited, and arcs set up of a dangerous nature at the point of contact. These remarks are specially cogent in such cases as those where many arc lights are being worked on a single circuit, and where there is of necessity a very high electromotive force employed. On such circuits, moreover, should some of the arcs go out, there is a risk of the others becoming excessive in power, risking the metal-work of the lamps, and thereby endangering a conflagration. Moreover, the lamps themselves are not free from danger, if so constructed that fragments of red-hot carbon can fall from them, as was the case not many months ago with one of the Siemens’ lamps in the reading-room of the British Museum.
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Fire Risks of Electric Lighting . Nature 25, 223 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/025223b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/025223b0