The interest in this question,
however, died away after the close of the Smoke Abatement Exhibition;
and the experiments of Mr. Aiken, of Edinburgh, showed how futile was
the hope that gas fires would prevent fogs altogether. They might
indeed ameliorate the noxious character of a fog by checking the
discharge of soot into the atmosphere; but Mr. Aiken's experiments
showed that particles of gas were in themselves capable of condensing
the moisture of the air upon them. The great scheme of Siemens for
making London a smokeless city, by manufacturing gas at the coal-pit and
leading it in pipes from street to street, would not have rendered it
altogether a fogless one, though the coke and gas fires would certainly
have reduced the quantity of soot launched into the air. Siemens's
scheme was rejected by a Committee of the House of Lords on the somewhat
mistaken ground that if the plan were as profitable as Siemens supposed,
it would have been put in practice long ago by private enterprise.
>From the problem of heating a room, the mind of Siemens also passed
to the maintenance of solar fires, and occupied itself with the supply
of fuel to the sun. Some physicists have attributed the continuance of
solar heat to the contraction of the solar mass, and others to the
impact of cometary matter.
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