Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
keep it dry, split it into suitable forms. It was hard to say which most con-
trolled the other—the fire or the fire tender.
The need for fuel prompted its own technologies. Not surprisingly, most
relied on fire—fire-killed forests, fire-pruned coppice, fire-distilled wood
such that fire created the fuel for more fire. Perhaps the best-known prac-
tice involves charcoal, a twice-cooked substance (once without oxygen,
once with it). The slow heating of wood in a sealed dome leaches out by
pyrolysis the volatiles that encourage flaming. The solids that remain will
then burn steadily through conduction, glowing with a steady heat, rather
than flame wildly.
Still, fire could burn everything people brought to it: it could quickly
exhaust, if people chose, whole countrysides. The lust for more fire—
checked only by the ability of surrounding landscapes to grow biomass
and people to convert them into combustibles—eventually led to an
unbounded fuel source: fossil biomass. Fossil fuels existed as coals, lignites,
oil shales, natural gas, and petroleum. Petroleum, in particular, inspired its
own pyrotechnology for chemical distillation, which made it also
immensely portable and vastly more potent. But refined fuels required
refined combustion chambers. Automobiles could not run on wood or
coal; refrigerators and heat pumps could not function easily with furnaces;
power lawnmowers could not survive on steam.The creation of new fuels,
in brief, not only made possible but demanded new tinder pouches and
new hearths. The fusion of fossil fuels with fire engines, each rapidly
redesigning the other, traces the fast spiral of industrial fire.
FIRE APPLIANCES: CREATING SPECIALTY HABITATS FOR FIRE
The place where spark and fuel met decided the traits of the domesticated
fire. Fire proved enormously malleable—flame had no fixed form, firelight
no necessary brilliance, the heat of combustion no inevitable flow.All could
be molded, and over time each property was selected much as dogs and
horses were bred for size, speed, coloration, and sense of smell. The chosen
means was the combustion chamber, which controlled not only the move-
ment of heat and fuel but also that of air.And more: refining the fire required
that air be refined into oxygen and rough biomass into its chemically active
parts.What oxygen was to air, this distilled combustion was to fire.
Until recently, however, these contrived keepers of specialty flames still
put fire before its human tenders in a very direct way. Fire's presence, as fire,
