A Brief History of Building Ventilation: Part 1
Humankind apparently first witnessed the power of fire over a million years ago. You’d like to think we witnessed the power of ventilation at the same time, given we were living in caves at the time. But did we?
The Origins of Ventilation
Whatever our cave living ancestors did to combat smoke inhalation, it wasn’t ventilation. That’s because the word never appeared until much later, around the early 1500s. Taken from the Latin ventilationem, as in ‘an exposing to the air’, it’s a noun of action and a past participle of ventilare. The original meaning of the word was ‘the act of fanning or blowing’, changing in the 1660s to the more precise ‘process of replacing foul air in an enclosed place with fresh, pure air’.
The common understanding of the word hasn’t changed much since then. Our scientific understanding of ventilation has though, as we’ll discover shortly.
Evidence of Early Ventilation Solutions
The island of Crete plays a significant role in world history. As the largest Greek Island, legend has it that Zeus was born there. What we do know is that for hundreds of years, during the Bronze Age, the Minoan civilization called Crete home and the buildings they left behind include windmill towers and evidence of early ventilation solutions, especially from their peak period, around 1600 B.C.
Their chimneys might be recognisable as chimneys by most people today, but they weren’t the first. That accolade likely goes to the villagers of Banpo in China, around 4000-5000 B.C. They constructed ventilation systems in their homes by piercing holes through the roof, allowing smoke from cooking to escape. This makes sense as the widespread use and control of fire is thought to have only started 7000 years ago, meaning the Banpo villagers were likely amongst the first adopters of fire.
Alas, this also means our cavemen ancestors likely never purposely lit fires in their caves, solving the issue of why they didn’t invent the word ventilation. It also rules out the likelihood of a dinosaur BBQ ever having taken place.
Around the same time, the lesser-known Vinca culture was flourishing in Serbia. Little was known about how they lived until their settlements were discovered by archaeologists in 1908. Aside from evidence of some of the most advanced living conditions of the time, with communal areas and complicated housing arrangements, they used ventilation pipes (chimneys) in furnaces used for copper smelting, so they could make tools.
There has been some debate that the shafts discovered in the Great Pyramid of Giza offer proof that the need for ventilation and our understanding of its importance continued to grow over the years following the Vinca chimneys. However, similar shafts in the Queens Chamber were discovered sealed, casting doubt on their use. That said, the entombed were dead, so we suppose the shafts provided a good way for workers to place them in their resting place and get out without suffocating and joining their leaders, so sealing the tomb afterwards seems plausible.
More certain is the fact that the Romans of the same period used ventilation for keeping their baths warm. The hypocaust system used air and combustible products in ventilation ducts to heat the water to a temperature that would be pleasant enough to relax in while being hand-fed grapes and goblets of wine. The same method was then used to heat the walls in buildings to keep warm in winter.
Air Quality Becomes an Issue
It took a remarkably long time before air quality was seen as a problem in need of a solution, like ventilation. The Middle Ages housing stock was generally poor and we suppose either the homes were so porous that ventilation occurred as a by-product of poor build quality, or the saying ‘there’s no smoke without a fire’ was yet to catch on (pun intended) and people didn’t yet realise the side effects of poor air quality were significant.
There is a Gothic Parish Church in Poland that would seemingly be one of the first to tackle the issue. Built between 1418 and 1436 in Gostyn, channels in the wall were connected to a 70cm opening and were used to bring fresh air into the building.
This was likely a rarity though, and ventilation, for the most part, was restricted to use in Churches and the palatial residences of the landed gentry. The commoners didn’t get ventilation until King Charles I introduced new building guidelines in 1631. Whether this was because he genuinely cared about the health of his subjects or not is up for debate. After all, he was known to levy taxes at will, and a dead man pays no taxes. Either way, the law now required the ceiling to be at least 10 feet high and the windows to be increased in size (windows would be taxed in 1696, but that was William II. Charles’ head had been chopped off by then).
By now, there was a growing acceptance that fresh air was a good thing, and as cities sprang up in an often haphazard manner, many observed the ill effects of smoke-laden streets and housing on the occupants. Scientists like John Mayow were taking note, too. Born in Cornwall in 1642, Mayow was among a new breed of Scientists concerned with respiration and air. In one of his most famous experiments, he placed mice in a bottle with a burning candle. The candle was extinguished before the mice’s lives, leading him to the conclusion that igneo-aerial particles in the air caused their demise.
To be fair to Mayow, he was onto something. In 1775, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, later to be known as the ‘father of gaseous chemistry’, started studying oxygen and carbon dioxide in crowded rooms. He hypothesized that bad air was caused by excess carbon dioxide (as opposed to a reduction in oxygen), starting a debate that would last for another century. By that time, Levoisier would be dead, having met the same fate as Charles I and been executed.
Ventilation was just getting started though and in the years following Lavoisier's execution, a slew of new innovations were to sweep the world like a breath of fresh air. A very much needed breath of fresh air.
We’ll share their story in part 2, coming soon.