The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-04-07

the streets in the busy sections of the city clean and presentable. A great drawback in many instances is the lack of sufficient funds to effectively carry on this work; in others it Is the eng ployment of obsolete methods and ap- pliances, often at a large expense, which are neither efficient nor satisfactory
 The most primitive method of street cleaning and one still much in vogue is the hand sweeper with his broom. This method is costly and impractical for large cities, besides being unde- sirable in many other respects. The most modern effective and sanitary method-and sanitation cuts much ice nowadays--ls the pneumatic stree, cleaning machine, which does the work on the principle of the vacuum clean CT that sucks" up the household dust and dirt
 Between these two methods are the rotary, mule drawn sweeper. and the machines that flush the pavements with
 water under a high pressure. The rotary sweeper has been justly named the dust devil" It is an obsolete and inefficient piece of mechanism that should have been discontinued years ago. The municipal authorities have been compelled to use them for the reason they were the only mechanical street sweepers on the market for near ly 25 years
 The machines for flushing the streets with water under high pressure. while effective from point of cleanliness, are undesirable from many other stand points. In the first place the cost of operation Is excessive, the volume of water necessary for successful opera ton is often so great that the flow down the gutters sewepward Is so great that one cannot cross the street while the "flushers" are at work without
 wading The tremendous force with which the water Is projected does seri- ous damage to artificial, pavements, re- sulting in frequent repairs, while the street dirt Is by them transferred to the sewers which necessitates the cost | ly work of cleaning them out. IL is the opinion of many engineers of wide leXperience in these matters that the flushing" system ruins pavements of all kinds, fills the sewers with street dirt, consumes an excessive portion of
 water and is not economical otherwise. 1 With the pneumatic street cleaning apparatus all these objections are re-
 moved. The work Is quickly done. the dust and dirt are drawn up" into the
 machine. No dust is made by it's opera tion, hence no sprinklng is necessary.
 It is easily operated and cleans rough
 and uneven streets as quickly and ef- 1 fectively as the smoother pavements; in other words, the apparatus has been proven to be by far the most economi-
 cal and effective street sweeping ap- paratus ever devised. It Is auto driven
 and can travel five and half miles
 ..or hour. The machines are costly, ai
 all good things are they are not for sale, the patentees rent them out, but
 in the end they would doubtless prove
 not only far more satisfying but less
 costly of operation than the present
 cum bersome system.
 As in all cities, whatever the method
 of street cleaning adopted. the hand
 sweeper IS an auxiliary means of clean l ing streets subject to heavy traffic. has
 without doubt a permanent place but with the installation of the pneumatic cleaners the abomnable rotary and ns
 attendant gang of miserable shackled prisoners, that Is reproach to our
 vaunted civilization, would soon be a lthing of the past.
 1 The city of Birmingham depends largely upon the rotary sweeper and
 its city prisoners for it's street clean
 ing. In addition the department has | several flushing" machines, and to the
 credit of the department be 1t said that
 considering the means the streets of the city are kept clean and presentable Of
 course, in the proximity of the railroads
 and where new buildings are in course
 of construction. there is some untid-
 ness. but on the whole the streets are
 kept clean.
 l In recent issue of Municipal En-
 Fineering periodical devoted to city l affairs, appears a fine paper on street
 cleaning by A. c. Tripp, consulting en- gineer of Indianapolis, Ind. Space pre- vents a reproduction of the article of
 which the following Is s part:
 Tn comparison with the advances
 made by sanitary science in provid- ing pure water supplies, pure food, and
 in the disposal of sewerage, very lit-
 tie progress has been made in the d.
 rection of the gathering and disposal
 of street wastes, and the prevention of air pollution from street dust
 | Quoting from an address by ,rr
 George A. Soper, president of the Metro politan sewer commission of New York
 before the Boston Society of Civil En-
 gineers:
 "'The conservation of health has no 1 better field for effective operation than | systematic War1Are against aust. Wlth
 one notable exception. the use of oil
 on thoroughfares and railroads no new
 method of combating this evil has been l developed by sanitary science in recent l ears, while the quantities of dust pro- lduced enormously increased with the growth of our cities AS matters stand, the greatest dust scavcnger is the at Imosphere Into 1t we east the dust of our houses with the same heedlessness | with which we dump our sewerage into the water courses We do not stop to l think that this air must serve to ven- tiIate our dwellings and shops and the lungs of our children and ourselves. | eff the filthy dust of our streets were to be kept from the lungs by efficient l methods of street clean-ig, consider the progress in decency anu order, not to rne ention health which this reform would accomplish
 Al the present time probably 90 per ] cent of the street cleaning is done by 1 the horse drawn rotary brush which has I been in use in substantially it's present
 form for the past 25 years. II is cer- ] tainly not to the credit of American in- l genuity that this has been the case, s ithe machine is far from a satisfactory one and falls far shosk of accomplish ling it's purpose. When used on dry l streets 1t does gather up the heavy dirt hut as a dust producer .. can hardly he lexcelled If the street Is sprinkled be- 1 fore sweeping the principal result o.
 the brushing is to spread the mud in an
 even layer over the street and fill the cracks, leaving 1t in perfect shape to
 dry and blow away.