Each of these failures, whether
accompanied by explosions and injury to persons or not, acts more
powerfully to restrain a possible new customer from adopting the
acetylene light, than several wholly successful plants urge him to take
it up; for the average member of the public is not in a position to
distinguish properly between the collapse of a certain generator owing to
defective design or construction (which reflects no discredit upon the
gas itself), and the failure of acetylene to show in practice those
advantages that have been ascribed to it. One peculiar and noteworthy
feature of acetylene, often overlooked, is that the apparatus is
constructed by men who may have been accustomed to gas-making plant all
their lives, and who may understand by mere habit how to superintend a
chemical operation; but the same apparatus is used by persons who
generally have no special acquaintance with such subjects, and who, very
possibly, have not even burnt coal-gas at any period of their lives.
Hence it happens that when some thoughtless action on the part of the
country attendant of an acetylene apparatus is followed by an escape of
gas from the generator, and by an accumulation of that gas in the house
where the plant is situated, or when, in disregard of rules, he takes a
naked light into the house and an explosion follows, the builder
dismisses the episode as a piece of stupidity or wilful misbehaviour for
which he can in nowise be held morally responsible; whereas the builder
himself is to blame for designing an apparatus from which an escape of
gas can be accompanied by sensible risks to property or life.
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