Nevertheless it is incontrovertible
that an acetylene plant calculated to supply so many burners for so long
a period of time must be very much larger if it is constructed on the
non-automatic principle, when the carbide is decomposed all at once, than
if the automatic system is adopted, when the solid remains unattacked
until a corresponding quantity of gas is required for combustion. Clearly
it is the storage part of a non-automatic plant alone which must be so
much larger; the actual decomposing chambers may be of the same size or
even smaller, according to the system of generation to which the
apparatus belongs. In practice this extra size of the non-automatic plant
causes it to exhibit two disadvantages in comparison with automatic
apparatus, disadvantages which are less serious than they appear, or than
they may easily be represented to be. In the first place, the non-
automatic generator requires more space for its erection. If acetylene
were an illuminating agent suitable for adoption by dwellers in city or
suburb, where the back premises and open-air part of the messuage are
reduced to minute proportions or are even non-existent, this objection
might well be fatal.
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