This is presumably due to the fact either that the
same burner was used throughout the tests, and was only intended to work
at a pressure of 10 inches or thereabouts, or that the larger burners
were not so well constructed as the smaller ones. Other investigators
have not given this maximum of duty with a medium-sized or medium-driven
burner; but Lewes has observed a similar phenomenon in the case of 0.7 to
0.8 cubic foot self-luminous jets.
Figures, however, which seem to show that the duty of incandescent
acetylene does not always rise with the size of the burner or with the
pressure at which the gas is delivered to it, have been published in
connexion with the installation at the French lighthouse at Chassiron,
the northern point of the Island of Oleron. Here the acetylene is
generated in hand-fed carbide-to-water generators so constructed as to
give any pressure up to nearly 200 inches of water column; purified by
means of heratol, and finally delivered to a burner composed of thirty-
seven small tubes, which raises to incandescence a mantle 55 millimetres
in diameter at its base. At a pressure of 7.77 inches of water, the
burner passes 3.9 cubic feet of acetylene per hour, and at a pressure of
49.
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