August, 
19 2 0 
49 
THE WAY THEY DO IT NOW 
Modern Garbage Incineration Is Another Step in the Evolution 
of the Almost Perfect Household 
The treadle-worked 
garbage can saves 
bending over 
O NCE upon a 
time, al 1 the 
water that came 
into the big white 
house on the hill 
came per Rastus, 
in two large pails 
that were filled 
at the well. 
There was a 
sweep at that 
well, and three 
or four apple 
trees, and it was 
a cool and pic¬ 
turesque spot on 
a hot summer 
day. What if 
Rastus did stop 
on the way, to 
see if the robin 
sure was going to 
get that-there 
worm after all ? 
Nobody was in a 
hurry. . . . 
Later on in the perfumed and somnolent 
afternoon, it was part of Rastus’ work to carry 
out everything the folks didn’t eat, and feed 
it to the pigs, reserving the bones for Lion and 
Tiger who waved appreciative collie tails be¬ 
fore going back to sleep in the shade. Then 
Rastus went to sleep, too, and 
even Miss Effie in the high 
white room with the French 
wall paper, dozed over her 
stately novel where nobody 
spoke a sentence that didn’t 
have all the parts of speech in 
it, and nobody even dreamed 
there’d be a day when water 
would come into the house all 
by its clever self in a lead 
pipe—and a lucky thing it 
would be, because Rastus’ 
great-grandson would probably 
be impossibly independent. 
Three Generations Later 
Miss Effie’s great-grand¬ 
daughter lives in town, in an 
apartment—quite a modest 
affair—and in place of the 
straggling mob of retainers 
that belonged to the white house on the hill, 
she has two trim maids who have stayed with 
her for a remarkably long time in these hectic 
and degenerate days, largely because she has 
given them every assistance that Mr. Edison 
and his fellow-inventors have put on the mar¬ 
ket—and she hasn’t waited until competing 
housekeepers have installed them, either. In 
addition to buying the usual household genii, 
such as vacuum cleaner, an electric stove, 
and an iceless refrigerator, their mistress has 
moved into an apartment house up-to-date 
enough to own an installed garbage incinerator 
which she considers worth its weight in em¬ 
ployment agency fees. 
If the ghost of Rastus ever drifts shadow- 
wise into that white and miraculous kitchen 
after luncheon, he may surprise Sonya scrap¬ 
ing the plates. Pekey-Pekey has his own pre¬ 
digested pabulum, and there are no pigs within 
twenty-five roaring city miles, so Sonya isn’t 
wasting anything when she whisks open a lit¬ 
tle hopper set in the white wall and tilts all 
the scraps into a sort of mailing chute that 
takes them out of her brisk life forever. No 
breaking her back scraping food into a gar¬ 
bage can, for Sonya. No cluttering up her 
immaculate dumb-waiter with packages ad¬ 
dressed to the garbage man. Nothing but this 
one quick tilt into infinity—bits of bread, and 
scraps of salad, the bag the peas came in, the 
box that brought Miss Genevieve’s new dress, 
the dust from the internals of the vacuum 
cleaner, this morning’s newspapers, and the egg 
shells that were the ancestral halls of that deli¬ 
cious omelette—all gone, Rastus, just like that! 
If we undertook to follow his inquisitive 
black ghost and trace their descent to the In¬ 
ferno, we’d discover the incinerator itself 
crouched in the cellar, where the architect in¬ 
dicated it should go when he designed the 
apartment house. Some landlords build first, 
and think afterward. But a thought in time 
saves nine on one’s building bills nowadays. 
And the wise landlord or householder puts in 
his incinerator along with his refrigerating 
system. 
The Cost of Operation 
It costs comparatively little to operate one 
of these installed incinerators because once 
the gas or coal with which it runs has started 
the garbage burning, the waste material goes 
ahead under its own steam, until there is noth¬ 
ing left for the janitor but fine white ash after 
the clever incinerator has disposed of the gases 
produced in combustion and has sterilized it¬ 
self and its flues. Gas, or no fuel in some in¬ 
cinerators, is a favored starter in these days of 
strikes, small cellar space, and few furnace- 
men, and the average incinerator consumes 
only from twenty to thirty feet per burning. 
The heat generated in the process is, to the 
lay mind, inconceivably great—somewhere in 
the neighborhood of 1600° 
Fahrenheit—and this consti¬ 
tutes a real problem in con¬ 
struction, not so difficult in 
the installed type of in¬ 
cinerator as in the portable 
kind that Miss Effie’s great- 
granddaughter has in her sum¬ 
mer home on Long Island. 
This portable incinerator looks 
like an oblong high stove 
placed in a recess in the wall. 
Just as an ice box is insulated 
to keep in the cold, so this in- 
(Continued on page 76) 
With a cellar incinerator one has 
merely to pour the garbage down 
the chute. Courtesy of Kerner 
Incinerator Co. 
The chute to the cellar incinerator 
is usually located in close prox¬ 
imity to the sink. Photograph by 
courtesy of Kerner 
Another type of incinerator, gas¬ 
burning. is installed in the kitchen 
itself, close to the range. Courtesy, 
Borge Incinerator Corporation 
P 
