Disciplining the Environment: Ventilation and Prison Reform in Britain, 1750-1800

For this session, I will present a selection from my dissertation, “Ventilating the Empire: Environmental Machines in the British Atlantic World, 1700-1850.” My overall project proposes that efforts to improve air quality have a significant history that pre-dates the industrial revolution. Alarmed at the high mortality rates of sailors, miners, and prisoners who breathed “close, confined, putrid air,” British experimenter and clergyman Stephen Hales (1677-1761) invented new “ventilators”: hand-or-wind-powered bellows to freshen enclosed atmospheres. Hales’ ventilators were fixed inside ships, prisons, hospitals, and even the House of Commons. My dissertation asks how natural-philosophical ideas about climate, the environment, and human health were embodied in these devices and how the politics of ventilation evolved in Britain, France, and the United States during the long eighteenth century. The paper I will present examines the uses and abuses of ventilating machines in British prisons. First installed at the behest of Stephen Hales, these machines were specially modified to endure the strains placed on them by the unwilling prisoners who were tasked with their operation. Over two decades later, prison reformer John Howard noted that many of these devices were inadequate and made ventilation a central part of his crusade to improve prisons. His actions helped to shape the 1774 Act of Parliament for Preserving the Health of Prisoners, and prompted the Society for the Encouragement of Arts to fund a 17-year-long search for an improved method of ventilation by hand. I propose that the ongoing concern for ventilation was a central and oft-overlooked constituent of changing regimes of prison construction and prisoner reform that were emerging by the end of the eighteenth century.