HYLAND
and swathed in velvets and brocades (to impress the
audience), a place in which large numbers of people
were forced to sit close together for hours, generating
their own considerable bodily heat, without so much as
a breeze. Of course audience members would become
miserably overheated. There seemed to be nothing to
do about it.
For that matter, anyone who felt overheated by the
crowding could count on being even more overheated
by the lighting. In that pre-electric age, a theater might
use a thousand gas jets—on the stage, lined up at
the footlights, ranged along the auditorium walls and
clustered in the central chandelier—each one a small fire,
sucking oxygen from the air while replacing it with carbon
dioxide, carbon monoxide, even a dash of ammonia. All
of those fires effortlessly pushed the temperature to 100
degrees or higher.
Above the chandelier was the single attempt at
temperature control: a ventilator, described by one
theatrical insider as "a large circular grating, placed in the
centre of the roof." Theoretically, the heat of the chandelier
would draw the auditorium's hot air out through the
ventilator. It was a system that was almost guaranteed
not to work. The indoor air became "vitiated," the polite
term for an atmosphere that was oxygen-starved, fouled
with nauseating gases, unbreathably hot. And a whole
evening of vitiated air was a sickening experience. Men
who braved the theater under those conditions steeled
