That's basically what I remember: the leading reason is that a steel furnace needs a lot of heat to build up a lot of pressure and push carbon in, and higher chimneys help provide that.
Others like Japan found another way to achieve the necessary temp/pressure, but it hardly scaled as it needed to during the industrial revolution.
TBH the "let's avoid smoke" aspect sounds like a retcon, the mythical London smog is a testament of that.
> TBH the "let's avoid smoke" aspect sounds like a retcon
Yes, that’s what the article says:
“ When you look at all the pictures of the factories in the 19th century, those stacks weren’t there to improve air quality, if you can believe it. The increased airflow generated by a stack just created more efficient combustion for the boilers and furnaces. Any benefits to air quality in the cities were secondary. With the advent of diesel and electric motors, we could use forced drafts, reducing the need for a tall stack to increase airflow. That was kind of the decline of the forests of industrial chimneys that marked the landscape in the 19th century. But they’re obviously not all gone, because that secondary benefit of air quality turned into the primary benefit as environmental rules about air pollution became stricter.”
People hate on Reddit but this is why I love Reddit, I got the answer in a few seconds as opposed to the original article pontificating and padding forever about it.
It's not an article. Its a transcript of an entertaining educational video on one of the best engineering youtube channels in the world and a gift to society. It says that it's a transcript at the top of the text for goodness sake.
That's a bit uncharitable towards the article. If you're just looking to answer a question as simply as possible, you're going to want a different source than if you're curious about the background and history of something.
I didn't think so; I also tried to read the article, but spreading out a 20 word answer over what seemed like 2000 words of navel-gazing got me out of there in a hurry.
I like the backgrounder about Sudbury.