smoke of great cities: British and American efforts to control air pollution, 1860-1914, The

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Stradling, David, Thorsheim, Peter

Coal smoke plagued Great Britain and the United States for well over one hundred years. Cities that relied on soft coal for fuel, including London, Manchester, Glasgow, Chicago, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, all suffered through decades of dense air pollution before relief could be found. Although British cities, especially London, suffered longer under a pall of smoke, many U.S. cities experienced remarkably similar environmental problems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concerns about the effect of coal smoke on city residents and the urban environment loomed large in the minds of activists on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite significant differences in economies, governance, and culture, Britons and Americans defined their problems in similar terms. Activists in the two countries engaged in roughly synchronous movements to abate smoke. Sanitarians, physicians, engineers, and lay reformers, particularly from the middle and upper classes, participated in an international discussion of the smoke problem and learned much from each others' attempts to find a solution.'

Coal smoke posed complex scientific and technical challenges, and it also raised difficult questions about society. Reformers in both nations used smoke as a symbol for broader problems, which in their view could not be solved unless the smoke dissipated. Despite the many similarities in the two countries' responses to coal smoke, significant differences existed. In Britain, some members of the middle and upper classes worried that industrialization and urbanization had gone too far, in the process undermining both Britain's claim to civilization and its own privileged position within it. Smoke became symbolic of disorder and decline. In the United States, the middle class feared that its great and growing economy was not creating a worthy civilization. Smoke symbolized greed and callousness, the sacrifice of beauty and health in the pursuit of profit. As evidence of their shared Victorian ideals, the upper classes of both nations worried that smoke gravely harmed the lower classes, stunting their moral and physical development. In both nations, smoke became symbolic of a fear of the working class and the increasingly visible urban poor.'

Perhaps the physical nature of the pollution itself gave credence to these grand metaphors. Coal smoke could seem so permanent, so omnipresent. During intense pollution episodes, which all of the cities listed above experienced, residents could only escape the smoke by escaping the city, an option rarely possible for all but the wealthiest urbanites. Smoke's metaphorical meanings too often led reform-minded Britons and Americans to think in terms of civilization rather than coal, the ultimate source of all the smoke. Yet as Peter Brimblecombe observed, "a history of air pollution is almost a history of fuel." In neither country did the movement to abate smoke become a movement to control coal use, and by the outbreak of World War I, neither country had come close to solving the already old pollution problem.3

The Smoke Problem

In both Britain and the United States, when people spoke of smoke they generally meant the dark particulate emissions of fires. The Chicago Association of Commerce, for instance, defined smoke in 1915 as "the visible effluvium or sooty exhalation of anything burning." Indeed, visibility was an important part of the popular definition of smoke and the nuisance it caused. Although persons who complained about smoke rarely bothered to define it precisely, they did generally use adjectives like "dark," "black," and "gloomy" to describe it. This conception was codified in municipal law. Without exception, both American and British anti-smoke laws relied on shade for definition and enforcement. Only dark smoke, as determined on the Ringelmann scale in most cities, constituted a nuisance that required prevention.4

This emphasis on visible emissions did not preclude a deeper appreciation of the complexity of combustion's products. The public also frequently complained of noxious gases, which caused significant damage in both nations. In places where smelters and chemical works emitted acidic fumes, residents well understood the ravages of invisible emissions. The Alkali Inspectorate, established in Britain in 1863, initially regulated hydrochloric acid gases emitted in the manufacture of sodium carbonate. Over time, its responsibilities grew to include other industries and pollutants (though not coal smoke). In the United States, however, laws continued to regulate only "dark" smoke, not sulphur or any other emissions. Nonetheless, after the turn of the century, when scientific investigation of smoke became more rigorous and smoke offenders hoped to divert attention from their dark emanations, a greater appreciation of the invisible portion of emissions entered the public dialogue.5

Britain and the United States witnessed rapid increases in coal consumption in the nineteenth century, with concomitant increases in smoke. London long had the reputation as Britain's smokiest urban area, but rapidly growing industrial cities such as Manchester and Glasgow also vied for the title by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the United States the most dramatic growth in coal consumption occurred after the turn of the twentieth century; in 19o8, the U.S. Geological Society estimated that the consumption of the preceding decade had exceeded that of the previous century.6 The industrial cities of the Midwest, dependent on dirty bituminous coal, were the first to develop smoke problems after the middle of the nineteenth century, with Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis gaining notoriety for dirty air.7 Common law, which prevailed in the courts of both nations, allowed victims of pollution to sue perpetrators of smoke nuisances, but complainants could expect relief only if they linked harm to a particular polluter. Civil litigation could stop individual polluters, but this approach was generally reserved for damage caused by smells and noxious vapors easily traced to a single source. The British Parliament periodically passed measures designed to improve air quality, including an 1821 act that prohibited steam engines from emitting smoke in London. Later legislation contained additional anti-smoke provisions, but offenders often escaped conviction and continued to release huge quantities of smoke.8 In the United States, the earliest efforts to control smoke tended to concentrate on litigation, although some cities did pass specific anti-smoke legislation. In 1869, Pittsburgh enacted an ordinance forbidding the use of dirty coal in locomotives, and two years later the Cincinnati city council passed an anti-smoke ordinance. These anti-smoke measures went largely unenforced, however, as did those in Britain. In addition, the strict requirements for successful litigation and judicial sympathy for industry limited the effectiveness of civil suits. Any reductions in smoke that did result from anti-smoke laws and litigation were more than offset by increases from rapidly growing populations and industries.9