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

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

In large cities, the resulting smoke affected nearly everything. Urban air pollution levels were highest during calm weather, when an absence of breezes or rain allowed smoke to accumulate. Temperature inversions, which occurred most frequently in low-lying areas, prevented warm air from rising and trapped smoke near street level. One visitor to Pittsburgh during a temperature inversion in 1868 described the city as "hell with the lid taken off," as he peered through a heavy, shifting blanket of smoke that hid everything but the bare flames of the coke furnaces that surrounded the town. During autumn and winter this smoke often mixed with fog to form an oily vapor, first called smog in the frequently afflicted London. In addition to darkening city skies, smoky chimneys deposited a fine layer of soot and sulfuric acid on every surface. "After a few days of dense fogs," one Londoner observed in 1894, "the leaves and blossoms of some plants fall off, the blossoms of others are crimped, [and] others turn black." In addition to harming flowers, trees, and food crops, air pollution disfigured and eroded stone and iron monuments, buildings, and bridges. Of greatest concern to many contemporaries, however, was the effect that smoke had on human health. Respiratory diseases, especially tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, and asthma, were serious public health problems in late-nineteenth-century Britain and the United States."

The complexity of the smoke problem made finding a solution exceedingly difficult. As engineers well understood, incomplete combustion caused all visible emissions, meaning that smoky fires were either too cool or had an insufficient oxygen supply. But understanding the causes of smoke did not make implementing solutions easy. In many cases, poor design of existing equipment made improvements difficult to achieve. This was particularly true in Britain, where most people preferred to burn coal in inefficient open hearths, making domestic fires a major source of pollution. In addition, the great variety of smoke sources-railroad locomotives and steamships, blast furnaces and coke ovens, domestic fires and office building boilers-made deriving and implementing a universal solution impossible. Similarly, wide variations in fuel quality complicated the issue, since some equipment functioned smokelessly with certain coals, but smoked badly with others. The coal markets in most American and British cities contained many different grades of coal, from anthracite, a clean-burning but relatively rare form of coal found in eastern Pennsylvania, southern Wales, and parts of Scotland, to bituminous slack, a cheap, dirty, and widely available grade of fuel.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain experienced enormous economic and geopolitical competition from abroad and increasing class conflict at home. Depressed trade, combined with foreign industrial and imperial competition, led many Britons to feel pessimistic about their country's future. Using imagery familiar to all who had experienced a smoke-filled fog, one writer referred to the economy as clouded by a "gloom of uncertainty." To some, coal smoke might once have been an acceptable price to pay for Britain's unrivaled industrial supremacy. But as other nations eroded Britain's lead in the late nineteenth century, many people began to associate smoke not with national preeminence, but with national decline, physical degeneration, and social disorder."