THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF SMOG

Fog was not a new phenomenon in London. Residents of the city had lived in this atmosphere for several centuries. By the twelfth century, there were few forests left nearby, and wood had to be brought from afar, which was an expensive endeavor. Initially, this wasn't a significant issue for city dwellers: they didn't require many logs for cooking, and they didn't need as much wood for warmth in winter, given it was the era of the Medieval Climate Optimum, when even grapes were grown in Scotland. However, for London craftsmen—blacksmiths, brewers, ironworkers, lime burners—things were not as simple. Their furnaces required a lot of wood, or more precisely, charcoal, which is produced by burning wood in the absence of air. Charcoal produces significantly more heat than wood and burns almost without smoke.

However, charcoal soon became unaffordable for craftsmen, and so they found an alternative—sea coal (seacoal or carbo maris in Latin), now known as stone or bituminous coal. It contains less carbon than the rarer and pricier anthracite coal and a lot of bitumen, a resinous substance similar to very thick oil, albeit much easier to extract. Initially, it was simply collected from rugged coastal cliffs where coal shelves surfaced, giving it the name ‘sea coal’.

Beginning in the early thirteenth century, sea coal was regularly transported to London from the northeast coast of England. One of the city's streets still bears the name Seacoal Lane, where London blacksmiths, dyers, brewers, and lime burners began using it in their furnaces and kilns. They appreciated the affordability and efficient burning of this new fuel, but their neighbors were not pleased. While charcoal burned almost smoke-free, ‘sea’ coal left dense black trails in the chimneys. In Samuil Marshak's ballad ‘Queen Eleanor's Confession’, set in the mid-thirteenth century, the heroine is compelled to flee from Nottingham to Tatberi Castle, seeking refuge from the smoky workshops, thus becoming the first environmental refugee in literary history.

Of course, most Londoners lacked castles in cleaner areas, and they began to complain loudly. Both clergy and nobles demanded action from Parliament, and in 1306, they made some progress. Edward I Longshanks—the monarch responsible for the execution of Scottish leader William Wallace (played by Mel Gibson in the film Braveheart)—became the first politician in history to advocate for clean air. He issued a decree prohibiting craftsmen from burning sea coal during Parliament sessions and mandating the use of wood fuel instead.

However, this attempt was not particularly successful because, even though one person whose hearth contained hot coal was executed in accordance with the decree, and several others faced corporal punishment, it did little to deter the use of sea coal. A year later, Edward I passed away, and sea coal remained both cheaper and more readily available. Consequently, craftsmen continued to burn it, disregarding bans, fines, and the threat of their illegal furnaces being demolished.

Household ovens and stoves didn't use coal for another two centuries—nobody wanted to endure the smell of sulfur and suffer throat irritation from the smoke. However, as wood prices rose in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the poorest residents of London began burning coal at home. By the seventeenth century, during the reign of James I, wood became so expensive that even the wealthiest families in the capital started using coal to fuel their ovens.

If, in 1600, ladies in London avoided entering houses or rooms where sea coal was burnt and refused to eat meat roasted on coal-fired stoves, in the following decade, high society resigned itself to the inevitable. As chronicler Edmund Howes wrote, they, ‘holding their collective noses, began purchasing coal for heating homes and cooking’.

It wouldn't be accurate to say that Londoners silently endured the perpetual ‘fog’ hanging over the city—a dense, yellowish-brown haze with flakes of soot that left oily droplets on windows, stinging eyes and causing sore throats. Various suggestions for change were put forward. People began to advocate for taller chimney stacks, proposing that all workshops and forges be moved six miles beyond city limits. Others asked for anthracite to be brought in from Wales due to its lower sulfur and phosphorus content. Still others advocated for the creation of gardens within the city. Committees were established and laws were enacted, yet ultimately, none of these efforts yielded any significant results.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the creation of steam engines brought many new sources of smoke to the city—locomotives and stationary factory steam engines all ran on coal. And thus, the problem of smoke wasn't confined to the capital anymore. Hundreds of factory chimneys began to belch black smoke into the skies over rapidly developing industrial cities, including Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Leeds. Minutes of municipal bodies’ meetings were filled with complaints about the harmful effects of smoke on health and cleanliness. In the center and north of England, the ‘black belt’ emerged, and its inhabitants, according to sinister jokes, for generations believed that the natural color of the sky was gray and black was the normal color of leaves.

Usually, the term ‘smog’ is thought to have been invented by Dr Harold Antoine Des Voeux. He served as the treasurer of the Society for the Prevention of Smoke, and today, we would consider him an activist. On 25 July 1905, he presented a report titled ‘Smoke and Fog’ at the congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health. The following day, notes about his presentation appeared in newspapers, along with the term ‘smog’, formed by combining the words ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’. However, Dr Des Voeux never explicitly claimed to have coined this word. It is quite likely that it appeared over twenty years earlier, in 1881, in a scathing review of Oscar Wilde's play Vera (based on the biography of Vera Zasulich) in the Sporting Times. ‘“Smog”—a word I invented by combining “smoke” and “fog” to describe the atmosphere of London,’ wrote the author of the review under the pseudonym ‘Cornered Bull’, who was, in real life, lawyer James Davis and the playwright and librettist known as Owen Hall.

By then, doctors already understood that the London fog was not as much a sightseeing attraction as a deadly threat. In November 1922, The Times reported that, according to medical experts, when a dense smog hung over the city for nearly two weeks, the number of deaths from respiratory diseases doubled. There was no flu epidemic at that time, and this increase couldn't be attributed to infection. In 1926, Parliament passed a third, relatively stringent, law against air pollution. Nonetheless, the situation still did not change in any significant way.

It cannot be said that Londoners were particularly indifferent to environmental pollution issues or that there were no proactive and energetic individuals in the city. Even in the Victorian era, in the mid-nineteenth century, London successfully dealt with a cholera epidemic. The source of infection, contaminated water, was identified, new sanitary standards were developed, water intakes were purified, and the problem was resolved.

In the case of air pollution, the situation was more complex. No one could say with any certainty how many victims smoke claimed each year. People died from chronic diseases, and it was impossible to establish a strict causal link, as in the case of infection, where both the threat and the cause were obvious. Fighting air pollution would require restructuring the habits of 4 million city dwellers and, most importantly, a large-scale restructuring of the economy, affecting hundreds of gasworks, power stations, sugar factories, locomotive depots, and ports. However, ultimately, this proved to be necessary—but it took a genuine catastrophe to make it happen.

The first day of December 1952 in London dawned beautiful—the sky was clear, the air transparent and calm. By evening, however, the instruments monitoring the ‘atmosphere’ (which was really the air quality) showed that the concentration of sulfur dioxide was 0.09 ppm (0.23 milligrams per cubic meter) and the soot was 0.3 milligrams per cubic meter, which, even by modern standards, would be considered very good indicators. Hospitals recorded 81 new cases of respiratory diseases, and a total of 259 people died within one day from all causes.

London's ambulance service received 261 calls, with each taking about 44 minutes to respond. The following day, 2 December, was frosty and clear, with sunshine and moderate winds. The ambulance service received 215 calls, with an average response time of 35 minutes. Although there was a slight increase in the levels of soot and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, it was still insignificant. The weather remained fine on 3 December, with sunny skies and a northeasterly wind carrying clouds across the blue sky, indicating the arrival of a new weather system—a mass of cold, dry, stagnant air, an anticyclone, its center positioned a few hundred miles north and west of London.

The weather began to change on Thursday, 4 December. The temperatures dropped, humidity increased, and winds calmed. Dark clouds soon appeared in the sky. The anticyclone covered much of Scotland, Ireland, and northern and central England. Meteorologists understood that if this mass of cold air lingered in the Thames Valley, it would create conditions for the formation of ‘pea soup’ fog. How long the anticyclone would remain depended on many factors, primary amongst which was how quickly it would be displaced by a low-pressure area—a cyclone. At that moment, a relatively weak cyclone was forming over the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland.

Londoners saw nothing unusual in what was happening—they were accustomed to unpleasant December weather: humid air with a slight smell of smoke and particles of soot in the air, which they attributed to the power stations along the banks of the Thames. The center of the anticyclone moved towards London. On the evening of 4 December, meteorologists warned the police, road services, port authorities, and medical personnel about the dense fog, which could persist for at least 24 hours. That evening, the visibility sharply deteriorated. Within six hours, it decreased from three-quarters of a mile to 88 yards (about 80 meters). The temperature dropped even further, reaching below zero in some areas. Many Londoners, feeling the cold, added more coal to their stoves.

However, the air remained relatively clean with 0.44 milligrams of soot per cubic meter and 0.144 ppm of sulfur dioxide. But these measurements can be misleading—they were average data for the time. Closer to midnight, London's fog was already turning into smog. Visibility worsened to the extent that port authorities closed shipping traffic on the Thames.

On Friday morning, 5 December, Londoners lit their stoves and turned on their electrical appliances, adding yet more smoke to the atmosphere. A dense fog, so thick that many struggled to find their way through it, engulfed the city. As William Wise recounts in a book about London's smog, Dr Brian Williston noticed that the fog was different from usual for this time of year—it wasn't gray but had a yellowish-amber hue instead. Dr Williston looked at a chimney visible from his window and saw that the smoke from it wasn't rising upwards but, on the contrary, descending towards the ground. It was an inversion.

Under normal conditions, air temperature decreases with height because the air warms up at the surface of the earth, heated by the sun's rays, and this warm air rises. However, sometimes, this pattern is reversed: the air near the ground becomes colder while a warmer layer forms above it. This layer acts like a lid or a blanket, preventing air from mixing, and all the smoke, cooling down, doesn't rise upwards but descends downwards, increasing the concentration of pollutants.

Dr Williston knew about the catastrophic events in the Maas Valley in Belgium in 1930, where smog claimed the lives of more than sixty people. He also knew about similar events in the American town of Donora in 1948, where inversion played a key role in deaths. He called the mayor's office, but they didn't believe him and said that there was no inversion according to their data.

By the evening of 5 December, the smog thickened even further, and the number of cases of acute respiratory diseases sharply increased. Nurses and hospitals reported that their numbers had doubled compared to the previous day. The number of emergency calls increased by a third, and the daily death toll rose by 50 per cent. Meteorological conditions worsened as the wind calmed. Despite this, the authorities did not issue any special warnings as everyone considered the situation normal. The ‘pea soup’ was seen as an unavoidable evil, and when it happened, someone old and sick would die. No one perceived the situation as a disaster, neither officials from the Ministry of Health nor the press.

After an extremely cold and windless night, Londoners woke up on Saturday, 6 December, to find the smog stretching for 20 miles in all directions from the city center. Visibility in some areas dropped to 50 yards. Due to the smog, airports were closed, and shipping on the Thames had been halted earlier. Grocery shopping in almost zero visibility turned into a real adventure and lasted for hours. On returning home, people complained of a bad cough and burning eyes.

For those who had to venture onto the streets of London, 6 December turned into a nightmare. Buses stopped and waited for ‘escorts’ with torches who could guide them to the garage. Drivers who parked their cars on the streets had to leave their headlights and hazard lights on to prevent other cars from crashing into them in the thick smog. Soon, hundreds of cars with dead batteries littered the streets.

People started coming to police stations to report missing neighbors. Frequently, when the police visited the reported addresses, they discovered bodies—mostly elderly individuals who lived alone and either couldn't or didn't have the opportunity to call a doctor. From Thursday to Saturday, the number of deaths in Greater London was twice as high as usual.

On Sunday morning, 7 December, housewives in London discovered that the smog seeping into their homes left a thick, black, sticky film on all surfaces—including on curtains and furniture—that was nearly impossible to wipe off. The conditions outside worsened further. Ships remained stationary, airports remained closed, local and long-distance trains were delayed by an hour or two, and some routes were suspended entirely. Even subway trains began experiencing delays, with at least one line running an hour behind schedule. In addition, by Sunday morning, the London Transport Authority had announced the cessation of bus routes, except for a few vehicles operating on three routes in the south of the city.

Meanwhile, hospitals began to send new inquiries to the ambulance service about missing patients. They were expecting the vehicles to arrive, but they never showed up. For example, on Sunday evening, one hospital awaited an ambulance with four patients, but it never came. After a few hours, the vehicle was located. It turned out that an hour and a half into the journey, the paramedic informed the driver that all four patients were already dead. The driver decided not to proceed to the hospital and instead delivered all four passengers to the nearest morgue.

Only on Monday, 8 December, did the anticyclone begin to shift under the pressure of a cyclone crossing Scotland and northern England. It finally brought warmth, rain, and the promise of an end to the smog in the Thames Valley. During the day, a light breeze finally stirred the stagnant air after 100 hours.

During the night of 9 December, the mass of cold and extremely polluted air slowly shifted, and winds from the south and west began to pump clean air into the smog zone. By dawn, the wind speed reached 4–5 knots, and the smog started to dissipate. By the time it was the morning rush hour, the air had cleared in almost all neighborhoods of the capital. However, at that time, none of the residents realized the extent of the catastrophe London had experienced. It was only days and months later, as statistics on the number of deaths and illnesses were gathered, that the scale of the disaster gradually became clear.

In July 1953, the British Parliament established a special commission to investigate the air pollution problem, with the main task of determining all the circumstances of the disaster. In November, the commission presented its preliminary report. They found that during the period of the smog, hospitals received almost twice as many patients as during the peak of the flu epidemic in January 1951: 492 people per day compared to 293 people. In addition, mortality data showed that about 4,000 people had died from smog-related causes. During the smog, mortality from bronchitis increased approximately nine times and death from pneumonia four times.

However, this number was not final. In 2001, American researchers Devra Davis and Michelle Bell re-evaluated the medical statistics from December 1952 and the first months of 1953. They concluded that a significant portion of the ‘excess’ deaths in the early months of 1953 were unrelated to the flu, as British authorities believed, but caused by the effects of that same smog. According to their estimate, from December to February, around 12,000 people died in London from related causes.

In July 1956, the Clean Air Act was passed, becoming the first practical tool for air protection. It established zones where burning coal was prohibited under the threat of fines, allowing only strictly defined types of smokeless fuels and furnaces that met specific standards.

Read the second part of the global history of smog.