>"The black lungs of heavy smokers I would weigh once, then squeeze under cold running water for fifteen minutes until they became baby pink and tripelike, and then weigh again: the difference in the two figures, often a couple of pounds or more, was the weight of the tar and nicotine that quite possibly was the killer."
A few pounds? If you'd asked me, I would have guessed the weight of lung-accumulated smoking gunk would be an order of magnitude smaller.
(Also, not a bad hack for measuring some of the effects of smoking.)
>It wasn't only smoking that lacquered up one's innards with tar. Living in the London of the day was none too healthy, either.
Hmmm. Wonder how long I should continue to live in LA?
Not all of that tar stays in the lungs - some is breathed out; some is worked out by cillia (and sometimes swallowed, increasing the risk of cancer of the kidney, bladder, and penis).
Modern London pollution is bad and we need to work to reduce it - people still die from the pollution - but the London peasoupers were catastrophic. The US EPA has a great page about London smog, which has a long history: http://www2.epa.gov/aboutepa/londons-historic-pea-soupers
> Early on, no one had the scientific tools to correlate smog with adverse health effects, but complaints about the smoky air as an annoyance date back to at least 1272, when King Edward I, on the urging of important noblemen and clerics, banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death.
> banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death
"The result was that visibility could be down to a metre or so in the daytime. Walking out of doors became a matter of shuffling one’s feet to feel for road curbs, etc."
And form the article, based in 1962 (though things were surely better by then overall):
"More than once the bus I rode to work had to be led by a policeman walking on the road with a red flashlight, so thick were the greasy, sulfur-dioxide-laden pea-soup fogs that in 1962 were so bad as to send people by the hundreds to hospitals some days."
LA, Beijing... if not good, probably a lot better than this era and location.
"I can't trust air I can't see", was my favorite line of my grandfathers, who lived in LA for the past 60 years. He always mentioned how incredibly clear and clean the air is now compared to a few decades ago (where I live in Northern California now, even the Bay Area seems polluted and smoggy most days).
These days when I get behind a classic car that has a carburetor, I close the vents. Just can't stand the smell of the unburned fuel they put out. Which is odd because I grew up with them (my first car was a '75 Impala with the malaise-era small-block V-8). These days there are many more cars on the road and individually they're far cleaner than any 70's car was. So much cleaner that collectively they're cleaner than the population of cars from back then too.
I expect the same is true of many "industrial" cities in developed countries...
I live in Kawasaki, just outside of Tokyo, which is famous for its industry. The air now is lovely and clean, there are essentially no pollution issues at all, but 50 years ago, things were apparently very, very, different... In old pictures, it's like a black miasma hanging over everything.... oO;
Notice that SO2 and smoke particles are measured in units of milligrams per m^3 (today such measurements are in micrograms per m^3). To put Beijing's air in the context of this graph, the smoke particles in Beijing on a bad air day will go up to 0.2 to 0.8 mg/m^3 and SO2 will spike up to 0.3 for short periods. Compared to the Great Smog of 1952, Beijing's air isn't nearly as bad, but it's still incredibly bad. The Great Smog killed 0.03% of the population of London per day. Beijing's air regularly gets to around 1/4 the amount of smoke in the air as during the Great Smog.
Liverpool area, early 60s: we had those thick yellow fogs less often than in London, but with added ingredients from the chemical works up the estuary.
My grandfather would be hospitalised in the winter months with bronchitis - on one occasion spending time in an oxygen tent to aid his breathing. Our teacher at school suggested we breathe through handkerchiefs on the way to school if there was a fog. Impressive quantities of tar.
Similar things to what was done in America. Lots of regulations. The "Great Smog" of 1952, which resulted in several thousand deaths in a matter of days, spurred action, resulting in the Clean Air Act of 1956 and other legislation. It banned many of the more polluting activities which had been common at the time, use of low grade coal and wood in home heating, use of unfiltered diesel engines on transportation in the city, use of coal in power stations near to the city. Factories and power plants were also moved farther away from the city.
Among other things, a switch to gas-fired central heating (with the discovery of gas in the North Sea) and a mandate to use "smokeless fuel" in the remaining hearths. Smokeless fuel is a sort of briquette made of ground and reconstituted coal that's had most of the sulphuric impurities washed and cooked out of it, along with a blend of other things like sawdust and molasses.
A lot of people think of lungs as if they are big bags, but in reality they are more like a sponge. So if you could imagine what the accumulation would be like in a kitchen sponge, that is kind of what it is like in the lungs.
A few pounds? If you'd asked me, I would have guessed the weight of lung-accumulated smoking gunk would be an order of magnitude smaller.
(Also, not a bad hack for measuring some of the effects of smoking.)
>It wasn't only smoking that lacquered up one's innards with tar. Living in the London of the day was none too healthy, either.
Hmmm. Wonder how long I should continue to live in LA?