July 2, 2014 • 20 mins
London is no stranger to smog, which is why when the Great London Smog descended in December of 1952, nobody quite realized anything unusual was going on. At its largest, it extended 30 kilometers around London, and it killed thousands of people. Read the show notes here.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we have
a listener request. It is for listeners Stewart. So, London
(00:23):
has a long and established history as a very foggy place,
and for many centuries that fog was also very dirty.
In the eighteen fifties, Charles Dickens described London as fog
up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows,
fogged down the river where it rolls, defiled among the
(00:44):
tears of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great
and dirty city. Uh Like in the eighteen eighties when
Jack the Ripper was, you know, in London, being a
serial killer, that was even more terrifying because it was
all going on in this disgusting smog. Claude Monet, who
uh you know his his paintings really examined light and shadow,
(01:07):
went to London at the turn of the twentieth century
specifically to paint what the smag was doing to the sun.
So smog is not a modern Los Angeles thing, no,
So that is why when the Great London smog descended
in December of nineteen fifty two. Nobody quite realized anything
(01:29):
unusual was going on. People had been burning cold to
heat their homes in London at least since the Middle Ages,
and this dense grimy pea soup frog had been documented
all the way back to the sixteen hundreds that it
really did get worse. Um A lot of this like filth,
was coming from people burning cold to heat their homes,
(01:51):
but the Industrial Revolution did make it worse by adding
industrial smokestacks to the mix. There had also been some
possibly deadly smog before nineteen fifty two at various points.
This dense smog had rolled in during the dead of winter,
and it seemed like maybe more people were dying than normal,
but it was also usually during a bitter cold snap,
(02:12):
and so it wasn't completely clear whether it was the
smog or the cold that was killing people. Doctors had
suspected it's the Victorian era that smog could be deadly,
but they didn't really have a good way to prove it.
But in the case of the Great London Smog, it
was conclusive. This was an environmental disaster that was worse
than anything that had been documented at that point it UH.
(02:35):
It dwarfed some more recent smog related deaths that had
hit Built, Belgium in nineteen thirty and Donora, Pennsylvania in
eight and by the time it was over there was
no real there was a There were attempts to argue
that it was not the smog's fault, but it was
obvious that it was the smog's fault. Um. And at
(02:57):
its largest, the smog was a thirty co pometers or
eighteen miles around London, and before it was gone, it
had killed thousands of people. Yeah. And it all started
on Friday, December five of ninety two. UH. And at
first this smog wasn't particularly unusual as small went during
(03:18):
that first day, it was just your standard dry, smoky fog,
and people went about their business. Uh. That night, however,
the fog thickened and it took on a distinctly sulfurous smell.
So Normally, air near the ground is warmer than the
air above it, so hot air like smoke from a chimney,
can rise up through the cold air. But on the
(03:39):
night of December five, as the ground got colder, the
air near the ground also got colder, and it wound
up cooling off to a lower temperature than the air
above it. That's create that created what's known as a
thermal inversion. So smoke from chimney chimneys and smoke stacks
got trapped near the ground, and a high pressure area
over the city contributed to this problem them as well,
(04:01):
and a mist also formed in that layer of cool air,
which was also a very big problem. As water condensed
out of the air, it collected on the particles of soot, tar,
and sulfur dioxide, basically creating acid fog. Acid fog was
also not really an extraordinary situation in London at this point,
but normally in the morning, the sun would come out
(04:24):
and it would heat up the air in the ground again,
so smoke could start to rise normally and the sun
would evaporate all of this acid mist that was lingering.
But on the morning of December six, the smog was
so thick that the sun could not break through it,
so the air that was near the ground stayed cold
and the smog did not go anywhere. It was also
colder than normal, so people had to burn more cold
(04:46):
than usual to heat their homes. So as the smog
wore on, more and more pollution was added to this
already stagnant cloud of hovering acid rain every night during
the smog. When the when night fell, the fog would
just get thicker and thicker, and at the worst of it,
which was that Sunday, visibility dropped to as little as
a meter or about three ft. According to the Met Office,
(05:10):
Here's what was pumped into the air around London every
day during the smog. One thousand tons of smoke particles,
two thousand tons of carbon dioxide, a hundred and forty
tons of hydrochloric acid, and fourteen tons of fluorine compounds.
On top of that, about three hundred and seventy tons
(05:32):
of sulfur dioxide going into the air were converted into
eight hundred tons of sulfuric acid. During the worst of
a smog, you could not see the sun or as
a saying goes your hand in front of your face
or your own feet while you were standing up, so
basically settled on and blackened everything. Everything smelled terrible and
(05:54):
it was physically difficult to breathe. People wore masks or
covered their nose the mouth with handkerchiefs. This might have
helped a little bit, but not a lot Invisibility was
so bad that taxi and bus drivers couldn't see to drive,
so transportation along the roads ground to a halt and
people abandoned their vehicles because they either couldn't see or
(06:17):
couldn't get through the resulting gridlock. This completely overloaded the
London Underground, which was spared from the smog by virtue
simply of being underground. The BBC published an account of
Barbara Fuster, who described having gone out to dinner with
her fiance during the smog, and the smog was so
thick that her fiance couldn't see to drive home, and
(06:39):
the headlights of the car just reflected off the smog
and couldn't penetrate through it at all, so they used
the sidelights. She walked ahead of the car the whole
way in the range of the sidelights, while her fiance
leaned his head out the window so he could see her.
They also could not stop because the people behind them
would not be able to see their break lights, so
(07:01):
if they stopped that would have meant risk and getting
rear ended. And they proceeded in this manner for sixteen miles,
just a very long distance. Tracy and I have both
done some distance running and we know that that is
a very long distance, that's more than off marathon. So
they got home at five in the morning and everything,
(07:23):
their faces, their clothes, their vehicle completely black with soot.
So this may sound like the extraordinary effort of one
person to get home, but at ambulances and fire trucks
were doing exactly the same thing to get to where
they needed to go. And when the ambulance has failed
to run, people who needed to get to the hospital
walked there, so uh, you know, not so delightful. Patients
(07:50):
arrived with blackened faces and blue lips from their lack
of oxygen. Because remember the air was unbreathable. Boat traffic
on the Thames ground to a halt, as did air
traffic at Heathrow Airport. Flights were either canceled or diverted
to other airports that were outside of the smog. And
this smog disrupted the train schedules as well, and one
(08:11):
ferry across the English Channel was delayed by fifteen hours.
It had to anchor off the coast of France because
visibility was simply too bad for it to get to
England and Great Britain. Parents were advised to keep their
children home from school, not just because the air was foul,
but because people were literally afraid that the children would
get lost in the smog on their way there. And
(08:34):
because it was almost dark as night outside all the
time and the impassable roads kept police from being able
to respond, crime rates skyrocketed. Most sporting events during this
mog were canceled, including rugby and soccer games. This was
the first time that an event in Wimbley Stadium had
been canceled since the facility had opened in On the
(08:58):
other hand, Oxford and Cambridge were due to have a
cross country running competition competition and for some reason that
went ahead as planned, but because the runners couldn't really
see the field, there would be volunteers stationed to yell
at them which way to go, like come here this way.
I can't imagine what breathing at the rate of a
(09:20):
speed runner in that air quality must have felt like. Well,
in doing the research, I did not find anything about
like what the medical condition of these runners was when
it got to the end. Oh sounds horrible. On the
night of the eighth a theater in London had to
cancel the remainder of its performance of the opera La
Traviata after act one because the building had filled with smog.
(09:46):
Archivis also we're finding smog in the stacks at the
British Museum, so this sounds pretty horrifying to me. And
it went on like this for days until the wind
finally came to the rescue and it blew the fog
down the Thames and out to the North Sea on
Tuesday the ninth. It does indeed sound like a sci
fi film in many regards. I'm sure Vin Diesel will
(10:08):
star in the story of the smog. Uh Buses and
taxis were able to return to their service early quickly
after the wind blew this stuff away, but rail delays
did persist for a bit so apart from the inconvenience,
a lot of people died during this mog. A normal
death toll during this period of time in London would
have been one thousand, eight hundred fifty two people, but
(10:32):
during the smog, four thousand, seven hundred and three people died.
The death rate in the East End, which was home
to a lot of factories as well as being a
very poor and overcrowded part of town, was nine times
higher than normal Most of the people who died between
December five and December ten were people who already had
(10:52):
some kind of problem with their lungs or their ability
to breathe. The majority was elderly, which was another reason
it wasn't immediately a parent that something unusual was really happening. Uh,
and often repeated story is that because so many of
the people who died were already sick, nobody really realized
that the number of people dying was actually higher than
normal until the supplies of coffins and flowers started to
(11:15):
run low because of all of the um funeral services
that they had to have. I found multiple places citing
the story, but I couldn't find the original source of it.
But that's too crazy to leave out. Yeah, so people
were basically breathing acid. So, especially for people who already
(11:36):
had bronchitis or asthma or some of their condition, they're
already irritated. Lungs would just get more and more irritated,
and they would produce more and more mucus and an
effort of protecting themselves, which this amount of mucus just
made it harder to breathe. People wound up choking on
the mucus that their bodies were producing, or they died
of heart failure as their bodies struggled to support their
(11:59):
efforts to you. Twice as many children died as usual
for that period of time, and three times as many
adults between the ages of forty five and sixty four.
Babies were particularly hard hit as well, since the lungs
of infants are not as fully developed as older children.
According to the General Register Office, during the week ending
(12:21):
December so the week after the smog ended, fifty nine
percent of the increases and deaths came directly from respiratory diseases.
That number jumped to seventy six percent the following week
when the smog had cleared, but its effects on people's
respiratory systems lingered, and it's probably no surprise that the
(12:43):
smog also killed animals. The annual Smithfield Cattle Show was
going on in West London, and according to news reports,
a dozen prize cattle died. Some of these had to
be slaughtered because they were beyond help. Many other animals
needed serious veterinary attention. Interestingly, the animals sleeping and dirty
bedding largely survived, and the theories that the ammonia in
(13:05):
their betting neutralized the acid in the air, so the
this smog had a lot of effects for people in
London and for life in London afterwards. Even though the
worst of the fog moved out on the wind on
December ninth, more people than normal continued to die for
several more months afterward. By March of nineteen fifty three,
(13:27):
about thirteen thousand, five hundred more people than usual had died,
and it wasn't until three weeks after the smog had
cleared when the registrar published the death tolls that anybody
knew really how bad it had been. People compared this
spike and death to a cholera epidemic that had struck
nearly a hundred years earlier, and they also compared it
(13:49):
to the nineteen eighteen flu, which we've talked about before.
Even when it was conclusively shown that the smog had
definitely killed people and killed lots of people, a number
of politicians acted like smog was just an unchangeable fact
of life in London. Legislation for cleaner air was decried
as being a move of over regulation and basically a
(14:10):
lot of worrying over nothing. In the words of Harold McMillan,
who was then the Minister of Housing. Quote, today everybody
expects the government to solve every problem. It is a
symptom of the welfare state. For some reason or another,
smog has captured the imagination of the press and people.
I would suggest we form a committee. We cannot do
(14:31):
very much, but we can seem to be very busy,
and that is half the battle nowadays. There were also
fears that the city, which was still facing rationing and
debt in the wake of World War Two, could not
afford for people to switch to a cleaner fuel, and
for a while the government even tried to pin this
spike in deaths on the flu instead of on air quality. However,
(14:53):
this investigative committee originally forms to just sort of look busy,
found that there really was an actual problem that needed
to be addressed, and consequently Parliament passed the Clean Air
Act in nineteen fifty six. The Clean Air Acts included
provisions for setting up smoke free zones and to provide
money to homeowners to convert their heat source to something
(15:15):
cleaner than coal. It also prohibited furnaces from putting out
dark smoke. This didn't fix things overnight, and there was
at least one other deadly smog in London. There was
one that killed almost a thousand people in in January
of nineteen fifty six, and then another year later another
similar event occurred. Some of this was because it just
(15:38):
takes time to change how an entire city is heating
itself in the winter. New power stations and delivery systems
had to be built to accommodate the increased demand as
people converted their homes to use different sources of heat.
The air did get better, though, and the last London
smog that you know was this monumental but not so deadly,
(15:59):
took play us in nineteen sixty two. In nineteen sixty five,
natural gas became widely available in London and many households
converted to its use. There is still pollution in London,
you know, just like most industrialized places. Um, the smog
in London now more has to do with summer than
with winter because the pollutants of the air are mostly
(16:22):
tied to vehicle emissions rather than home heating, and they
react with heat and sunlight. And according to the World
Health Organization, every year around the world seven million deaths,
which breaks down to about one in eight are tied
to exposure to air pollution. Pollution. While there's not a
deadly smog blanketing everything, uh, air pollution is still definitely
(16:47):
a problem. So I'm glad Stewart asked us to talk
about This was something that I personally was very familiar with.
Although people who lived in London at the time like,
that's definitely a story that they remember. Well, I've seen
it mentioned, but I had never really investigated it and
didn't realize the breadth of it. Yeah, and the recency. Yeah.
(17:11):
So I also have some listener mail that is also
about breathing and dying. So stupid Mary. Yes, Mary writes
to us UM and she writes about our nineteen eighteen
influenza epidemic. Uh, and she was one of a few
letters that we got about the distribution of masks. She says,
you made the comment that masks are not effective at
(17:32):
preventing viral transmission. This is actually untrue, and mask isolation,
along with handwashing, is the primary method to prevent fluid
transmission and healthcare settings. The problem in nineteen eighteen and
now is that infected persons are able to spread influenza.
For a couple of days before they have symptoms, and
waiting to mask them when they have symptoms is too late.
(17:53):
In addition, small children and the elderly can shed virus
for a while after their symptoms have improved. I also
suspect that anyone in nineteen eighteen with sneezing and a
cough who felt well enough to be out in public
may have merely had a cold. Um. Another point is
the remark that the hemorrhagic pneumonia scene with this illness
was all due to secondary infections. That was the thinking
(18:14):
for a long time. Recently, the studies done on the
virus identified in the Inuit cadaver is suggested this particular
viral strain actually was more virulent than most strains and
was often the cause of this catastrophic and fatal UH pneumonia.
There's a great story of one community's response to the epidemic.
I believe it was Silverton, Colorado, which completely isolated the town.
(18:38):
Anyone trying to enter the town was arrested and jailed.
I believe this was one of the only communicate communities
in the United States that did not have a death
due to the Spanish flu. Keep up the great work, Mary,
thank you, Mary, It's very funny. My sources that I
was researching during the podcast unanimously felt that the distribution
of masks was not effective, and we have gotten several
(18:59):
letters uh after the podcast came out saying the apposite.
So there you go. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other subject you kid
or a history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Our facebook is Facebook dot com slash misspit history, and
we're on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is
missed in history dot tumbler dot com and we are
(19:19):
on Interest. If you would like to learn a little
more about what we talked about today, you can come
see how stuff Works and you can put the words
smog in the search bar and you will find a
couple of articles about smog. One of them is whether
smog makes for more beautiful sunsets, which would be I
guess I'm blessing and a curse. And you can come
to our website miss in history dot com to find
(19:41):
show notes and uh and all of the episodes in
an archive of every episode. So do all of that
and all up more at either of our websites with
our house stuff works dot com and missing history dot
com for more on those thousands of other topics. Is
it how to works dot com in in
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we have
a listener request. It is for listeners Stewart. So, London
(00:23):
has a long and established history as a very foggy place,
and for many centuries that fog was also very dirty.
In the eighteen fifties, Charles Dickens described London as fog
up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows,
fogged down the river where it rolls, defiled among the
(00:44):
tears of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great
and dirty city. Uh Like in the eighteen eighties when
Jack the Ripper was, you know, in London, being a
serial killer, that was even more terrifying because it was
all going on in this disgusting smog. Claude Monet, who
uh you know his his paintings really examined light and shadow,
(01:07):
went to London at the turn of the twentieth century
specifically to paint what the smag was doing to the sun.
So smog is not a modern Los Angeles thing, no,
So that is why when the Great London smog descended
in December of nineteen fifty two. Nobody quite realized anything
(01:29):
unusual was going on. People had been burning cold to
heat their homes in London at least since the Middle Ages,
and this dense grimy pea soup frog had been documented
all the way back to the sixteen hundreds that it
really did get worse. Um A lot of this like filth,
was coming from people burning cold to heat their homes,
(01:51):
but the Industrial Revolution did make it worse by adding
industrial smokestacks to the mix. There had also been some
possibly deadly smog before nineteen fifty two at various points.
This dense smog had rolled in during the dead of winter,
and it seemed like maybe more people were dying than normal,
but it was also usually during a bitter cold snap,
(02:12):
and so it wasn't completely clear whether it was the
smog or the cold that was killing people. Doctors had
suspected it's the Victorian era that smog could be deadly,
but they didn't really have a good way to prove it.
But in the case of the Great London Smog, it
was conclusive. This was an environmental disaster that was worse
than anything that had been documented at that point it UH.
(02:35):
It dwarfed some more recent smog related deaths that had
hit Built, Belgium in nineteen thirty and Donora, Pennsylvania in
eight and by the time it was over there was
no real there was a There were attempts to argue
that it was not the smog's fault, but it was
obvious that it was the smog's fault. Um. And at
(02:57):
its largest, the smog was a thirty co pometers or
eighteen miles around London, and before it was gone, it
had killed thousands of people. Yeah. And it all started
on Friday, December five of ninety two. UH. And at
first this smog wasn't particularly unusual as small went during
(03:18):
that first day, it was just your standard dry, smoky fog,
and people went about their business. Uh. That night, however,
the fog thickened and it took on a distinctly sulfurous smell.
So Normally, air near the ground is warmer than the
air above it, so hot air like smoke from a chimney,
can rise up through the cold air. But on the
(03:39):
night of December five, as the ground got colder, the
air near the ground also got colder, and it wound
up cooling off to a lower temperature than the air
above it. That's create that created what's known as a
thermal inversion. So smoke from chimney chimneys and smoke stacks
got trapped near the ground, and a high pressure area
over the city contributed to this problem them as well,
(04:01):
and a mist also formed in that layer of cool air,
which was also a very big problem. As water condensed
out of the air, it collected on the particles of soot, tar,
and sulfur dioxide, basically creating acid fog. Acid fog was
also not really an extraordinary situation in London at this point,
but normally in the morning, the sun would come out
(04:24):
and it would heat up the air in the ground again,
so smoke could start to rise normally and the sun
would evaporate all of this acid mist that was lingering.
But on the morning of December six, the smog was
so thick that the sun could not break through it,
so the air that was near the ground stayed cold
and the smog did not go anywhere. It was also
colder than normal, so people had to burn more cold
(04:46):
than usual to heat their homes. So as the smog
wore on, more and more pollution was added to this
already stagnant cloud of hovering acid rain every night during
the smog. When the when night fell, the fog would
just get thicker and thicker, and at the worst of it,
which was that Sunday, visibility dropped to as little as
a meter or about three ft. According to the Met Office,
(05:10):
Here's what was pumped into the air around London every
day during the smog. One thousand tons of smoke particles,
two thousand tons of carbon dioxide, a hundred and forty
tons of hydrochloric acid, and fourteen tons of fluorine compounds.
On top of that, about three hundred and seventy tons
(05:32):
of sulfur dioxide going into the air were converted into
eight hundred tons of sulfuric acid. During the worst of
a smog, you could not see the sun or as
a saying goes your hand in front of your face
or your own feet while you were standing up, so
basically settled on and blackened everything. Everything smelled terrible and
(05:54):
it was physically difficult to breathe. People wore masks or
covered their nose the mouth with handkerchiefs. This might have
helped a little bit, but not a lot Invisibility was
so bad that taxi and bus drivers couldn't see to drive,
so transportation along the roads ground to a halt and
people abandoned their vehicles because they either couldn't see or
(06:17):
couldn't get through the resulting gridlock. This completely overloaded the
London Underground, which was spared from the smog by virtue
simply of being underground. The BBC published an account of
Barbara Fuster, who described having gone out to dinner with
her fiance during the smog, and the smog was so
thick that her fiance couldn't see to drive home, and
(06:39):
the headlights of the car just reflected off the smog
and couldn't penetrate through it at all, so they used
the sidelights. She walked ahead of the car the whole
way in the range of the sidelights, while her fiance
leaned his head out the window so he could see her.
They also could not stop because the people behind them
would not be able to see their break lights, so
(07:01):
if they stopped that would have meant risk and getting
rear ended. And they proceeded in this manner for sixteen miles,
just a very long distance. Tracy and I have both
done some distance running and we know that that is
a very long distance, that's more than off marathon. So
they got home at five in the morning and everything,
(07:23):
their faces, their clothes, their vehicle completely black with soot.
So this may sound like the extraordinary effort of one
person to get home, but at ambulances and fire trucks
were doing exactly the same thing to get to where
they needed to go. And when the ambulance has failed
to run, people who needed to get to the hospital
walked there, so uh, you know, not so delightful. Patients
(07:50):
arrived with blackened faces and blue lips from their lack
of oxygen. Because remember the air was unbreathable. Boat traffic
on the Thames ground to a halt, as did air
traffic at Heathrow Airport. Flights were either canceled or diverted
to other airports that were outside of the smog. And
this smog disrupted the train schedules as well, and one
(08:11):
ferry across the English Channel was delayed by fifteen hours.
It had to anchor off the coast of France because
visibility was simply too bad for it to get to
England and Great Britain. Parents were advised to keep their
children home from school, not just because the air was foul,
but because people were literally afraid that the children would
get lost in the smog on their way there. And
(08:34):
because it was almost dark as night outside all the
time and the impassable roads kept police from being able
to respond, crime rates skyrocketed. Most sporting events during this
mog were canceled, including rugby and soccer games. This was
the first time that an event in Wimbley Stadium had
been canceled since the facility had opened in On the
(08:58):
other hand, Oxford and Cambridge were due to have a
cross country running competition competition and for some reason that
went ahead as planned, but because the runners couldn't really
see the field, there would be volunteers stationed to yell
at them which way to go, like come here this way.
I can't imagine what breathing at the rate of a
(09:20):
speed runner in that air quality must have felt like. Well,
in doing the research, I did not find anything about
like what the medical condition of these runners was when
it got to the end. Oh sounds horrible. On the
night of the eighth a theater in London had to
cancel the remainder of its performance of the opera La
Traviata after act one because the building had filled with smog.
(09:46):
Archivis also we're finding smog in the stacks at the
British Museum, so this sounds pretty horrifying to me. And
it went on like this for days until the wind
finally came to the rescue and it blew the fog
down the Thames and out to the North Sea on
Tuesday the ninth. It does indeed sound like a sci
fi film in many regards. I'm sure Vin Diesel will
(10:08):
star in the story of the smog. Uh Buses and
taxis were able to return to their service early quickly
after the wind blew this stuff away, but rail delays
did persist for a bit so apart from the inconvenience,
a lot of people died during this mog. A normal
death toll during this period of time in London would
have been one thousand, eight hundred fifty two people, but
(10:32):
during the smog, four thousand, seven hundred and three people died.
The death rate in the East End, which was home
to a lot of factories as well as being a
very poor and overcrowded part of town, was nine times
higher than normal Most of the people who died between
December five and December ten were people who already had
(10:52):
some kind of problem with their lungs or their ability
to breathe. The majority was elderly, which was another reason
it wasn't immediately a parent that something unusual was really happening. Uh,
and often repeated story is that because so many of
the people who died were already sick, nobody really realized
that the number of people dying was actually higher than
normal until the supplies of coffins and flowers started to
(11:15):
run low because of all of the um funeral services
that they had to have. I found multiple places citing
the story, but I couldn't find the original source of it.
But that's too crazy to leave out. Yeah, so people
were basically breathing acid. So, especially for people who already
(11:36):
had bronchitis or asthma or some of their condition, they're
already irritated. Lungs would just get more and more irritated,
and they would produce more and more mucus and an
effort of protecting themselves, which this amount of mucus just
made it harder to breathe. People wound up choking on
the mucus that their bodies were producing, or they died
of heart failure as their bodies struggled to support their
(11:59):
efforts to you. Twice as many children died as usual
for that period of time, and three times as many
adults between the ages of forty five and sixty four.
Babies were particularly hard hit as well, since the lungs
of infants are not as fully developed as older children.
According to the General Register Office, during the week ending
(12:21):
December so the week after the smog ended, fifty nine
percent of the increases and deaths came directly from respiratory diseases.
That number jumped to seventy six percent the following week
when the smog had cleared, but its effects on people's
respiratory systems lingered, and it's probably no surprise that the
(12:43):
smog also killed animals. The annual Smithfield Cattle Show was
going on in West London, and according to news reports,
a dozen prize cattle died. Some of these had to
be slaughtered because they were beyond help. Many other animals
needed serious veterinary attention. Interestingly, the animals sleeping and dirty
bedding largely survived, and the theories that the ammonia in
(13:05):
their betting neutralized the acid in the air, so the
this smog had a lot of effects for people in
London and for life in London afterwards. Even though the
worst of the fog moved out on the wind on
December ninth, more people than normal continued to die for
several more months afterward. By March of nineteen fifty three,
(13:27):
about thirteen thousand, five hundred more people than usual had died,
and it wasn't until three weeks after the smog had
cleared when the registrar published the death tolls that anybody
knew really how bad it had been. People compared this
spike and death to a cholera epidemic that had struck
nearly a hundred years earlier, and they also compared it
(13:49):
to the nineteen eighteen flu, which we've talked about before.
Even when it was conclusively shown that the smog had
definitely killed people and killed lots of people, a number
of politicians acted like smog was just an unchangeable fact
of life in London. Legislation for cleaner air was decried
as being a move of over regulation and basically a
(14:10):
lot of worrying over nothing. In the words of Harold McMillan,
who was then the Minister of Housing. Quote, today everybody
expects the government to solve every problem. It is a
symptom of the welfare state. For some reason or another,
smog has captured the imagination of the press and people.
I would suggest we form a committee. We cannot do
(14:31):
very much, but we can seem to be very busy,
and that is half the battle nowadays. There were also
fears that the city, which was still facing rationing and
debt in the wake of World War Two, could not
afford for people to switch to a cleaner fuel, and
for a while the government even tried to pin this
spike in deaths on the flu instead of on air quality. However,
(14:53):
this investigative committee originally forms to just sort of look busy,
found that there really was an actual problem that needed
to be addressed, and consequently Parliament passed the Clean Air
Act in nineteen fifty six. The Clean Air Acts included
provisions for setting up smoke free zones and to provide
money to homeowners to convert their heat source to something
(15:15):
cleaner than coal. It also prohibited furnaces from putting out
dark smoke. This didn't fix things overnight, and there was
at least one other deadly smog in London. There was
one that killed almost a thousand people in in January
of nineteen fifty six, and then another year later another
similar event occurred. Some of this was because it just
(15:38):
takes time to change how an entire city is heating
itself in the winter. New power stations and delivery systems
had to be built to accommodate the increased demand as
people converted their homes to use different sources of heat.
The air did get better, though, and the last London
smog that you know was this monumental but not so deadly,
(15:59):
took play us in nineteen sixty two. In nineteen sixty five,
natural gas became widely available in London and many households
converted to its use. There is still pollution in London,
you know, just like most industrialized places. Um, the smog
in London now more has to do with summer than
with winter because the pollutants of the air are mostly
(16:22):
tied to vehicle emissions rather than home heating, and they
react with heat and sunlight. And according to the World
Health Organization, every year around the world seven million deaths,
which breaks down to about one in eight are tied
to exposure to air pollution. Pollution. While there's not a
deadly smog blanketing everything, uh, air pollution is still definitely
(16:47):
a problem. So I'm glad Stewart asked us to talk
about This was something that I personally was very familiar with.
Although people who lived in London at the time like,
that's definitely a story that they remember. Well, I've seen
it mentioned, but I had never really investigated it and
didn't realize the breadth of it. Yeah, and the recency. Yeah.
(17:11):
So I also have some listener mail that is also
about breathing and dying. So stupid Mary. Yes, Mary writes
to us UM and she writes about our nineteen eighteen
influenza epidemic. Uh, and she was one of a few
letters that we got about the distribution of masks. She says,
you made the comment that masks are not effective at
(17:32):
preventing viral transmission. This is actually untrue, and mask isolation,
along with handwashing, is the primary method to prevent fluid
transmission and healthcare settings. The problem in nineteen eighteen and
now is that infected persons are able to spread influenza.
For a couple of days before they have symptoms, and
waiting to mask them when they have symptoms is too late.
(17:53):
In addition, small children and the elderly can shed virus
for a while after their symptoms have improved. I also
suspect that anyone in nineteen eighteen with sneezing and a
cough who felt well enough to be out in public
may have merely had a cold. Um. Another point is
the remark that the hemorrhagic pneumonia scene with this illness
was all due to secondary infections. That was the thinking
(18:14):
for a long time. Recently, the studies done on the
virus identified in the Inuit cadaver is suggested this particular
viral strain actually was more virulent than most strains and
was often the cause of this catastrophic and fatal UH pneumonia.
There's a great story of one community's response to the epidemic.
I believe it was Silverton, Colorado, which completely isolated the town.
(18:38):
Anyone trying to enter the town was arrested and jailed.
I believe this was one of the only communicate communities
in the United States that did not have a death
due to the Spanish flu. Keep up the great work, Mary,
thank you, Mary, It's very funny. My sources that I
was researching during the podcast unanimously felt that the distribution
of masks was not effective, and we have gotten several
(18:59):
letters uh after the podcast came out saying the apposite.
So there you go. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other subject you kid
or a history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Our facebook is Facebook dot com slash misspit history, and
we're on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is
missed in history dot tumbler dot com and we are
(19:19):
on Interest. If you would like to learn a little
more about what we talked about today, you can come
see how stuff Works and you can put the words
smog in the search bar and you will find a
couple of articles about smog. One of them is whether
smog makes for more beautiful sunsets, which would be I
guess I'm blessing and a curse. And you can come
to our website miss in history dot com to find
(19:41):
show notes and uh and all of the episodes in
an archive of every episode. So do all of that
and all up more at either of our websites with
our house stuff works dot com and missing history dot
com for more on those thousands of other topics. Is
it how to works dot com in in
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.