The Toxic Disaster You Didn’t Learn About in History Class
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
- Discover the tragic tale of London's 1952 Great Smog, a deadly environmental disaster that claimed thousands of lives. Learn how the event transformed air pollution awareness and shaped modern environmental policies.
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My grandmother couldn't go out as she had a "weak chest" as they called asthma then. She stayed indoors...with a coal fire burning. And they burned more coal in braziers in the streets. They had no idea.
WORSE: WE DO KNOW the consequences but still carry on allowing to pollution to continue. Big companies have a team of lawyers fighting to delay the installation or upgrade of filters and they are still dumping toxic waste to our rivers and sea: locals are warned not to go swimming when the toxity is too high for even a short exposure - not because it is always toxic.
@@oakstrong1 A lot then was due to Coal being Nationalised with Coal output having minimum totals. Unfortunately the smoke regulations that came in didnt note that Efficient burning of coal reduced output of unwanted products as more was combusted, unfortunately most fluing (inc of Nationalised Electricity) was inefficient and boilers just stoked rather than managed. Even Diesel fumes were.are not clear ones which helped a bit as trains switched from coal burning. From memory Bankside power station in London only burned oil, which was interesting
@@highpath4776 Thanks for the info. The problem is still the same though. We burn fossil fuels rather than invest money on cleaner alternatives. Energy companies will start only become serious about developing more efficient systems once most of us switch and the next step after that is to develop less polluting manufacturing processes. Demand drives innovation.
There was science back then that they should have known. This kind of thing was happening in London since Victorian times, it’s common during the Industrial Revolution in all big cities.
@@oakstrong1 Particularly clean nuclear energy.
I live in Lima city Peru, here we get atmospheric inversion from May till October. The number of people who suffer from asthma is mind boggling. In Santiago de Chile, too. The police patrol the streets with infrared visors on the lookout for warm chimney stacks. The police have a standing warrant to enter houses that have warm chimney stacks. An excellent video Simon and team!!!
And shut down the fires, that are heating the homes?
Or do they measure the smoke to see if it's up to regulation?
I have so many questions.
Slight correction: An inversion layer is by no means a rare occurrence, and is likely the primary cause of the frequent thick fogs in London. It is extremely common on cold winter mornings. What may have been rare in this case was the strength and duration of the inversion layer.
Correct. London is in a basin and is one reason why air quality is so bad. It happens where I live to a lesser degree. I have athsma so its terrifying!
I lived in Denver, Colorado, USA for most of my life. Denver is frequently subject to temperature inversions, primarily during fall and winter. When coming into Denver from the mountains with a temperature inversion present, it is strikingly visible. There will be a layer of brown air close to the ground, with a sharp demarcation between the brown layer and the clearer air above it.
Yep. Fairbanks AK has them often in the winter.
Missoula Montana too.
@@feiryfella Also get it out in Dagenham Freezing Fog due to the marshes and the relative temp of the Thames which never quite warms up in winter but is warmer than the freezing air temps. If it stays around depends on the winds, so high pressure for a long time holds the fog in, we have not had so much recent years - maybe the use of glass in the tall london city buildings rather than brick changing the heat pattern and retention of the city ?
Seems an appropriate day to release this given the UK turned off it’s last coal powered power station today
Came here to say this! How cool is that?
Really? Well good on them 😁👏
I just hope the British can now afford their heating bills. Have you noticed green warriors tend to be those who can afford the ‘Green Revolution’
Awesome! Congratulations from Germany
Which is insane because the thing that's meant to be replacing it isn't actually finished yet, you'd think they could just wait until the replacement to the coal powered power station is finished before they close down the one that they just shut down?
Imagine surviving the entire war only to choke to death under those black skies.
Imagine surviving both wars just to get smoked by fog
@@SoreSurvival Most in WW1 men had been gassed so the flu after WW1 and the smog in the 1950s finished them off
And here’s a good example of why I don’t believe in any kind of god or deity whatsoever. The cruel injustice of surviving either WW2 or both world wars only to choke out due to this smog is… It’s too much. No benevolent deity that’s supposed to be the perfect good would do that to its beloved creations. This is just one of hundreds of things that have happened to people that lead me to this conclusion.
@mikoto7693 You've only ruled out the benevolent deities, the ones who could be perfectly good. There's still a lot of room left over for a god after that.
@@LordMarcus This is sort of the root of Islam/ Rostratucism where God is seen as both "good" and "evil" - even in the Bible the poets speak of a time to build up and a time to destroy. but what is ex post analysis of the vaguries of life itself - the lord sends the rain and the sun on the good and bad alike (and Jesus - the wall that collapsed and killed those people - were they all evil doers ?) . Is though God (in whatever shape we build him ) interested in "social justice" of the equality that is up to his creation to deliver ? ( note use of male in the absence of theroetical not actually gender specific word being availble )
My parents talk about this subject....when I was grown up... the River Thames stank and the buildings were black... when they started cleaning up the buildings.. it was a real shock I didn't realize the buildings weren't black
I lived in london for 15 years and at times you could taste the pollution on the air
I stayed with a friend in Camden for a week 15 years ago and was horrified that my boogers had turned pitch black
Only some times? I lived there 3 months and you could taste it all the time and I was mostly on the outskirts. I think you have just got used to it and only notice when it is particularly bad.
wonder if i should visit china for tasting 50% BatteryElectricVehicle adoption air and some of the strictest air pollution laws. Cant belive it.
I was living in London during this fog. I was two years old and my sister was born on Dec 6. Of course I don't remember it, but my mother used to talk about it.
I'm glad you survived! It's a vulnerable age to encounter something like this. Clearly your lungs were better than mine. I spent my first three years in hospital.
My mum was born in london 2 weeks before the smog, I had no idea how deadly it was!
Last smog I saw was in Sussex early 60's , they still used the old air-raid sirens on pea soup fogs then.
Hearing those air-raid sirens may have triggered PTSD for some people who lived through the Blitz. I presume this may have also affected cold war population.
As we get boil water advisories in Georgia because of a burning chlorine plant.
Missed that news about the explosion.. Usually we only boil water because of e-coli. This no longer happens because the chlorinate our section of the town water. Hope you are well.
I only got an advisory so reduce exposure to the outside, especially if you have health issues.
Because of the hurricane?
i heard there was a shelter-in-place advisory regarding the chlorine though there's also a boil water advisory because of a pumping station failure (iirc) in atlanta - are the two related?
Why boil the water?
The chlorine in it isn't that bad, the chlorinated organic compounds however, oh boy! But those don't go away just because you boil the water.
I read an article about it and I hope they shut down that factory for good. 3 serious incidents in 20 years is way too much!
I've come across references to the London fogs in Dickens novels. I've heard The Great Fog of London referenced in videos before. This was fascinatingly horrific.
yes but that predated the main coal burning other than domestic coal (which was not insubstantial)
Favorite fact : at the West Ham greyhound track, the smog was so bad that the guy operating the mechanical hare lure could not see the track, so the dogs actually beat the hare. They canceled the meet.
I have seen and heard documentaries of this London Great Smog of 1952 a number of times over the last several decades. This was a good summary of that terrible event. It was indeed a turning point for the environment even to today with bans of high pollution cars in the London area and other cities in the UK and in the world (LEZ's). For many the use of tobacco, exposures to toxic chemicals from workplaces, from service in WW I & II likely added to their doomed fates.
That makes no sense. The exhaust of cars is cleaner than ambient air in London and LA.
@@gregorymalchuk272 might be now with CATs , wasnt then, but we didnt have many cars, just 7000 diesel buses every day
The lesson learned was apparently to pour more money into denying pollution is bad, because it doesn't seem like much ELSE is being done.
I remember the smogs around the industrial north in the 1960s. I remember being let out of school early and told to get home quickly. No buses running so had to walk. Had to feel our way around buildings to figure out where we were. Scarey stuff when you are in your early teens. Amazed that I've reached 75 but then my family emigrated to a cleaner country. NZ first and now living in beautiful Adelaide, South Australia.
Should do a similar video on the rampant cancer caused by 3M dumping waste in Oakdale Minnesota
And Antwerpen!
As someone who live in Woodbury, I'd love to see that!
wow sadly I"m American and knew about the London Fog of 52 but did NOT know about this!
Unless they made a movie of week or life magazine we rarely knew.
I remember when I was a kid when we were sitting stuck in traffic in Los Angeles, back in the 70s, I used to hang my head out of the car trying to keep myself from being nauseous... but I would eventually vomit out onto the street because the air outside was even worse than the freon from the air conditioner making me ill on the inside. Of course it didn't help that my father smoked inside the car. People just really hadn't learned anything in those 20+ years. If you're younger than that you don't realize how much things have changed for the better, which means bad things for the short memory of societies. The Environmental Protection Act here in the US might be sh1tcanned during this next Administration, which terrifies me because going back to that sounds like the worst idea!
nothing ever changes until people die, our societies moral compass is a bit askew, money first, people second?!?!?
More like people last😢
So far only 6 have supported this. It should be MILLIONS. And our politicians are not able to be made accountable.
Because people are lazy, greedy, and don't care about things that don't concern them.
Even when mass deaths happen, people are still lazy and greedy to make any significant changes before something else happens, and most people move on to that.
Like how people forgot about Myanmar after Ukraine happened. And how people are starting to forget Ukraine after Palestinian happened.
More convenience and stability. Those are the real killers of people. Probably close to money though
Lets think about this real fast .... Most times when something needs to be done it's too late because it was a true unknown. Other things not so much. So it's not always money first. Although that being said once some disasters happen they profit afterwards due to knowledge gained and healthy living becomes toxic. Continuous patients.
Boise Idaho suffers from regular inversions. I liver there for about 10 years, and I remember a few times the public was told not to go to work or travel at all for the time. Sometimes a week or more.
I remember how hard it was breathing during black summer in Australia. It went on day after day, it was like trying to breathe through water. I felt so sorry for those with asthma and people that couldn't get away from the smoke 😔
I live in Melbourne, we were well away from the main fires even as the East Gippsland burned down here. I've been a chronic asthmatic since birth, and it was painful to breathe here. My best friend serves with the Navy in Sydney, and summed it up simply when describing how bad it was there - "mate, you'd be dead"
I learned about this in history class in the 70s, but there wasn't much information and it was easily forgotten. Pretty much just a mention that stirred a few questions that the teacher couldn't answer, other than to say "pollution is bad" and "we never know what unexpected consequences there will be unless we thoroughly investigate things before we do them".
yeah so did I and I graduated in 08 but I'm sure mine was more detailed than yours. maybe they don't teach it in England, I live in America
@@theantichrist5191 And I'm in Canadia. I mean Canada.
“Mostly preexisting conditions”
Man they’ve really been pulling that card to minimize tragedies for generations huh?
Preexisting conditions have to start somewhere
They covered this in an episode of The Crown - it made me cry 😢
😂😂😂 Get a grip.
If true that is concerning. Perhaps have the dosage on your med.s evaluated.
@@wolfmantroy6601 That's a needless nasty comment. Have you ever heard the words EMOTIONS AND EMPATHY. Some people visualise as if it is real and happening and put themselves into the shoes of those whose lives were either ruined or taken. Maybe you might consider that you are not the same as other people - in a truly negative fashion.
@@aidencox790 I have zero empathy for you overly emotional women. You just proved my point with your silly comment. Now keep that hole under your nose closed until your opinion is asked for.
@@wolfmantroy6601I'm sorry that you don't have empathy for other human beings. Have you served a lot of time in prison for violent crimes? Clearly you don't see other people as human beings and you're missing that part in your brain that gives you empathy.
Yep, put me down for this one. Approaching my 6th birthday at the time (15 January 53), I have no personal recollection of the event. What I do remember is the years of chronic bronchitis I suffered from then until probably 1960 and the onset of puberty (although I also recall a recurrence as late as 1967). When I wrote about this in my autobiography in 2022 I could almost taste, smell and feel the bronchitic condition of my childhood lungs - especially the pain of trying to cough up the horrible phlegm generated in them. And, of course, there were many later though lesser instances of smogs before the clean air acts took hold. I remember cycling off to school in 1959 in a fog so thick that I rode into a car on the other side of the road before I could even see it clearly - at about three miles an hour!
My grandmother was in London in the early 1960s as an exchange student from Austria and she said the smog was unbelievable. She was born in 1944, so it was roughly in 1960-1962.
What struck me about the UK was that the country was so poor that people were still heating ther hovels with the open grate burning of coal in individual rooms as late as the 1970s. We hadn't done that since probably the mid 1800s in the USA.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Wasnt really being poor, its how houses were built. open fires were quite efficient, a downstairs one would warm the upstairs, though indeed enclosed burners were probably better these were rarely marketted. Coal was relatively cheap to, compared to electricity. Warm Air district systems were unreliable. Our flats were built in 1960 and more still to the mid 60s had coal fires - cleaning, lighting of them was the wives job so no wonder they didnt go to work with all that to do. The flats also meant our coal heated someone elses flat.
Never knew of this case, shocking! Thanks for shedding light on it
Another amazing episode! I can't imagine basically breathing sulfuric acid for days.
You had to be already very to die then, or really weak.
Brilliant as always, Simon and utterly fascinating. Thanks to you and the team.
This video ought to be shown to kids in schools. I recall at no point in my schooling was it ever mentioned that breathing in ANY type of pollutant, whether it be smoke from a fire, sawdust, or chemicals - they all do harm to your lungs.
An excellent video, thank you👍
When I visited London in 1991, the world still had acid rain and an ozone hole so the statues were striped black and white. I think all cabs and buses had to use diesel fuel, as it was believed that since it didn't go into the upper atmosphere so it didn't increase the ozone hole.. All I know is that I got blackheads pretty quickly even after washing my face several times a day. Every time I blew my nose, there was gray and black stuff in it. I think it was the same in Edinborough, Dublin, and Belfast. Super happy to hear the UK gave up its last coal powered plant.
Caveat: I haven't visited in 33 years, so I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, possibly a LOT of things.
Europe going all-in on passenger diesel automobiles was great for fuel economy but terrible for air pollution. Gasoline cars from the late 1970s and early 1980s in the USA were way cleaner.
My parents were living in London at that time and told me about this horrific event. A contributing factor to this disaster which was not mentioned in this video was the decision to replace the electric trams with new diesel buses. These belched out black toxic fumes making the whole situation worse.
Learned about this from my history loving father. Then I moved to Thailand; and realised some places still have toxic air pollution as a facet of daily life. Clean, breathable air should be a human right monitored by international law-makers.
Wow. I had no idea. I guess I've heard references to it, but I never understood how deadly it was. It's a warning we should all heed. 😳☮️🙏🏻🕊
quite simply, until recently the British History curriculm was basically From Plato to NATO, hence Mid 50s and beyond not covered, and Modern History seemed to start in the 1970s.
I love this Channel. Thank you for all you do.
I learnt about this in history class. Mind you, I was in school in the 90s, and it seems like school doesn't teach anything these days.
Agree, My younger kids seem to have learned very little of what we did in 80s/90s, Youngest especially talks a different language lol
As an asthma sufferer this makes me shudder.
I read about this 55 yrs ago, extraordinary story the resulted in Britains clean air act. Wonderful story of the blind man leading the ambulance around because he knew the route the driver couldn’t see. And the tragedy of the people dying in theatres because the ushers torches were so ineffective.
I remember it very well. I was Ten years old at that time. It was indeed a Pea Souper as the air was a thick yellow and I could see my hand only if it was very close to my eyes. My own familiar street, the one I played in every day, had disappeared. It was like being blind. I had to feel the walls for guidance. My Footsteps sounded so loud it was if I was being followed. We had a family car (very rare at that time). I had to walk in the road, my foot touching the kerb, so I could direct my Dad by means of tapping the bonnet to guide him at a snails pace. Exciting for a kid who didn't know the dangers it brought
At 13 hooray you finally said it. The air is London is absolutely rancid and in the past 2 years I've had to be picked up off the pavement four times because of asthma attacks - I'm on 5 different asthma meds
The Clean Air Act was part of my childhood. My father got a job that included inspecting smoke colour and density from school boilerhouse chimneys. I remember the sheets of graded greys used to estimate the smoke colour. We moved from a mining village in Yorkshire to a much cleaner environment in the Midlands, it made a great impression on me.
The human race is profoundly adept at closing the barn door long after the cows have come home and left again...
I had an uncle who was a baby during this, and he was left with lifelong lung damage and recurring pneumonia. He had to use oxygen from an early age. His family left soon after this, but the damage was done.
It's weirdly supernatural sounding. Kinda inspiring in a macabre way. A fog that creeps into a coastal city and kills all it touches. Sounds like something straight out of Lovecraft.
I live in Utah, where every winter we go through periods where our highest population center (utah and salt lake valleys) is covered in inversion that makes our air quality the worst in the world. We have air quality as a part of our weather reports. And we have high rates of lung cancer and asthma because of it all. There's been mornings where I've woken up and not been able to see out my window, or breathe when I leave the house. What does our government do?
Absolutely nothing.
Add into it that as the great salt lake dries up it puts off arsenic and lead dust that's blowing across the valley and it's a climate hell.
It wasn't just London. I remember pea-soupers in Leeds when I was a child. Your hand almost disappeared if you stretched out your arm. My mother and I felt our way home from school along fences and hedges.
The worst traffic accident in US history is something I remember seeing on the news when I was a kid. I think it went down like this:
This was in TN and temperatures had plummeted. A paper plant straddled a highway and was releasing a ton of vapor. This meant all three factors were about to combine into something incredibly unpleasant and unprecedented. The vapor *would* have just floated into the jetstream... If not for the pressure system holding it firmly down. So this giant, white wall floated onto a highway during the start of Christmas shopping season...
The carnage was as I recall, severe. Something like 50 to 60 deaths as hundreds of vehicles rear ended each other.
Almost 23,000 early deaths happen in the EU each year as a result of air pollution from burning coal for electricity.
In Asia, the number is much higher and increasing.
From 1999-2020, approximately 460,000 deaths in the Medicare population were attributable to coal electricity-generating emissions in the U.S.
Here in northern Nevada, when we get a temperature inversion, we get a freezing fog, locally called "pogonip." The Native American tribes used to go to a higher elevation to protect their elders and children. During that time, they ban use of wood burning stoves unless they are used as a primary source of heat.
I have seen it when driving up to see my dad in Reno, he had to leave that area because the air was so bad .
@@DesertFernweh Lake Tahoe is warmer and clear when we get those inversions.
My dad remembered this and said that when he went to the cinema, the screen was obscured by the smog as it drifted in to the theatre
In Utah, from Salt Lake City down to south of Provo, they go through inversion every winter. You can literally hike a short trail into the nearby mountains and look down on the huge cloud of smog everyone is living in. The irony of living in one of the most beautiful places in the US but not even being able to see the mountains only a few miles away. That area is top 10 in the US for most polluted ozone levels.
It's not just the air that's TOXIC 🎉🎉🎉🎉
The same thing happened in Donora, Pennsylvania four years earlier.
Didn't Simon do a video on that? Or was it Fascinating Horror?
@@sjenny5891 it's probable that someone has by now. It's a good topic for these types of videos.
Air pollution is still not taken seriously at all, neither by governments nor by the general public. The staggering figures of annual deaths from air pollution evidence this fact. We have the technology to drastically reduce air pollution from industrial sources but that would cost money. An easier tactic is to keep the public ignorant about the dangers of air pollution and just proceed as normal.
Next do a feature on the Donora Smog. Same situation but even more deadly. It happened in Donora, Pennsylvania in 1948 and killed 1 out of every 700 residents in a shorter time period, 4 days instead of the 5 days of the London Smog that killed 1 out of 2000 people.
Thanks for letting me know. Never heard of it before
Edit: Fascinating Horror actually has a video on it
Both are covered in atmospheric chemistry classes, of course. That’s where I learned about these.
@@ladyeowyn42 Makes sense. I learned about the London Smog in a general weather and climate class back in the 70's but didn't know about Donora until The Weather Channel did a documentary on it. I think it was part of the "When weather changed History" or something similar.
@@Jamietheroadrunner The Weather Channel had one too. Not sure if it is available anywhere. It was part of their "When Weather Changed History" series.
@@hectorsmommy1717 there are multiple docs on it. The Fascinating Horror was good but brief
Some more focus on primary sources would be nice. Like, showing actual photos from 1952 london instead of random stock footage
remarkably few decent photos , or film , that isnt licenced, or indeed much taken. The BBC wasnt really into showing it, neither the newsreels. I think it had been common , but less long lasting , in years past, so initially wasnt noteworthy
I read of this someplace before. I think it was a murder mystery and fog was a backdrop for the story
Great channel mate keep it up
Such a cheerful video! 😢
This was actually covered at my school, though I'm an american, I guess it was in an attempt to push home the concept of the dangers of capricious environmental neglect.
The great smog of London - yes we learned about it all right! My year 7 geography teacher was a former pupil at my school in Harrow Weald. He recalled the Harrow and Wealdstone Train Crash in 1952 occurring at the same time. He said something along the lines of us kids being fortunate enough not to have experienced it... Well, until you end up in Jakarta for more than a few weeks!
Tv series 'The Crown' did a great job on this
How have I never heard of this?
We definitely learned about this in history class here in south carolina
Back in the early 1970's, Nottingham started banning home burning of coal (in the days before central heating) and I remember us having to switch to coke and other coal alternatives. But I did not know the background to this, and hadn't heard about the London disaster at all. (I was only about 5 at the time, and we didn't have a TV). Thanks for this documentary
That is what strikes me as shocking about the UK. The country was so poor that people were engaged in open hearth burning of coal on a room by room basis as late as the 1970s. We hadn't done that in the USA since probably the 1850s.
We had a coal fire in a house built in the 1960's (village outside Nottingham) As an asthmatic I remember having to wear a smog mask at age 3-6 when we moved away from the low lying area by the Trent
I was 6 1/2 at the time and clearly remember it. It was difficult to find my way home, the 1/4 mile, from school and the sky was green. There was also a very thick fog in 1962 but not as polluted. I had to walk 5 miles home, barely able to see the road.
Here in Pennsylvania we had the same type of thing happen near Pittsburgh and it was around the same time too but I don't think it was anywhere as deadly as this.
I remember learning about this at school in history lessons
6 years on and FINALLY got to hear respiratory pronounced properly!
I live in Denver Colorado and for days we had the worst air quality on the planet.
We had the same thing in Vancouver, Canada but it was from the forest wildfires last year.
I saw it on the crown. It was interesting.
Fantastic show..
The US city of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania had a smoke problem during wwII. In the first year after the war the street lamps were on during noon. BY 1950 "Smoke Control" became the law.
Temperature inversion is very common in Stuttgart, Germany. This has to do with the fact that the center of the city is in a bowl-shaped valley.
No idea how they survived the era of wood and coal. But they did.
Check average age death stats, did older people move away ?
The joys too of the coking plants - Nantgarw in South Wales, Manvers in South Yorkshire were just some
I live in Salt Lake City, we get inversions all the time, about a month ago we had the fifth worst air quality in the world.
As someone with asthma, this is a NIGHTMARE 😱Holy fucking shit, no wonder Tom Lehrer has an entire song about pollution!!! And sulpher dioxide is a nightmare to me because of my asthma. Those poor people, their lungs must have gotten scarred ick!
The poor veterans of WW1 who managed to survive the gas attacks would have had no chance in this fog.
Most of those exposed to gas yet "survived" didn't live that long. My great uncle and everyone that was gassed alongside him died 7 years later, all within the space of a year.
You’re right. I never heard of this…
Smog is nasty stuff. My home town used to be so bad for that shit that locals are still nicknamed "Smoggies".
Modern day Bjing is bad now but not as bad as London was in 1959
Simon apparently covered the same topic on his Sideprojects channel a few years before. Whoops. I don't really fault Simon. Even he admits that he can't always keep track of what he covers on his channels.
Actually this was well known and taught for quiote a while - as a kid in the 60s and 70s I certainly learned about this. But it's seldom been mentioned for years, maybe as many people's view of those now distamnt days have grown rosier.
I'm at the same age. As a little child I lived in a workers' settlement in the Ruhrgebiet between a foundry and a hydrochloric acid factory, my lungs are still impaired 60 years later. When my little sister almost died of air pollution we moved to a city near Netherland border where we could smell cow dung instead of coal fires.
@@schnetzelschwesteryeah you can’t get lung health back
I've never heard of this. My grandmama was 10 years old but she lived in Scotland. I'll ask her if she remembers this.
Yes, I learned about it!
I learned about the great smog in an episode of *The Crown* .
I live in the Monongahela River valley in Pennsylvania. In 1948, we had smog in one of the towns Donora because of a local zinc plant.
Coking for Town Gas probably been forgotten about, we had Gas Works Everywhere - Fulham, Beckton, being a couple of the bigger ones in London but plenty more smaller
It didn't just happen in London either, this well documented smog disaster happened there but many parts of the UK were plagued by temperature inversions causing exactly this. I live in what used to be a cotton town in the north which is set on/within a valley and the reason we were first given free access to the privately owned moorlands either side was so that the people who lived here had somewhere to go where they could breathe clear air when the toxic smog became stagnated close to the ground.
The legacy of these is still visible on many old stone and brick buildings, the chimneys on top are black in color unlike the rest of the building which is left over soot and pollutants from that era. The reason the other bricks below the gutter lines are clean is because they were all sandblasted back in the 60's in preparation for a visit from the queen, but the chimneys didn't get done due to budgeting and time constraints.
great video.
How many channels is Simon the host for?
In my grammar school history class we did learn about this disaster as an example of air pollution.
Lost a Grandfather to the smog in London.
Lived in a rural villiage in Oxford in the 1980s. the evening smog was terrible with all the houses burning coal and wood
I remember leaning about killer smog in London in the 19th century in history class (USA)
less Smog (was some) in C19th but Fog was around a lot in colder times and narrower buildings and streets in what is now Central London.
Another sad casualty of all this was the destruction of many beautiful home fireplaces across the UK, now with a little heater stuck in. it's nice to have a wood burning fire now and then, in addition to your regular central heating.
This could be the future of planet Earth.
I vaguely remember reading a few years ago about some declassified documents which related to the 1956 smog, probably in new scientist.
Apparently it was already well understood that the sulphur in coal made the smogs much worse and generally higher quality low sulphur coal was used in London and especially Battersea Power Station. Battersea PS had been built with aesthetically pleasing but way too short chimneys, so it didn't send the smoke above the winter inversion layer. The power output of Battersea correlated well with the severity of smogs. However in 1956 the issue was made much worse by the government of the day desperately trying to pay down the war debts, by exporting the low sulphur coal and allowing cheaper high sulphur coal to be burned instead, especially in Battersea PS. I doubt they did this knowingly but the law of unintended consequences often catches people out.
Wonderful introduction...of that London disaster 1952 12000 murdered due toxic gas expansion as lethal fog...
Not sure if this happens elsewhere, but in Australia most country people call cities “the big smoke”, despite none of them being smokey, foggy maybe, but not smokey.
An episode of the Crown on Netflix covered the 1952 great smog
Hmm. some folk could escape but I wonder it it was what finished King George off
To make things even worse is that most adults and even teens smoked cigarettes, pipes, and cigars in those days.