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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Bruce-Partington Plans and the chosen topic is London fogs.
A few facts:
☁ Pea soup, or a pea souper... is a very thick and often yellowish, greenish, or blackish fog caused by air pollution that contains soot particulates and the poisonous gas sulfur dioxide. This very thick smog occurs in cities and is derived from the smoke given off by the burning of soft coal for home heating and in industrial processes… The result of these phenomena was commonly known as a London particular or London fog… [Wikipedia]
☁ The British capital is particularly liable to natural winter fogs. It is surrounded by low hills, with marshland on its outskirts, and a large river running through it. Its location encourages the meteorological phenomenon of temperature inversion, when warm air traps cold air beneath it for days on end. During such a fog, the sulfur-laden smoke from domestic coal fires and factory chimneys was unable to rise into the upper atmosphere, and seeped into the natural fog, turning it yellow, brown, green or black… [Christine L Corton]
☁ A London fog is brown, reddish-yellow, or greenish, darkens more than a white fog, has a smoky, or sulphurous smell, is often somewhat dryer than a country fog, and produces, when thick, a choking sensation. Instead of diminishing while the sun rises higher, it often increases in density, and some of the most lowering London fogs occur about midday or late in the afternoon. Sometimes the brown masses rise and interpose a thick curtain at a considerable elevation between earth and sky. A white cloth spread out on the ground rapidly turns dirty, and particles of soot attach themselves to every exposed object. [R Russell, London Fogs (London: 1880), p. 6. Quoted by Dr Bruce Rosen]
☁ ...the plane tree became so popular in London in part because soot on its shiny leaves could easily be washed away. [Michael Dirda]
☁ Christine Corton [author of London Fog: The Biography] dates the emergence of “true London fog, thick, yellow, and all-encompassing” to the 1840s. [PD Smith]
☁ Londoners were well aware of the dangers the fogs posed to health. In 1873 a number of prize cattle at the Smithfield cattle show, in central London, choked to death during a particularly dense and suffocating fog. Newspapers and medical experts pointed to a statistical increase in deaths in London’s human population from bronchitis and other respiratory diseases during fogs. [Christine L Corton]
☁ In 1873, the first of several “black fogs” descended on London. In December, the gas lights illuminating the capital’s streets vanished in a smoky haze; horse-drawn cabs had to be led by men carrying torches who proceeded a foot at a time. Visibility was a few feet at most… Tabulating the deaths in the wake of the disaster, the Lancet realized that the city’s death rate had spiked, with more than 700 people perishing from respiratory ailments attributed to the smoky fog. ...thousands more died in blinding clouds in 1879 and 1880. A British correspondent writing to the New York Times in 1880 reported that London had been plunged into a “week of night,” and that the fog had “poisoned some our citizens to death…” [Stephen Mihm]
☁ The worst of all London fogs was that of the winter of 1879-80. The sun did not seem to rise over London on Christmas Day 1879, a day of complete darkness. At its worst, in one three-week period in January-February 1880, at least 2000 Londoners died as a consequence of fog inhalation. The mortality rate in east London increased by as much as 83 per cent during bad fogs. [Edited by T. Ferguson]
☁ Victorian Britons were well aware of how unpleasant polluted cities were to live in, even if the full health consequences were less clear than they are today. As the Times of London… commented in 1882: “There was nothing more irritating than the unburnt carbon floating in the air; it fell on the air tubes of the human system, and formed a dark expectoration which was so injurious to the constitution; it gathered on the lungs and there accumulated.” [Feargus O'Sullivan]
☁ During the Victorian era, the worst London fogs occurred in the 1880s and ’90s, most often in November… An 1892 study concluded that between 1886 and 1890 there were, on average, 63 foggy days per year. [Michael Dirda]
☁ The wind direction in London tends to be from west to east, so the East End had a lot of industry puffing out smoke and houses that used open fires. But it was also getting the smoke from the West End because of the wind direction… The East End was very much seen as the dark continent… It was much easier to pick a pocket back then. There’s stories of ladders being put up the side of buildings, and burglars making their way up, stealing whatever is inside and escaping without being seen. [Christine L Corton, quoted by Russell Parton]
☁ Britain’s capital was far from the worst in terms of airborne soot. Despite some industry and reliance on coal for heating, London’s reliance on commerce and trade meant its air wasn’t as bad as that of Sheffield and Birmingham, whose specialization in metal production required the highest volumes of coal burning. [Feargus O'Sullivan]
☁ ...other industrial cities also had smoke problems, but only in London did residents actually feel quite proud of the fog. A smoky street was a sign that industry was booming and that people could afford coal on their fire – which through most of 19th century was most people’s only source of heat and light… [Russell Parton] Although people detested the fog and knew it killed them they thought it represented something very special about London. And it was partly because of that the legislation passed was always weakened. [Christine L Corton, quoted by Russell Parton]
☁ ...for decades, every law proposed in Parliament to curb smoke emissions was watered down so heavily that it had no tangible effect… In 19th- and 20th-century London, many industries thwarted attempts by successive governments to clean up the capital’s air. Often they would simply refuse to install smoke purifiers on their factory chimneys, blaming the smoke from household fires instead… Magistrates had sympathy for the industrialists, especially the smaller ones, who could not afford to convert their furnaces to more efficient, cleaner models… There was a cultural component, too. The British were wedded to their open fires. Closed stoves, popular throughout much of Europe, especially in Germany, were shunned by Londoners. [Christine L Corton]
☁ There was discussion in the press as to whether innovative technology might provide an answer. The proposed solutions were rather impracticable, from ‘smoke drainage’ (connecting chimneys with the sewers, and using steam engines to suck smoke underground) to the discharge of electricity from specially erected lampposts, balloons or kites. More realistically, it was plain that gas and electricity in the home could reduce reliance on coal. Gas and electric, however, would not dominate domestic fuel until well into the twentieth century. Expense and inertia meant that most late-Victorian households retained the devil they knew. [Lee Jackson]
☁ After the 1890s the increasing popularity of gas fires and stoves, the introduction of electric motors to replace steam engines, and the gradual relocation of industry to the outer boroughs began to slowly reduce the number of foggy days endured by Londoners. But fogs persisted well into the 20th century. [PD Smith]
☁ The worst recorded instance was the Great Smog of 1952, when 4,000 deaths were reported in [London] over a couple of days, and a subsequent 8,000 related deaths, leading to the passage of the Clean Air Act 1956, which banned the use of coal for domestic fires in some urban areas. [Wikipedia]
☁ The Act was revised in 1968 when industries burning coal, gas or other fuels were ordered to use tall chimneys. In 1974 the first Control of Air Pollution Act introduced regulations on the composition of motor fuels. By the 1980s and 1990s the increasing use of the motor vehicle led to a new kind of smog caused by the chemical reaction of car pollutants and sunshine. The 1995 Environment Act introduced new regulations for air pollutants. [BBC]
Some useful resources:
A London Fog By Bruce Rosen, on Victorian History.
Pea soup fog On Wikipedia.
Weather - Fog On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
“London Fog,” a study of the great city’s legendary atmosphere A review by Michael Dirda of the book by Christine L. Corton, on The Washington Post.
Beyond the pall … how London fog seeped into fiction By Christine L Corton, on the Guardian website.
The Return of London’s Fog By Christine L. Corton, on The New York Times.
London Fog – The Biography: how air pollution changed the nature of city life By Russell Parton, on East End Review.
London Fog by Christine Corton – the history of the pea-souper Review by PD Smith.
China’s Smog Can’t Compete With London’s Pea Soup By Stephen Mihm, on BloombergView.
What Victorian England Tells Us About Pollution and Urban Development By Feargus O’Sullivan, on CityLab.
1952: London fog clears after days of chaos Part of ‘On This Day’, on the BBC website.
The Big Smoke (Routledge Revivals): A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times By Peter Brimblecombe. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you.
Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes Edited by T. Ferguson. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you.
Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth by Lee Jackson – review By PD Smith, on the Guardian website. Two paragraphs deal specifically with air pollution.
Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth By Lee Jackson. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you.
The Victorian Environment An index of articles on The Victorian Web.
'London Fogs' by R.Russell, 1880 On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
London Fog By Tine Hreno, on Writers in London in the 1890s.
EYEWITNESS: The Chromatic Effects of Late Nineteenth-Century London Fog By Anna Novakov and T. Novakov, on The Literary London Journal.
Monet’s art may reveal Victorian London’s smog By Zeeya Merali, on the New Scientist website.
Monet's view of London casts light on Victorian pollution By Roger Highfield, Science Editor, on the Telegraph website.
Descriptions of Fog in Bleak House [Charles Dickens, 1853] On the Victorian Web.
A London Fog Image and article from Illustrated London News (23 December 1849). On the Victorian Web.
Smog in Victorian London – 1839 This is an eyewitness account by Flora Tristan, a Frenchwoman who visited the capital in 1839. On My Time Machine.
Shroud of London By Amy Henderson, on the Weekly Standard.
January 9, 1888 --- King Fog By Tom Hughes, on Victorian Calendar.
'The Heart and Home of Horror': The Great London Fogs of the Late Nineteenth Century By Bill Luckin - an academic work from ‘Social History, Vol. 28’, published by Taylor & Francis, Ltd. In PDF form.
Worse than Cimmerian Darkness: fog and the representation of Victorian London Talk by Joseph de Sapio (Oxford), on Institute of Historical Research website. The IHR is a member of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. 45 minutes, 43 seconds.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
☁ Pea soup, or a pea souper... is a very thick and often yellowish, greenish, or blackish fog caused by air pollution that contains soot particulates and the poisonous gas sulfur dioxide. This very thick smog occurs in cities and is derived from the smoke given off by the burning of soft coal for home heating and in industrial processes… The result of these phenomena was commonly known as a London particular or London fog… [Wikipedia]
☁ The British capital is particularly liable to natural winter fogs. It is surrounded by low hills, with marshland on its outskirts, and a large river running through it. Its location encourages the meteorological phenomenon of temperature inversion, when warm air traps cold air beneath it for days on end. During such a fog, the sulfur-laden smoke from domestic coal fires and factory chimneys was unable to rise into the upper atmosphere, and seeped into the natural fog, turning it yellow, brown, green or black… [Christine L Corton]
☁ A London fog is brown, reddish-yellow, or greenish, darkens more than a white fog, has a smoky, or sulphurous smell, is often somewhat dryer than a country fog, and produces, when thick, a choking sensation. Instead of diminishing while the sun rises higher, it often increases in density, and some of the most lowering London fogs occur about midday or late in the afternoon. Sometimes the brown masses rise and interpose a thick curtain at a considerable elevation between earth and sky. A white cloth spread out on the ground rapidly turns dirty, and particles of soot attach themselves to every exposed object. [R Russell, London Fogs (London: 1880), p. 6. Quoted by Dr Bruce Rosen]
☁ ...the plane tree became so popular in London in part because soot on its shiny leaves could easily be washed away. [Michael Dirda]
☁ Christine Corton [author of London Fog: The Biography] dates the emergence of “true London fog, thick, yellow, and all-encompassing” to the 1840s. [PD Smith]
☁ Londoners were well aware of the dangers the fogs posed to health. In 1873 a number of prize cattle at the Smithfield cattle show, in central London, choked to death during a particularly dense and suffocating fog. Newspapers and medical experts pointed to a statistical increase in deaths in London’s human population from bronchitis and other respiratory diseases during fogs. [Christine L Corton]
☁ In 1873, the first of several “black fogs” descended on London. In December, the gas lights illuminating the capital’s streets vanished in a smoky haze; horse-drawn cabs had to be led by men carrying torches who proceeded a foot at a time. Visibility was a few feet at most… Tabulating the deaths in the wake of the disaster, the Lancet realized that the city’s death rate had spiked, with more than 700 people perishing from respiratory ailments attributed to the smoky fog. ...thousands more died in blinding clouds in 1879 and 1880. A British correspondent writing to the New York Times in 1880 reported that London had been plunged into a “week of night,” and that the fog had “poisoned some our citizens to death…” [Stephen Mihm]
☁ The worst of all London fogs was that of the winter of 1879-80. The sun did not seem to rise over London on Christmas Day 1879, a day of complete darkness. At its worst, in one three-week period in January-February 1880, at least 2000 Londoners died as a consequence of fog inhalation. The mortality rate in east London increased by as much as 83 per cent during bad fogs. [Edited by T. Ferguson]
☁ Victorian Britons were well aware of how unpleasant polluted cities were to live in, even if the full health consequences were less clear than they are today. As the Times of London… commented in 1882: “There was nothing more irritating than the unburnt carbon floating in the air; it fell on the air tubes of the human system, and formed a dark expectoration which was so injurious to the constitution; it gathered on the lungs and there accumulated.” [Feargus O'Sullivan]
☁ During the Victorian era, the worst London fogs occurred in the 1880s and ’90s, most often in November… An 1892 study concluded that between 1886 and 1890 there were, on average, 63 foggy days per year. [Michael Dirda]
☁ The wind direction in London tends to be from west to east, so the East End had a lot of industry puffing out smoke and houses that used open fires. But it was also getting the smoke from the West End because of the wind direction… The East End was very much seen as the dark continent… It was much easier to pick a pocket back then. There’s stories of ladders being put up the side of buildings, and burglars making their way up, stealing whatever is inside and escaping without being seen. [Christine L Corton, quoted by Russell Parton]
☁ Britain’s capital was far from the worst in terms of airborne soot. Despite some industry and reliance on coal for heating, London’s reliance on commerce and trade meant its air wasn’t as bad as that of Sheffield and Birmingham, whose specialization in metal production required the highest volumes of coal burning. [Feargus O'Sullivan]
☁ ...other industrial cities also had smoke problems, but only in London did residents actually feel quite proud of the fog. A smoky street was a sign that industry was booming and that people could afford coal on their fire – which through most of 19th century was most people’s only source of heat and light… [Russell Parton] Although people detested the fog and knew it killed them they thought it represented something very special about London. And it was partly because of that the legislation passed was always weakened. [Christine L Corton, quoted by Russell Parton]
☁ ...for decades, every law proposed in Parliament to curb smoke emissions was watered down so heavily that it had no tangible effect… In 19th- and 20th-century London, many industries thwarted attempts by successive governments to clean up the capital’s air. Often they would simply refuse to install smoke purifiers on their factory chimneys, blaming the smoke from household fires instead… Magistrates had sympathy for the industrialists, especially the smaller ones, who could not afford to convert their furnaces to more efficient, cleaner models… There was a cultural component, too. The British were wedded to their open fires. Closed stoves, popular throughout much of Europe, especially in Germany, were shunned by Londoners. [Christine L Corton]
☁ There was discussion in the press as to whether innovative technology might provide an answer. The proposed solutions were rather impracticable, from ‘smoke drainage’ (connecting chimneys with the sewers, and using steam engines to suck smoke underground) to the discharge of electricity from specially erected lampposts, balloons or kites. More realistically, it was plain that gas and electricity in the home could reduce reliance on coal. Gas and electric, however, would not dominate domestic fuel until well into the twentieth century. Expense and inertia meant that most late-Victorian households retained the devil they knew. [Lee Jackson]
☁ After the 1890s the increasing popularity of gas fires and stoves, the introduction of electric motors to replace steam engines, and the gradual relocation of industry to the outer boroughs began to slowly reduce the number of foggy days endured by Londoners. But fogs persisted well into the 20th century. [PD Smith]
☁ The worst recorded instance was the Great Smog of 1952, when 4,000 deaths were reported in [London] over a couple of days, and a subsequent 8,000 related deaths, leading to the passage of the Clean Air Act 1956, which banned the use of coal for domestic fires in some urban areas. [Wikipedia]
☁ The Act was revised in 1968 when industries burning coal, gas or other fuels were ordered to use tall chimneys. In 1974 the first Control of Air Pollution Act introduced regulations on the composition of motor fuels. By the 1980s and 1990s the increasing use of the motor vehicle led to a new kind of smog caused by the chemical reaction of car pollutants and sunshine. The 1995 Environment Act introduced new regulations for air pollutants. [BBC]
Some useful resources:
A London Fog By Bruce Rosen, on Victorian History.
Pea soup fog On Wikipedia.
Weather - Fog On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
“London Fog,” a study of the great city’s legendary atmosphere A review by Michael Dirda of the book by Christine L. Corton, on The Washington Post.
Beyond the pall … how London fog seeped into fiction By Christine L Corton, on the Guardian website.
The Return of London’s Fog By Christine L. Corton, on The New York Times.
London Fog – The Biography: how air pollution changed the nature of city life By Russell Parton, on East End Review.
London Fog by Christine Corton – the history of the pea-souper Review by PD Smith.
China’s Smog Can’t Compete With London’s Pea Soup By Stephen Mihm, on BloombergView.
What Victorian England Tells Us About Pollution and Urban Development By Feargus O’Sullivan, on CityLab.
1952: London fog clears after days of chaos Part of ‘On This Day’, on the BBC website.
The Big Smoke (Routledge Revivals): A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times By Peter Brimblecombe. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you.
Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes Edited by T. Ferguson. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you.
Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth by Lee Jackson – review By PD Smith, on the Guardian website. Two paragraphs deal specifically with air pollution.
Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth By Lee Jackson. A preview on Google Books, so it may or may not work for you.
The Victorian Environment An index of articles on The Victorian Web.
'London Fogs' by R.Russell, 1880 On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
London Fog By Tine Hreno, on Writers in London in the 1890s.
EYEWITNESS: The Chromatic Effects of Late Nineteenth-Century London Fog By Anna Novakov and T. Novakov, on The Literary London Journal.
Monet’s art may reveal Victorian London’s smog By Zeeya Merali, on the New Scientist website.
Monet's view of London casts light on Victorian pollution By Roger Highfield, Science Editor, on the Telegraph website.
Descriptions of Fog in Bleak House [Charles Dickens, 1853] On the Victorian Web.
A London Fog Image and article from Illustrated London News (23 December 1849). On the Victorian Web.
Smog in Victorian London – 1839 This is an eyewitness account by Flora Tristan, a Frenchwoman who visited the capital in 1839. On My Time Machine.
Shroud of London By Amy Henderson, on the Weekly Standard.
January 9, 1888 --- King Fog By Tom Hughes, on Victorian Calendar.
'The Heart and Home of Horror': The Great London Fogs of the Late Nineteenth Century By Bill Luckin - an academic work from ‘Social History, Vol. 28’, published by Taylor & Francis, Ltd. In PDF form.
Worse than Cimmerian Darkness: fog and the representation of Victorian London Talk by Joseph de Sapio (Oxford), on Institute of Historical Research website. The IHR is a member of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. 45 minutes, 43 seconds.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
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no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 09:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 03:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 12:43 pm (UTC)Unrelated, I came across this: https://www.behance.net/gallery/29142233/The-Memoirs-of-Sherlock-Holmes
An artist illustrated 6 stories (not BRUC). The text is in Russian, but the drawings are very nice.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 03:50 pm (UTC)It was such an odd combination: Londoners knowing the fogs were bad for their health, loathing the fogs, but being sentimental about them too. But I can sort of understand that.
And those illustrations are gorgeous - I especially liked the one of Miss Violet Hunter ^__^
no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 01:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 03:53 pm (UTC)Especially the 1952 Great Smog - that sounded absolutely nightmarish. And it isn't comfortingly off in the distant past - not that long ago at all.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 05:22 pm (UTC)Seeing them in collections like that rather highlights the range of colors and effects, no?
Also, while the University of Birmingham researchers (referenced in the New Scientist and Telegraph articles above) suggest the transient purples and such might have been nano-particles, I'm struck by the Novakovs' coal-tar derivatives theory:
...was someone perhaps homesick, when he was mucking about with coal-tar derivatives in France?
Oh, and back to the art: Whistler, too, liked to paint the London fog.
And I quite like Giuseppe de Nittis' paintings of Westminster (one, two, three)
/dives back in to the linkspam, muttering about my inability to find further detail on the proposal for "the discharge of electricity from specially erected lampposts, balloons or kites..."
no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 07:43 pm (UTC)...was someone perhaps homesick, when he was mucking about with coal-tar derivatives in France? I love that idea - that's so clever ^___^
I particularly loved the third Giuseppe de Nittis painting - it's got the immediacy of a photograph.
And if you do find out more about "the discharge of electricity from specially erected lampposts, balloons or kites...", please let the rest of us know ^___^
no subject
Date: 2017-03-13 09:47 am (UTC)Yesterday afternoon Sir Douglas Galton, F.R - S., delivered a lecture at the Parkes Museum of Hygiene on "Smoke and Fog." In the course of his remarks Sir Douglas Galton said that - to those who were in the habit of getting up at half - past 6 or seven, it would at once be evident that black fog was entirely the result of smoke. They rose to see a lovely sky, but by 8 o'clock, when fires - began to be lighted, the brightness was dimmed ; the sky had disappeared. If people could be impressed with the' fact that the greater part of the evil of black fog was pre - ventible if each person would endeavour to mitigate that evil, our light and air would cease to be obscured. But there was something singularly submissive, and Itahomedaa in the .'constitution of an Englishman, and he accepted the evil with apathy. The evils of our fogs might be summed up in loss of daylight and deteriorated air. The black canopy always hanging over as strained our eyesight and lowered our vitality ; we Mt the acrid nature of the London fog in our breathing. Dr. Russell's experiments showed that the air in a fog contained four times as much carbonic acid as ordinary London air, and that this might be taken as an index of the quantity of other impurities which a fog accumulated around us. Was it a matter for surprise that delicate persons often suffered grievously? The fog and the smoke combined to increase the evils of each other. Could they be diminished t Fog was caused by the floating matter in the air attaching to itself the aqueous vapour which was always more or less present. Some forms of matter, such as ammonia and sulphur, had a greater affinity for the vapour than other matters. These substances were present in London air to an unnecessary extent. The ammonia arose from the manure which the authorities took no pains to remove from stables ; and if dustbins were emptied frequently so as to remove all organic matters rapidly, and if the streets were properly cleansed instead of such a quantity of horse manure being allowed to remain on the pavement, one potent cause of fog - would be removed. Tbe blackness of London fogs arcee from the smoke proceeding from incompletely burnt coal. There was no doubt that factories had furnished much smoke ; but the efforts which had been made in recent years showed that that cause of smoke was one which was absolutely unnecessary. It might all be prevented. Fires or boilers were quite easily made smokeless either by proper care or . mechanical stokers. Bakehouses, potteries, and other factories might be entirely smokeless if gas were used, and this had been done by Messrs. Minton and others. But the domestic fires caused' most of tbe foul smoke ; anyone could see that who rose early and watched the gradual obscuration of the sky, often clear and bright at Cor 7" o'clock on a winter morning. This evil, daily increased with the increase of London. There, was a great contrast between the London of 40 years ago, when Kensington, Clapham, and Hampstead were country villages, and the London of to - day when there was a con - - tinuous town from Hammersmith to Stratford, and from Highgate to Sydenham. If this smoke was to be abolished it would be necessary in the first place to use pi for cooking the open fire could not be retained. All experience showed that the open fire must be given up, although it had great advantages in that it warmed the walls and furniture, and left the air of the room cool to breathe, and. therefore more exhilarating. With open fires the dust did not attach itself to the warm walls and furniture so much as it did in a room heated by hot - water pipes or by hot air, which heated - the air of the room, but left the walls cold. At the same time, if smoke was to be avoided, houses must be warmed by hot air, hot water, steam, or gas. Those methods of heating should be applied so as to warm the walls or dados and the floors, and then some of the comfort of the open fire would be experienced; and it was to be hoped that, in the progress of invention, electricity would be resorted to for warming as well as lighting rooms.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-13 09:52 am (UTC)Professor Lodge had suggested that black fogs might possibly be dispersed by electricity, it was certain that an electric spark passed through a bell - jar filled with smoke cauied the smoke to clear off and to settle on tbe sides of the jar. Professor Lodge suggested trying Whether, in a fog, a powerful discharge of electricity into the atmosphere, from Mr. De la Rue's battery at the Royal Institution, by means of a balloon or a kite, might have the effect of partially dispersing a London fog. And certainly that plan, if successful, would be - simpler than changing the fireplaces all over London. But : even if snceestf uf for clearing off a dense fog it could hardly be available to clear the sky from the black canopy which hung over London for almost two - thirds of the year. And therefore the alteration of existing methods of heat - ing houses was indispensable if the rapidly increasing city of London was to be made fit for its inhabitants. A vote of thanks was passed to Sir Douglas Galton at the conclusion of his lecture.
There's also a briefer note in the Pall Mall Budget, Dec 8 1887, "The Fog and the Electricians."
And another mention of Galton's paper in Nature, March 7 1889.
btw, Sir Douglas Galton, F.R.S was a railway engineer. The Parkes Museum of Hygiene was established in honor of the physician Edmund Alexander Parkes.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-14 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-03-14 12:32 am (UTC)I mostly just want the story where someone builds these fog-zapping lamposts, crackling away like so many Jacobs-ladders, and suddenly all of London becomes a metropolis-sized precursor to the Miller-Urey experiment. Except with DINOSAURS.
no subject
Date: 2017-03-14 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-03-14 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-03-12 07:29 pm (UTC)