Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 3
Smoke pouring from Chicago's McCormick Reaper Works in the 1860s. (Wisconsin
Historical Society)
poisonous fumes and polluting the water, it is shown in a lovely country
setting. Sailboats are floating by, their sails billowing in the breeze, on what
appears to be a lovely little stream. There is a lot of greenery around. The
picture shows smoke coming out of the factory's smoke stacks, but, of
course, at the time such smoke was viewed as a sign that a business was
operating at full capacity and as such was a symbol of its success.You can-
not get a realistic sense of the foul smells and the other actual environ-
mental impacts of such businesses from pictures like this.
7
Case law reports are a much better place to look for information about
industrial pollution. Private and public nuisance law allowed individuals and
communities to sue businesses that generated industrial pollution. The
reports generated by the litigation provide a good sense of what industrial
pollution was like back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
what people did not like about it, and what they wanted to do about it.The
case reports show that people were particularly distressed by pollution that
they could see or hear or smell or taste, or that was damaging their prop-
erty. People sued businesses burning soft bituminous coal that emitted thick
