Environmental Engineering Reference
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sooty smoke and cinders, blackening everything in their homes and places
of business. They sued slaughterhouses, rendering businesses, chemical
plants, gas works, and other factories to stop them from emitting nauseat-
ing stenches and poisonous fumes. They sued textile mills, coal mines, and
other plants that discharged wastes into streams, contaminating and discol-
oring water used for drinking, household use, watering of farm animals, and
even manufacturing. Many plaintiffs went to court to obtain injunctions to
force polluters to shut down or abate their nuisances. Others sued for com-
pensation for the damages and inconveniences they suffered as a result of
pollution.
Case law reports provide a great sense of how people approached the
problem of controlling such pollution. Pollution nuisance litigation
increased steadily during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I
have collected hundreds of cases.What I found was that, in the nineteenth
century, the judges who decided such cases decided in favor of the plain-
tiffs about half the time.They issued damage awards that forced the owners
of polluting businesses to pay compensation to plaintiffs. More important,
they also issued injunctions that required them to curtail their pollution, or
even shut down altogether. 8
From the middle of the nineteenth century on, municipalities also
attempted to regulate various kinds of industrial pollution. Public health
reformers used early forms of zoning to try to move businesses that emit-
ted noxious stenches out of densely settled areas in a number of cities.
Women's organizations and business reform groups agitated for smoke reg-
ulation, noise regulations, and public works to deal with water pollution in
many places. Groups of neighbors mounted protests in efforts to force some
especially noxious businesses, like bone boiling establishments, to improve
their operations. 9
What is important from the perspective of understanding the history of
industrial pollution management is that these legal and political develop-
ments led to the development of pollution control technologies. Recogni-
tion on the part of some enlightened managers that pollution was a sign of
inefficient production also spurred this kind of innovation.Technologies for
abating smoke pollution proliferated during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Figure 5 is a schematic diagram of a piece of smoke-
abatement equipment from the turn of the century, in this case a cinder
catching apparatus. All sorts of smoke consuming devices were invented in
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