Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
homes and children clean. In Britain, the middle classes relocated to semi-rural
suburbs beyond the reach of the smoke, leaving the working classes behind with
few appropriate
to emulate.
21
Common concerns about the detrimental effects of air pollution on industrial
cities and their communities led to the establishment of numerous smoke abatement
societies in Britain and the United States, but not in Germany where citizen
'
role models
'
'
s
associations generally played less of a role in municipal politics.
22
Britain
rst
anti-smoke groups were founded in 1842, including a Committee for the Con-
sumption of Smoke at Leeds and the Manchester Association for the Prevention of
Smoke. Eager to secure clean air for the
'
s
of city-
dwellers, these early reformers tended to focus on technical solutions to the smoke
problem. For example, meetings of the Manchester Association for the Prevention
of Smoke were held in the lecture room of the Royal Victoria Gallery for the
Encouragement of Practical Science, and they were attended by some of the city
'
health, comfort and well-being
'
s
foremost scientists, technologists, and industrialists, including William Sturgeon,
Peter Clare, William Fairbairn, and Henry Houldsworth. Its main goal was to
persuade manufacturers that preventing pollution was good business, as the
installation of the latest abatement devices and ef
'
cient boiler-furnaces would
reduce fuel bills as well as smoke emissions. Education was thought to be the key to
making progress in smoke abatement, and later societies such as the London-based
Smoke Abatement Committee and the National Smoke Abatement Society organ-
ised major exhibitions of smoke abatement technologies to encourage large num-
bers of industrialists and householders to adopt cleaner, fuel-ef
cient appliances
(such as automatic stokers and closed stoves).
23
Anti-smoke activism did not begin
in earnest in the United States until the late 1880s and early 1890s, when reformers
in Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis and Pittsburgh organised to address the problem.
24
Unlike Britain, middle-class women, rather than professional men, were in the
vanguard of the smoke abatement movement in the United States. Re
ecting the
fact that women, as housewives and mothers, bore a heavy burden in keeping
homes clean and healthy in the face of a constant barrage of soot and grime,
in
s groups such as the Ladies Health Protection Association in
Pittsburgh and the Wednesday Club in St. Louis spearheaded the anti-smoke
campaign. But as questions of technology, economy and ef
uential women
'
ciency began to come
to the fore, by the early 1910s male engineering experts were playing a central role
in the American smoke abatement movement. There was increasing cooperation
between British and American anti-smoke activists with, for example, delegates
from Chicago, Pittsburgh and other US cities attending the 1912 International
Smoke Abatement Exhibition in London. However, as bituminous coal was both
plentiful and inexpensive, and smoke-consuming appliances were expensive to buy
21
Mosley (
2003
,
2008
), Andersen (
1994
) and Stradling (
1999
).
22
Mosley (
2008
), Stradling and Thorsheim (
1999
) and Uek
รถ
tter (
1999
).
23
Mosley (
2007
,
2008
) and Ranlett (
1981
).
24
Stradling (
1999
).
