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How did it start? -
The Great Smog of London started in 1952,
because the only way to heat homes back then was to use coal,
so it was used very widespreadly and thus smog started to form across the streets of London.

What happened? - 
There was no wind and thus the smog filled London,
it was a common thing back then but not to this extent,
soon visibility was reduced to 5 yards in some places.

Precautions used - 
People started making or using premade masks to protect their lungs from the thick smog.
Some people tried staying in their homes, but slowly smog started seeping in.

How the crane workers described the event - 
The crane workers said that when they climbed to the top of their cranes, 
they experienced clear skies
above 50 ft.

Why did the smog disappear? - 
Finally after 5 days of waiting Londoners were blessed
with a big gust of wind that blew the smog away,
and people discovered that the city was covered in
a black film of smog.

Aftermath - 
After the smog had dissapeared England passed the Clean Air Act
which prohibited the use of coal and promoted the use of smokeless fuels.
And started relocation power plants further from the city.
Later it was discovered that over 12,000 people died of smog, it was
first blamed on influenza but later turned out to be because of the smog.

Book about the incident - 
Later an author decided to make a book about the incident since one hasn't
been made yet. The book was going to be called "Death in the Air"

Inspiration & research - 
The author found inspiration both in the events that took place on 1952 and
the seriel killer that was roaming around at the time.
She said she added the serial killer due to the same MO's he used aswell the
deaths in the great smog.

John Reginald Christie - 
John Reginald Christie was a serial killer,
who murdered 8 people including his wife,
he was later hung for the murders of 7 people.
His last words were "My nose itched" and as the executioner said,
"It wont bother you long", he was later hung.

https://spark.adobe.com/sp/design/video/1f8ceef9-9dfb-424f-b9ca-1b87c0a7a618/play

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The pea souper that killed 12,000: How the Great Smog choked London 60 years ago this week

A dense, green-yellow fog choked the streets. Cars edged forwards with passengers sitting on the bonnets shouting instructions. From behind the wheel, drivers could not even see as far as their own headlights.

Mothers took their children to school with handkerchiefs and scarves wrapped over their faces. With their hands tightly clasped, they shuffled along in 'crocodiles'.

One pedestrian remembers bumping into a motorcyclist who asked: 'Which way to the Tube station?'

The pedestrian could only reply: 'Carry on 20 yards, and you'll go straight down the steps - you're on the pavement!'

Such were the scenes during the Great Smog of London, which began 60 years ago today.

A thick, greasy, grimy fog descended on the city and killed 12,000 people in four days. A blanket of soot hung over the streets so thickly that visibility was reduced to a couple of yards or less.

It was a pea-souper, a 'London Particular' - and it was the worst in history.

The city had been paralysed by swirling fogs since the Napoleonic era, 150 years earlier. By the time Dickens came to write about them, he imagined dinosaurs stalking out of the mists. Readers of Sherlock Holmes cannot imagine the great detective without seeing him striding up Baker Street shrouded in eerie tendrils of fog.

But the Great Smog was not romantic. It was murderous. People and animals suffocated in appalling numbers, making it 20th-century Britain's worst peace-time catastrophe.

Londoners again had to summon up the Blitz spirit which had sustained them through the war.

Professor Roy Parker, now a social historian, was living with his parents in Lewisham, South-East London in 1952. His father, a World War I veteran who had been gassed in the trenches, was intent on cycling to work even though the choking conditions caused severe pain in his damaged lungs. 'He was 56 and in great distress, gasping for breath, struggling.' But still he cycled on.

Buses could not run. One driver who tried said 'fat flakes of soot stuck to the greasy windscreen like paint' and could not be wiped off. In order to see just a couple of yards ahead, to where his conductor was walking with a torch to light the way, he had to lean out of the window.

In the East End, people could not see their own feet. Yet dock workers reported that, in crane cabins 50ft above the ground, the skies were quite clear. Below them, the smog lay like a dark sea.

It was a particularly cold December and the damp, freezing air soaked up the pollution and held it like a blanket over the city.

A band of high pressure then settled over London holding the pollution in place, almost like a layer of oil over water.

As homes stoked up their fires, the conditions only became worse. Domestic fireplaces were the biggest culprits.

Households mostly burned the cheapest coal, which was heavy with dust. In the days before central heating, a fire was the only way to heat the rooms, and was often used to boil water and even cook.

But the smog was also the result of a lethal climate cocktail produced by coal-fired factories, diesel fumes from lorries and buses, and clouds of pollution drifting across the Channel from continental industrial centres.

The scale of the pollution was incredible. Every day, 1,000 tonnes of smoke belched from London's chimneys, emitting 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, 140 tonnes of hydrochloric acid and 14 tonnes of fluorine compounds.

Even more deadly, 800 tonnes of sulphuric acid was formed as sulphur dioxide coming from chimneys mixed with moisture in the air.

The acid burned the back of the throat, bringing on choking fits. It caused inflammation of the lungs, especially in children, the old and people with bronchial illness.

Thousands died, suffocating from within. As the death toll mounted, undertakers ran out of coffins.

More than 100,000 people suffered such health problems as bronchitis and pneumonia.

Some estimates suggest a further 8,000 may have died in the weeks and months after it.

Sir Donald Acheson, the government's former chief medical officer, recalled as a young doctor feeling his way through deserted streets: 'I had to creep along the walls of the buildings, to the next corner, to read the name of the street.

'I remember an eerie silence, as there was little or no traffic. Visibility was less than three metres, and it was bitterly cold.'

At the Middlesex Hospital, off Tottenham Court Road, where he was resident medical officer, Acheson saw an unstoppable tide of admissions.

'Within a few days, patients with acute respiratory distress spilled over into all wards - they were in the surgical wards, and even in the obstetric wards, and as the majority were men, room had to be found in some of the women's wards. The supply of oxygen was stretched to the limit.'

Nothing could keep the smog out and as it oozed indoors, it left a film of black over every surface.

It even closed cinemas - the black pall made it impossible to see the screens.

At Sadler's Wells theatre, the opera La Traviata was halted because of the noise of choking as smog spread through the auditorium.

Dog racing at White City was abandoned because the greyhounds couldn't see the hare.

Ambulances, of course, had to stay on the roads whatever the conditions. One crewman would drive the vehicle, while another walked ahead, warning people out of the way.

Some trains were kept in operation, but, in near-total darkness, ingenious measures were needed to avoid accidents.

Railway engineers put small packets of explosive on the lines, to be set off like pop-gun caps by the wheels as trains inched along the tracks - the noise warned workers that a train was approaching.

In the days that followed, the Mail reported: 'The Great Smog Grows Worse: Thousands in Fog Queues. London Paralysed. No Buses, No Taxis, No Coaches, No Planes.'

Richard Scorer, a professor at Imperial College, recalled cycling home through the fog, following the kerb at a snail's pace.

'I became very dirty,' he told an inquiry into the Great Smog, 50 years later. 'My eyebrows were covered with what you might call mud; my hair was filthy; and my hands had collected a lot of muck. It was as if I'd fallen into a puddle of mud.'

And it wasn't just men, women and children. At the annual Smithfield livestock show in Earl's Court, cattle gasped for air and collapsed. More than a dozen had to be slaughtered to put them out of their suffering.

After five days, the weather changed. A breeze cleared the air, leaving an oily residue caked on every building and tree. It was as if the city had been sprayed black. Rain came and washed the grime into the gutters, producing an evil-smelling trickle of sooty gunge.

The government was keen to play down the scale of the disaster and the ministry of health released figures purporting to show the death toll was much lower than it really was.

In the Commons, the minister for housing, Harold Macmillan, future Tory prime minister, tried to blame the weather for the disaster, and emphasised that pollution was a necessary evil.

When the Opposition benches attacked the government for not doing more to cut down on pollution, he replied: 'We do what we can, but of course, the honourable gentleman must realise the enormous number of broad economic considerations which have to be taken into account and which it would be foolish altogether to disregard.'

There were smogs again, but never so bad. A campaign by backbench MPs forced the introduction of the Clean Air Act in 1956. It enforced the use of smokeless fuels in homes, and ordered the relocation of power stations further from cities.

London would never again see the return of a fog as choking, blinding and terrifying as the Great Smog which suffocated the capital city 60 years ago.

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Pea souper that killed 12,000: So black you couldn't see the screen in cinemas. So suffocatingly lethal they ran out of coffins. How the Great Smog choked London 60 years ago this week

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A dense, green-yellow fog choked the streets. Cars edged forwards with passengers sitting on the bonnets shouting instructions. From behind the wheel, drivers could not even see as far as their own headlights. Mothers took their children to school with handkerchiefs and scarves wrapped over their faces.

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The great smog of London took place in 1952.

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In February 2015, journalist Kate Dawson was browsing the Getty Images website when she stumbled upon an enigmatic black and white photo of a woman with four strings of pearls around her neck and a chiffon scarf around her nose and mouth. The woman was surrounded by an ominous gray haze. "I was just struck by the photo," Dawson tells The Verge.

That image was taken in December 1952, when London was trapped in a deadly cloud of fog and pollution for five days. At the time, the city ran on cheap coal for everything from generating power to heating homes. So when an anticyclone caused cold air to stagnate over London, the sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and smoke particles mounted - and ended up choking as many as 12,000 people to death.

When Dawson realized no books about the Great Smog of 1952 had been written, she decided to pick up the project. But as she researched newspaper clips from the time, she saw that another killer dominated the headlines: a man who had murdered at least six women, stashing their corpses under the floorboards and into the cupboards of his apartment in Notting Hill. "It was just this deluge, it was incredible," Dawson says. "I couldn't get around it and I couldn't find anything about the smog."

Eventually, Dawson decided to weave the two stories together, in a new book called Death in the Air. The parallels are "bizarre," Dawson says, if not eerie: both the Great Smog and the serial killer, called John Reginald Christie, asphyxiated innocent people to death, and both spurred the passage of historic legislation. The deadly smog prompted the British government - after much denying any connection between the deaths and pollution - to pass the world's first Clean Air Act. Christie's horror story, on the other hand, led to the abolition of the death penalty years later. A neighbor of Christie, named Tim Evans, was accused of killing his own wife and child and executed before Christie confessed to the murders - a wrongful conviction that riled the public.

"It was just this deluge, it was incredible."

For Dawson, the way the media - and the public - reacted to both stories at the time is very telling of how the world still works to this day. Outlandish tweets and headline-grabbing news often get the most attention, sometimes overshadowing more important stories, she says. "All of this to me just resonated in our time period, and so I thought the juxtaposition was really important," Dawson says.

With air pollution still making headlines today, The Verge spoke with Dawson about wrongful convictions, why Londoners didn't freak out about the deadly fog, and whether the Great Smog could still happen today.
The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

In the book, you mention a very well-Why didn't Londoners react with panic? known incident: the smog that killed 20 people and sickened thousands more in Donora, Pennsylvania in 1948. I don't remember ever reading about London's Great Smog of 1952 in history books, though. Why is that?
It is interesting the reaction between the two, and I think it's very telling about both societies. In 1948, the reaction of the small town was [similar to the one you'd expect for] a natural disaster: they set up a triage center in the community center. It was a concerted effort from everyone in the town to try to get through this. And they recognized it as a deadly disaster. It's not what happened in the Great Smog of 1952. Really, it was yet another smog, it just lasted a lot longer. And the panic didn't even come until months later when the death tolls came out and they realized that thousands of people died. And even then there wasn't panic. So in Donora, there's a museum dedicated to the event, and there's nothing like that in London. So you're talking about two drastically different reactions. So right, in the history books one is represented and one isn't.

There are a couple reasons. Number one, we're talking about 300 years of smog like this. Because of the weather system, this turned into an extraordinarily long and extraordinarily deadly smog but these weather systems, these anticyclones, had come every year; they were always there. They lasted two or three days, usually two, and then they'd be blown away by a wind and all the pollution would float to the atmosphere. That's just not what happened [in 1952]. It stayed around for five days.
The Great Smog eventually spurred the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1956 in the UK. What influence did it have on clean-air legislation in the US and around the world?
There were people who died in their bed, died in the hospital rooms, and because there were no central computerized systems for the hospitals, there was no data that connected all of the deaths. It was anecdotal evidence. But even the doctors in the hospital said, "You know, we just thought we had a really rough few days." It didn't occur to people that this happened across the city. The media didn't connect it.

The book is filled with vividly painted characters that lived through the Great Smog. How did you find those people?
UK's Clean Air Act was really the first sort of overarching federal legislation in the world where you had a government, not just local government or state government, that placed some pretty restrictive rules on industry and on local citizens, and provided subsidies so that Londoners could begin to convert from coal-burning fireplaces to smokeless fuel, which is very expensive. It really was a blueprint for other nations to follow.

It was the pioneer effort that was really only brought about because of Norman Dodds and many people from the Labour Party, who pushed the issue so far and forced the British government to finally act. This was a systemic problem that no one really took seriously in the government because it was just something that was always there and the government was bankrupt.

I had to think to myself: Who actually would have been in the smog? Who was a lifesaver, who were the helpers? So of course I thought of doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and police officers. So I found the national retirement associations for each of these groups, and I emailed the head of each of these associations and said, "Listen, I know you all have an email database, can you blast an email on my behalf to all of your members and say, I'm a journalist who's writing a book about the Great Smog of 1952, she's looking for people who worked in the Great Smog. Would you respond if you're interested in being interviewed?" So I got a huge amount of responses. They were very interested in telling the story.
What surprised you the most about this time period?
Even then, when I spoke to all of these people who survived the smog, even Rosemary Sergeant, who had lost her father and it was this incredibly heartbreaking story, they all had the same mantra: this was just part of life in London. It was the most overpopulated and industrialized city in the world. And it became something of, well, this is just a byproduct of living in the city. That's why it was important for me to include Rosemary, as a 13-year-old girl, because she had no decision in this. She didn't buy coal. Eighty percent of the public smoked, she didn't smoke. She didn't choose to live in London. She was truly an innocent victim, with no culpability at all.

One, I thought London recovered from World War II much more quickly than, in fact, it did. I was surprised that in 1952, seven years after the war, London was still in dire straits. The government was still in dire straits. And then, of course, all the repercussions that come from that: the poverty, the crime, the small police budgets.
What evidence did you find that convinced you of this?
What surprised me about John Christie's case, besides the incredible media attention that it received, [is that] there was a lot of controversy. Christie had a neighbor who was eventually hanged partly because of Christie's testimony. The man had been convicted of killing his wife and child, and later it was found that Christie had confessed and that Christie was really guilty and the man was posthumously exonerated. And so I went into this case really feeling like I was going to find the same evidence and come to the same conclusion, and really didn't come to the same conclusion. And that was surprising to me.

I fell into the trap that a lot of people do, which is just assuming that history and conventional wisdom is right. After looking at all the evidence, I don't think Christie's confession was right and I think the right man was hanged for killing the wife and the child. I think people really just did not want to believe that two people could be living in the same house at the same time, and both be killers and not know each other or work together. And I believe it's absolutely feasible.

Speaking to the police officer, Len Trevallion, who helped investigate the case, we talked about how the crime wasn't feasible the way John Christie laid it out. I looked at the pathologist's report, which to me was the most interesting. The wife, who was Beryl Evans, there were many photographs of her before they buried her. And the pathologist, buried deep in his report, said that she had been hit in the mouth so hard that her lip was touching her nose. That's very hard. And the way the blood clotted, he estimated that she had been hit 20 minutes before she died.
This book is also a story of what happens when there are no regulations about pollution. I'm wondering what it says about our current political climate, where we have an administration that's gutting the Environmental Protection Agency.
"The truth lies with both of them who are dead."

I gave that photo to present-day pathologists, two of them, and they agreed: yeah, it looks like she was hit 20 minutes before. Now, in what world is a woman going to let a neighbor hit her, sit around for 20 minutes, and then strangle her? It doesn't make any sense. No one heard her scream. But her husband was abusive and hit her all the time. So to me, what makes sense is that the husband hit her and they fought and then he killed her later. When John Christie confessed to killing his neighbor's wife and child, I think it was just taken as gospel. Christie was confessing to killing everybody under the Sun because he wanted to escape the death penalty [by appearing insane]. So he had what he called the-more-the-merrier defense. And I didn't believe any bit of his confessions. Of course, the truth lies with both of them who are dead.

I think that our current situation is distressing and troubling. Of course it's unlikely something like [the Great Smog of 1952] is going to happen in our country. Pollution is horrible but not to that extent in such a closed area. But I think that what's happening with the EPA, defunding certain programs, reducing the staff, and the current political climate of leaning more towards the industrialists and less towards clean air, is distressing and in some cases irreversible.

This should be a cautionary tale. And I think that very few people in power are listening. Just because you don't have the Great Smog of 1952, with the yellow clouds and the air that smells like rotten eggs, doesn't mean that the air you breathe is not destroying your health, and every research shows it is. And I just think we take it for granted.

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In 1952 London, 12,000 people died from smog - here's why that matters now

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In February 2015, journalist Kate Dawson was browsing the Getty Images website when she stumbled upon an enigmatic black and white photo of a woman with four strings of pearls around her neck and a chiffon scarf around her nose and mouth. The woman was surrounded by an ominous gray haze.

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Listening