Page 25 - Fundamentals of Air Pollution

4 1. The History of Air Pollution

hundred-sixteen years later, coal burning was prohibited in London; and
in 1306, Edward I issued a royal proclamation enjoining the use of sea-
coal in furnaces. Elizabeth I barred the burning of coal in London when
Parliament was in session. The repeated necessity for such royal action
would seem to indicate that coal continued to be burned despite these
edicts. By 1661 the pollution of London had become bad enough to prompt
John Evelyn to submit a brochure "Fumifugium, or the Inconvenience of
the Aer, and Smoake of London Dissipated (together with some remedies
humbly proposed)" to King Charles II and Parliament. This brochure has
been reprinted and is recommended to students of air pollution (1). It
proposes means of air pollution control that are still viable in the twentieth
century.
The principal industries associated with the production of air pollution
in the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution were metallurgy, ce-
ramics, and preservation of animal products. In the bronze and iron ages,
villages were exposed to dust and fumes from many sources. Native copper
and gold were forged, and clay was baked and glazed to form pottery and
bricks before 4000 BC Iron was in common use and leather was tanned
before 1000 BC. Most of the methods of modern metallurgy were known
before AD 1. They relied on charcoal rather than coal or coke. However,
coal was mined and used for fuel before AD 1000, although it was not made
into coke until about 1600; and coke did not enter metallurgical practice
significantly until about 1700. These industries and their effluents as they
existed before 1556 are best described in the book "De Re Metallica" pub-
lished in that year by Georg Bauer, known as Georgius Agricola (Fig. 1-
1). This book was translated into English and published in 1912 by Herbert
Clark Hoover and his wife (2).
Examples of the air pollution associated with the ceramic and animal
product preservation industries are shown in Figs. 1-2 and 1-3, respectively.

II. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The Industrial Revolution was the consequence of the harnessing of
steam to provide power to pump water and move machinery. This began
in the early years of the eighteenth century, when Savery, Papin, and
Newcomen designed their pumping engines, and culminated in 1784 in
Watt's reciprocating engine. The reciprocating steam engine reigned su-
preme until it was displaced by the steam turbine in the twentieth century.
Steam engines and steam turbines require steam boilers, which, until
the advent of the nuclear reactor, were fired by vegetable or fossil fuels.
During most of the nineteenth century, coal was the principal fuel, although
some oil was used for steam generation late in the century.