That “much of human life, energy and happiness is wasted by the effects of vapors, noxious because wasted, is now an established certainty” (Gillespie, [8]). It has been estimated that London’s annual smoke tax amounts to $1,500,000 in death, disease and lowered working capacity alone. Unfortunately up to the present time there has been no scientific attempt made to directly measure the degree in which the producing capacity and the bodily and mental efficiency of city dwellers may be impaired by atmospheric impurities, nor has any effort been made to measure the direct or indirect influences of smoke upon sensory, motor, intellectual, affective and emotional functions, and on the habits and conduct of human beings. A part of the human waste caused by smoke-polluted air is certainly due to the irritation caused by solid smoke particles. The functional efficiency of the visual, naso-pharyngeal, pulmonary, gastro-intestinal and neural mechanisms, may be more or less disabled by constant irritation by solid particles. But it is likewise presumptively probable that irritating, acrid soot particles and poisonous smoke compounds may become factors in causing premature decay, untimely death, exaggerated fatigue, frequent sickness, instability of attention, malcontent, irritability, lessened self-control and possibly psychic disequilibrium. It is probable that there goes on a gradual process of absorption by the human system of the poisonous products of imperfect smoke combustion. This insensible intake may not give rise to any definitely recognizable acute disorder or specific disabilities. But the process of slow poisoning may insidiously eat away like a mild canker at vital tissues and thus in time deplete our potential reserve, thereby making it impossible for body and brain to function at their points of maximal efficiency. With an impaired brain the mind cannot reach its highest levels of creative insight and constructive achievement. It has often been a matter of comment that people who have lived in relatively smoke-free cities after coming to live in a city like Pittsburgh, have experienced a distinct disinclination to work, or a sort of chronic ennui. A Pittsburgh business man writes that “people coming to Pittsburgh to reside notice a great depression; likewise many residents of Pittsburgh on visits find they feel infinitely better and business men working for periods in cities where there is not the same smoke find they can do twice as much work. These are not isolated cases but the result of very general inquiry which I have made for a number of years.[2] People very frequently remark on the depressed expression not only on the working men of Pittsburgh, but they also observe it in the clubs. It is very frequently referred to humidity, but this is entirely wrong as the humidity in New York ranges much higher than in Pittsburgh. This certainly is a condition that tends to keep people from coming here and makes people desirous of leaving at the first opportunity.”
The writer of this essay has now lived in Pittsburgh somewhat over a year and has experienced during this time a marked distaste or disinclination to engage in productive authorship. Clear, trenchant, reflective thinking seems to have been more difficult; and the attempt to write concisely, incisively and perspicuously has seemed more labored. Is it possible that the low esteem in which Pittsburgh is held in the world of productive scholarship—a matter of occasional remark among medical men and other scientists—is due to the fact that the air which its scientists must breathe is polluted and poisoned by smoke? [There are other contributory factors, as we shall see in the following sections, viz., the various devitalizing weather states induced by smoke, and possibly the common use of convection heat from gas stoves in the living rooms. Convection heat from gas stoves, it is maintained by Scotch investigators, is more injurious than heat by radiation ([21]).] Is it possible that the highest spiritual creations of the citizens of smoke-begrimed cities are being sacrificed on the altar of commercial greed? Is it possible that, in the interests of a pseudo-economy, we are impairing the very brains of the people by permitting our breathing air to be saturated with the poisons of preventable fumes? Is it possible that the industrial energy for which Pittsburgh has become famous is less due to the surpassing excellence of the brain and brawn of its workers than to the munificent bounty of its mines? We shall probably not be able to offer any satisfactory answer to questions such as these until a series of controlled psychological experiments on efficiency, fatigue, and endurance (in so far as various motor, sensory, and intellectual functions are concerned), have been carried out under varying degrees of density of atmospheric smoke.
B. The indirect influences of smoke on mental and physical well-being; the meteorological aspects of atmospheric smoke contamination.
I shall first discuss the meteorological variations produced by smoke, and then the effects of the smoke-produced weather states upon well-being.
The smoke-clouds of our cities influence a number of weather states which affect human conduct. The meteorological conditions particularly affected are: sunshine, clouds, humidity, fogs, temperature, electrical potential and luminosity. That the smoke from factory and domestic fires, by filling the atmosphere with opaque clouds of smoke and by inducing mists and fogs, deprives the city dwellers of the luminous, vitalizing, cheering, health giving, germicidal rays of the sun, has been proved by numerous observations and tests. It has been computed that seven-eighths of the sun’s power is shut out by the smoke in the manufacturing center of London, and five-eighths in Westminster. The percentage of sunshine in these two places compared with the rural stations of Oxford, Cambridge, Marlborough and Gildiston was found to be as follows ([12]):
TABLE I.
| Winter | Summer | |
|---|---|---|
| From 1881-1885: | 17% | 83% |
| ” 1906-1910: | 38% | 92% |
It is observable that the amount of sunshine suffers an enormous reduction in the winter time but only a very slight diminution in the summer, and that during the last five years the conditions have considerably improved, due, as we are told, to the considerable abatement during the last decade or two of London smoke. During one calendar year the hours of sunshine in the center of Leeds amounted to 1164 while the corresponding figure for Adel, which is only 4 miles distant, was 1402 ([4]). Thus the loss of sunshine in Leeds due to smoke amounted to 17%. The diminution of sunshine in towns near smoke-producing cities is, again, shown in the following tabulation of the comparative monthly average duration of bright sunshine for a period of 20 years ([24]):
TABLE II.
| Station | Nov. | Dec. | Jan. | Feb. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runhill Row | 22.8% | 7.5% | 14.1% | 30.5% |
| Westminster | 27.7% | 13.1% | 18.4% | 32.8% |
| Kew | 50.8% | 38.1% | 40.3% | 54.6% |
| Cambridge | 61.0% | 40.6% | 48.9% | 72.8% |