Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (12 page)

Normally the air hundreds of feet off the ground is cooler than the air at ground level, and the higher you go the cooler it gets. That’s a good thing in a polluted city like London of the 1950s. When hot smoke leaves the chimneys of homes and factories and the exhaust pipes of buses and automobiles, it rises quickly and climbs to an altitude high enough for it to disperse. It is only able to do that because it
is
hotter, and therefore lighter, than the surrounding air.

But what happens when the polluted air is about the same temperature as the surrounding air, such as was the case when the smoke and exhaust hit that layer of warm air over London? The polluted air stops rising. And if there’s no wind to disperse it, it accumulates. That’s what happened in London on December 5th—it was as if a giant lid had been placed over the city to prevent the smoke and exhaust from escaping.

You may have lived in a city with smoggy air, but it was probably nothing compared to London of the 1950s. Firewood was a scarce and expensive commodity in the British Isles, and for centuries people had burned coal instead. The coal in London
that December was especially bad: England had accumulated enormous debts during World War II, and one of the ways it was paying them off was by exporting its clean, hard, valuable “anthracite” coal, forcing Londoners to burn the cheaper, softer, and much dirtier “bituminous” coal in fireplaces, factories, and power plants.

Have you ever seen what coal looks like when it is burning? If you’ve ever seen an automobile tire on fire, it’s pretty much the same thing, at least visually: When bituminous coal burns, it gives off a filthy, choking black smoke.

Now picture a tire burning in the fireplace of every home in a city of more than eight million people, and picture those fires burning 24 hours a day. Imagine hundreds more tires burning in every factory in London, and still more tires being burned in power plants to generate the city’s electricity. Add to that all the automobile exhaust generated by one of the world’s largest cities, and the diesel fumes given off by the thousands of London buses that had recently replaced the city’s network of electric trams. Now breathe deeply…

London’s air quality was bad even on a good day, and now that the smoke and exhaust was accumulating above the city, it became positively deadly. Scientists calculated that coal fires and other sources of pollution in London of the early 1950s belched an estimated 1,000 tons of smoke, 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide, and 140 tons of hydrochloric acid into the air every day. They released an estimated 370 tons of sulfur dioxide too, which, when combined with oxygen and moisture in the air, formed 800 tons of sulfuric acid.

On the morning of December 5, the smog around London was dry and smoky, not at all unusual for a cold winter morning. Then, thanks to the temperature inversion, the air quality and visibility deteriorated markedly over the course of the day. By evening the air pollution had become so acrid that many people suffered fits of uncontrollable coughing. Who wouldn’t cough? The hydrochloric and sulfuric acid in the air had a pH of about 2—about the same
as the acid in a lemon. The mass of warm air that held the pollution in place hadn’t dispersed by the following morning, or the day after that, or the day after that. As smoke, soot, exhaust, and acid continued to be released into the air, pollution climbed to the highest levels the city had ever seen.

“Seen,” it turns out, was just a figure of speech: By December 7, the air was so thick with smoke and soot that visibility in many parts of the city had dropped to less than one foot—people literally could not see their hands in front of their faces. Some of the first casualties of the Great Smog of 1952, as it came to be known, were drownings—people who died when they became disoriented and fell into the Thames River.

Have you ever tried to drive your car when you can’t even see to the end of the hood? Transportation slowed to a crawl as passengers got out and walked in front of or alongside vehicles to help their drivers see the way. Many people gave up and abandoned their vehicles in the middle of the street—which made driving even more difficult—or blindly followed the lights of cars ahead of them, even when they turned into their own driveways. Some homeowners offered lost drivers who’d followed them home a room for the night, rather than let them risk their lives finding their own way home in the oily, choking black smog.

Anyone who did manage to make it home arrived covered in soot, looking like a coal miner or a chimney sweep, with the stench of sulfur in their nose and a bitter, acrid taste in their mouth. When they changed out of their clothes, they saw that the soot had penetrated all the way to their underwear, which had been burned by the acid in the air. And the air inside was no better than the air outside: Offices and factories suspended operations when their workers could no longer see what they were doing, movie theaters cancelled screenings when audiences couldn’t see the screen, and at least one live theater had to shut its doors because the actors couldn’t see each other onstage. At the city’s Smithfield livestock show, the cattle asphyxiated before they could be slaughtered, and had to be disposed of.

As crazy as it sounds, few people who hacked and wheezed their way through the smog thought much about it at the time. London had been famous for its “pea soup” smog as far back as the 1300s, and people just accepted it as a fact of life. The word “smog” itself was coined in London in 1905 to describe the combination of smoke and fog that was a common occurrence in the city. People learned to deal with it just as they would a spell of bad weather: They waited it out, and a few days later things got better. That’s what they did in December 1952—and sure enough on December 9th, 4 days and 18 hours after the air first began to turn black, a fresh wind blew into London and pushed the dirty air out to sea. Life returned to normal.

But what’s even harder to understand today is how no one at the time—not even the city’s medical professionals—seemed to grasp the terrible toll that the smog would take on the health of Londoners. Even at the height of the crisis, the city officials issued no warnings instructing people to stay inside or to wear masks if they did go outside. Apparently the first people to realize that something unusual was afoot were the city’s undertakers and florists, who ran out of caskets and flowers because so many people had died.

The first official recognition that the Great Smog of 1952 was more than just another bad air day came three weeks after the fact, when the registrar general published the mortality statistics for the first weeks of December. Only then did people understand that they had just gone through a major environmental disaster… without even realizing it.

For the week ending December 6, which included the first two days of the smog, the number of deaths in Greater London came to 2,062, or 295 deaths per day—not much higher than normal. But as the amount of pollution in the air intensified in the days that followed, the death toll soared. Nine hundred people—more than three times the daily average—died on December 8th, and another 900 died on December 9th, with the death toll remaining well above average for another two weeks.

In all, more than 4,000 people died during and immediately
after the smog; another 8,000 died in the weeks and months that followed. Many thousands more suffered permanent lung damage, making the Great Smog of 1952 one of the deadliest environmental catastrophes in recorded history. Most of the victims were the very young, the elderly, or those who suffered from pre-existing lung conditions, such as asthma, bronchitis, or pneumonia, which were themselves often the result of a lifetime spent breathing the air in one of the most polluted cities in the world.

Ironically, the enormous scale of the catastrophe may have been one of the things that kept people from realizing just how bad it was. When the air turned black, the hospitals in and around London were deluged with people who were coughing and choking uncontrollably and unable to breathe, and many of these people did die in the hospital. But many others were too sick to get to the hospital on their own and had to call for ambulances, which could not find their way through the blackness. By the time the ambulance finally did arrive, in many cases the patient had already died and was taken straight to the morgue or a funeral home instead of to the hospital. The fact that these people did not even live long enough to be seen by a doctor may have prevented public health officials from realizing the full magnitude of the disaster until the death statistics were published.

More than any single incident, the Great London Smog of 1952 changed the way people in the United Kingdom thought about pollution. Instead of seeing it as an inevitable consequence of industrial progress, they came to view it as something that could and should be controlled. Clean-air legislation was passed in 1954, 1956, and again in 1968. The new laws regulated chimney heights, forced businesses and homeowners to switch over to smokeless fuels, and made other reforms as well. Gradually, the skies over London began to improve. The smog of 1952 wasn’t the last one the city ever saw; a similar incident in 1962 killed 750 people. But nothing on the scale of the 1952 disaster ever happened again.

Some tantalizing tales of unusual uses of people who aren’t really people.

T
HE ALMA-NNEQUIN

In 1918, after a years-long tumultuous affair, Austrian artist Oscar Kokoschka was dumped by the musician, sculptor, and infamous Viennese socialite Alma Mahler. Kokoschka, already known as a wild-tempered man, was devastated. In order to deal with the loss, he commissioned Munich dollmaker Hermine Moos to craft him a life-sized doll that looked exactly like Mahler. Over the next year he sent Moos hundreds of letters with sketches of Mahler—intimate sketches—so Moos would get the dimensions of the wood and wool doll exactly right. “Please pay special attention to the dimension of the head and neck, to the rib-cage, the rump and the limbs,” Kokoschka wrote. And, “Can the mouth be opened? And are there teeth and a tongue inside? I hope so.” Shortly after he finally received the doll in spring, 1919, Kokoschka could be seen driving through the streets of Vienna with his Alma-nnequin riding in the passenger seat. At parties it would be seated beside him; it would be with him in his studio in Dresden. They even shared a box at the opera. But Kokoschka’s Mahler mannequin didn’t last. The end came, so the story goes, at the close of a champagne-soaked party in Dresden. At dawn, a drunken Kokoschka took the doll out into his garden and beheaded it.

In March, 1939, New York department store Bonwit Teller commissioned Salvador Dali to create a window display. Not surprisingly, soon after having offered the commission, the store regretted it. Dali created a two-window display he titled “Day and Night.” On the “day” side was a female mannequin with bright red hair dressed in green feathers. Behind her was a clawfoot bathtub lined with Persian lambskin, and filled with water and floating narcissi. Three mannequin arms reached out of the bath water, each holding a mirror. On the “night” side, a male mannequin was depicted lying on a bed of hot, glowing coals under the mounted and
stuffed fore-body of a bizarre beast, which Dali described as “the decapitated head and the savage hooves of a great somnambulist buffalo extenuated by a thousand years of sleep.” As soon as the window was unveiled people started complaining that the display was “too extreme.” Bonwit Teller’s staff took it upon themselves to alter the scene…without asking the artist. Bad idea. That afternoon Dali walked by the window and flew into a rage. He went into the store, screamed at the managers, then jumped into the display area. He picked up an end of the bathtub, spilling all the water out—and threw it through the plate-glass window and out into the street. He was arrested and thrown in jail, but released that evening by a judge who gave him a suspended sentence, saying, “These are some of the privileges that an artist with temperament seems to enjoy.” (And Dali’s one-man show, which just happened to be opening that night, was a hit.)

On March 9, 1961, Ivan Ivanovich became the first person to fly into space. Well, the first person-like
thing
to fly into space. Ivan Ivanovich (the Russian equivalent of “John Smith”) was a life-sized test-flight mannequin, and he and his companion, a (live) dog named Chernushka (“Blackie”), were rocketed into space weeks before Yuri Gagarin was to take his historic flight. Ivanovich’s mission: to test the Vostok spacecraft and the SK-1 pressure suit. After making a single orbit of the planet in 89 minutes, Ivanovich (and the dog) returned safely to Earth. He was so lifelike, with eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows, lips and all, that the word “Maket,” or “Dummy” was written on his forehead so nobody would think he was a dead cosmonaut.

Update:
Ivan the Space Mannequin was sold at Sotheby’s auction house in 1993. He was purchased by Texas billionaire (and onetime presidential candidate) H. Ross Perot for $189,500.