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From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Part 3—Deindustrialization as Pollution Export: From Pittsburgh and Chicago to Baghdad and Delhi

In spring 1960, a senior city councillor from Frankfurt set off on a two-week trip to the USA to study the measures taken there to keep the air clean in industrial cities, and to bring them back to Germany if appropriate.1 From 7 to 23 May, he visited the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cleveland, OH. In New York, he visited the seventy-storey Rockefeller Centre, from where he could see no air pollution from either chemical or heavy industry—all that was visible was the smoke from the power stations. A visit to the city administration revealed that smoke inspections had been in operation since 1935 and had been conducted by an independent office with eleven employees and its own laboratories since 1952. Numerous ordinances and bans regulated inner-city combustion, prohibiting not only smoke, soot, dust, vapours, gases, and fly ash as ‘pollution of the air by noxious or unpleasant substances’, but also ‘odours that are detrimental or cause a nuisance to people.’2 Violations (in 1959 there were almost 5,000) were punished with fines or plant closures.

Philadelphia, too, monitored not just smoke and dust, but also odours from asphalt processing plants, the textile and food industries, fertilizer factories, rendering plants, and laundries, and even from hotels, schools, and residential buildings. Countermeasures included the use of smokeless fuels, filter systems, and catalytic converters. The Saturday Evening Post printing works, for example, which had caused considerable pollution, used a platinum-iridium catalyst for aldehydes and hydrocarbons, rendering ‘the escaping vapours almost odourless.3

Some serious changes had been made in Pittsburgh in particular, which was the former ‘coal, iron and steel centre of the world’, notorious since the nineteenth century as the ‘Smoky City’4 and still lamented as such by Pete Seeger in one of his American Industrial Ballads in 1956.5 Contrary to the smoke control regulations of 1892, the idea that ‘smoke meant prosperity, and that air pollution was a necessary evil in an industrial city’ had long prevailed in Pittsburgh. As already noted in the case of Frankfurt (see part 2 in this series of blog posts), this raised the question of what constituted normality when there was so much regional variation; according to the report, the example of Pittsburgh demonstrated ‘that each area has its own particular problems.’6

‘Pittsburgh Town’ by Woodie Guthrie, sung by Pete Seeger, presented with background photographs of Pittsburgh. By landenchantment on YouTube.

Chicago’s Smoke Detectives: Visualizing Smell

It was only with the decline of local industry in the 1940s, the senior councillor argued, that a uniform district air pollution control programme was implemented, reducing smoke by 90 per cent from 1946, even though emissions continued. In Chicago, a centre of the meat, leather goods, and food industries, twenty-four ‘smoke observers’ were employed as smoke and odour detectives—a profession that had first emerged in the nineteenth century.7 Here, as in London around 1900, smoke was still measured according to the Ringelmann scale, which was developed by the end of the nineteenth century. This was a transparent disc printed with grids of varying density, which enabled a visual classification of smoke according to its grey tones.8 It was more difficult, however, to detect invisible odours, for example from metal factories and foundries; Cleveland tried to prevent these by banning the burning of oil.9

Overall, the councillor’s trip revealed that the higher priority given to air pollution control in the USA was reflected in budgets and headcounts, which were ten times higher than in Frankfurt. ‘Practicable legislation’ also existed there. When it came to other kinds of emissions, the US authorities faced ‘similar problems to those in Germany’, but unlike the German authorities, they had a ‘general clause’ that could be enforced by the police, giving them the power to intervene in the event of nuisances,10 especially in the case of unpleasant odours.

After the fact-finding mission was completed, the report was presented to a senior government official in Wiesbaden, and the same general clause was proposed as a means to oblige companies to ‘provide all necessary and reasonable safety measures (based on currently available technology) to protect the public against noise and odour pollution, or to immediately implement them as soon as any nuisance occurs’.11 This was enforced by means of licences, and odour-emitting specialist businesses such as asphalt processing plants and pitch boileries, foundries, chemical plants, and rendering plants were covered by the Industrial Code.12

Corner of Liberty and Fifth Avenues in Pittsburgh. Image courtesy of the Smoke Control Lantern Slide Collection, c.1940–1950, AIS.1978.22, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

Protective Strips and Purification Systems: Transurban Knowledge Exchange

These proposals were pragmatic; the idea of making industry, commerce, and agricultural businesses ‘odour- and noise-free’ was deemed ‘a utopian project’, but ‘some things could be achieved by settling for a little less’, such as absorbing ‘95–98 per cent of foul exhaust fumes and vapours by installing costly equipment’ and being generously prepared to forego the ‘capture of the last few per cent’. Hopes were also pinned on a report on air pollution which, according to the press, had been ‘finalized after painstaking work’ but was ‘still being kept secret by the federal government’.13 According to this report, concrete measures were to be implemented, including strict approval procedures, the installation of purification systems, and permanent monitoring, as well as urban planning measures such as an increase in green spaces and the planting of ‘protective strips’ to improve air quality. Transurban networking with cities in other countries in the UK, and especially in the USA, helped in this regard.

Such courses of action, however, by no means blew all the smog away. Certainly, drastic measures were taken in London in response to the ‘Killer Fog’ of 1952: the British government passed the Clean Air Act in 1956, which came into force in 1958, largely replacing the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act of 1875 (modified in 1926).14 The new law stipulated the establishment of smoke-free zones in the city centre and the switch to soot-free fuels. In 1962, old-style extreme smog obscured Londoners’ vision for the last time; after that, the measures seemed to take effect.15

A clean air law was also passed in the Federal Republic of Germany: the Bundes-Immissionsschutzgesetz (Federal Prevention of Environmental Impact Act) of 1974.16 However, temperature inversions escalated well into the 1970s in many large cities and also in the countryside, as shown by the so-called Katzendreckgestank-Affäre (‘Cat Droppings Stench Affair’), a cross-border odour nuisance which caused diplomatic complications between Czechoslovakia, the Federal Republic, and the GDR from 1976 to 1989/90—and which, to this day, has not completely evaporated.17

Shifting Smoke to the South: Deindustrialization as Pollution-Export

Since the 1970s, it is not only laws and regulations, filter systems, catalytic converters, and lower-emission power plants that have, to a large extent, rolled back the smog problem in the northern hemisphere, but also deindustrialization—which shifts the problem to other regions of the world, most of them former colonies. Today, according to the Air Monitor of the IQAir Foundation, Baghdad, Jakarta, Dakar, Lima, and Delhi are among the most polluted cities in the world. At the same time, the transition from physical perception to measurement and data analysis reflects the shift from anthropogenic (local) weather to anthropogenic (global) climate. The fact that emissions are now barely perceptible in the deindustrialized north-western hemisphere has long contributed to the misconception that they are a phenomenon, quite literally, from the dark ages.

The inaccuracy of this view was most recently demonstrated in February 2025 by a map of Germany published by the German Meteorological Service, a visualization of air pollution by the Federal Environment Agency.

Graphic: 2 colour-coded maps of Germany illustrating mean air quality values in different parts of the country on 12 Feb. 2025. The scale from blue to red (low to high) represents the concentration of particulate matter in the air, with red areas being mainly in the northern and central regions.
Daily mean air quality values in Germany on Wednesday 12 February 2025, PM10 on the left, PM2.5 on the right. Courtesy of the Federal Environment Agency.

The map was accompanied by a warning of ‘bad air’: due to a temperature inversion, ‘the thresholds per cubic metre for particulate matter with a particle size of a maximum of 10 microns (µm)’ were exceeded at many measuring stations in north-eastern Germany.18 Smoke from wood-burning stoves and exhaust pipes was once again the subject of heated debate—right in the middle of the German parliamentary election (upon which, however, it had barely any impact.)19

Unlike in around 1900 and 1950, it seems that now, in the second decade of the twenty-first-century—a period of economic recession and right-wing mobilization against ‘climate madness’ and net zero policies—driving bans and smoke-free zones are a hard sell to the electorate.


Feature Image: Downtown Pittsburgh between 1940 and 1945. Image courtesy of the Smoke Control Lantern Slide Collection, c.1940–1950, AIS.1978.22, Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

Translated by Marielle Sutherland

This blog post is the last in a series of 3 (see part 1 and part 2 here) and is based on archival research made possible by a fellowship at the German Historical Institute London in the foggy month of November 2024. My thanks go to Christina von Hodenberg and the GHIL team. This contribution will also be published in German as an article in an issue of the journal Historische Anthropologie on climate perception edited by my fellow GHIL scholarship holder Karolin Wetjen together with Regina Thumser-Wöhs (forthcoming). I am grateful to Marielle Sutherland for the translation into English.

  1. See ISG FSA_3705, Hauptakten der Magistrat/Sozialverwaltung der Stadt Frankfurt a.M.: Bekämpfung von Lärm und Luftverunreinigung im Stadtgebiet: Obermagistratsrat Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft in den Vereinigten Staaten: Bericht über eine Studienreise’, Frankfurt a. M., 1960. []
  2. Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 5. All quotes translated by Marielle Sutherland, GHIL []
  3. Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 11. []
  4. Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 15 []
  5. ‘All I do is cough and choke in Pittsburgh / . . . From the iron filings and the sulphur smoke’. Pete Seeger, ‘Pittsburgh Town’, in American Industrial Ballads, Folkway Records FH 5251 A (1956), no. 23 [LP, 33 ⅓ rpm]. []
  6. Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 18. []
  7. Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 21; see Melanie A. Kiechle, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (Seattle, 2017). []
  8. See TMA CL/MD/1/1, Smoke Nuisance Legislation 1904–14; London County Council to the Public Control Committee, Chief Officer James Ollis, ‘Smoke Consumption’, 1. []
  9. See Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 22. []
  10. Wiegand, ‘Reinhaltung der Luft’, 31. []
  11. ISG MA_1095, Der Magistrat, Gewerbe- und Preisamt der Stadt Frankfurt am Main: ‘Arbeitsbericht über die Bekämpfung von Luftverunreinigung und Lärm aus Industrie-, Gewerbe-, Handwerks- und landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben in Frankfurt a.M.’, Aug. 1957, 12. []
  12. See ISG MA_1095, Magistrat, ‘Arbeitsbericht’, 12. []
  13. ISG MA_1095, Magistrat, ‘Arbeitsbericht’, 24. []
  14. Ian Douglas, Cities: An Environmental History (London, 2013), 76. []
  15. See Christine L. Corton, London Fog: The Biography (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 315. []
  16. See Bundesgesetzblatt 1974, Part I, 721–43: Gesetz zum Schutz vor schädlichen Umwelteinwirkungen durch Luftverunreinigungen, Geräusche, Erschütterungen und ähnliche Vorgänge (Bundes-Immissionsschutzgesetz of 15 March 1974). []
  17. See Bodo Mrozek, and Doubravka Olšáková, ‘The Katzendreck Stench Affair. Cross-border Odor Conflicts between the Federal Republic of Germany, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and the German Democratic Republic, 1976–89′, in Dierk Hoffmann, Hermann Wentker, and Jonathan Zatlin (eds.), Entangled but Estranged: Perspectives on East German History after 1990 / German Yearbook of Contemporary History, 8 (2025) [forthcoming]. []
  18. Dipl.-Met. Jacqueline Kernn, Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), Vorhersage- und Beratungszentrale, ‘Schlechte Luft’, 13 Feb. 2025. []
  19. See Dominik Jung, ‘Gefährliche Feinstaub-Werte in Deutschland: Wetter-Experte widerlegt fragwürdige Theorie’, Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine, 14 Feb. 2025. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Bodo Mrozek (June 6, 2025). From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved June 15, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/142ec


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Bodo Mrozek

I am a historian, working on cultural and contemporary history. In my last book Jugend - Pop - Kultur. Eine transnationale Geschichte (Histoire de la pop. Quand la culture jeune dépasse les frontières), I analyze both the criminalization and the establishment of an international youth and pop culture during the second half of the 20th century. Currently, I am a researcher at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies of the Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin, working on sensory and hybrid warfare and the olfactory history of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

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