- It makes your eyes water
your nose run.
- Why are you running?
- It irritates your throat,
(screaming)
it makes you wheeze.
(wheezing)
♪ Smoke weed every day. ♪
- No not that, it's smog.
Los Angeles residents know all about the ugly brown haze
that's tarnished Tinseltown in the past.
How did the city break the grip of this nasty scourge
and pull itself back from the smoggy abyss?
Grab your inhaler, adjust your gas mask
and stockpile some Visine 'cause this is the Story of Smog.
(upbeat music)
All cities have some degree of air pollution.
But places like Denver, Mexico City
and Los Angeles have it tougher
because of their similar layout.
LA is situated on a low-lying coastal plain,
surrounded by high mountains.
It's like a giant fish bowl.
Because of these geographical features,
Los Angeles is at the mercy of a phenomenon
called temperature inversion.
But what's a Temperature Inversion?
- During the day, the radiation from the sun
heats up the ground and that hot air rises,
cools off, comes back down and heats up
from the ground again.
It's convection, creates a flow of air.
Once the sun goes down, it stops heating the ground
and the ground stops heating the air above it.
So the hot air left over from the day just
takes off as coll air swoops in.
But in a place surrounded by mountains,
that hot air gets trapped,
a temperature inversion occurs where air
closer to the ground cools and gets trapped.
It's got nowhere to go,
the warm air just sitting above it
keeps pollutants from escaping into the stratosphere.
Got it? Great!
- This anomaly took a frightening turn on July 26, 1943
when a dense brown fog appeared suddenly and dramatically
over the city.
This mysterious cloud immediately made people's eyes sting,
their nose run, and their throats burn.
Visibility was cut to just three city blocks
and blinded motorists had to swerve their way
through the thick, soupy mess.
For years Angelenos had coped with an irritating haze
and now it seemed as though it had reappeared
in a much stronger and forceful form.
Everyone panicked, it's gotta be a chemical attack
by the Japanese.
The surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor was just
two years earlier, what else could it be?
Little did they know, this was LA's first encounter
with smog.
LA officials blamed a local gas plant that was manufacturing
synthetic rubber ingredients
and public pressure shut the plant down,
but the smog continued.
And it got worse.
Everyone from polished businessmen to sweaty cab drivers
hacked by the tens of thousands, as the menacing fog
deprived them of fresh air.
The mayor of LA foolishly vowed to eliminate
the mysterious haze in four months
but it would actually take several years
to identify the problem.
In October that same year,
a Smoke and Fumes Commission was set up
and believing this air pollutant was a mixture
of smoke and coastal fog, the term smog became popular.
Some even referred to it as "the beast".
The war came to a close, but the problem continued.
LA Angels fans struggled to see players on the field
during a game.
With pleas from red-eyed, raspy-voiced citizens,
Governor Earl Warren, signed a law in 1947
setting up the Los Angeles
County Air Pollution Control District.
The first of its kind, this organization was tasked
with regulating the oil refineries,
power plants and steel mills,
the industries everyone thought was the obvious culprits.
As the brown fog persisted, city officials rode blimps
over the city, trying to spot the source
of the suspicious haze.
What was going on in LA?
Other cities were coping with their own air pollution.
Pittsburgh, and other cities like it on the East Coast
were mostly dealing with pollutants from burning coal
but LA didn't even use much coal, if at all.
It wasn't until the early 1950s that the 'gas attack'
mystery of '43 was finally solved.
There was a chemist working at the Cal Tech
named Arie Haagen-Smit.
He had been studying pineapples and fine wines
for a few years, but in 1948, he chose to shift gears.
Farmers in LA County complained that air pollution
from refineries damaged their crops by bleaching
and discoloring the leaves.
This was something not seen in other parts of the country.
So, Arie's starting-point was investigating
the damaged plants.
He knew that LA smog was not like the air
pollution found back East.
There it was composed mainly of sulfur compounds
and soot from burning coal and heavy oils.
He also noticed that despite early smoke control measures,
citizens still suffered from eye irritation
on smoggy days and continued to smell
a bleach-like odor in the air.
Arie enlisted the help of Peg Brunelle,
a chief chemist for the LA County
Air Pollution Control District.
Having experienced the effects of smog first-hand,
Peg was ready to solve this mystery.
The pair sealed plants in airtight containers to hunt
for the oxidizing elements in smog
that was causing so much damage.
They put in the legwork, driving to local Southland
refineries and gathering air samples in five-liter flasks.
Arie reconfigured his old pineapple-testing device
and blew a few hundred cubic feet of polluted air
through cooling traps and what came out was several ounces
of vile-smelling, nasty brown sludge.
He put it in a bottle, and called it Jagermeister, the end.
I'm kidding, it was smog.
Ozone, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen
were all revealed in the liquified smog.
This explained the bleachy odor that people smelled.
Wait, I thought Ozone was way up high?
- Well, who's this guy?
Okay ready.
Well there's good ozone and bad ozone.
Good ozone is the stratosphere extending upward
about 6 miles to 30 miles.
It's the layer that's natural, untainted
and protects life on Earth by filtering harmful sun rays.
We don't have to breath it, it's all good.
Bad ozone, or ground-level ozone, is harmful,
it doesn't belong down here,
it reacts with the aldehydes and ketones
and has other harmful agents like
sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen.
- The ozone found in the experiment at Arie's lab
posed a real head-scratcher,
since no local industries released ozone.
Where was the smog forming?
Where did it come from?
Arie knew nitric oxides from car exhaust
was released into the air, and the incomplete burning
of gasoline also released gaseous hydrocarbons,
as did oil refineries.
By themselves neither nitrous oxide nor hydrocarbons
could explain the smog.
There had to be an additional piece to the puzzle.
What did LA have more of than other city?
Sunlight.
♪ The sun is shining bright. ♪
- To confirm his hunch, Arie's team
set up a Plexiglass smog chamber
and pumped in nitrous oxide and hydrocarbons.
Then they let the mix bake in the sun and
(whooshing)
smog.
This was a whole new ball game.
Unlike classic pollutants that got released directly
into the air, this new smog formed only
when man-made chemicals interacted with natural sunlight.
It was photo-chemical smog.
So, the bottom line was that LA's newly uncovered
beast didn't come from half-assed actions
at a factory or a flub at some oil plant,
like originally believed in '43.
It was cars.
By this time Los Angeles County had two million cars
on its road and all the traffic streaming
into LA was making an already bad situation apocalyptic.
Now that people were armed with the information,
Los Angeles set out to conquer the problem, right?
Mmmm, mmm, mmm, mmm,
not really.
The link to vehicles caused a huge uproar
in car-crazed Los Angeles.
- I'm in a serious relationship with my car.
(banjo music)
- Automobile owners blamed the car manufacturers
for making a defective product,
and industry advocates accused Arie of biased
and incompetent science.
So, he started giving lectures where he whipped up
smog on demand, leaving audiences choking, literally.
(cheering)
Smog.
(cheering)
Smog.
(cheering)
Smog.
(cheering)
Smog.
Many on the front lines even sacrificed
their health to expose the dangers of this beast.
Air Pollution Control Officer S. Smith Griswold
volunteered to breathe extreme levels
of the pollutant in Arie's smog chamber
and developed bronchitis.
Other LA County Air Pollution Control District employees
exposed their eyes to smog from the chamber
while colleagues manned stopwatches
and timed how long it took for the volunteers
to experience irritation, or even tears.
But civic leaders and the business community
still pushed back, they were all
"ozone only comes from the stratosphere.
"It must drop to ocean levels and get blown
"in by coastal breezes."
It wasn't until 1954 that Arie got to say "I told you so."
- You know what, I told ya so.
I (bleeping) told ya so.
- To prove the ozone from the ocean theory,
the oil industry funded a Stanford Research Institute study.
If the ozone was blowing in,
then Catalina Island, just 29 miles
off the coast would be getting a bunch of ozone
but it wasn't- this blew the whole migrating
ozone theory right out of the water.
Get it?
It's the ocean.
Still, much of the public sincerely believed
that automakers couldn't possibly be the bad guy
in this scenario because the clear car exhaust
didn't match the brown cloud they were seeing
in the sky and those people who did believe it
had some crazy ideas for getting rid of it.
Some suggested to drill tunnels or cut passages
through the mountains then build giant fans
to blow the smog into the desert.
Other people were just like, no let's stuff rice
in car tailpipes to absorb the hydrocarbons.
So, the smog situation in 1950s
lingered and city officials dragged their feet
until a catastrophic incident on the other side
of the World.
During a London cold snap on December 5th, 1952,
sulfur particles mixed with fumes from burning coal.
It produced a yellow fog that smelled like rotten eggs.
The skies darkened and daytime visibility became so limited
that if you looked down, you couldn't see your feet.
That is true.
Over the next four days, an estimated 12,000
Londoners would die from the pollution.
By the time cold winds blew out the London smog,
an additional 150,000 people had been hospitalized
and thousand of animals also fell victim to the deadly fog.
And the craziest part is that during this whole mess,
no one noticed the rising death toll because the bodies
that began to line the streets couldn't be seen
through the dark haze.
One year later, California's new lieutenant
governor Goodwin J. Knight cited the London tragedy
and made combating smog his mission.
Knight started looking for someone to help improve
air quality and reduce pollution.
Arnold Beckman was a celebrated chemist, is that a thing?
- Yeah Nolan, it's a thing.
This guy invented the DU spectrophotometer,
you know, the UV/VIS spectrophotometer
it's like Model-T of scientific instrumentation.
♪ Can I say hell yeah ♪
♪ Hell yeah, hell yeah ♪
- You're goddamn right.
- Beckman was tasked with making recommendations
about pollution reform.
His prescription for the cure,
establish car exhaust standards,
create a mass transit system, impose more regulations
on refineries and fueling operations,
end backyard trash burning,
and ensure slower growth for heavy-polluting industries.
His guidelines were published in 1953,
but progress was slow.
LA's population meant any full-on attempt
to curb smog couldn't keep up with the pace
of LA's lightning-quick growth.
Car manufacturers' reaction to the crisis
was sluggish at best
and only when prompted by the government
did they do anything.
With the threat of mandatory federal regulations,
the auto industry begin installing
a crankcase ventilation system on their cars.
This blow-by device returned unburned gases
to the combustion chambers.
It was a significant advance because crankcase blowby
made up about 25 percent
of the engine's hydrocarbon emissions.
The equipment became mandatory on all cars sold
in California, beginning with the 1963 models.
By the mid 70s, Los Angeles experienced dangerous levels
of smog more than 200 days out of the year.
The city's residents were breathing some
of the dirtiest air in the world.
Some people built underground, backyard smog shelters.
One guy started a successful business
selling balloons filled with fresh, clean,
desert air to Angelenos for 50 cents.
There was even a Smog board game for kids.
If you were a tourist, forget about buying a picture
of the Hollywood sign, instead you could settle
for a canister of Genuine Los Angeles Smog
- a gag gift that'll make you gag!
That's a fun joke we wrote.
Smog alerts were put in place to warn people
of hazardous air conditions, with stage one
being the least severe and stage three being
the don't-set-foot-outside-unless-you're-suicidal phase.
As more and more research linked smog to health issues,
average people became advocates.
A Beverly Hills mom named Afton Slade
formed Stamp Out Smog.
With a flair for the theatrical,
she put together an event at the Ambassador Hotel in 1964
that displayed a birthday cake.
The cake, which had a skull and crossbones
outlined in bright frosting, was to mark 21 years
of smog in Los Angeles.
Hey the smog can drink now.
Slade also encouraged mothers to show up
at rallies with their kids wearing gas masks,
an item that became really popular
at many anti-pollution rallies.
Other anti-smog groups popped up in LA during the late '50s
and early 60s.
Dedicated and vocal, these folks influenced
public opinion and demanded the powers-that-be
do something about what had become a crisis.
Building a better environment had entered
the nation's collective consciousness.
On April 22, 1970 this country held
its first ever Earth Day,
and eight months later President Richard Nixon
signed into law the Clean Air Act,
which, among other things, required a 90%
reductions in emissions from new automobiles by 1975.
It also allowed the newly formed
Environmental Protection Agency to regulate
harmful chemicals.
The act provided a framework for seriously addressing
the problem of rising levels of pollutants.
Today, tailpipe emissions on new passenger cars
are almost 99% cleaner compared to the 1960s
and US cities have a much-improved air quality,
with air pollutants declining by 68% from 1990 to 2014.
That's really good.
Fuels are much cleaner.
Lead's been eliminated and sulfur levels
are more than 90% lower than they were
before regulations were imposed.
Hydrocarbons are no longer escaping
into the atmosphere when you fill up your pump.
This month marks the 75th anniversary
of the day LA witnessed its first encounter with smog.
The incident became a turning point
in the fight against air pollution
and by remaining committed to clean air measures,
embracing electric cars, and staying vigilant,
hopefully we'll never see another day
like the one on July 26, 1943.
We tell the lesser known stories of the car world
every week, here on Wheel House
so make sure you hit that subscribe button right there
and maybe hit that notification bell as well.
Thanks to Bart for guest-starring on this episode,
you can watch his show Science Garage right here.
(laughing)
Ow (coughing)
Check out this episode of Up to Speed.
Follow me on Instagram @nolanjsykes,
follow Donut on Twitter, on Instagram @donutmedia.
Be nice.