Ever-Cleaner Auto Exhaust

Abstract

Touch football games and automobile catalytic converters share little in common, as far as most people are concerned. Not so for Galen B. Fisher. As a college student in Southern California in the 1960s, Fisher remembers all too well the choking dark clouds that drifted 30 miles eastward from the traffic-congested highways of Los Angeles and frequently descended onto the grounds of Pomona College, in Claremont, where he often played afternoon pickup games. “Around 4 o’clock when we were out playing football, we’d often see this big cloud roll in,” Fisher recalls. “Before you knew it, all these healthy college kids would lie down on the ground gasping for air and struggling to catch their breath.” As Fisher would come to learn, he and his football buddies of the ’60s were experiencing the noxious effects of untreated engine emissions. He would go on to spend decades researching catalytic cleanup of ...