Technology and the End of Smog in Fred M. White's "The Four Days' Night" Kate Neilsen (bio) in 1883, the British physicist Oliver Lodge and his partner, J.W. Clark, set out to solve the problem of England's intractable fogs. Using the smoke from Clark's "innumerable cigars," they discovered that smoke "blown into a small glass box" could be dispersed by the insertion of warmed metal rods. Eventually, Lodge noted, "we began electrifying the rods, instead of warming them," which "had a much more violent effect. … the dust was deposited on the sides of the box, and the whole became clear" (Past Years 175). Lodge dreamed of a practical application for his experiments, envisioning a series of giant electrodes and high-voltage electrical discharges along Liverpool's River Mersey that would dissolve dense fogs (Rowlands 45). [End Page 9] Yet, in a 1903 letter, he pointed out the inefficiency of such a method: "My view, of course, is that a town fog ought not to be produced; that it is very extravagant of a community to go to the double expense, first of producing a fog by incomplete combustion, and next of coping with it." Lodge's description of a "town fog" emphasizes the blend of the human-made and the natural—such events were the result of both natural weather patterns and an influx of smoke and pollution. Nevertheless, he continued, given that "combustion reform will take some time, and meanwhile fogs are a nuisance, it is quite possible that something temporary ought to be done" ("Fog Prevention"). Neither Liverpool nor London's streets, of course, ever came to be dotted with high-voltage electrodes and arcing electrical sparks, yet Lodge's comments highlight the paradox of English smogs: they were, in part, created by industrial and technological forces and yet seemed to require a technological solution that could make up for the inefficiencies of burning coal. For Lodge, the promise of a technological solution, though perhaps inefficient, offered English society the chance for some measure of control over the mixture of "natural" fogs and human-made pollutants. Today, we commonly refer to this mixture as "smog," a term that was first introduced in 1905 by Dr. H.A. des Voeux, the treasurer of the London Coal Smoke Abatement Society, who used the term to underscore that such events were made "more of smoke than of true fog." As Jesse Oak Taylor has recently noted, "Smog does not simply emerge at the intersection of nature and culture, it emerges as that intersection" (3). Smog highlighted the unpredictability of this junction. Neither fog nor pollution was under human control, and smog, the combination of the two, was nearly always uncertain. Literary representations of smogs similarly emphasized notions of uncertainty and unpredictability, while also imagining the role that technology might play in negotiating atmospheric dangers. In Robert Barr's 1892 short fiction "The Doom of London," for example, Barr imagines a deadly smog overtaking London, emphasizing the inability of the Londoners to predict the effects of the intermixture of air and smoke. He writes that "[s]cientific men have since showed that a simple mathematical calculation might have told us exactly when the last atom of oxygen would have been consumed," but, he continues, "it is easy to be wise after the event" (404). In Barr's telling, only increased scientific knowledge can provide the ability to fully understand smogs and to protect the public from them. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, numerous writers, such as M.P. Shiel, William Delisle Hay, and Fred M. White, depicted London's streets suffocating under debilitating and poisonous smogs. While these works drew attention to the toxic effects of smoke and industrial manufacture, they also often imagined the role that technology might play in remedying the problem of smogs. In Fred M. White's 1903 short story "The Four Days' Night," he envisions technology as central to managing England's smogs and caring for [End Page 10] the environment. In the story, a fire breaks out in London, burning "great petroleum storage tanks" (167). As the smoke from the fire rises over the city, a fog simultaneously arrives...
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May 6, 2021
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