December 4: Great London Smog awakes enviromental conscience

Today in 1952 a typical London fog became a nightmare: the fog was so mixed with pollution (smog) that it wasn't just extremly hard to see even inside closed spaces, but it also caused many respiratory illnesses in people and animals and colored the clothes and even the underwear.


Driving was extremely risky but that wasn't the worst problem.

While in the days of the event it didn't cause any particular panic, the medical statistics showed soon that 4,000 people had died and other 8,000 did in the weeks and months after it happened.



The Great Smog of 1952 was a product of several related factors: a severe cold that trapped the air, domestic coal heating, the fog, the total replacement of electric tranways by diesel buses. It wasn't the first one: others had happened in the 19th century but, times were changing and this one caused the introduction of clean air laws (1956) that nevertheless weren't able to reduce the smog notably till the en of the 60s.

You can see some vivid descriptions of this phenomenon in the following sites:

• http://www.metoffice.com/education/secondary/students/smog.h tml
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2542315.stm
• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=873954

Other things that happened today:

• 771: the death of Carloman, king of Austrasia, leaves his brother Charlemagne as only soverign of the Frankish Empire.
• 1563: final session of the Council of Trent, that stabilished the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
  

A session of the Council.

• 1674: a French Catholic mission is founded in what would later become Chicago.
• 1829: William Bentinck abolishes the practice of sati in colonial India. By this widespread practice, the widows would jump to the funerary pire of her husband burning alive with his corpse.
  
• 1918: Woodrow Wilson becomes the first US President to travel to Europe while in office, in order to attend to WWI peace conference at Versailles.
• 1969: Greg Noll stabilishes the all-times record of surfing by riding a wave of 65 feet (20 meters).
  
• 1977: The infamous Jean-Bedel Bokassa crowns himself emperor of Central Africa in a lavish ceremony.
• 1991: Journalist Terry Anderson is released after seven years captive of Hizbollah in Lebanon.
  
• 1992: US President George Bush (the elder) orders 28,000 troops to intervene in Somalia.
  

Full list: Wikipedia.