Commentary
Historical perspective fifty years of particles: a personal retrospect
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Correspondence: Anthony Seaton a.seaton@abdn.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, The University of Aberdeen, King's College, Aberdeen, AB24 3FX
8 Avon Grove, Edinburgh EH4 6RF, Scotland, UK
Particle and Fibre Toxicology 2011, 8:35 doi:10.1186/1743-8977-8-35
Published: 29 December 2011First paragraph (this article has no abstract)
The year 2010 was the 350th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Society of London, the world's oldest scientific academy. Among its earliest correspondents was the Dutch instrument maker, Anton van Leuwenhoek, whose single lens microscopes opened the eyes of the world to what had previously been invisible. In that same era of scientific and philosophical advance, the Enlightenment, attention was first drawn to the problem of industrial pollution by John Evelyn's petition, Fumifugium, to King Charles II in 1661. However, it was not until late in the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in use of coal as a source of power in factories and heating in homes, that the full impact of particulate pollution began to be recognised. Pollution episodes in Donora, Pennsylvania and the Meuse valley in Belgium in the 1940s, and the great London smog of 1952, were associated with dramatic increases in deaths in the local populations and led eventually to Western Governments taking action to curb emissions. Nevertheless, coal remained the primary cause of urban pollution into the 1970s, when oil began to take over.