Chaos and Cosmos. Heidi C. M. Scott

to humans. Second natures, the patchy clusters of trees that serve aesthetic needs in cities, have their own version of black lung. Their sickness is a poignant symbol of the transorganismal health effects of air pollution. In 1910 T. S. Eliot lyrically described how the urban yellow fog “rubs its back upon the window-panes [. . .] / lingered upon the pools that stand in drains [. . .] / curled once about the house, and fell asleep” (“Prufrock” lines 15, 18, 22). The “fog demon” had become endemic, another offspring of industry.

      Victorian factory architecture provides another measure of industrial air pollution. The statistics on average chimney height over the course of the nineteenth century reveal how legislation attempted to curtail urban pollution without the bother of regulating emissions. Gale Christianson traces the growth of “Cleopatra’s needles” from an average somewhat below 300 feet in the early decades of the century to new records of 435.5 feet in 1841 and 454 feet in 1857. An average of one hundred chimneys rose each year in London between 1846 and 1853. The House of Commons Select Committee on the Smoke Nuisance, created in 1843, recommended that manufacturers be removed from the city center to a radius of five or six miles (Christianson 56–59). These measures substituted a visibly apparent local environmental problem for an almost invisible but widespread trend toward the blackening of England, urban and rural. As these industrial forests came to define city skylines, architecture trended toward more attractive and ever-taller stacks capable of distributing their effluent over a wider area. Aesthetic chimneys included those designed after the Egyptian prototype, Cleopatra’s needle. Perhaps it helped with public opinion to have their aesthetics contribute some artistic character to otherwise utilitarian cities.