QUEEN VICTORIA breathed London air that was 100 times smokier than today’s, according to atmospheric records. But the large smoke particles of her era have simply been replaced by smaller ones, which are also damaging to health.
Giles Harrison of the University of Reading, UK, used samples of airborne smoke particles and measurements of the air’s electrical conductivity taken in London between 1898 and 1979 to deduce the particle load in the air over that time. “Air is more conductive when it is clean and less conductive when it is polluted,” he says.
Harrison found that 19th-century London air contained…
