Word: coal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...workers trudged to their jobs, a heavy fog blanketed the bleak and grimy town. It hung suspended in the stagnant air while local businesses-steel mills, a wire factory, zinc and coke plants-continued to spew waste gases, zinc fumes, coal smoke and fly ash into the lowering darkness. The atmosphere thickened. Grime began to fall out of the smog, covering homes, sidewalks and streets with a black coating in which pedestrians and automobiles left distinct footprints and tire tracks. Within 48 hours, visibility had become so bad that residents had difficulty finding their way home...
...thick fog began to roll over London. Hardly anyone paid any attention at first in a city long used to "pea-soupers." But this fog was pinned down by a temperature inversion, and was steadily thickened by the soot and smoke of the coal-burning city. Within three days, the air was so black that Londoners could see no more than a yard ahead. Drivers were forced to leave cars and buses to peer closely at street signs to find out where they were. Policemen strapped on respiratory masks. The Manchester Guardian reported that London's midday sun "hung...
...second most plentiful gas pollutant is composed of oxides of sulphur, produced by home, power-plant and factory combustion of coal and oil containing large percentages of sulphur. More than a tenth of air pollution consists of hydrocarbons, most of them emanating as unburned or only partially burned gaseous compounds from automobile fuel systems. Combustion also produces large quantities of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other gases...
Victim No. 1 is a wealthy widow (Anna Quayle) who consoles herself by bawling the Kashmiri Song ("Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar/ Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway far?") while she somehow makes her harp sound like a bedspring banged with a coal scuttle. Before long teeny Tony, her stepson and heir, just can't face the music. So he runs a wire from his toy-train set to the frame of the harp, transforming it into a colossal toaster that does stepmother up brown...
Tame Lion. Offstage, no project or gimmick was too daring, too dangerous or too absurd for her. She took up sculpture and painting, the piano and writing, pistol shooting and fishing, ballooning and alligator hunting. She went down into a Pennsylvania coal mine, kept a tame lion in her house, and-though she claimed vehemently that she opposed capital punishment-attended a hanging in London, a garroting in Madrid and two beheadings in France. "If there's anything more remarkable than watching Sarah act," observed one admirer, "it's watching her live...