{"id":22250,"date":"2026-03-26T10:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T10:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/2026\/03\/26\/smoglandia-smog-was-killing-la-and-a-caltech-chemist-found-the-murder-weapon-in-our-garage\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T10:13:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T10:13:14","slug":"smoglandia-smog-was-killing-la-and-a-caltech-chemist-found-the-murder-weapon-in-our-garage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/2026\/03\/26\/smoglandia-smog-was-killing-la-and-a-caltech-chemist-found-the-murder-weapon-in-our-garage\/","title":{"rendered":"Smoglandia: Smog was killing LA, and a Caltech chemist found the murder weapon \u2013 in our garage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n<\/p>\n

<\/span> <\/p>\n

Just like a Hollywood crime movie \u2013 everyone, everything was a suspect.<\/p>\n

Crime: Smog. The victim: Any Angeleno with a set of lungs.<\/p>\n

Raymond Chandler, master of detective stories, described the crime scene in “The Long Goodbye” in 1953:<\/p>\n

“The weather was hot and sticky, and the acidic sting of smog extended west as far as Beverly Hills. From the top of Mulholland Drive, you could see it spread like a ground smog across town. When you were in it you could taste it and smell it and it made your eyes smart. Everybody was worried about it. … Everything was smog’s fault. If the canary didn’t sing, if the milkman came late, if The Pekingese would have done that, Flea, if some old dog with a starched collar had a heart attack on the way to church, it was the fog…”<\/p>\n

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\"smoglandia <\/picture> <\/div>\n

Smoglandia is a four-part series on L.A.’s historic battle with smog.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Smog affected Southern California worse, but not better, from the 1940s to the 1950s. The magazine National Defense, published in Arcadia, warned in 1948, “If you value your life, your health and comfort, stay away from California, or at least … stay away from Los Angeles County.”<\/p>\n

Local air pollution officials, who had little power and little solid science, singled out oil industries, factories, manufacturers, and chemical companies, and they weren’t wrong\u2014just looking from the opposite end of the telescope. Some people have given up and said the only solution to smog is a good strong wind.<\/p>\n

War industries put in the spotlight<\/h3>\n

There was nothing small to blame. One of LA’s pollution chiefs warned that “anyone who smokes also contributes to the danger of smog.” At one time housewives were advised not to shake their dust mops outside, otherwise it would contribute to smog.<\/p>\n

But a Caltech biochemist was about to deliver some good news… and some bad news.<\/p>\n

Arie Hagen-Smit was from the Netherlands, and at Caltech he researched plant biochemistry. Like many Angelenos, he found life here a bit expensive. Years later, his wife, nicknamed Zuse, told a Caltech interviewer that they were able to buy their family home because Hagi \u2013 that was her surname \u2013 was busy testing the urine of racehorses for illegal doping.<\/p>\n

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\"Looking <\/picture>\n
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Looking down the Arroyo Seco Parkway at the smog-shrouded Los Angeles City Hall and Civic Center buildings in 1948. <\/p>\n

(UCLA Library Digital Collection)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

Two things inspired Hagi to discontinue his own plant research and focus on the mystery of the haze blackening the sky. One was that plants were dying all over L.A., from the flower beds of Pasadena to the crop fields of Compton. The second was being recruited by Caltech alumnus Arnold Beckman, a renowned inventor of scientific instruments and scientific advisor to L.A.’s primary air pollution control operation.<\/p>\n

By 1952, Hagee had figured out the smog recipe: Start with the dirty leftovers of fossil fuels burned from factories, oil refineries, and unburned gas exhaust from cars and trucks. Add \u201cvolatile organic compounds,\u201d which come from cars, paint, industrial processing, perfume, cleaning supplies \u2013 just open your cabinets and you’ll find some. Then add sunlight and you get ozone. Not the good, high-altitude ozone that protects us from dangerous UV light, but the bad ozone, which hovers just above the ground \u2013 smelly, grayish, brown photochemical smog.<\/p>\n

Hagee explained this in a black-and-white educational film from 1959 that had not been seen for decades. It was discovered and saved by Rick Flanagan, a professor of chemical engineering and environmental science, who found it in a tin film canister in a Caltech closet. The Times converted it into a viewable format.<\/p>\n

Here is the introduction to Hagi’s work: “Most people don’t give much thought to the air. After all, it is invisible and doesn’t seem to weigh much. And so we hear about the air only when it is too hot or too cold, or perhaps too smoky.”<\/p>\n

And that’s what happened. The evidence was all around us. So the price tag of smog was: destroyed crops.<\/p>\n

In our age of subdivisions and suburban sprawl, try to remember this: In the first half of the 20th century, LA was the most prosperous agricultural county in the country.<\/p>\n

From pigs to pig iron<\/h3>\n

There was nothing that we did not develop. Fields of walnuts, avocados, peaches, lettuce, beans, grapes, tomatoes, olives, berries, onions, and, from La Mirada to Malibu, commercial flowers. However, haze can destroy a spinach crop in half a day. By 1947 commercial beekeepers were moving their hives miles away; The smoke was killing the bees, or making them crazy so they couldn’t find their way back home.<\/p>\n

No one saw it faster or from closer than the city of Fontana in San Bernardino County. Until 1942, Fontana was a place where ordinary people worked hard on the land with pig farms, vineyards and vegetable gardens. This is also where and when industrial titan Henry J. Kaiser laid the foundation for a steel-making defense plant, and within a year, Fontana was completely transformed, as the headlines said, from “Pig Farm to Pig Iron.”<\/p>\n

Historian Rick Dias tells this story in his book “Kaiser’s Stele of Fontana”. A woman who worked on a berry farm before the steel mill opened told them, “As soon as that plant caught fire… everything was over.” Once the farm jobs ended, she went to work in the mill. He told Dyess that he did not have the money to stand against Henry J. Kaiser.<\/p>\n

Smog has taken its hazy grip around Hollywood, too.<\/p>\n

Fog during film shooting meant wastage of time and money. The perfection of air and climate that had first attracted filmmakers here was being lost in a gray illusion. LA still had year-round climate, but certainly not clean air year-round.<\/p>\n

In 1953, Alfred Hitchcock was shooting “Rear Window” on a sound stage, but the blower sucked in so much foggy air that Hitchcock had to send his stars Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart and everyone else home for the day.<\/p>\n

Actors Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra expressed concern about the haze. Don Knotts, “Mr. Chicken”, himself was ready to fly the coop from L.A. “Everyone makes fun of smog. But it’s not funny. It could kill us all. I didn’t know it was so bad when I moved out here,” he complained. “If it doesn’t get better, I’m selling my new house in Glendale and moving back to Jersey.”<\/p>\n

What’s most ominous is that the “airborne waste” we were breathing was taking a toll on everyone’s health.<\/p>\n

In 1953, the LA County Medical Association. Gave clear warning that smog harms human organs. Three years later, its doctors reported observing “smog syndrome”. His patients were turning away because of the haze and the doctors were asking them to leave. Respiratory problems, heart problems, allergies, respiratory cancers \u2013 MDs realized that smog had a heavy hand in all of these.<\/p>\n

It is unclear whether “smog” was ever listed on death certificates in Los Angeles, but in the smoggy autumn of 1954, three infants, each 3 months old and living as far apart as Hollywood and Van Nuys and San Pedro, died of breathing problems within 45 minutes of each other.<\/p>\n

Children and their developing lungs were particularly vulnerable. In August 1969, a dozen smog warnings over six weeks moved high school football practices and games from the afternoon to the morning or evening. Clermont High School head coach Asper Keizer said he was OK with the rescheduling. Otherwise, he said, “We’ll be playing with fire if we don’t comply. We’ll feel really bad if a guy vomits. I can hear them coughing and saying something.”<\/p>\n

Famous actor and political crusader Jane Fonda has made air quality the target of her protests. About 93% of the world’s children live in polluted air, she said, and pollution affects their own children at home, and L.A. children also suffer from asthma. “I know what it’s like, because my son Troy had terrible asthma. Oh, how horrible it is to sit in the hospital in a tent with your child, (watching them) struggle to be able to breathe.”<\/p>\n

The biggest source of smog has been identified<\/h3>\n

Caltech scientist Hagi’s discovery profoundly changed the future of California’s public health, cars, and L.A.’s self-image and identity. But not without a fight.<\/p>\n

America was crazy about cars in the 1950s, and L.A. was the beating engine of auto eroticism. Amateur racers, pimped-out coupes, woodies and ragtops, sedate sedans and souped-up hot rods, all shared the brand new, wide-open freeways and boulevards. We were out there having fun in the hot California sun.<\/p>\n

And here’s this Dutch scientist in a lab coat telling us that the problem with our cars was, maybe the shiny grille and hood ornament in the front, but in the back there was all this noxious exhaust crap.<\/p>\n

Did we reward him for this amazing, life-changing, life-saving discovery?<\/p>\n

Did we make him the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade? Did he win the Nobel Prize? No, this guy practically saved Southern California from itself, and we didn’t even name a freeway off-ramp in his honor.<\/p>\n

Because theirs was a harsh message, and not always a welcome one. Later, Hagi described it: “I had a lot of trouble getting people to accept it. They said it was absolute nonsense, and the auto industry was of the opinion that it was none of my business.”<\/p>\n

In 1960, there were more than 7 million polluting cars, trucks, and motorcycles on California’s roads. Human nature being what it is, L.A.’s complex expanse being what it is, Southern Californians weren’t going to stop driving their cars. Therefore the cars themselves will have to be replaced.<\/p>\n

And it expanded the country’s largest car markets to Detroit and Washington, D.C. It was felt as a shock throughout the country.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just like a Hollywood crime movie \u2013 everyone, everything was a suspect. Crime: Smog. The victim: Any Angeleno with a set of lungs. Raymond Chandler, master of detective stories, described the crime scene in “The Long Goodbye” in 1953: “The weather was hot and sticky, and the acidic sting of smog extended west as far<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[10313,10314,7778,296,160,10311,10312,2716],"class_list":["post-22250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bible-verse","tag-caltech","tag-chemist","tag-garage","tag-killing","tag-murder","tag-smog","tag-smoglandia","tag-weapon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22252,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22250\/revisions\/22252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}