From “That Creeping Menace Called Smog” by Leigh White, May 5, 1957, issue of The Saturday Evening Post
For some time now, the Los Angeles authorities have been experimenting with various forms of automotive cutoffs and afterburners. To date, no satisfactory cutoff or afterburner has been developed for all types of motor vehicles. As soon as one has been perfected, however, its use will probably be made compulsory in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and other cities where ozone smog has begun to menace our existence. Indeed, the day is not far off, it seems, when such systems will be mandatory equipment on all types of automotive locomotion, from the family sedan to the air transports of the jet age.
This article is featured in the March/April 2020 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
Comments
I read the entire article, and have no doubt this Post feature didn’t help accelerate the progress in eradicating smog to the extent it has over the past 60 years. Being an L.A. resident, it was still bad well into the ’60s as a child, but greatly improved in the ’70s-the present.
More still needs to be done on this and many other fronts, but the air quality is substantially better out here. I was always complaining about it in elementary school (burning my eyes), and yet here was a major article on it 3 weeks before I was born. The newer worries with air pollution have been the all the fires over the past 30 years. There has to be a way to to stop that also, and high speed chases.
Don’t we have have something called drones now, that could be shot out of a helicopter to strategically and instantly neutralize these criminal vehicles at this late date? Am I the only one smart enough to have thought that obvious solution up?