Summary and Conclusion

Abstract

Concern about air pollution has been known for thousands of years. “Complaints about its effects on human health and the built environment were first voiced by the citizens of ancient Athens and Rome. Urban air quality, however, worsened during the Industrial Revolution, as the widespread use of coal in factories in Britain, Germany, the United States and other nations ushered in an ‘age of smoke’” (Mosley 2014). As urban areas developed, pollution sources, such as chimneys and industrial processes, were concentrated, leading to visible and damaging pollution dominated by smoke. The harmful effects of air pollution were recognized by Hippocrates in his fifth-century treatise Air, Water and Places; Hippocrates noted that people’s health could be affected by the air they breathe and that quality of the air differed by area (cited in Adams 1891).