BFI

This item from Mining Review's first year shows how technology originally developed to prevent ships emitting smoke during wartime, and thus give away their position to the enemy, could be adapted for use in heavy industry in peacetime.

It was based on the principle that smoke consists of incompletely burnt fuel particles, and so by ensuring that they're driven onto a boiler's flames and burnt up before emission, the amount of smoke that gets through to the chimney is reduced to a minimum.

As with the following year's Mining Review item A Dim View (2nd Year No. 5), the film tends to stress the economic downside of pollution - smoke is bad, because it indicates wasted coal at a time of national shortage. But there is also an acknowledgement of the environmental impact when the narrator refers to smoke polluting the air we breathe, shutting out the sunlight and defiling our cities with a daily deposit of soot and filth. However, the Clean Air Act of 1956 was still nearly a decade away.

Michael Brooke

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