Change takes a long time. Pittsburgh, for its part, did not enact smoke controls until more than a century after travelers described it as hell with the lid off.

NASA

The photographs and measurements coming out of Beijing these days are horrifying. You can see the brown clouds from space, and Chinese media has even been talking up the problem.

I've heard from some Americans saying, "Why don't they do something about this? How can they live like this?" Etcetera. To an early 21st century American, particularly one living in northern California or a relatively pollution-free Washington, DC, it seems crazy to live with such bad air.

But it was not always so.

As America became an industrial power during the 19th century, Pittsburgh emerged as the seat of metalworking, iron and then steel. This was a city powered by coal. Soot and smoke covered the city. There was no blue sky. Travelers from around the world visited Pittsburgh to see the wonder of American capitalism. The stories they tell are like -- exactly, like -- the ones you hear today about China. (This is a story that I covered in some detail in my book.)

A wry southerner observed, "If a sheet of white paper lie upon your desk for half an hour you may write on it with your finger's end through the thin stratum of coal dust that has settled upon it during that interval." Another traveler recounted, "Every body who has heard of Pittsburgh knows that it is the city of perpetual smoke, and looks as if it were built above the descent to 'the bottomless pit,'" that is to say, hell. And yet, this dirty power also happened to make a lot of people a lot of money. It was said, "He whose hands are the most sooty handles the most money, and it is reasonable to infer is the richer man."