In any discussion about curtailing air pollution in Southern California, the odds are that some wag will point out that smog has been an issue explorers dropped anchor in the region and dubbed today’s

San Pedro Harbor “the Bay of the Smokes”.

Smog had been a problem for major cities long before Los Angeles was named, yet for clean air is that Los Angeles may have actually given smog its name a dozen years before most historians agree the term was invented.

Autumn smoke When Portuguese explorer Juan Cabrillo sailed toward a marshland at the northwest end of today’s San Pedro Bay on Oct. 8, 1542, he noticed a thick veil of smoke clinging to the hillsides and called the bay “Bahia de Los Fumas.” What he may have seen was both the Tongva villages or he may have witnessed a unique autumn hunting tradition of the local tribes: what we today would call “controlled burns.” Often, the natives, armed with cudgels formed from hardwoods that grew in the out small game, clubbing the game as it escaped.

The natives also found smoke to be a use- Smog had been a major issue in cities long before Dr. Des Voeux, of London’s Coal Smoke Abatement Society, at a 1905 public health congress suggested that London be renamed ‘Smog’ due to its pollution issues.

It took a few years before the term came to describe the acrid pollution itself, and according to California State University, Long Beach History Librarian Greg Armento, it was not universally embraced.

Smoggy with smud According to Armento, the March 29, 1914, Kokomo Times wrote “(t) he esteemed Weather Bureau has sprung a new one. It is the word ‘smog,’ and it means smoke and fog… “Very well, ‘smog’ let it be. But why end there? Let’s call a mixture of snow and mud ‘smud.’ A mixture of snow and soot ‘snoot,’ and a mixture of snow and hail ‘snail.’ Thus we might have a weather forecast: ‘snail today, turning to snoot tonight; tomorrow smoggy with smud”.

Yet, over a decade before Des Voeux suggested renaming London, a January 19, 1893 ar ticle in The Los Angeles Times credited only to a “witty English writer” as using the term “smog” to describe the pollution itself and its role in nearly doubling London’s death rate.

issue in Los Angeles in 1903, when residents mistook an episode of smog as an eclipse of the sun and on July 8, 1943, rumors ran riot that the particularly thick acrid smog bank was wartime chemical attack.

After 472 years, the battle against Cabrillo’s “Smokes” continues, but to took Los Angeles to identify the enemy by name.