If my economic history is correct, then I wish it wasn’t. It starts then with the industrial revolution in England. The wealthy especially, wanting to get more work out of people. So, they looked for and invented machines to do more, go faster, and make more money. I don’t think that ordinary people much like it, the threat to their jobs, the fear of being replaced by machinery was a big thing from Victorian world to the present even.
My point is that it took more coal, it took more steel, it took more polluting fuels. Think about the smog of London and elsewhere. The fogs as late as the 50’s.
Pollution started in this country; it’s beginning was here in England.
Mikes New Web 
I think it started in all industrial countries. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the posters picturing black smoke from the factories’ stack furnaces symbolized prosperity (booming economy :))
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