John Switzer Owens

[1][3][8] Sir Napier Shaw, who was chairman of the same committee and first director of the Met Office, described Owens as the "moving spirit" behind the initiative, noting that as both an engineer and a doctor, he "possessed an extraordinary qualification for dealing with the subject of atmospheric pollution".

[8] In a paper Owens read to the Royal Society of Arts the same year, he was even more emphatic: "The evil of atmospheric pollution has crept on us almost unawares, with the increase in the use of raw coal.

In his description of the invention, he speculated that the particles he observed in England might have been "derived from the smoke of Continental fires... it appears highly probable that the great industrial effort now being made by Germany is, under certain conditions, responsible for a fair proportion of the suspended impurity in the air over this country".

[19] Unlike the deposit gauge, Owens' jet dust counter was largely neglected – and, with it, the idea of long-distance pollution as an international problem.

[22] The same year, Sir George Clark of the Royal Geographical Society also paid tribute to Owens and "his pioneer work in the study of atmospheric pollution and smoke-abatement".

[23] In his 2018 book The Invisible Killer, scientist Gary Fuller argued that Owens was a crucial figure "who more than any other person would define the transformation of air pollution science from the haphazard investigations of Victorian gentlemen into a systematic national surveillance program..."[3]