There’s an old saying that goes something like, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Consider the story of the Blitz Fogger as one of those “good intentions”. The idea was pretty brilliant. Using the exhaust of a lawn tractor as the dispersal means, a homeowner could fog his or her property with insecticide to keep mosquitos or whatever else in check. The downside of course is that changes in wind direction, an errant kid not paying attention, an operator that had been sucking down a couple of frosties will cutting the grass, and the generally deadly nature of the chemicals being sprayed meant that this addition to the “better living through chemistry” club would not be a permanent one. Did we mention that they made a push mower version as well? At least on a tractor you had a chance of escaping the gaseous cloud of bad shooing from your exhaust. With a wimpy little walking mower you were in it at all times.

As best we have been able to tell the Blitz Fogger was created by a company in Wisconsin called Northern Industries. It was sold on shelves at hardware stories, at tractor dealers, and as you will see in the old photos below, it was sold as a “factory option” on some of the most popular garden tractors of its day. They are extremely rare and prized by vintage lawn tractor collectors now because so few of them still exist. They were either scrapped by owners when they did the math and figured out that they were probably better off not breathing in hot vaporized DDT shooting out of their tractor’s exhaust. Many more went to the scrapper with the tractor they were attached to and others simply rotted to death and have returned back to the Earth, coated in one of the most effective, hyped, and ultimately crummy substances people have some up with to combat insects.

The device itself was beyond simple. A small tank about the size of a coffee can would be mounted on the hood of the tractor or the handle of the push mower and then a line was plumbed into the exhaust of whatever device you were using. You filled the tank up with Blitz Fogger “thermalized” insecticide, and when you wanted to use it you simply opened a valve which sent the stuff into the exhaust pipe where the heat turned it into “fog” and the force of the rushing exhaust blasted it off to the side of the tractor. This was no trickle of smoke, it was a big, honkin’ cloud. Unfortunately that cloud was filled with DDT, the insecticide that was used heavily during WWII to help knock out disease carrying bugs in areas where malaria and other medical problems were present. It worked so good that the guy who invented it was given a Nobel Prize in 1948. At that point the nation went DDT crazy.

By the time the late 50s rolled around, Americans were using 100,000,000lbs of the stuff a year and multiple companies and factories were producing it. By the early 1960s there were concerns of what the stuff was doing to the people near it all the time and rightfully so as science has shown. DDT has been linked to all kinds of stuff, not the least of which is dementia, respiratory issues, and a myriad of other things. The US banned the product in 1972 as did most of the modern world. But life was a party up until then.

Now, if you’ll excuse us we’re going to pack the exhaust of a big rig full of beer and introduce the Beer Fogger. Way better idea.

SCROLL DOWN TO SEE PHOTS OF THE BLITZ FOGGER –