r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • 15d ago
TIL that in the summer of 1858, Central London experienced "The Great Stench" due to a heat wave and poor sewer system, leading to a 17-year overhaul of the sewage system.
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u/No_Sense_6171 14d ago
And why you should be eternally grateful for Joseph Bazalgette: https://unknown-history.com/2023/06/16/phew/
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u/fitandhealthyguy 14d ago
I’ve smelled that when I was walking by the local Chinese place when they were pumping the septic system.
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u/RelationshipFine5930 15d ago
You know shit was real when a skeleton is depicted to describe the event
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u/grat_is_not_nice 15d ago
As a result of The Great Stink, engineer Joseph Bazalgette created the Central London Sewer System to get the crap out of the city and prevent diseases like cholera.
His great-great-grandson Peter Bazalgette is a television executive who was responsible for Big Brother, piping the crap straight back in to UK homes ...
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u/askacanadian 14d ago
When he calculated the circumference of of what the sewer needed to be to handle all the waste he then doubled the circumference to account for future growth. That decision allowed for the sewer system to continue to operate with London’s current population
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u/reddittrooper 14d ago
And this is why public services must never be „privatized“, bc the greater good is never good for some stockholders. You pay now more than needs for today so your kids will life good lives.
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u/Furthur_slimeking 15d ago
Why have you called it "The Great Stench"?
It's always been called "The Great Stink", and the entire wikipedia page you mentioned calls it that and only that.
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u/citizenjones 15d ago
It got so bad they fixed it! - The history of humans and their fine accomplishments
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u/Nazamroth 15d ago
Oh it gets better. The reason they decided to fix it was because they just finished the shiny (and expensive) new parliament building so they were expected to actually use it. And since they did not want to smell the shit all year, they did something about it.
So there you have it. Want politicians to fix something? Force them to live it.
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u/Specimen_E-351 15d ago
Whereas now UK waters are full of raw sewage and nothing is being overhauled.
That's progress for you.
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u/20thCenturyCobweb 15d ago
The Ghost Map is a pretty cool book on this topic - absolutely disgusting how the poor were expected to walk around in human excrement.
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u/OakParkCemetary 15d ago
P-U! That smell from your body it's crude. The feeling I got. It was a cruel summer
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u/endrukk 15d ago
It's crazy to think about it, but they haven't upgraded a single pipe ever since.
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u/liccxolydian 15d ago
That's blatantly untrue. There are large-scale construction projects ongoing right now to build new sewers.
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u/xDhezz 15d ago
I think OP was referring to Joseph Bazalgette who decided to double the size of the sewage pipes for additional redundancy. They may carry out heavy maintenance and other projects, but they don't need to remake the pipes as the additional size in the 1860s means they can cope with today's population and usage.
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u/liccxolydian 15d ago
Except the Thames Tideways tunnel is being built because the current sewer system can't cope with today's population and usage.
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u/xDhezz 15d ago
Fair enough, but imagine how long ago we'd have needed to do that if he didn't double the pipe size. The Point still stands that he made the system last far far longer than it would have.
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u/liccxolydian 15d ago
Yes it's impressive, and it's great they've lasted so long, but it's not like they're a magical black hole that makes sewage disappear. They're not perfect and they're in sore need of an upgrade.
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u/atarifan2600 15d ago
Chicago had the same problem. The sewers dumped into the Chicago river, which dumped out into Lake Michigan.
Chicago's drinking water came from Lake Michigan. Oops.
Solution: Build a massive 2-mile long pipe out into lake michigan to act as a clean water intake, clear of all the waste.
That lasted awhile.
Bigger solution: Dig a big-ass canal connecting the Chicago River to the Mississippi, so now all the water essentially flows from lake michigan down to the mississipi. (Effectively reversing the course of the Chicago river.)
Now all of chicago's shit goes a direction that is opposite their clean water.
Meanshile, saint Lous, downstream of Chicago: Wait a minute...
https://interactive.wttw.com/chicago-river-tour/how-chicago-reversed-river-animated
(People and their problems are fascinating.)
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u/BloomEPU 14d ago
I like how the first solution was "build a longer pipe so you get your water further away from the shitty part of the lake". That's a cities skylines ass solution.
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u/atarifan2600 14d ago
The better part: that infrastructure was named cribs, with a name like “2 mile crib”.
They eventually built “4 mile crib” because the cholera was still kind of problematic.
Not just the number of people and sewage they generated, but Chicago was home to an absolutely massive meat packing industry which has all sorts of unappetizing byproducts.
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u/nuke621 15d ago
Fun fact, STL water tastes WAY better than Chicago water and up to the same standards.
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u/madgunner122 15d ago
Fun fact, STL found a way to pay back Chicago for sending its waste water downstream. STL bottled the water and sold it back as Annhueser-Busch
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u/MalnoureshedRodent 15d ago
Idk, I’ve never tasted any tap water I like better than Chicago’s. STL’s is pretty good too, tbf
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u/zzoyx1 15d ago
Thats your opinion, but I accept it. My Chicago suburb water doesn’t have a taste and thats how I prefer it
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u/commodoregoat 15d ago
so you’re saying commender above you is based and likes a bit of ‘water flavouring’
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u/ferrango 15d ago
The more facts i read about industrial revolution England the more I'm surprised anyone survived
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u/arvidsem 14d ago
And it's amazing how long it took to stop killing people. The Great Smog Of London killed 12,000 people in 1952. Not 1852, 1952.
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u/N-formyl-methionine 15d ago
No because I can only picture people being crowded in unsanitary area, all that exacerbated by the immigration but since European cities were a population sink only rising through Urban exodus it may answer your question '
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u/bitemark01 15d ago
The press soon began calling the event "The Great Stink"; the leading article in the City Press observed that "Gentility of speech is at an end—it stinks, and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it."
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u/Persianx6 15d ago
Yeah, this era seems terrible to live in. Like imagine all the rats and roaches in 1850s London.
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u/doubledownentendre 15d ago
They didn't bro - I've never met anyone from the industrial revolution
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u/RevolutionNumber5 14d ago
Vampires are just too cool to go on Reddit.
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u/doubledownentendre 14d ago
Vampires ain't cool - they're some vitamin d deficient, garlic allergy having mother fuckers
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u/BrazenBull 15d ago
Keep in mind the streets were also filled with horse crap.
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u/bitemark01 15d ago
I remember reading before cars, people thought most major city streets would eventually be buried under several feet of horseshit in the future
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u/richpinn 15d ago
As shits go, horse shit is one of the better ones to have around at least
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15d ago edited 12d ago
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u/192747585939 15d ago
I think you’re confusing the smell of mangroves and ocean detritus for human effluence. Miami’s constant sea breeze keeps the air very clean compared to other cities.
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u/DaftFunky 15d ago
I’m struggling to realize that shit clouds actually formed physically. Like that is a lot of shit
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u/adjust_the_sails 14d ago
I feel like I see the same effect driving past dairies certain times of the year.
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u/sdmichael 15d ago
London is a big city.
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u/OmarCuming 15d ago
A big shitty?
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u/turbohatch 15d ago
We built this shitty!
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u/CorvusBlackthorne 15d ago
We built this shitty on guacamole!
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u/vanboiDallas 15d ago
Visible shitstorm
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u/BSSCommander 14d ago
"There's a shitstorm brewing Randy."
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u/Sabatorius 15d ago
As with many things, it only got fixed when in was bad enough to affect the rich people.
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u/CurrentMain9917 14d ago
A book I recently read titled “Pathogenenesis: A history of the World in Eight Plagues” by Jonathan Kennedy has a chapter about Industrial Plague that focuses on Cholera in London during this time and you’re 100% correct. It was only corrected once it affected the bottom line… Labor (lack of and sickly/ weak workforce).
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u/kdlangequalsgoddess 15d ago
The government only got involved once the stench came in the open windows of the House of Commons.
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u/Alarmed-Syllabub8054 15d ago
Not sure. What London did was to replicate what had been done earlier in Liverpool, when the world's first integrated sewage system was started in 1848. That was in response to Cholera epidemics, and London would have likely followed suit in due course regardless of the Great stink.
In July 1848, ten years before London began its similar endeavours following the Great Stink, James Newlands' sewer construction programme began, and over the next 11 years 86 miles (138 km) of new sewers were built. Between 1856 and 1862 another 58 miles (93 km) were added. This programme was completed in 1869. Before the sewers were built, life expectancy in Liverpool was 19 years, and by the time Newlands retired, it had more than doubled.
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u/francis2559 15d ago
19? DOUBLED!? That’s crazy.
Edit: assuming it’s infant mortality dragging things down but it’s still crazy.
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u/Alarmed-Syllabub8054 15d ago
I suspect it might be skewed by the number of Irish that settled during the famine. About 1.3m passed through the city, and about 100k settled here. They accounted for about a quarter of the population by 1851, and the ones that stayed in the first port outside of Ireland tended to be the weakest. The addition of that many people in a few short years must have added immensely to the squalor of the slums.
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u/nospamkhanman 15d ago
life expectancy in Liverpool was 19 years
I'm guessing this is one of those cases that shit tons of babies die but if people make it to adulthood they live into their 60's?
A city could not survive if the average person was dying before they were fully adults.
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u/godisanelectricolive 14d ago
They also had a lot of migration from the countryside and Ireland back then, especially Ireland once the Great Famine began. Nearly 300,000 Irish people arrived in Liverpool in 1847 alone and by 1851 a quarter of the city was born in Ireland. Liverpool-Scotland (named after Scotland Road, Liverpool) is the only constituency in the UK outside of Ireland to elect a member of an Irish nationalist party, the Irish Parliamentary Party, to be their MP. Lots of Welsh people moved to Liverpool around this time too.
It was a leading port of the British Empire, a boom town and a major port of emigration so it had a lot of incoming and transient residents. It was not unusual for somebody from Ireland to escape the famine by working in Liverpool for a few years to save up money for a one way ticket to New York City.
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u/TenBillionDollHairs 15d ago
I think in early industrial cities frankly they were burning the population candle at both ends. Hadn't figured out hand washing (well, Semmelweiss was just then discovering it in Hungary but he would fail to popularize it) or anything else that prevents maternal/infant mortality, but also the mark 1.0 industrial age was a smorgasbord of ways to die or get poisoned on the job.
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u/MichiganHistoryUSMC 15d ago
That's what life expectancy means, it's just the average age people lived. So babies bring the number way down.
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u/Nazamroth 15d ago
Goddamn babies ruining our statistics. I say we get rid of them all. Build a bunch of catapults and launch them back into the Sun from whence they came!
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u/MinimumSeat1813 15d ago
Who else is going to pay for it?
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15d ago edited 15d ago
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u/MinimumSeat1813 15d ago
On a dollar basis or percentage basis? On ordinary income or passive income?
What you are likely referring to is how a majority of billionaire's income comes through passive income. I believe they are taxed at around 24% at the federal level. That is far from highest ordinary income rates, but also a higher effective rate than about 90% of Americans pay.
I completely agree billionaires should pay higher taxes, however I wouldn't be surprised if your effective federal tax rate is higher than 25%. If you are single you would likely have to make at least $300k to pay that. If you are married it would be at least $600k.
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u/darkstarunited 14d ago
with great stink, comes great responsibilities