When London Smelled So Bad Parliament Had to Soak Curtains in Chemicals Just to Breathe

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I am the resident historian here, and we have a truly fascinating discussion lined up for you. We really do. Yeah. But before we jump into today's incredible story, do us a massive favor. Take a quick second to rate and subscribe to Weird History on whatever app you're using right now. Yeah, it helps us out immensely. And you know, it ensures you never miss out on the bizarre and, well, frequently shopping stories we uncover from the past. Exactly. To start things off, I want you to close your eyes unless you're driving, of course. Right. Please keep your eyes open if you are behind the wheel. Yeah, safety first. But imagine you are standing in the very heart of the richest, most powerful city on Earth. It is the height of the Victorian era. Oh, setting the scene. I love it. You are wearing your absolute finest, like perhaps a sharp tailored frot coat or a sweeping multi-layered, crinoline dress. You were just the picture of 19th century elegance standing near the banks of the River Thames. Sounds lovely so far. It does, right? But there is a monumental problem. You are doubled over and you genuinely cannot stop gagging. Oh, wow. Yeah. The sensation is entirely overpowering. You might be pressing a thick handkerchief against your face, completely doused in the strongest lavender perfume you own, but it is utterly useless. Completely useless. The air itself feels heavy, you know, it's thick and almost greasy. Yeah, greasy is the perfect word for it. Because the entire city around you smells like an unholy nightmarish mixture of rotting cabbage, putrifying flesh, and fermenting sewage. It is a stench so thick, so visceral, that grown men working on the river docks are actively vomiting. Yes, and people are actually collapsing on the streets. So today we are taking an extensive exploration into the summer of 1858 in London. An event that history has quite aptly dubbed the Great Stink. The Great Stink. I mean, what a title. We have a massive stack of sources guiding our conversation today, right? We do. We are pulling from some really fascinating historical articles, an incredibly detailed BBC Radio 4 transcript and several documentary excerpts. And the mission for our discussion today is to understand exactly how an unbearable stench managed to bring the mighty British Empire to its knees. Exactly. We're going to explore how this single, false-milling summer fundamentally altered public health. It revolutionized our understanding of disease and forced the creation of modern urban sanitation. And trust me, we are going to keep this fun and lively. There is no academic dryness here today. No, definitely not. Because this is fundamentally a story about human waste paralyzing the most powerful politicians on the planet. It certainly is. We have to travel back a bit. We need to look at the physical reality of London leading up to the 19th century. Right. Because this was a city bursting at the seams, wasn't it? Oh, absolutely bursting. The demographic shift is just staggering. The industrial revolution triggered an era of unprecedented explosive population growth. People were just flooding into the urban centers on the countryside, right? Exactly. They were chasing factory work and the promise of a modern economy. To put the numbers into a clear perspective, in the year 1700, London had a population of roughly half a million people. Okay, half a million. Yeah. But by 1850, that number had skyrocketed to two and a half million. Wow. Two and a half million. Yes, it had become the largest, most densely populated city in the history of the world at that time. Two and a half million people all packed into a geographic area that just was not designed for a fraction of that number. Not even close. But the kicker here, the detail that really sets the stage for our disaster is how they were managing the daily physical output of those two and a half million bodies. Oh, this is where it gets incredibly grim. They were relying on ancient medieval sanitation methods. Right. Specifically, our source in point out that London was sitting on top of over 200,000 cesspits. So, 100,000. And for anyone who hasn't had the distinct displeasure of studying medieval plumbing, the last pit is essentially just a large brick-lined hole, basically. It is a tank dug directly into the earth. These were usually located in the dank basements of tenement buildings or in underground sellers. Or sometimes right in the center of shared residential courtyards, right? Yeah, exactly. All the human waste from a household or often an entire block of overcrowded tenement households would just drop down a chute or be thrown into this pit. It is the equivalent of ignoring a full kitchen trash can, except the trash can is in your basement. And it is shared by 50 people in your building. And it hasn't been emptied since the tutor dynasty. Right. The environmental reality of living above one of these is just hard to fathom. Well, the environmental reality was highly dangerous because these cesspits were not benign holding tanks, you know. They were leaking? Oh, severely. The porous bricks allowed the liquid waste to seep out into the surrounding soil, contaminating all the groundwater. And while the solid waste remained and slowly decomposed. And that decomposition causes a lot of gas, doesn't it? It does. This anaerobic decomposition generated enormous amounts of methane and hydrogen sulfide gases. Sometimes this gas would become trapped in air pockets within the basements. Wow. I was reading through the historical accounts in our sources and there were actual documented instances where someone would go down into their cellar with a lit candle. Yes. The explosions. Yeah. They would ignite one of these trapped methane pockets and cause a massive explosion of human waste directly beneath their floorboards. It sounds almost comical until you realize the sheer destructive force. The horrific aftermath of a subterranean methane explosion is no joke. I mean, I cannot even imagine the cleanup for that. Well, to prevent these pits from reaching critical mass or simply backing up into the living spaces, they had to be manually emptied. Which brings us to one of the most unfortunate, yet oddly lucrative, professions of the Victorian era, the Gong firmers. The Gong firmers, also colloquially known as the Night Soil Men. Right. These were laborers hired to come to your home and physically empty your cesspit. The term "Gong" actually derives from an old English word meaning "to go," which referred to the privy. And the job was universally conducted in the dead of night. Thus the Night Soil Men. Exactly. The authorities mandated this to avoid causing a public nuisance with the sight and smell of the operation during the day. The logistics of this job were just gruesome. They would arrive with a horse-drawn cart, which was rather ironically and universally referred to as a honey cart. A honey cart. The Victorian irony is strong there. Truly. And because London was so densely packed with incredibly narrow alleys and houses built tightly against one another, there was rarely exterior access to the basements. Right. So they couldn't just pump it out from the street. No. These men often had to carry heavy, sloshing buckets of raw human waste straight through the interior hallways and parlors of people's houses to get to the street. Through the parlors. Just imagine sitting in your living room while that is happening. It is unthinkable. It was a cramped, dark, and unimaginably filthy operation. And the architecture of some older buildings meant the entrances to these basement pits were incredibly narrow. Right. I read about this. It's heartbreaking. It really is. Often full grown men couldn't fit through the access hatches. This meant small apprentices, frequently children, had to be squeezed into the toxic environments of the pit. Squeez- Let's be honest. By cannabis shouldn't be complicated sketchy or low quality. That's m-o-o-d.com. Even here's the kicker, the quality is better than anything you'll find in your local dispensary. Yeah. I said it. And it's not just a variety that makes them stand out. You can't just head to mood.com. They're with a shovel to scoop the hardened waste into the buckets. Just awful. They're conditions. But the economics of the trade are what really kept the system churning for centuries. The gong farmers were highly paid for their suffering. How much were they making? They are in two to three times the weekly wage of a standard skilled laborer, like a carpenter or a blacksmith. Wow. So it was actually a really good living financially speaking. Oh yeah. It functioned as a complete economic ecosystem. They charged the homeowner or the landlord a hefty fee for the extractor. And their revenue stream didn't stop there, did it. No, it didn't. They took all that collected night soil in their honey carts and drove it to the out sureds of the city where they sold it to agricultural farmers. Because human waste, which is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, is a highly effective fertilizer. Exactly. So the landlord pays to get rid of it, the farmer pays to acquire it, and the gong farmer gets rich in the middle. It makes sense. It is a perfect little gross economy. But as the 19th century progressed, our sources show this entire delicate, disgusting ecosystem began to butterly collapse. Yes, the collapse was driven by two massive converging factors. First, the very success of London caused a geographical problem. Because of the urban sprawl. Precisely. As the city rapidly expanded to house those two and a half million people, the urban sprawl swallowed up the surrounding countryside. The farmland was pushed further and further away from the city center. Which meant the gong farmers had to travel much greater distances with their heavy carts to find farmers willing to buy the waste. And that increased transit time and labor drove up their prices significantly. And landlords who were already squeezing every penny out of their tenement properties simply decided they didn't want to pay the increased fees. Exactly. They just stopped hiring the night soil men. But wait, compounding that localized issue was a massive disruption in the global fertilizer market, right? Yes. In the 1840s, the British agricultural sector discovered a far superior product, South American guano. Guano. Which is solidified bird and bad droppings scraped off the coastal islands of Peru. That is right. Sea birds on these arid Pacific islands had been depositing droppings for millennia. Because it rarely rains there, the droppings piled up into mountains and never watched away. So they retained incredibly high concentrations of nitrates. Exactly. Britain began importing this guano by the thousands of tons. It was an incredibly potent fertilizer far outperforming local human waste. So the influx of cheap, highly effective guano completely undercut the domestic market for night soil. It destroyed the market. So local farmers didn't want the London waste anymore. The urban landlords refused to pay the higher removal fees and the gong farmers were essentially put out of business. So what happened to the 200,000 cess pits sitting under the city? They were abandoned. Landlords simply let them fill to the brim. They overflowed, seeping heavily into the surrounding soil, saturating the ground the city was built upon. That is just so incredibly foul. There is a famous heavily cited anecdote from the diaries of Samuel Peep's about this. Oh yes, the Peep's diary entry. Right. While he was writing a bit earlier in history, it perfectly illustrates the ongoing reality of shared urban infrastructure. Peep's went down into his own cellar to fetch something, only to find that his neighbor's cesspool had breached the dividing wall. And he wrote about it with such clear disgust. He did. He noted that he had stepped into a great heap of turrets. It is such a vivid image. Just trying to grab a nice bottle of claret for dinner and ending up ankle deep in the neighbor's digested button. It is terrible. And because the basements were awful, people living in the upper stories of these cramped tenements reverted to the oldest trick in the book, throwing the waste out the window. Right. The open streets, the gutters, and the alleyways became public conveniences. Rainwater would occasionally wash some of the filth down the central street channels, but largely it just sat there, it baked in the sun or turned into a toxic mud during the rain. This actually gives us a brilliant piece of linguistic history, doesn't it? It does. When throwing a full chamber pots out of upper story windows, people in earlier eras, particularly in cities like Edinburgh and London, would often shout a warning. Right. They used a bastardized version of the French phrase, "Garde-l'au," meaning watch out for the water. Yes. And Garde-l'au was eventually corrupted by the British tongue into Garde-l'au. Which was then shortened simply to L'au, which is a slang term still universally used in the UK today for the toilet. I love that we get a fun etymology lesson mixed in with the squalor. Me too. But if the end of the gong from a trade meant the waste was piling up, what was the actual catalyst that pushed this grim reality into a full-blown catastrophe? Well, the source is point to a piece of modern technology intended to make things cleaner. Which feels like a massive historical contradiction, honestly. It is the ultimate paradox of the flush toilet. To understand how a device meant to improve hygiene actually triggered a biological disaster, we have to look at the evolution of the water closet. Okay, so the concept itself wasn't new in the 1850s, right? No, not at all. We have to go all the way back to 1592 when Sir John Harrington invented an early rudimentary fleshing device called the Ajax for Queen Elizabeth I. But she only had one installed at Richmond Palace, and he only ever made two. It wasn't exactly a commercial success. No, it required an immense amount of water to operate, which most homes simply didn't have piped in the technology language for centuries. So when did it start picking up again? It wasn't until the late 18th century that inventors began seriously tinkering with it again. Alexander Cummings patented the "S" bend pipe in 1775. The "S" bend, which is brilliant in its simplicity. It really is. By curving the exit pipe, a small pool of water is permanently trapped in the dip of the "S", and that water acts as a seal, blocking the foul gases from the sewer or cesspit from rising back up through the toilet bowl and into the room. An absolutely essential innovation for indoor plumbing. A few years later, Joseph Brahma improved the flushing mechanism with a series of complex, reliable valves. But even with these improvements, water closets remained an incredibly rare luxury item for the ultra wealthy, didn't they? They did. The real tipping point, the moment the flush toilet entered, the public consciousness arrived with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London's Hyde Park. All the Great Exhibition housed in the magnificent Crystal Palace, which was a massive structure made entirely of cast iron and plate glass. It was a global showcase of the wonders of industry, culture, and technological progress. Millions of people attended. And amidst the steam engines, the fine art, and the exotic textiles, what really captured the public's imagination. Public toilets. Public toilets. A man named George Jennings installed the world's first public flush toilets at the exhibition. He called them monkey closets. Monkey closets. I mean, they were a complete marvel to the Victorian public. Jennings spared no expense in their presentation either. No, he had pristine white coated attendons working inside, keeping everything immaculate. He provided fresh towels and combs. And he charged visitors a single penny to use the facilities, which by the way, birthed another famous British phrase to spend a penny, meaning to excuse yourself to the restroom. I used that phrase all the time. And it was a staggering success. Over 800,000 people paid their penny during the exhibition. They were amazed by this clean, modern, odorless convenience. They went home and anyone who had a modicum of wealth or aspiration immediately contacted a plumber to install. Let's be honest. That's m-o-o-d dot com. Yeah, I said it. Every product is sourced from small, American-owned family farms that care deeply about what they grow. Just head to mood dot com. That's m-o-o-d dot com to get started. All the water closets in their own house. The demand must have skyrocketed. It did. A few decades later, the famous plumber, Thomas Crapper, would popularize them even further with relentless marketing. You have that catchy advertising slogan, right? A certain flush with every pulp. Exactly. The water closet became the ultimate symbol of middle-class Victorian hygiene and respectability. Okay, so we have hundreds of thousands of people installing these wonderful, clean, flushing toilets. Yeah. Why on earth was this a bad thing? Because of a severe catastrophic blind spot in civic planning, technological progress, frequently races ahead of infrastructure. Ah, I see. The flush toilet was an undeniable marvel of personal, localized hygiene. It removed the waste from the immediate sight and smell of the home honor instantly. But you have to consider the mechanics of the system as a whole. Where was that waste going once it left the pristine porcelain bowl? Oh, no. It was going straight down the pipes into the basements, wasn't it? Yes. Wealthy and middle-class lenders were suddenly pumping massive volumes of water gallons and gallons with every single pull of the chain into those exact same medieval cesspits we were just talking about. Wow. So you are introducing a modern, high-volume, continuous water delivery device into a static, porous, medieval holding tank. Precisely. A cesspit was only ever designed to hold solid waste and a relatively small amount of liquid, like urine or the occasional slop bucket. It relied on the surrounding soil to slowly absorb the minimal moisture. So when you start flushing 50 gallons of water a day down there? The cesspits failed immediately. They just flooded. Yes. The surrounding soil was instantly super saturated. The pits filled to the brim in a matter of days rather than years. Homes across the wethiest districts of London were suddenly facing catastrophic inundations. So their basements were completely flooded with a highly diluted, rapidly rising tide of raw sewage. That is a nightmare. To prevent [BLANK_AUDIO] Thousands of basements from entirely flooding across the city, the government realized they had to intervene. The waste had to go somewhere else. And they acted by passing what has to be one of the worst legislative missteps in the history of urban planning. Truly. In 1815, prior to the massive boom, but when the problem was already becoming apparent with early water closets, a law was passed that actually mandated a new connection. What did it mandate? It required that overflowing cesspit be hooked up to the city's surface water drains. In the 1840s, under the guidance of early health performers, this practice was accelerated and enforced on a massive scale. We really need to explain the mechanics of these surface drains, because why was hooking the toilets to them such a disastrous idea? Because those drains were originally engineered and constructed solely to handle rainwater runoff from the streets. So they were just storm drains? Exactly. They were relatively shallow, simple channels meant to prevent the roads from flooding during heavy British downpours. They were never designed, in their gradient, their size or their material, to handle the constant viscous flow of raw, concentrated human effluent. And the ultimate destination of all those street trains, they didn't lead to a treatment plant wreck. No, they indeed directly into the river terms. So suddenly, you have millions of cubic feet of raw sewage propelled by millions of gallons of toilet water pouring straight into the river every single day. The river that cuts right through the very heart of the city. Completely transformed the Thames from a commercial waterway into an open air sewer. I want to pause here and ask about the geography and the fluid dynamics of this situation, because I think a listener today might be confused. Sure, what is the confusion? Well, the Thames is a massive river and it flows out to the ocean. If you dump a bunch of waste into a fast-moving river, shouldn't it just wash out to the North Sea and become the ocean's problem? Why did it stay in London? That is the critical question and it highlights the tragic ignorance of the authorities at the time. They genuinely believe the river would simply act as a giant conveyor belt, whisking the filth away to the sea. Right, that makes logical sense. But the River Thames, particularly the sprawling section that flows through central London, is a tidal river. It is essentially an estuary. A tidal river, so the ocean dictates its movement. Exactly. The river's flow is entirely dictated by the immense gravitational pull of the tides from the North Sea. When the tide comes in, the sheer volume and force of the ocean water, pushing up the estuary, essentially halts the river's seaworth progress. The flow of the river actually reverses. The water pushes upstream deep into the city. When the tide goes out, it flows back toward the sea. So you dump millions of gallons of human waste into the river at Westminster, or the city of London. And instead of floating away to the ocean, it just sloshes back and forth. It acted exactly like an enormous, slow-moving washing machine, agitating a truly disgusting soup. That visual. The waste would float a few miles down River on the ebb tide, and then be pushed right back up into the center of the city on the flood tide. It was trapped in a perpetual pendulum swing. So the sewage remained corralled within the metropolitan area, just accumulating mass and toxicity day after day, month after month, year after year. It is deeply repulsive. And it leads us directly into the deadliest consequence of this entire situation. Because the people of London weren't just living next to this sloshing, tidal toilet. They were drinking from it. This brings us to the horrific reality of the Victorian water supply. In the early to mid-19th century, Londoners were largely extracting their daily drinking water from the exact same river where they were dumping all of their waste. The city was served by several private competing water companies, weren't they? Yes. And where do you think these companies were putting their intake pipes to draw the water for the public? I am almost afraid to ask. Shockingly close to the major sewer outfalls. Companies like the South Work and Vox Hall Waterworks Company had their intake pipes positioned right in the heavily polluted tidal stretch of the Thames. So they would pump this water up, perhaps let it settle in a holding tank for a day, to let the largest solid chunks sink to the bottom. And then pipe it directly into the homes of their customers. I am looking at an incredible account from our sources about the famous scientist Michael Faraday. Faraday, the pioneer of electromagnetism, was deeply concerned about the state of the river. He was. In July of 1855, he took a steamboat ride down the Thames to observe the water quality first hand. And he conducted a brilliant, simple experiment. The famous white-card experiment. It is a striking visual demonstration of the river's opacity. Can you describe what he did? Yeah, so he cut small pieces of bright white cardboard. As the boat moved along the river, he dropped these pieces of white paper into the water to see how far they would sink before disappearing from view. And what did he find? He wrote a scathing letter to the Thames detailing his findings. He noted that the white paper vanished from sight before it had even sunk a single inch. Less than an inch. He couldn't even see an inch into the water. He described the river not as water, but as an opaque pale brown fluid. He also noted the smell, describing how the water rolling up in the wake of the steamboat released clouds of noxious gas. And remember, this is the very fluid that people were drawing from their tabs. Perhaps they boiled it to make tea if they were cautious. But many, especially the poor who couldn't afford expensive coal for a fire, were drinking it cold, straight from the source. The biological consequences must have been utterly devastating. They were. Puming water severely contaminated with raw human sewage is the absolute perfect vector for catastrophic disease. Specifically, it created the ideal breeding ground for Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera. Throughout the mid-19th century, London was repeatedly ravaged by terrifying cholera epidemics. The major waves hit in 1831, 1848, and 1853. And death tolls are staggering to comprehend, tens of thousands of people perished in each wave, and cholerae is an exceptionally brutal way to die. Our medical sources note the terrifying speed of the disease. A victim could wake up feeling perfectly healthy, eat breakfast, drink a glass of contaminated water, begin showing symptoms by noon, and be dead by nighttime. The mechanism of cholera is horrific. The bacteria infects the small intestine and produces a potent toxin. This toxin causes the cells lining the intestines to rapidly release massive amounts of water and electrolytes. So the victim suffers from profuse, uncontrollable watery diarrhea and vomiting? Yes. The human body is essentially draining itself of all fluid in a matter of hours. The severe dehydration causes the blood to thicken, the blood pressure plummets, the muscles cramp violently. And the victim's skin famously turns a haunting shade of blue due to the lack of oxygen in the blood. It was a complete mystery to the medical establishment at the time. The concept of microscopic germs or bacteria was not accepted science. They had no idea what the pathogen was or how it was entering the body. Desperation naturally leads to some wild panic-driven attempts at a cure. I mean, when people are turning blue and dying in 12 hours, you try anything. Oh, absolutely. The quack remedies were everywhere. People were slathering themselves and mustard. Others swore by drinking massive quantities of port wine or even champagne, hoping the alcohol would fortify their blood. Some doctors even administered tobacco smear alanimas. They were physically blowing smoke up the patient's rectum in an attempt to stimulate the body. Which is just wild to think about. And none of it worked, obviously. No, of course not. The lack of scientific understanding created a void. And that void was filled by the dominant medical paradigm of the Victorian era. Right. If they didn't know about germs, what did the leading medical minds think was causing these massive deathwaves? They believed in the miasma theory. The word miasma comes from ancient Greek, basically meaning pollution or bad air. Once, I see. The theory held that terrifying diseases like cholera, typhoid, and chlamydia were transmitted by inhaling, fowl, corrupted air. So they believed that the smell of rotting organic matter, the stench of the decaying sewage itself, formed a toxic, invisible cloud. Yes. This miasma would drift through the streets and anyone unlucky enough to breathe it in would have their bodily humors disrupted and fall violently ill. It's crucial to understand why this theory was so incredibly popular and widely accepted, because it makes intuitive evolutionary sense. How so? Well, human beings have evolved to find the smell of rotting meat and feces absolutely repulsive. That disgust is a survival mechanism to keep us away from pathogens. That is a very good point. Right. So if you live in a neighborhood that smells like an open sewer and everyone in that neighborhood is dying of cholera, the most logical, observable conclusion before microscopes is the smell is killing us. That evolutionary heuristic is exactly why brilliant minds fell for it. Leading figures, highly respected and powerful individuals, were staunch miasmatists. Like Edwin Chadwick. Yes. Edwin Chadwick, the great pioneer of public health and sanitary reform, was a firm believer. Even Florence Nightingale, the legendary founder of modern nursing who championed hospital cleanliness, firmly believed that foul air caused disease. It's like trying to fix a catastrophic computer virus by aggressively wiping down your monitor with a tissue. That is a brilliant analogy. You are pouring all your energy into fighting the symptom, the visual dirt, or in this case, the foul smell, while completely ignoring the actual invisible malicious code that is destroying the system from the inside out. And the adherence to miasmat theory resulted in public health interventions that were not just misguided, they were actively lethal. Wait, how are they lethal? Well, Edwin Chadwick, operating under the absolute belief that smell equal death. champion the 1848 Public Health Act. And what did that act do? It forced thousands of households to abolish their cesspit and connect their household drains directly to the sewer system. Because his primary goal was to get the foul smelling waste out of the basements and away from the immediate living areas to eliminate the local miasma. Exactly. Wait a second, the most powerful man in public health mandated that more sewage be slushed directly into the temps. Yes. He believed he was saving lives by clearing the air. In reality, by flushing the waste into the river, he was exponentially increasing the mass poisoning of the city's drinking water supply. Oh my goodness. The death tolls from cholera skyrocketed after his reforms were implemented. It is an agonizing historical irony. They were actively serving the poison to their citizens in the name of health. They were. But there was one man who managed to see through the fog of the miasma. The brilliant Dr. John Snow. Dr. John Snow is a foundational heroic figure in the history of epidemiology. Before his work on cholera, he was already a pioneering anesthetist. He was. He extensively studied the diffusion of gases and how the human lungs absorb vapors like ether and chloroform. He was so respected in this field that he personally administered chloroform to queen Victoria during the birth of two of her children. And his deep understanding of gases is exactly why he was highly skeptical of the miasma theory. Because he knew how gases dispersed in the air. Exactly. If cholera was an airborne cloud, he argued, the pattern of infection would look different. It wouldn't hit one house and spare the house next door. It wouldn't specifically target the digestive tract first. It would affect the lungs. His reasoning was sound, but he needed proof. And the opportunity to gather that proof arrived during a horrific, highly localized cholera outbreak in the Soho neighborhood of London in August of 1854. Over 500 people died within a terrifyingly small radius in just a few days. And Snow didn't just theorize. He did the grueling legwork. He went door to door in Soho, interviewing the grieving families of the victims. And he created his famous ghost map. The visual representation of the data was revolutionary. He took a street map of Soho and placed a black bar next to a house for every person who died there. When you look at the map, the cluster of deaths is undeniable. They radiate out tightly from one very specific point on Broad Street. A public water pump. The Broad Street pump. Snow discovered that nearly every single victim drew their daily water from that specific well. But his depressive work gets even better because he found anomalies that definitively disproved the airborne miasma theory. Because epidemiology relies just as much on who doesn't get sick as who does. Right. Snow found two incredible anomalies. First, there was a large workhouse nearby with over 500 inmates. They were surrounded by the outbreak, breathing the exact same air, yet barely anyone died. Why? Because the workhouse had its own private well. They didn't drink from Broad Street. And the second anomaly is my absolute favorite. Right in the epicenter of the infected zone on Broad Street was a large brewery, the lion brewery. None of the workers there contracted cholera. And snow investigated and found out why. The brewery workers were given a daily allowance of beer as part of their wages. They drank beer instead of water. And crucially, the brewing process involves boiling the water to make the work. Boiling the water unknowingly killed the cholera bacteria. Snow had his proof. The pathogen was not in the air. It was being ingested through the water. Let's be honest. That's m-o-o-d.com. Yeah, I said it. Rather you're into edibles, concentrates, flower, or just looking to explore, you'll find it all at mood. He investigated the broad street well and discovered it was situated just three feet away from a crumbling leaking zest pit. A zest pit serving a house where an infant had recently suffered from cholera-like diarrhea. The infected feces seeped through the bricks directly into the drinking water. So armed with his map and his data, snow went to the local parish council and convinced them to remove the handle from the broad street pump. It was a monumental moment in public health. With the handle removed, people couldn't access the contaminated water and the localized outbreak subsided almost immediately. Snow published his findings, detailing exactly how contaminated water acted as the vector for the disease. He proved it. And you would think the medical establishment would throw him a parade, apologize for their ignorance, and immediately overhaul the water system. Tragically, human nature and institutional pride rarely work that way. His conclusions were met with fierce resistance, ignored, and in some prominent medical journals openly mocked. The Mayasmatheria was too deeply entrenched in the minds of the establishment. The idea that gentleman, doctors, and politicians were drinking water tainted by human feces was too repulsive to accept. Cognitive dissonance on a societal scale. The authorities even replaced the pump handle shortly after the outbreak ended. They simply could not accept that they were drinking the cause of their own demise, which perfectly sets the stage for the catastrophic summer of 1858. Because the establishment firmly believed that smell of Mayasmo was the actual killer, they were completely utterly unprepared for the unprecedented meteorological event that was about to turn the River Thames into an instrument of terror. We have finally arrived at the boiling point, June 1858. The summer began with a weather pattern that was highly unusual for England. A massive, relentless heat wave settled over London and refused to break. We are talking about temperatures routinely reaching 35 degrees Celsius in the shade that's roughly 95 degrees Fahrenheit. And out in the direct sun, it was much worse. Thermometers placed in the sun were registering up to 48 degrees Celsius or 118 degrees Fahrenheit in 1858. This is a city built of dark, heat absorbing brick with no air conditioning, no electric fans. The population is walking around wearing heavy wool suits, tightly-laced corsets and heavy layered dresses. The heat fundamentally altered the physical state of the river, didn't it? It did. First, the severe lack of rain over the preceding weeks caused the water level of the Thames to drop significantly. The river shrank back exposing massive, deep banks of accumulated sludge along the shores. And this wasn't just mud. Our sources describe a cocktail of horrors left baking in the brutal sun. It was decades of human effluent, yes, but also industrial waste. London was a massive manufacturing hub. The sludge contained highly toxic runoff from canneries, chemical dyes from textile mills, rotting vegetable matter from the markets. Blood and awful dumped straight from the slaughterhouses. And the decaying bodies of dead animals like dogs, cats, and workhorses that had simply been tossed into the river. And when you expose a thick layer of organic matter to a 118 degree sunlight, basic chemistry takes over. It accelerates the process of anaerobic digestion. The bacteria within the sludge went into overdrive, fermenting the waste. The entire surface of the river physically began to bake, bubble, and seize. The resulting stench was apocalyptic. The press, seizing on the sheer terror of the moment, quickly dubbed it the great spink. The smell was so dense it became an almost physical presence in the city. The physical reactions of the public were extreme. We mentioned the vomiting and fainting earlier, but you have to imagine the sheer pervasiveness of it. There's no escaping the smell. A newspaper at the time described the stench as being so thick it possess a taste, a vile rot that coated the back of the throat and tongue. People walking over the bridges were seen sprinting to get to the other side while holding their breath. We really need to emphasize the psychological terror of this moment. Remember our discussion on the Mayasm theory. The people of London didn't just find this smell disgusting or offensive. They believed the smell itself was a legal invisible cloud of cholera. They firmly believed that inhaling this overwhelming stench meant the disease was entering their lungs and an agonizing rapid death was imminent. Imagine that for a second. Think about walking down your street, trapped in your home, lying in your bed, trying to sleep, and knowing with every fiber of your being that the very area you're breathing is laced with poison. Every breath feels like inhaling a death sentence. It is pure psychological torture. It was a city gripped by sheer unprecedented panic. Those who had the financial means, the wealthy elites, the aristocracy, the successful merchants, immediately abandoned the city. The packed their bags and fled to their country estates or up to Scotland, leaving the poor, who had to stay in work, trapped in the suffocating Mayasma. Even the royal family tried to tough it out to show solidarity and failed spectacularly. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attempted a brief pleasure cruise on the Thames, perhaps to show the public that things weren't as catastrophic as the newspapers claimed. A severely miscalculated public relations maneuver by the monarchy. Completely disastrous. The Queen stood on the deck of her royal barge, dressed in her finery. To combat the odor, she was pressing a massive bouquet of fresh, highly fragrant flowers directly to her face. But it was no match for the bubbling Thames, was it? Not at all. Within mere minutes of setting off, the stench was so overwhelmingly nauseated. that she was forced to abandon the cruise. She ordered the captain to turn the boat around and dock immediately so she could flee back to the palace. When the raining monarch of the British Empire cannot endure the natural environment of her own capital city for five minutes, you have a crisis of monumental proportions. Indeed. But while the poor of London had been suffering the horrific smells and dying of water-borne diseases in the streets for decades, the smell eventually crept its way into the one building that could actually force a systemic change. The most important building in the British Empire. The halls of power. This involves a beautiful piece of geographical and architectural irony. The Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament, had recently been rebuilt following a devastating fire in 1834. The architect Charles Berry designed a magnificent Gothic revival masterpiece. And where did they build this sprawling new seat of government? Directly on the banks of the river Thames, right at the water's edge. The windows of the Grand Committee rooms looked right out over the bubbling sludge. Yes. Furthermore, the building featured a newly designed, highly advanced ventilation system created by Dr. David Boswell Reed. His system was intended to draw in cool, fresh air from over the river, pass it through a series of chambers and circulate it gently up through the floors of the legislative chambers to keep the politicians comfortable. So in the summer of 1858, instead of drawing in fresh cooling breezes, the ventilation system was essentially acting as a giant vacuum. Sucking up the fermented, concentrated stench of a million rotting toilets and blasting it directly into the faces of the most powerful men in the world while they were trying to debate laws. The chaotic scenes inside the government were entirely unprecedented. Lawmakers were physically fleeing committee rooms, clutching handkerchiefs to their noses, their eyes watering from the ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. The chancellor of the exchequer at the time, Benjamin Desirelli, who had later become one of Britain's most famous prime ministers, was forced to flee a committee room. He later gave a dramatic speech where he famously called the river a "stigian pool," wreaking with ineffable and intolerable horrors. The Victorian flair for dramatic vocabulary is wonderful. Referencing the river Sticks, the mythical river of the underworld that souls cross to enter the realm of the dead. It was poetry born of nausea. But while Disraeli's words were eloquent, Parliament's attempts to fix the immediate problem were frantic, desperate, and chemically misguided. They tried massive, expensive, bandaid fixes. The government authorized the emergency expenditure of thousands of pounds to dump tons of chalk, lime, and carbolic acid directly into the river from barges. What exactly were they hoping to achieve with the lime and acid? They were attempting to chemically neutralize the odor and disinfect the water. Carbolic acid is a powerful antiseptic, and lime can reduce the acidity of water and suppress hydrogen sulfide gas. But the scale was entirely wrong, wasn't it? Oh, completely. Dumping a few tons of chemicals into a title estuary, containing millions of tons of raw, continuously replenished sewage, is like trying to put out a force fire with a squirt gun. It was an incredibly expensive, highly visible, and entirely futile gesture. My favorite desperate detail is what they did to the physical building of Parliament. They took the heavy, luxurious curtains from the windows and soaked them in chloride of lime. Chloride of lime is a powerful, highly toxic bleaching agent. They hung these soaking wet chemical curtains over the windows to block the smell from coming in. So instead of just smelling the overwhelming rot of raw sewage, the politicians were smelling raw sewage mixed with the stinging, eye-watering, cightful burn of industrial bleach. The combination was likely worse than the original smell. It failed completely to make the rooms habitable. The situation deteriorated so rapidly that there were genuine formal proposals drafted to abandon London altogether. Lawmaker seriously discussed moving the entire seat of the British government, the courts, and the administration to Oxford or St. Alpens until the weather broke. The disruption to the legislative process of the empire was total. They simply could not function. And this is where we see miraculous, almost unbelievable acceleration of the political process. Driven entirely by their own personal physical nausea and their absolute terror of the measma death cloud, Parliament acted with a speed that defies belief. This reveals the ultimate cynical truth about politics. The lawmakers have Britain sat by and completely ignored decades of mass death among the poor. Tens of thousands of poor Londoners died agonizing deaths from cholera in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. And what did Parliament do? They debated. They formed committees. They commissioned lengthy reports that went nowhere. But the absolute moment, their own immediate workplace smelled bad, and they felt personally threatened. They drafted, debated, and passed a sweeping, a massive historic reform bill in a record 18 days. 18 days. To resolve a structural crisis, they had ignored for generation. It is a stark historical truth regarding political motivation. Desraily introduced the metropolis local management amendment bill, and it sailed through both houses. The resulting legislation fundamentally shifted the administrative power of the city. It handed 3 million pounds, which is an absolute astronomical sum in 1858 currency equivalent to hundreds of millions today to the newly formed metropolitan board of works. And they were given a very clear, urgent mandate. Fix the river. Stop the smell. Keep the sewage out of our noses. It all costs. Yeah. With the massive funding finally secured, the city needed a visionary capable of executing what seemed like an impossible task. They needed to build a modern high-capacity sewer system underneath a bustling, overcrowded, ancient metropolis. And they had to do it without destroying the city in the process. Enter Sir Joseph Bezelcat. The true hero of our story. Tell us about the man who saved London. Sir Joseph Bezelcat was the chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works. He was a brilliant, meticulous civil engineer with a deep background in railway construction and land drainage. He was known for his relentless work ethic. And as nearly every historical account fondly notes, he possessed a truly magnificent, heavily waxed Victorian mustache. A strong mustache inspires confidence when you're handing over 3 million pounds. But Bezelgett was an newcomer to this problem. He had actually drawn up plans for a sewer system years earlier, right? He had. He had spent years surveying the city and drafting incredibly detailed proposals, only to have them repeatedly rejected by various government commissions who couldn't agree on the cost or the scope. But the great stink finally broke the political deadlock. They dusted off his plans and told him to start digging. So what was his master plan? How do you fix a fundamentally broken river system? As I'll get recognized, the core architectural flaw in the existing haphazard system, the old sewers, which were originally those street drains, ran on a north-south axis. They simply drained straight down the natural incline of the land directly into the Thames in the center of the city. And his solution was brilliant in its conceptual simplicity, yet staggering in its execution. He designed a massive system of intercepting sewers. Intercepting sewers? Explain the mechanics of how that works. Instead of allowing the waste to flow north-south into the river, Bezelgett designed new gigantic underground tunnels that would run west to east parallel to the river Thames. These massive tunnels would intersect and cut off the old sewers before they could ever reach the river. They would catch all the flowing waste, divert it, and carry it miles downstream far to the east of the city out toward the wider Thames estuary. In the most elegant part of the design is the propulsion system. He didn't rely on massive mechanical pumps to move the heavy waste horizontally through the entire city. He let nature do the heavy lifting. He utilized the natural topography of the land. The intercepting sewers were built on a highly precise, gentle, downward gradient. I was reading about this gradient and the math is fascinating. It dropped exactly two feet for every mile of tunnel. Why such a specific slope? Because the fluid dynamics of moving raw sewage are incredibly tricky. If you make the slope too steep, the liquid water rushes away quickly, leaving the heavy solid waste behind to dry out and form massive blockages. A steep slope also causes the water to move so fast that the grit and debris in the sewage act like sandpaper, eroding the brickwork of the tunnel over time. But if you make the slope too shallow-- then the flow loses momentum. The waste simply stops, pulls, ferments, and produces the explosive methane gas we discussed earlier. Two feet per mile was the exact mathematical sweet spot. It maintained a constant flow rate of about 2 and 1/2 miles per hour. That is fast enough to keep the solid waste suspended in the liquid and naturally scour the tunnel walls clean, but slow enough to prevent friction damage to the bricks. It used the sheer unrelenting force of natural gravity to pull millions of gallons of waste continuously out of the city. The scale of the construction required to achieve this is genuinely mind-boggling. I want to rattle off some numbers from our sources because they are hard to comprehend without context. Please do. Bezel Jett and his army of laborers constructed 82 miles of these massive brick intercepting sewers. They dug up and rebuilt over 1,000 miles of smaller street sewers to connect every house to the main lines. The excavated 3.5 million cubic yards of earth. And we must remember, this was the 1860s. There were no diesel excavators or hydraulic backhose. The vast majority of those 3.5 million cubic yards of earth were dug entirely by hand. By thousands of laborers known as navies, swinging pickaxes and shovels deep underground by candlelight. And to line these tunnels, they used 318 million bricks. Someone in one of our sources calculated that-- Let's be honest. why cannabis shouldn't be complicated sketchy or low quality. I want to tell you about mood.com. Yeah, I said it. 318 million bricks is enough to build homes for the entire modern population of a city the size of portsmith. It is an astronomical logistical undertaking. And the logistics were complicated by the environment. Basil Jett was performing open-heart surgery on the city. He was tearing up major, highly congested thoroughfares, managing chaotic, horse-strawn traffic. Avoiding the newly constructed underground railway tunnels, navigating around existing gas lines, all while keeping the financial capital of the world functioning above ground. But perhaps Basil Jett's greatest contribution to London wasn't just the successful construction itself, but his unparalleled foresight. He over-engineered the system. Yes. Basil Jett was an incredibly forward-thinking engineer. He looked at the explosive population growth of London from 1 million to 2.5 million in a few decades. And he realized of vital truth. Building a sewer perfectly sized for 2.5 million people would be obsolete and overwhelmed in 20 years. So what did he do? He meticulously calculated the absolute densest possible population the geography of London could conceivably hold. He determined the absolute maximum amount of sewage that theoretical future population would produce. And then he looked at his blueprints and doubled the diameter of the pipes. He doubled it. If he had built the system to the exact necessary specifications of the 1850s, the system would have catastrophically failed by the turn of the century. But because he over-engineered those tunnels, making some of the main interceptors larger than subway tubes, it is the exact reason that same fundamental sewer system still functions for a modern city of 9 million people today. We're still writing on the coattails of his foresight. His foresight extended to his choice of materials as well. Building underground tunnels near a tidal river means dealing with constant moisture. Standard line mortar, used in bricklaying for centuries, struggles to set properly and can degrade in damp environments. So Bozill get rigorously tested and insisted on using a relatively new innovative building material called Portland Sment. Why is Portland Sement so special? Unlike standard mortar, which dries out to harden, Portland cement cures through a chemical reaction called hydration. It actually absorbs water to form incredibly strong calcium silicate hydrate bonds. This means it cures incredibly hard, and it can cure entirely underwater. It is highly water resistant. But the manufacturing of Portland cement back then was inconsistent. Some batches were weak. Which is why Basil Get instituted one of the first massive rigorous quality control testing programs in civil engineering history. He refused to let the contractors just use whatever cement they bought. He had his engineers test samples from every single batch. If a batch didn't meet his exacting tensile strength requirements, the entire shipment was rejected. It infuriated the manufacturers. But it is the reason his brickwork has survived the acidic environment of a sewer for over a century and a half. But gravity, even perfectly calculated gravity, could only take the sewage so far. The city is relatively flat. Yes. By the time the massive intercepting tunnels reached the eastern edges of the city, at places like Crossness on the South Bank and Abbey Mills on the North, the tunnels had sloped incredibly deep underground. They were significantly below the high tide level of the river. So how do you get the waste out of the deep tunnels and into the river to be washed away? You have to lift it. Basil Jad had to build massive pumping stations to physically lift millions of gallons of raw sewage up from the deep tunnels so it could be released into the Temsestuary at high tide. And if you are a Victorian engineer building a facility to pump human waste, you don't just build a utilitarian ugly concrete box. You build a cathedral of sewage. The architecture of these pumping stations is genuinely breathtaking. The facility at Crossness is a masterpiece of Romanesque design. Inside, the massive cast iron columns and walkways are incredibly ornate, painted in brilliant colors of red, gold, and green. And the engines themselves. They install four massive steam-driven beam engines. The flywheels alone wait 47 tons each. And they named these giant sewage pumps after the royal family. There is an engine named Victoria, another name Prince Concort, one named Albert Edward, and one named Alexandra. It demonstrates the immense civic pride the Victorians took in this achievement. This wasn't something to hide. It was a triumph of the empire over nature. The Prince of Wales himself, the future king Edward VII, attended the grand opening ceremony at Crossness. He personally turned the ornamental wheel to officially start the massive steam engines. There was one more highly visible lasting aspect of Bazzalgette's project that completely changed the map of London. To house the massive low-level intercepting sewers running directly alongside the north and south banks of the river, he couldn't dig into the tightly packed riverside buildings. So he pushed the boundaries of the river banks inward, reclaiming marshy land straight from the Thames. This colossal land reclamation birthed the famous Thames and Bankments. The Victoria, Chelsea, and Albert and Bankments. If you walk along the river in London today, those massive sweeping stone walkways and roads lining the water that is all Bazzalgette's work. The embankment served multiple brilliant purposes. By narrowing the river channel with the heavy stone walls, it naturally increased the speed and force of the river's water flow. This faster water helped naturally scour the riverbed clean of the decades of accumulated sludge. Furthermore, the newly reclaimed land on top of the sewers provided desperately needed space. He built sweeping new roads to relieve traffic congestion, planted public gardens, and even provided the subterranean space for new underground rail lines like the district line. He didn't just fix the plumbing. He completely transformed the geography, the transportation, and the aesthetic of central London. It is a monumental triumph. The great stink was conquered. The river slowly began to clear, and the immediate threat to Parliament's noses was neutralized. But the story of London's waste doesn't end neatly there. There were profound ripples, some validating, some deeply tragic. Let's start with the profound validation of our early hero, Dr. John Snow. This is a bittersweet epilogue to the engineering triumph. In 1866, eight years after the great stink, and while the sewer construction was mostly finished, but still ongoing in a few areas, a final cholera outbreak struck London. But this outbreak was different. It didn't sweep across the whole city. It was entirely confined to a very specific localized section of the east end, primarily around bow and white chapel. When medical investigators rushed to understand why the disease had suddenly returned, but only to this specific enclave, they uncovered a staggering fact. They realized that this east end neighborhood was the absolute only remaining area of central London that had not yet been fully connected to bubblegets new intercepting sewer system. Their local water supply, drawn from the river Lee, was still being actively contaminated by sewage from the unconnected houses. It was the tragic, undeniable, definitive proof that Dr. John Snow had been right all along. It wasn't a foul, my asthma cloud, selectively floating over the east end while ignoring the rest of the city. The air in the east end was the same as the air in the west end. The difference was the water. This isolated outbreak officially finally killed the miasma theory in British public health. The medical establishment had a concede that cholera was a water-born pathogen. Dr. Snow had died a few years earlier, sadly, never seeing his theory universally accepted. But his legacy was cemented. Because Bizzoget's system successfully separated the drinking water supply from the raw sewage for the rest of the city, that 1866 outbreak was the very last time cholera ever threatened London. The sewers worked. They saved millions of lives over the following century. But while the sewers cured the city of cholera, there was a horrific tragedy associated with where all that waste was actually going once it left London. Right. Bizzoget built an amazing system to transport the waste out of the city, but he didn't build a system to treat it. Exactly. The pumping stations at Crossness and Abbey Mills simply lifted millions of gallons of completely raw untreated sewage and dumped it directly into the Thames Estuary at high tide, with the hope that the outgoing tide would wash it into the open ocean. In September 1878, a tragic accident highlighted the danger of this practice. A large paddle steamer, the SS Princess Alice, was packed with over 700 day trippers. They were mostly working-class families returning to London from a lovely pleasure cruise to the coastal town of Gravesend. As the steamer navigated the Thames Estuary in the dark, near an area called Barking Reach, it collided with a heavy coal ship, the Biowell Castle. The Princess Alice, a relatively fragile pleasure craft, broke apart and sank almost immediately. Over 600 people died, making it the greatest loss of civilian life in a British inland waterway. But the grim detail here, the detail that ties this tragedy directly back to our story, is exactly where the ship sank. It sank directly beside the northern outfall pipes of Bizzoget sewer system. and crucially, it's St. Lesley. than an hour after the pumping station had executed a massive scheduled release of millions of gallons of raw effluent. An official inquiry was launched into the disaster. When they recovered the bodies and examined the survivors, the medical findings were horrifying. They concluded that a significant portion of the victims didn't simply drown in the water. They were asphyxiaated and poisoned by the water itself. The concentration of raw sewage, industrial chemicals, and noxious gases was so incredibly thick and toxic in that specific spot that swallowing even a small amount was lethal. The water physically poisoned them before they could drown. Eat is an unimaginable horror. Surviving a shipwreck only to be poisoned by your own city's waste. But the sheer scale of the tragedy sparked another massive public outcry. The city was forced to realize that simply moving the problem a few miles downstream and dumping raw waste into the estuary wasn't a sustainable or safe, permanent solution. This tragedy forced the next vital evolution in urban sanitation. Following the public outrage over the Princess Alice, the authorities realized they had to treat the sewage. They constructed massive settling tanks at the outfall stations. The raw sewage was pumped into these enormous tanks and allowed to sit completely still. Gravity pulled the heavy solid waste the sludge to the bottom, leaving the relatively clearer liquid water on top. They would then chemically treat the liquid water and release it into the river, which is a vast improvement. But that leaves a massive problem. What did they do with the millions of tons of concentrated solid sludge sitting at the bottom of the tanks? This is the part of the story that genuinely leaves me in total disbelief. The solution they devised was to load the highly concentrated solid human waste onto a fleet of specially designed heavy transport ships. These ships were colloquially known by the public as "Bovrol Barges." "Bovrol." For anyone listening, you doesn't know. "Bovrol is a very popular historic British brand of thick, dark, incredibly salty meat extract paste. You spread it on toast or mix it with hot water to make a beef tea." So the British public looking at a ship full of thick brown sewage sludge and cheekily calling it a "Bovrol Barge" is both hilarious and deeply, deeply disturbing. The dark humor of the working class. The "Bovrol Barges" had a very specific mission. They would load up at the treatment plants, sail out of the TEMs estuary, travel miles out into the open ocean of the North Sea, open to their bottom ashes, and dump millions of tons of solid sludge directly into the marine environment. Humanities' historical approach to solving complex environmental problems is fascinating, isn't it? Our primary strategy is just moving the problem slightly further away from our immediate line of sight. "First, we threw the waste out the window into the street. Then we buried it in a pit in the basement. Then we flushed it into the river running through the city." Then Buzzle Jet moved it down the river outside the city. And finally, we just loaded it onto ships and threw it into the open ocean. "And the most shocking part of this entire saga. How long did the "Bovrol Barges" operate?" It is difficult to believe, but the practice of dumping London's treated sewage sludge into the North Sea via the "Bovrol Barges" continued uninterrupted until the year 1998. 1998. People were listening to the Spice Girls, playing Nintendo 64, and using dial-up internet. While the city of London was still actively sailing ships out to dump raw sewage sludge into the ocean, it absolutely boggles the mind. It highlights the extreme inertia of civic infrastructure. It only stopped in 1998 because of a sweeping European Union directive on urban wastewater treatment that legally banned the dumping of sludge at sea. "Today, that sludge is dried and incinerated to generate electricity, or heavily treated and used for agricultural fertilizer, bringing us right back to the original gong firmers, but in a much safer way." Despite the incredibly slow evolution of ecological practices, we have to recognize the monumental legacy of what occurred during that one intense season. That single, unbearable, stinky summer of 1858 forced humanity to cross a vital threshold. It forced governments and society at large to accept a fundamental truth. Public health, sanitation, and civic infrastructure are deeply interconnected inescapable responsibilities. "You cannot have a functioning, prosperous society if you do not manage the biology of your citizens. It was the violent, smelly birth of modern urban planning." "Posalgetse Sewers, eliminated cholera, vastly expanded the average lifespan of the urban citizen, and laid the necessary groundwork for the modern metropolis to thrive without collapsing under its own weight." "And we should note the environmental trine-up as well. Today, the River Thames, which in the 1950s was officially declared biologically dead by the Natural History Museum, has been transformed." Through continued investment in modern treatment plants, it is now considered one of the cleanest metropolitan rivers in the entire world, teaming with over a hundred species of fish, seals, and returning bird life. From a stage in pool of death to a thriving ecosystem, all because it got too hot and too smelly for politicians to ignore. "It's an incredible journey." "It really is." "As we wrap up this discussion today, I want to leave you, our listener, with a provocative thought to ponder on your own." "Oh, this should be good." So Joseph Vasojet saved London, because he had the unparalleled foresight to predict the invisible needs of the future. He built vital infrastructure for a population that didn't exist yet, doubling the size of his tunnels just in case. "He looked ahead." Exactly. So, as you look around our incredibly fast-paced, highly connected modern world today, ask yourself, what vital, entirely invisible infrastructure are we currently pushing to the absolute brink without even realizing it? "Patrually sobering questions." "Are the thousands of miles of fragile, fiber optic data cables resting exposed on the bottom of our oceans? Are the tens of thousands of defunct satellites currently cluttering our low-worth orbit, waiting for a cascading collision?" What in our century is the equivalent of our great stink just waiting to happen? "Thank you so much for joining us on this fragrant journey through history. Remember to rate and subscribe to Weird History on your app. We will see you next time.