The Backstory: The great stink of 1858

So we’re all sweltering from the heat…air so thick and hot you can feel it go down your throat as you breathe. But heat waves are nothing new. They killed thousands in 1898 and thousands more in the early 1900s. But the one that hit London 166 years ago, changed the city forever. It was “the great stink of 1858.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh man, it seems like no matter where you live,
there have been days and weeks this summer that have
been absolutely sweltering. Am I right? But imagine a time
when there was no escaping it, no fans, no air conditioning,
heat waves that killed thousands of people and livestock. Now
add to that a primitive public sewer system that made

(00:21):
just breathing hell on earth. I'm Patty Steele. Welcome to
London's Great Stink of eighteen fifty eight. That's next on
the backstory. We're back with the backstory. Our summers really
seemed to be getting a whole lot hotter. Right. If
you have air conditioning at home and at work, you

(00:42):
find yourself kind of darting from place to place to
stay out of the heat. It's really not even pleasant
to sit by a pool or at the beach in
this sultry, steamy heat. Right, But imagine a time when
nobody anywhere had any air conditioning at home or work,
None in stores, restaurants, theaters to escape for just a

(01:03):
little while into public ac and not even any electric fans.
Just heat, relentless heat, with no cooling breezes for relief
or even to blow away a bit of the Great
Stink which battered London in eighteen fifty eight. Now, heat

(01:25):
waves have tortured us for centuries. Talk about a rough patch.
The nineteen thirty six North American heat wave had followed
a bitterly cold winter, so nobody was prepared for that
kind of heat. We were in the thick of the
Great Depression. There'd been years of drought and endless blinding
dust storms, but there was even more to endure when

(01:46):
we were hit with all time high temperatures throughout the
entire middle of the country, almost from coast to coast.
Some areas, including as far north as North Dakota, hit
one hundred and twenty degrees, and the heat swept up
into Canada as well. Add to it the Midwest year's
long grasshopper infestation, which meant those broiled lifeless bug bodies

(02:09):
started raining down from the sky. In New York City,
which hit a record high of one hundred and six degrees,
hundreds of seamstresses at clothing factories, which were already notorious
for terrible working conditions, fainted right onto their sewing machines. Detroit,
one of the worst hit cities, saw doctors and nurses
literally collapsing while treating patients, and the morgues were overrun

(02:34):
with bodies. By summer's end, more than six thousand people
had died from heat. Now, let's go back even further.
It's New York City and the Great New York heat
Wave of eighteen ninety six. Now, by that time, New
York already had three million residents, and a lot of
them were living in the misery of the notoriously cramped

(02:54):
and stifling tenements of the Lower East Side and other
poor neighborhoods. A ten day heat wave, almost fifteen hundred
New Yorkers died after roasting in their jam packed, dark
and dirty rooms. The city had banned folks from sleeping
in the public parks, so those living in tenements tried
to find a breath of fresh air by hanging out

(03:16):
and even sleeping on rooftops, fire escapes, and piers along
the river. But yet this a lot of the heat
wave casualties happened when people fell asleep and rolled off
the side of the building or the peer and plummet
into their deaths. Others died from heatstroke. More than a
thousand horses also died in the streets, adding to the misery. Now,

(03:38):
the problem is the city government wasn't really addressing the disaster,
but one relatively unknown official became a hero, and what
he did launched his political career. Theodore Roosevelt was the
city's police commissioner, and he had his police force begin
to distribute free ice into tenement neighborhoods and also to
provide ambulance service for the sick. Some historians believe that

(04:02):
the heat wave and his response helped propel him to
the White House. Then another East Coast heat wave hid
in nineteen eleven, and it literally drove people crazy. In
New York City, one young guy leaped off a pier
and into the water after hours of trying to nap
but getting no rest. As he jumped, he yelled, I

(04:22):
can't stand this any longer. Meantime, up in Harlem, an
overheated worker tried to throw himself in front of a train.
Cops had to force him into a strait jacket. Up
and down the East Coast railways buckled in the heat.
Horses collapsed in the streets and rotted in the sun,
and one Connecticut newspaper said the tar surface on some

(04:44):
streets is boiling like syrup in the sun. They said
people went mad in the heat, with the New York
Tribune reporting one drunken fool, crazed by the heat, attacked
a policeman with a meat cleaver. And finally we get
to a heat wave for the ages, the one with
the most evocative name London's Great Stink of eighteen fifty eight. Hew,

(05:06):
what is that about? Well, it was July of eighteen
fifty eight and the heat was turned up to historic
levels in London one hundred degrees in the shade and
out in direct sun. Temperatures hit as high as one
hundred and eighteen degrees in London. But it wasn't just
the horrific heat. It was also the notorious stench that

(05:27):
filled the air. It seems most Londoners had recently given
up their chamber pots for those brand new water closets
or flushing toilets. Now, the problem is the antiquated sewer
system couldn't handle all the extra water and what went
with it. Three million Londoners were serviced by just two
hundred thousand ancient cesspits, and they were overflowing straight into

(05:51):
the city's main river, the Thames, as well as its tributaries,
no rain, all that heat and all that Effluvians nice
name for it encouraged the growth of tons of bacteria.
And the smell was god awful. It was so noxious
that in the House of Commons, in order to get
any work done, they had to hang sheets soaked in

(06:13):
chloride of lime from the windows to try to blunt
some of the smell. On top of that, poor neighborhoods
still that they're drinking water from the Thames, and thousands
died that summer from cholera, typhoid and other diseases. In fact,
one newspaper said, gentility of speech is at an end.
It stinks, and whosoever Inhales this stink can never forget it,

(06:36):
and can count himself lucky if he even lives to
remember it. Finally, the public outcry convinced Parliament to overhaul
the city's antiquated sewer system. Joseph Baziljet, a brilliant civil engineer,
designed a network of drains and actually spectacularly beautiful pumping
stations that were a technological marvel, able to handle four

(06:59):
hundred in twenty million gallons of liquid waste a day.
As the system was put into place, neighborhood by neighborhood,
cholera in those areas that got them first saw a
huge drop in the disease, finally convincing the scientific world
that filthy water, not air or miasma as they called it,
was to blame for the spread. It took almost twenty

(07:22):
years to finish the new system, but it virtually ended
cholera epidemics in London and it's still in use today. Coincidentally,
cholera is probably what killed Abe Lincoln's little boy Willie
in eighteen sixty two because he too used to play
in the river, the Potomac River in that case, which
also overflowed the dead bodies of animals and the effluvians

(07:46):
of the sewer system in Washington. So at the end
of the day, what's really interesting is you can see
that these disasters actually propelled forward thinking and the development
of new technology to deal with what mother needs delivers,
including a great stink. I hope you're enjoying the backstory

(08:12):
with Patty Steele. Follow or subscribe for free to get
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I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,

(08:32):
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Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the

(08:53):
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.