February 10, 2026 • 11 mins
Today's tour through the Cabinet focuses on some weird and wacky ways humans have interacted with their environment.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Nke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Long before the flush
(00:37):
toilet became commonplace, humanity grappled with a persistent, pungent problem,
how and where to dispose of our own waste? We
know that ancient Mesopotamia had some plumbing technology. They built
a system of clay pipes that carried waste away when
rainwater flushed the system, but far too often the refuse
simply ended up as a feted pool just outside the
(00:59):
outskirts of town. Rome also adopted a kind of sewer system,
but it was used largely to drain rain water from
city streets, not for human waste in the modern sense.
Even in more recent centuries, many people still relied on
chamber pots and cesspools, holes dug to hold waste until
they overflowed or were emptied. In many cities, the smell,
(01:21):
pestilence and sheer volume of refuse were visible reminders that
sanitation was not simply a domestic task but public good.
Nowhere was this more true than in Victorian England, where
the sweltering summer of eighteen fifty eight created the conditions
for a public disaster that came to be known as
the Big Stink. London in the eighteen hundreds did not
(01:43):
have what you would consider to be a modern waste
disposal system. People used chamber pots, which would then be
emptied into cesspits dug nearby the nearest river, or even worse,
would just empty them into the streets. All over the cities,
ditches and waterways were clogged with feces. Neighbors would fight
over cesspits dug too close to one another's homes, which
(02:05):
would seep into their basements and walls. These pits, of course,
would fill up, and so night men were paid to
remove the waste after the world had gone to sleep
and carted off to farms to fertilize crops. It was
an imperfect system, to say the least, but it would
only get worse. Between eighteen hundred and eighteen fifty London's
population exploded, and by eighteen fifty eight, two and a
(02:28):
half million people called it home. Overcrowding was a major issue,
and along with the people came the people's waist. The
city's infrastructure did not keep pace with the massive influx
of newly minted Londoners. Suddenly there were nearly twice as
many people dumping their waste into cesspits, making it expensive
to transport away. The drains and gutters that were frequently
(02:50):
used to remove feces all emptied into the Thames and
its tributaries. Refuse accumulated, and slowly the river itself became
a sewer, taking in not only human waste but that
of livestock, as well as the factory run off that
was a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Regular outbreaks of
cholera killed over ten thousand Londoners. The city was groaning
(03:13):
under the pressure of its own excrement. The summer of
eighteen fifty eight proved to be the tipping point. It's
fair to say that the summer that year was hot
and dry. The lack of rain meant that the Thames
water levels were lower than usual, and this meant that
waste that it normally carried away to sea was instead
drying on the river bank. In the sweltering heat, the
(03:34):
stench became overpowering, so much so that the rich people
left the city for the fresh air of the countryside,
and the poor folks had to stay indoors as much
as they could afford. And for the poor guys who
had to stick around and work in the Parliament building,
they soaked the curtains with chloride of lime to fight
the smell.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
And although Parliament had been debating sanitation for years, very
little progress had been made toward real reform, and the stench,
mixed with harsh headlines and public rage, finally forced the
government's hand. Within eighteen days of its introduction, a bill
to fund new infrastructure was passed into law. Enter Joseph Basiljet,
(04:12):
a civil engineer who was appointed to lead the charge.
Basiljet developed an ambitious design of underground brick sewers and
powerful pumping stations to move London's waste beyond the city
and release it into the tidal Thames, where currents would
carry it away. Work began almost immediately. Between eighteen fifty
eight and eighteen seventy five, miles of tunnels were dug
(04:36):
reinforced with hundreds of millions of bricks, It was one
of the largest infrastructure projects of its day, solving London's
sewage problem and paving the way for modern urban sanitation
everywhere else. The Great Stink was disastrous, but its legacy
was structural and profound. The immediate crisis ended, and cholera
outbreaks in London dwindled in subsequent years as waste disposed,
(05:00):
improved in water quality rows and as wild as it sounds,
basljets sewers still underpin London's sanitation network today, even as
new pressures emerge from the ever increasing population and climate
driven rainfall. The event remains a milestone in sanitation history,
how environmental, sanitary, and political pressures collided to force a
(05:23):
major infrastructure overhaul. Visiting the Thames today, it's hard to
imagine what it once was. A stinking, disease ridden sewer.
It's a curious tale, to say the least. Thanks to
bold engineering and public health reform, the city has been transformed.
The Great Stink stands as a dramatic reminder of how
ignoring waste doesn't just stink, It also causes outbreaks of
(05:46):
preventable disease and makes the city that one lives in
completely unlivable. I think it's fair to say that meteorology,
(06:08):
the scientific study of the atmosphere in an attempt to
predict the weather, is often misunderstood. People expect the weather
anchor on TV to be accurate all the time. They
think that predicting the weather is the same as seeing
the future. But all weather people can do is look
at past trends and current conditions and say how likely
something is to happen. A ninety percent chance of rain
(06:31):
means that it still might not rain. But that's science
using evidence to form a hypothesis. If you want magic, well,
A curious story from eighteen ninety one shows us just
how well it goes when humankind tries to bend the
weather to its will. Robert G. Deer and Foth wasn't
a scientist, but he was an engineer, and his friend
(06:52):
Edward Powers was a retired Civil War general. However, in
eighteen ninety one, the two had formed a hypothesis. During
the war, Edward noticed that it was almost always raining
following a big battle. This led to their concussion theory,
the idea that sonic waves from loud explosions would jostle
the rain right out of the clouds. Now, you might
(07:13):
already be questioning this, but just bear with me. Congress
thought that it was a decent theory, and so they
gave Robert and Edward seven thousand dollars back then that's
worth about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars today. To
test their theory, they set up their experiment on a
ranch in Illinois, lining the fields with mortars packed with
blasting powder from nearby mines. They also set up several
(07:36):
rows of hydrogen balloons, and they would hoist these balloons
into the air and then shoot at them to create
an even louder sound. Soon everything was ready, Roberts, Edward
and their associates lit the fuses and plugged their ears.
Massive thundering blasts sounded out across the fields as the
mortars fired. The booming pops of the hydrogen balloons sent
(07:59):
birds flying from the trees. The noise continued for hours.
It almost sounded like the Civil War was back on.
Once the men were done firing, the silence that followed
was almost just as deafening. They looked to the skies,
where storm clouds were gathering. They held their breath as
something extraordinary took place. Rain began to trickle down from above.
(08:21):
The men jumped for joy their experiment had worked. The
next day, that trickle turned into a downpour. However, the
local meteorologist was about to rain on Robert and Edward's parade.
No pun intended, I swear, wink wink. He had predicted
this rain. It was likely to happen with or without
their experiment. The two men were forced to concede defeat,
(08:42):
at least for now, but they continued to champion their theory. Eventually,
the mayor of El Paso, Texas took notice and asked
Robert's team to come test his theory in their town.
They used the same artillery and the same balloon system,
but this time it rained only on the opposite side
of the city where the experiment took place. It was
even more of a mediocre result. Robert continued his experiments
(09:07):
throughout the Southwest, but his methods didn't seem to have
much of an effort. He always wanted to take credit
for rain that was just as likely to have happened
without his concussive blasts. This didn't stop others from trying
similar experiments over the decades, though there are reports of
other concussion weather experiments from his late as nineteen eleven.
But as the scientific method came into focus, the problems
(09:30):
with the concussion theory became clear. For one, that initial
observation by Edward powers that rain always seemed to follow
a battle is all correlation without causation. He may have
just been fighting during a rainy period or in a
rainy region. Most Civil War battles were fought in Southern States,
where it does rain a lot. And second, once he
(09:51):
started to form his theory, observation bias may have led
him to only notice when it did rain and ignore
when it didn't. He wasn't considering the actual mechanisms that
cause rain, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Those were already well
studied phenomena. Robert and Edward's hypothesis basically ignored the water
(10:14):
cycle completely and instead put forth the idea that rain
could just be shaken out of the clouds like fruit
from a tree. In the scientific method, a hypothesis typically
doesn't even make it to the testing stage if it
can't stand up to existing evidence. That seven thousand dollars
grant from Congress was truly a waste of money without
(10:35):
understanding the scientific method and studying the research that had
already been done. These men were pretty much on par
with medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold or,
in this case, dynamite into rain. If you're a longtime
listener of this show, you know that it never hurts
to be curious, but pointing that curiosity in the right
direction is important. A meteorologist guessing when it might rain
(10:58):
may not be perfect, but it's a lot more reliable
than hurling explosives at a cloud and hoping for the best.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
(11:20):
This show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Nke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Long before the flush
(00:37):
toilet became commonplace, humanity grappled with a persistent, pungent problem,
how and where to dispose of our own waste? We
know that ancient Mesopotamia had some plumbing technology. They built
a system of clay pipes that carried waste away when
rainwater flushed the system, but far too often the refuse
simply ended up as a feted pool just outside the
(00:59):
outskirts of town. Rome also adopted a kind of sewer system,
but it was used largely to drain rain water from
city streets, not for human waste in the modern sense.
Even in more recent centuries, many people still relied on
chamber pots and cesspools, holes dug to hold waste until
they overflowed or were emptied. In many cities, the smell,
(01:21):
pestilence and sheer volume of refuse were visible reminders that
sanitation was not simply a domestic task but public good.
Nowhere was this more true than in Victorian England, where
the sweltering summer of eighteen fifty eight created the conditions
for a public disaster that came to be known as
the Big Stink. London in the eighteen hundreds did not
(01:43):
have what you would consider to be a modern waste
disposal system. People used chamber pots, which would then be
emptied into cesspits dug nearby the nearest river, or even worse,
would just empty them into the streets. All over the cities,
ditches and waterways were clogged with feces. Neighbors would fight
over cesspits dug too close to one another's homes, which
(02:05):
would seep into their basements and walls. These pits, of course,
would fill up, and so night men were paid to
remove the waste after the world had gone to sleep
and carted off to farms to fertilize crops. It was
an imperfect system, to say the least, but it would
only get worse. Between eighteen hundred and eighteen fifty London's
population exploded, and by eighteen fifty eight, two and a
(02:28):
half million people called it home. Overcrowding was a major issue,
and along with the people came the people's waist. The
city's infrastructure did not keep pace with the massive influx
of newly minted Londoners. Suddenly there were nearly twice as
many people dumping their waste into cesspits, making it expensive
to transport away. The drains and gutters that were frequently
(02:50):
used to remove feces all emptied into the Thames and
its tributaries. Refuse accumulated, and slowly the river itself became
a sewer, taking in not only human waste but that
of livestock, as well as the factory run off that
was a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Regular outbreaks of
cholera killed over ten thousand Londoners. The city was groaning
(03:13):
under the pressure of its own excrement. The summer of
eighteen fifty eight proved to be the tipping point. It's
fair to say that the summer that year was hot
and dry. The lack of rain meant that the Thames
water levels were lower than usual, and this meant that
waste that it normally carried away to sea was instead
drying on the river bank. In the sweltering heat, the
(03:34):
stench became overpowering, so much so that the rich people
left the city for the fresh air of the countryside,
and the poor folks had to stay indoors as much
as they could afford. And for the poor guys who
had to stick around and work in the Parliament building,
they soaked the curtains with chloride of lime to fight
the smell.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
And although Parliament had been debating sanitation for years, very
little progress had been made toward real reform, and the stench,
mixed with harsh headlines and public rage, finally forced the
government's hand. Within eighteen days of its introduction, a bill
to fund new infrastructure was passed into law. Enter Joseph Basiljet,
(04:12):
a civil engineer who was appointed to lead the charge.
Basiljet developed an ambitious design of underground brick sewers and
powerful pumping stations to move London's waste beyond the city
and release it into the tidal Thames, where currents would
carry it away. Work began almost immediately. Between eighteen fifty
eight and eighteen seventy five, miles of tunnels were dug
(04:36):
reinforced with hundreds of millions of bricks, It was one
of the largest infrastructure projects of its day, solving London's
sewage problem and paving the way for modern urban sanitation
everywhere else. The Great Stink was disastrous, but its legacy
was structural and profound. The immediate crisis ended, and cholera
outbreaks in London dwindled in subsequent years as waste disposed,
(05:00):
improved in water quality rows and as wild as it sounds,
basljets sewers still underpin London's sanitation network today, even as
new pressures emerge from the ever increasing population and climate
driven rainfall. The event remains a milestone in sanitation history,
how environmental, sanitary, and political pressures collided to force a
(05:23):
major infrastructure overhaul. Visiting the Thames today, it's hard to
imagine what it once was. A stinking, disease ridden sewer.
It's a curious tale, to say the least. Thanks to
bold engineering and public health reform, the city has been transformed.
The Great Stink stands as a dramatic reminder of how
ignoring waste doesn't just stink, It also causes outbreaks of
(05:46):
preventable disease and makes the city that one lives in
completely unlivable. I think it's fair to say that meteorology,
(06:08):
the scientific study of the atmosphere in an attempt to
predict the weather, is often misunderstood. People expect the weather
anchor on TV to be accurate all the time. They
think that predicting the weather is the same as seeing
the future. But all weather people can do is look
at past trends and current conditions and say how likely
something is to happen. A ninety percent chance of rain
(06:31):
means that it still might not rain. But that's science
using evidence to form a hypothesis. If you want magic, well,
A curious story from eighteen ninety one shows us just
how well it goes when humankind tries to bend the
weather to its will. Robert G. Deer and Foth wasn't
a scientist, but he was an engineer, and his friend
(06:52):
Edward Powers was a retired Civil War general. However, in
eighteen ninety one, the two had formed a hypothesis. During
the war, Edward noticed that it was almost always raining
following a big battle. This led to their concussion theory,
the idea that sonic waves from loud explosions would jostle
the rain right out of the clouds. Now, you might
(07:13):
already be questioning this, but just bear with me. Congress
thought that it was a decent theory, and so they
gave Robert and Edward seven thousand dollars back then that's
worth about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars today. To
test their theory, they set up their experiment on a
ranch in Illinois, lining the fields with mortars packed with
blasting powder from nearby mines. They also set up several
(07:36):
rows of hydrogen balloons, and they would hoist these balloons
into the air and then shoot at them to create
an even louder sound. Soon everything was ready, Roberts, Edward
and their associates lit the fuses and plugged their ears.
Massive thundering blasts sounded out across the fields as the
mortars fired. The booming pops of the hydrogen balloons sent
(07:59):
birds flying from the trees. The noise continued for hours.
It almost sounded like the Civil War was back on.
Once the men were done firing, the silence that followed
was almost just as deafening. They looked to the skies,
where storm clouds were gathering. They held their breath as
something extraordinary took place. Rain began to trickle down from above.
(08:21):
The men jumped for joy their experiment had worked. The
next day, that trickle turned into a downpour. However, the
local meteorologist was about to rain on Robert and Edward's parade.
No pun intended, I swear, wink wink. He had predicted
this rain. It was likely to happen with or without
their experiment. The two men were forced to concede defeat,
(08:42):
at least for now, but they continued to champion their theory. Eventually,
the mayor of El Paso, Texas took notice and asked
Robert's team to come test his theory in their town.
They used the same artillery and the same balloon system,
but this time it rained only on the opposite side
of the city where the experiment took place. It was
even more of a mediocre result. Robert continued his experiments
(09:07):
throughout the Southwest, but his methods didn't seem to have
much of an effort. He always wanted to take credit
for rain that was just as likely to have happened
without his concussive blasts. This didn't stop others from trying
similar experiments over the decades, though there are reports of
other concussion weather experiments from his late as nineteen eleven.
But as the scientific method came into focus, the problems
(09:30):
with the concussion theory became clear. For one, that initial
observation by Edward powers that rain always seemed to follow
a battle is all correlation without causation. He may have
just been fighting during a rainy period or in a
rainy region. Most Civil War battles were fought in Southern States,
where it does rain a lot. And second, once he
(09:51):
started to form his theory, observation bias may have led
him to only notice when it did rain and ignore
when it didn't. He wasn't considering the actual mechanisms that
cause rain, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Those were already well
studied phenomena. Robert and Edward's hypothesis basically ignored the water
(10:14):
cycle completely and instead put forth the idea that rain
could just be shaken out of the clouds like fruit
from a tree. In the scientific method, a hypothesis typically
doesn't even make it to the testing stage if it
can't stand up to existing evidence. That seven thousand dollars
grant from Congress was truly a waste of money without
(10:35):
understanding the scientific method and studying the research that had
already been done. These men were pretty much on par
with medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold or,
in this case, dynamite into rain. If you're a longtime
listener of this show, you know that it never hurts
to be curious, but pointing that curiosity in the right
direction is important. A meteorologist guessing when it might rain
(10:58):
may not be perfect, but it's a lot more reliable
than hurling explosives at a cloud and hoping for the best.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
(11:20):
This show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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