The Backstory: Eeww! What’s That Smell??

Before the world was industrialized less than 200 years ago . . it smelled really different! They didn’t have to deal with the smell of gasoline fumes, burning rubber or oil, or the output of giant smokey factories. But imagine 3 1/2 million pounds of manure dumped onto the streets of New York City every day! Were they nose blind?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, did you ever stop to think about what

(00:01):
the world smelled like before factories, cars, and other mechanical
devices sort of took over our olifactory senses. Maybe like trees, flowers,
and baby animals. Yeah, think again. There's a reason everybody
wore perfume or carried flowers back in the day. I'm
Patty Steele. What in the hell is that smell? That's

(00:24):
next on the backstory. We're back with the backstory. Ah,
take a good deep breath of the cool autumn air.
What do you smell? Well, it sort of depends on
where you are. If you're in a city or suburb,
most likely the effluvia pulsing up your nostrils is tinged

(00:48):
with the smell of progress gasoline chemicals used in manufacturing
and cleaning supplies, along with some more pleasant things like
room or car air fresheners, or even natural substances like trees, plants,
and flowers. If you live in the countryside, you may
be inhaling the smell of the earth, woods, plants, and

(01:09):
of course animals. But here's the thing. Before the Industrial Revolution,
when factories began spewing out smoke mixed with tangy, cold dust,
there was a whole lot of stuff to smell. It
was just mostly organic animals, unwashed bodies, and decaying food.
It was pretty pungent and mostly pretty rank. Stop and

(01:30):
think about it. In New York City in the late
eighteen hundreds, there were at least one hundred and fifty
thousand horses all right, now, let's do the math. Each
horse produced about twenty two pounds of manure every day
and dropped it onto the streets for the most part,
meaning almost three and a half million pounds of this

(01:51):
stuff clogging dusty or muddy roads again every day. Street
cleaners couldn't begin to keep up with it, and which
frequently find empty lots to dump it in. And there
were reports of areas with six story tall mountains of manure.
And that doesn't include the forty thousand gallons of horsepeed
that went with it every day. In London, it got

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so bad the papers called it the Great horse manure
Crisis of eighteen ninety four. I mean, there were actually
guys who made a living off of standing on street
corners and offering for a fee to run ahead of
you and shovel the horse stuff out of the way
to clear a path. If you were out walking, it
wasn't pleasant. In the rain, the unpaved streets were a

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muddy river that wasn't just good old earth type mud,
and in dry weather it all turned to dust. The
choked pedestrians and coated the outside of buildings by sticking
to them. Yikes. So there's that, but there's more. In
the era before modern plumbing, e also had human waste
flowing through the gutters and into the streets and into

(03:00):
rivers and other waterways. It pulled in cesspits or was
collected in what were called night soil buckets that often
was used in the garden as fertilizer. On top of that,
you had butchers and fishmongers dumping blood and other leftover
parts into the street. Those businesses, along with the tanning
of hides for leather, which made use of urine mixed

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with lime, were called the offensive trades due to the
terribly offensive smells they produced, and as you can imagine,
all of this was especially nasty in the summer heat.
But for folks out in the countryside there was a
trade off. Sure, they had boatloads of manure from cows, horses, pigs, sheep,
chickens and other animals, and there were animal carcasses to

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deal with. But in spring and summer, the air was
scented by trees in bloom, clover and pine forests. In autumn, apples,
root vegetables and fermenting fruit perfumed the air, along with
the smell from wood fire. So not as bad for
rural types. Right, But here's another treat for nasal passages

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that impacted folks everywhere. Before deodorant came along, a lot
of people only bathed once a week at most. In fact,
going way back, bathing more than a few times a
year was considered unhealthy by Europeans beginning in the mid
fourteenth century. Why they were terrified by the Black Death,

(04:26):
the plague which killed as much as fifty percent of
the population of Europe in those days. They thought water
carried disease, and that warm water would open their pores
and allow disease to get into their body. They believed
illnesses also spread through air. They called that miasma. A
lot of folks felt that the body's natural oils and

(04:47):
dirt could actually work to protect us. I guess if
you're terrified of an uncontrollable pandemic ending in a painful death.
You'll pretty much try anything. They did, however, enjoy the
occasional sponge or cat bath, tiny bit of water and
a washcloth rubbed on a few spots. Now, interestingly, there
are a number of celebrities today who don't believe in

(05:10):
bathing much and are into cat baths of a sort.
Case in Point Ashton Kutcher, Emilakunis, Jake Gillenhall, Brad Pitt,
Rob Pattinson. But again, pre twentieth century, not much in
the way of soap or deodorant for most people, so
in order to stand being within smell distance of one another,
they loaded up on scented oils, perfume, and grooming water

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aka toilet water toilet water. That all began thousands of
years earlier in Egypt, as well as in Greece and Rome,
where they oiled their skin and then scraped the dirt
and residue off with a metal tool called a stridel.
Beyond that, folks often wore wool, which can really hang
onto scents, both good and bad. In order to mask

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the smells around you and emanating from you, you would
use scented oils, herbal sachets, and handkerchiefs drenched in perfume,
at least if you could afford those pricey things. In addition,
people planted gardens near windows to combat bad smells coming in,
including roses, jasmine, and lilac, as well as greenery. And

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did you ever wonder why so many people, including a
lot of men, used to wear flowers bootineers for the guys,
and corsages or even a small bouquet called a nosegay
for women. If you were outside in that intense stench,
or in a room filled with folks partying while dancing
and sweating, you could just clutch your little bunch of

(06:38):
flowers to your nose for smell relief from the funk. Now,
on the other hand, a lot of folks were probably
a little bit nose blind, as they say, and what
would be horrifying to us in our chemically sanitized world
just didn't bother them nearly as much, if at all.
It was a part of life and maybe even unnoticeable
to a lot of folks. These days were tested with

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everything smelling clean, from houses and workplaces to our bodies
and even our dogs. Billions of dollars are spent on
perfuming everything makes you wonder how folks who lived a
few centuries ago would process the smell of today's world.
I hope you like the Backstory with Patty Steele. Please
leave a review. I would love it if you'd subscribe

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or follow for free to get new episodes delivered automatically.
Also feel free to dm me if you have a
story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty
Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele.
The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis

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Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser.
Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday
and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with
comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty
Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening
to the back Story with Patty Steele. The pieces of

(08:05):
history you didn't know you needed to know.