March 14, 2019 • 35 mins
In the summer of 1858, a heatwave dried up the Thames River to a trickle in London. As centuries’ worth of human waste, animal carcasses and other nasty things cooked in the sun, a stench arose that was so horrific it got its own name: The Great Stink.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there, and today we
have guest producer Josh sitting in. Not me, another Josh,
Another Josh. Josh. Yeah, you know what his nickname is, uh,
little Josh, the great Stink. That is a terrible nickname, Chuck.
(00:26):
We're just kidding, of course. Sorry, Josh, I'm I'm sorry
for Chuck. Everyone knows I'm the great Stink. I don't
know about that either. I've never once smelled you in
the like more than decade that we've worked together. I've
never known you to smell fouley. Wow. Alright, that means
I'm doing my I'm keeping my distance. We've been close, buddy,
(00:49):
and you still don't stink. Certainly not a great stink.
But that's neither here nor there. We're not talking about
a great stink yet, are we. No. I don't even
know what you're talking about, right, Actually, you don't even
know what it is that you brought up. We we
are talking to start, Chuck about a little city called
London Town across the pond in Great Britain, the United Kingdom, England.
(01:16):
That whole area over there, and um, London's been around
a very long time. It's been around since at least
the Romans kind of came and set up shop. Right. Yeah, Oh,
by the way, since you brought that up. I hate
to get sidetracked already, but my good friend Rob from
college Rob Elsie, my roommate and one of the smartest
guys I know, texted me the other day and said,
(01:37):
by the way, Alexander the Great was neither Greek nor Roman.
He was Macedonian. I saw somebody else emailed that in
I was like, Greek still closer. Yeah, So anyway, shout
out to Rob. Way to go Rob, real time corrections. Yes,
that's the way to go, Rob. All right. So London
has been around for a couple of years, is what
you were saying it is, And it's kind of slowly
(02:00):
grew and more and more people were like, Hey, I
like the I like this town. There's a lot going
on here. The fish and chips are great. Um, eventually
it will produce uh, some pretty pretty neat people. I'm
gonna settle down here. I couldn't think of a single
London as an example, but you know, people, Mary Pop
(02:20):
is going to show up eventually, thanks Chuck so um,
people started settling and accumulating, and uh, it became like
a pretty substantial city by the like sixteen hundreds, right.
But then the nineteenth century came and all of a sudden,
this is at the peak of the British Empire. Uh,
(02:40):
the early nineteenth century came along and London just exploded
in in population, in industry, um, right before and then
during and then right after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Um,
London really uh just grew as a result of that,
and all of a sudden there was something like three
(03:00):
million people living in London by like the eighteen fifties,
which made it the most densely populated city on the
planet from what I understand, at least the it had
the largest population from what I understand. And you know
what that means, Yes, that means if there's how many
millions you said three million, three in eighteen fifty, that's
(03:22):
three million butt holes. Yep, human butt holes are not
just humans expelling things now, just three million humans. And
then you've got horse butt holes and all sorts of
other animal but holes, pig butt holes, and they're just
all they're all pooping all the time. Right, pooping. Every
(03:46):
once in a while they catch a food board all
this and they'd start throwing up to there is a
lot of tinkle coming out of other holes. Um, there's
a lot of excrement that was being generated in London
all of a sudden, and there had been for a
very long time, but all of a sudden it reached
like a critical mass. And up to this point London
(04:07):
um enjoyed what we're called Roman sewards, which are basically
just a ditch in the ground that were meant to
collect rainwater. Right, And if you had to poop or
p or um vomit or something like that, and you
were a human in your house, you probably had a cesspool,
which was basically a pit in the basement. Sometimes, if
(04:31):
you were fancy, you might have like a sister or
a canister or something like that, and you would go
pooper vomit or p into this hole. And then the
hope was that the whole was big enough and your
family was small enough in number that the pooper p
your vomit would would decay and get absorbed into the
surrounding ground faster than you could fill it up. That
(04:54):
was that was how they dealt with with um surface
water and sewage. Then you had a hole that you
pooped and puked and from impeded. And then you had
rain ditches conveying rainwater to the to the Thames is
where the rainwater was supposed to end up. But it
wasn't just rainwater was it that ended up in the Thames? No,
(05:16):
I mean these I mean I don't think we can
just breaze past these cesspools. They were purposely designed to
overflow into the streets. Eventually, yes, they figured out that, yeah,
we're getting to the point where we have enough people
that that ore are cesspools are not decaying fast enough
that they're starting to overflow. Yeah. And if you lived
(05:38):
if you were poor and lived on like the basement
or the ground floor of an apartment building or something, um,
you might very well see the stuff seeping into your household. Uh.
Sometimes if that's if like someone's gone or if it's
an empty building, that stuff would build up and methane
would become trapped in there and there would be literal
(05:58):
explosions for the trap methane of people's pooh poop explosion. Yeah,
it was really really bad. And then when you talk
about the Thames, river. The Thames is a tide way,
so that means that the tides affect the water flow
and so it's not like sewage. You know, they were
thought like, let's just send it out to the sea
(06:19):
and it's all good. But what it would would happen
is stuff would just kind of slash back and forth
because of the tides. And the end result was the
Thames River was and when I say disgusting, I mean
capital D disgusting, Yes, dangerously disgusting Capital D dangerously too. Yeah,
(06:42):
so um, chuck, it was. I don't know how they
didn't realize that where London was on the Thames was
what's called the tide way, so it is affected by
the tide. And not only is it affected by the tide,
meaning when the tide rises, the um the estuary and
the sea basically comes up into London, but there's also
still water coming from the headwaters of the Thames. So
(07:04):
at high tide sometimes the Thames would overflow its banks
it would get so high. Right, So not only did
you have the Thames itself just basically turning into like
a washing machine on the agitation cycle, stewing and mixing
up garbage and remains because there are a lot of
dead human and animal bodies and it's much all yeah,
(07:29):
all that sewage, everything that people didn't want anymore, they
just put into the Thames. But unfortunately it wasn't carried
out to the seat. It was just kind of mixed together,
and it would be mixed together and kind of turned
into a solution that was suspended in the in the water,
and then eventually some of that would settle to the
to the bottom. But you have hundreds and hundreds of
(07:50):
years of waste just cycling right outside of London, and
like you said, eventually by the by the the nineteenth century,
apparently it really turned earned starting in about eighteen thirty.
They found records that as as late as eighteen hundred
people were still um catching and eating salmon out of
the Thames. By by eight well it was okay back then,
(08:13):
it was fine that by eighteen thirties something had changed
that that it had just again reached that critical mass
kind of like um, jeverson that South park where um
they go to the water park and like there there
there's like some scientists who realizes that the the p
to water ratio is about to hit a tipping point.
(08:35):
And once it tips past that point, everything's going to
turn into p um and it happens, and it's disgusting.
That's all kind of what happened to the eighteen thirties
to the Thames. It reached a critical point and tipped
into just like that dangerously disgusting vat of water that
was just hanging around in London at the time. Yeah. So, uh,
(08:57):
there's a very famous scientist named Michael Faraday who made
his name in UH in other realms of science, but
he actually worked for the Royal Institution UH in eighteen
fifty five when he basically started doing an investigation. He
went down to that river like got in it in
a boat, I would imagine, UH, and did various tests
(09:19):
and you know, recorded a bunch of stuff. And then
one of his tests was like he would drop white
paper in there and he said, after this paper gets
in like an inch below the surface, you can't even
see it, and like poop is basically like bubbling up
to the surface, Like you can see human excrement on
the surface down here. Yeah, like where where the time
(09:41):
the attempts is flowing past, like the structure of a
bridge that is jutting out of the water and it's
it's being cut up by that bridge. The flow is
it's roiling up this muck and disgusting stuff is just
roiling up in clouds. That he said, we're visible even
in this this opaque of a water. And he wrote
all this stuff up into an article letter I guess
(10:04):
that he sent to the Times newspaper, uh that he
called Observations on the Filth of the Thames. And this
was in eighteen fifty five, I think it was published.
And um, he basically says, if we just keep going
this way, we should not be surprised if um, something
really bad happens, like a hot spell comes along and
(10:24):
reminds us that we really missed a chance to do
something about this, and it's now too late. So that's
eighteen fifty five, and that's faaraday. At the same time,
there's another thing going on kind of off to the side,
where a um, a scientist named John Snow who actually
knew a lot. It turns out he um was that
(10:47):
was a Game of Thrones joke. Yeah, didn't somebody say, like,
you know nothing, John Snow? I think, but I think
that might have been first season. But anyway, but did
make an impact. I think somebody said, you know nothing,
John Snow. I don't know. I just saw it on
Twitter years back, right they said red wedding. I don't know.
(11:10):
They just just say red wedding. That's it. Um. So,
this John Snow guy, I think he had an H
in his name, which was his parents put in to
differentiate him from the Game of Thrones cat is um.
He He was basically one of the world's first epidemiologists
and he's working feverishly at the time because there was
(11:31):
something called the Victorian plague, which is cholera, and cholera
was a water borne illness that you did not want.
You could literally vomit and poop yourself to death in
a matter of hours. You would lose so much um
how you would dehydrate that quickly. And so John Snow
(11:54):
was like, there's a caller outbreak, and I suspect it's
in the water. But he went against a grain at
the time because during the eighteen fifties, Chuck, everyone thought
that you caught diseases from the smell of things. It
was called the miasma theory. That's right. People thought that,
and they thought that possibly that's where even cholera was
(12:17):
coming from UH, and cholera was was nothing new. UH.
There was an epidemic in the eighteen thirties that killed
more than six thousand people. There was a second outbreak
kind of shortly before this in the late forties that
killed fourteen thousand, So that's twenty and then between fifty
three and fifty four another ten. So that's thirty thousand
(12:37):
Londoners UH killed by cholera. And there are miasthmus that think, yeah,
it's from it's from smelling this stuff in the air, right,
so people are trying to like treat the air. They
poured something called um calcium of chloride of lime, which
amounts to basically pool chlorine today into the Thames, like
(13:01):
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of this stuff
to try to cover up the stench. That didn't work
and actually has made the Thames more toxic. But John
Snow is running around, He's like, no, no, there's there's
some other method of transmission. It has nothing to do
with the smell. Smells just a byproduct. And he actually
did a an an outbreak map of cholera and traced
(13:22):
it back to a particular well a public well that
had been dug unbeknownst to the well diggers, within about
um three or four feet of an abandoned cess pool
that had been built over and forgotten, and that the
cess pool that contained color laden fecal bacteria um into
(13:44):
the the the public well was making people sick, and
John Snow figured it out, and he's considered one of
the early earliest epidemiologists as a result. All right, let's
take a break and uh, I need to go wash
my hands, and then we'll come back and talk about
what happened in the summer of eighteen fifty eight right
(14:05):
after this. All right, so the times is in bad shape.
(14:33):
A few very smart people realize this. They're trying to
raise a little hay about it. Nothing much is happening.
People are getting cholera. Poor people are dying. But because
you know, I was about to say, because as Britain,
but a lot of countries back then may have handled
this the same way. Uh it really until it hit
kind of the the politicians and the rich and the
(14:54):
famous is when things really are going to change. And
in the summer of eighteen fifty eight, eat wave is
what really really changed things. Because the heat combined with
the the what was going on in that river really
made what was called the Great stinkh Capital g Capital
(15:14):
s in London. And it was happening all up and
down the Thims, but it was happening very close to where,
uh what was it Westminster where the politicians yeah, huddled
and uh and made their little rules and they couldn't
they basically couldn't go to work. They were like, you
know what, this is starting to affect our government. We're
(15:35):
using scented handkerchiefs. Uh, none of this is working. So
like we finally it took that to be able to
it be like in America, if you know, there was
something going on and no one reacted until like poop
was flowing up the steps of the White House basically right, basically,
and the the the irony of the whole thing is
(15:55):
that had it not been for um, the persistence of
myasthma theory of disease, Parliament might have not actually ended
up acting because so you have to, you have to
put yourself in this. So this stink is so bad
that we're talking about it a hundred and fifty or
sixty years later, right, That's how bad it was it
(16:18):
was a legendarily bad offensive stench. And not only was
it a terrible, wretching smell of supposedly people miles away
would catch scent of it and throw up, like just
throw up where they were standing. It was that bad.
Because again we're talking hundreds of years of human waste
(16:39):
and animal waste and um and decaying bodies and just
all sorts of nastiness and destines. Like you know what
they did with this, you know, when they were like
preparing animals for slaughter. It went to the same place exactly.
And again, this is hundreds of years of this stuff,
and the Thames has um slowed to a trickle because
it's a dry spell, and now because of this heat wave,
(17:01):
it's cooking. The Thames is cooking, all this nasty stuff
is cooking and the stench is coming off. So on
top of it being that bad of a smell, you
also have to put yourself in the position of the
people who are living at the time, who believed that
smells cause disease, that cholera and typhus and malaria are caused,
like if you smell it, you may have just caught it.
(17:23):
So they are terrified of this. But had john snow
had people listened to him and realized that no, you
get it from actually drinking the water, which is what
they're doing right. But Parliament may not have acted because
Parliament and some of the wealthier people in London they
got their water from like north of the city, um
piped in through aqueducts, so they had clean drinking water.
(17:46):
It was the lower classes that were drinking the water
drawn straight from the Thames, so they were drinking the
same water that they were throwing their waste into. Because
they didn't realize that there was such thing as um
the oral equal oral transmission of water borne illnesses. Everybody
thought it was just the stench. Yea. So parliaments uh
(18:08):
notoriously very slow to get anything done, like a lot
of governments. Uh. And then it took about, uh what
eighteen days, which was super fast. I think it was
a record. Yeah, I think so too. And they created
a bill past this bill and signed it into law
that basically said we need to basically re redo the
(18:30):
river here. I don't know what it's gonna take. Um.
I don't even think they knew how much it was
gonna cost at the time, but they knew that the
great stink had to stop right. So um. Again, this
was after it kind of like you said, the poop
just piled up at their doorstep, right. But they had fortunately,
just like a couple of years before, I think maybe
(18:52):
eighteen fifty five, they created a new department UM. Up
to this time, like the water works and the UM,
I think the sewage works were privately held. But Parliament
had just recently created a new department called the Metropolitan
Board of Works, and they had UM designated a chief
(19:14):
engineer by the name of Joseph H. Basil Get. Isn't
that how you would say it? Sure, we're going with
basil Get, then chuck if you're on board with that.
So Joseph basil Get would turn out to be one
of the most celebrated engineers in Western history. And he
just so happened to have kind of gotten on the
(19:35):
Michael Faraday trolley and been like, yes, we need to
do something about the Thames. And the solution is a sewer.
It's a modernized sewer. So he had spent years already
drawing up plans and trying to get them implemented to
no avail, and now all of a sudden, out of nowhere.
Within eighteen days of this, the great stink developing, the
(19:56):
Parliament says, hey, Basil get go, get your plans. We're
gonna put him into uh. You go raise some money,
say about three million dollars, which is like I think
four d and thirty million dollars today three million pounds um,
and get to work as fast as you can. Yeah.
Before this, the UH, they didn't even have, like before
(20:17):
the Metropolitan Board of Works, they didn't even have a
a group that was even funded to tackle anything like this.
And then once they even had the Metropolitan Board, it
wasn't really funded yet. So that's why they had to
go out and raise money. So the hiring of Basil
Gat was Basil Gat. Basil Gette is the Italian. No
(20:38):
I think his family originated in revolutionary France, so let's
say Basil get Yeah, so the hiring of him was
fortuitous because he knew what he was doing. Um, he
was definitely the guy to come in and take care
of this and his plan, like it was so revolutionary
that it's still in its simplicity though that it's still
sort of the basis for how things work aday all
(21:00):
these years later. Yeah, No, I mean, not only was
the revolutionary, was that well built as well, Like it's
it's the that sewer built in from like eighteen fifty
eight to I think the eighteen seventies forms the backbone
of London's metropolitan sewer system. Still to this day. It
was that well made. Oh yeah, So he's like, here's
what we'll do. He says, We're gonna catch this water, uh,
(21:23):
and the waste like you know, rain water and stuff,
surface water before it gets to the river. And everyone said,
good start, and he said, and then then we're gonna
just reroute it. Basically, we're gonna run it parallel to
the river and uh, combine these sewers together and divert
this stuff downstream. And again the plan those sadly is
(21:46):
still to divert it out to the sea, but just
not to the sea such that it would wash right
back in with the tides exactly. And and most importantly
where where it dumped out into the Thames was way
below the populated area, so it was out of sight,
out of mind, but it was still I mean, is
(22:06):
that that is definitely a mark against it, But with
considering what he had to work with, it was quite revolutionary.
The idea of catching all this stuff and moving it
away from the city to keep the Thames clean. Right,
all right, So let's take another break and we'll come
back and talk more about basil Gets plan that actually
(22:27):
worked right after this. So Chuck Um, you said, like,
(22:53):
the main part of basil Gets plan was, um to
basically build a subtranean sewer that rampare a little to
the Thames. That was big. I saw somewhere else miles.
I don't know where they got that, but let's go
with eighty two miles because it sounds much much more realistic.
But um that that in parts were big enough to
(23:15):
build it to to run a train through. And in fact,
some of these underground sewer tunnels they're like, well, it's
also build the underground subway system at the same time. Um.
So it was a massive project. And those use gravity.
They had like a two ft drop per mile, which
is a pretty good drop, so they would conduct the
sewage and rainwater down down towards the Thames, but not
(23:39):
at the times using gravity. And then smaller ones were
egg shaped so that they they were narrower at the bottom,
so that would kind of get the flow going even
faster too. So, um, that's like the main part, that's
the bulk of of this project, but it's certainly not
the whole thing by a long shot, No, not at all.
So they uh realized that they were like, you know,
(24:02):
even if you build a house that runs on gravity,
there might be low lying areas of your sewage pipe
that eventually calls you problems. I've been through this myself.
It's no fun. No one wants to deal with poop,
whether it's Victorian London or modern day Atlanta. And so
like today, you have to pump that stuff out. So
(24:23):
they built these giant pumping stations, a few different ones,
um Crossness, Abbey Mills, Chelsea and Deptford. And they made
these things really nice looking, which was probably a pretty
good move. Um, especially Abbey Mills and Crossness really really
lovely buildings. They kind of look like cathedrals, which is
(24:44):
ironic because they were pumping out poop the whole time. Uh.
And it was this was really key there because like
I said, this low lying you've got to take care
of all of the problem or else it's just gonna
like magnify, you know. So it wasn't good enough just
to be like, let's get it out, not worry about
the low levels or the low lying areas. So they
(25:05):
really had to pump it all out. Yeah, So so
they built these beautiful pumping stations. One of the other
things that they did was they reclaimed a tremendous amount
of land from the Thames. At the time that the
Thames just had natural banks, right like the river just
kind of came up to the city and that was
where you stopped, or that's where the building started. Um
(25:27):
what they did was they built massive embankments that were
but they were started with sea walls and then we're
filled in that contained the sewers, contained the subway tunnels.
That was just basically extending the city out into the Thames.
And it did one thing. It gave you a lot
more space. It also covered up the tunnels. But it
(25:49):
also very wisely um brought the banks of the Thames
closer together in those stretches through the city. So the
Thames went from wider to narrower, which had the effect
of increasing its flow through London. It used to flow
much more slowly than it does now. But one of
the ways that they kind of make sure that all
(26:10):
that stuff washes through London and gets out to the sea.
Is by bringing the banks closer together to narrow it
to UM push the same amount of volume of water
through a narrower spot, which speeds the whole thing up. Yeah.
So if you go to the Victoria embankment today, UM.
Basil Get actually was knighted in eighteen seventy five because
(26:32):
of these achievements that he made as an engineer, and
that's where you're going to find the monument to him, UM.
And he he was very funny, like if you ever
read any interviews with him, he just kind of talks
about what what a drag it was to do that
job and how hard it was. Um, just sort of
in a very understated English way. Um. But that's where
the monument is. And by eighteen sixty six it was
(26:57):
evident that this plan was working because there was another
cholera outbreak UM, and the only part of London that
was really hit hard was the East End, which was
the only section of London that wasn't connected to the
sewer system. So they realized this, this is obviously working.
It's going to stop this disease. UM. It's clearly not
(27:18):
just airborne. So that that proved that correct too. Yeah,
it definitely supported I think Louis Pasture by that time
had formed his germ theory that Joseph Lister was really
starting to demonstrate it in the seventies. So yeah, it
was pretty um, pretty pretty evident that that. You know that,
and I think the microscope really kind of showed like, yeah,
(27:38):
there's there are such things as germs that whole myasthma
theories out the window. Yeah. But uh, basil Gett was
really smart because he was like he had foresight. He
wasn't like, let me just solve this problem, like London
has this many people and so just let me, let
me build this thing to handle this many people. He
built it with that on on the future and said, uh,
(27:59):
you know, let's build it to accommodate a population growth
of and um that happened within thirty years, London's population
doubled again. But because of the fore side of basil
get Um that things still remain pretty strong. At the time,
it did, I mean think about that, right. So he
was like, Okay, we'll make it so that four and
(28:20):
a half million people can use this thing and it'll
do just fine. He must have thought it would take
forever to get to that number, and they reached six
million in thirty years. That's crazy, that's a crazy amount
of population growth. And yet still basil gets designed worked
And one of the reasons it worked was because he
had a fail safe and I guess it was a
(28:41):
I guess you would call it a fail safe. But
so if there were a lot of water that suddenly
hit in the form of like rain or something like that,
like a flash flood. Remember, the sewers connected sewage and
rain water, so you didn't want the sewers overflowing into
the streets because that would sewage was overflowing in the streets. Right.
(29:03):
What he designed were um basically outfalls or overflows, so
that if there are a sudden large amount of rainwater
entered the sewers, it would be directed to spew into
the Thames, which is not not the greatest thing you
wanted to happen, but it would happen infrequently enough because
the sewers were so big that um it was an
(29:24):
acceptable fail safe, right, And it worked, And that's why
we added more and more and more Londoners using the
same sewer system because it had those outflows. Well, unfortunately
now I've reached the point, thanks to things like climate
change and the fact that it's creeping up on ten
million Londoners, that the sewer system is now fairly routinely
(29:45):
discharging raw sewage and storm water anytime heavy rain comes along.
And don't get anybody started on the fatbirds either, because
those are just making the problems even worse. So now
there there has to be another update and they're working
on that right now too. Yeah, but London still uh,
I mean, the Tyms is known as the cleanest river
(30:06):
that runs through a major city despite this, Yeah, much
because of the work of Basil get Um. But this
is a problem that these fifty overflows happening every year
no one's happy about. So they've they're underway, I think
started a couple of years ago in two thousand and sixteen.
The Tideway Tunnel Scheme UM, also known as the super Sewer,
(30:31):
should be completed in two thousand twenty three. And what
their goal basically is are these overflows that are, like
I said, around fifty times a year, to get those
down to no more than four every year, which is
good quarterly dump, quarterly overflow, all right, not bad. That
beats almost once a week. Yeah, you could just make
(30:53):
it like a national holiday and everybody can leave town
if you could schedule it. Yeah. So they've been working
on this for a while and it's um. I mean,
it's one of the biggest civil engineering projects in the
world probably yeah, or history maybe it. Um. What's funny
about it is that, like so basil Get created the
sewer to catch the sewage before it reached the Thames.
(31:14):
They're creating this super sewer, the tideway tunnel to catch
the overflow from basil Gets sewers before it reaches the Thames. Yes,
so his system is still the foundation. Yeah, I mean
they've definitely added to it and and improved on it. They
I guess sometime in the twentieth century stopped just pumping
raw sewage into the Thames and started treating it instead.
(31:36):
And then they still discharge the treated water into the Thames,
but it's now going through a treatment process that wasn't
there before. But yeah, but that that thing designed by
Basil Get this made of bricks, like three hundred something
million bricks um is still the foundation of this sewer
system in London. Pretty amazing. I think so too, man,
(31:57):
all because of the Great stink of eighteen fifty because
of a heat wave that came through and cooked several
hundred years of poop and pea and vomit and dead bodies.
This makes me want to do, uh, maybe a short
stuff on the when the Kiaga River and accurate or
in Ohio burned rivers on fire. That's not a good sign. No,
(32:19):
it's not Port Cleveland. Everybody just kind of hung their
head like, yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, Okay, we'll be a
good short stuff. I think I agree, chuck uh. In
the meantime, while we're whipping up that short stuff for you,
if you want to know more about the Great Stink,
head on over to um the Internet and read up
(32:40):
on it because there's plenty of great articles, including some
of the ones we used today. And since I said that, everybody,
it's time for listener mail. Uh. Hey, guys, started listening
to stuff you should know sometime last summer. Have been
hooked ever since. I've been working my way back through
the catalog and probably listened to a couple of hundred.
Listen to some of the other shows you guys talk about,
(33:02):
but they feel too scripted. Your show is really well done,
educational and entertaining thank you love Andrew, No kidding, there's
more uh. In a few different episodes, you guys use
the word yankee a lot. Uh. New England Vampires for
one Monument removal come to mind. Um. And by the way,
if we use yankee, were either quoting or like our
(33:24):
tongue is in our cheek. We're not like really saying yankee. No,
it's like loving if any no one really says that.
I mean there are people that still say that anger, yeah,
but they're read knecks. Um. I'm from New England and
have lived all over New England and I'm still in
New England. I wanted to share with you all my
favorite definition of yankee if you're from the South. And
(33:46):
by the way, I should preface this by saying I
don't get it. If you're from the South, a yankee
is someone from the North. If you're from the North,
a yankee is someone from New England. If you're from
New England, a yankee is someone from Vermont who eat
it's pie for breakfast with a knife. M Do you
get that? No? I think. Um. What Andrew doesn't realize
(34:07):
is that the person who told him that is insane
and that the only person who gets it as the
person who told them that. Well, he said, this comes
from an old timey farmer in Vermont that I used
to work for. So wait pie with a knife and
left himself a lot. Glad you got out of there live, Andrew. Thanks,
Thanks Andrew. If anyone out there can shed some light
(34:29):
on Andrew's farmers friends joke, we'd love to know, you
can get in touch with us. Go to stuff you
Should Know dot com and check out our social links there. Uh,
and you can also just send us a good old
fashioned email. To Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(34:52):
Is it how stuff works dot com
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there, and today we
have guest producer Josh sitting in. Not me, another Josh,
Another Josh. Josh. Yeah, you know what his nickname is, uh,
little Josh, the great Stink. That is a terrible nickname, Chuck.
(00:26):
We're just kidding, of course. Sorry, Josh, I'm I'm sorry
for Chuck. Everyone knows I'm the great Stink. I don't
know about that either. I've never once smelled you in
the like more than decade that we've worked together. I've
never known you to smell fouley. Wow. Alright, that means
I'm doing my I'm keeping my distance. We've been close, buddy,
(00:49):
and you still don't stink. Certainly not a great stink.
But that's neither here nor there. We're not talking about
a great stink yet, are we. No. I don't even
know what you're talking about, right, Actually, you don't even
know what it is that you brought up. We we
are talking to start, Chuck about a little city called
London Town across the pond in Great Britain, the United Kingdom, England.
(01:16):
That whole area over there, and um, London's been around
a very long time. It's been around since at least
the Romans kind of came and set up shop. Right. Yeah, Oh,
by the way, since you brought that up. I hate
to get sidetracked already, but my good friend Rob from
college Rob Elsie, my roommate and one of the smartest
guys I know, texted me the other day and said,
(01:37):
by the way, Alexander the Great was neither Greek nor Roman.
He was Macedonian. I saw somebody else emailed that in
I was like, Greek still closer. Yeah, So anyway, shout
out to Rob. Way to go Rob, real time corrections. Yes,
that's the way to go, Rob. All right. So London
has been around for a couple of years, is what
you were saying it is, And it's kind of slowly
(02:00):
grew and more and more people were like, Hey, I
like the I like this town. There's a lot going
on here. The fish and chips are great. Um, eventually
it will produce uh, some pretty pretty neat people. I'm
gonna settle down here. I couldn't think of a single
London as an example, but you know, people, Mary Pop
(02:20):
is going to show up eventually, thanks Chuck so um,
people started settling and accumulating, and uh, it became like
a pretty substantial city by the like sixteen hundreds, right.
But then the nineteenth century came and all of a sudden,
this is at the peak of the British Empire. Uh,
(02:40):
the early nineteenth century came along and London just exploded
in in population, in industry, um, right before and then
during and then right after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Um,
London really uh just grew as a result of that,
and all of a sudden there was something like three
(03:00):
million people living in London by like the eighteen fifties,
which made it the most densely populated city on the
planet from what I understand, at least the it had
the largest population from what I understand. And you know
what that means, Yes, that means if there's how many
millions you said three million, three in eighteen fifty, that's
(03:22):
three million butt holes. Yep, human butt holes are not
just humans expelling things now, just three million humans. And
then you've got horse butt holes and all sorts of
other animal but holes, pig butt holes, and they're just
all they're all pooping all the time. Right, pooping. Every
(03:46):
once in a while they catch a food board all
this and they'd start throwing up to there is a
lot of tinkle coming out of other holes. Um, there's
a lot of excrement that was being generated in London
all of a sudden, and there had been for a
very long time, but all of a sudden it reached
like a critical mass. And up to this point London
(04:07):
um enjoyed what we're called Roman sewards, which are basically
just a ditch in the ground that were meant to
collect rainwater. Right, And if you had to poop or
p or um vomit or something like that, and you
were a human in your house, you probably had a cesspool,
which was basically a pit in the basement. Sometimes, if
(04:31):
you were fancy, you might have like a sister or
a canister or something like that, and you would go
pooper vomit or p into this hole. And then the
hope was that the whole was big enough and your
family was small enough in number that the pooper p
your vomit would would decay and get absorbed into the
surrounding ground faster than you could fill it up. That
(04:54):
was that was how they dealt with with um surface
water and sewage. Then you had a hole that you
pooped and puked and from impeded. And then you had
rain ditches conveying rainwater to the to the Thames is
where the rainwater was supposed to end up. But it
wasn't just rainwater was it that ended up in the Thames? No,
(05:16):
I mean these I mean I don't think we can
just breaze past these cesspools. They were purposely designed to
overflow into the streets. Eventually, yes, they figured out that, yeah,
we're getting to the point where we have enough people
that that ore are cesspools are not decaying fast enough
that they're starting to overflow. Yeah. And if you lived
(05:38):
if you were poor and lived on like the basement
or the ground floor of an apartment building or something, um,
you might very well see the stuff seeping into your household. Uh.
Sometimes if that's if like someone's gone or if it's
an empty building, that stuff would build up and methane
would become trapped in there and there would be literal
(05:58):
explosions for the trap methane of people's pooh poop explosion. Yeah,
it was really really bad. And then when you talk
about the Thames, river. The Thames is a tide way,
so that means that the tides affect the water flow
and so it's not like sewage. You know, they were
thought like, let's just send it out to the sea
(06:19):
and it's all good. But what it would would happen
is stuff would just kind of slash back and forth
because of the tides. And the end result was the
Thames River was and when I say disgusting, I mean
capital D disgusting, Yes, dangerously disgusting Capital D dangerously too. Yeah,
(06:42):
so um, chuck, it was. I don't know how they
didn't realize that where London was on the Thames was
what's called the tide way, so it is affected by
the tide. And not only is it affected by the tide,
meaning when the tide rises, the um the estuary and
the sea basically comes up into London, but there's also
still water coming from the headwaters of the Thames. So
(07:04):
at high tide sometimes the Thames would overflow its banks
it would get so high. Right, So not only did
you have the Thames itself just basically turning into like
a washing machine on the agitation cycle, stewing and mixing
up garbage and remains because there are a lot of
dead human and animal bodies and it's much all yeah,
(07:29):
all that sewage, everything that people didn't want anymore, they
just put into the Thames. But unfortunately it wasn't carried
out to the seat. It was just kind of mixed together,
and it would be mixed together and kind of turned
into a solution that was suspended in the in the water,
and then eventually some of that would settle to the
to the bottom. But you have hundreds and hundreds of
(07:50):
years of waste just cycling right outside of London, and
like you said, eventually by the by the the nineteenth century,
apparently it really turned earned starting in about eighteen thirty.
They found records that as as late as eighteen hundred
people were still um catching and eating salmon out of
the Thames. By by eight well it was okay back then,
(08:13):
it was fine that by eighteen thirties something had changed
that that it had just again reached that critical mass
kind of like um, jeverson that South park where um
they go to the water park and like there there
there's like some scientists who realizes that the the p
to water ratio is about to hit a tipping point.
(08:35):
And once it tips past that point, everything's going to
turn into p um and it happens, and it's disgusting.
That's all kind of what happened to the eighteen thirties
to the Thames. It reached a critical point and tipped
into just like that dangerously disgusting vat of water that
was just hanging around in London at the time. Yeah. So, uh,
(08:57):
there's a very famous scientist named Michael Faraday who made
his name in UH in other realms of science, but
he actually worked for the Royal Institution UH in eighteen
fifty five when he basically started doing an investigation. He
went down to that river like got in it in
a boat, I would imagine, UH, and did various tests
(09:19):
and you know, recorded a bunch of stuff. And then
one of his tests was like he would drop white
paper in there and he said, after this paper gets
in like an inch below the surface, you can't even
see it, and like poop is basically like bubbling up
to the surface, Like you can see human excrement on
the surface down here. Yeah, like where where the time
(09:41):
the attempts is flowing past, like the structure of a
bridge that is jutting out of the water and it's
it's being cut up by that bridge. The flow is
it's roiling up this muck and disgusting stuff is just
roiling up in clouds. That he said, we're visible even
in this this opaque of a water. And he wrote
all this stuff up into an article letter I guess
(10:04):
that he sent to the Times newspaper, uh that he
called Observations on the Filth of the Thames. And this
was in eighteen fifty five, I think it was published.
And um, he basically says, if we just keep going
this way, we should not be surprised if um, something
really bad happens, like a hot spell comes along and
(10:24):
reminds us that we really missed a chance to do
something about this, and it's now too late. So that's
eighteen fifty five, and that's faaraday. At the same time,
there's another thing going on kind of off to the side,
where a um, a scientist named John Snow who actually
knew a lot. It turns out he um was that
(10:47):
was a Game of Thrones joke. Yeah, didn't somebody say, like,
you know nothing, John Snow? I think, but I think
that might have been first season. But anyway, but did
make an impact. I think somebody said, you know nothing,
John Snow. I don't know. I just saw it on
Twitter years back, right they said red wedding. I don't know.
(11:10):
They just just say red wedding. That's it. Um. So,
this John Snow guy, I think he had an H
in his name, which was his parents put in to
differentiate him from the Game of Thrones cat is um.
He He was basically one of the world's first epidemiologists
and he's working feverishly at the time because there was
(11:31):
something called the Victorian plague, which is cholera, and cholera
was a water borne illness that you did not want.
You could literally vomit and poop yourself to death in
a matter of hours. You would lose so much um
how you would dehydrate that quickly. And so John Snow
(11:54):
was like, there's a caller outbreak, and I suspect it's
in the water. But he went against a grain at
the time because during the eighteen fifties, Chuck, everyone thought
that you caught diseases from the smell of things. It
was called the miasma theory. That's right. People thought that,
and they thought that possibly that's where even cholera was
(12:17):
coming from UH, and cholera was was nothing new. UH.
There was an epidemic in the eighteen thirties that killed
more than six thousand people. There was a second outbreak
kind of shortly before this in the late forties that
killed fourteen thousand, So that's twenty and then between fifty
three and fifty four another ten. So that's thirty thousand
(12:37):
Londoners UH killed by cholera. And there are miasthmus that think, yeah,
it's from it's from smelling this stuff in the air, right,
so people are trying to like treat the air. They
poured something called um calcium of chloride of lime, which
amounts to basically pool chlorine today into the Thames, like
(13:01):
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of this stuff
to try to cover up the stench. That didn't work
and actually has made the Thames more toxic. But John
Snow is running around, He's like, no, no, there's there's
some other method of transmission. It has nothing to do
with the smell. Smells just a byproduct. And he actually
did a an an outbreak map of cholera and traced
(13:22):
it back to a particular well a public well that
had been dug unbeknownst to the well diggers, within about
um three or four feet of an abandoned cess pool
that had been built over and forgotten, and that the
cess pool that contained color laden fecal bacteria um into
(13:44):
the the the public well was making people sick, and
John Snow figured it out, and he's considered one of
the early earliest epidemiologists as a result. All right, let's
take a break and uh, I need to go wash
my hands, and then we'll come back and talk about
what happened in the summer of eighteen fifty eight right
(14:05):
after this. All right, so the times is in bad shape.
(14:33):
A few very smart people realize this. They're trying to
raise a little hay about it. Nothing much is happening.
People are getting cholera. Poor people are dying. But because
you know, I was about to say, because as Britain,
but a lot of countries back then may have handled
this the same way. Uh it really until it hit
kind of the the politicians and the rich and the
(14:54):
famous is when things really are going to change. And
in the summer of eighteen fifty eight, eat wave is
what really really changed things. Because the heat combined with
the the what was going on in that river really
made what was called the Great stinkh Capital g Capital
(15:14):
s in London. And it was happening all up and
down the Thims, but it was happening very close to where,
uh what was it Westminster where the politicians yeah, huddled
and uh and made their little rules and they couldn't
they basically couldn't go to work. They were like, you
know what, this is starting to affect our government. We're
(15:35):
using scented handkerchiefs. Uh, none of this is working. So
like we finally it took that to be able to
it be like in America, if you know, there was
something going on and no one reacted until like poop
was flowing up the steps of the White House basically right, basically,
and the the the irony of the whole thing is
(15:55):
that had it not been for um, the persistence of
myasthma theory of disease, Parliament might have not actually ended
up acting because so you have to, you have to
put yourself in this. So this stink is so bad
that we're talking about it a hundred and fifty or
sixty years later, right, That's how bad it was it
(16:18):
was a legendarily bad offensive stench. And not only was
it a terrible, wretching smell of supposedly people miles away
would catch scent of it and throw up, like just
throw up where they were standing. It was that bad.
Because again we're talking hundreds of years of human waste
(16:39):
and animal waste and um and decaying bodies and just
all sorts of nastiness and destines. Like you know what
they did with this, you know, when they were like
preparing animals for slaughter. It went to the same place exactly.
And again, this is hundreds of years of this stuff,
and the Thames has um slowed to a trickle because
it's a dry spell, and now because of this heat wave,
(17:01):
it's cooking. The Thames is cooking, all this nasty stuff
is cooking and the stench is coming off. So on
top of it being that bad of a smell, you
also have to put yourself in the position of the
people who are living at the time, who believed that
smells cause disease, that cholera and typhus and malaria are caused,
like if you smell it, you may have just caught it.
(17:23):
So they are terrified of this. But had john snow
had people listened to him and realized that no, you
get it from actually drinking the water, which is what
they're doing right. But Parliament may not have acted because
Parliament and some of the wealthier people in London they
got their water from like north of the city, um
piped in through aqueducts, so they had clean drinking water.
(17:46):
It was the lower classes that were drinking the water
drawn straight from the Thames, so they were drinking the
same water that they were throwing their waste into. Because
they didn't realize that there was such thing as um
the oral equal oral transmission of water borne illnesses. Everybody
thought it was just the stench. Yea. So parliaments uh
(18:08):
notoriously very slow to get anything done, like a lot
of governments. Uh. And then it took about, uh what
eighteen days, which was super fast. I think it was
a record. Yeah, I think so too. And they created
a bill past this bill and signed it into law
that basically said we need to basically re redo the
(18:30):
river here. I don't know what it's gonna take. Um.
I don't even think they knew how much it was
gonna cost at the time, but they knew that the
great stink had to stop right. So um. Again, this
was after it kind of like you said, the poop
just piled up at their doorstep, right. But they had fortunately,
just like a couple of years before, I think maybe
(18:52):
eighteen fifty five, they created a new department UM. Up
to this time, like the water works and the UM,
I think the sewage works were privately held. But Parliament
had just recently created a new department called the Metropolitan
Board of Works, and they had UM designated a chief
(19:14):
engineer by the name of Joseph H. Basil Get. Isn't
that how you would say it? Sure, we're going with
basil Get, then chuck if you're on board with that.
So Joseph basil Get would turn out to be one
of the most celebrated engineers in Western history. And he
just so happened to have kind of gotten on the
(19:35):
Michael Faraday trolley and been like, yes, we need to
do something about the Thames. And the solution is a sewer.
It's a modernized sewer. So he had spent years already
drawing up plans and trying to get them implemented to
no avail, and now all of a sudden, out of nowhere.
Within eighteen days of this, the great stink developing, the
(19:56):
Parliament says, hey, Basil get go, get your plans. We're
gonna put him into uh. You go raise some money,
say about three million dollars, which is like I think
four d and thirty million dollars today three million pounds um,
and get to work as fast as you can. Yeah.
Before this, the UH, they didn't even have, like before
(20:17):
the Metropolitan Board of Works, they didn't even have a
a group that was even funded to tackle anything like this.
And then once they even had the Metropolitan Board, it
wasn't really funded yet. So that's why they had to
go out and raise money. So the hiring of Basil
Gat was Basil Gat. Basil Gette is the Italian. No
(20:38):
I think his family originated in revolutionary France, so let's
say Basil get Yeah, so the hiring of him was
fortuitous because he knew what he was doing. Um, he
was definitely the guy to come in and take care
of this and his plan, like it was so revolutionary
that it's still in its simplicity though that it's still
sort of the basis for how things work aday all
(21:00):
these years later. Yeah, No, I mean, not only was
the revolutionary, was that well built as well, Like it's
it's the that sewer built in from like eighteen fifty
eight to I think the eighteen seventies forms the backbone
of London's metropolitan sewer system. Still to this day. It
was that well made. Oh yeah, So he's like, here's
what we'll do. He says, We're gonna catch this water, uh,
(21:23):
and the waste like you know, rain water and stuff,
surface water before it gets to the river. And everyone said,
good start, and he said, and then then we're gonna
just reroute it. Basically, we're gonna run it parallel to
the river and uh, combine these sewers together and divert
this stuff downstream. And again the plan those sadly is
(21:46):
still to divert it out to the sea, but just
not to the sea such that it would wash right
back in with the tides exactly. And and most importantly
where where it dumped out into the Thames was way
below the populated area, so it was out of sight,
out of mind, but it was still I mean, is
(22:06):
that that is definitely a mark against it, But with
considering what he had to work with, it was quite revolutionary.
The idea of catching all this stuff and moving it
away from the city to keep the Thames clean. Right,
all right, So let's take another break and we'll come
back and talk more about basil Gets plan that actually
(22:27):
worked right after this. So Chuck Um, you said, like,
(22:53):
the main part of basil Gets plan was, um to
basically build a subtranean sewer that rampare a little to
the Thames. That was big. I saw somewhere else miles.
I don't know where they got that, but let's go
with eighty two miles because it sounds much much more realistic.
But um that that in parts were big enough to
(23:15):
build it to to run a train through. And in fact,
some of these underground sewer tunnels they're like, well, it's
also build the underground subway system at the same time. Um.
So it was a massive project. And those use gravity.
They had like a two ft drop per mile, which
is a pretty good drop, so they would conduct the
sewage and rainwater down down towards the Thames, but not
(23:39):
at the times using gravity. And then smaller ones were
egg shaped so that they they were narrower at the bottom,
so that would kind of get the flow going even
faster too. So, um, that's like the main part, that's
the bulk of of this project, but it's certainly not
the whole thing by a long shot, No, not at all.
So they uh realized that they were like, you know,
(24:02):
even if you build a house that runs on gravity,
there might be low lying areas of your sewage pipe
that eventually calls you problems. I've been through this myself.
It's no fun. No one wants to deal with poop,
whether it's Victorian London or modern day Atlanta. And so
like today, you have to pump that stuff out. So
(24:23):
they built these giant pumping stations, a few different ones,
um Crossness, Abbey Mills, Chelsea and Deptford. And they made
these things really nice looking, which was probably a pretty
good move. Um, especially Abbey Mills and Crossness really really
lovely buildings. They kind of look like cathedrals, which is
(24:44):
ironic because they were pumping out poop the whole time. Uh.
And it was this was really key there because like
I said, this low lying you've got to take care
of all of the problem or else it's just gonna
like magnify, you know. So it wasn't good enough just
to be like, let's get it out, not worry about
the low levels or the low lying areas. So they
(25:05):
really had to pump it all out. Yeah, So so
they built these beautiful pumping stations. One of the other
things that they did was they reclaimed a tremendous amount
of land from the Thames. At the time that the
Thames just had natural banks, right like the river just
kind of came up to the city and that was
where you stopped, or that's where the building started. Um
(25:27):
what they did was they built massive embankments that were
but they were started with sea walls and then we're
filled in that contained the sewers, contained the subway tunnels.
That was just basically extending the city out into the Thames.
And it did one thing. It gave you a lot
more space. It also covered up the tunnels. But it
(25:49):
also very wisely um brought the banks of the Thames
closer together in those stretches through the city. So the
Thames went from wider to narrower, which had the effect
of increasing its flow through London. It used to flow
much more slowly than it does now. But one of
the ways that they kind of make sure that all
(26:10):
that stuff washes through London and gets out to the sea.
Is by bringing the banks closer together to narrow it
to UM push the same amount of volume of water
through a narrower spot, which speeds the whole thing up. Yeah.
So if you go to the Victoria embankment today, UM.
Basil Get actually was knighted in eighteen seventy five because
(26:32):
of these achievements that he made as an engineer, and
that's where you're going to find the monument to him, UM.
And he he was very funny, like if you ever
read any interviews with him, he just kind of talks
about what what a drag it was to do that
job and how hard it was. Um, just sort of
in a very understated English way. Um. But that's where
the monument is. And by eighteen sixty six it was
(26:57):
evident that this plan was working because there was another
cholera outbreak UM, and the only part of London that
was really hit hard was the East End, which was
the only section of London that wasn't connected to the
sewer system. So they realized this, this is obviously working.
It's going to stop this disease. UM. It's clearly not
(27:18):
just airborne. So that that proved that correct too. Yeah,
it definitely supported I think Louis Pasture by that time
had formed his germ theory that Joseph Lister was really
starting to demonstrate it in the seventies. So yeah, it
was pretty um, pretty pretty evident that that. You know that,
and I think the microscope really kind of showed like, yeah,
(27:38):
there's there are such things as germs that whole myasthma
theories out the window. Yeah. But uh, basil Gett was
really smart because he was like he had foresight. He
wasn't like, let me just solve this problem, like London
has this many people and so just let me, let
me build this thing to handle this many people. He
built it with that on on the future and said, uh,
(27:59):
you know, let's build it to accommodate a population growth
of and um that happened within thirty years, London's population
doubled again. But because of the fore side of basil
get Um that things still remain pretty strong. At the time,
it did, I mean think about that, right. So he
was like, Okay, we'll make it so that four and
(28:20):
a half million people can use this thing and it'll
do just fine. He must have thought it would take
forever to get to that number, and they reached six
million in thirty years. That's crazy, that's a crazy amount
of population growth. And yet still basil gets designed worked
And one of the reasons it worked was because he
had a fail safe and I guess it was a
(28:41):
I guess you would call it a fail safe. But
so if there were a lot of water that suddenly
hit in the form of like rain or something like that,
like a flash flood. Remember, the sewers connected sewage and
rain water, so you didn't want the sewers overflowing into
the streets because that would sewage was overflowing in the streets. Right.
(29:03):
What he designed were um basically outfalls or overflows, so
that if there are a sudden large amount of rainwater
entered the sewers, it would be directed to spew into
the Thames, which is not not the greatest thing you
wanted to happen, but it would happen infrequently enough because
the sewers were so big that um it was an
(29:24):
acceptable fail safe, right, And it worked, And that's why
we added more and more and more Londoners using the
same sewer system because it had those outflows. Well, unfortunately
now I've reached the point, thanks to things like climate
change and the fact that it's creeping up on ten
million Londoners, that the sewer system is now fairly routinely
(29:45):
discharging raw sewage and storm water anytime heavy rain comes along.
And don't get anybody started on the fatbirds either, because
those are just making the problems even worse. So now
there there has to be another update and they're working
on that right now too. Yeah, but London still uh,
I mean, the Tyms is known as the cleanest river
(30:06):
that runs through a major city despite this, Yeah, much
because of the work of Basil get Um. But this
is a problem that these fifty overflows happening every year
no one's happy about. So they've they're underway, I think
started a couple of years ago in two thousand and sixteen.
The Tideway Tunnel Scheme UM, also known as the super Sewer,
(30:31):
should be completed in two thousand twenty three. And what
their goal basically is are these overflows that are, like
I said, around fifty times a year, to get those
down to no more than four every year, which is
good quarterly dump, quarterly overflow, all right, not bad. That
beats almost once a week. Yeah, you could just make
(30:53):
it like a national holiday and everybody can leave town
if you could schedule it. Yeah. So they've been working
on this for a while and it's um. I mean,
it's one of the biggest civil engineering projects in the
world probably yeah, or history maybe it. Um. What's funny
about it is that, like so basil Get created the
sewer to catch the sewage before it reached the Thames.
(31:14):
They're creating this super sewer, the tideway tunnel to catch
the overflow from basil Gets sewers before it reaches the Thames. Yes,
so his system is still the foundation. Yeah, I mean
they've definitely added to it and and improved on it. They
I guess sometime in the twentieth century stopped just pumping
raw sewage into the Thames and started treating it instead.
(31:36):
And then they still discharge the treated water into the Thames,
but it's now going through a treatment process that wasn't
there before. But yeah, but that that thing designed by
Basil Get this made of bricks, like three hundred something
million bricks um is still the foundation of this sewer
system in London. Pretty amazing. I think so too, man,
(31:57):
all because of the Great stink of eighteen fifty because
of a heat wave that came through and cooked several
hundred years of poop and pea and vomit and dead bodies.
This makes me want to do, uh, maybe a short
stuff on the when the Kiaga River and accurate or
in Ohio burned rivers on fire. That's not a good sign. No,
(32:19):
it's not Port Cleveland. Everybody just kind of hung their
head like, yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, Okay, we'll be a
good short stuff. I think I agree, chuck uh. In
the meantime, while we're whipping up that short stuff for you,
if you want to know more about the Great Stink,
head on over to um the Internet and read up
(32:40):
on it because there's plenty of great articles, including some
of the ones we used today. And since I said that, everybody,
it's time for listener mail. Uh. Hey, guys, started listening
to stuff you should know sometime last summer. Have been
hooked ever since. I've been working my way back through
the catalog and probably listened to a couple of hundred.
Listen to some of the other shows you guys talk about,
(33:02):
but they feel too scripted. Your show is really well done,
educational and entertaining thank you love Andrew, No kidding, there's
more uh. In a few different episodes, you guys use
the word yankee a lot. Uh. New England Vampires for
one Monument removal come to mind. Um. And by the way,
if we use yankee, were either quoting or like our
(33:24):
tongue is in our cheek. We're not like really saying yankee. No,
it's like loving if any no one really says that.
I mean there are people that still say that anger, yeah,
but they're read knecks. Um. I'm from New England and
have lived all over New England and I'm still in
New England. I wanted to share with you all my
favorite definition of yankee if you're from the South. And
(33:46):
by the way, I should preface this by saying I
don't get it. If you're from the South, a yankee
is someone from the North. If you're from the North,
a yankee is someone from New England. If you're from
New England, a yankee is someone from Vermont who eat
it's pie for breakfast with a knife. M Do you
get that? No? I think. Um. What Andrew doesn't realize
(34:07):
is that the person who told him that is insane
and that the only person who gets it as the
person who told them that. Well, he said, this comes
from an old timey farmer in Vermont that I used
to work for. So wait pie with a knife and
left himself a lot. Glad you got out of there live, Andrew. Thanks,
Thanks Andrew. If anyone out there can shed some light
(34:29):
on Andrew's farmers friends joke, we'd love to know, you
can get in touch with us. Go to stuff you
Should Know dot com and check out our social links there. Uh,
and you can also just send us a good old
fashioned email. To Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(34:52):
Is it how stuff works dot com
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Chuck Bryant
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