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podcast transcript
In the summer of 1858, London was brought to a standstill by something you couldn’t see but couldn’t ignore: the overwhelming stench of the Thames.
This incident, known as the Great Stink, was more than just unpleasant. This has left modern cities facing growing sanitation, public health, and urban planning crises.
What happened that summer reshaped one of the world’s greatest cities and forever changed the way we think about infrastructure.
Learn more about the stench of 1858 and the smell that changed history in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Looking back to the roots of the crisis of 1858, it is important to remember that London, the world’s first great industrial city, faced unique challenges.
The driving force of the Industrial Revolution during this period was the steam engine powered by coal. These coal engines were extremely dirty and spewed out soot and soot that covered everything and hung in the air.
Writers of the era, such as Charles Dickens, provided grim accounts of the environmental destruction caused by the widespread use of coal. Their depictions often depict factories polluting the air with smoke and polluting waterways such as the Thames with industrial waste.
Urbanization has created equally serious problems for Britain’s waterways, particularly in cities such as London.
London’s population jumped from 1 million to 2.5 million in the mid-19th century, and exceeded 6 million in the 20th century. This rapid urbanization has placed unbearable pressure on the environment, leading to increasingly dire consequences and setting the stage for a crisis.
By Dickens’ time, London’s population had approached three million, but its sewage system was still stuck in the dark ages. London’s old sewage system was little more than a series of underground water channels. These brought waste to the river, which was also London’s only source of drinking water.
If you remember my episode on the history of sewers, sewers are one of the most important inventions that made urban living possible.
The city of London has long paid the price for overusing the Thames with recurring cholera outbreaks. Cholera is mainly caused by consuming water contaminated with human waste.
A particularly vivid event was the cholera outbreak of 1831, which spread through London’s water system and killed as many as 30,000 people. It was not until John Snow’s work during the 1854 outbreak that people began to realize that water was the root of the problem.
At the time, the miasma theory that diseases were caused by breathing in polluted air was popular, and it was an interesting concept because the water they drank was the color of mud.
However, because most beverage containers at the time were made of pewter, the putrid color of the water could not be seen even when boiled for tea in the morning.
Hastily built housing for London’s burgeoning urban population often lacked toilets, leading to human waste being collected in buckets. Residents found it unbearable and left it on the street rather than storing it indoors. In buckets it ended up covering the streets. In some areas, roads were covered in several inches of human and animal waste.
According to 19th century estimates, up to 300,000 horses lived in London. Each produced up to 30 pounds of manure and several liters of urine per day. Whenever it rains in London, this terrible runoff flows into the city’s ancient storm system and inevitably into the River Thames.
In his novel Little Dorrit, published a year before the summer of 1858, Charles Dickens said: Narrow wells and house pits through which the inhabitants gasped stretched out far to every point of the compass. Where there was a clear, fresh river running through the heart of the town, a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed.
In Little Dorrit, Dickens harshly criticized the city’s sewage office, satirizing it as the Circumlocution Office. The Circumlocution Office is a fictional agency whose sole purpose is to clearly expose the real bureaucratic failures of the city and explore ways of not getting things done.
When not writing novels exposing the trials of urbanization, Dickens published his own weekly journal. Charles Dickens’ Weekly Journal, House Words. In the summer of 1858 he addressed the sewage problem in the following article:
The River Thames, polluted by the drainage of 700,000 people before it reaches London, piles up hundreds of thousands of sludge on its mudbanks, exposed daily to low water, and on this hot day is festering in the heart of the metropolis.
Dickens was not alone in his interest in London. His concerns resonated with others on the front lines of science and public health. The city’s most famous scientist, Michael Faraday, joined Dickens in campaigning against river pollution.
In addition to his work on electromagnetic induction and electric motors, Faraday was one of the first to warn of the crisis on the Thames. In 1855, a few years before the disastrous summer of 1858, Faraday performed a white cardboard experiment.
Deeply concerned about the pollution of the Thames River, Faraday devised a simple test. As he walked along the riverbank, he dropped a piece of white card into the water and noted the depth at which it disappeared from view. Faraday reported that the card disappeared from sight before it had sunk even an inch. The water was a pale, opaque brown liquid.
Faraday published his findings in an editorial in The Times of London on July 9, 1855, titled ‘Observations on the Sewage of the Thames’. He warned that if the city doesn’t take action, it will virtually spell disaster. Faraday warned: “If we ignore this subject, we cannot expect impunity, and we should not be surprised if the hot season gives sad evidence of our carelessness.”
In the summer of 1858, a combination of factors put the Thames in crisis. With temperatures reaching an astonishing 48°C (118°F) in July, river conditions deteriorated rapidly, making earlier ominous warnings come true. This perfect storm ultimately led to an environmental disaster.
Centuries of waste accumulated in the River Thames have literally begun to ferment in the water. As the putrid ferment became more severe, a terrible stench swept through the city.
The city’s suffering was captured in a series of famous cartoons in The Times of London. The cartoon depicts Father Thames resurrecting from a putrid watery stew filled with dead animals and industrial waste.
By a twist of fate, Parliament moved to the Westminster campus, right next to the Thames and now the epicenter of the disaster.
Lawmakers coated all the building’s curtains with calcium hypochlorite, also known as lime chloride, to mask the acrid smell.
It didn’t work.
Lawmakers left their offices with scented handkerchiefs on their faces. Because the smell overpowered any attempts to mask them.
The situation got so bad that even the most staunch Londoners were finally forced to leave the city. Finance Minister Benjamin Disraeli could take it no more and left London by July to return home.
As the crisis continued to escalate, even Queen Victoria could not escape disaster. In an effort to calm the public, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert took a boat ride on the Thames to show the city that all was well.
The trip was a colossal failure.
Despite the scented handkerchiefs and luxury boat, it only took the royal couple a few minutes to order the boat back as water levels dropped, exposing more sewage.
Ironically, just a month after her hasty retreat, the Queen sent the world’s first transcontinental message to the United States via 3,200 kilometers of undersea cable. This is an incredible technological feat considering London’s waste problem just a few miles from the Queen’s Palace.
Dickens claimed that the message finally reached the Circumlocution Office. Now that political leaders were experiencing the crisis firsthand, Congress was forced to act, setting off years of recriminations and debates that initially resulted in little action.
Ironically, the plan to address the crisis has been known and awaiting adoption for decades. John Martin, a famous landscape painter and colleague of Faraday’s, developed a plan to solve the problem.
In 1828 Martin published the following book: A scheme to provide the cities of London and Westminster with pure water and to materially improve and beautify the western part of the metropolis. It called for embankments to be built along the river to capture waste and transport it parallel to the river rather than across it.
Surprisingly, even dire public health warnings have failed to lead to action by Congress. An 1842 report published in the Lancet by health reformer Edwin Chadwick claimed that as a result of filth, only half of children born in British cities reached their fifth birthday.
Another cholera outbreak in 1849, again blamed on the long-term theory, did not move the needle. The city did not have a solution of this scale ready until 1858.
Benjamin Disraeli, the most staunch advocate of reform, explained the need for a solution: That noble river, which had long been the pride and joy of the English people, and which had hitherto possessed all the qualities which can make a great city prosperous and healthy, has now become an otherworldly pool, reeking with an indescribable and intolerable stench of horror.
The difficult task of saving the city fell to Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Metropolitan Commission. Bazelgette’s genius was based on several fundamental insights.
He concluded that the north-south alignment of London’s sewers draining into the Thames should be changed. The new design would have the sewer run parallel to the river and extend to the river’s mouth outside the city, allowing the tide to carry waste out to sea.
Bazelgette, understanding the enormous costs, persuaded lawmakers that the pipe size of the system would have to be expanded at high cost, but sooner rather than later given London’s urbanization. The city’s engineers also implemented Martin’s embankment plan to collect waste before it enters the Thames.
Bazelgette advocated the use of Portland cement in new sewage systems, arguing that this modern material would withstand the passage of time and the strain of London’s continued growth.
The gamble to use Portland cement paid off. Because the sewer system is still functional and structurally sound after 160 years.
Bazalgette’s plan saved the city. With 82 miles of main intercept sewers and more than 1,100 miles of street sewers, he ensured that waste was collected. before It reached the Thames River and flowed east towards the sea.
Bazalgette was knighted and remains a prominent figure in British history.
In the stench of 1858, one of the greatest engineering achievements in modern history was born, transforming London and setting the standard for cities around the world. It reminds us that sometimes progress begins not from inspiration, but from despair.
Sometimes it turns out that the driving force behind progress isn’t vision or ambition, but an overwhelming desire to get away from a really bad smell.
