The Big Necessity Read Online Free PDF Page B

happily ignorant that their new purchases had spent years wading through the most unfashionable muck.
    By modern standards of smell and hygiene, London was disgusting. So was everywhere else. Over the Channel in Paris, contemporary accounts tell of grand aristocrats regularly soiling the corridors at Versailles and the Palais Royal. At Versailles, the garden designer Le Nôtre deliberately planted tall hedges to serve as de facto stall partitions. The eighteenth-century writer Turneau de la Morandière described the Versailles of Louis XV as “the receptacle of all of humanity’s horrors—the passageways, corridors, and courtyards are filled with urine and fecal matter.” Waste matters in the Kremlin were no better, and toilet facilities only improved because it was feared all that excreta would corrode the gold.
    Nonetheless, London and Paris both continued on their smelly way until population growth intervened. With industrialization and rural migration, London grew from 959,000 residents in 1801 to 2.3 million in 1851, making it the largest city in the world. The on-site system could no longer cope. There was too much waste to dispose of and inflation didn’t help: the cesspool emptying fee was by now a shilling, twice the average laborer’s daily wage. Also, the gradual introduction of the flush toilet increased the amount of water to be dealt with. Faced with expense and hassle, people did what people still do, and illegally dumped their cesspool contents into the nearest pond, river, or sewer.
    London had had sewers for centuries. Henry VIII issued the first Bill of Sewers in 1531, which gave “the loving Commons” the powers to appoint sewer commissioners, Tudor environmental health inspectors who inspected drains and gutters. But neither the commissioners nor the sewers they protected were concerned with human excreta. The word
sewer
either derives from “seaward,” according to one source, or, according to the compilers of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, from the Old Northern French
seuwire
, meaning “to drain the overflow from a fish pond.” Somehow, in a way obvious only to etymologists,
seuwire
in turn derived from the Latin
ex
[out of] and
aqua
[water]. Sewers have always been a carriage for dirtied water, but the degree and manner of dirt has changed. The modern assumption that sewers carry sewage is relatively new, as is the presumption that waste and water have always gone together.
    There were some in antiquity who decided water was a clever way tocarry away the contents of their latrines. Primitive forms of the flushing toilet, together with channels to carry foul water away, were found at the 3,700-year-old palace of King Minos at Knossos. (This allowed one twentieth-century Englishman to wonder why his Oxford college “denied him the everyday sanitary conveniences of Minoan Crete.”) The Romans had the Cloaca Maxima, a large city sewer that was cleaned by prisoners of war.
    But most ancient societies did not think of using water to transport waste because they didn’t need to. The volume of waste and of people could be satisfied with on-site containment and removal services. Even after toilets became popular, it remained illegal for London’s citizens to connect their waste pipes to the sewers. It had to go somewhere. By 1840, as the Victorian builder Thomas Cubitt testified before the Parliamentary Select Committee into the Health of Towns, “The Thames is now made a great cesspool instead of each person having one of his own.”
    In these conditions, diseases thrived happily and fruitfully. Feces carries nasty passengers, and one of the worst is cholera, which arrived from India by ship in 1831. Cholera’s primary vehicle is the excrement of humans, who act like inadvertent seeders of the bacteria by expelling diarrhea violently and relentlessly. In a good sanitary system, where excreta are kept separate from drinking water,