>> Speaker A: And, like, pull it out, uh, and see how brown it came out. Uh, welcome back to privy. Privy is a podcast about bathrooms, recorded from my home bathroom. I'm your host, hunter hoover, and I love bathrooms. I'm, uh, just going to say. So this recording is coming right off the tail end of, um, pretty great technical difficulties. Did a full computer reset. The dinosaur lives on. And I did get the blue screen of doom with a frowny face. Um, so that's how you know your computer
hates you. Uh, is when it just puts a frowny face onto the screen on your behalf. So that was fun, but we're here. Uh, if I try to record in mono, um, it won't go above a certain level. Um, and so I'm working out that fun little feature of my computer now. Um, and so we're going to record this a little different this time. And so if it sounds weird, I apologize, but we're moving forward. A few weeks ago, my family ate at a local establishment here in Albany. Um, first of all, before I get there,
my wife and I ate in a local establishment. And I got to say the name of this. I'm not going to say the name of this mexican food place, but, um, they tout authentic mexican food. And I ordered a tray of, like, a plate of nachos. And I got tortilla chips with melted cheese that had been melted in a microwave. And I'm just sitting here going like, I understand that this is probably what I ordered, but when you order nachos with cheese, I just expected something more.
And maybe that's on me. That might be on me, but, uh, it was kind of just all around. I came home and put some nacho flavored cheese powder for, like, microwave popcorn on my microwave nachos from the authentic mexican restaurant. And so if that's not some level of white trash, I don't know what is. Um, but about a month or so ago, my family went to a local establishment called the
cascade grill. Now, I'm not going to say anything about the, um, teen and young adult aged employees who really missed it. As far as, like, hospitality and just being on top of your job, we're going to skip that. Um, well, actually, it comes back here in a second. But we sat there for 25 minutes, which is fine. They were not busy. But I was like, well, I'm going to use the bathroom. So I go in the bathroom, and it's chalk empty. And, um, you all probably saw
this. If you follow the social media, like, TikTok stuff for the cast at privycast, you saw this. But I went in and the bathroom was just not clean. And that's fine. Bathrooms get dirty. But again, the flock or conglomerate, or like I say, I think the technical term for a group of teens up to no good is like a gaggle or an conglomerate, but they're just not doing anything on the job. And it's like somebody could clean toilets. Like, just go do a bathroom check real quick. But, uh, the bathroom
was pretty whack. And I'm sitting in there and this gentleman comes in now, and he's an older guy doing his deed, and I'm in the stall. And so I'm like, I'm just going to mess with this guy. And I start to just make fart sounds with my mouth. And I do it the first time. I can hear him standing out the other side of the thing. And I'm like, uh. And I hear, oh, jeez, it's coming. And to which I realize that this gentleman thought
that the fart came out of him. Um, so I'm like, oh my gosh, you got to be kidding me. And I'm kind of just giggling, and then I decide I'm going to go for it again, and I just make another sound. And then he gets spooked by the fact that this happened and then quickly leaves the bathroom and does not wash his hands. Ten out of ten. Um, I spooked some old guy at the Cascade grill. And it was fun. And then we had our food and ate, and that was what you
do at restaurants. But it's hot out here. This privy summer here in the Willamete valley in Oregon. At the time of recording, it was 101 high. Today, I don't do well. I'm what the kids call of a thicker nature. And so when the temperatures exceed like 80, I just kind of don't function as well. Like everything just systems are much like my computer at the beginning of this record, they all just go frowny face on you and it's real
great. But one of the things that happens this time of year is it gets dummy hot. And yeah, by the time you hear this, I have already gone to Montana and returned. But at the point of this recording, I'm recording a little ahead of time because we're going to make this, we're, the heat's going to travel with us, and it's a real disappointment because Montana doesn't have to be as hot as Oregon is right now, but it is going to be while we're there. So we might as well just live with it. You know
what I'm saying? But it's hot out here, and the heat does something else. When you've interacted, uh, with a good, um, well, milled yard bin or maybe just like a leaky garbage, um, in a trash bin on the sidewalk in the summer heat, those things can build up a real big funk. They get real stinky, and heat has a habit of doing that. And thankfully, we live in a time where we have come up with a lot of systems. Like I've, uh, shared on the
podcast. This podcast is nothing if it's not a, uh, podcast to just be thankful for the bathroom situation that we have in today's age. But we live in a time where we have a lot of systems in place to help deal with our rank. We have a lot of waste. We create it both with our butt and with the things we put in our trash. And so there are systems in place to help us remove those waste. Waste removal in a way that gets it away from us so we don't have to endure the stink.
And we've talked quite a bit about a lot of those services, and we've talked a lot about those services this summer. Maybe it's the summer of stink here on privy. There's no way that'll catch on the summer of stink. But this week on privy, we're going to look at a specific time in history where things were far less sanitary, uh, and as a result, much more stinky. And if you hear that, you might go, well, yeah, that was, like, probably 95% of all of history before us was just a little more rank.
Uh, it's recently come to my awareness that when I go to the gym and I have gym funk going on. Uptown gym funk. No, I tried for it. The hip kids were not into that one. But when I go to the gym, it smells specifically like chicken and vegetable soup, like heavy onion chicken and vegetable soup, and it's just a disaster. But I picked up some soup for some. I can't remember who. Um. Oh, it's the Cascade grill. And I was like, dang, that smells exactly like when I go to the
gym. Sorry, Cascade grill, but your food is good. But it did make me think of how I smell when I go to the gym. But this week, uh, on privy, we're going to talk about a moment in history where this was almost out of hand. We're going to talk about the great
stink. Before, we had sewer systems, but after people decided it was not appropriate to just dump or perhaps plop their sewage straight into the street, they began to dump their sewage and privy pots and chamber pots and other things directly into the local river. The good old local river. We have a river here in Albany. Not too many people get up in it. Like, there's some floating. That happens, but it's
fine. But in many parts of the world, as they began to dump partially full chamber pots into the rivers, or if you're really swanky, maybe you had sewage that was piped into your chambers and then would empty itself directly out into the rivers. As time went on, it would run and dump into these rivers. But not only that, even after sewers were constructed in major cities, they often just routed the sewer with the end line
at the local river. Like, it would just seep out the end, like some sort of weird, like, 1960s and 70s cartoon where alt sewers lead to the river. It's kind of like finding Nemo, I think, in that regard. I think that's a plot point in finding Nemo. I think at one point they're like, if we can get flushed, it goes to the ocean. Which they, I believe were in Australia. Peacherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia. Yeah. And so, um, hopefully Australia is not
solely doing that type system. I doubt they are. But there was this idea that all sewers are just going to empty into the local rivers. It's fine that water is moving, so surely it will move in such a way to carry the very stinky brown we made downriver and away from our lives and knowledge. But the thing is, it settles, it collects, it builds up in time, and in other cases, the air quotes sewers were just rivers. Here's the other thing. It has to carry the stinky brown,
like, downriver. And so, God forbid you're the people that are downriver, because if you have North Humperdinksville and all the people in north Humperdinksville are just, like, skeeting it right into the river, and you're downriver from that, you get to enjoy all of the benefits of being downriver of north Humperdinksville.
The other thing is that as this waste is dumped and, uh, slung into the rivers, willy nilly and Hickelty Pickledy, if you will, it begins to settle and collect and builds up. It rests on the bottom. I've gone on record on the show once before and once in the future, we've already recorded it saying that you can add enough water to any solid and it will make it a liquid. But sometimes the sheer volume of solids being added to the liquid is too much for the dwindling amounts of liquid to
liquefy the solids. It's science. But as it settles and collects, the sewers, again, are just brick covers that shield the unsightly brown flow. Like, uh, there were some places where they just built a brick covering over the local river and called it a sewer and continued to just dump in it, even though it's just the river that used to be there, but now we can't see it or smell it as much because we put brick on top. Cities back then didn't rely solely on sewers.
Um, it was by the mid 18 hundreds. Waste management was a two part rinse it down the drain or dump it in the river, or take it to the cess pit or privy pit and dump it in there. So you got two options. You can either skeet it into the river, either directly or indirectly, or you can dump it in a big hole in the ground and contaminate your well water. I'm looking at you. Cholera. I bet cholera sucks. It can't be good. I'm pretty confident people passed from it,
but we're not talking about cesspits today. Um, these sewers that. These early sewers were often in bad shape. They're just slinging these sewers together. They're made out of brick, they're made out of stone. Um, in some cases, the sewers are getting worse. The population amount of people, like, dumping their brown and, um, just slinging human crap into these lakes and rivers and streams and sewers, air quotes, sewers. Um, it's increasing.
And also to couple that we have a full Springfield Simpsons situation, where with the rise of the industrial revolution, the factories began to just dump their noise straight into the river as a way of getting rid of, you know, we have all sorts of laws and things. Yeah, we have all sorts of laws and things to keep that from happening nowadays. But at the time, they didn't exist. And so this produced more than just turds and trash and other things. Like, this is also like chemical runoff.
It was a different world back then. Nowadays, if that happened, companies would be slapped with so many fines and put them under. But later, flush toilets are introduced, further adding to the problem of overused sewers. Like, now, it's just easy to get rid of it. You don't even have to carry the little thing outside like, you have it plumb straight into your house. Granted, you probably had to pour some water down
the bowl, but that's fine. Like in a world where you used to just deuce into a small pan and have somebody carry it outside for you. The piss boy, if you will. Like having a flush toilet, even if you have to put the water in the bowl to get it to flush. It's a better world. Um, it's just a better world at the time. With all of this added, we'll call it traffic
to the sewers and the sewer lines. There was a lot of overflow, and there was a lot of outflow in these situations and when you're dealing with septic or rank water or any sort of sewage situation, two things you don't want overflow and outflow. Never, ever. You don't want it. Um, and if you do have it, you want to plan for where and how those things are going to overflow and outflow. More on that here in
a couple of episodes. Well, in one city, the majority of the overflow and the dumping went into one body of water. London, 1855. The river tames Thames. I don't know, but the river became something of, uh, quote, concern to local officials and citizens. Visual logs, not tree logs, but, like, big, big, dougie dookie brown logs, could be seen floating in the river. It's like a freaky, weird game of frogger, but instead of, like, the fun little lily pads and logs, like, it's turds.
It'd be a different game for frogger if some of those logs were just turds and you couldn't jump on them and they were, like, tricked. Huh. Huh. But they're visually like the river Tams. You could go down and you could see just skeet, just floating. Whew. The optics on this were so bad. That scientist, Michael Faraday, um, I believe known for the Faraday cage, uh, he did a lot with magnets and electricity. Yeah, yeah. He has to be the Faraday cage guy. He decided to
test the water. He's like, hey, that stuff looks pretty whack. We should test it and see if it's bad. See if it's committed crimes of pollution unseen to humankind. So far, he tested the water. The situation was so bad that one test was just to dip a piece of paper in the river and pull it out, uh, and, uh, see how brown it came out. That's how bad this river had gotten. It's not science, but the stink and everything was so
awful that that's where they had to start. They're like, is it even not completely brown? Like, what level of brown is the water? Do you know what I'm saying? His report on his tests of the river Thames was near the bridges. Quote, near the bridges, the feculents rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface. Even in water of this kind, the smell was very bad and common to the whole of the water. It was the same as that which now comes up from the gully holes
in the streets. The whole river was, for the time, an actual sewer. Woof. In response to this and the increasing problem of the river Tams, the river itself actually took on a personality in their culture, and the personality was that of being a crappy river. The Thames was known as monster soup. Uh, monster soup. I made a monster soup this week. Uh, but publications pretended to draw artwork of the river Thames. Um, and the water is filled with skulls and monsters and other filthy looking
creatures. A character called Dirty Father Tams. Sweet lord, could you imagine them in the modern days, year 2022, of our lord having a character named Dirty Father thames? It, uh, was a simpler time, I'll tell you what. But this character, dirty father Thames, looks like kind of like a homeless wish Santa Claus, because he's this character in their society who lived under the bridge by the river Thames and came out of the water to, like, cause everything
to smell real bad. One poem written about the Thames titled Father Thames says, filthy river, filthy river, foul. From London to the nor, what art thou but one vast gutter, one tremendous common shore. Father Thames took on a personal dirty. Don't, uh, forget the dirty, dirty. Father Thames took on a personality, and the local government did what they could to fight it. They're like, we got to shut this down. This dude's going to overthrow
Santa Claus in popularity over here. Um, not really, but they decided to fight the actual stink in the river, and they dumped lime and chloride and caloric acid, I think, to help ease the stench. So now they're just dumping chemical in the river to try to make it smell less. People were actually afraid of this great stink because at the time, they still had the miasma theory of disease, which essentially says that a disease that a person could contract, uh, by
inhaling bad air. So the stink of the air in London at the time, they believed it could actually make you sick, um, and that it was, like, bad. This river that was ranked with the stink of Englishmen's leavings. But finally, everyone's least favorite stinky water contracted a friend, cholera, and it ravished London between 1845 and 1855. Now, while most at the time still believed it to be an air quality control issue, Jon Snow, the
scientist, not the White Walker. Jon Snow from the game of Thrones. Uh, he poised and posited and was doing research in whether the contaminated water was a problem or if it was, in fact, the air. Spoiler alert, the water was defoe the problem. So on the scene in London is air that is just kind of perpetually smells like a human diaper. Cholera. From contaminated drinking water. A continuing system of dumping the culprit of both of these into the local water supply.
The river became famous again for being foul. Charles Dickens also wrote to a friend, the thing stank so bad it hurt your head and made you want to skeet your insides. Those are his exact words, skeet your insides. It is stated that the deposits of human crap were up to 6ft deep in the river at places 6ft. That's taller than I am standing. I'm sitting now, but if I was standing, the amount of human foul in the river Thames at the time would be
taller than I am. In places unreal, people would smear lime on the curtains of houses and rooms to try to block the stench out. It's almost like a plague of its own had struck the area. Stench. In the summer of 1858, the weather provided the final straw for this camel's back. June, London, 1858, they had a particular heat wave and dry spell that caused the water level of the Thames to go down, leaving exposed human sludge on the banks and in part of the bed of the river.
Couple that with the record high temperatures there at the time, mid 90s in the shade and over 115 in the sun. Preach. I feel that. I felt that today. I was going to take my children to a park today, and I looked at the thing and it said, 99 degrees. And I went, you know what's better than a park right now? Air condition. Like, I'm all for kids getting outside and playing, but when it's 100 degrees, no, it's
just not worth it. Somebody's going to gun, come keel over about that, you know what I'm saying? But this insanely high temperatures in London at the time resulted in what the people of London, and later the world would call the great stink. It was so bad, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, famous, uh, lovers, canceled a trip to the river because they couldn't bear the polluted air. Like, it was so stinky, they canceled their vacation.
The great stink was so great, they actually saw a pause in parliamentary meetings. It shut down the government again. The remedy was powdered lime, and the substance, not the delicious fruit. Uh, at one point, they were pouring 250 tons of powdered lime into the river to shut down the smell. Within weeks of the great stink. The government at the time passed a bill saying that dumping of sewage and waste had to happen outside the boundaries of the city. Voila. And to remedy the stink
in the city. Now, over time, they went about an infrastructure rehaul to do away with the piles of turds that had become a part of their lives. Now, uh, uh, we're going to talk about this stink and the purpose of stink here in a know, we got to get philosophical with it. But one engineer, Joseph Basilget, Basalgit Basilget, Bazalgit bazinga, came up with the sewage solution, rerouting the already present lines, sewage lines to dump outside of the city.
It took over 15 years to complete this sewer system rehaul. But the sewage and the waste no longer ending up on the banks of the city, solved the problem of the great stink. And more importantly, it showed a market decrease in cholera cases in the area. Basilget is a. Huh. Basalgit. Basilget is a hero of London, known for how he rerouted turds to save lives. His sewer system, or at least parts of it, is still in operation today and serves a population of over 8 million people.
What a rad dude. And I want to note here, the purpose of stink is the problem existed prior to the stink. But as is most cases when there is stink, the stink exists to alert you of a danger or a bad thing lurking just out of reach. And so the next time you smell big, smell somewhere, it's probably something letting you know that there's something going on somewhere with something, as was the case with the River Thames in 1850s London. This brings us to the end of another episode of
Privy. I really appreciate y'all joining us. I hope your summers get cooler and remain non stinky. Uh, as always, we'd love for you to leave us a rating or review. If you're on Spotify, it's really easy. You just click the little stars. If you're on Apple Podcasts, it's also very easy. Um, but you can also leave us a review there, and we'd love to read some of those during the show. As time goes on, we're going to read them as they come
in. Uh, the reason that you might hear that and you go, oh boy, here we go, another podcast asking me to leave a rating and review. But the reason that those things happen is because it helps people find the show. It actually helps people locate the show and, um, know that it's out there. So when they search for it, it helps them find it. Leave us a rating and review. Five star options are preferred. We'd love for you to do that. It's much appreciated.
And it's just a simple way that you can, as always, send us email suggestions. Privycast@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. Just say hi. Just say, hey, I listened to the show. I didn't like it when you talked about pooping. Uh, and my name is Lil Dougie for 19. Follow, um, us on social media. We're at Privycast. Tread lightly on the TikTok. Remember that. But, uh, yeah, follow us on social media. See what
we got going out there. As always, we want to thank Kevin McLeod for the use of barroom ballet as our intro and outro music. You can find Kevin's music@incompetent.com and his music is licensed under Creative Commons license Attribution 40. Thanks, Kevin. This has been another episode of Privy. Thank you so much for joining us. And now, as always, don't forget to flush. See.