The Great Stink: The Stench So Bad They Gave It A Name

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, 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 after this. All right, so the times is in bad shape. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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. 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 worked right after this. So Chuck Um, you said, like, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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,

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 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. 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. 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. Is it how stuff works dot com