436 - The History of Sh*t (Literally)

so how do we like get rid of shit and i'm not saying how do we figure out what random stuff we don't want anymore no how do we actually literally get rid of all the shit that pours out of our stinky buttholes. For the vast majority of us, at least I hope the vast majority of us, having access to a toilet is probably something you don't really ever think about.

Though there may not be as many public toilets as we'd always like, it's usually pretty safe to say that no matter where you are in a town or a city or even along a freeway, every hour's drive or so, there's an available bathroom. Even if it's one of extremely dubious cleanliness and lots of poorly spelled graffiti for us to do our business in. It might not compare to your sweet, sweet bathroom at home with a sturdy door, familiar toilet seat, unsoiled by an...

army of possibly filthy-ass strangers. Cushy multi-ply toilet paper or wet wipes and nobody banging on the door unless you have a particularly rude housemate or small children, but it'll do. You do your business. You flush, you wipe, or you rinse with a bidet, and it's done. Bye-bye, nasty-ass, stinky old poop. And then that shit just goes wherever shit goes. You don't even have to think about it. Not your problem.

all part of the miracle of modern plumbing and sanitation. Well, it probably comes as no surprise that for much of human history, this wasn't the case. It wasn't always so easy to get rid of human shit, but that also wasn't always a problem. Way, way back in the times of nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, about two million years ago until approximately 10,000 years ago, shit simply cycled back into nature. While you hunted or gathered, you took a dump wherever you happened to be.

as long as it was away from where you were picking berries or sleeping, I'm guessing. And you kept walking, leaving your man- or woman-made compost to fertilize the soil and become part of nature's vast life-giving machinery. Then the miracle of agriculture came along, and it became more advantageous for humans to stay in one place while smaller bands of people set out to hunt and bring back what they killed. Those early human beings are the ones we credit with agriculture.

cultivating land and domesticating animals, switching human behavior from that characteristic of small clannish bands to that of people existing in an elaborate and complex social network. But they also were the ones who made it necessary for the first time in human history. for us to deal literally with our own shit. And how did we deal with it? In many different ways.

Some dug pits away from their dwellings or in the middle of their fields. Some designated bathroom spaces outside the village or behind the bushes or underneath the trees. Some went out to the riverbanks, letting their excrement get carried away by water. To the detriment.

of anyone living downstream. As long as those settlements were small and people avoided the shittiest parts of the river, those methods worked. But as little villages burgeoned into cities and their populations grew while the surrounding fields and forests shrank, all that shit...

began to pile up to the tune of about a pound of shit per person per day, which of course grew exponentially with the population. In an ancient city like Rome or Alexandria, it had around a million people as early as 100 BCE. They were dealing with a million pounds of new shit every day. 365 million pounds of new shit a year. And that's a lot of shit to deal with. And in order to deal with it all, a new sewage system needed to be developed. And it was. Nothing spurs on innovation like necessity.

It might surprise you that many ancient societies had complex sewage systems, the Minoan civilization of present-day Greece, the Etruscans, and especially the Romans, whose contributions to the advancement of waterworks are still well-known today.

of course without modern technology these systems rarely worked perfectly and the tough thing about shit is that when things go wrong when some poop gets in the water supply all that shit so to speak can really hit the fan the history of shit, sewers, and pretty much everything you've wanted to know or haven't ever wanted to know about how our species has gone number two on this historical, strange, and shitty-ass edition of Time Suck.

This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck. You're listening. Well, happy Monday and welcome to the Cult of the Curious for the first time in 2025. I think I said last week that it was the last time in 2025. Obviously, I meant 2024. Or I've been tinkering around with my homemade time machine.

And it's getting harder to track what's the future, present, or past. I'm Dan Cummins, a master sucker. Someone Dolly Parton may need to get a restraining order against at some point. I'm still very much in love with her. Poop fan. Butthole aficionado. Aficionado.

Aficionado? Aficionado. And you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod. Hail Lucifina. Praise be to good boy Bojangles and glory be to Triple M. Thanks for checking in on Time Suck for the 10th calendar year of its existence. Started this shit. Back in 2016. And now without further ado, let's talk about poo, you beautiful bastards. This topic might sound a little boring to some of your ears. After all, shit is shit, right? Comes out of us. It's brown or yellow or every little green tinged.

Or you've had a lot of beets to eat recently or drank a lot of beet juice. A very fucking alarming reddish purple that sure looks a lot like blood at first glance. It makes you think as I once did, oh my God, I'm dying. And quickly, regardless of its color or consistency.

Don't even get me started on consistency. It plops into the bowl, spray paints around it, and then you flush it down as fast as you possibly can and try and figure out how to unstink the bathroom before someone else comes in. Unless, like my wife Lindsay assures me, You literally don't ever poop. You don't even know what it is. You just have a rosy-smelling, sparkling, clean little butthole just for funsies. Pooping can be stressful, a relief, an emergency, more depending on your bathroom setup.

Like if you have one of those ultra high-end, high-tech Japanese toilets, even luxurious experience. But we don't tend to think about that much after the bathroom door swings shut. Maybe we should, because poop, poop is life and death.

First of all, human behavior and the behavior of all living things in general is geared towards survival, which means finding food and consuming it. Our brains, limbs, whatever tools of whatever era we live in help us get the food. But it's our digestive systems, beginning with your mouth and ending with your butthole. to do the real dirty work of delivering essential nutrients to your body and getting the waste out.

In your mouth, food goes in and gets mashed up and added with saliva to help it liquefy in the stomach. Food is stored and mixed, adding water to help digestive chemicals turn it into mush in the small intestine. An assembly line of specialized chemicals from organs, including the pancreas, liver.

and gallbladder, break down food into molecules small enough to be absorbed through the intestinal walls in your colon or large intestine, whatever the small intestine hasn't digested, spends hours or even days working its way through.

I feel like mine, depending on what I eat, always spends about five minutes tops on certain meals, but whatever. Hordes of teeming bacteria live symbiotically in your digestive tract, working to liberate the more stubborn nutrients from the molecules that made it this far without being digested.

Most of the water added in the stomach is reclaimed here. And then we get to your sweet, sweet little rectum. It contains important nerves that inform your body when someone has put a finger or a thumb or a butt plug or dildo or...

Scary as hell looking silicone fisting toy or a real live wiener in it. Or maybe several wieners. If you're extremely adventurous or completely insane and have your rectum confused with some strange cheap carnival game that you don't need to take special care of. But for real.

Your rectum does contain important nerves that inform your body that it's time to evacuate everything that hasn't been digested. Water, dead bacteria, indigestible fiber, undigested fat and protein, maybe a small piece of saran wrap you accidentally swallowed because you ate those leftovers too fast. Dead cells. In other words, poop, shit, feces, dung, homemade chocolate syrup, knockoff Play-Doh. And your poop and pooping habits are just as unique as you are, you cute little snowflake you.

Some people are thrice daily poopers. Guilty as charged. Others only thrice weekly. Some people make floaters. Others make sinkers. Some people poop big. Really, really. How the fuck did that just come out of a human butthole? That isn't seconds away from being part of a dying body big. And others make round little deer droppings. Your unique pooping experience is informed by your diet, your metabolism, the environment, how good of a person, morally speaking, that you are. Did you know that?

Did you know that the better of a person you are, the better your poop smells? My poop smells so good, numerous friends have offered to pay me to come over to their houses and just shit in the corners of their basements or in the pots to hold their houseplants just so they can bask in my golden, heavenly odor.

No, that'd be crazy. I've never had anyone beg me for my shit. I have had family members beg that I don't shit in their bathroom, though. Or that I, you know, light a candle more often or run the fan longer. You know? What do we do? before candles in bathrooms. Of course, whatever your diet, metabolism, and environment are, shit can go sideways. Shit can get fucked up. And the two biggest problematic shit culprits are diarrhea and constipation.

The digestive process requires up to 9 liters of water, which come from drinking, from saliva, from secretions in the stomach. In your stomach, the food, water, and various chemical secretions mixed into a partially digested liquid mass. chyme that your digestive muscles push through the system in undulations, peristalsis. Normally, your intestines reclaim up to 95% of that water, drying out the stool to the point of cohesion as a nice...

Perfect little butt lock. I still think about the most perfect, satisfying turd I've ever created sometimes. I was on my honeymoon with Lindsay. We just got into the hotel. Just got checked in in Kauai. I went to go use the lobby bathroom. We were going to have a little drink. And I didn't want to blow up our room's bathroom after a very long flight and a ride over from the airport. I really had to go. And when I did, it was just this perfect, smooth log.

So big that when it twisted around, it formed the letter D, written much like the D I write when I sign my name. I almost took a picture of it, and I wish I did. It was unbroken. If stretched out straight, I bet it was a good 18 inches long at least. And I barely had to wipe. It was fucking majestic. I feel like it should be showcased in a museum somewhere. I was actually sad to flush it. I wanted to leave it for others to admire. Wish I could do that every time.

Memories like the corners of my mind. Misty water colored memories of the shit that was. Anyway. Diarrhea occurs when there's too much water left in the stool. The stool doesn't coagulate, but instead comes out and fits and spurts. Too little water in your stool can cause constipation and some pain when you finally push out that rock hard, sometimes even jagged.

naughty, bumpy-ass log piece of literal shit. One of your intestines' job is to remove water from the liquid waste that passes through it, ideally just enough to make it soft but cohesive poop. If the stool spends too long in the colon, it can be dried out too much. Stool needs to be pliable to negotiate the colon's twists and turns. If it's too dry, it can get stuck. And that can result in little rabbit poops, if you're lucky. If you're not...

The result is a nasty old big butt log stuck against your colon wall, too dry to overcome friction, and that can land you in the hospital. If a stool softener can't get it unstuck, it can even kill you in rare cases. This is why fiber is so important for the human digestive system. Thank you, Metamucil! I do drink it, actually. Found in plant matter, fiber is a kind of carbohydrate too complex to digest.

Instead, it acts as a bulking agent absorbing water and giving your peristaltic muscles traction as they work towards that mass through your system. Hopefully, your bouts of poop-built log jams and Poonami explosions are rare.

Two extreme ends of the spectrum with regular healthy poops in the middle of the bell curve. And yet this best case scenario still causes other kinds of problems. Did you know that throughout human history, the number one cause of death has been contamination of water supplies? The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water-related diseases, making it the leading cause of death and disease around the world.

During the 1830s, just under 200 years ago, the infant mortality rate in British towns was close to 50% of all the babies who were born, only half reached their fifth birthdays. The unlucky ones died mostly of diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, and cholera. And they mostly died of all that because the sewage was not separated from the drinking water. So one person infected from cholera could easily start an epidemic and often did. That.

That's why lifeguards make such a fuss and evacuate the pool when some fuckhead shits in the water. Don't shit in the water. You'll kill us all! But for so long, people had no idea that butts were the real culprit of all this pain and suffering. Or rather, all the shit those butts were spewing. They knew shit wasn't nice to keep close to you.

They should probably stick it in the cesspool or in a nearby stream to get that stinky stuff as far away as possible. But they had no idea that putting that smelly stuff in the stream was actually what was making them sick. It was actually the stuff that was killing people. Lots and lots of people.

Luckily, we have progressed past that. Nowadays, if you shit, so to speak, it's probably because, or excuse me, if you eat shit, so to speak, it's probably because you wanted to. And I guess it's better to get sick from some butt play than from just trying to stay hydrated. Hey, Lucifina! It took an incredibly long time to make shit safe as ancient cultures built sewers and toilets and then that knowledge was all but lost during the Middle Ages.

when only religious orders and royalty benefited from plumbing. And then things actually got arguably worse when the Industrial Revolution created filthy, overcrowded cities, which made the problems that had been brewing for hundreds of years suddenly a whole lot worse. Now, are you excited about this shit? Me too. Hail Nimrod. Let's dig into this shit for real. Stock structure.

Today's episode will be most similar in structure to our episode a long time ago about the Dark Ages or other more anthology-type episodes, since after all, we'll be covering several thousands a year as a human shittery. We'll start in the days of the hunter-gatherers.

go over how ancient cultures thought of and dealt with poop before progressing, mostly through Europe, since I have one hell of a time reading Mandarin and don't have the same level of access to historical documents from the Far East. through the Middle Ages and into the modern day and the hideous events in the 19th century that pushed us to attain comprehensive plumbing. Those hideous 19th century events were two great stinks, capital G, capital S.

One in London, the other in Paris. Cannot wait to share that shit. For decades, these cities have been growing steadily, spurred on by the Industrial Revolution. They developed from bustling urban areas into overcrowded, filthy, poop-filled metropolises full of people dumping their shit in cesspools.

Cesspools often stagnated, overflowed, and even literally exploded. In London, smaller rivers like the Fleet and the Tyburn, which ran into the Thames, were a common place to empty the contents of chamber pots. Charles Dickens. Describe the situation in his novel Little Dorrit, writing, Through the heart of town, a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed in the place of a fine, fresh river. Indeed, everything ended up in the Thames. There was human waste, dead animals.

thrown away food, industrial waste from riverside factories, the bodies of anyone who drowned, bodies of a lot of people who were murdered in somewhat close proximity to the river. Then in 1858, temperatures rose and stayed abnormally high for weeks, sometimes over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun. A lot of water evaporated and the river sank much lower than normal, leaving piled up sewage along the banks and under that hot, hot sun.

Tons and tons of filth sat there and baked and stunk and baked and stunk some more. Many who could afford to left the city. Most of the unfortunate Londoners who had remained stayed inside if they could afford to. Curtains and blinds were soaked in chloride of lime, a.k.a. bleaching powder, to try and mask the smell, especially in Parliament, which was right next to the Thames.

Speaking of Parliament, its members tried at first to stay the course and continue their sessions without agreeing to any drastic plans of reform concerning said shit. They knew that any action taken in regards to ridding the stench would involve an arduous overhauling. of the entire infrastructure of the Thames and a lot of money. Many lawmakers were hesitant to make such a commitment, but then the stink remained and worsened and sickened them in addition to everyone else in town.

And it was clear the dreadful smell was not going away on its own anytime soon. Finally pushed to their wits end, the government rushed through a bill proposed by Benjamin Disraeli to fund a new sewer. The bill became law in just 18 days, a record at the time. How quickly would they then be able to end the Great Stink? And how would Paris end their Great Stink, which occurs just over two decades later? How did they deal with so much shit?

How does such an integral part of our lives become such a big-ass problem, a literal-ass problem? Well, let's find out in today's Time Suck Timeline. Strap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-sunk timeline. A long, long time ago...

And for most of human history, we meat sacks were wanderers, hunters and gatherers for around 200,000 years until the development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. And really for millions of years before that, when we were some lesser form of monkey. we were also hunting and gathering. And even before we were monkeys, we were shitting wherever we happened to be when the need arose.

Not at the top of the food chain, just a part of the circle of life early humans took from the land, pooped where they walked, and organisms in the soil converted that poop into nitrates. Plants absorbed those nitrates as fertilizer. New plants fed more poop makers and the cycle started up all over again.

About 10,000 years ago, agricultural skills advanced to the point that humans could attain their basic needs, food, water, and shelter by staying in permanent villages that allowed for shared resources, encouraged specializations. Thank you, art and culture. Now only some of the hunters were ignorant poopers. The rest stayed around their homes, pooping in closer proximity to where they ate, drank, and slept. And accumulating this poop, as we said in the beginning, was dangerous.

For many forms of life, other species feces, other species feces, that's kind of tricky, including human feces, is a reproductive vehicle. For example, many kinds of seeds pass undigested through an animal system to disperse. wherever the animal may poop, making the animal an unintentional Johnny shit seed, spreading fruit or other types of flora wherever they wander. Unfortunately, many kinds of parasites, eggs, bacteria, viruses use the same tactics.

So Johnny's shit seed, he be spreading some nasty ass shit. Fecal contact is a massive disease vector. Directly, if you take a little lick of your afflicted neighbor's feces or butthole, it might look clean, but maybe still has traces of infected shit. Or indirectly.

through accidental ingestion, through water contamination, and through diseases carried by the insects and vermin that feces attracts. The more poop that's lying around, obviously, the bigger the potential threat. Even if early village dwellers didn't know that poop could cause disease...

a fact that was unknown to all until the 1850s, they knew that it smelled bad and that it attracted vermin, two very undesirable characteristics. To combat these, social codes arose to regulate the placement of poop. For most early civilizations, acceptable places were rivers or ravines, or even behind a bush, far from anybody's abode. This sequestered the poop from sight and smell, and hopefully from the village's food, shelter, and water if they poop downstream.

As long as the ravine was deep enough for decomposition to occur before it filled up, the village was safe. And as long as the river flowed swiftly enough to remove the poop faster than the people who could deposit, the village was again safe.

In other words, as long as the method of sequestering enabled poop to disperse or decompose faster than the villagers could produce it, the village was safe. I've never really thought about a shit volume to river current speed ratio before, but that makes perfect sense.

If you want to dump a lot of shit in the river, make sure that the river is one that moves quick. Slow current plus loads of shit equals a lot of stink, misery, and death. Never forget that! If you remember one thing in this episode is that slow current. plus loads of shit, big old fucking hunking dumps of shit, equals a lot of stink, misery, and death. Write that down somewhere. Tattoo it on your body.

As population density grew around the world's ravines, rivers, and bushes, and the method of removal still took the same amount of time to incorporate poop back into the environment, poop started to pile. The good thing was that many societies knew that poop was more valuable as fertilizer on the farm than it was in a ravine at the edge of town. And using poop as fertilizer returns humanity to its appropriate place as a link in the food chain.

Eastern civilizations recognize this far more often than their Western counterparts. Unfortunately, Eastern cultures didn't know that human poop is only safe and sanitary for agriculture if it's properly composted. You can't, for example, just take fat dump after fat dump directly onto a rice paddy.

or on some ripening berries, and not expect some digestive problems once you go to eat said rice or berries. If you're curious, the composting process is simple. Put poop in a pile, a literal pile of shit. Let it sit long enough for bacteria to convert it into nitrates and for organic activity to raise the temperature high enough to kill any lurking pathogens. Then you spread it on your fields of grain from sea to shining sea. But, and I'm talking about but with one T here.

This is a lot of work. And there's another constant to human behavior besides pooping. And that is human laziness. Not everyone who shits wants to or will fuck with the compost pile. And that's where poop problems come into play. You gotta get everyone on board for this shit to work. And people not thinking about that is where a lot of problems arise. For example, if you just poop close to or in your town, probably won't kill anyone.

But if everyone shits close to or in town, well, now you've got a serious shit problem on your shit hands. And that's what kept happening in ancient towns. People kept shitting in or close to town. Of course he did. Unregulated, too many people. I would argue most people. or filthy fucking animals. Think about the litter you probably find each and every time you hike. Fucking animals. The shit equation early city planners needed to solve quickly became clear.

how to make the most convenient structures that people would reliably use that would get their poop as far away as possible. The Mesopotamians introduced clay sewer pipes around 4000 BCE to solve this problem, with earliest examples found in the Temple of Bel at Nippur, largely destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists in 2009. Thanks, you fucking idiots.

and at Eshnuna, which were used to remove wastewater from sites and capture rainwater and wells. The city of Uruk in present-day Iraq also marked the first examples of brick-constructed latrines or communal outhouses starting around 3200 BCE. Similarly, a primitive indoor fresh and wastewater system, like freshwater and wastewater system, consisting of two stone channels lined with tree bark, appears to have been installed in the Neolithic settlement of Scarabray in Scotland.

way back around 3000 BC. Not familiar with Scarabray before. Scarabray consisted, or at least it remains consistent today, 10 clustered houses made of flagstones and earthen dams that provided support for the walls. And the houses included stone hearths.

beds, even cupboards. But most importantly, for our purposes, they also included a sewer system, what might have been an early latrine. Latrines, if you don't know, are actually a range of waste disposal systems, anything from a hole in the ground, a pit latrine.

or a communal trench, or even more advanced designs that include poor flush systems. The use of latrines was a major advancement in sanitation over more basic practices such as open defecation. Fancy way of saying, just go ahead and shit wherever the fuck you want. and helped control the spread of many waterborne diseases. Around 2400 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization that existed where modern-day northeast Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwest India exists today.

was making big strides in their public water supply and sanitation. Their waste removal systems included a number of advanced features. For example, in the city of Lothal in present-day India, the ruler's house had their own private bathing platform and latrine.

which was connected to an open street drain that discharged the waste directly into a few of the homes of the city's poorest citizens. Fuck yeah, bro. Punish those poor fucks. Cover them in shit. That's what they get for being poor. If they didn't like it...

They should have chosen to have been born into better circumstances. Easy peasy. No, that's crazy. The latrine discharged into the town's harbor, which is still pretty crazy, actually. Just sliding turd after turd into the town's public swimming pool. On the daily, basically. A number of other houses had burnished brick bathing platforms that drained into a covered brick sewer held together with a gypsum-based mortar. The brick sewer ran to a soak pit.

outside the town's walls while the lower town offered soaked jars, large buried urns, with a hole in the bottom to permit liquids to be able to drain through them, the latter of which were regularly emptied and cleaned. Old-timey septic tanks of a sort. Pretty ingenious. Now let's head to Greece.

to see how shit removal systems advance. And oh, did they advance. Fucking Greeks. Always so impressed. The ancient Greek civilization of Crete, known as the Minoan civilization, which lasted from around 3100 BCE until they were absorbed into the mainland Greek culture around 1450 BCE. built advanced underground clay pipes for sanitation and access to their water supply, which is fucking mind-blowing. Their capital, Knossos, had a well-organized water system for bringing in clean water.

taking out wastewater and storm sewage canals for overflow when there was heavy rain. And the Greeks just so ahead of their time, such an incredible part of the ancient world. People even constructed flush toilets in ancient Crete. like in ancient Egypt and before them at places in the Indus civilization, with the facilities on Crete possibly having a first flush installation for pouring water into dating back to the 16th century BCE.

This ancient toilet consisted of a wooden seat, an earthenware pan, and a rooftop reservoir as a source of water, which is wild. Those clever bastards figured out how to make toilets very similar to the toilets we use today over 3,500 years ago. Over 3,000 years before the Puritans settled in America in shit and nasty-ass outhouses, those Greeks had some early version of a modern toilet. The ancient Greeks of Athens and Asia Minor, those uppity mainland Greeks,

Also used an indoor plumbing system that even utilized for pressurized, that they even utilized, excuse me, for pressurized showers. Making use of aqueducts, made of lead piping to carry large supplies of water and using water pressure to public, you know, to... pressure public shower rooms, the Greeks actually introduced showering as a social activity for the masses. But they were pretty lax about poop. They even found it funny, like most of us do. Or like a lot of us. I don't know about most.

For example, in the Greek play The Assembly Women, written by Aristophanes in 391 BCE, we first encounter the central male character, Blipyrus. In the street outside his house, in the middle of the night, complaining to the audience that he'd been woken up because of a pressing need to take a huge shit. Stumbling around in his wife's cloak and slippers, the only garments he could find in the darkness, he muses. Now let me see.

Where will one be able to shit in privacy? Why, you know at night, anywhere is okay. Nobody is going to see me shitty now. He then goes on to attempt to defecate, but finds that his system is almost completely constipated. He describes his problem to the audience and pleads with them to find a doctor specializing in, quote, anal complaints. And I really hope at least one of you talks to your health care provider and tells them that you need to see a doctor specializing in.

Anal complaints. The tone of the scene written by Aristophanes in the fourth century BCE is explicitly vulgar and rude, with various references being made to turds stuck in the anus, being like prickly pears, and to homosexual men being anal specialists.

In Greek plays, being in touch with your shit was actually part and parcel with archetypal heroes. Comic heroes like Blipyrus were represented as being in touch with nature, playing merry havoc with the conventions of polite society, which included... discussions of poop. Love it. Ancient Greeks making fun of people getting uptight about something literally up all of our asses. Shit. This casual attitude was not carried by the Greeks enemies, the Persians.

And before checking in with some Persian poop, time for the first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. Okay, let's return to ancient times, find out what the Persians thought of their poop. In the Syropedia, an account of the childhood of the Persian king Cyrus. The Greek historian Xenophon tells us that among the Persians, defecation was an important problem to be managed. Moreover, Xenophon reports that it was a major breach of decorum for a Persian male to be seen leaving the company of others.

for the purpose of urination and or defecation. How dare someone walk off to take a shit? How dare their bodies do what all bodies just do? Some ancient societies thought that getting rid of your shit was silly. Why not use it instead? The Scythians, the central Eurasian nomadic people who were around from about the 9th century BCE up until the 4th century CE, used special arrows during warfare.

These arrows were tainted with a mixture of viper venom, viper corpses, human blood, and turds. The arrows, if they wounded a person, would often cause gangrene and tetanus from the blood and the shit, as well as other infections from the venom. Even people who are not wounded by the poison projectiles suffer from their terrible odor. Noted Strabo, the Greek geographer. Man, shit arrows. That's genius. Deadly and a powerful psychological weapon.

Back to more conventional waste disposal now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ancient Rome would make enormous strides in this regard. They acquired many of their ideas from the Etruscans, an ancient civilization that lived in Italy from around 900 to 500 BCE.

Estimated that the first sewers of ancient Rome were built sometime in the 6th century BC by the Romans, directly imitating the sewers of the Etruscans before them. Then they took things a step further by making the Cloica Maxima, which translates to greatest sewer. which was built under the orders of the king of Rome, Tarquinicus Priscus, who ordered Etruscan workers to construct it. Originally an open channel constructed in the 6th century by lining an existing streambed with stone.

It was enclosed in stone beginning in the 3rd century BCE, so it became an underground sewer, which was much praised for its functionality even 700 years after its initial construction. In the words of Pliny the Elder, who lived from 23 or 24 to 79 CE, Hills were tunneled into the course of construction of the sewers. So let me start off. Hills were tunneled into the course of the construction of the sewers, and Rome was a city on stilts, beneath which men sailed when Marcus Agrippa was aedile.

Seven rivers join together and rush headlong through Rome, and, like torrents, they necessarily sweep away everything in their path. With raging force owing to the additional amount of rainwater, they shake the bottom and sides of the sewers. Sometimes water from the Tiber. flows backwards and makes its way up the sewers. Then the powerful floodwaters clash head-on in the confined space, but the unyielding structure holds firm.

Huge blocks of stone are dragged across the surface above the tunnels, buildings collapse of their own accord or come crashing down because of fire. Earth tremors shake the ground, but still, for 700 years from the time of Tarquinicus Priscus, the sewers have survived almost completely intact.

While some scholars believe that there's not sufficient evidence to accurately determine the effectiveness of the cloaca maxima, other scholars believe that 4.5 hectatons of human feces in water, so around 900,000 pounds of shit in water, could be handled at one time by the Cloaca Maxima.

It's because of the Cloca Maxima that the Roman Forum even exists. The construction and eventual underground position of the sewer system allow the central rectangle of the Forum to be paved and for permanent structures to fill the area. as prior to its existence, structures were constantly being demolished and rebuilt due to continual flooding. Alongside the development of the Cloaca Maxima, other sewers were built, many of them linked to one another.

And because it was still hard to make people use the sewers, laziness strikes again, a law was eventually passed to protect innocent bystanders from assault by waste thrown into the street. The violator was forced to pay damages to whomever his shit hit.

Use the toilets, you filthy fucking animals. As Rome grew, the complexity of the sewer systems grew as well, leading to indoor plumbing. As Strabo, again that Greek author who lived from the 60s BCE to 24 CE, wrote, The sewers, covered with a vault of tightly fitted stones, have room in some places for hay wagons to drive through them.

And the quantity of water brought into the city by aqueducts is so great that rivers, as it were, flow through the city and the sewers. Almost every house has water tanks and service pipes and plentiful streams of water. In short, the ancient Romans gave little thought to the beauty of Rome because they were occupied with other greater and more necessary matters. Seems like he snuck in some shade there. Yeah, Rome's fucking ugly.

But, you know, it's probably just because they were dealing with, you know, really keeping like a big, cool city, you know, together. Indeed, Romans had very little desire to see or smell their waste. For example, sometime in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder wrote to the emperor Trajan.

about the case of the city of Amastris, which was spoiled by, quote, what is called indeed a river, but in fact is no other than a vile common sewer, extremely offensive to the eye, and at the same time very unwholesome by its noxious smell. It will be advantageous, therefore, in point of health, as well as ornament to have it covered. This was a sentiment shared by Trajan himself, who wrote back to approve Pliny's proposed project to fix that shit.

They also saw tax potential in waste removal in Rome. A slightly earlier emperor, Vespasian, imposed a tax on the contents of the city's journals. about which a subordinate once complained, the emperor handed the subordinate a coin taken from the proceeds of the tax and asked if it smelt bad. And when the underling replied, no, did not, Vespasian retorted, get it comes from Europe. Mm hmm. Regardless of where it comes from.

It all spends the same. As the empire grew, not only Rome itself, but other towns in Italy and Roman colonial cities were often planned around relatively intricate systems, both of drainage, which allowed rainwater to be taken out of the urban environment and not flood, and of sewerage. which took waste materials out of the city proper. Around 100 CE, direct connections of homes to sewers began, and the Romans completed most of the sewer system infrastructure.

But those initial homes belong mostly to the wealthy. If you're poor, you shit in a public latrine, which was often located in town squares or other central locations in open air, with multiple seats leading to a central cesspit. And whether intentionally or not, they became places to socialize, which is fucking weird. I hate it when someone tries to talk to me in a public bathroom. We're in the bathroom, dickhead. This is a place for quiet time, if there ever was one.

Long bench-like seats with keyhole-shaped openings cut in rows offered little privacy. Some latrines were free, others cost a small amount of money to use. These latrines also had some pretty interesting art on them. that reveals how Romans thought about their own bodies and what came out of them. In 2018, it was reported that archaeologists discovered a pair of mosaics in a Roman-era latrine in Antiochia.

Antiochia ad Kragum in present-day Turkey, that depict well-known mythological scenes, each with its own raunchy spin. The mosaics feature humorous versions of the stories of Narcissus and Ganymede. Instead of gazing at his own face in the reflection of the water, as the myth tells, the latrine Narcissus can be seen looking adoringly at his own cock.

In the other scene, Jupiter slash Zeus in the form of a heron is shown cleaning Ganymede's wiener with a sponge. Nice. I wouldn't mind having a god sponge bath my dick from time to time. Imagine that would feel pretty pleasant. Typically, Ganymede, a Trojan youth who was abducted by Zeus and taken to Olympus, where he was made the cupbearer of the gods and became immortal, is depicted with a hoop and a stick. Two Roman toys, which is intended to, quote, underline his boyish innocence.

According to Eva C. Kuhls, classics professor at the University of Minnesota. In this mosaic, however, Ganymede is shown with a stick with a sponge on the tip, possibly so he could clean the latrines. So Jupiter slash Zeus was making him clean his toilets and then... Washing up his dick. Maybe. Doesn't clear exactly what these mosaics mean. But from the placement, they do seem to be some kind of ancient versions of dirty jokes. Latrines were also sites for frequent graffiti, just like today.

One line from the latrine in, from a latrine in Ostia, Ostia Antica, reads, to shit well, Solon rubbed his belly. Another translates to, Thales admonish those shitting to strain hard. And one more translates to, call 976-8897 to talk to Caesar's mom who longs for strange men to shit in her pussy. Or that was way too much. That was me. That was nasty. No, one more said, sly chylon.

taught to sly kylon taught to fart silently uh these names are notable romans uh it's kind of like uh you know if we were somebody today was writing uh abraham lincoln took a shit here or einstein farts a lot something like that Some Roman latrines were made for some strange reasons, according to Lord Amory, a British physician. The site where Julius Caesar was assassinated, the Hall of Curia in the Theater of Pompeii, was turned into a public latrine because of the dishonor it had witnessed.

But even with all this advancement, disease was still rampant. That was because most dwellings still were not connected to sewers. Some apartment buildings might have had a latrine and a fountain on the ground floor.

But that didn't stop the residents on the upper floors from just literally dumping their piss and shit out onto the street below. And imagine walking on the sidewalk and having a bucket of someone's piss and shit dumped onto you. And you know that happened to people. I'd fuck your day up.

especially you're headed out to work, you know, about to go on a date. Also, there were no street cleaning services in Rome, so all that dumped piss and shit oftentimes just festered where it landed until some heavy rain washed it away or someone just couldn't take the stink anymore and cleaned it up.

which was a good way for them to get sick. The latrines themselves would also be vectors for disease. The Romans wiped themselves after defecating with a sea sponge on a stick, this thing called a tesorium. This might be shared by... All of those using a latrine or people could bring their own special sponge stick. To clean the sponge, they washed it in a bucket with water, salt, vinegar, which didn't work that well to actually clean it up.

These sticks and the buckets these guys rinsed them out in became breeding grounds for bacteria. And there was the widespread presence of intestinal worms in Rome. Man, I don't even want to wash my body with the same loofah that somebody else has used.

I don't want to use the same bar of soap somebody else has used, at least not in the shower where I can't stop thinking about, you know, that they just washed their ass crack with it. And now I'm just pushing little poop particles onto my face. Imagine using somebody else's butthole brush.

Imagine using a butthole brush used by many other someones, a lot of strangers. That's nasty. Even the famous Roman bass, known to represent the advanced hygiene of Rome, the cleanliness of Rome, weren't always that healthy. A ritualized practice bathing in the Roman world involved passing through a series of variously heated pools, including the frigidarium, a cold water bath, and the caledarium, sort of a sauna.

Along the way, Romans could stop at the unctorium to have scented oil, massage into their skin, and proceed to the laconicum. or dry sweating room to work up a sweat before oil and dirt were scraped off with a curved metal instrument called a strigil. Sounds pretty nice. Because it was so good for you, doctors commonly prescribe their patients a bath. Consequently, the diseased...

the diseased and the healthy sometimes would bathe together. Even though the sick generally preferred to visit the baths during the afternoon or night to avoid the healthy, the baths were not constantly being cleaned. So that wasn't great. This idea of priding cleanliness and not being all that clean was actually a recurring theme.

In the ancient world, easy to stress the importance of cleanliness, not as easy to carry it out. Islamic culture, like the culture of Rome, stressed and continues to stress the importance of personal hygiene.

emphasis on ritual purification dates back to the 7th century ce when islam was founded and has a number of elaborate rules uh tahara ritual purity involves performing ablution for five daily prayers, as well as regularly performing bathing, which led to bathhouses being built across the Islamic world, like in Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate from the 8th to the 13th centuries.

There were 65,000 baths at one point in Baghdad, along with water supply systems powered by hydraulic technologies that supplied drinking water and water for ritual washing. Medieval Islamic cities such as Baghdad, Cordoba in Islamic Spain, Fez in Morocco, and Fustat in Egypt also had sophisticated waste disposal and sewage systems. Fustat had multi-story tenement buildings.

with up to six floors, with flush toilets, which were connected to a water supply system and flues on each floor carrying waste to underground channels. That is fucking incredible. Al Karachi. A Muslim scholar who lived from 953 to 1029 CE wrote a book called The Extraction of Hidden Waters, which presented groundbreaking ideas like an early water filtration process. But despite that, things still got pretty gross.

The Egyptian physician Ali Ibn Ridwan wrote in the 11th century, the people of Al-Fustat are in the habit of throwing whatever dies in their homes. out into the streets and alleys where they decay, and their corruption mixes with the air. The sewers from the latrines also empty into the Nile. When the flow of water is cut off, the people drink this corruption mingled with the water.

That first sentence is a little weird, right? The people of Al-Fustat are in the habit of throwing whatever dies in their homes out into the streets and alleys where they decay and their corruption mixes with the air. Just throwing everything nasty out onto the street. You know? Shit. Moldy bread. Dead Nana. Dead Mr. Whiskers cat. What were they tossing? Why did I say Nana? It's Nana. Dead Nana. Dead Nana.

dead bananas uh now let's head to the middle ages in europe where how how we meet sacks dealt with a shit regressed considerably in medieval europe the practice of bathing that had been so popular with the romans which though it spread disease was ultimately better for you than not bathing at all, was lost for centuries, replaced by a deep fear of water and mistrust of washing because ignorance reigned supreme in the Middle Ages.

The Roman emphasis on opening the pores for health and hygiene was superseded by this mistaken belief that pores should remain clogged with literal dirt. That's cool. To prevent deadly vapors, to prevent stink from invading the body. This idea that bad vapors or gross smells cause poor health was something called miasma theory, which had been advanced by the Greek physician Hippocrates in the 4th century BCE.

In one way, it was an early forerunner to germ theory. Since you can't see germs, smell would be the easiest way to see how rotting matter and its associated bacteria move through an environment. But they didn't know that smell alone couldn't cause disease. And the things that did cause disease...

often did not smell. And miasma theory became very popular in the Middle Ages, which, funnily enough, led to people not bathing, which ironically made them smell much worse. Meanwhile, our views of shit were also changing. While the Greek and Roman world thought that shit could be pretty funny, or at least a means of social connection, with the wide adoption of Christianity, Christian texts used excrement and filth as a metaphor for sin.

According to popular belief at the time, the devil was said to be the king of filth, ruling over obscure places of putrefying matter such as dung heaps. I see you, Satan, hiding your nasty ass in a big old pile of shit. Not today, BL's a turd! Uh-uh! The excrement was diabolic filth spawned by the evil one. And witches, wishing to tap into the power of these foul forces, were thought to literally kiss the devil's butthole.

because poop was associated with supernatural entities, took on a kind of magical role in Europe in the Middle Ages. Both human and animal poop were thought to be used as materials in the casting of spells by witches and warlocks equally. They could be used by victims of witchcraft to detect hidden witches and to ward off curses. Those are some strange spell ingredients. Eye of Newt, Mandrake Root, Toe of Frog, and Poop of Jimmy.

Poop was also used by apothecaries and doctors. By examining the color and texture of a patient's waist, doctors thought they could diagnose their ailment. Then sometimes this poop would be recycled back into medicine. Not only human feces and urine, but also blood, sweat, fat, and mucus were used to make a wide range of supposedly beneficial products. Some alchemists even used poop in their experiments.

Believing that the fabled philosopher's stone, a legendary substance believed to have many magical properties, including the ability to turn common stones into gold, could be derived from the salt taken from human shit. Spoiler alert, those alchemists were wrong. You can't shockingly make something out of shit and use that to turn gravel into a small fortune. If you could, we'd all have lots of gold and then it wouldn't be worth, ironically, shit.

primarily to this view of poop as sin prevailed in the Middle Ages. Because of this view, the human body was nothing but a corrupt husk that harbored foul materials, an idea no doubt reinforced by the fact that nobody was bathing. Only monks, some royals, and some of the wealthy were fortunate enough to enjoy respite from this ubiquitous filth. Ritual purification was part of a monk's professional duties. Indeed, the best plumbing would be found in churches and other holy spaces.

At the back of a lavishly illustrated book of Psalms dating from 1155 CE called the Edwine Psalter is an unexpected document, a detailed two-page pull-out diagram of the plumbing of Canterbury Cathedral. Showing what is probably one of the most sophisticated plumbing systems of the time, the map details how spring water was piped in, irrigating apple orchards in a vineyard, before being raised to a water tower that gave it the necessary momentum to flow through the monastery.

Water spouts from spigots decorated with dragon or animal heads, and a latrine block is topped with a statue of a lion. Because of all this, monks could shit in peace. Use another latrine that had a running water system to flush out their waste, a feature considered very advanced for the time. even though even better sewer systems existed in Greece roughly 3,000 years earlier. And what if you're just an average Joe in the Middle Ages? Just some Peter Peasant McShitbridges.

To relieve oneself in the countryside, one could just go behind a bush. But in the cities, things were more complicated. Chamber pots, which could simply be buckets, just of any sort, or a similar type vessel. Very common in the Middle Ages, families kept chamber pots to relieve themselves and the privacy and warmth of their homes. The content of the pot had to, of course, be thrown away and often was tossed upon the farm's pile of manure in a waste pit, a cesspool, a river.

or just, in some cases, out into the street. Affluent households usually had their own privies. Sometimes these privies had commode chairs, a chair with a hole in the seat, under which a chamber pot was attached to hold anything that might come out of one's wean, vagine, or bunghole.

It's like a type of toilet. In rural areas, farmers had more space to make their own backhouse or outhouse, which in turn provided manure for their crops, manure they should have tried turning into compost before using, but of course they did not because they did not understand how bacteria worked. So that shit was dangerous. And sometimes the act of shitting itself just was also dangerous. In 1326, a peasant named Richard LeRacier...

He was doing his business on his toilet. When the planks of the seat gave way, an old dick fell into the cesspit below and drowned in his own shit. What a way to go. In 1339, some kid who was begging was killed when a cart ran over him on a London street.

while he was squatting to take a shit. And we'll come back to England in a bit for our main story about the London Great Stink. For now, let's take our little toilet tour elsewhere. Let's back up slightly to the 1100s, just for a moment, in 12th century China. Shit was once again used for a weapon. The weapon, which renowned British historian Stephen Turnbull calls an excrement trebuchet bomb, was a type of explosive device made from hemp string and filled with gunpowder, human shit, and poison.

lit with a hot poker before being flung at the enemy. Holy shit, that would suck to get hit with a literal shit bomb. And also, kind of want to make a shit bomb now and throw it to somebody. Feels like that would be very satisfying to hit your enemy with a bomb. partially made out of your own shit, right? Now let's return to Europe, to the post-medieval era slash renaissance, which directly followed the Middle Ages, back when poop was still used for medicine. That's fun.

Beginning in the 1500s, human excrement was, quote, applied as a poultice for all inflammations and separations, carbuncles and pest buboes administered for the cure of bites and serpents and all venomous animals. It can be taken raw, dried, or in drink. according to historian J.G. Bork. That's cool. First you get hit, you know, bit by a venomous snake, which I imagine really sucks. And then, you know, some insane excuse for a doctor was like, quick, drink my shit. Hurry, drink thy shit.

Human shit was used as one of the ingredients and cures for consumption, gangrene, hysteria, cancer, jaundice, the plague. A lot of reasons to drink shit back then and other illnesses. People eventually started thinking differently about shit during the Renaissance. Again, that period of the revival of art and literature under the influence of Greek and Roman classical works that followed the Middle Ages. All of a sudden, artists, writers, thinkers now reconsidering new ideas.

Involving birth, regeneration, life cycles, human anatomy. And with all that, they're getting interested in shit again. Not as a sin, but as part of the inner workings of the human body. Francois Rabulé. Fucking French names. François Rabulais. Oh, there we go. A French author and physician born in the late 1400s who died in 1553, sometimes called the first great French prose author, would write extensively about poop and his books detailing the adventures of two giants.

Gargantua and Pantreguel. For example, at the end of the fourth book of his Chronicles, Rabule draws upon a typical image of the period, whereby an absurd and cowardly character, Panerjee, literally shits himself out of fear. His companions laugh at his excrement-stained clothes, as people tend to do when you shoot yourself, and at his generally disheveled appearance. Panergi, there we go.

Panerjee responds by listing off 15 different names for excrement, then concludes that his own is akin to the finest of substances, saffron, from Ireland. Scholars sometimes cite this passage as exemplifying a cheerful acceptance of bodily filth. and an idea that one could be a connoisseur about the body and what it produces. At the same time, an increasing emphasis on political life meant that shit could be used as a metaphor to describe power relationships or to lampoon the elites.

In another book, Rob Boulay names a villain, Lord Kiss My Arse. And in another instance, lists out the supposed contents at the Library of St. Victor. which is said to include the following scholarly tracks. All this is being written by various politicians he did not like. The art of farting decently in public on the foulness of scholars. Tara. Oh my gosh. Tartare.

on methods of shitting. The maiden's shittery and the shitter's martingale. Indeed, shit was, as always been, a popular metaphor to talk about people whom you really don't like. This was even exemplified by pious men like the father of Protestant Christianity, Martin Luther, whose visceral writings against the papacy were dripping with poop references.

Like the medieval religious thinkers before him, Luther associated poop with the devil and with sin, and then he would extend that to use fecal imagery to obliterate the Pope's authority. In 1545, Luther wrote, The Pope and his papacy are the spirit of the devil and derived from lies and blasphemies born out of the rear end of the devil. Right? The Pope is nothing but Satan's turd. And writing of the Pope's failure to back up the authority of the church from scripture.

Luther exclaims, this is where the Pope's trousers will stink. Also detailing his plan for dismantling Catholicism, Luther would write, we may, with a good conscience, take the Pope's coat of arms. and his crown to the privy, use it for wiping, and then throw it into the fire. It would be better if it were the Pope himself. A good Christian, whenever he sees the Pope's coat of arms, should spit and throw filth at it, just as one should spit and throw filth at an idol, to the glory of God.

Yeah, God wants you peasants to throw the Pope into a fire, burn him alive. But if you can't do that, you can at least like, you know, like wipe your ass with some of his shit, throw shit at his shit and shit. Now let's head to 1596 CE.

We've talked about metaphorical shit for a while. Let's return to the physical act, how it might be made better. That year, the first modern flushable toilet was described by Sir John Harrington, an English courtier, and the godson of Queen Elizabeth, the first who temporarily banished him from her court. for writing stories she deemed too risque. There had already been flushable toilets in the ancient world, as we saw.

But that technology largely lost the Middle Ages. Harrington's device now called for a two-foot deep oval bowl, waterproof with pitch, resin, and wax, fed by water from an upstairs cistern. Flushing Harrington's pot required 7.5 gallons of water, a veritable torrent in an era before indoor plumbing. Harrington noted that when water was scarce, up to 20 people could use his big-ass commode between flushes.

Harrington described his device in a satirical pamphlet entitled, A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, a pun on the term Ajax, which was a popular slang term for toilets. Although Harrington installed a working model to Queen Elizabeth at Richmond, or, you know, for, yeah, Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace, it will take several centuries and the Industrial Revolution's improvements in manufacturing and waste disposal for the flushing toilet to really catch on.

But before that, wouldn't you think that the riches of the rich would be all about bringing the flushing toilet back? Well, maybe, maybe not. Perhaps someone like France's son King, Louis XIV, but not really. Let's take a look at one of the most opulent residences of all time and how people did their business there. The Palace of Versailles, which originally built as a hunting lodge in 1623 by King Louis XIII.

and later transformed into a wildly lavish and tremendously massive residence by his son, Louis XIV, the Sun King. 721,206 square feet of enclosed space. That's fucking insane. The number of nobles who would live at Versailles varied depending on the day, but it was between 3,000 and 10,000 people, along with about 14,000 soldiers and servants staying somewhere on the grounds. That's a lot of people. Whole city's worth.

And there were simply not enough bathrooms for them all. It's estimated there were about 300 commodes for somewhere around 20,000 people. Since Versailles had been built in a small rural village, there was not a sewer system nearby to connect to.

There were so many people, a lot of them frequently relieved themselves in various corners and courtyards. And corners is very funny to me. Just people literally shitting in some shadowy corner of this opulent palace. Like a dog that somebody forgot to let outside.

Soon visitors complained about the awful smell that hung over everything. Even the gardens were not free from the hideous odors of so much shit. The problem with too much shit became so serious that Louis XIV put a new rule in place. The halls had to be thoroughly cleaned once a week. Stop shitting in my palace, you filthy fucking animals. Also, many of the king's beloved orange trees were put into vases inside the palace in an attempt to mask the smells.

During the many parties held at Versailles, it was not uncommon for the guests to bribe the servants of the courtiers to let them use their master's chamber pots. Or if you were royal or in the royal court, you could just go to the bathroom while doing other stuff, since there was always servants around to clean up your mess after you.

Princess DeHartcourt allegedly would often piss while walking, which I imagine did not win her any points with the servants who had to walk behind her and clean up after her. That is fucking barbaric. Just walking and pissing. While some servants, you know, scrub and soak her warm piss up behind her. Finally, well over a century later, in 1768, toilets were added. Before that, maybe some in the palace did at least wash their assholes with a primitive form of bidet, though.

As far as historians can tell, the bidet is a French invention, spearheaded by French, which makes sense, French word, spearheaded by French furniture makers around the late 17th century. The first bidets were just chamber pots filled with water. The word bidet. Comes from a French word meaning pony or small horse. This colorful name owes to the bidet's size and stature and the fact that traditional bidets look like a small porcelain horse which is squatted over during use.

The first bidets were pretty much just bowls of water set into sturdy wooden stools. People would crouch over these primitive bidets, use their hands to wash up their b-holes. Over the next few decades, the original bidet got more advanced by adopting a hand pump that would spray water.

With the advent of plumbing, bidets morphed into convenient devices with nozzles and integrated sprayers. In the 19th century, though, many thought that bidets worked as contraceptive devices as well. Just pressure wash. that come out of your hoo-ha and your baby free. First written reference to the bidet shows up in Italy in 1726, somewhere around the later half of the 18th century. Maria Carolina of Austria, Queen of Naples and Sicily.

said to have requested Bidet for use in her bathroom at the Royal Palace at Caserta. The Bidet did not become popular throughout Italy, though, until the end of World War II. Part of the reason for this is that World War II was a bit of a rough time for the Bidet. During the foreign war, American soldiers kept seeing bidets in European brothels, which gave rise to the incorrect perception that bidets were a tool of immorality rather than just a nice way to keep your butthole clean.

Bidet started to catch on in the U.S. in the 1980s. While it's tough to track the exact origin of the current integrated bidet toilet seat, most bidet experts believe it was invented in Switzerland. Once there was an original prototype in place, the Japanese bought the patent, got to work improving it. While some Japanese number two masterminds liked the style of the American toilet, they wanted the cleaning functionality of the bidet so they combined the two.

What they wound up with was a porcelain toilet complete with a toilet seat, which offered retractable cleaning jets, controls, dryer, and many other features. Today, more than 80% of Japanese households have a bidet toilet seat, which does sound pretty amazing.

even though I'm still kind of on the fence with bidets. My son, Kyler, though, he's convincing me to start using them, I think. He loves them. We got a free bidet accessory when Tushy sponsored us. I tried it, but I don't know. It just didn't take from me. Gave it to Kyler. He took it to college.

And he swears it is a million times better than wiping. Might have to give it another go. I had convinced myself that some of my bathroom trips were just far too brutal for a little toilet squirt gun to clean up. Maybe I'm wrong. There's also the rise of so-called squatty potties recently in the West where you squat your ass down below your knees to shit or have a little bench so your knees are raised up above you as you sit on a Western toilet. This defecation position.

has been popular in Asia and Africa for centuries, where toilets evolved differently, and the porcelain throne style we use here in the West never became as widely accepted. Or as, yeah, widely accepted. Uh, too much additional history to get into here and muddy up this already shitty timeline. Uh, but wanted, you know, as far as like the development of the squatty potty and everything, but wanted to at least acknowledge the squatty potties and the bidets.

And now, before returning to some toilet tech developments back in 1775, time for today's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. Now let's talk some more shit. Backing up to 1775 now. Scottish inventor Alexander Cumming, maybe a distant relative of mine, was granted the first patent for a flush toilet.

His greatest invention, or innovation, excuse me, was the S-shaped pipe below the bowl that used water to create a seal, which prevented sewer gas from rising up through the toilet and into the home. Soon other improvements would follow.

As an installer of water closets, aka toilets, based on Cummings' design, an English inventor named Joseph Brahma noted that toilet water in London homes tended to freeze in the winter. And he solved that problem by replacing the valve with a flap to seal the bottom of the bowl. Nice! Also in 1778, Brahma invented the first float valve for the flush tank, which allowed water to flow into the tank when empty and then stop when full.

Thank you, Toilet Joe. I can picture that right now. It's pretty cool. It's been around since 1778. By the turn of the century, Brahma's company had sold and installed over 6,000 toilets across England. And you might think based on all of these advancements, based on the long way we've come now when it comes to shit.

that the world was getting cleaner and cleaner. But you'd be ignoring one simple fact to think about. The population was getting exponentially bigger, much too big for these innovations to keep up with. By the middle of the 19th century, the rapidly expanding population of London had surpassed 2 million people.

the world's first city to reach that size, and its population had roughly doubled since the turn of the century. So it was, you know, growing fast. Despite the rapid growth, scientific authorities hastened to reassure Londoners that the city was still as hygienic as ever.

In 1844, the influential journal The Builder published a letter from a chemist named Professor Booth, who wrote that the free currents of air, which are necessarily in constant circulation from their proximity to the majestic Thames, have been considered as a great cause of the salubrity of the metropolis. Salubrity means promoting good health and well-being. So basically having fresh air around the river is good for everyone's health. Like, you know, fresh air from around the river.

This is classic miasma theory, right? It smells good, so it must be good. If it doesn't smell good, it must be bad. Some people like Professor Booth took it a step further, saying things like, from inhaling the odor of the beef, the butcher's wife obtains her obesity. Stop smelling that steak, Margaret. You're never going to drop those extra 80 pounds if you're always sniffing about. Pretty ridiculous. Both wanted to reassure everyone that the Thames was healthy to be around.

And he was acting in line with a strong tradition. In 1756, Charles Lucas, an Irishman who qualified as a doctor in Paris, had written that London's water, quote, undoubtedly is one of the principal causes why our capital is the most healthful great city in the world. And in 1818, another writer, Samuel Lay, claimed of the capital, its healthfulness is equal to that of any other metropolis in existence.

Its plentiful supply of water, which is furnished by different water companies, must also have an excellent effect on the cleanliness and consequently on the health of the inhabitants of London. while its system of sewers and drains adds still more to the general cause which conduce to salubrity, or general causes. Eight years later, John Britton wrote that this metropolis has fully deserved to be considered one of the most healthy on Earth. And they had a right to be proud.

English waterways had a long noble history. Let's back up a little now, zoom in on England. The Romans had laid clay pipes throughout London. conveying the waters of the River Walbrook, now considered one of London's many lost rivers for having been buried in pipes that lay beneath the city, to public conduits and baths like the ones discovered in Upper Thames Street.

During the medieval and Tudor periods, water was drawn from the Thames, from its tributaries, and from the numerous natural wells, comforted today in street and district names like Well Court, Well Closed Square, the Clerks Well. Other important wells were found at Holywell near Blackfriars and St. Clement's Well close to St. Clement's Inn. Most inhabitants drew and carried their own supplies from these sources while wealthier citizens employed the services of water carriers.

who in 1496 formed themselves into a guild of their own called the Brotherhood of St. Christopher of the Water Bears. Meanwhile, civil engineering projects were undertaken to supplement local supplies using pipes of clay, sandstone, lead.

even hollowed-out elm trees. Some citizens were appointed to collect tax money to fund these projects, and religious institutions, such as the monks of Westminster, made grants to the city allowing them to erect fountains, vents, cisterns, and other works to increase the city's water supply.

In 1592, a Dutchman called Peter Maurice leased from London for 25 pounds a year, the first arch of the London Bridge, where he constructed a waterwheel that drew water from the Thames and piped it into the city. It would remain in use all the way until 1822.

But the most remarkable enterprise was that of Hugh Middleton, a successful goldsmith, banker and cloth maker and member of parliament. In 1613, he began to construct the so-called New River, which brought fresh water from a spring in Amwell in Hertfordshire. to a point near Sadler's Wells, a distance of some 38 miles. He found an investor in King James I, who had inherited the British throne from Elizabeth I, and in doing so created a new source of London's water that still remains today.

A century later, in 1723, the Chelsea Water Company was established to draw water from the north bank of the Thames, adopting the slogan, water three times a week for three shillings a quarter. Six other companies started up to compete with Chelsea, the West Middlesex, Grand Junction, East London, South London, Lambeth, and Southwark companies. But while this gave London a lot of water, it also posed another problem. What would take that water?

and anything floating in it away. Rainwater would flow into covered or open streams, basically doing the same thing they would in nature, plus any refuse that accumulated in the streets. Waste from houses, on the other hand, was very different. There were around 200,000 cesspools in homes and businesses in London. So much shit. Some of which had been there since the 12th century. Old, old cesspools. When the first mayor of London, Henry Fitzalwin...

proclaimed that the necessary chamber cesspool should be at least two and a half feet from the neighboring building if it was made of stone and at least three and a half feet if it is made of other material. These cesspools were meant to be emptied by, quote, night soil men. also called rakers or gong firmers, who were paid handsomely about three times the normal rate for labor. These men carried off literal shit to be sold as fertilizer.

And they made a very profitable living, not only getting paid by the houses who needed their pits to be emptied, but also by people who needed the materials they were emptying. Double dealing that shit.

Then in the 16th century, a new market was found amongst shit slingers who extracted nitrogen from excrement for use in making gunpowder for the Spanish wars. Sometimes there wasn't enough of these men hauling away enough of the shit or not enough people could afford to have their shit hauled off.

and these cesspools overflowed. I believe we touched on that in an episode about the plague, the Black Death, back in 2019. Samuel Pepe's diary from October 20th, 1660, recorded, Going Down to My Cellar. I put my feet into a great heap of turds. That's an actual quote. I love it. Going down to my cellar, I put my feet into a great heap of turds by which I find that Mr. Turner's house of office is full and comes into my cellar.

Dude walked down into his own cellar, ended up knee deep in a neighbor's shit. I think I'd be writing a very different message in my diary if that had happened to me. Oh my God, I can't imagine how angry I'd be. Dear diary. Today was so completely fucked. This may be the last entry I write as a free man. I have not decided yet if I am to murder Mr. Turner and his shit factory of a family or not as I write this.

But walking fuck-tub of turds has shit so much and shit for so long, as have his poop-peddling children and human stink pickle of a wife. That their growing homemade shit pond has finally broken through the dam that is the wall and flooded my abode with the remnants of their commode. When I walked down to the bottom floor of my own home, I nearly slipped, fell, and drowned.

in what was once a place for storing fresh fruits and vegetables, but is now a literal shithole. I sank knee-deep into that asshole-manufactured muck of that family of shitty dumb fucks. I've always prided myself on tidiness and cleanliness. And yet here I sit, smelling of nothing but Turner butthole shit, and covered in the dirt of another family's Hershey squirts. Alas, what shall I do? Kill them all?

Or have my grown sons hold each member of that family down, force open their mouths, and defecate into them. There is no third option. But as fair is fair. Shit must be met with shit. Sometimes. these personal cesspits, like methane and other gases, which could and would catch on fire and literally explode. If you go on YouTube, you can find video after video of local news stations talking about septic tank explosions. Here's one from an ABC news station in Tampa.

Tampa, Florida, eight years ago. These poor people. At 5 o'clock, I want to show you the charred remains of what's left of a mobile home in Zephyr Hills. There it is right there. The family who lives there barely made it out alive after their septic tank exploded. Now they're having to live in town.

Hence, ABC action. God, that is literally the shittiest day ever. When your own poop blows up your trailer. Oh, man. Yeah, the tank lacks adequate ventilation. Methane gas can accumulate to dangerous levels and blow up.

A spark or open flame near the tank opening can also set it off. There were attempts in London to move away from cesspits and make a sewer system, especially with the creation of... the commissioner of sewers in the mid-1500s, but each new commissioner was permitted to adopt their own practices concerning such matters as the size, shape, and inclination of sewers, which didn't lead to a very unified sewer system because people couldn't make enough progress.

The next person would come in and fuck everything up. So the cesspools remain the best option, even when the market for human waste collapsed due to the importation of solidified guano, aka bird and batshit, from South America as a better fertilizer option.

And the cost for emptying them increased, leading to more families not being able to empty their cesspools, leading to more cesspools overflowing. And when they did overflow, people without access to emptying services, people couldn't afford them, took to literally dumping their shit out onto the street.

Free to wash away with the rain now. The shit would travel downhill until it eventually made its way into the Thames. And then that nasty-ass water, much of it literal-ass water, would be brought directly back into London via all those water companies we mentioned.

for people to drink and soon more and more people noticed that the drinking water was looking a lot less like water and a whole lot more like diarrhea how fun was that? drinking water that contained noticeable quantities of your neighbor's shit In 1827, a pamphleteer named John Wright anonymously published a tract called The Dolphin or Grand Junction Nuisance.

proving that several thousand families in Westminster and the suburbs are supplied with water in a state offensive to the site, disgusting to the imagination, and destructive to health. Wright claimed that Grand Junction Waterworks Company provided, quote, a fluid saturated with the impurities of 50,000 homes, a dilute solution of animal and vegetable substances in a state of putrefaction, alike offensive to the site.

disgusting to the imagination and destructive to the health. He dedicated the pamphlet to the radical member of Parliament, Sir Francis Burdett, who read it and then appointed a royal commission to address it in 1828.

His members concluded that the present state of the supply of water to the metropolis is susceptible of and requires improvement, that many of the complaints respecting the quality of the water are well-founded, and that it ought to be derived from other sources than those now resorted to.

They appointed the aging engineer Thomas Telford to, quote, survey and report his opinion as to the best mode of supplying the metropolis with pure water. His report recognized that polluted problems posed by the Thames and proposed.

to bring water supplies to London from three unpolluted sources. Aqueducts would bring water from the River Ver at Aldenham and from the River Wandel at Beddington, while the new river company would augment its supplies by drawing on waters from the upper reaches of the Lee. and from some wells north of London. A further select committee was appointed to consider the matter further in 1834, but they did not recommend any action. Meanwhile, poor families kept dumping their shit into the Thames.

Over a million pounds of poop being produced each day, and more of it just dumped into the river. Soon, two million fucking pounds of poop, roughly. And it wasn't just the poor unloading their shit into the river. With the rise in flush toilets, aka water closets, wealthy families had their waste just pumped out directly into the Thames. Water closets used way more water, almost double, placed a far bigger strain on the drainage system, which also went into the Thames.

Meanwhile, the Thames was still being largely used for washing clothes and drinking water. And all this has created a massive public health crisis. Cholera first arrived in England in 1831 and was followed by outbreaks of influenza and typhoid in 1837 and 1838. That prompted the government to ask a lawyer and leading social reformer named Edwin Chadwick to carry out an inquiry into sanitation improvements.

In his subsequent 1842 publication, The Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population, Chadwick used quantitative methods to show that there was a direct link between the poor living conditions, excuse me, direct link between poor living conditions, disease, and life expectancy. This investigation inspired the Public Health Act of 1848 and the establishment of the General Board of Health, of which Chadwick was the first director.

And in his capacity as director, Chadwick supported the rapid removal of human waste, seeing it as a major source of the bad air that he felt caused disease. Unfortunately, his improvements were not great. He advocated clearing out the sewers.

thinking along miasma theory lines that the sewage closest to people was giving off bad smells, and that in turn was making people sick, the stink. So he advocated for more ways to go directly into the temps, which again, is still the main source of drinking water. for London. By further contaminating London's water supply, the risk of cholera was now greatly increased. In 1848 slash 1849, there was a second outbreak of cholera, ultimately killed over 14,000 Londoners.

Towards the end of the outbreak, John Snow, a London-based physician, published the 1849 paper on the mode of communication of cholera, in which he proposed that cholera was not transmitted by bad air, but by a waterborne infection. However, no one gave a proverbial shit regarding his musings on the problems of literal shit, and very little attention was paid to his paper. Still wasn't a popular idea that the government should be responsible for where sewage went and how it was treated.

most Londoners felt that the matter was up to the water companies. Following that line of thinking in April of 1850, author and social activist Charles Dickens gave an account of his visit to the works of the Grand Junction Water Company. Dickens asked the engineer, how many companies take their supplies from the Thames, near to, and after it has received the contents of the common sewers? The engineer replied, no water is taken from the Thames below Chelsea except that of the Lambeth Company.

which is supplied from between Waterloo and Hungerford bridges. Dickens observed that the Thames being a tidal river, any sewage entering the river was liable to be conveyed by the tidal flow above Chelsea. But the engineer replied that many problems of water pollution were caused by dirt entering cisterns within houses. Basically, the engineer was adamant that any of the health concerns he was being asked about, not his company's fucking fault.

Chelsea Company was not as complacent as the Grand Junction. They'd received complaints from the royal palaces in the 1820s, so they'd introduced a filtration system where water was pushed through a bed of sand to clean it up. But that was only one company. And it still didn't solve the mounting turd crisis on everyone's hands. As London grew, so did its poo problems.

In the early 1850s, more and more sewage was overflowing, leaking from various cesspools into the Thames, where it then slopped up and down with the tides, coming to rest on its now even muddier banks. Then the next cholera epidemic struck in 1853, killing over 10,000 more people.

That same year, a monthly journal of architecture called The Builder published a correspondence complaint that began, the flood is now below London Bridge. Bad is poetical descriptions of the Stygian Lake while the London dock is black as Acheron. Where are ye, ye civil engineers? You can remove mountains. Sorry, ye can remove mountains. Gotta get that right. Bridge seas and fill rivers. Can ye not purify the Thames and so render your own city habitable?

i'm not picturing just a literal river of shit just one big massive flowing cesspool meanwhile there was yet another outbreak of cholera that year following that outbreak john snow published an update to his theory that cholera could be spread by contaminated water with statistical evidence that he had collected from an area of London around Broad Street, Soho.

By recording the location of deaths related to cholera in the area, Snow was able to show that the majority were clustered around one particular public water pump in Broad Street. Working later with a local reverend named Henry Whitehead, Snow was even able to trace the contamination to its source.

a woman named Sarah Lewis, who had dumped the wash water from her sick daughter's soiled clothes into a cesspool in front of her house. And then that cesspool drained into the Broad Street pump's water supply. Fucking Sarah! What have you done, you filthy fuck?

He eventually convinced local officials to remove the handle of the pump, although by that time the worst of the epidemic had actually passed. It was later established that a leaking sewer ran near the well from which the water was drawn. Unfortunately, Snow failed to convince many in the medical establishment of his theory.

including William Farr, who was responsible for medical statistics at the General Register office. And so, nothing was done about the water supply as a whole, or the Thames, which was rapidly becoming a literal shit river, even as the public got angrier and angrier about it.

The working class basket maker and poet Thomas Miller wrote in the illustrated London News, let us then agitate for pure air and pure water and break through the monopolies of water and sewer companies as we would break down the door of a house to rescue some fellow creature from the flames that rage within.

It rests with ourselves to get rid of these evils. In 1855, the Times of London published a letter from a distinguished and celebrated scientist named Michael Faraday describing all this fucking horror show. Sir, I traverse this day. By a steamboat. The space between London and Hungerford bridges. Between half past one and two o'clock. It was low water and I think the tide must have been near the return. Near the turn, excuse me. The appearance and the smell of the water.

forced themselves at once upon my attention. The whole of the river was an opaque, pale brown liquid. In order to test the degree of opacity, I tore up some white card into pieces, moistened them. so as to make them sink easily below the surface, and then drop some of these pieces into the water at every pier the boat came to. Before they had sunk in each below the surface, they were indistinguishable. Though the sun shone brightly at the time,

And when the pieces fell edgeways, the lower part was hidden from sight before the upper was underwater. This happened at St. Paul's Wharf, Blackfriars Bridge, Temple Wharf, Southwick Bridge, Hungerford Bridge, so many bridges. I have no doubt would have occurred further up and down the river. Near the bridges, the feculents, the damn 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, uncommon to the whole of the water. The same as that which now comes from the gully holes in the streets, the whole river was for the time a real sewer. Having just returned from out of the country air, I was perhaps more affected by it than others. I do not think I could have gone on to Lambeth or Chelsea. I was glad to enter the streets for an atmosphere which, except near the sinkholes,

I found much sweeter than that of the river. I have thought it a duty to record these facts that they may be brought to the attention of those who exercise power, or of responsibility in relation to the condition of our river.

There is nothing figurative in the words I've employed or any approach to exaggeration. They are the simple truth. If there be sufficient authority to remove a putrescent pond from the neighborhood of a few simple dwellings. Surely the river which flows so many miles through London. Ought not to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer. These stupid fucks. They are fucking ruining my city. And I wish I could...

cut their fucking heads off and shit down their necks and then make them mothers. Look what I've done and say, mother, look at the fucking person I just, that's your son. I just cut his head off and that's his neck and I just shit it. Look in there. That's my shit. Because that's how angry I am. I'm tired of it. Tired of the stink. I feel like I'm coated in it. I try to wash myself. It remains. I feel like I'm just a turd with clothes.

I don't want to be a turd anymore. Don't you hear me? Okay, I kind of went on there just to fill the rest of the space until that sound ended. But basically about a minute before I stopped talking here, that was what he really said. Really painted a picture. Faraday's letter.

Went unnoticed by authorities, of course. Eventually the smell got so bad that the authorities had to do something, though. And in 1857, the government poured a whole bunch of chalk lime, chloride of lime, and carbolic acid into the river to ease the stench. Didn't do much in the end.

other than kill a fuck ton of fish, which probably added considerably to the stink. The smell continued to build, and a letter to a friend, Charles Dickens, said, I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head and stomach distending nature.

Social scientist and journalist George Godwin observed that in parts the deposit is more than six feet deep on the Thames foreshore. Oh my gosh, six feet deep of shit. And the whole of this is thickly impregnated with impure matter. It was getting real bad. And it was about to get worse. If the smell could be considered tolerable in the winter and even during the chilly English summers, it was about to become intolerable because in June of 1858, the temperatures in the shade in London...

Average between 93 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit, rising to a height of 118 in the sun. That's wild. Combined with an extended spell of dry weather, the level of the Thames dropped and so much poop. from the sewers now laid in full view for all on the banks of the river to witness. That summer, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attempted to take a pleasure cruise in the Thames. They returned to the shore within about two minutes because the smell was overwhelmingly terrible.

Soon the press began calling the mess the Great Stink, leading an article in the city press to say, Gentility of speech is at an end. It stinks. And whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it. A writer for The Standard concurred with that opinion. One of its reporters described the river as a pestiferous and typhus breeding abomination. While a second wrote that...

The amount of poisonous gases which is thrown off is proportionate to the increase of the sewage which is passed into the stream. The leading article in the Illustrated London News commented that we can colonize the remotest ends of the earth. We can conquer India. We can pay the interest of the most enormous debt ever contracted.

We can spread our name and our fame and our fruit-defying wealth to every part of the world, but we cannot clean the River Thames. By mid-June, the stench from the river had become so bad that business and parliament was affected. Curtains on the river side of the building were soaked in lime chloride to try and overcome the smell, but it didn't work. Discussions were being held about possibly moving the business of government to Oxford or St. Albans, a city in Hertfordshire.

It's apparently so bad that the leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli. was seen fleeing from the chamber, handkerchief to nose, complaining loudly of the overwhelming shit sneak. And yet still nobody was doing anything besides pouring more lime into the river and killing so many more fish who weren't already choking to death on shit.

At the height of the stink, 450,000 to 560,000 pounds of lime was dumped near the mouths of the sewers that discharged into the Thames, and men were employed spreading lime onto the Thames foreshore at low tide, at a cost of 1,500 pounds per week. and it wasn't doing shit in regards to dealing with the shit. Member of Parliament John Brady informed Commissioner of Works Lord John Manners that members were unable to either use the committee rooms or the library because of the stench.

and asked the minister, quote, if the noble Lord has taken any measures for mitigating the effume and discontinuing the nuisance. Manners replied that the Thames was not under his jurisdiction. Four days later, a second MP said to Manners that, by a perverse ingenuity, one of the noblest of rivers has been changed into a cesspool, and I wish to ask whether Her Majesty's government intend to take any steps to remedy the evil.

Manners pointed out that Her Majesty's government have nothing to do with whatever the state of the Thames is. But then on June 15th, apparently they'd had enough. And Israeli put forward the Metropolis Local Management Amendment Bill. a proposed amendment to the 1855 Act. In the opening debate, he called the Thames a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.

The bill put the responsibility to clear up the Thames on the Metropolitan Board of Works and stated that as far as may be possible, the sewerage outlets should not be within the boundaries of London. It also allowed the board to borrow three million pounds.

which was to be repaid from a three-penny levy on all London households for the next 40 years. The leading article in the Times observed that Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench. And indeed they were. The bill was debated in late July, passed into law August 2nd, putting the problem almost squarely in the hands of one man, Chief Engineer Joseph Basilget. Joseph was born at Hill Lodge, Clay Hill, Enfield.

the son of Joseph William Basilgate, a retired Royal Navy captain, and Teresa Pilton. In 1827, when Joseph was eight years old, the family moved into a newly built house in Hamilton Terrace, St. John's Wood, London. And it was in the big city that Joseph decided to become an engineer.

He spent his early career working alongside the noted engineer Sir John McNeill, working on railway projects in China and Ireland that gave him a significant experience in land drainage. He set up his own London consulting practice in 1842. worked so hard in expanding the railway network that in 1847, he suffered a total nervous breakdown. Later in 1847, while he was recovering, London's Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, which would be replaced by the Metropolitan Board of Works,

ordered that all cesspits should be closed and that house drains should connect to sewers and empty into the Thames. And we already know that a cholera epidemic ensued, killing over 14,000 Londoners in 1849. The next cholera epidemic struck in 1853. killing nearly 11,000, and that fascinated Joseph. Shifting his focus now from railroads to waste treatment, Basilgate was appointed assistant surveyor to the Metropolitan Commission in 1849.

taking over as engineer in 1852 after his predecessor died of, quote, harassing fatigues and anxieties. Not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds awful. He would come up with a plan by June of 1856, two years before the Great Stink.

The plan instructed that local sewers about three feet in diameter should feed into a series of larger sewers until they drained into main outflow pipes about 11 feet high. A northern and southern outfall sewer were planned to manage the waste for each side of the river.

And because of London's uneven geography, Joseph mapped the city into high-middle and low-level areas, each serviced by their own sewer and pumping stations. All told, this plan could accommodate more people than currently lived in London, about three to four and a half million.

Basil Gates submitted his plans to Sir Benjamin Hall, the first commissioner of the works. Hall had reservations about the outfalls, the discharge points of waste outlets and other bodies of water from the sewers, which he said were still within the bounds of the Capitol and were therefore unacceptable.

Joseph would make changes to the plan for the next several months, adding discharge points that ran 15 kilometers or about nine miles outside of the boundary that Hall had set. But then on the cusp of approving the plan, the general election in February of 1858, saw the fall of Lord Palmerston's Whig government, which was replaced by Lord Derby's second conservative ministry, which meant that Lord John Manners now replaced Hall, and now the tides of shit had turned again.

and Manners and others in charge said that it was time for Joseph to do his thing. Basil Gates plans for the 1,100 miles of additional street stores. That's crazy, 1,100 miles. Collecting both effluent and rainwater. would feed into 82 miles of main interconnecting sewers which would be constructed between 1859 and 1865. Approximately 400 draftsmen worked on the detailed plans and sectional views for the first phase of the building process.

And they needed a lot of people because there were a lot of challenges. Particularly challenging were the fact that parts of London, including the areas around Lambeth and Pimlico, were below the high water mark. In other words, they're in low ground, like bowls.

meaning it's hard to get the sewage up and out of them. Baselgate's plan for the low-level areas was to lift the sewage from low-lying sewers at key points into the mid- and high-level sewers, which would then drain with the aid of gravity out toward the eastern outfalls at a gradient of two feet per mile.

Another important consideration was both a simple and complex one. What material would be used to construct the sewers? Baselgate was a proponent of the use of Portland cement, a material stronger than standard cement, but one which became weaker when overheated.

To overcome the problem, he instituted a quality control system to test batches of cement that's described by the historian Stephen Halliday as both elaborate and draconian. The results were fed back into the manufacturers who altered their production processes to further improve the cement.

And soon, construction is underway. The southern system across the less populated suburbs of London was the smaller and easier part of the system to build. Three main sewers ran from Putney, Wandsworth, and Norwood until they linked together in Deptford. At that point, a pumping station lifted the effluent 21 feet into the main outflow sewer, which ran to the Crossness pumping station on the Aerith marshes, where it was discharged into the Thames at high tide.

That pumping station was designed by Basilgate himself, and the power came from four massive beam engines, a type of steam engine, named Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert Edward, and Alexandria. But that wasn't the end of it. The northern side of the Thames was the more populous, housing two-thirds of London's population, and the works had to proceed through congested streets and overcome urban hurdles like canals, bridges, and railway lines. Work began in the system January 31st, 1859.

but the builders encountered numerous problems in construction, including a labor strike in 1859 and 1860, hard frost in the winter, and heavier than normal rainfall. The high-level sewer, the most northern of the works, ran from Hampstead Heath to Stoke Newington.

and across Victoria where it joined with the eastern end of the mid-level sewer. The mid-level sewer began in the west at Baywater, Bayswater, and ran along Oxford Street through Clerkenwell and Bethnal Green where it connected to the high-level sewer. This combined main sewer ran to the Abbey Mills Pumping Station in Stratford, where it was joined by the eastern end of the low-level sewer.

The pumps at Abbey Mills lifted the effluent from the low-level sewer, 36 feet into the main sewer. The main sewer then ran five miles along what is now known as the Greenway to the outfall at Becton to provide the drainage.

For the low-level sewers, in February of 1864, Basilgate began building three embankments along the shores of the Thames. Informed by his experience of land drainage and reclamation while working as a railway engineer, London's embankments were designed to not only carry tunnels, including the Underground Railway,

but also to help cleanse the river by narrowing and strengthening its flow through the city center. On the northern side, he built the Victoria Embankment, which runs from Westminster to Blackfire's Bridge, and the Chelsea Embankment, running from Milbank to the Cadogan Pier at Chelsea.

The south side contains the Albert Embankment from the Lambeth end of Westminster Bridge to Vauxhall. The works claimed over 52 acres of land from the Thames. The Victoria Embankment had the added benefit of relieving the congestion of the... pre-existing roads between Westminster and London. The cost of building the embankments was estimated at £1.7 million, of which £450,000 was used for purchasing the necessary riverfront properties.

The embankment project was seen as being nationally important and with the Queen unable to attend because of illness, the Victoria Embankment was opened by the Prince of Wales in July of 1870. The Auburn Embankment had been completed in November of 1869. while the Chelsea Embankment was opened in July of 1874. Shortly afterwards, Joseph Basilgate was knighted for his service to the crown. He had become massively popular at this point because he got that shit fixed.

According to the Observer newspaper, every penny spent is sunk in a good cause in the creation of this most extensive and wonderful work of modern times. Now all that was left to do was finish the Western drainage system. that was completed in 1875, finally giving London an operational sewer after 16 years of construction.

All in all, the building work had required 318 million bricks, 880,000 cubic yards of concrete and mortar, and the final cost was approximately 6.5 million pounds. But did that help the city's problems?

Well, there had been another cholera outbreak in 1866 that claimed nearly 6,000 lives, but that was confined to an area of London's east end that hadn't yet connected to Basilgate's system. The fault lay with the East London Water Company, who discharged their sewage half a mile downriver from the reservoir.

The sewage was then being carried upriver into the reservoir on the incoming tide, contaminating the area's drinking water. Fortunately, however, the outbreak and the diagnosis of its causes led to the acceptance that cholera was waterborne. not transmitted by stink, not by scent, by miasma. And it would be the last major outbreak of cholera in the capital.

Basil Gate's sewage work continued until 1889, during which time he replaced three of London's bridges and was appointed president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He then died two years later in March of 1891. In his obituary opine that, when the New Zealander comes to London a thousand years hence, the magnificent solidity and the faultless symmetry of the great granite blocks which form the wall of the Thames embankment will still remain.

Later, the writer continued, the great sewer that runs beneath Londoners has added some 20 years to their chance of life. So London, finally, no longer a shitstorm. Must have felt so incredibly good. to put all that foul stink behind him. I feel like I gotta give that guy a little applause. Good job, Basilgate. Good job, buddy. I mean, that is crazy. He cleaned up an entire fucking city by designing this thing. Major city, the biggest in the world.

But then just after the River Thames had all of its shit sanitized, another great European capital city would get hit with stink. We'll go through this one quicker about the second great stink now. In the late summer of 1880 in Paris... Death was in the air, and it once again smelled like shit. Paris, like London, had experienced brutal physical growth. During the half-century preceding their own great stink, the city had grown in population from less than 800,000 to more than 2.2 million.

Fucking explosive growth. Second most popular city in Europe behind London now. In 1860, seemingly on the verge of implosion, the city of Paris annexed several suburban towns, thereby adding a sizable poor and working class population to the city and expanding its spatial reach far outward. That meant that there were more people than ever producing more shit.

and also that the waste treatment plants that have been far away in the countryside were now squarely in the middle of the suburbs. The city's growth provoked crises in housing and water supply and in sewage disposal. In response, Napoleon III and his prefect of the Seine Department Tried to remake the city.

clearing the slums to pave the way for wide boulevards and modern amenities, an architectural measure, but also a public health movement since it was thought that the Haasman would bring light to the dark, dense areas where disease flourished and parks to clear out to the sickly city air.

My asthma theory at work again. But what this meant in practice was that Paris turned into an immense construction site, displacing tenants from the crowded central districts, causing rent in the city to rise dramatically. Still, there were improvements. New aqueducts, reservoirs, and water mains greatly expanded the supply of fresh water into the city, and more than 600 kilometers of new sewer lines drained the streets of impurities. But then, in the summer of 1880, things took a bad turn.

For more than two months, oppressive and insufferable odors pervaded the air of the capital, occasionally disappearing and then reappearing with greater intensity. People took to the press to complain. Our great and beautiful city is being turned into an immense cesspool, which soon will be uninhabitable.

One newspaper reported. The foul stench sweeping down on Paris has provoked a general outcry and public lamentations, another reported. But Paris's great stink of 1880 hadn't started in Paris. It began in the western suburb. of Nanterre, where a waste treatment plant had become notorious for spreading unpleasant odors over the adjoining towns. Residents complained so insistently that on May 14th, 1880, the prefect of police of the Seine Department ordered the plant's operating permit.

temporarily suspended. But local authorities continued to receive complaints of stinky-ass activity at the plant. Finally, nine neighboring towns took the plant's operator to court for violation of its original license and of the May 14th suspension. The judge ruled against his company and ordered the plant shut down permanently because the towns were unable to prove actual damages instead of merely hypothetical damages. They were denied monetary compensation, however.

But the suspension and subsequent shutdown of the non-terror plant caused the Parisian company, which enjoyed a near monopoly on cesspit emptying services to transport the waste that would have been treated.

in Nanterre to other plants in the northern, eastern, and southern suburbs, and it was alleged that some of the resulting surplus waste was simply just dumped into the Paris sewers, and Paris already had sewage problems. Cess pits under residential buildings were the main mode of waste disposal.

In theory, latrines emptied urine and feces directly into these impermeable containers, which stored them safely underground beneath each residential building, while ventilation pipes carried the malodorous fumes. up above the rooftops to be carried away inoffensively with the wind. In practice, the pits themselves often overflowed or leaked odors into the houses above. Defective construction or installation also allowed their contents to leach into the surrounding soil or groundwater.

The ventilation pipes, even when they were intact, too often merely carried their stench to adjoining houses or neighborhoods. And when the ventilation pipes leaked, sickening gases crept into the lodgings above. So much smelling of neighbor shit in this episode. God, we are so spoiled comparatively now. I might lose my fucking mind if I constantly could smell my neighbor's actual shit day after day after day and not be able to do shit about it to fix it.

A few Parisians were satisfied with the work of cesspit cleaners who were paid a fee by property owners to empty out each building's pit and cart the contents to suburban dumps or treatment plants, which they had to do at night to minimize inconvenience.

Aside from the sheer smell produced by the entire operation and the annoyance of some cesspit cleaners who worked on the up and up, it was also alleged that some cleaners took advantage of the cover darkness and the absence of police surveillance at night to illegally dump their cargo into gutters.

or into sewer outlets in the streets. This practice poisoned the entire network of sewers, and by extension, through manholes and ventilation outlets in the underground galleries, the very air of the city itself. All of Paris fucking stunk now. Obstructions and inadequate water flow in the sewers compounded the problem as foul smelling and hazardous material accumulated and stagnated in the sewers rather than being flushed out to the system.

Then in the winter of 1879-1880, unusually large amounts of snow piled up in the streets of Paris. This caused a major snow removal problem, as well as buildup of garbage and shit that could not be carted to the proper disposal sites. As a result, unprecedented quantities of snow.

Shit. Miscellaneous refuse. Dumped into the sewers now, blocking normal flow, creating log jams whose scent could be smelled in the streets above. With the closure of the plant at Nanterre, other plants were now overloaded. agricultural workers begged their employers not to send them to work near one of these plants in uh hunts utborn uh excuse me in uh utborn not i don't know why i added the first word where the suffocating summertime stench actually made them vomit

and the local school medical inspector reported that the plant's operation seriously compromised the health of the children at a nearby nursery school. I'm not sure if you've ever smelled something so foul it makes it hard to properly function, makes you feel sick, but I definitely have. Two-time standout. Once was on a BART train in San Francisco. This is back in, like, 2000, I think, 11. I think on a stand-up album. Hear This. I did a bit about it.

But it was unreal. It was the stinkiest human being I've ever encountered. They got onto the train I was on and I started to dry heave. My eyes started to water. Some other people around me got off for the next stop. just moved other cars one dude literally just exclaimed god damn just scurried away she had to have had some kind of abscess or something just an

a lot of hygiene problems going on. There's just an overpowering mix of like yeast infection, body odor, pus, literal shit. Smelled like she shit herself, then not washed, then the unwashed shit. gave her infections and then she didn't treat those. And she was also sometimes maybe thrown up on herself and then not cleaning that and then shitting herself more all while living on a diet of mostly burnt tires, rotten skunk meat and spoiled milk.

If she was my coworker and shared a workspace, I would have had to have given my boss an ultimatum, right? She goes or I do today, now, right now. And then the second great stink I encountered personally was when I stayed at a terrible motel in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

It was next to a beet processing plant. If I remember correctly, it was some kind of plant. And when I walked down to the parking lot and caught a whiff of the fumes of that plant, I literally like keeled over and I started gagging and threw up a little bit. It was just an overpowering stink. I don't know. It was super cold that day. Maybe there's some kind of weather inversion. Didn't let the stink dissipate like normal, but fuck, it was horrific. And I wonder if Paris in 1880 was even worse.

Some in Paris allege that the stinky plant in Utborn had not been closed like the one in Nanterre because its owners were politically well-connected, and now it was getting more shit than ever. And soon more and more Parisians are starting to complain. Shortly after the final shutdown of the Nanterre plant in August,

The complaints in Paris greatly intensified, particularly in the north central districts. Fetid emanations, residents claimed in the third week of August, were spreading through the city, particularly in the evening hours and positively stinking up their neighborhoods. Horrible miasmas, one newspaper reported on August 22nd, are infecting certain districts of the city. Never before has the infection of Paris been so great.

By the end of the month, the odors had become an almost daily fixture in the Parisian press. And in September, it was reported that pestilential emanations are turning Paris into a locus of infection. and that the foul stench sweeping down on Paris has provoked a general outcry and public lamentations. By the end of the month, with the arrival of cooler weather, the odors had by all accounts lost none of their intensity, and some Parisians wondered if they would ever end.

Another article in a local paper featured the following testimonial. All last night we fell prey to these fetid exhalations. In vain, we hermetically sealed our windows. We couldn't sleep a wink all night. My God. That morning at 7 o'clock, the remains of a pestilential mist still hung in the air. It was not until 9 or 10 o'clock that we had any relief. The torture is becoming unbearable.

what even an autumn with a clear sky and a cool dry breeze which seemed to herald winter will it last our entire lives then this can't go on according to some claims the smells were more than smells they alleged that the stink soured milk instantly turned iron blue and red, attracted, even generated swarms of large green flies. One family, as a demonstration of the noxious powers of the stinking air, placed a basin full of water on his balcony, and they claim that...

After half an hour, the water was already fetid and it's even worse for the milk. One reader wrote to the editor of La National to complain about the proverbial stench or the powerful stench. We were poisoned during the night. To the point that many people on our street fell sick with fevers and got sores on their lips. I was working with some galvanized iron springs and the poison was so violent they were turned blue, black and red from the gases. And the newspaper La Gula...

Reported on September 11th that several neighborhoods of Paris were invaded by a considerable quantity of large green flies, which bothered both people and horses. It's like fucking apocalyptic here. This is like revelation stuff. But that wasn't all. Some Parisians claimed that these odors were also deadly. Illnesses and deaths were attributed to the great stink both by medical and scientific authorities and by lay observers.

and predictions of imminent epidemics were made on a regular basis. And soon, during August and September of 1880, Parisians occasionally reported specific illnesses, in themselves or in family members, that they blamed on foul smells. The newspaper Paris Journal printed this excerpt from an angry letter. I have three children who have had the fever for two months now, as have we parents too. If they die, it will be the fault of the city council and the engineers.

The press accused the local government, in its refusal to commit resources to remedial action, of speculating on the health of the population, exploiting the mortality of poor little children, and condemning death to several hundred Parisians, both young and old. The French newspaper La Cicla editorialized, due to the poisoning of the air, an epidemic could break out any day now. One of my colleagues assures me that child mortality has tripled.

Infantile diarrhea was singled out as the principal illness by which the Parisian Great Stink manifested statistically. But some observers also argued that the odors spread typhoid fever and dysentery, even cholera and smallpox were mentioned. But there weren't...

actually increased deaths, just smelled so fucking bad that a lot of people thought the stink was killing them. A month-by-month breakdown of deaths in the city for 1880 and 1880 will show no mortal upsurge during or immediately after the wave of foul orders.

But the foul odors would not stop with the onset of fall as many expected them to. In late September of 1880, after a week of respite, one Parisian found to his disgust that the odors had reappeared with a vengeance as a fetid mist, engulfing him as he rode in a horse-drawn carriage.

He wrote, The coachman slowed the carriage to a walk. He held the reins with one hand only, while the other held his nose. The demands of local authorities do something increased. The newspaper, La Gula, wrote, Why no action? It is incumbent upon our local officials.

on the administration of the Sen Department to recognize their duty and responsibility to take charge of such a state of affairs. Some accuse the government of being more concerned with moral disinfection, that is, an anti-clerical agenda of rooting out church influence in schools and other institutions.

than with the actual physical well-being of the population. Others denounced secrecy and a lack of communication in government circles. Especially frustrating was the fact that, as the elders had struck during the traditional period of summer vacations, Prominent officials left the capital in the middle of the Great Sting for various, presumably pleasant-smelling holiday destinations. While Parisians suffocated the La Lanterna, or, oh my gosh, the La Laterne.

Newspaper remarked, Our local officials are in the countryside, inhaling to the point of intoxication, the sweet scent of freshly cut hay. Prefect of police, Louis and Drew, for example, whose administration oversaw certain public health-related functions in Paris at the time, deserted the city for an alpine resort town. The government did create a high-level commission to study the odors, but that didn't do shit. In an editorial in La Figaro entitled The Plague Victims of Paris,

George or, uh, yeah, whatever. Fucking George is good enough. George Grison reported that we don't need commissioners with the pens tucked behind their ears. We need workers armed with brooms and shovels. He targeted all levels of government to blame, from cabinet members to city councilors who spent their time renaming streets while the city rotted, saying he'd come up with a street name for them that he could apply everywhere. Plague Street.

Meanwhile, petitioners begged the city council and the prefecture of the Seine department to clean out the sewers and to transport the capital's bodily waste far away into the countryside, where it would no longer be a scourge for the Parisian population.

Faced with such loud and sustained demands, the authorities had no choice but to respond in some fashion. But since there were so many causes, authorities really had no idea where to start. The easiest thing to do is simply be defensive, dismissive, or shift the blame. The Health Committee of the Sixth...

A rondismant, a district within Paris, however, did address the great stink directly. It found that the odors came from multiple sources, from the soil, from the sewers, from cesspit ventilation pipes, and from the suburban waste dumps and treatment plants.

The committee's discussion called attention to the exceptional frequency of northerly winds in the late summer of 1880 and of their tendency to transport the gases from the plants of the northern suburbs through the Rue Lafayette to the 9th and 10th arrondissements.

There was some debate in scientific circles that reported knowledge over whether such gases provided a hospitable environment for those lesser organisms that have been blamed for the spread of epidemic diseases, aka germs, though they didn't know that yet.

However, the committee concluded that under any circumstances, the gases were dispersed in the air and quantities too small to pose any real danger. Moreover, the city's weekly mortality statistics showed a general tendency toward improvement during the period between July...

In October of 1880, the report said. As a result, the committee concluded the health effects of the bad smells had been exaggerated, which was true, but not what people wanted to hear. City Council aligned more with public sentiment. In July, Councilmember Jules Roche had demanded to know what the prefecture of police was doing to alleviate the odor, which he called a perpetual danger to health.

The council debated the matter at length in early October, interrogating officials from various departmental offices in order to determine the causes of the odors and find out who was responsible for remedying them. Two people were under particularly heavy scrutiny from the public. Prefect of police Andrew, or Andrew, and the director of public works, Adolphe Alfond. Andrew replied that the, or probably Andrew, replied that the press and the public had singularly exaggerated.

The seriousness of the odors, which was blamed on a special atmospheric state caused by the succession of a harsh winter and a hot, stormy summer. Furthermore, he insisted he had acted as vigorously as his position allowed in enforcing existing ordinances. Every time that a violation of the regulations governing waste treatment plans had been brought to his administration's attention, he claimed an official report was filed and the operator brought before the courts. It wasn't his fault.

that the existing laws provided for only nominal fines and penalties. Basically, this is not my problem. He blamed Alfond, whom he called the great sweeper and cleaner of Paris, and whose duties included the surveillance of waste disposal inside city limits.

But Alfon wasn't going to take the blame. He claimed not only that the odors were harmless to human health, but also that the campaign of outrage and criticism in the press was politically motivated and orchestrated. Furthermore, Alfon argued it was entirely unreasonable to expect a metropolis such as Paris to be sweet-smelling. He wrote, one cannot prevent odors from being generated, an agglomeration of two million residents sweating, eating, etc., not to mention animals of all kinds.

I must add that Paris is not only a city of wealth and fashion, but also an industrial city, and factories always give off more or less disgusting odors. But between that and a great poisoning, there is a big difference. Kind of funny. Yeah, guys, it fucking stinks, okay? You know what? Wake up. That's life. Life fucking stinks. You don't like it? Move to the beach, asshole. Go to the mountains. But if you want to keep living in Paris...

You just have to accept that life is stink, motherfucker. Finally, Alphonse said, if this all led to his dismissal, so be it. He would leave with his head held high. With the city government clearly being full of... infighting and blame passing, the national government now decides to step in. On September 20th, 1880, toward the end of the Great Stink, as it turned out, the central government entered the fray.

The Minister of Agriculture and Commerce named an 11-member commission to study the causes of the infection of Paris and recommend remedial measures. Among the commission's members were two leading authorities who would get to weigh in on the great stink, Louis Pasteur. and Paul Bruadel. Pasteur was arguably the world's best-known microbiologist. He's a dude widely credited with germ theory and for inventing the process of pasteurization named after him to preserve foods.

Also developed the rabies and anthrax vaccines and made major contributions to combating cholera. Kind of a big deal. Paul Bruidel, on the other hand, was a complete fucking idiot. He knew a lot about shit only because he ate his own shit. Every fucking day. Like the stupid... No. Brouadel was a French pathologist, hygienist, and member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine. I have no idea if I pronounced that right. I tried to do it fast. Brouadel was a leading authority of...

French forensic medicine, and was also a passionate advocate concerning all aspects of public health and hygiene, including issues like food safety, tuberculosis, venereal disease, child abuse, alcoholism, public decency. There's a lot of things to be an expert in. or advocate for. The commission held 21 meetings between September 30th, 1880 and June 20th, 1881, in addition to numerous subcommittee meetings and issued a lengthy final report in 1881. Its strategy was three-pronged.

Subcommittees were named to investigate and detail all potential causes of the Great Stink inside the city itself, including the cesspit system and the sewers. All suburban industrial establishments that might have spread odors to the city, including the waste dumps and treatment plants.

and the advisability of continuing to allow the Paris sewers to empty into the Seine downstream from the city. The final report detailed an exhaustive array of sites and practices that were potential or actual causes of odors ranging from canneries and slaughterhouses.

to tar distilleries, and of course, cesspits, and maybe also to that one fucking lady on the BART train that almost killed us all. It concluded cautiously that all of these factors and many more were jointly responsible for the odors of 1880.

And that it was impossible to figure out which was the most responsible. But it also held another important finding. Some but not all odors are hazardous to human health. They even had a catchphrase. Not everything that stinks kills. And not everything that kills stinks. It's pretty good. Too bad the radio wasn't around yet, right? They could have made a fun little jingle for all that. Let's see. Let's get some jingle music going in the background.

Not everything that stinks will kill you. Not everything that kills you will stink. So instead of worrying about that smell, think death is everywhere, not death. Just in the stinky air. Big pots of poop with nothing to dread. So worry about everything instead. Because everything and anything make you dead. Not bad for no practice.

Not bad for no practice. Maybe not that jingle though. That was depressing. But maybe like a more positive jingle. In essence, just because something smelled bad, that didn't mean it was deadly. And just because something smelled good or didn't smell at all, didn't mean it was good for you. In our era, this seems, you know, pretty obvious, but this was going against miasma theory, which, like we said, had been around since the days of Hippocrates.

And basically every response to outbreaks of illness in Europe, like how the plague doctors wore sweet-smelling flowers to counteract the Black Death, just because you thought something was gross didn't mean it was actually going to kill you. From now on, the commission wrote, only experts trained in the new emerging medical sciences and backed by laboratory methods were in a position to arbitrate what was safe and unsafe, harmless and hazardous. Fuck yeah, bro. Hell, Nimrod. Look to scientists.

And so the great stink of Paris marked just a couple of months of horrible smells, or marked not just a couple of months of horrible smells, but also the entrance into the modern scientific era of the germ. So that's pretty cool.

Meanwhile, the second half of the 19th century also marked the beginning of the hygiene movement in the United States. This movement was led by activists and reformers like John Griscombe and Jacob Rees, who concentrated on the plight of the urban poor in tenement neighborhoods in places like New York and Chicago.

but it was actually a frenzy for technology that paved the way for the wide adoption of toilets rather than a concern for social ills. Toilets and technology were imported from England at first, but then American inventors provided an endless rush of innovation.

Across the country, flush toilets flourished, though they weren't initially connected to a main sewer system. That was considered a household's responsibility, not the government's, and so sewage emptied into cesspool streams and some private sewer systems. But by the 1870s, this helter-skelter approach was starting to fail. Cheap pipes, defective faucets, faulty drainage, leaky gas traps, leaching cesspools were the biggest culprits.

The nation was soon awash in hysteria over the dangers of poor plumbing and the potential for disease built into everyone's homes. The solution would be a public responsibility, thank God. I would not want all of my neighbors to be responsible for their own sewer systems right now, and my neighborhood would be a fucking shithole.

Municipal governments received the mandate to enact plumbing laws and public health codes, and they did. By the end of the century, the water going into houses and the sewage coming out were under stringent government regulation.

Now that germ theory was also being increasingly accepted, people also started thinking about poop in terms of your health. In 1896, the well-known wellness fanatic and physician John Harvey Kellogg summed up the digestive ethos of his day in a book titled simply, The Stomach.

The highway to health, he wrote, ran through the gut. Indeed, so important was the digestive tract that the body might be best thought of as a stomach with organs appended. Which is pretty funny. But it's a bunch of walking poop machines. He thought the most important thing about the body was what came out, ideally prolific amounts of poop, expelled with great frequency, which is an interesting take. Oh, you have constant diarrhea.

That is incredible. Congratulations. You're the healthiest a person can be. Kellogg preached to adherence at his then famous health resort, Battle Creek Sanitarium. We've talked about that crazy ass place in previous episodes. They're producing at least three and much better four.

Bowel movements a day ought to be the norm. And as someone with a very sensitive stomach who has pooped four times a day on a lot of days, I assure you that should not be the norm. Not at all. To him, every meal should end with the body dismissing the meal you had two meals ago. Expel breakfast after dinner, for example. He considered that a leisurely pace. According to his calculations, this schedule allowed eight hours for food processing in the 25 feet that separated mouth and colon.

and a lavish four to six for the remaining five feet from colon to toilet. In his 1918 book, The Itinerary of a Breakfast, Kellogg laid out the ideal schedule of arrivals and departures that food traveling through this subway might expect. His timetable featured the various delays, the wrecks, collisions, and obstructions that might cause the most dreaded of all ailments in the Kellogg catalog, constipation. He felt that waste that lingered in the body posed a crisis.

with halted digestive locomotion supposedly resulting in putrefaction. If not quickly empty, the stomach would pass on its rot to its neighboring organs, resulting in auto-intoxication or the poisoning of the body. The critical need to keep the digestive system humming along led to the serial empire associated with the Kellogg name, as it was Kellogg's mission to deliver fiber to keep up with the human subway.

John Harvey Kellogg's obsession with digestion was far from fringe in his day. He was part of a small but very loud crew of gut gurus, which differently parsed what it meant to keep the body healthy. Kellogg's greatest competition was Horace Fletcher.

known affectionately to his followers as the great masticator for his demand that food be chewed to a liquid state before being swallowed. Can't fucking imagine how long it would take. Production would go, I would go down to one podcast a month, maybe.

If I had to chew every fucking bite to a liquid state before swelling, I'd be having like four hour lunches. Must have taken that dude like a whole day to work his way through a single stick of beef jerky. In stark contrast to Kellogg, Fletcher dismissed poop as simply waste leftover from the production system.

of the digestive tract, digestive ash, as he politely called it, was not something to produce. It was something to reduce, if possible, if one could not eliminate defecation entirely. He believed that was possible. If only. If only you could figure out a diet that eliminated the need to shit altogether. What an accomplishment that would be, right? Just train your body to utilize every fucking last drop of every meal. Like my wife, Lindsay, who again assures me, never poops.

In Fletcher's view, the indigestible fiber that Kellogg flogged as the key to digestive health should never go into the mouth in the first place. The funny part was that both of these guys came at it from an idea that had taken hold of the country in the early 20th century, the production line.

This was after all the heady days of Henry Ford and his assembly line of efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, all of whom helped popularize the ethic, one now embedded in the national psyche, that productivity and speed were the greatest good. and waste of any sort was the worst sin. The difference between Fletcher and Kellogg was merely one of perspective. Kellogg poop was the system's product, or at least the guarantor.

of the smoothly running system. Producing more of it and speeding up production was simply good industrial practice. For Fletcher, waste was waste. A sign that the system producing it was inefficient, unproductive, and in dire need of repair. The less of it, the better.

The more you pooped, the more of a fucking disgusting, inept dickwad you were. Right? So stop shitting, you dumb, lazy animal. These fads continue. Celebrity diet coach Paul Bragg, whose reign as a health guru began in the late 1920s. and wouldn't reach its peak until the 1970s, advocated the strange practice of bowel breathing, a method designed to force oxygen directly into the bowel by taking a deep breath, you know, taking a deep breath in.

Squatting, bearing down as though mid-bowel movement while slowly exhaling. Through this practice, Bragg promised you could train your bowels to remove the accreted waste that even the strongest laxatives left behind. And that is a bunch of nonsense. Bragg was a fucking con artist, or an idiot. Bragg was also well-known for his techniques of fasting, which added what he called detoxification to the mix of cures for the potentially poisoned gut.

In his 1973 book, The Miracle of Fasting, Bragg reported that a 10-day fast he had undertaken in Virginia produced something remarkable. A turd comprised of a third of a cup of quicksilver from a laxative he had taken as a child that had been festering in his gut. for the past half century. I doubt it. This excreted artifact was a revelation for Bragg, who touted it as evidence of both the detoxifying effects of his method of fasting...

and the dangers of the over-the-counter laxative formulations that competed with his own methods and products. Even so, the laxative market across the country was already sizable. By 1978, the pharmaceutical company, G.D. Searle & Co., Announced that in that year, Americans spent nearly $200 million on laxatives. And now let's head back in time a little bit to another theme we explored earlier in the episode. Shit weapons! They haven't gone away. They've gotten more advanced. Who me?

was a top-secret weapon developed by the Office of Strategic Services in the U.S., the precursor to the CIA, during the Second World War. Though the weapon didn't actually contain any feces, Humi was heavily inspired by poop. The actual weapon was a foul-smelling chemical sent to members of the French resistance in small atomizers. The aim of the device was to spray it on a German officer in order to humiliate them in front of their colleagues.

by making them smell as though they had literally shit themselves. Pam Dalton, a cognitive psychologist, told New Scientist in 2001, Imagine the worst garbage dumpster left in the street for a long time in the middle of the hottest summer ever, and that gives you a taste of the Who Me smell quality. Who Me ultimately proved to be a disaster.

Because it was impossible to deploy a chemical that foul-smelling without also tainting everyone around it with its horrible scent, including the person who sprayed it. What a weird thing to develop. It sounds... less like something that really happened, more like a I think you should leave sketch. Just some bumbling, shit-obsessed World War II era scientist. Guys, guys, I know we can defeat the Nazis. I think I just want us to war. Eric?

This isn't another shit idea, is it? Like your turd cannon? Where soldiers are given lots of bean and cheese burritos instead of bullets so they can make their own ammo and shoot it at the enemy? Or it's not like your whoopee bomb, is it? Where he wanted us to try and sneak explosive whoopee cushions onto the chairs of high-ranking Nazi officers. So when they sit on him, it smells like they farted, and then that fart explodes and kills them.

No, no. No, it's nothing like, it's a little bit like that. Okay, hear me out. What if we made like pens with little sprayers in them? Like they had a real stinky fart juice inside of them. And we had secret agents act like they were writing something when really they're just getting ready to spray the fart juice on the Nazis who will get so embarrassed about stinking like they should.

themselves that don't go crazy and try to kill Hitler. Eric, that is literally the best idea I've ever heard. Oh my God, you did just win the war for us. No, it's ridiculous. And that wasn't the end of Poop Warfare. In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong made use of a simple but effective and pretty fucking gross weapon called a punji stick. We talked about it in the Vietnam episode. The punjis were made by sharpening bamboo sticks, which would then be dipped in human shit.

also sometimes poison from plants or animals. And these poop-encrusted spears will be placed in the ground, concealed with foliage, or under a trap door, left for the enemy to fall upon. The sticks didn't generally kill the people that fell on them. Did really fuck them up, especially their feet and legs, right? And then that shit would help lead to dangerous infections. Now back to our main thrust, how people shit.

By the middle of the 20th century, for the average person, you might think that the widespread insulation of toilets, similar to the ones we know today, meant that things were pretty well settled in terms of how people do their business. Not so. In the middle of the 20th century, the pay-per-use toilet was on the rise, just like back in ancient Rome.

For exact change, users would be permitted to relieve themselves. By 1970, an estimated 50,000 pay toilets were in place. But then there was a problem. While toilets were subject to a fee, urinals were not. That meant men had the freedom to empty their bladders without being charged, while women looking to do the same had to pay a fee. In 1969, California State Assemblywoman March Fong Yu took to the steps of the California State Capitol building and smashed a porcelain toilet.

with a sledgehammer to protest the inequality promoted by these locked stalls. It was the beginning of a piss and shit revolution. Around the same time, four high school students decided to make pay toilets their pet cause. In 1968, Dayton, Ohio, teenagers and brothers, Michael and Ira Gessel, were on a road trip to Pennsylvania with their parents when they encountered a pay toilet at a Howard Johnson's restaurant. The brothers couldn't believe spare change was needed to relieve themselves.

Back in Dayton, and with friends Steve Freuchen and Natalie Precker, the group formed what became known as the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, an activist group that championed free bowel movements for all. The foursome drafted model legislation, circulated press releases, drawing attention to the issue, which received national media exposure. Their logo was a fist clutching chains rising out of a toilet bowl.

Pretty obvious what they thought about the pay-per-use toilets. While some of this was clearly a kind of, you know, juvenile theater, the foursome wrote ballads like Ode to a Pay Toilet. Their endgame was actually no joke. They opened collegiate chapters around the country, drew the attention of lawmakers. Speaking with the Associated Press many years later in 2018, Michael Gessel said, we did what no one else before us had succeeded in doing, which was to move the debate.

from a pure joke to serious action. I think there was a window to do this. We were involved in the 70s. It was the beginning of the feminist movement, then called Women's Liberation. And 10 years later, you had Ronald Reagan and a curtain of conservatism that came down. I think people would not have been open to the humor of it then.

And they really did make an impact. Chicago made the first move following a committee press conference removing paid toilets from public facilities. Ohio followed suit with then-governor James Rhodes signing a bill into law that mandated one free toilet for every paid bull in the state.

before long, roughly half the pay toilets in the country were decommissioned. And though there's a lot more we could say, far more, about the history of shit, I feel like that was enough to get across the gist of how far we have come regarding our shits. Now let's get out. of the strange, strange timeline. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely.

So shit. Do you feel enlightened now? Grossed out? Both? We spend a lot of our time probably not thinking about shit. Trying to distance our elevated intellectual brains away from the stinky, just, you know, low reality.

base reality of our nasty bodies, processing food and turning it into a sludge in our digestive tract. And then hopefully squeezing that waste out into neat, lubricated, not too wet, not too dry, smooth old turds. Like the one I dropped off in the lobby bathroom at the Sheridan Hotel in Kauai.

Really was the best shit. So smooth. So massive. So clean on the way out and satisfying. I wish they had it inside a glass case in their lobby. How we deal with our shit is so important regarding the quality of modern life.

Aren't you so thankful so many engineers and other innovative meat sacks figured out sewage technology so we don't have to sit in the stink of our neighbors' buttholes all the time anymore? So we don't have to drink little disease-filled flecks our neighbors have launched out of their ass cannons for many, many years?

We were just another part of the great circle of life. Shit was not a big problem. Back in defecations, good old days, people poop where they wanted. True freedom was shit. Simply moved on to the next location. leaving their waste to become part of the natural cycle of decomposition, fertilization, and plant growth that people and animals would then eat and poop out and so on and so forth. But the advent of agriculture posed a shitty new problem. Now the people are staying in the same place.

How do we poop in a way that was easy for us, right? Not too far in the way, outside of the city, you know, you don't have to walk a long time, but also put the way somewhere far away where it won't attract vermin, won't threaten our health by accidental ingestion, won't fucking stink us out of the city.

The answer was, of course, sewer systems, and many ancient societies went on to develop them. Ancient cultures across the world formed primitive latrines or even flush toilets in the case of the Minoans and others. The Greeks and the Romans in particular made promising advances in sanitation, provided you were rich enough to afford to be able to be connected to the sewer line. If you weren't, you got to shit in a public latrine, maybe using a nasty-ass sponge stick to clean yourself.

a shared fucking poop stick. Uh, but there was, there were some positives though from these public latrines, you know, it became like little social activities. one rife with toilet humor, literally, literally toilet humor and discourse. Middle Ages in Europe changed that. Shit became associated with the devil. So much Satan in the Middle Ages. And the idea of miasma, right? Smells, it could harm you.

proliferating, you know, leading people to bathe infrequently. This then seemed to amplify humanity's sinfulness since everyone was covered in filth all the time and superstition and tribalism ruled. Let's please never. Let a proliferation of magical thinking send us back to those horrific days. There were a few places where people had access to sewer systems like royalty or monasteries.

But some royalty didn't care much for toilets, even as they were being invented. King Louis XIV, France's son-king, lived in the opulent Palace of Versailles, which was covered in shit, more often than it wasn't. Thanks to the worst house guests ever, literally shitting in corners or pissing as they walked to the palace. As technology progressed, it seemed like we would soon be on the horizon of a new era, an era where everyone had access to waste disposal.

But technological advancement also led to a boom in population, and existing systems just could not keep up. That would lead to two major great stinks, one in London and one in Paris. Londoners have been dumping their sewage straight into the 10th for centuries, even increased doing so during epidemics, since it was thought that miasmas or bad smells caused illness, which when people drank or used the contaminated water, of course, led to even more illness.

In response, London swiftly modernized its sewer system, a project led by Joseph Basilgate. It would save countless lives and is still in use today. In Paris, the stink produced a frenzy of fear also because of miasma theory, and while waste treatment didn't change in the way that it did in London, as a result of the great stink of Paris and scientific commissions, it did lead to an overall reduction in the belief of miasma theory.

and its replacement with germ theory. And that moved us towards the modernized plumbing we know today. But the history... of shit is really so much more complex and multilayered than the history of sewage systems. It's the history of people forming societies, religious codes, of humor, of governments figuring out how to tax shit.

It's the history of weapons and health fads of the one thing that kings and peasants have in common that we all have to shit. And now you know a lot more about what we all do every day. Every day if you're a well-oiled shit factory knocking out at least two dumps a day like this fella. So thanks for listening to this shit. Time now.

for the takeaways number one the transition from nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers to stationary societies doing activities like agriculture and constructing settlements turn poop from an anytime, anywhere activity to a serious societal concern. Number two, many ancient societies had functioning waterways like the ancient Greeks, the Romans, and especially the Minoans, who had a flushable toilet thousands of years before Westerners would start putting them into their homes.

Those ancient Greeks be so smart and shit. Number three, my asthma theory held that it was bad smells, not germs, that caused disease. Now we know that the number one killer of people for most of human history was disease often spread by contaminated, i.e. shitty water.

But back then, before people could see germs with advanced technology, people believed it was the literal smell that killed you. Unfortunately, this led to people trying to get the smells and the shit as far away as possible, which meant dumping it into a river or creek, but few stopped using those creeks for washing or drinking.

which meant the disease continued to run rampant. Number four, in the searing hot summer of 1858, the hideous stench of human excrement rising from the River Thames and sweeping to the hallowed halls of the Houses of Parliament finally became too much for Britain's politicians.

who've been ignoring the problem for years. The river had been the dumping point for the city's waste for decades, if not centuries, while people continued to use it for washing and bathing, drinking, and because of the belief in miasma, the disease, that disease comes from bad smells.

Waste that would have gone into cesspits was diverted into the Thames during cholera epidemics, making the situation even worse. In response, the Metropolitan Board of Works was given full authority and enough money to start work on tackling London's waste problem. Joseph Basilgate was in charge of...

was in charge of constructing London's new sewer system, adding four pumping stations and two treatment works to manage, treat sewage, and pump out the putrefied liquid into the River Thames. Ultimately, the construction of the sewer system transformed London's landscape shape.

and improve the health of the city's population tremendously. And number five, new info. If you're especially interested in toilets, excuse me, you might have heard of one man, Thomas Crapper. Born in 1836, many say that Crapper was the inventor of the toilet. which as we know is not true. That was Sir John Harrington, though really it was the Minoans. Or maybe even some other group lost to history.

It's true that Crapper was a successful sanitary engineer, a plumber, whose greatest innovation was actually the invention of the bathroom-fitting showroom, something that brought flush toilets out of the water closet and into the public eye. For the time, the idea, or for the time...

The idea of actually displaying any part of the bathroom was scandalous. But Crapper's innovation helped to create a market for the relatively new and high investment indoor plumbing that he sold. And then years after his death in 1910, the myth building began. Much of the confusion stems from a 1969 book by Wallace Rayburn, Flushed with Pride, the story of Thomas Crapper.

Among the other claims it makes is that Crapper was from the north of England, but walked to London at the tender age of 11 to become a plumber, rising to become the inventor of the modern toilet. Based on that, the story says toilets became known as Crappers, but that's not true. The word crap as a slang for evacuating one's bowels of shit dates back to before crapper went into business.

Crapper is a term for toilet, though, may have links to the sanitary engineer. When U.S. soldiers were based in England in 1917 or in World War I, they probably saw a cistern stamp with T. Crapper in public toilets and may have taken the word Crapper back home with them.

Castle's Dictionary of Slang records the word crapper as a synonym for a toilet in use from the 1920s, so that would fit. Today, crapper's name can still be found on some of London's sewer infrastructure, mostly manhole covers that read T. Crapper & Co. Sanitary Engineers. So there you go. A little extra bit of trivia crap in this shitty ass episode. Time suck. Top five takeaways. A history of shit literally has been sucked.

The first episode of 2025 is in the toilet. I like it. Completely ridiculous, like the history of this podcast. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for all the help of Mike and Tom suck.

Voices all over the place. Thank you once again to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins. Thanks to Logan Keith for helping to publish this episode. Sign a merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com. Thanks to Sophie Evans for her initial research this week. She said she had a blast working on this shit.

And thanks to the All Seen Eyes, moderating the Cult of the Curious private Facebook page, the Mod Squad making sure Discord keeps running smooth, and everyone over on the Time Suck and Bad Magic subreddits. A lot of cool sacks doing a lot of cool shit.

And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Updates? Get your Time Sucker Updates. I'm going to start off with an update to, well... something I've referenced on a lot of different episodes, sent in by analytical sucker Shea Marco with the subject line of On Sexual Partners.

And Shay writes, Hey Dan and the rest of you wonderful meat sacks with Bad Magic. I wanted to pick your brain a little bit on the topic of the number of sexual partners. I do not apologize for the length of this email in advance. I'm a longtime listener and major fan of both Time Suck and Scared to Death. Thank you.

as well as your stand-up. Even saw you perform in Denver. I mean, had some fun, fun shows in Denver. I have noticed, though, I have noticed through the show that you are often inclined to mention how stupid it is for people to care about the number of sexual partners someone has.

Before I get into the gritty part of this email, I wanted to say that I've achieved a bachelor's in economics, which focuses heavily on a method of thinking and understanding beyond who handles money and why people like buying white cars.

Because of this, I feel as though my plain devil's advocate with you may come off as being prude. On several occasions, I've conducted research analysis for both my schooling and career. I do personally agree with you that caring about one's sexual history to a degree is nothing short of an insecurity. of an insecurity. However, I do believe that there is merit to those that think this particular way. There have been several dozen studies of varying methods and conduct that show that as a...

The number of sexual partners increases. The likelihood of divorce and infidelity in a boyfriend-girlfriend stage or marriage also increases. The fewer sexual partners someone has shows a direct correlation to a decrease in both divorce rates and infidelity. This number differs slightly between men and women. There are people out there whose main goal it is to find a stable relationship that leads to marriage, arguably a large portion of the population.

If this is someone's end goal, then it would be right for them to be concerned with the number of sexual partners that someone they plan on dating for a long run has. While there are many instances where this can be a gray area, such as instances of being cheated on, religion, manipulation, etc., overwhelmingly, that is statistically not true. It ties back in to an age-old saying, comparison is the thief of joy.

People should take this into account as every single action also has consequences, no matter how small they may be. If your goal is to get married and live out as many years as you have left with someone that wants the same, then it would be a good idea for both parties to be more reserved.

If you want some fun bang-bang time, hail Lucifina, then there is absolutely no shame in that. But if someone judges you because they are more long-term oriented, it may not be as narrow-minded as they originally seem.

I say all this not in an attempt to advocate for people to stop fucking each other's brains out, but as someone that sees a potential flaw in the idea that it shouldn't matter. I'm linking to a couple articles to this email, or I'm linking a couple articles to this email for you to zip through if you're interested in seeing the actual data.

Popular public opinion clashing with statistical data is nothing new, and I doubt it will ever go away. That is so true. The first article is much longer and contains a lot of statistical analysis. If you are able to understand the figures and the second is conducted by the Institute for Family Studies, which may seem like a religious cult, but is an overwhelmingly bipartisan research organization.

Feel free to paraphrase this long-ass piece of shit email if you decide to read it on the show. And as always, to you, your wife, and kids, and the rest of the magical people of Bad Magic, keep on fighting the good fight. Shea Marco. Well, Shea, first off, thanks for sending in a very well-crafted... And sourced message. I'll start by admitting that I'm surprised at the results of those studies. I checked them out. I would have guessed...

You know, that people with fewer partners were more unfaithful as they might feel like they missed out on experimental sexual phase in their development and they get caught up wondering if the unknown grass is greener, so to speak, you know, with somebody else.

Anecdotally, I've known several couples who got married young where each other's, you know, were each other's first, excuse me, and then got divorced years later, due primarily to one person seeming to really want to check out, you know, what other people have to offer sexually. They want to go so oats they didn't.

so before for whatever reason uh i will stand by my original sentiment with an asterisk uh i should have explained myself further what i'm against i mean i there are there are instances i can i can definitely see there are instances where Yeah, it is right to be concerned. You know, if somebody has had like hundreds and hundreds of people in a short amount of time, you might be like.

I don't know if I can satisfy them. They seem to want to constantly go from person to person to person. Maybe monogamy is not their thing. You know, I mean, I mean, in a variety of other instances where I'm like, yeah, OK, I can see this concern. What I'm against specifically. Is this longstanding attitude of sexual ownership almost exclusively perpetuated by men at the expense of women?

and monogamous relationships. Basically, this attitude that the guy, you know, boys will be boys, is almost expected to have fucked around before they got married, while the woman should remain chaste. saving her precious pussy for a man she has not met yet, one who will someday marry her. And this patriarchal attitude has been perpetuated since ancient times by almost every culture on Earth, Abrahamic and otherwise.

And it is destructive in the sense that it both reduces a woman's primary value to her sexual body count while also then expecting the sexually repressed person, you know, oftentimes to become wild with lust when they finally meet their husband, which is... a very illogical expectation. You know, why would you think that this person who has abstained from sex for years, you know, suddenly will become a bedroom banshee just for you? And I think another reason, ego, right? Selfish ego.

A lot of guys, my younger self included to a degree, you know, create this fantasy where they are, they're just such a stud. They're the only one who could possibly get some sexy, but also sexless woman to give it up. And it's a pretty juvenile childish expectation. It punishes women for doing the same shit that men do and do not get punished for. You know, that classic double standard. And that is what I would like to see go away and be replaced by us all seeing each other.

in a more nuanced way, you know, seeing each other as autonomous beings, trying to figure out how to find happiness in this crazy world, including in the sexual space. You know, people who come from wildly different backgrounds, leading them to different choices.

Maybe some woman has more partners than another because her parents were absent growing up and it was a way to get attention in that absence. Maybe she has more partners because she developed sexually at a younger age. And maybe she just has a stronger libido and likes to fuck more.

You know, and why should any of that make her feel less than? Shouldn't non-sexual qualities for a relationship like honesty, loyalty, compassion, work ethic, communication, overall personality compatibility, you know, et cetera, matter more than body count?

And also, I feel like this mindset posits that sex is inherently dirty, which I have a problem with. Like the person has done something wrong by exploring their own sexuality that it should be coveted because it's a shameful thing to engage in.

And even when I say that, I'm also not advocating, you know, just having a fuck frenzy, you know, free for all. I mean, because there are STIs to worry about, unwanted pregnancy, also putting yourself in vulnerable situations more often, you know, increases the chance that, you know, you could be raped, et cetera.

So, you know, be careful and protect yourself, but also don't feel guilt or shame, you know, over some sowed oats and over figuring out, you know, what you like and don't like sexually. And then if a partner comes along and tries to shame you about your sexual history, even though the relationship's going fine.

Well, maybe approach the conversation from a place of wondering why they are so insecure about something you did that was not wrong. Are they jealous? Are they not enlightened enough to appreciate you as a full person and see you as more than sexual property? See you more as an extension of their own ego?

So I guess that's what I'm talking about. But I, yeah, I didn't really present it. I kind of flippantly just tossed it off, you know, here and there and comments in some episodes. So thanks for making me think more about it. And I do appreciate what you sent me.

Yeah. Some people have large body counts because they don't like fucking one person for very long. And those people should probably never be in a relationship that isn't an open one. Okay, so I hope I was able to clarify some thoughts there and not make it more confusing. Thanks again, Shay.

Now a shout out from Sweet Sack Drea D. Sent in with a subject line of From One Dan to Another I Hope. Hey Dan and Lindsey, Merry Christmas. Hope your holidays treated you as well, or treated you well. They did actually, thank you.

And he got to enjoy some family time. Did. Grandma Betty's very happy. Family is kind of why I'm writing in. My name is Drea. I was wondering if you could hopefully give a shout out to someone important in my life, my son's father, Dan. He's a huge fan of Time Suck and especially scared to death.

We've been listening for about five years now, maybe more, and you've given us so many laughs and have been the soundtrack to many car rides. Anyway, his birthday is coming up on January 2nd, 34 years old. Woo! He's also celebrating one year sober.

on I think the third, recently got promoted to executive chef of a great resort near Yosemite, which is something he's been working very hard at for a real long time, and it's so well-deserved. He's so funny and smart and good at everything he touches.

And he's such a great dad and does everything he can to give us a good life. And I just want him to know how goddamn proud of him I am and how lucky we are to have him in our lives. Sorry, not sorry for being corny. Love you. Thanks for killing the big spiders for me and listening to my random bullshit. Anyway, I hope this makes it in. I'm a procrastinator, so I recognize this will probably get to you late. Thanks a bunch and happy new year. Well, thank you, Dreo. And big congrats to Dan.

I would have mentioned where he works so a lot of you suckers could find him, but Drea asked me not to mention the restaurant name. Maybe Dan's bosses would not love knowing he listens to this debaucherous, heathen shit show of a podcast. But yeah, Dan, very cool, special accomplishments. And you two seem to have a very cool, special relationship. Oh, Drea, like saying the nicest things about you. That's so cool. So yeah, thanks for writing that in. And now let's end on a journey.

Adventurous psychonaut Ben Goldstein, longtime listener, sent in a message with the subject line of the trippiest trip I ever did trip. And I will be reading this for the first time here. I don't know this story. Lindsay read it and was dying. Said I have to share it.

And I wanted just to hear it for the first time with you guys. Let's see if she was right. Ahoy, fellow psychonauts and bad magicians. I've written in previously about substance use, so I'm sure it's no surprise I felt prompted to send a story after listening to the psychedelics episode.

There's no way for this not to be long, so I'm just going to hop right into it. I only took one hit of acid, but nobody should expect to have this kind of experience on that dose. The context was that I was in a rough place with my chemical consumption at this time. I've been taking MDMA daily for around three months. Oh my God. It's a great drug when used appropriately, but obviously I had a problem. I was also taking hallucinogens every few days. This is just to save my grip on reality.

This is just to say my grip on reality going into this trip was very weak. When using drugs in more reasonable ways, I've never had anything really comparable to this occur ever. So I take this one hit of acid. It's a month or so before my 21st birthday. I'm starting my senior year of undergrad. It's 10, 11 p.m. on a random fucking weeknight. I drop the acid at a friend's house less than five minutes from my apartment. And when I have the first inkling to the trip, I drive home.

It starts escalating faster than I'm accustomed to. I drop my keys right after getting out of my car but don't realize it. Parenthetical here. The next day, I find them on the ground immediately next to my car. Oh, you got so lucky. I can't get into my apartment. Oh, yeah, because you want no keys.

I can't get ahold of my roommate on the phone and he doesn't come to the door when I knock. I don't know what to do. And end up just sort of pacing the parking lot as I grow swiftly more confused. Then I start having a break with reality. Know those concrete storm drains they put under roads? There's one at the entrance of the parking lot from my apartment building. For reasons that have never become clear to me, I crawl into it. Oh my God. It's just barely wide enough for me to squeeze into.

For reasons even less clear, I undress first. Oh my God. And then he wrote, the next day I find my clothes right next to the entrance to the drain, folded neatly into a pile. How did you not skin your dick up? Maybe you did. I worm my way in deep. I have to be in there for a couple of hours, perhaps because it's a dark, confined space and, you know, the drugs and stuff for sure contributed. I become convinced I've, I become convinced I've died.

I believe the feeling of wriggling my body through the drain is from my consciousness transferring into worms that are eating through my corpse and my grave. But I'll only be worms temporarily. Oh my God. As I continue through the drain, what the fuck? I come to realize I'm going to be reincarnated as a lion. It's all very exciting. My memories of my former human life have already grown distance.

I'm starting to have lion thoughts. Oh, this makes so much sense. And it's fucking weird. I project forward to rushing across a savanna to prey on gazelles and zebras, chilling with my pack, you know? All the traditional ins and outs of being a lion. I practice. Oh my God. I practice roaring in the liminal space. I no longer realize it's a storm drain in the tiny. I still hope somebody walked by and fucking heard that. Like, what the fuck?

Oh my God. In the tiny enclosed space, it reverberates powerfully. If anyone had walked by between midnight and 2 a.m., they would have heard some wild shit. Eventually, I see light at the end of the tunnel. I realize this confined space I'm in is my mother's Linus womb, and the light is from outside of her.

I'm crowning and looking out and ready to be born. I am fucking pumped. I cannot express how truly joyful I am at the prospect of my new life as a big cat. It is my destiny. And then magically, or no, excuse me. And then tragically, my destiny is denied.

The light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be a streetlight overhanging the exit of the storm drain. I finally pushed out enough rocks and mud and litter to get all the way across. That is fucking absurd. My overwhelming disappointment at not being a lion is short-lived.

As I stand up and look around, I realize I vaguely recognize my surroundings. My memories of my former pre-lion, pre-womb life have indeed faded into a fractured dream. But I pieced together that this was the last place I had been before I died. I am, of course, still entirely certain I'm dead. How could I not be? But I now realize, while I'll be able to incarnate as a lion later on, or whatever else my heart desires, I'm currently set to enter the next plane of existence.

And the gods in their infinite wisdom have set things up so that there is an intermediate, so there are intermediate steps in the transition to help ease things smoothly without being so jarring. The first bit will of course take place in a projected environment reflecting the most recent one resided in while alive. This will give mortals a sense of familiarity and safety as they begin their journey through the afterlife. Now naked and muddy.

I realized the chirping of the crickets and cicadas are in fact messages from the gods, directing me along a path of fate. So I start booking it down the sidewalk towards wherever they're leading me. I'm ushered along to a nearby hotel. Nine years later, there's an NA convention in the lobby of this very hotel. I'm not a member of that organization, but went with a friend. She quite enjoyed the story. The crickets lead me to the back entrance, which opens to the pool room.

The door is, of course, unlocked, as the gods commanded. I realize, ah, okay, I see now. This transitional experience will come to an end with this pool. I'll leap in as a baptism, and when I emerge, I'll be in the afterlife proper. This does not occur. I swim across and get out of the pool. There are some hotel towels, which I sort of use as I kind of dab dry a few parts of my body, but I'm way too intoxicated to be effective.

I start wandering the hotel, awaiting the next sign from the gods. I try to open several doors along the way and knock on a couple. Luckily, in hindsight, though confounding at the time, none open. I get to the front desk. The receptionist looks displeased.

I can't fathom why. I'm so goddamn happy. Other than the fact that I would have preferred being a lion, I'm absolutely loving everything that's going on. I'm naked, still a bit muddy, now also somewhat wet, and beaming from ear to ear like a fucking lunatic. I wish I had the security camera footage of all of this. Maybe it exists somewhere. Unfortunately, this man or angel or other transdimensional being is not sharing my joy. I wish I could channel it into him.

I wish everyone could feel this level of exaltation. No worries. They will once they're dead like me. After I just smile insanely and silently at him for a tick, the receptionist asks, can I help you? I know how hotels work, so I reply, can I have a key? Sternly, he goes, you want a room key, but you don't know what room? I'm not sure what the game is here, given he obviously isn't going to give me whatever key he's been divinely ordained to provide.

And the number doesn't even matter, since there won't be a hotel room, as the doorway will be the threshold to the next plane. Duh, but I do my best to play along. Four, I request? We don't have a room four, he informs me sourly. So you won't give me a key, I ask. Just to make sure. Nah, he says. If I can't get a key, can I at least have a smile, I propose. A reasonable compromise. Nah, he repeats. Then I don't do that. This guy, what is he thinking? I get to the house of a friend.

where I'd initially taken the hit of acid. He doesn't answer the door. It's between 3 and 4 a.m., so that makes sense. But I'm also not even sure I knock versus just assuming the gods will make him or an angel disguised as him come meet me at the door.

There's a tree immediately next to the house, so I climb it and get onto the roof. Maybe I'm planning to go down the chimney like Santa. Not really sure. Being on drugs is the only clear motivation for all of my actions at this time. Now for the first feat of superhuman strength. I jump off of the roof in a full sprint.

Oh my God. I sustained no injuries, just zip off back into the woods. To be clear, at this time in my life, I had never had a gym membership. I'm not an athlete of any kind and certainly not a parkour master. Not while sober, at least. I wander the woods a bit, aiming roughly in the direction of my apartment. I try the doors of more houses. You're so lucky you didn't get fucking killed. But all are locked. I also try cars. Most of those are also locked.

One opens up and I sit in the driver's... Oh my God. I sit in the driver's seat for a bit, but the car does not magically start. I'm no longer clear why the gods are marshalling me around in what feels like a pointless fashion. It's okay though. None of this is real. I eventually get back to my apartment. I still can't find my keys.

I walk around the building. I have a back porch on the second floor. I see my downstairs neighbor has a punching bag hanging down from the porch. Now for my second feet. I climb the bag, get a grip on the bottom of the porch, hoist myself up to grab a trellis, requiring me to launch myself upward with both hands and get a couple inches of air before reaching it. What the fuck? And then climb the rest of the way onto the porch.

Thank the gods our porch door is unlocked. Why wouldn't it be? It's the second story. I enter, go to my room and collapse on the bed. The voyage concludes somehow back at home and not in a hospital or a jail cell. It's been over a decade since it's happened. I'm still not a lion. Not quite yet. But with the power of Nimrod, anything is possible. Hail Nimrod, your loyal space lizard, Ben Goldstein. Oh my God.

That's fucking terrifying that all that happened on one hit of acid. That makes me nervous about acid again. Jesus Christ. But also kind of excited about it. Because that is, oh, I mean. I mean, obviously, it's going to suck if you jumped out the roof and died. But since you didn't, what an insanely amazing adventure you had. I mean, you could have got arrested for so many things.

I mean, sadly, you probably could have got like a sexual offense just for running around naked. Just for being naked in the fucking hotel trying to get into people's rooms. Oh, man. That would have not been good if the police would have showed up. Because you would not have reacted. in any normal fashion so so glad you made it home and also thank you for sharing that story that is I wonder if I would think it was as funny as I do prior to doing hallucinogens because like

I can actually understand to some level, like why you were thinking those things and just how magical you feel and how the most absurd thoughts feel totally rational. Oh, that was a great update. My God, let's. I don't even know what to say right now. Let's get out of here. Thanks for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast, you shit lions.

scared to death time suck each week short sucks nightmare fuel and the time sucks scared to death podcast feeds twice a month enjoy your shit this week enjoy not having to deal with other people's shit kick back and relax on that porcelain throne you're you're a golden god Enjoy that bidet butthole pressure wash. And while you doom scroll on the loo, in the loo, one of those things, maybe also put a little time suck and keep on sucking. Now, before I go...

I want to share some shit-related jingles with you. A lot of poop-related businesses out there. And how they advertise their services often cracks me up. So let's start with a 2006 local commercial for a poop scoop business in Anchorage, Alaska called Scoop the Poop. Hey, gotcha now! Scoop, scoop, scoop the poop, poop, scoop the poop. Pick up all the poop and put it in a baggie. Then you throw it all away. That's the dog singing.

I love local commercials. But here's a national one. I'll do another local. Well. I don't know if the last one's local. It's a weird infomercial. But this is a commercial for Butt Wipes. Good Wipes is the company, and it came out two years ago. Sophia, where are the spatulas? Just a minute, Grandma. She's running to the bathroom. She is on the toilet. Oh, boy. Here it comes. Here comes the thunder.

Toilet paper got you down? Good Wipes, your one-way ticket to Pootopia. You know what? She's so happy. If I had to work in corporate America, it'd be fun to work for, like, a toilet paper company, maybe. Or, like, in the advertising department of, like, whoever gets to do these, like, poop-related commercials. Pretty fun, silly little job. And now for my favorite. It's so fucking bad. This is, uh...

a fantastically horrible infomercial for a product that never took off called poo trap from 15 years ago. And what this is, it's like this, it's like basically like you just take a little, um, a poop bag that you use for a dog and you, But make it like, I don't know, tougher, I guess. Like make it like thicker. And then you just hook it up with a bunch of straps to your dog. So it's just stuck on their butt underneath their tail as they walk around.

It's fucking absurd. Are you tired of taking your dog for a walk and picking up after their mess? Yes. It can get very messy when your pet goes in the house or on the sidewalk or even your neighbor's lawn. We have the answer for you. Introducing PooTrap. An amazing new innovation that eliminates the need of picking up after your dog.

Poo Trap is a unique new product that fits any size dog without any hassles and your pets will love it too. No they don't. It's easy to install on your dog and makes your walking experience fun. It doesn't look easy to install. Walking your dog just got easier with a poo trap. No poops, no whoops. Poo Trap is available in eight sizes and three colors. There are no substitutes. Poo Trap, the magic poop collector.

Order yours today. Call 888-POOTRAP. That's 888-766-8727. Call now or visit our website at www.pootrapusa.com. Order yours today. I love, I miss those old infomercials. I just love stuff like that where it's like, no one needs that. It's not that hard, actually, just to bend down with the bag over your hand and just pick up the poop. It's easier than to set up a weird fucking bag contraption.

That looks like you're trying to like, I don't know, fucking catch your dog's farts as you walk around, look like an asshole. Just as all the people that see you mock you with a stupid contraption. I just love it when they, when they act like there's a need for something that there isn't.

Are you tired of having to bend over to pick up dog poop? Well, you're still gonna have to fucking bend over to put on this stupid contraption on your dog. This saves nothing. This is more work to look dumber. Oh, but it is pretty funny. Poo! Poo trap! Thanks, everybody. I hope you have some really good poops this week.