The Microbe Solution

In the hot, dry summer of 1858, the Thames was a stew of sewage that festered in the sun, giving off an unbearable stench. “We believe this to be the uncleanest, foulest river in the known world,” wrote a London pundit in July. “There you shall see in the brief space of half an hour and two or three miles, a hundred sewers disgorging solid filth, a hundred broad acres of unnatural, slimy chymical compost . . . The water—the liquid rather—is inky black.” Dockworkers suffered nausea, headache, sore throats, temporary blindness—some of them fainted from breathing in the river’s aroma. In the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament, on the riverbank, legislators choked on what the press labeled “the Great Stink.” The Thames had been badly polluted for decades, but the heat and low water that summer brought the situation to a crisis. Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the House, held a handkerchief over his nose as he fled from the Chamber, complaining that the Thames had become a “Stygian Pool.” In July 1858, he introduced a law that authorized the construction of a costly new sewer system, designed by engineer Joseph Bazalgette, that would carry London’s waste downstream of the city. Britain’s rivers were overwhelmed with sewage, its cities bursting at the seams. Between 1801 and 1841 London’s population had grown from 958,000 to 1,948,000. Numbers of people living in smaller cities like Leeds, Bradford, and Huddersfield doubled or tripled in the same span of time. While the same pattern held in other European and American cities, geography made the problem more intense in Britain, where the rivers were too small to carry off the wastes of the towns that sprouted on their banks. In 1885, engineer James Gordon estimated that dumping the raw sewage of the major towns along the Rhine would give that river a concentration of only one part sewage per 2,345 parts water. The lower Lea, a tributary of the Thames whose upstream flows had been diverted to provide drinking water for London, was by contrast composed of two- thirds sewage.