by Bill Bryson
Finally, the inevitable happened. In the summer of 1858, London suffered a heat wave combined with a drought in which waste accumulated but didn’t get washed away. Temperatures soared into the nineties and stayed there—an unusual condition for London. The result was “the Great Stink,” as the Times dubbed it. The Thames grew so noxious that almost no one could bear to be near it. “Whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it,” wrote one newspaper. The drapes of the new Houses of Parliament were drawn tight and doused in a solution of chloride of lime to mitigate the lethal smells, but the result was something like panic. Parliament had to be suspended. Some members, according to Stephen Halliday in The Great Stink of London, tried to venture into the library, overlooking the river, “but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.”
Snow never got to see this or any of his ideas vindicated. He died suddenly of a stroke in the midst of the Great Stink, not knowing that one day he would be considered a hero. He was just forty-five years old. At the time, his death was hardly noted.
Happily, another heroic figure was about to stride onto the scene—Joseph Bazalgette. By chance, Bazalgette worked in offices around the corner from Snow, though the two men never met as far as is known. Bazalgette was a very small man, short and featherlight, but compensated for his jockeylike stature with a spectacular curling mustache that reached literally from ear to ear. Like that other great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bazalgette’s antecedents were French, though the family had been settled in England for thirty-five years by the time Joseph was born in 1819. His father was a Royal Naval commander, and Bazalgette grew up in an atmosphere of privilege, educated by private tutors and given every advantage in life.
Disqualified from a military career by his elfin stature, he trained as a railway engineer, but in 1849, aged thirty, he joined the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers, where he soon rose to the position of chief engineer. Sanitation has never had a greater champion. Nothing concerning sewage and waste disposal escaped his scrutiny. Troubled that there were almost no public lavatories in London, he devised a plan to place public toilets at critical spots throughout the city. By collecting urine and selling it as an industrial product (stale urine was vital to the processing of alum, for one thing), he calculated that each urinal could produce £48 of income a year, a very handsome return. That plan was never adopted, but it did instill the general conviction that where sewers were concerned Joseph Bazalgette was the man to turn to.
After the Great Stink it became clear that London’s sewage system needed to be rebuilt, and Bazalgette was handed the job. The challenge was formidable. Bazalgette had to insert into an immensely busy city some twelve hundred miles of tunnels, which would last indefinitely, carry away every particle of waste generated by three million people, and be able to handle future growth of unknowable dimensions. He would have to acquire land, negotiate rights of way, procure and distribute materials, and direct hordes of laborers. The scale of every aspect of the job was exhausting merely to contemplate. The tunnels required 318 million bricks and necessitated the digging up and redistributing of 3.5 million cubic yards of earth. All this was to be done on a budget of just £3 million.
Bazalgette brilliantly exceeded every expectation. In the process of building the new sewer system he transformed three and a half miles of riverfront through the creation of the Chelsea, Albert, and Victoria embankments (which is where a lot of that displaced earth went). These new embankments not only provided space for a mighty intercepting sewer—a kind of sewer superhighway—but also left ample room for a new Underground line and ducts for gas and other utilities below and a new relief road above. Altogether he reclaimed fifty-two acres of land, over which he scattered parks and promenades. An incidental feature of the embankments was that they narrowed the river and made it flow faster, improving its ability to cleanse itself. It would be hard to name an engineering project anywhere that offered a wider array of improvements—to public health, transportation, traffic management, recreation, river management—with a single scheme. This is the system that still drains London. Outside of the city’s parks, the embankments remain among the most agreeable environments in the city.
Because of the limits on his funds, Bazalgette could afford to take the sewage only as far as the eastern edge of the metropolis, to a place called Barking Reach. There mighty outfall pipes disgorged 150 million gallons of raw, lumpy, potently malodorous sewage into the Thames each day. Barking was still twenty miles from the open sea, as the dismayed and unfortunate people all along those twenty miles never stopped pointing out, but the tides were vigorous enough to haul most of the discharge safely (if not always odorlessly) out to sea, and ensured that there were never again any sewage-related epidemics in London.
The new sewage outfalls did, however, have an unfortunate role in the greatest tragedy ever experienced on the Thames. In September 1878, a pleasure boat named the Princess Alice, packed to overflowing with day-trippers, was returning to London after a day at the seaside, when it collided with another ship at Barking at the very place and moment when the two giant outfall pipes surged into action. The Princess Alice sank in less than five minutes. Nearly eight hundred people drowned in a choking sludge of raw sewage. Even those who could swim found it nearly impossible to make headway through the glutinous filth. For days afterward bodies bobbed to the surface. Many, the Times reported, were so bloated with gaseous bacteria that they wouldn’t fit into normal coffins.
Construction of a sewage tunnel near Old Ford in Bow, East London (photo credit 16.1)
In 1876, Robert Koch, then an unknown country doctor in Germany, identified the microbe, Bacillus anthracis, responsible for anthrax. Seven years later, he identified Vibrio cholerae, another bacillus, as the cause of cholera. At long last there was proof that individual microorganisms caused specific diseases. It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people. Edwin Chadwick never did believe that, and continued throughout his life to suggest ways of eliminating odors as the most effective method for keeping people healthy. One of his last and more singular proposals was to build across London a series of towers modeled on the new Eiffel Tower in Paris. In Chadwick’s vision, the towers would act as mighty ventilators, pulling in fresh, healthful air from the heights and pumping it back out at ground level. He went to his grave in the summer of 1890 implacably convinced that the cause of epidemics was atmospheric vapors.
Bazalgette, meanwhile, moved on to other projects. He built some of London’s handsomest bridges—at Hammersmith, Battersea, and Putney—and drove through the heart of London several bold new streets designed to alleviate congestion, including Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue. Late in life he was knighted, but he never really received the fame he deserved. Sewer engineers seldom do. He is commemorated with a modest statue on the Victoria Embankment beside the Thames. He died a few months after Edwin Chadwick.
III
In America, the situation was more complicated than in England. Travelers to North America were often struck by the fact that epidemics tended to be rarer and milder there. There was a good reason for this: American communities were generally cleaner. This was not so much because Americans were more fastidious in their habits as because their communities were more open and spacious, creating less chance for contamination and cross-infection. At the same time, however, people in the New World had several additional diseases to contend with, and some of them were completely mystifying. One such was “the milk sick.” People who drank milk in America sometimes grew delirious and swiftly died—Abraham Lincoln’s mother was one such victim—but infected milk tasted and smelled no different from ordinary milk, and no one knew what the infectious agent was. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anyone finally deduce that it came from cows grazing on a plant called white snakeroot, which was harmless to the cows but made their milk toxic to drink.<
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Even more lethal and widely feared was yellow fever. A viral disease, it was called yellow fever because the skin of victims often turned sallow. The real symptoms, however, were high fever and black vomit. Yellow fever came into America aboard slave ships from Africa. The first case was in Barbados in 1647. It was a horrible disease. A doctor who got it said it felt “as if three or four hooks were fastened onto the globe of each eye and some person, standing behind me, was dragging them forcibly from their orbits back into the head.” Nobody knew what its cause was, but there was a general feeling—more instinct than intellectual certainty—that putrid water was at the root of things.
In the 1790s, a heroic English immigrant named Benjamin Latrobe began a long campaign to clean up water supplies. Latrobe was in America only because of a personal misfortune. He had been a successful architect and engineer in England when, in 1793, his wife died in childbirth. Devastated, he decided to emigrate to America, his mother’s native country, to try to rebuild his life. For a time he was the only formally trained architect and engineer in the country, and as such he landed many important commissions, from the Bank of Pennsylvania building in Philadelphia to the new Capitol Building in Washington.
His principal preoccupation, however, was with the belief that dirty water was killing thousands of people unnecessarily. After a devastating outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, Latrobe persuaded the authorities to fill in the city swamps and bring in clean, fresh water from outside the city boundaries. The changes had a miraculous effect, and yellow fever never came back to Philadelphia with anything like the same force again. Latrobe took his efforts elsewhere and, ironically, while working in New Orleans in 1820, he contracted yellow fever himself and died.
Where cities failed to improve water supplies, heavy penalties were paid. Until about 1800, all Manhattan’s fresh water came from a single filthy pool—little more than a “common sewer,” in the words of one contemporary—in lower Manhattan known as the Collect Pond. But matters grew much worse as the population soared after the building of the Erie Canal. By the 1830s, it was estimated that a hundred tons of excrement were added to the city’s cesspits each day, often with contaminating effects on nearby wells. Water in New York was generally, and often visibly, polluted and undrinkable. New York in 1832 not only had a cholera epidemic, but also a yellow fever epidemic. Together they claimed more than four times as many victims as in Philadelphia with its cleaner water supplies. The dual outbreak acted as a spur to New York in much the way the Great Stink motivated London, and in 1837 work started on the Croton Aqueduct, which when finished in 1842 finally began to deliver clean, safe water to the city.
But where America was really ahead of the rest of the world was in the provision of private bathrooms. Here the main driver was not homeowners, but hotels. The very first hotel in the world to offer a bath for every bedroom was the Mount Vernon Hotel in the resort community of Cape May, New Jersey. This was in 1853 and was so far ahead of its time that over half a century passed before any other hotels offered such extravagance. Increasingly, however, bathrooms—albeit shared and down the corridor rather than private and in one’s room—became standard in hotels, first in the United States and then increasingly in Europe, and hoteliers who failed to heed this trend paid a hefty price.
Nowhere was that more memorably demonstrated than at the vast and otherwise glorious Midland Hotel at St. Pancras Station in London. Designed by the great George Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for the Albert Memorial, the Midland was intended to be the most magnificent hotel in the world when it opened in 1873. It cost the equivalent of $450 million in today’s money and was a wonder in almost every way. Unfortunately—in fact, amazingly—Scott provided just four bathrooms to be shared among six hundred bedrooms. Almost from the day of its opening, the hotel was a failure.
In private homes the provision of bathrooms was more hit-or-miss. Until quite late in the nineteenth century, many houses had plumbing to their kitchen and perhaps to a downstairs toilet, but lacked a proper bathroom because there wasn’t enough pressure in the pipes to get water upstairs. In Europe, even when pressure allowed, the rich proved unexpectedly reluctant to bring bathrooms into their lives. “Bathrooms are for servants,” sniffed one English aristocrat. Or as the Duc de Doudeauville in France responded loftily when asked if he would be installing plumbing in his new house: “I am not building a hotel.” Americans, by contrast, were much more attached to the satisfactions of hot water and flushing toilets. When the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst bought St. Donat’s, a Welsh castle, the first thing he did was install thirty-two bathrooms.
Bathrooms were not at first decorated any more than you would decorate a boiler room, so they tended to be starkly utilitarian. In existing houses, baths had to be fit in wherever they could. Usually they took the place of a bedroom, but sometimes were jimmied into alcoves or other odd corners. In the rectory at Whatfield in Suffolk, the bath was simply put behind a screen in the downstairs front hall. Baths, toilets, and basins tended to be of exceedingly variable sizes. A bath at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall was so big that a stepladder was needed to climb into it. Others, with showers built in, looked as if they were designed to wash a horse.
Technological problems slowed the take-up of bathrooms, too. Casting a one-piece bath that was neither too thick nor too heavy was a surprisingly challenging proposition. It was easier in some ways to build a cast-iron bridge than a cast-iron bath. There was also the problem of giving the bath a finish that wouldn’t chip, stain, graze into hairline cracks, or simply wear away. Hot water proved to be a formidably corrosive medium. Zinc, copper, and cast-iron baths looked splendid when new but wouldn’t keep a finish. It wasn’t until the invention of porcelain enamels, about 1910, that baths became durable and attractive. The process involved spraying a mix of powder onto cast iron and baking it repeatedly till it acquired a porcelain-like gleam. Porcelain enamel is in fact neither porcelain nor enamel, but a vitreous coating—in essence a type of glass. Enamel bath surfaces would be quite transparent if whiteners or other tints weren’t added to the glazing compound.
At last the world had baths that looked good and stayed looking good for a long time. But they were still extremely expensive. A bath alone could easily cost $200 in 1910—a price well beyond the range of most households. But as manufacturers improved the processes of mass manufacture, prices fell: by 1940, an American could buy an entire bath suite—sink, bath, and toilet—for $70, a price nearly everyone could afford.
Elsewhere, however, baths remained luxuries. In Europe a big part of the problem was a lack of space in which to put bathrooms. In 1954, just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath. In Britain the journalist Katharine Whitehorn recalled that as recently as the late 1950s she and her colleagues on the magazine Woman’s Own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms, as not enough British homes had them, and such articles would only promote envy.
As for our Old Rectory, it had no bathroom in 1851, which is of course no surprise. However, the architect, the endlessly fascinating Edward Tull, did include a water closet—quite a novelty in 1851. Even more novel was where he elected to place it: on the landing of the main staircase, behind a thin partition. Apart from putting the water closet in an odd and rather inconvenient place, the partition would have had the effect of closing off the stair window, leaving the staircase veiled in permanent darkness.
The absence of any outlet pipes on the drawings of the house exterior suggests that Tull may not entirely have thought all this through. The point is, in any case, academic as the water closet was never built.
* There is slightly more to this. James Chadwick, the father of Edwin and Henry, had earlier in his life been a teacher in Manchester, where he taught science to John Dalton, who is generally credited with the discovery of the atom. Then, as a radical journalist, James Chadwick had gone to Paris, where he had lived for a time with Thomas Paine. So although he was a man of no particular import
ance himself, he served as a direct link between Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, the discovery of the atom, the sewage of London, and the beginnings of professional baseball.
• CHAPTER XVII •
THE DRESSING ROOM
I
Toward the end of September 1991, two German hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon of Nuremberg, were making their way along a glacier high in the South Tyrolean Alps, at a place called the Tisenjoch Pass, on the border of Austria and Italy, when they happened upon a human body protruding from the ice at the glacier’s edge. The body was leathery and severely emaciated but intact.
The Simons made a two-mile detour to a manned hut at Similaun to report their discovery. Police were summoned, but when they arrived it quickly became apparent that this was a matter not for them but for prehistorians. With the body were personal effects—a copper ax, a flint knife, arrows, and a quiver—that connected the man to a much earlier, more primitive age.
Subsequent radiocarbon dating showed that the man had died over five thousand years ago. He was quickly nicknamed Ötzi, after the nearest major valley, the Ötztal; others called him the Iceman. Ötzi had not only a full range of tools but also all his clothing. Nothing so complete and ancient had ever been found before.
Contrary to common assumption, bodies that fall into glaciers almost never pop out at the terminal end in an impeccably preserved state. Glaciers grind and churn with slow but brutal force, and any bodies within them are generally crushed to molecules. Very occasionally they are stretched to outlandish lengths, like characters flattened by a steamroller in a cartoon. If no oxygen gets to the body, it may undergo a process called saponification, in which the flesh transmutes into a waxy, foul-smelling substance called adipocere. Such bodies look eerily as if they have been carved from soap and lose nearly all meaningful definition.