In the 1850’s, the River Thames in London was an open sewer, responsible for thousands of deaths annually from cholera, typhoid, and dysentery, this because London’s drinking water was largely drawn from the River Thames. In 1858, the public outcry against the event that came to be known as ‘The Great Stink’ was so severe that the British government decided that something had to be done about the ongoing pollution of the river, and it was.
A civil engineer named Joseph Bazalgette was tasked with finding an effective and economical solution to the enormous problem of cleaning up the River Thames, which ran through a mature city of nearly three million people. London was crisscrossed with roads, buildings, subway tunnels, drainage pipes, and the other infrastructure components,…
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