Author: Eddie Copeland / Source: The Next Web
What’s the first name that comes to mind when you think about a smart city?
Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Travis Kalanick?
It’s natural that we should leap to the technologists. Smart cities are, after all, about technology: driverless cars, drone deliveries, and Minority Report-style signs that change depending on who’s looking at them.
But I’ll tell you who I think of first: an English physician called John Snow. An unusual choice, perhaps, given that he died in 1858.
The reason I mention him is that as we think about the future of our urban spaces, it’s important to recognize that some of the ideas we think are most cutting-edge actually originated long ago. What happened in history can offer lessons about what we should do today.
So let’s look at John, starting with where he was and what he was doing in 1854.
Living near Regent Street in central London, he was a practicing physician and one of the early pioneers of anesthetics. At the time, anesthetics were commonly chloroform or ether, so he knew a thing or two about the effect on the human body of breathing in gases.
He knew that, all other things being equal, if the volume and temperature of the gas were the same, and the size of person roughly constant, the effect on each individual would be similar. This was important to know for his patients, who ranged from working men requiring amputations to Queen Victoria – the first monarch to use anesthetics during labor.
It would turn out to be even more important given what was happening just a few streets away: in 1854 the people of Soho were dying.
Out of nowhere, a cholera outbreak claimed the lives of 616 people; 127 died in just three days. Some fell ill at lunchtime and died before dinner.The recently formed Board of Health thought it knew the cause: miasma, or bad air.
It’s no wonder this was said to be the culprit, as that part of London was thick with stench. The smell of rot and decay was almost unbearable – attributed to the habits and living conditions of London’s poor. They lived in badly ventilated houses with no running water or connected sewage system. Human waste was thrown from windows where it slowly decomposed in back yards, spilled out into street gutters, or seeped into basements where it could fester away, three feet deep. As if that weren’t bad enough, Soho was also home to the revolting odors of tanners and slaughterhouses. Of course it was the fumes that were making people ill.
But Snow thought that made no sense, for two reasons.
First, if it was about gas, why would…
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