This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Long before the flush toilet became commonplace, humanity grappled with a persistent,

pungent problem. How and where to dispose of our own waste. We know that ancient Mesopotamia had some plumbing technology. They built a system of

clay pipes that carried waste away when rainwater flushed the system, but far too often the

refuse simply ended up as a fetid pool just outside the outskirts of town. Rome also adopted

a kind of sewer system, but it was used largely to drain rainwater from city streets, not for human

waste in the modern sense. Even in more recent centuries, many people still relied on chamber

pots and cesspools, holes dug to hold waste until they overflowed or were emptied.

In many cities, the smell, pestilence, and sheer volume of refuse were visible reminders that

sanitation was not simply a domestic task, but public good.

Nowhere was this more true than in Victorian England, where the sweltering summer of 1858

created the conditions for a public disaster that came to be known as the Big Stink.

London in the 1800s did not have what you would consider to be a modern waste disposal system.

People used chamber pots, which would then be emptied into cess pits dug nearby,

the nearest river, or even worse, would just empty them into the streets.

All over the cities, ditches and waterways were clogged with feces. Neighbors would fight over cess pits dug too close to one another's

homes, which would seep into their basements and walls. These pits, of course, would fill up,

...