S-Bend

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

BBC

Business

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2017

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

If you live in a city with modern sanitation, it’s hard to imagine daily life being permeated with the suffocating stench of human excrement. For that, we have a number of people to thank – not least a London watchmaker called Alexander Cumming. Cumming’s world-changing invention owed nothing to precision engineering. In 1775, he patented the S-bend. It was a bit of pipe with a curve in it and it became the missing ingredient to create the flushing toilet – and, with it, public sanitation as we know it. Roll-out was slow, but it was a vision of how public sanitation could be – clean, and smell-free – if only government would fund it. More than two centuries later, two and a half billion people still remain without improved sanitation, and improved sanitation itself is a low bar. We still haven’t reliably managed to solve the problem of collective action – of getting those who exercise power or have responsibility to organise themselves. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Vadon and Richard Knight (Image: S-bend, Credit: ericlefrancais/Shutterstock)

Transcript

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0:00.0	50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
0:19.0	Gentility of speech is at an end.
0:23.0	Thundered an editorial in London's city press.
0:26.0	It stinks!
0:30.0	The stink in question was partly metaphorical.
0:34.0	Politicians were failing to tackle an obvious problem.
0:37.0	As its population grew, London's system for disposing of human waste became woefully inadequate.
0:44.0	To relieve pressure on cesspits, which were prone to leaking, overflowing and belching explosive methane,
0:51.0	the authorities had instead started encouraging sewage into gullies.
0:56.0	However, this created a different issue.
0:58.0	The gullies were originally intended only for rainwater, and they emptied directly into the river Thames.
1:04.0	So that was the literal stink. The Thames became an open sewer.
1:11.0	The distinguished scientist Michael Faraday was moved by a boat journey to write to the Times newspaper.
1:18.0	He described the river water as an opaque pale brown fluid.
1:23.0	Near the bridges, the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface.
1:29.0	Colourer was rife. One outbreak killed 14,000 Londoners, nearly one in every hundred.
1:37.0	Civil engineer Joseph Baseljet drew up plans for new, closed sewers to pump the waste far from the city.
1:45.0	It was this project that politicians came under pressure to approve.
1:52.0	Michael Faraday ended his letter by pleading with those who exercise power, all have responsibility,
1:59.0	to stop neglecting the problem, less a hot season gives a sad proof of the folly of our carelessness.
2:06.0	And three years later, that's exactly what happened.
2:09.0	The sweltering hot summer of 1858 made London's Malodorous River impossible to politely ignore
	...

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