Everyone studied history at school, but did anyone else feel like they were always learning the same old stuff?

There's plenty of interesting things the history books left out.

Like what happened to the bodies after big wars, why Queen Elizabeth really wore all that clown makeup,

or some of the truly bizarre ways people tried to cure the plague.

Have I peed your interest?

Then buckle up for this historical edition of the Ultimate Fact Show.

You're listening.

You're listening.

You're listening.

You're listening.

Be amazed.

Whoa.

What was the greatink of 1858?

In the summer of 1858, an unbearable stench, later known as the Great Stink, bought the city of London to its knees.

As people locked themselves indoors, they demanded that the government, which was barely functioning,

tackled the increasingly smelly problem.

But where was this horrendous stench coming from?

For centuries, England's most famous river, the Thames, had been a dumping ground for all of London's

various wastes, human, animal, and industrial.

The problem of course is that as London gradually grew from a tiny Roman fort into a large

metropolitan city, the amount of waste it produced also grew.

People first speculated that using the Thames as one big rubbish bin probably wasn't such

...