Piped water may be the greatest convenience ever known but our sewage systems and bathrooms are a disaster
The Guardian 15 July 2014 (and still valid): For centuries, the people of London and other big cities got their
cooking and washing water from rivers or wells, limiting their
consumption to pretty much what they could carry. They dumped their
waste into brick-lined cesspits that would be emptied by the night soil
men, who sold it as fertilizer or dumped it off Dung Pier into the
Thames. Liquid waste might be thrown into gutters in the middle of the
road.
In 1854, in the middle of a cholera epidemic in London, Dr John Snow
mapped where victims died and found that the deaths seemed concentrated
around one of those pumps, at 37 Broad Street. When he had the handle
removed from the pump, the cholera epidemic stopped immediately. He had
made the first verifiable connection between human ...
read on.
