
The Great Stink - antonios
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
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tialaramex
Good "off the beaten path" visit for mechanical enthusiast visitors to London:
Crossness Pumping Station, which would once have been an essential part of the
solution to the Great Stink but is now a museum. They have a complete restored
(but be sure to check schedules to visit when it's actually running) steam
pump plus exhibits about how this works and they've restored the highly
decorated Victorian building the pump is installed into.

Far more rarely open to visitors, but worth it if the stars align and you're
into infrastructure: Its sister Abbey Mills is still a working sewage pump
site, now run off much more modern and thus in some sense "boring" electrical
pumps but still really fascinating if you're an infrastructure nerd.

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NeedMoreTea
Definitely agree with this, quite a remarkable place. Although highly
decorated rather underplays expectation I think. It's more a Victorian
cathedral of engineering. Crossness is of the era that was perhaps the height
of Victorian confidence, and it showed in the attention to detail and
aesthetic in something seen by so few.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Engineering drawings of that era where works of art - carefully coloured and
shaded.

~~~
sopooneo
And I have always wondered, why? Why not just straight lines and pure
utilitarianism? Granted, I love looking at that sort of thing, so I'm glad
they made it as they did. But why?

Was it just a given that you would put art into anything you built?

~~~
noir_lord
The Victorian engineers took pride in engineering, it was an era when progress
was been made month on month they applied sheer craftsmanship to a lot of what
they did (in a similar way to the famous quote from Steve Jobs[1]).

[1] - “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not
going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and
nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a
beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the
aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” - Steve Jobs

If you go to the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology, they have cotton
looms that have doric columns - there is no earthly reason for that (indeed
today we'd use tubular or box section) other than the sheer joy of _doing it_.

It must have been a hell of a thing to have been alive from 1860 to 1930 (if
we exclude all the negatives).

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Gravityloss
One alternative is that society has to oscillate around these kind of things.
[x] The waste problem has to get so bad that people agree to do something.
Then when it's fixed, future generations can start to question why their tax
money has to go for something like this, since it's not a problem.

x: depends on the control theory dynamics of the system. It can also reach a
stable state.

~~~
rob74
With climate change, we still have to get to the stage where the problem
becomes so bad that most people agree to do something about it. The question
is if it will still be possible to "fix it" at that point...

~~~
Gravityloss
The problem with long delays in your feedback loops.

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MrBuddyCasino
Fun fact: London dumped its shit into the north sea until 1998, by boat.

"In the 1880s further fears over possible health concerns because of the
outfalls led to the MBW purifying sewage at Crossness and Beckton, rather than
dumping the untreated waste into the river,[90] and a series of six sludge
boats were ordered to ship effluent into the North Sea for dumping. The first
boat commissioned in 1887 was named the SS Bazalgette; the procedure remained
in service until December 1998, when the dumping stopped and an incinerator
was used to dispose of the waste."

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I really hope the other five boats had more creative names. Cheeky names for
things is a longstanding tradition in the sanitation industry (though I don't
know if it dates all the way back to Victorian England).

SS Floater would have been a good one.

~~~
VBprogrammer
I really hope one was ShittyMcShitface[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface)

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anon_cow1111
See also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River)

Another interesting note of history in the United states, specifically, the
Cuyahoga river was so polluted that it caught fire at least a dozen times. The
resulting damage was significant enough that it became a rallying point for
the creation of the EPA in the 60s/70s.

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OliverJones
Bazalgette is a great hero of civil engineering. The so-called interceptor
sewers he designed are a model for pretty much all present-day sanitary
sewers. His Crossness Pumping Station (powered by steam engines from James
Watt's company) functioned for 90 years before it was replaced by newer
equipment.

90 years, dear Hacker News colleagues. That's engineering. Is the stuff you
and I did today going to last that long?

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I drew an interesting parallel to this story with John Snow’s cholera well
analysis:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_ou...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak)

This is widely considered to be one of the first modern geospatial analayses
to be conducted. It’s interesting how urban problems in London have led to
advancement in various scientific fields.

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mothsonasloth
Some of the streets in central London really stink up in the heat of summer.
One's that come to mind are Moorgate, Barbian and some of Bank.

Fun times walking between Old Street and Farringdon...

~~~
mytailorisrich
I don't know in London but these days many local authorities collect trash
only once a fortnight.

In summer, on residential streets where bins are kept next to the street the
stench can be something...

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sugarysenpai
The 'Stuff You Should Know' guys have a great podcast episode about this

~~~
danesparza
So does the "Stuff you missed in History Class" podcast! Here is a link to the
episode: [https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/the-great-stink-
of-...](https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/the-great-stink-of-1858.htm)

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rurounijones
The construciton of the london sewers is one of the episodes of the excellent
BBC documentary series "The 7 wonders of the industrial world"[1] (Which also
talks about Cholera and the Broad Street Pump).

Highly recommended viewing if you can find it.

[1]
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/seven_wonde...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/seven_wonders_01.shtml)

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christkv
I just finished reading «the butchering art» about Jospeh lister and
revolution of medicinal science. They mentioned the great stink and how it
related to the miasma theory. Great book, author was on Joe Rogan as well.

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interfixus
_The Difference Engine_ [Gibson and Sterling] vividly describes a fictional -
and probably worse - debacle based on this event.

