A Brief History of Sewage

By Dr. Michael Smith, UK/Mexico (Published in Issue 11)

It is popularly believed that the Romans invented the sewerage system; however
there is evidence of indoor plumbing in Mesopotamia 8000BC which carried waste
to nearby rivers. Flush toilets are known to have existed in 3000BC in Ancient Crete,
complete with overhead cisterns. Similar toilets were well established by Roman
times. I myself have sat on a stone toilet which was once fed by a river water flush
system at Housesteads Fort on Hadrians Wall, northern England.

One of the most visible effects of the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of
the Middle Ages was the loss of public sanitation. One exception was castles where
there was an obvious need to get rid of noxious waste, particularly in times of siege.
There is evidence in England of raised platforms over the moat (presumably with
protection from attacking hoards) where one could relieve oneself. This would have
given the enemy an added disincentive to ford the moat I presume.

Both before and after the fall of the Roman Empire, waste was commonly thrown
into the streets, often from overhead windows. As a result, Roman streets had
raised stepping stones to prevent pedestrian citizens from soiling their sandals and
togas. The habit of emptying ones chamber pot onto the heads of passing
neighbours led to the Dejecti Efflusive Act of Rome, which allowed a Roman citizen
to collect damages after being hit by such ejecta. It became polite for a gentleman
to walk on the outside of a lady when walking down the street. In this way, he would
be in the line of fire from above. It is often postulated that this practice started to
protect ladies from being splashed by the wheels of passing carriages, but the truth
is a little more unsavoury.

In Europe up until the 1500s, people were fairly careless and uncouth about where
they deposited their bodily wastes. Stairways, closets and corners were often fouled
and the populace became accustomed to the stench and the sight of people
relieving themselves in public. In Erasmus' writings on etiquette, he declared it was
most rude to observe as one relieved himself (although he doesnt appear to
condemn those doing the relieving).
Prior to the conquest of what later would become to be known as Latin America by
the Spanish, complex sewerage systems had been constructed. In Tenochtitlan, the

Aztec Capital (now Mexico City), there existed public fountains for drinking and
bathing and waste was discharged to a series of lakes via a system of clay pipes.
Public hygiene was catered for, and the populace was able to bathe daily
something alien to even wealthy Europeans of the time. Waterborne diseases were
not common (as in London), despite the fact that the city was built in the middle of
a lake on a set of man-made islands. One of the first acts of the Conquistadors was
to destroy the Aztec flood defences and water control measures and to start filling
in the lakes. Ever since, the government of Mexico City has been fighting successive
periods of flood and drought. The centre of Mexico City is sinking at an alarming
rate as the huge population continues to withdraw groundwater at a faster rate than
it can be replaced naturally.

Turning back towards Europe, in Victorian London, disease was rife. The 1848-49
cholera outbreak shocked the population when it killed more than 50,000 of the
citys inhabitants. City dwellers lived in constant fear that disease could take their
lives with little warning. In the mid-19th century, a Londoners life expectancy was
shockingly low: forty five for a gentleman and mid-twenties for a tradesman.

Storm water and sewage were diverted into the River Thames by a rudimentary
system of pipes and underground sewers. The huge amounts of nutrients deposited
into it daily caused the successive growth of algae and bacteria which used up the
dissolved oxygen, killing most of the organisms in the water. The sewer system coexisted with the old method of dealing with human excrementthe night soil
men, who hauled the waste that literally filled up the basements of house to farms
on the edge of the city. Previous generations had grown used to the urine tax. This
forced families to urinate on the same patch of earth in the corner of the house.
This would be dug up periodically to be turned into saltpetre one of the major
ingredients of gunpowder. Its a little known fact that it was the wee of the British
peasant that ensured that Britain became a world superpower.

As London grew, human waste seeped from the Thames into the underground rivers
that were one of the citys main water supplies. Ironically, the man in charge of this
was Londons sanitation commissioner, Edwin Chadwick. An adherent of the Miasma
Theory, which held that cholera was transmitted through a foul stench in the air,
Chadwick believed that dumping waste into the river, away from residences, would
prevent further outbreaks of the disease. Of course, by contaminating Londons
main water supply, he greatly contributed to the spread of the disease.

In 1857 the stench from the river was so great that Parliament could not meet.
Heavy curtains soaked in lime were hung over the windows to prevent the odour
from permeating the building, without success. Amusingly this became known as
The Great Stink. A cynic might say that as is often the case, something was only
done because it directly affected politicians. Interestingly, it appears that it was the
smell which was affecting the gears of democracy, not the preventable deaths of
thousands of subjects every year. However, the Great Stink did lead directly to
action, and the construction of the first modern effective sewerage system.

Joseph Bazalgette, a civil engineer and Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of
Works, was given responsibility for the work. He designed an extensive underground
sewerage system that diverted waste to the Thames Estuary, downstream of the
main centre of population. Six main interceptor sewers, totalling almost 100 miles
(160 km) in length, were constructed. Bazalgette saw to it that the flow of foul
water from old sewers and underground rivers was intercepted, and diverted along
new, low-level sewers. Although proper treatment works were not constructed until
many years later, the unforeseen consequence of the work was that groundwater
was no longer contaminated with sewage, therefore stemming the spread of cholera
and other waterborne diseases. Bazalgette is now the great hero of sewage workers
throughout the world. He is commemorated by a blue plaque on his house in St
Johns Wood, London, and a memorial on Victoria Embankment above one of the
sewers he designed. He was one of the first of a generation of British engineers with
a social conscience.

So there you have it: a brief history of sewage. Now what about the future? Modern
mega-cities such as Nairobi and Dhaka have populations approaching 20 million,
while the population of Mexico City is even greater, yet their struggle with a lack of
clean drinking water and an inadequate public health system go largely unnoticed.
As the worlds population (and sewage) continues to rise past the seven billion
mark, the answers to these problems will come in part only with massive
investments in these cities infrastructures, but both the scale and cultural
differences of these cities will require new approaches and a new awareness of the
history of excrement.