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By Root 1983 0

districts found that many streets were “floating with sewage”; one street, housing 176 families, had not been cleaned for fifteen years. In Liverpool, as many as one-sixth of the populace lived in dark cellars, where wastes could all too easily seep in. And of course human waste was only a small part of the enormous heaps of filth that were generated in the crowded and rapidly industrializing cities. In London, the Thames absorbed anything that wasn’t wanted: condemned meat, offal, dead cats and dogs, food waste, industrial waste, human feces, and much more. Animals were marched daily to Smithfield Market to be turned into beefsteaks and mutton chops; they deposited forty thousand tons of dung en route in a typical year. That was, of course, on top of all the waste of dogs, horses, geese, ducks, chickens, and rutting pigs that were kept domestically. Gluemakers, tanners, dyers, tallow chandlers—indeed, chemical enterprises of all sorts—all added their by-products to the sea of daily sludge. Much of this rotting detritus ultimately found its way into the Thames, where the hope was that the tide would carry it out to sea. But of course tides run in both directions, and the tide that carried waste out toward sea brought a good deal of it back when it turned. The river was a perpetual “flood of liquid manure,” as one observer put it. Smollett, writing in Humphry Clinker, said that “human excrement is the least offensive part,” for the river also contained “all the drugs, minerals and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers.” The Thames grew so noxious that when a tunnel being dug at Rotherhithe sprang a leak, the first matter through the breach was not river water but concentrated gases, which were ignited by the miners’ lamps, putting the miners in the absurdly desperate position of trying to outrun incoming waters and clouds of burning air.

The streams that fed into the Thames were often even worse than the Thames itself. The River Fleet was in 1831 “almost motionless with solidifying filth.” Even the Serpentine in Hyde Park became so progressively putrid that park users stayed upwind of it. In the 1860s, a layer of sewage fifteen feet deep was dredged from the bottom.

Into this morass came something that proved, unexpectedly, to be a disaster: the flush toilet. Flush toilets of a type had been around for some time. The very first was built by John Harington, godson to Queen Elizabeth. When Harington demonstrated his invention to her in 1597, she expressed great delight and had one immediately installed in Richmond Palace. But it was a novelty well ahead of its time, and almost two hundred years passed before Joseph Bramah, a cabinetmaker and locksmith, patented the first modern flush toilet in 1778. It caught on in a modest way. Many others followed. In America in 1801, at the White House—or President’s House, as it was then called—Thomas Jefferson improved on the indoor privies he had installed at Monticello by installing three of the first flushing toilets to be found in the new nation. They were powered by rainwater cisterns in the attic.

But early toilets often didn’t work well. Sometimes they backfired, filling the room with even more of what the horrified owner had very much hoped to be rid of. Until the development of the U-bend and water trap—which create that little reservoir of water that returns to the bottom of the bowl after each flush—every toilet bowl acted as a conduit to the smells of cesspit and sewer. The backwaft of odors, particularly in hot weather, could be unbearable.

This problem was resolved by one of the great and surely most extraordinarily appropriate names in hygiene history, Thomas Crapper (1837–1910), who was born into a poor family in Yorkshire and reputedly walked to London at the age of eleven. There he became an apprentice plumber in Chelsea. Crapper invented the classic and, in Britain, still familiar toilet with an elevated cistern activated by