SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_03: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford Gentility of speech is at an end. Funded and editorial in London's City Press.
SPEAKER_01: It stinks. The stink in question was partly metaphorical.
SPEAKER_02: Politicians were failing to tackle an obvious problem. As its population grew, London's system for disposing of human waste became woefully inadequate. To relieve pressure on cesspits which were prone to leaking, overflowing and belching explosive methane, the authorities had instead started encouraging sewage into gullies. However, this created a different issue. The gullies were originally intended only for rainwater and they emptied directly into the River Thames. So that was the literal stink. The Thames became an open sewer. The distinguished scientist Michael Faraday was moved by a boat journey to write to the Times newspaper. He described the river water as an opaque pale brown fluid. Near the bridges,
SPEAKER_01: the feculents rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface. Cholera
SPEAKER_02: was rife. One outbreak killed 14,000 Londoners, nearly one in every hundred. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette drew up plans for new closed sewers to pump the waste far from the city. It was this project that politicians came under pressure to approve. Michael Faraday ended his letter by pleading with
SPEAKER_01: Those who exercise power or have responsibility To stop neglecting the problem, lest a hot season gives us sad proof of the folly of our carelessness. And three years later, that's exactly what happened. The sweltering hot
SPEAKER_02: summer of 1858 made London's Malodorous River impossible to politely ignore or to discuss obliquely with gentility of speech. The heatwave became popularly known as the great stink. If you live in a city with modern sanitation, it's hard to imagine daily life being permeated with a suffocating stench of human excrement. For that, we have a number of people to thank, but perhaps none more so than the unlikely figure of Alexander Cumming. A watchmaker in London a century before the great stink, Cumming won renown for his mastery of intricate mechanics. King George III commissioned him to make an elaborate instrument for recording atmospheric pressure, and he pioneered the microtome, a device for cutting ultra-fine slivers of wood for microscopic analysis. But Cumming's world-changing invention owed nothing to precision engineering. It was a bit of pipe with a curve in it. In 1775, Cumming patented the S-bend. This became the missing ingredient to create the flushing toilet and with it, public sanitation as we know it. Flushing toilets had previously founded on the problem of smell. The pipe that connects the toilet to the sewer, allowing urine and feces to be flushed away, will also let sewer odours waft back up, unless you can create some kind of airtight seal. Cumming's solution was simplicity itself. Bend the pipe. Water settles in the dip, stopping smells coming up. Flushing the toilet replenishes the water. While we've moved on alphabetically from the S-bend to the U-bend, flushing toilets still deploy the same insight. Rollout, however, came slowly. By 1851, a lifetime after Cumming's patent, flushing toilets remained novel enough in London to cause mass excitement when introduced at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace. Use of the facilities cost one penny, giving the English language one of its enduring euphemisms for emptying one's bladder – to spend a penny. If the Great Exhibition gave Londoners a vision of how public sanitation could be, clean and smell-free, no doubt that added to the weight of popular discontent as politicians dragged their heels over finding the funds for Joseph Bazalgette's planned sewers. We still haven't reliably managed to solve the problem of collective action – how to get those who exercise power or have responsibility, as Faraday put it, to organise themselves. There's been a great deal of progress. According to the World Health Organisation, the proportion of the world's people who have access to what's called improved sanitation has increased from around a quarter in 1980 to around two-thirds today. That's a big step forward. But still, two and a half billion people remain without improved sanitation, and improved sanitation itself is a low bar. It hygienically separates human excreta from human contact, but it doesn't necessarily treat the sewage itself. Fewer than half the world's people have access to sanitation systems that do that. The economic costs of this ongoing failure to roll out proper sanitation are many and varied, from healthcare for diarrheal diseases to forgone revenue from hygiene-conscious tourists. The World Bank's Economics of Sanitation initiative has tried to tot up the price tag. Across various African countries, for example, it reckons inadequate sanitation lofts one or two percentage points off GDP. In India and Bangladesh, over 6%. In Cambodia, 7%. That soon adds up. The challenge is that public sanitation isn't something the market necessarily provides. Toilets cost money, but defecating in the street is free. If I install a toilet, I bear all the costs, while the benefits of the cleaner street are felt by everyone. In economic parlance, that's a positive externality. And goods which have positive externalities tend to be bought at a slower pace than society as a whole would prefer. Contrast, say, the mobile phone. That also costs money, but as long as there's somebody else I can phone, its benefits accrue largely to me. And that's one reason why, although the S-Bend has been around for ten times as long as the mobile phone, many more people already own a mobile phone than a flushing toilet. If you want to buy a flushing toilet, it also helps if there's a system of sewers to plummet into. And creating that system is a major undertaking, financially and logistically. When Joseph Bazalgette finally got the cash to build London's sewers, they took ten years to complete and necessitated digging up 2.5 million cubic meters of space. Because of the externality problem, such a project might not appeal to private investors. It tends to require determined politicians, willing taxpayers and well-functioning municipal governments. And those, it seems, are in short supply. London's lawmakers prevaricated. But when they finally acted, they didn't hang about. It took just 18 days to rush through the necessary legislation for Bazalgette's plans. What explains this sudden, impressive alacrity? A quirk of geography. London's Parliament building is located right next to the River Thames. Officials tried to shield lawmakers from the great stink, soaking the curtains in chloride of lime in a bid to mask the stench. But it was no use. Try as they might, the politicians couldn't ignore it. The Times described, with a note of grim satisfaction, how members of Parliament had been seen abandoning the building's library. Each gentleman with a handkerchief to his nose.
SPEAKER_01: If only concentrating politicians' minds were always that easy.
SPEAKER_02: Hello, it's me again. The S-bend was the 44th thing on my list of 50. So, six more to go. But I don't want it to be over just yet. I want a 51st thing. So, please tell me, what's the one extra thing you think I should be looking at? If you listen to the series regularly, you know. I'm looking for the underrated, the unexpected, the overlooked. If you're listening to this before 12 noon GMT on the 8th of September 2017, and if you haven't already, please send in your suggestions. I will then choose my six favourites, and in a few weeks, you'll have the chance to vote online. There'll be a special extra podcast all about the winning 51st thing. You can email me at 51, that's 51, 51things at bbc.com. Or you can send a message on the BBC World Service page on Facebook, or let us know on Twitter at BBC World Service. Remember, the deadline for suggestions is the 8th of September 2017 at 12 noon GMT. You can see a list of all my 50 things at bbcworldservice.com slash 51things. Again, 51 is 5-1. I can't wait to see what you suggest.
