Podcast Announcer (0:00)

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Erin Menke (0:08)

Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild.

Aaron Mahnke (0:17)

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

Erin Menke (0:20)

And if history is an open book.

Aaron Mahnke (0:22)

All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Erin Menke (0:40)

Long before the flush toilet became commonplace, humanity grappled with a persistent pungent how and where to dispose of our own waste. We know that ancient Mesopotamia had some plumbing technology. They built a system of clay pipes that carried waste away when rainwater flushed the system, but far too often the refuse simply ended up as a fetid pool just outside the outskirts of town. Rome also adopted a kind of sewer system, but it was used largely to drain rainwater from city streets, not for human waste in the modern sense. Even in more recent centuries, many people still relied on chamber pots and cesspools, holes dug to hold waste until they overflowed or were emptied. In many cities, the smell, pestilence, and sheer volume of refuse were visible reminders that sanitation was not simply a domestic task, but public good. Nowhere was this more true than in Victorian England, where the sweltering summer of 1858 created the conditions for a public disaster that came to be known as the Big Stink. London in the 1800s did not have what you would consider to be a modern waste disposal system. People used chamber pots, which would then be emptied into cesspits dug nearby the nearest river, or, even worse, would just empty them into the streets. All over the cities, ditches and waterways were clogged with feces. Neighbors would fight over cesspits dug too close to one another's homes, which would seep into their basements and walls. These pits, of course, would fill up, and so night men were paid to remove the waste after the world had gone to sleep and to cart it off to farms to fertilize crops. It was an imperfect system, to say the least, but it would only get worse. Between 1800 and 1850, London's population exploded, and by 1858, two and a half million people called it home. Overcrowding was a major issue, and along with the people came the people's waste. The city's infrastructure did not keep pace with the massive influx of newly minted Londoners. Suddenly there were nearly twice as many people dumping their waste into cesspits, making it expensive to transport away. The drains and gutters that were frequently used to remove feces, all emptied into the Thames and its tributaries. Refuse accumulated and slowly the river itself became a sewer, taking in not only human waste, but that of livestock as well as the factory runoff that was a consequence of the Industrial revolution. Regular outbreaks of cholera killed over 10,000 Londoners. The city was groaning under the pressure of its own excrement. The summer of 1858 proved to be the tipping point. It's fair to say that the summer that year was hot and dry. The lack of rain meant that the Thames water levels were lower than usual. And this meant that waste that it normally carried away to sea was instead drying on the riverbank in the sweltering heat. The stench became overpowering. And so much so that the rich people left the city for the fresh air of the countryside. And the poor folks had to stay indoors as much as they could afford. And for the poor guys who had to stick around and work in the parliament building, they soaked the curtains with chloride of lime to fight the smell. And although parliament had been debating sanitation for years, very little progress had been made toward real reform. And the stench, mixed with harsh headlines and public rage, finally forced the government's hand. Within 18 days of its introduction, a bill to fund new infrastructure was passed into law. Enter Joseph Bazalgette, a civil engineer who was appointed to lead the charge. Bazalgette developed an ambitious design of underground brick sewers and powerful pumping stations to move London's waste beyond the city and release it into the tidal Thames, where currents would carry it away. Work began almost immediately. Between 1858 and 1870, five miles of tunnels were dug, reinforced with hundreds of millions of bricks. It was one of the largest infrastructure projects of its day, solving London's sewage problem and paving the way for modern urban sanitation. Everywhere else, the Great Stink was disastrous, but its legacy was structural and profound. The immediate crisis ended and cholera outbreaks in London dwindled in subsequent years as waste disposal improved and water quality rose. And as wild as it sounds, Bazalgette's sewers still underpin London's sanitation network. Today, even as new pressures emerge from the ever increasing population and climate driven rainfall, the event remains a milestone in sanitation history. How environmental, sanitary and political pressures collided to force a major infrastructure overhaul. Visiting the Thames today, it's hard to imagine what it once was. A stinking, disease ridden sewer. It's a curious tale, to say the least. Thanks to bold engineering and public health reform, the city has been transformed. The Great Stink stands as a dramatic reminder of how ignoring waste doesn't just stink. It also causes outbreaks of preventable disease and makes the city that one lives in completely unlivable. I think it's fair to say that meteorology, the scientific study of the atmosphere in an attempt to predict the weather, is often misunderstood. People expect the weather anchor on TV to be accurate all the time. They think that predicting the weather is the same as seeing the future. But all weather people can do is look at past trends and current conditions and say how likely something is to happen. A 90% chance of rain means that it still might not rain. But that's science using evidence to form a hypothesis. If you want magic, well, a curious story from 1891 shows us just how well it goes when humankind tries to bend the weather to its will. Robert G. Direnforth wasn't a scientist, but he was an engineer, and his friend Edward Powers was a retired Civil War general. However, in 1891, the two had formed a hypothesis. During the war, Edward noticed that it was almost always raining following a big battle. This led to their concussion theory, the idea that sonic waves from loud explosions would jostle the rain right out of the clouds. Now, you might already be questioning this, but just bear with me. Congress thought that it was a decent theory, and so they gave Robert and Edward $7,000 back then. That's worth about $250,000 today. To test their theory, they set up their experiment on a ranch in Illinois, lining the fields with mortars packed with blasting powder from nearby mines. They also set up several rows of hydrogen balloons, and they would hoist these balloons into the air and then shoot at them to create an even louder sound. Soon, everything was ready. Robert, Edward, and their associates lit the fuses and plugged their ears. Massive thundering blasts sounded out across the fields as the mortars fired. The booming pops of the hydrogen balloons sent birds flying from the trees. The noise continued for hours. It almost sounded like the civil war was back on. Once the men were done firing, the silence that followed was almost just as deafening. They looked to the skies, where storm clouds were gathering. They held their breath as something extraordinary took place. Rain began to trickle down from above. The men jumped for joy. Their experiment had worked. The next day, that trickle turned into a downpour. However, the local meteorologist was about to rain on Robert and Edward's parade. No pun intended, I swear. Wink, wink. He had predicted this reign was likely to happen with or without their experiment. The two men were forced to concede defeat, at least for now. But they continued to champion their theory. Eventually, the mayor of El Paso, Texas, took notice and asked Robert's team to come test his theory in their town. They used the same artillery and the same balloon system, but this time it rained only on the opposite side of the city from where the experiment took place. It was even more of a mediocre result. Robert continued his experiments throughout the Southwest, but his methods didn't seem to have much of an effort. He always wanted to take credit for rain that was just as likely to have happened without his concussive blasts. This didn't stop others from trying similar experiments over the decades, though there are reports of other concussion weather experiments from as late as 1911. But as the scientific method came into focus, the problems with the concussion theory became clear. For one, that initial observation by Edward Powers that rain always seemed to follow a battle is all correlation without causation. He may have just been fighting during a rainy period or in a rainy region. Most Civil War battles were fought in southern states where it does rain a lot. And second, once he started to form his theory, observation bias may have led him to only notice when it did rain and ignore when it didn't. And third, he wasn't considering the actual mechanisms that cause rain evaporation, condensation and precipitation. Those were already well studied phenomena. Robert and Edwards hypothesis basically ignored the water cycle completely and instead put forth the idea that rain could just be shaken out of the clouds like fruit from a tree. In the scientific method, a hypothesis typically doesn't even make it to the testing stage if it can't stand up to existing evidence. That $7,000 grant from Congress was truly a waste of money. Without understanding the scientific method and studying the research that had already been done, these men were pretty much on par with medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold or in this case, dynamite into rain. If you're a longtime listener of this show, you know that it never hurts to be curious, but pointing that curiosity in the right direction is important. A meteorologist guessing when it might rain may not be perfect, but it's a lot more reliable than hurling explosives at a cloud and Hoping for the best.