The document discusses the impact of science and technology on Victorian London. It focuses on Joseph Bazalgette's role in improving London's drainage system in the 1850s. Faced with recurring cholera epidemics, Bazalgette implemented an unprecedented sewage system as chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works. His intercepting sewer network diverted human waste from the Thames through over 80 miles of large sewers. This revolutionary infrastructure project helped eliminate cholera in London and established Bazalgette as a visionary engineer who saved many lives.

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Impact of Science and Technology on Victorian London
LONDON, ENGLAND
Dr. Adrian Tinniswood
Oxford Berkeley Program
Merton College
University of Oxford
Summer, 2013
Jim Mukerjee

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Introduction:
Age of Invention
For many Victorians, rapid advances in science and technology, in particular the
use of machines to perform work that had previously been done by hand, were
the most striking developments of the nineteenth century. The mechanization of
the cotton industry, the invention of the steam engine, innovations in the
bleaching, dyeing,printing industries, and many other discoveries and inventions
in variousbranches of science and industry were taken as emblematic of the
economic progress of the “The Golden Age” of the nineteenth century.
The iron industry, for example, was the site of significant technological progress,
and while this did not lead to growth rates as impressive as those of the cotton
industry, it helped to revolutionize manufacturing industry and several other
sectors of the British economy (1). Technological improvements during this period
went hand in hand with a significant increase in output, as the necessities and
demands of a rapidly industrializing country increased. A good example is the ever
increasing output of the coal industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
which was the largest single provider of energy in England and Wales during this
transformative period. Possibly the most significant demonstration of the
symbiotic relationship between fuel and technology is provided by the coalmining
industry itself, which was only able to supply the ever-greater quantities of coal
required by industry because of the development of new technologies which
enabled the extraction of the coal in the first place.
Coal-fired steam engine for railroad transportation is a pertinent example of
exceptionally complex technologies to convert steam power to provide
locomotive power. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the
development of a new form of economic growth resting upon the exploitation of
a new source of energy: coal. After 1750, key industries – mining, iron-making,
textile and transportation – abandoned their reliance on horses, charcoal, and
water to switch to coal instead as the principal source of power (2).
The economic change over the period 1700 to 1870 is best understood as the
outcome of different forces driven by scientific discoveries and technical
innovations described as the “Age of Invention”, defined asa period of self-
sustaining growth in science and technology, which deserve a place at the core of
the definition of “Industrial Revolution”, popularized by Arnold Toynbee in 1881.

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The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every
aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. Most notably, average income
and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. In the words of
Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr., "For the first time in history, the living
standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained
growth ... Nothing remotely like this economic behavior is mentioned by the
classical economists, even as a theoretical possibility” (1).The Industrial
Revolution began in Great Britain and within a few decades had spread to
Western Europe and the United States.
Knowledge is Power
During the Victorian period of the nineteenth century London had become the
City of Empire – majestic public edifices, new thoroughfares, rebuilt markets and
hotels, elaborate docks and stations, all were visible expressions of a city
ofunrivalled strength and imperial power. The resulting sense of confidence and
curiosity generated a fearless pursuit of knowledge, which in a symbiotic
relationship, instilled more intellectual power -- a defining characteristic of
London.
Ever since the medieval period, there has been a close association between
alchemy and the advent of science. But in London it was impossible to distinguish
alchemy and other forms of intellectual aptitude. Many of the original founders of
the Royal Society were conversant with astrology and as well as “modern”
scientific research and knowledge. Among the prime movers in London were
Robert Hooke, Samuel Hartlib, Robert Boyle, Kenelm Digby, and Isaac Newton,
who merged systematic rationality with alchemy to create technical solutions (3).
The Royal Society held its first meetings in Gresham House in Bishopsgate before
moving to Crane Court off Fleet Street. When members met in the evening, a
lamp was hung out over the entrance to the court to invite public participation.
The practical approach of their discussions is evident from the nature of the
experiments – to promote inoculation, electrical experiments on fourteen miles
of wire near Shooters Hill, ventilation apropos of gaol fever, Cavendish’s improved
thermometer, experiments in horticulture and agriculture, use of medicine as a
progressive scientific tool, examine defective architectures, draining and
ventilation of the city, William Perry’s creation of the science of “political
arithmetic” – birth of statistical inquiry.

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In 1826 the first University College was established in London in Bloomsbury with
the goal of training engineers and doctors, creating the first Faculty of Science in
1858. In his workshop Babbage created the “Difference Engine”, which was the
harbinger of the modern computer and the revolution of Information Technology.
The pursuit of knowledge in London was not confined to the search for technical
proficiency. After his famous voyage, Charles Darwin, from his home in
Marlborough Street, wrote “It is sorrowful but I fear too certain truth that no
place is at all equal, for aiding one in Natural History pursuits, to this dirty, smoky
town”. After travelling around the world, Darwin, in 1837, considered London to
be the most appropriate place to continue his research on evolutionary nature
(4). His insight was confirmed 47 years later when the prime meridian of zero
degrees longitude was established upon a brass rail in the Greenwich
Observatory. Science in London indeed was power, and Brittania indeed ruled the
waves during the Victorian reign.
The pioneers of the age were practical visionaries, seeing beyond the immediate
horizon, the safe and the known, as they dreamt a path to the future. The slowly
evolving Industrial Revolution was the fertile ground that gave life to their dreams
in iron, cement, stone and steel. To illustrate the achievements of these
visionaries, two powerful symbols of human ingenuity and technical excellence
are described briefly for this course:
Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of Victorian London (in this paper)
How The London Underground shaped London (in the presentation)

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Sir Joseph Bazalgette and
Cleansing ofVictorian London
Joseph Bazalgette was born in London on 28 March 1819. His
father was a captain in the Royal Navy. Bazalgette began his
career as a railway engineer, gaining considerable experience
in land drainage and reclamation. On 6 March 1838 he
became a graduate member of the Institution of Civil
Engineers (ICE), was promoted to full member on 17 February 1846 at the
recommendation of prominent members of ICE. He was to become the President
of ICE in 1884. In 1842, aged 23, Joseph set up his own Civil Engineering practice.
The experience he gained in preparing plans, designing and laying out schemes
for railways, ship canals, and other engineering works in various parts of UK,
under great pressure of deadlines, and dealing with endless Parliamentary
requirements, was to be invaluable in his later work as Chief Engineer of
Metropolitan Board of Works. The sheer determination and doggedness with
which he confronted the numerous interest groups, and other obstacles that
stood in the way of the completion of the “intercepting sewers”, which diverted
surface water and sewage from the Thames to outfalls (dumps) outside London,
suggest that he was a man of heroic patience and relentless tenacity in the face of
opposition and frustration. Sir Harry Haward, comptroller and historian of the
London County Council (LCC) commented in 1882 “the most prominent figure
among the officers of the Board was the distinguished Chief Engineer Sir Joseph
Bazalgette, the designer of the main drainage system of London and of the
Victoria, Albert, Thames and Chelsea Embankments – monumental works entitling
him to a niche in the temple of fame.” John Doxat, author of The Living Thames:
the Restoration of a Great Tidal River claimed “Bazalgette did more good and
saved more lives than any single Victorian public official.” Bazalgette died on 15
March 1891 in his home in St. Mary’s, Wimbledon (5, 6).
Until the late 16th
century, London citizens were reliant for their water supplies on
shallow wells, the River Thames, its tributaries, natural springs, including the
major Tyburn spring at Mary le Bourne, which was connected by lead pipe to a
large cistern called the Great Conduit at Cheapside. Wealthy Londoners living
near a conduit pipe could connect to their home by permission, but it did not
prevent unauthorized tapping of the conduits. Households that could not get
water from conduits by gravity-feed, depended on water-carriers, or “cobs”, who

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formed their own guild in 1496, - The Brotherhood of St. Cristofer of the
Waterbearers. In 1582, Dutchman Peter Morice leased the northernmost arch of
London Bridge and constructed a waterwheel inside the arch to pump water from
the Thames to various districts of London. More waterwheels were added in 1584
and 1701, which remained in use until 1882. Over the following 122 years six
other companies followed in drawing water from the Thames to service various
parts of London via conduits and cisterns.
However, since 1815 house waste was permitted to be emptied into the Thames
via the sewers. So, for 7 years human waste was dumped into the Thames and
then pumped back to the same households for drinking, cooking, and bathing.
Prior to 1850 there were over 200,000 cesspits in London, which cost a shilling to
be cleaned – a cost the average citizen could ill afford. As a result, the contents
accumulated adding to the airborne stench or allowed to be conveyed to the
Thames via city sewers.
The unsanitary condition of the river was
inadvertently aggravated by the
Metropolitan Sewers Act of 1848, which
required all existing and new homes to
install Water Closets (WC) or a privy and
ash-pit, and suitable drainsto be
connected to public sewers which
drained into the Thames.
Men of influence expressed their concerns. In 1850 Charles Dickens exposed the
complacency of the Grand Junction Water Company at Kew (5), and Michael
Faraday wrote scathing, sarcastic, witty letters to The Times in 1855 describing
the Thames as a “fermenting sewer” (7).
From 1848 to 1855 six short-lived and underfunded Metropolitan Sewers
Commissions struggled with complex technical proposals, conflicting
personalities, vested interests, and incessant interference by Members of
Parliament. Finally, on 17 August 1855 the Metropolitan Management Act created
the Metropolitan Board of Works, London’s first representative Metropolitan
government, taking over all the responsibilities of all Sewers Commissions, with
John Thwaite as Chairman, and Joseph Bazalgette as Chief Engineer.
Metropolitan Board of Works, Spring Gardens,1860

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The summer of 1858 was unusually hot. The Thames and
its tributaries wereoverflowing with sewage; the warm
weather encouraged bacterial growth and the resulting
smell was so overwhelming that it affected the
deliberations of the House of Commons and the Law
Courts, prompting plans for Parliament to relocate
upstream to Hampton Court and the Law Courts to Oxford
and St. Albans. The press named it “The Big Stink” and
correctly predicted the extreme discomfort of the
Parliamentarians would finally lead to a remedy with a
sense of heightened urgency (5, 8).
In the mid-19th
century, London was suffering from recurring epidemics of
cholera. In 1853 -1854 more than 10,000 Londoners were killed by the disease.
The causes were not known, but the most widely accepted notion was that the
disease was due to air-borne foul “miasma”. Even Florence Nightingale and Sir
Edwin Chadwick were strong advocates of the “miasmic theory” of the source of
cholera, scarlet fever, measles and smallpox – spreading the disease by infected
atmosphere. Hence, removing the smells from the dwellings was considered more
important than to free the Thames from sewage. Because of the miasmic theory’s
predominance among scientists and influencers, the 1854 discovery by Filippo
Pacini of “Vibrio Cholerae” bacterium was ignored until its confirmation30 years
later by German bacteriologist Robert Koch. In 1854, London physician Dr John
Snow observed that the disease was transmitted by drinking water contaminated
by sewage after a cholera epidemic on Broad Street in Soho, but at first this idea
was not widely accepted. Faced with innovative work by William Farr and John
Simon using rigorous statistical methods, for the first time in a large scale, and the
evidence of theEast London cholera outbreak from the polluted River Lea draining
into the reservoirs of the East London Water Company, they were able to prove
conclusively that contaminated water was the main source of cholera. Eliminating
this source of water pollution would help eradicate cholera. In the light of these
glaringevidences and starkconclusions, the amended 1857 proposal by Bazalgette
and Thwaite was pushed through Parliament by Benjamin Disraeli, as leader of
the House, on 15 July 1858, with a critical sense of urgency to “Improve the Main
Drainage of the Metropolis and prevent as far as practicable the sewage of the
Metropolis from passing into the River Thames within the Metropolis.”

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Bazalgette’s plan of “Intercepting Sewers”, which was modified as the
construction progressed, proposed a bold solution of a network of “main sewers”,
running parallel to the Thames, which would intercept both surface water and
sewage, conducting them to the outfalls (dumps) at Barking on the northern side
of the river, and to Crossness, near Plumstead, on the southern side. This involved
installing 82 miles of large sewers, fed from 1,000 miles of new street-level
sewers, laid to a minimum fall of 2 feet per mile, consuming 318 million bricks,
880 thousand cubic yards of concrete, excavating 3.5 million cubic yards of earth
(5). A particular difficulty arose from the fact that much of London, specially the
area around Lambeth and Pimlico, lies below the high water mark, thus making it
necessary to lift the sewage to a level at which it would flow by gravity into the
rest of the system. It was an engineering plan on an unprecedented scale!
The northern drainage required construction of 3 main intercepting sewers at the
high level, middle level, and the lower level, with a number of branches at each
level. Much of the sewers were constructed by tunnelling, but the greatest
engineering problem was presented by the need to cross the new Underground
Metropolitan Railway without stopping the traffic. The northern low-level sewer
was a very complex undertaking since it lay for much of its length under the
Victoria Embankment, which also had to house a new subway, Underground
Metropolitan Railway (9), gas pipes, and other utility services. It took the
contractor, Furness, five years to complete the project including the northern
outfall reservoir at Barking, where the sewage was stored until it could be
released at high tide.
The southern drainage was similar in concept to the northern though the area
covered was smaller and the population little more than a third of the numbers
living north of the river. The southern high level sewer ran from Clapham High
Street 9 and 1/2 miles to Deptford Creek, where it was linked to Dulwich sewer
and flowed into the northern outfall at Deptford. The southern low-level sewer
ran from Putney High Street to Deptford with a branch to Bermondsey. At
Deptford a pumping station lifted the sewage 20 feet to the southern outfall
sewer which carried it to the outfall at Cressness.
In subsequent years the sludge treatment plants at Barking and Cressness
compressed the sludge recovered from the settlement tanks and incinerated it
through a bed of sand at a temperature of 8500
C. The heat generated was
recovered and used to drive a steam turbine to generate electricity to run the
treatment works while leaving a substantial surplus for ‘export’ to the National

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Grid. In 1995, Thames WaterCompany ‘exported’ 4.3 megawatts of electricity to
the National Grid from their Combined Gas and Steam power plant at Barking, yet
another example of serendipitous benefit to London from cleansing the Thames
and continued technical innovation (5).
Bazalgette described the phenomenal scale of the combined project, and the
engineering problems encountered, in his seminal paper presented to the
Institution of Civil Engineers in 1865.
An appreciation of Bazalgette’s work and contribution to society can be made on
the basis of five key observations:
- The scale and complexity of the engineering works he executed
- His contribution to the concept of representative municipal government
- The enterprise he demonstrated in executing complex engineering works
- The social and health consequences for his fellow-citizens of London
- The personal qualities he displayed during his arduous career
Bazalgette’s masterpiece design of “Intercepting Sewers” was used as a blueprint
for urban drainage and sewer networks across the globe from New York to New
Zealand, which is the ultimate tribute to his lasting legacy
andincomparabletechnical achievement. To reiterateJohn Doxat’s claim:
“Bazalgette did more good and saved more lives than any single Victorian public
official.”
_________________________________________________________________
Map of the River Thames downstream from London, 1840

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References for London, England course, Oxford Berkeley Program 2013
Sir Joseph Bazalgette and Cleansing of Victorian London
Reference # Title,Author, Publisher, Date
(1) A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution, by Emma Griffin,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
(2) The Development of Science and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain,
by Donald Cardwell, Edited by Richard L.Hills, Ashgate Publishing, 2003
(3) London, The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, 2000
(4) Victorian London, Life of a City, by Liza Picard, St. Martin’s Press,2006
(5) The Great Stink of London, Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the
Victorian Capital, Stephen Halliday, Sutton Publishing, 1999
(6) Joseph Bazalgette, BBC History Online
(7) King Faraday, James Hamilton, The Economist Book Review, Aug 1, 2002
(8) The Great Stink, Wikipedia Online
How the London Underground Shaped London Presentation
(9) Underground: How the Tube Shaped London, by David Bownes, Oliver
Green, Sam Mullins, Penguin Books, 2012
(10) London, An Illustrated History, by Robert Chester & Nicholas Awde,
Hippocrene Books, 2003