Latest / Privycast / Ep. 68 The Great Stink feat. Dirty Father Thames

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Ep. 68 The Great Stink feat. Dirty Father Thames · Privycast

0:01
>> Speaker A: And, like, pull it out,
0:04
uh, and see how brown it came out.
0:12
Uh, welcome back to privy.
0:14
Privy is a podcast about
0:16
bathrooms, recorded
0:19
from my home bathroom. I'm your host,
0:22
hunter hoover, and I love
0:24
bathrooms. I'm, uh, just going to say. So
0:27
this recording is coming right off the tail
0:30
end of, um, pretty great technical
0:32
difficulties. Did a full computer reset. The
0:35
dinosaur lives on. And I did
0:37
get the blue screen of doom with a frowny
0:40
face. Um, so that's how you know your computer
0:43
hates you. Uh, is when it just
0:46
puts a frowny face
0:49
onto the screen on your behalf. So that
0:52
was fun, but we're
0:55
here. Uh, if I try to record in
0:57
mono, um, it won't go
1:00
above a certain level. Um, and so I'm working out
1:03
that fun little feature of my computer
1:06
now. Um, and so we're going to record this a little different
1:09
this time. And so if it sounds weird, I apologize,
1:12
but we're moving forward. A few weeks ago,
1:14
my family ate at a local establishment here in
1:17
Albany. Um, first of all, before I get there,
1:20
my wife and I ate in a local establishment. And I got to
1:23
say the name of this. I'm not going to say the
1:26
name of this mexican food place, but, um, they tout
1:29
authentic mexican food. And I ordered a tray
1:32
of, like, a plate of nachos. And I got
1:35
tortilla chips with melted cheese that
1:38
had been melted in a microwave. And I'm just sitting here going
1:41
like, I
1:43
understand that this
1:46
is probably what I ordered, but when you order
1:49
nachos with cheese, I
1:51
just expected something more.
1:55
And maybe that's on me. That might be on me,
1:57
but, uh, it was kind of
2:00
just all around. I came home
2:03
and put some nacho flavored
2:05
cheese powder for, like, microwave
2:08
popcorn on my microwave nachos from the
2:11
authentic mexican restaurant. And so if that's
2:14
not some level of white trash, I don't know what
2:17
is. Um, but about a month or so
2:20
ago, my family went to a local establishment called the
2:22
cascade grill. Now, I'm not going to say anything
2:25
about the, um,
2:28
teen and young adult aged
2:30
employees who really missed
2:33
it. As far as, like,
2:35
hospitality and just being on top of your
2:38
job, we're going to skip that. Um, well, actually, it
2:41
comes back here in a second. But we sat there for
2:44
25 minutes, which is fine. They were not busy. But I
2:47
was like, well, I'm going to use the bathroom. So I go in the bathroom, and it's chalk
2:50
empty. And, um, you all probably saw
2:52
this. If you follow the social media,
2:55
like, TikTok stuff for the cast at privycast,
2:58
you saw this. But I went in and the bathroom was
3:01
just not clean. And that's fine. Bathrooms
3:04
get dirty. But again, the
3:07
flock or conglomerate, or like I say,
3:10
I think the technical term for a group of teens up to
3:13
no good is like a gaggle or an
3:15
conglomerate, but they're just
3:18
not doing anything on the job. And it's
3:21
like somebody could clean toilets. Like, just go do a bathroom
3:24
check real quick. But, uh, the bathroom
3:27
was pretty whack. And I'm sitting in
3:30
there and this gentleman comes in now, and
3:33
he's an older guy doing his deed, and I'm in the
3:35
stall. And so I'm like, I'm
3:38
just going to mess with this guy. And I start to just
3:41
make fart sounds with my mouth. And I do
3:44
it the first time. I can hear him standing out
3:47
the other side of the thing. And I'm like,
3:50
uh. And I hear, oh,
3:53
jeez, it's coming. And
3:55
to which I realize that this gentleman thought
3:58
that the fart came out of him. Um,
4:02
so I'm like, oh my gosh, you got to be kidding
4:05
me. And I'm kind of just giggling, and then I
4:08
decide I'm going to go for it again, and I just
4:12
make another sound. And then
4:14
he gets
4:17
spooked by the fact that this happened
4:20
and then quickly leaves the
4:22
bathroom and does not wash his hands. Ten out of
4:25
ten. Um, I spooked some old guy at the
4:28
Cascade grill. And it was fun. And then we had
4:31
our food and ate, and that was what you
4:34
do at restaurants. But it's hot out here. This
4:37
privy summer here in the Willamete valley in
4:39
Oregon. At the time of recording, it was
4:41
101 high. Today,
4:45
I don't do well. I'm what
4:47
the kids call of a thicker nature.
4:50
And so when the
4:53
temperatures exceed like 80, I
4:56
just kind of don't function as well. Like everything just
4:59
systems are much like my computer at the beginning of this
5:02
record, they all just go frowny face on you and it's real
5:05
great. But one of the things that
5:08
happens this time of year is it gets dummy
5:11
hot. And yeah,
5:14
by the time you hear this, I have already gone to Montana and
5:17
returned. But at the point of this recording,
5:20
I'm recording a little ahead of time because we're going to make this,
5:24
we're, the heat's going to travel with us, and it's a real
5:26
disappointment because Montana doesn't have
5:29
to be as hot as Oregon is right now, but it is
5:32
going to be while we're there. So we might as well just live with it. You know
5:35
what I'm saying? But it's hot out here,
5:38
and the heat does something else.
5:41
When you've interacted, uh, with a good,
5:44
um, well, milled yard bin or maybe just
5:47
like a leaky garbage, um,
5:50
in a trash bin on the sidewalk
5:53
in the summer heat, those things can
5:56
build up a real big funk. They
5:58
get real stinky, and heat has a habit of
6:01
doing that. And
6:04
thankfully, we live in a time where we have come up
6:07
with a lot of systems. Like I've, uh, shared on the
6:10
podcast. This podcast is nothing if it's not
6:13
a, uh, podcast to just be thankful for the bathroom
6:15
situation that we have in today's age.
6:18
But we live in a time where we
6:21
have a lot of systems in place to help
6:24
deal with our rank.
6:28
We have a lot of waste. We create it both with
6:31
our butt and with the things we put in our trash.
6:34
And so there are systems in place to help
6:36
us remove those waste. Waste removal
6:39
in a way that gets it away from us
6:42
so we don't have to endure the stink.
6:45
And we've talked quite a bit about a lot of those
6:47
services, and we've talked a lot about those services
6:50
this summer. Maybe it's the summer of stink here on
6:53
privy. There's no way that'll catch on
6:56
the summer of stink. But this week on privy, we're going to
6:59
look at a specific time in history
7:01
where things were far less sanitary, uh,
7:04
and as a result, much more stinky. And
7:07
if you hear that, you might go, well, yeah, that was, like,
7:10
probably 95% of all of history before
7:13
us was just a little more rank.
7:17
Uh, it's recently come to my awareness
7:20
that when I go to the gym and I have
7:23
gym funk going on. Uptown
7:26
gym funk. No, I tried
7:29
for it. The hip kids were not into
7:32
that one. But when I go to the
7:35
gym, it smells specifically
7:37
like chicken and vegetable
7:40
soup, like heavy onion chicken and vegetable soup, and
7:43
it's just a disaster. But I picked up some
7:46
soup for some. I can't remember who. Um. Oh, it's the
7:49
Cascade grill. And I was like, dang, that smells exactly like when I go to the
7:52
gym. Sorry, Cascade grill, but your food
7:55
is good. But it did make me think of how I smell when I go to
7:58
the gym. But this
8:00
week, uh, on privy, we're going to talk about a
8:03
moment in history where this was almost
8:06
out of hand. We're going to talk about the great
8:08
stink. Before,
8:11
we had sewer systems, but after
8:14
people decided it was not appropriate to just
8:17
dump or perhaps plop
8:20
their sewage straight into the
8:22
street, they began to
8:25
dump their sewage and privy pots
8:28
and chamber pots and other things directly
8:31
into the local river.
8:34
The good old local river. We have a river here in
8:37
Albany. Not too many people get up in it. Like,
8:40
there's some floating. That happens, but it's
8:42
fine. But in many parts of the
8:45
world, as they began to dump
8:48
partially full chamber pots into the
8:51
rivers, or if you're really swanky, maybe you
8:54
had sewage that was piped into
8:57
your chambers and then would
8:59
empty itself directly out into the
9:02
rivers. As time went
9:05
on, it would run and dump into these
9:08
rivers. But not only that, even
9:10
after sewers were constructed in major
9:13
cities, they often
9:16
just routed the sewer with the end line
9:19
at the local river. Like, it would just seep out the end,
9:22
like some sort of weird, like, 1960s
9:25
and 70s cartoon where alt
9:27
sewers lead to the river. It's kind of like
9:30
finding Nemo, I think, in that regard.
9:33
I think that's a plot point in finding Nemo. I think at
9:36
one point they're like, if we can get flushed, it goes to the
9:39
ocean. Which they, I believe were in
9:42
Australia. Peacherman, 42 Wallaby Way,
9:44
Sydney, Australia. Yeah. And
9:47
so,
9:50
um, hopefully Australia is not
9:53
solely doing that type system. I doubt they
9:56
are. But there was this idea that all
9:59
sewers are just going to empty into the local rivers. It's
10:01
fine that water
10:04
is moving, so surely it will move in such
10:07
a way to carry the very stinky brown we
10:10
made downriver and away from our
10:13
lives and knowledge. But the thing
10:16
is, it settles, it collects, it
10:18
builds up in time, and in other
10:21
cases, the air quotes sewers were
10:24
just rivers.
10:29
Here's the other thing. It has to carry the stinky brown,
10:32
like, downriver. And so,
10:35
God forbid you're the people that are downriver,
10:38
because if you have North
10:41
Humperdinksville and all the people
10:44
in north Humperdinksville are just, like, skeeting
10:47
it right into the river, and you're downriver from that,
10:50
you get to enjoy all of the benefits of being downriver
10:53
of north Humperdinksville.
10:56
The other thing is that as
10:59
this waste is dumped and, uh,
11:01
slung into the rivers, willy nilly and
11:04
Hickelty Pickledy, if you will, it begins
11:07
to settle and collect and builds up.
11:10
It rests on the bottom.
11:14
I've gone on record on the show once before and once in the
11:17
future, we've already recorded it saying that you can add
11:20
enough water to any solid and it will make it a liquid.
11:23
But sometimes the sheer
11:25
volume of solids being added to the
11:28
liquid is too much for the dwindling
11:31
amounts of liquid to
11:33
liquefy the solids. It's science.
11:37
But as it settles and collects,
11:40
the sewers, again, are just brick
11:43
covers that shield the
11:45
unsightly brown flow. Like, uh, there were
11:48
some places where they just built a brick
11:51
covering over the local river and
11:54
called it a sewer and continued to just dump in
11:57
it, even though it's just the river that used to be there, but now we can't see
12:00
it or smell it as much because we put brick
12:03
on top. Cities back then
12:06
didn't rely solely on sewers.
12:09
Um, it was by the mid 18 hundreds. Waste
12:12
management was a two part rinse
12:15
it down the drain or dump it in the
12:18
river, or take it to the cess pit or privy
12:21
pit and dump it in there. So you got
12:24
two options. You can either skeet it into the river,
12:26
either directly or indirectly, or you can dump it in a
12:29
big hole in the ground and contaminate your well water.
12:33
I'm looking at you. Cholera. I
12:36
bet cholera sucks. It can't be
12:38
good. I'm
12:41
pretty confident people passed from it,
12:44
but we're not talking about cesspits today. Um,
12:47
these sewers that. These early
12:50
sewers were often in bad shape.
12:53
They're just slinging these sewers together. They're made out
12:56
of brick, they're made out of stone. Um, in
12:59
some cases,
13:04
the sewers are getting worse. The population amount of people,
13:07
like, dumping their brown and, um,
13:10
just slinging human crap into
13:13
these lakes and rivers and streams and sewers,
13:15
air quotes, sewers. Um, it's increasing.
13:18
And also to
13:21
couple that we have a full Springfield
13:25
Simpsons situation, where with the
13:27
rise of the industrial revolution, the factories
13:30
began to just dump their noise straight into the
13:33
river as a way of getting rid of, you know,
13:36
we have all sorts of laws and things.
13:40
Yeah, we have all sorts of laws and things to
13:43
keep that from happening nowadays.
13:46
But at the time, they didn't exist. And
13:49
so this produced more than just
13:51
turds and trash and other things.
13:54
Like, this is also like chemical runoff.
13:58
It was a different world back then. Nowadays, if that happened,
14:01
companies would be slapped with so many fines and put them
14:03
under. But later,
14:06
flush toilets are introduced, further adding to
14:09
the problem of overused sewers. Like,
14:12
now, it's just easy to get rid of it.
14:16
You don't even have to carry the little thing
14:19
outside like, you have it plumb straight into your
14:22
house. Granted, you probably had to pour some water down
14:24
the bowl, but that's fine. Like in a world where you
14:27
used to just deuce
14:30
into a small pan and have
14:33
somebody carry it outside for you. The piss
14:36
boy, if you will.
14:38
Like having a flush toilet, even if you have to put
14:41
the water in the bowl to get it to flush. It's a better
14:44
world. Um, it's just a better world
14:47
at the time. With all of this
14:50
added, we'll call it traffic
14:52
to the sewers and the sewer lines. There was a lot of
14:55
overflow, and there was a lot of outflow in these
14:58
situations and when you're dealing with septic or
15:01
rank water or
15:04
any sort of sewage situation, two
15:07
things you don't want overflow and
15:09
outflow. Never, ever. You don't want
15:11
it. Um, and if you do have it, you want to
15:14
plan for where and how those things
15:17
are going to overflow and outflow. More on that here in
15:20
a couple of episodes. Well, in one
15:23
city, the majority of the overflow and the
15:25
dumping went into one body of water.
15:29
London, 1855.
15:32
The river tames Thames. I don't know,
15:35
but the river became something of, uh,
15:38
quote, concern to local officials and
15:41
citizens. Visual
15:43
logs, not tree logs,
15:46
but, like, big, big, dougie
15:49
dookie brown logs, could be seen floating
15:52
in the river. It's like a freaky, weird game of
15:55
frogger, but instead of, like, the fun
15:57
little lily pads and logs, like, it's turds.
16:01
It'd be a different game for frogger if some of those
16:03
logs were just turds and you couldn't jump on them and they were,
16:06
like, tricked. Huh.
16:08
Huh. But they're
16:11
visually like the river Tams. You could go down and
16:14
you could see just skeet,
16:17
just floating.
16:19
Whew. The optics on
16:22
this were so bad. That scientist, Michael
16:24
Faraday, um, I believe known
16:27
for the Faraday cage, uh,
16:31
he did a lot with magnets and electricity. Yeah, yeah.
16:34
He has to be the Faraday cage guy. He decided to
16:37
test the water. He's like, hey, that stuff looks pretty whack.
16:40
We should test it and see if it's bad.
16:43
See if it's committed crimes of
16:46
pollution unseen to humankind. So
16:49
far, he tested the water.
16:51
The situation was so bad that one test
16:54
was just to dip a piece of paper in the river
16:57
and pull it out,
17:01
uh, and, uh, see how brown it came out. That's how
17:03
bad this river had gotten. It's not science,
17:06
but the stink and everything was so
17:09
awful that that's where they had to start. They're like,
17:12
is it even not completely
17:15
brown? Like, what level of
17:17
brown is the water? Do you know what I'm saying?
17:21
His report on his tests of the river
17:24
Thames was near the bridges. Quote,
17:27
near the bridges,
17:30
the feculents rolled up in
17:33
clouds so dense that they were
17:36
visible at the surface. Even in water of this
17:38
kind, the smell was very bad and
17:41
common to the whole of the water. It was the same as
17:44
that which now comes up from the gully holes
17:47
in the streets. The whole river was, for the
17:50
time, an actual sewer.
17:54
Woof. In response to this and the
17:57
increasing problem of the river Tams,
18:01
the river itself actually took
18:04
on a personality in their culture, and the
18:06
personality was that of being a
18:09
crappy river. The Thames was known
18:12
as monster soup.
18:15
Uh, monster soup. I made a monster soup
18:18
this week. Uh, but publications pretended to
18:21
draw artwork of the river
18:24
Thames. Um, and the water is filled with
18:27
skulls and monsters and other filthy looking
18:29
creatures. A character called
18:32
Dirty Father Tams. Sweet
18:35
lord, could you imagine them
18:38
in the modern days, year
18:41
2022, of our lord having
18:43
a character named Dirty
18:46
Father thames?
18:51
It, uh, was a simpler time, I'll tell
18:54
you what. But
18:57
this character, dirty father
18:59
Thames, looks like kind
19:02
of like a homeless wish Santa
19:05
Claus, because he's this
19:07
character in their society who lived
19:10
under the bridge by the river Thames and came out
19:13
of the water to, like, cause everything
19:16
to smell real bad. One
19:19
poem written about the Thames
19:22
titled Father Thames says,
19:24
filthy river, filthy river, foul.
19:27
From London to the nor, what art
19:30
thou but one vast gutter, one
19:33
tremendous common shore. Father
19:36
Thames took on a personal dirty. Don't, uh, forget the
19:39
dirty, dirty. Father Thames took on a personality,
19:42
and the local government did what they could to fight it. They're
19:45
like, we got to shut this down. This dude's going to overthrow
19:47
Santa Claus in popularity over here. Um, not
19:50
really, but they decided
19:53
to fight the actual stink in the river, and
19:56
they dumped lime and chloride and
20:00
caloric acid, I think, to help
20:03
ease the stench. So now they're just dumping
20:06
chemical in the river to try to make it smell less.
20:10
People were actually afraid
20:13
of this great stink because at the time,
20:16
they still had the miasma theory of disease,
20:19
which essentially says that a disease that a person
20:21
could contract, uh, by
20:24
inhaling bad air. So the stink
20:27
of the air in London at the time, they believed
20:30
it could actually make you sick,
20:32
um, and that it was, like,
20:35
bad. This
20:38
river that was ranked with the stink of Englishmen's
20:41
leavings. But finally,
20:45
everyone's least favorite stinky water
20:48
contracted a friend,
20:50
cholera, and it ravished London
20:53
between 1845 and 1855.
20:55
Now, while most at the time
20:58
still believed it to be an air quality
21:01
control issue, Jon Snow, the
21:04
scientist, not the White Walker. Jon Snow from
21:07
the game of Thrones.
21:10
Uh, he poised
21:13
and posited and was doing research
21:16
in whether the contaminated
21:19
water was a problem or if it was, in fact, the air.
21:22
Spoiler alert, the water was defoe
21:25
the problem. So on the scene
21:27
in London is air that is just
21:30
kind of perpetually smells like a human
21:33
diaper. Cholera. From contaminated
21:36
drinking water. A continuing system of
21:39
dumping the culprit of both of these
21:42
into the local water supply.
21:45
The river became famous again for
21:47
being foul. Charles Dickens also wrote to
21:50
a friend, the thing stank so bad
21:53
it hurt your head and made you want to
21:56
skeet your insides. Those are his exact
21:59
words, skeet your insides.
22:02
It is stated that the deposits of human crap
22:05
were up to 6ft deep in the river at
22:08
places 6ft. That's
22:11
taller than I am
22:13
standing. I'm sitting
22:16
now, but if I was
22:19
standing, the amount of human
22:21
foul in the river Thames at the time would be
22:24
taller than I am. In places
22:26
unreal,
22:29
people would smear lime on the curtains of
22:32
houses and rooms to try to block the stench out.
22:35
It's almost like a plague of its own had struck the area.
22:37
Stench. In the summer of
22:40
1858, the weather
22:43
provided the final straw for this camel's back.
22:46
June, London, 1858,
22:49
they had a particular heat wave and dry spell that
22:52
caused the water level of
22:55
the Thames to go down, leaving
22:58
exposed human sludge on the banks and in
23:01
part of the bed of the river.
23:04
Couple that with the record high temperatures
23:06
there at the time, mid 90s in the shade and over
23:09
115 in the sun. Preach.
23:12
I feel that. I felt that today. I was
23:15
going to take my children to a park today, and I looked at the
23:18
thing and it said, 99 degrees. And I went,
23:21
you know what's better than a park right now? Air
23:24
condition. Like,
23:27
I'm all for kids getting outside and playing, but when it's
23:29
100 degrees, no, it's
23:32
just not worth it. Somebody's going to gun,
23:35
come keel over about that, you know what I'm saying?
23:38
But this insanely high temperatures
23:41
in London at the time
23:45
resulted in what the people of London, and later
23:48
the world would call the great stink.
23:51
It was so bad, Queen Victoria and
23:54
Prince Albert, famous, uh, lovers,
23:56
canceled a trip to the river because they couldn't bear
23:59
the polluted air. Like, it was
24:02
so stinky, they canceled their vacation.
24:06
The great stink was so great,
24:09
they actually saw a pause in parliamentary
24:13
meetings. It shut down the government
24:16
again. The remedy was powdered lime, and the substance,
24:19
not the delicious fruit. Uh, at
24:22
one point, they were pouring 250
24:25
tons of powdered lime into the
24:28
river to shut down the smell.
24:31
Within weeks of the great stink. The government at
24:34
the time passed a bill saying that dumping
24:37
of sewage and waste had to happen
24:40
outside the boundaries of the city.
24:43
Voila. And to remedy the stink
24:46
in the city. Now,
24:48
over time, they went about an infrastructure
24:51
rehaul to do away with the piles of
24:54
turds that had become a part of their lives.
24:58
Now, uh, uh,
25:01
we're going to talk about this stink and the purpose
25:04
of stink here in a know, we got to get
25:06
philosophical with it. But one engineer,
25:09
Joseph Basilget,
25:12
Basalgit Basilget,
25:14
Bazalgit bazinga,
25:17
came up with the sewage solution,
25:19
rerouting the already present
25:22
lines, sewage lines to
25:25
dump outside of the city.
25:28
It took over 15 years to complete this
25:31
sewer system rehaul.
25:33
But the sewage and the
25:36
waste no longer ending up on the banks of the
25:39
city, solved the problem of the great
25:42
stink. And more
25:44
importantly, it showed a market decrease
25:47
in cholera cases in the area.
25:50
Basilget is a. Huh.
25:52
Basalgit.
25:54
Basilget is a hero of
25:57
London, known for how he
25:59
rerouted turds to save lives. His
26:02
sewer system, or at least parts of it, is still in
26:05
operation today and serves a population of
26:08
over 8 million people.
26:11
What a rad dude. And I want to note here, the
26:14
purpose of stink is the problem
26:16
existed prior to the stink.
26:20
But as is most cases when there
26:23
is stink, the stink
26:25
exists to alert you of a
26:28
danger or a bad thing lurking
26:32
just out of reach.
26:34
And so the next time you smell
26:38
big, smell somewhere, it's probably something
26:40
letting you know that there's something going on somewhere
26:43
with something, as was the case with
26:46
the River Thames in
26:48
1850s London.
26:52
This brings us to the end of another episode of
26:54
Privy. I really appreciate y'all joining us. I hope your
26:57
summers get cooler and remain
27:00
non stinky. Uh, as always, we'd love
27:03
for you to leave us a rating or review. If you're on
27:06
Spotify, it's really easy. You just click the little stars.
27:09
If you're on Apple Podcasts, it's also very easy. Um,
27:12
but you can also leave us a review there, and we'd love to read some
27:14
of those during the show. As time goes
27:17
on, we're going to read them as they come
27:20
in. Uh, the reason that you might hear that
27:23
and you go, oh boy, here we go, another podcast
27:26
asking me to leave a rating and review. But the
27:29
reason that those things happen is because
27:32
it helps people find the show. It actually
27:36
helps people locate the show and,
27:38
um, know that it's out there. So when they search for
27:41
it, it helps them find it. Leave us a rating and review. Five star options
27:44
are preferred. We'd love for you to do that. It's much appreciated.
27:47
And it's just a simple way that you can, as
27:50
always, send us email suggestions.
27:52
Privycast@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from
27:55
you. Just say hi. Just say, hey, I listened to the show. I
27:58
didn't like it when you talked about pooping. Uh,
28:01
and my name is Lil Dougie
28:03
for 19.
28:06
Follow, um, us on social media. We're at Privycast.
28:09
Tread lightly on the TikTok. Remember that.
28:12
But, uh, yeah, follow us on social media. See what
28:15
we got going out there. As always, we want to thank Kevin
28:18
McLeod for the use of barroom ballet as our
28:21
intro and outro music. You can find Kevin's
28:24
music@incompetent.com and
28:27
his music is licensed under Creative Commons license
28:30
Attribution 40. Thanks,
28:32
Kevin. This has been another episode
28:35
of Privy. Thank you so much for joining us. And
28:38
now, as always,
28:41
don't forget to flush.
28:44
See.