The Lethal Disease That Victorians Feared The Most | How Victorians Built Britain | Absolute History

in the long reign of a single queen victorian inventions changed the world queen victoria came to the throne in 1837 by the time she died in 1901 the modern world had been formed [Music] it was a time of outstanding engineering remarkable innovation all of it driven by ambitious pioneers it shapes the world we live in today efficient and fast new transport systems allowed people to move freely for the first time you get a real sense in here of victorian engineering which is wonderful giant feats of ingenuity saved lives the victorians had ambition they thought big and they got on with it amazing inventions revolutionized our domestic lives what i'm holding in my hand changed our homes forever automation transformed mass production factories could now produce goods at a rate never imagined before the change is like a nuclear weapon going off this is the story of how the victorians built this time i discover how the victorians dug deep to tackle the nation's health crisis to walk along a victorian sewer and see how cleverly it's been built it just amazes me every time i see it how the new flushing toilet was both a cure and a curse and how they brought fresh healthy water to all the engineering that went into it you know we got to just take our hats off to the victorians they knew exactly what they were doing [Music] when queen victoria first came to the throne britain was in the grip of a public health catastrophe polluted over populated cities were ravaged by epidemics like cholera and typhoid thousands of people were dying the main cause was dirty water and raw sewage and it would take the ingenuity of remarkable engineers to win the battle for the health of the nation [Music] the solution they came up with was a sophisticated network of pipes and tunnels beneath our streets the sewers the victorians spent a lot of time thinking about the dark difficult world of human waste and sewage they had to it had become a matter of life and death the push to clean up britain's cities and provide good sanitation and clean water for all is one of the greatest achievements of the victorian age they got their hands dirty building miles of tunnels like these under our towns and cities designed and built by visionary engineers these mammoth projects have an extraordinary impact on people's lives and transformed public health the first steps in the creation of the sewers began not in london but in liverpool the most prosperous port in the whole of the empire by the 19th century business was really booming the city had grown even richer particularly thanks to the trade in american cotton these docks were a vital hub for the import and the export of cargo and people but there was another side to this success story liverpool had become a dangerous place to live in fact liverpool was now the most dangerously unhealthy city in the whole of britain people were flooding into liverpool desperate to find work the population had rocketed from 78 000 at the beginning of the century to nearly 400 000 by the late 1840s the poorest were forced to live in squalid overcrowded slums [Music] whole families were crammed into single rooms a couple of filthy privies would be shared by up to 50 people diseases like cholera were rife i've come to liverpool's docks to delve into the dark side of the victorian city so what was life like drudge from the moment you got up i would imagine physical hard labor if you wanted water you had to take a bucket to a standpipe in the street but the water wouldn't be on for more than two or three hours a day what was the system for getting rid of human waste well people had cesspits in their backyards and they would be manually dug out maybe once or twice a year and the contents would be put in carts and taken out to the fields and used as manure but what was the impact on this cesspit system of the huge increase in population the system breaks down you have overflowing cesspits leaking down into liverpool's water supply if the boreholes where liverpool's water came from then were infected with cholera it would spread the disease very quickly throughout the whole urban area and it killed hundreds if not thousands of people in each epidemic [Music] cholera was the disease victorians feared the most it caused excruciating pain diarrhoea and vomiting it could kill in a matter of hours liverpool slums were the perfect breeding ground the city had the highest mortality rates in victorian britain life expectancy was just 15 years of age ignorance was a huge problem the causes of this terrible waterborne disease were not understood victorians believed it spread by smell in the air but social reformers had established the link between poverty poor sanitation and disease and they began campaigning for change what was the tipping point when liverpool looked at itself and said this can't go on any longer well sadly it wasn't the infant mortality which at that time in the worst years one in four babies were dying before their first birthday in the poorest parts of liverpool you would think that would be enough to convince the town council to do something but it wasn't the shipping owners were beginning to find that if they went to new york or boston with a liverpool ship that had an infectious patient aboard they would be put into quarantine 40 days and the impact on their business was huge so it was the pressure from the shipping companies saying to the town council clean up your act with it affecting their wallets as well as their health the city fathers were forced to respond in 1846 they passed the liverpool sanitary act which finally opened the door for change the scale of the project to save liverpool would be huge thousands of lives were at stake but great victorians would rise to the challenge building the world's first modern sewerage system right here in the city of liverpool coming up i get to explore this magnificent victorian sewer for myself how far can we get down that old victorian tunnel shall we go and have a look and learn about james newlands the mastermind behind the rescue of liverpool at the moment he's an unsung hero i think he deserves far greater recognition and thanks for what he did in liverpool [Music] in 1846 with its slums overflowing with dirt death and disease the city of liverpool was leading the way in victorian britain's battle against poor sanitation the city fathers had just passed the liverpool sanitary act it was a revolutionary step forward and i'm heading to the city archive to find out more about this radical turning point and this is it sally the act of parliament itself it doesn't look much does it but some of the clauses here are the most innovative clauses of any legislation from the 19th century what this act did was to let liverpool town council raise money from the property owners to buy out the private water companies to build a sewer system to pave the streets but most importantly to employ a borough engineer and that went to a scottish man named james newlands liverpool urgently needed to build a sewerage system but all the most experienced engineers were working on the booming railways and the city had to turn to the relatively unknown james newlands it was a lucky break for someone who would soon become the savior of liverpool he was the first person that had the vision to link up a water system with a sewer system and if you link the two you can then have water closets wc's inside people's homes newlands knew he had to create barriers between people and their waste linking toilets to sewers would flush effluent away from the homes and the removal of cesspits would mean they'd no longer seep into the ground and contaminate drinking water what's the first thing that he does well he looks at the maps that exist of liverpool he says these are not good enough because they've not got enough detail so the first thing he did was to say to the town council i need a new map and i need a map that has a contour every four feet of altitude it took a year for newlands and his team fully to survey the city this contoured map would allow newlands accurately to plot out what would be the world's first integrated sewerage system taking advantage of the steep natural contours of liverpool's hills he would lay out the sewer pipes so they led to large outflows down on the river mersey where the water could safely take the effluent away he even produced innovations on the on the absolute basics as a wonderful book of his surveys here but it includes these drawings of the sewer pipe what's so radical about this is that they are egg-shaped but why not just a bonk standard excuse the expression round sewer pipe because the water would move quickly through the sewer and at a speed where it could carry solids to get a real sense of newland's revolutionary sewer i need to head underground this modern-day treatment works may seem about as far as you can get from victorian england but in fact newland sewer is just metres below my feet this is one of the places where newland's original sewer would flow into the mersey hello neil i found you this is one of your horns it is under here is a bit of the old sewerage system yeah absolutely it's the original 150 year old sewer and all we've literally done is put a new piece on the end of the old existing because ultimately it's in perfect working condition so why would we want to contemplate touching it working in the sewers is a tightly controlled activity and i'm joining a maintenance crew preparing to go down today so this beeper thing which is beeping from time to time we'll tell whether there's poisonous or inflammable gas yes then it'll start to sound and vibrate and i shout gas gas gas yes i pull this open i put the breathing apparatus on yes and i get the hell out yes [Laughter] first time in a sewer [Music] been in the odd tight spot not one quite like this [Music] this effectively was the old outfall was it for the victorian sewage system into the river absolutely that would have completely come through this new structure transporting there are sewage straight into the river mersey how far can we get down that old victorian tunnel shall we go and have a look well helped you i suppose the majority of newlands sewers are just three feet high fortunately for me the tunnels that lead to the river are tall enough to stand in there's quite a lot of drips phil yes obviously these are the little bits of the groundwater coming in well consider it's 150 year old and a little league construction began on newlands liverpool sewer in 1849 he oversaw the work of thousands of navis drafted in to dig the trenches armed with just picks and shovels they were the powerful digging machines of the victorian age without them giant engineering projects like canals or railways would have never been built 25 navis could dig the equivalent of an olympic size swimming pool in just one day a bit bit tricky walking along in them it is a little bit of the bottom it's just slightly slightly slimy but actually quite a decent grip on the side with these bricks once the navis had dug the trenches skilled bricklayers moved in to build newlands preferred oval-shaped pipes it you could really see uh the the fact that it's an oval shape absolutely with a kind of bit of a dip in the middle of it walking along it you see the sense of it don't you the water is still flowing even though you know it's way down as you can see the standard and the quality of that workmanship ensures that it flows free it doesn't block it doesn't get build up with silt or rag i knew about it from the plans but to actually walk along a victorian sewer and see how cleverly it's been built there were clever guys those victories clever guys newland's choice of material was controversial earthenware pipes were much cheaper but newlands chose the more durable brick and stone like all great victorians he wanted to build a legacy that would stand the test of time the new sewage system can last as much as 50 years and yet here we are in a tunnel that was built more than 150 years ago yeah absolutely what does that make you think about progress it's definitely puts into perspective what these guys did the fundamental purpose of what this pipe does is key to our everyday life and without it we can't function and to have this quality of workmanship still serving that purpose it just amazes me every time i see it the pioneering sewer took 21 years to complete it would transform liverpool and the lives of its citizens by the 1870s life expectancy had doubled for the poorest in the city but newlands wasn't content to stop there what newlands did was to have a holistic vision of urban health he designed municipal boulevards public bars and wash houses he did street paving just about everything that could be done to improve urban health at that time he thought of and he planned for the eyes of the nation had been closely following newlin's pioneering work his success showed the way forward engineers would be inspired to follow in his footsteps on the road to a public health revolution how should history judge james newlands if he'd not done this here there wouldn't have been the model for other towns and cities to copy in britain and then worldwide and it was newlands who had that vision and created the first example of what you could do how you could make a system like this work at the moment he's an unsung hero i think he deserves far greater recognition and thanks for what he did in liverpool coming up another great victorian innovation that emerged flushed with success [Music] the development of the ceramic toilet saved lives and i get a sense of the huge task facing the capital the thames was literally an open sewer london was a very smelly place in which to live there's no pleasant way to put this well into the victorian era defecating was downright disgusting and occasionally deadly this privy was bog standard for the time you do the deed and it stays there for weeks maybe months before the night soil men come to take it away oh and you're probably sharing it with 11 other families [Music] if you were rich you might run to this so to speak looks good ceramic bowl rather complicated if ineffective mechanics but trickle not a flush and it wasn't going anywhere except down into the cellar by the time queen victoria came to the throne her ever resourceful subjects had arrived at a practical ceramic flushing toilet that resembles the ones we know today manufacturers like thomas crapper and george jennings started to make a name for themselves a breakthrough george jennings put public toilets into the great exhibition queen victoria's husband prince albert commissioned the building of a giant crystal palace in hyde park to house the exhibition when it opened in 1851 it showcased the marvels of the victorian age including jennings flushing toilet he charged a penny a time spent a penny of course in total 827 000 people paid to use jennings water closet clearly there was big money to be made in toilets [Music] by the mid-19th century manufacturers in the pottery heartlands of the midlands were cashing in on the fashion for flushing tough durable and easy to clean ceramics were the perfect material for making toilets factories in places like stoke on trent were churning them out for the masses and i've come to find out more ceramics is the kind of game changer in the sense that it's so hygienic compared to any other material you could use ceramics comes in quite early if you think about chamber pots but where it explodes if you like as an industry is when the totally ceramic toilet is developed to what extent was george jennings the father of the modern toilet he's an important engineer and he's linked forever with public toilets but he isn't kind of the person who made a big step i choose thomas twyford because he's the one who successfully develops manufactures makes it available to everyone twyford was a victorian industrialist with big ideas when he inherited the family business he quickly turned it to the mass production of toilets he never looked back he was able to expand building more factories here and abroad and his most popular product the unitas sold all over the world it was the kind of first million selling ceramic toilet and in russia unitassis built the word for toilet what about thomas crapper then he is the name that everybody knows but he didn't invent the toilet he had toilets made for him that he sold but his name is uh associated with the process so to speak sadly not crap is a very old word meaning rubbish i think people did find it amusing that it was crap and crap so he's really caught the public imagination to what extent has the development of the toilet that we use today improved our lives well in our day-to-day lives because of its hygienic qualities linked to a suitable sewage and drainage system the development of the ceramic toilet saved lives [Music] by the mid 19th century the increased popularity of the flushing toilet was literally putting bums on seats playing a vital role in the transformation of hygiene in the victorian home [Music] meanwhile in london the largest and most populous city in the world the filth and the squalor continued to build up ten years after james newlands began his sewers in liverpool the great capital still didn't have a proper system of its own and it was causing a stink it's hard to imagine but walking here by the river thames in 1850 you'd be gazing out over a giant toxic open sewer flowing through this magnificent city a polluted stinking river of excrement in 1855 the future prime minister benjamin disraeli famously said of the thames that noble river so long the pride and joy of englishmen has become a pool wreaking with intolerable horror the public's health is at stake how bad was it in the 1840s and 1850s london was a very smelly place in which to live and the real killer was the widespread adoption of the water closet the flushing toilet indeed when you flush the lavatory what you send round the s-bend is a small quantity of potential manure and 10 or 20 times as much water so the cesspools were filling up 10 or 20 times as quickly and they leaked into the underground rivers and into the water supply victorian london had 200 000 overflowing cesspits and the city's smaller rivers had long been used for dumping excrement this poisonous mess was finding its way down into the thames the thames was conveying the sewage of two and a half million people out towards the thames estuary and the north sea but of course it's a tidal river so it didn't just go away it kept coming back with each incoming tide all eyes were on liverpool's pioneering sewerage system but no one had the guts to give the go-ahead in london the cost of a much larger sewer in this sprawling metropolis would be astronomical but with death stalking the streets of london with every new cholera epidemic the press were up in arms this cartoon from 1858 powerfully illustrates their fears in the end nature would have its own way of forcing the issue [Music] london had had a run of some of the hottest summers on record and as temperatures soared in the high summer of 1858 the river thames became a stinking stagnant soup this time parliament just couldn't ignore it the foul smell coming off the river quickly became known as the great stink there was no escaping it [Music] the smell got so bad that they ended up soaking the curtains on the windows of parliament in lime chloride to try to disguise the stench but by wednesday the 30th of june members of parliament could stand the stink no longer they simply evacuated the place the times reported a sudden rush from the room took place foremost among them being the chancellor of the exchequered israeli who hastened in dismay from the pestilential odor the great stink had brought parliament to a standstill this couldn't go on in just 18 days the members of parliament rushed through a bill that meant they could now build a new london sewer i've sometimes thought that if the houses of parliament had been rebuilt on hampstead heath we might still be arguing about it now but once the politicians believed that they were in danger from the smell they then changed the legislation and by the late autumn of 1858 they were digging up victoria park hackney delayed the first sewers [Music] so finally with literally lapping the doorstep of government politicians were forced to act the solution was extraordinary in scale an epic engineering feat to rival all others and the result would transform london the man chosen to be chief engineer of the project was joseph baseljet as a young man he had cut his teeth working on the railways and won the respect of the engineering greats isembard kingdom brunel and george stevenson the scale and ambition of basiljet's plan was mind-boggling like newlands he would build a network of small street sewers connected to homes [Music] but the liverpool scheme fed untreated effluent into the mersey baseljet's ambitious plan was to build five main mega sewers snaking across the city that would feed out to treatment works in the east all this under the most populous city in the world [Music] within just a year of the great stink construction began all over london down on the river thames he built towering new stone embankments to house some of the main mega sewers and also a stretch of london's first underground railway running right alongside it along the way he re-sculpted london as we know it creating a riverside vista befitting a great world capital city these now iconic embankments replaced rank marshland and narrowed the river creating the fast-flowing body of water we recognize today to get a sense of the scale of basiljet's great project stephen is taking me down to the thames embankment we're standing in victoria embankment gardens which is part of sir joseph basiljet's victoria embankment and this is the york watergate from which the duke of buckingham in the 17th century used to step onto his boat which would have been in the river thames all in all basiljet's scheme reclaimed 52 acres of land from the river but it's a hundred meters it is yes the river came all the way back here if we had been here here in 1860 would have been up to our next in water up to here yeah the scale of it's astonishing i know it's very hard to imagine now bearing in mind that this was done mostly by people with picks and shovels [Music] this gargantuan engineering project was victorian ambition writ large by the time he'd finished basil jet had spent six and a half million pounds building 1300 miles of sewers and in all that he had used an astonishing 300 million bricks this extraordinary achievement all but eradicated poor sanitation across the city the last cholera outbreak was in 1866 what do you think is his lasting legacy the city was protected by basiljet sewers when he died his obituary stated that he had saved many many lives so he was he was a public hero i think he's one of the greatest of the victorian engineers who made it possible for us to live safely in cities baseljet scheme didn't just change the shape of london it eradicated diseases like cholera forever and it transformed the lives of london's inhabitants looking at the river thames today it's a far cry from those descriptions of it as a wreaking pool of sewage for that and for so much else we have to thank joseph baseljet up i encountered the power of victorian ingenuity you're right it isn't that noisy it's clockwork engineering on a massive scale and their thirst for sanitation at this 59 000 million liters of water by the second half of the 19th century the tide had started to turn in the battle against disease poor sanitation and dirty water fired by the success of newlands groundbreaking sewer in liverpool and basiljet's engineering marvel in london cities across britain were inspired to join in the great victorian sewer building bonanza but while some were making their names building sewers others were taking on a much bigger [Music] challenge [Music] this is vern we damn built to provide the city of liverpool with water its construction was a huge undertaking and it stands today as one of the great monuments of victorian engineering the dam is 1165 feet long it's built of stone blocks carved out of welsh slate each weighing up to 10 tons it's supported by 31 arches and it's decorated with towers you can just see the turrets over there it's beautiful [Music] newland's visionary plan to clean up liverpool had identified early on that the city would need not just sewers but clean water and lots of it not only for drinking water but also to flush the toilets and rinse out the new sewers but local wells rivers and reservoirs struggled to keep up with demand and it would be another 30 years before two pioneering engineers would come up with a solution and they found it in wales noel hughes has the job of overseeing the smooth running of this remarkable dam oh they're glorious on that i just how old are they almost 140 years of age it's so beautifully done isn't it the bridge has been done with such clarity and detail and delicacy notice signatures oh gosh yes here we go uh hoaxley and george deacon george deacon succeeded as borough engineer when james newlands retired together with thomas hawksley the leading water engineer of the victorian era they took on the challenge of supplying liverpool with water is this what they would have taken to the liverpool council that's right this would have made up the portfolio to say this is what we're going to be delivering this is how we can provide water to every citizen of liverpool that's right and all you've got to do is pay for it construction on the veronwe dam began in 1881. [Music] the scale of the project was far much more ambitious than anything that had come before what are the things that deacon brought to this dam that you couldn't at that time see anywhere else the height the sheer volume of water that was holding behind it this 59 000 million liters of water but also the first time ever to over spill most dams would have an overflow which goes around the side yeah deacon said no he wanted it to come over the top as it's doing now as it's doing now it's because it's been raining the dam is really full the overflow is right the length of the dam itself that's correct you've got to have a really good dam for this to work though if this isn't strong this is dangerous isn't it [Music] engineers knew only too well the perils of dam building 17 years previously on the night of the 11th of march 1864 the dyke dale dam near sheffield had a catastrophic failure [Music] the dam wall collapsed and a deadly deluge of nearly 700 million gallons swept away everything in its path 240 people lost their lives it was one of the worst engineering disasters of the victorian age engineer george deacon was determined his dam wouldn't suffer the same fate you've got to realize that this structure is as wide at the base as it is high so as you can imagine it is really solid this isn't going anywhere more than a thousand men were employed to build the dam half a million tons of stone were quarried nearby and brought to the site masons carved the huge stone blocks before they were lifted into place with the aid of steam-powered cranes it was a dangerous enterprise which claimed the lives of 44 men but by 1888 just seven years after construction began the dam was complete the engineering that went into it you know we got to just take our hats off to the victorians they knew exactly what they were doing [Music] to get the fresh water from wales all the way to liverpool the engineers laid out what was at the time the world's longest aqueduct miles of underground pipes designed to convey the water purely by the power of gravity the water's long journey starts right here in this tower perched on the edge of the reservoir it looks extraordinary doesn't it peter it looks like something out of dracula's tower it's superb yeah deacon as a principal engineer was really concerned about the aesthetics of what he built so although it was absolutely functional you know he wanted it to look pretty in its environment what is the function it will draw the water off from the lake okay this is one of the deepest parts of the lake and then also it filters it before it moves off towards liverpool should we go inside yeah this is great and this is liverpool's water is it exactly yeah we're now in the base of the tower on the end of this chain this whopping chain exactly yeah is where your filtration sits so the water from the lake is drawn in through the siphon tubes and the only place it can go is through one of those strainers and off through the pipeline and into the aqueduct itself those clever victorians designed the tower so they could draw off water from different depths in the lake to ensure the best quality enters the aqueduct and the machinery that operates this is an ingenious victorian water engine so here we are the heart of the tower the engine room itself a real victorian engine and it still works not only is it functional we actually have to use it for adjusting that drawer off level out in the lake all done by water all done by water yeah might you need to do it today well i think with all the heavy rainfall that we had the lake level has come up and i'm going to have to adjust that great does it make a really big racket actually compared to steam engine i think you'll find it relatively quiet it's going to make some noise but uh it's uh it'll be quite majestic i think majestic let's do it this engine is powered by water pressure from a pool in the hills above the tower did you hear the pressure now coming into the engine and this brings the water in through here yeah you can hear it yeah so that's the water pressure starting to move yeah from the pipeline up from quarry pool into the building look at that you're right it isn't that noisy it's just a hiss but look how smoothly it moves it's clockwork engineering on a massive scale it's crazy we're right on the top of the tower now looking down towards the dam how far is it to liverpool the pipelines leave the tower now and they travel 68 miles all the way to liverpool yeah all that way just by gravity that's an engineering feat in itself is it it is it's superb isn't it i mean what do you make of the people who built this absolutely innovators doing things that we don't even do today this engineering masterpiece stands as a glorious tribute to the victorian's greatest ever achievement their victory in transforming health across the nation the challenges they'd faced at the beginning of the century were colossal [Music] the victorians set about solving them with an ingenuity and drive that had never been seen before and has hardly been seen since public health became a cause to be championed cleanliness was available for all these stunning feats of engineering serve to remind us of the debt that we owe to the victorians who built britain [Music] next time i learn how the victorians harness the power of gas and electricity for the home this really was the invention that drove electricity into the home how brand new domestic appliances became the must-have items of the day you can't underestimate the effect of the gas cooker for the victorians this was absolutely amazing and how the victorians laid the foundations for the world we live in today

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 1,111,638

Keywords: history documentaries, quirky history, world history, ridiculous history

Id: ru50TmW3yck

Length: 42min 56sec (2576 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020