Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables that “the history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.”… The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else."
It has not changed much since Victor Hugo’s day. In fact, one could say that the North American development industry is built on poopoo. Basically, you either have ultra-low density development based on individual septic systems or you have development driven by the sewer system- the municipal responsibility of collecting poop and processing it and getting rid of it. But we have only had toilets in our houses for a hundred years or so, and have had cities in North America for longer than that. How did our extravagantly wasteful system develop, how does it tie us down, and how can we solve this problem?
This series will look at how we got the bathrooms we have, what’s wrong with them, and what we have to do to fix them.
The History of Human Waste
Human waste used to be a considered a valuable commodity. Urine was used for tanning leather and in the making of saltpetre, an important component of gunpowder. “Pole men” would collect it in vats, carried on a pole. It was a surprisingly competitive industry ; Diarist John Evelyn wrote:
“They digge in dove cotes when the doves be nesting, cast up malting floors when the malt be green, in bedchambers, in sickrooms, not even sparing women in childbed, yea, even in God’s house, the Church.”
The Value of Night Soil
Night soil was another story; there was more of it than they needed on English farms, which had a nearby supply from livestock and horses. You couldn’t give the stuff away. Contrary to some sources that say that it was used on farms, Alan McFarlane writes about the Non-use of night soil in England:
Solid waste was picked up by Gong farmers, who were well paid to dig it out of cesspits; in the 15th century they charged two shillings per ton. They often dumped in the Thames (from the appropriately named Dung Pier) or barged it away, where some of it was used for farming, and more was just piled up in mounds. (One mound known as Mount Pleasant covered 7.5 acres) In continental Europe, things were a bit better managed; Kris De Decker writes about the generally messy European poop management systems:
In other countries, the business was sophisticated and competitive. In Japan, the value of your nightsoil varied according to wealth; rich people had better diets and made better quality fertilizer. With their more intensive farming techniques and fewer farm animals, they needed a lot of poop. Susan Haney writes in Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan:
In fact people would even steal it.
The Benefits of Separating Waste From Water Supply
In China, they said “Treasure Nightsoil As If It Were Gold.” Kris De Decker writes:
The system worked; in Japan in particular, the water supply and waste management system were kept far apart, and the Japanese rarely had epidemics of typhoid or cholera. Not so in England, where the poop kept piling up in cesspits (and leaking out) and cholera epidemics were killing thousands. The system wasn’t working at all.
Next: How a pump handle changed everything.
