History of septic systems

The invention of the cistern is a sign of civilization. The fact that every house has a cistern is a sign of culture.

“The provision of clean water, wastewater disposal and sewerage are the three most important pillars of human progress”.

At the beginning of the XXI century, you must agree that it is difficult to take such statements “in all seriousness.” Nevertheless, it is taken from a more than serious, fundamental, I would even say, document – “Human Development Report – 2006. What lies behind water scarcity: power, poverty and the global water crisis.” The Report was prepared by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) at the end of 2006. The fact that it contains speaks for itself … Approximately 2.6 billion people on Earth are deprived of access to improved sewerage systems – this, by the way, is 2.5 times more than the shortage of access to clean water. About 1.8 million child deaths each year are attributable to diarrhea – 4,900 deaths daily, which is equal to the under-5 population in New York and London combined. In general, the combination of dirty water and the lack of sewage systems is the second most fatal factor in infant mortality in the world. In 2004, diarrhea killed six times more people than the average number of deaths annually in armed conflicts in the 1990s …

It seems that even the authors of the UNDP report themselves are discouraged: “It seems unlikely that toilets can be a catalyst for the progress of human development …”. And this, indeed, is strange, because the creation of water closets, sewer systems, and related water supply systems is about as long as humanity can remember. Literally the same amount. The history of mankind is born in the history of the cloaca. The cloaca is the conscience of the city, Victor Hugo remarked in Les Miserables. And it’s hard to argue with that.

It is generally accepted that the builders of medieval cities did not really burden themselves with the care of the sewage system. And, by and large, this is true.

Still not in such a vague historical retrospective, in 1764, a certain La Morandière painted the aromas of the residence of the French kings – the Palace of Versailles as follows: “The parks, gardens and the castle itself are disgusting with their disgusting stench. Passages, yards, buildings, and corridors are filled with urine and feces; near the wing where the ministers live, the sausage maker slaughters and roasts pigs every morning; and the whole rue Saint-Cloud is flooded with rotten water and littered with dead cats“.

Fleet River turned into a gutter

All subsequent years, the Parisian stench only grew. However, not only Parisian. There is a sketch from the life of an English traveler who at the end of the 18th century. visited the main town of Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand: “The streets, in their filth and stench, resembled trenches cut in a heap of dung.”)

In his fundamental work “Painting of Paris” (1781-1788) Sebastian Mercier gives this, in the full sense of the word macabre, description of latrines in the French capital: “Let those who value their own health never defecate in these holes, called latrines, and may they never expose their anus to these currents of plague air; mouths are better since stomach acid would rather cope with them. Many diseases originate in these dangerous foci, from where putrefactive miasms evaporate while penetrating into the body. Children are afraid of these infected holes; it seems to them that the road to hell begins here; I thought the same when I was a child.

Not surprisingly, in 1889, a special law was passed to clean up the city. Another thing is surprising: in 1758 Louis XV received as a gift … a sturgeon caught in the Seine within the city! And in 1782 another French monarch, Louis XVI, received the same presentation. Moreover, the famous French chef of the early 19th century, Antonin Karem, claimed that he saw an almost three-meter sturgeon within the city! But it is known that sturgeon is a fish extremely sensitive to the purity of water. Maybe they were the wrong sturgeons?…

The neighbors of the French across the English Channel, the British, had no problems with public sewage either. Here is an example of written complaints at the beginning of the 13th century by the inhabitants of one of London’s quarters, Guildhall. The governor of this municipality, it turns out, allowed the local river Fleet to be flooded with excrement to such an extent that the flow in some places stopped. (The long-suffering river was confined in a pipe in 1733). Someone blamed the fourteen families living on Foster Lane: they used to “throw sewage out of the windows and throw out urine, to the annoyance of everyone in this ward.” The situation, apparently, was close to the battle …

Leonardo da Vinci himself was invited to the court of the French king Francis I in 1516. Paris was then drowned in excrement. This prompted Leonardo to invent a toilet bowl, from which feces had to be flushed with tap water down the drain. True, like most of Leonardo’s other inventions, this, too, was never implemented. For many reasons: for example, he needed water supply and sewerage, and with them there were, to put it mildly, problems.

Oddly enough (however, if you think about it, there is nothing strange about it), epidemics, especially cholera and plague, which raged throughout Europe, and not only in Europe, in the Middle Ages, became a kind of stimulus for the development of urban sewers. Already in the 15th century, doctors began to offer local authorities such measures as cleaning cities, streets, cesspools; drainage of swamps. Unfortunately, most of these activities were extremely costly. The authorities got off with half measures. Daniel Dafoe, in his Diary of the Plague City, quotes “The Orders Made and Issued by the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen of the City of London in Relation to the Spread of the Plague Contagion, 1665.” Among others, we find: “Dumps and reservoirs with sewage should be as far as possible from the City and from crowded roads; nocturnal passers-by, like everyone else, are strictly prohibited from relieving their bowels in the gardens and surroundings of the City.

You can, of course, be ironic for a long time about the naivety and supposedly primitiveness of the disinfection measures taken. However, even at the end of the 19th century, it was generally accepted that the purpose of disinfection is neither more nor less – preventing the decomposition of excrement, corpses of people and animals that died from an acutely infectious disease, emitting gaseous products (miasms) that spoil the air.

However, even more, surprising is the fact that the processes of modernization of urban sewerage networks took place almost simultaneously throughout Europe.

In 1847, a special Royal Commission for the Rehabilitation of Londoners carried out some modernization of the metropolitan sewerage system. In 1848, for example, a ban was introduced on cesspools in the city limits. At that time, in the English capital, cesspools were under 200 thousand houses. No wonder the modern English writer Peter Ackroyd calls the London fragrances of that time “the smell of progress.”

But the effect of this prohibition turned out to be the opposite: the main waterway of the city – the River Thames – only became even dirtier due to the increased volume of wastewater into it. It is characteristic that the appearance in 1810 of a cistern in toilets (in fact, a water closet) only exacerbated the situation with wastewater disposal. All the sewage of the largest city in the world at that time (about 3 million inhabitants), London, all human waste was dumped directly into the Thames. The curtains on the windows of the parliament had to be impregnated with bleach, but this did not help much. According to Chancellor Benjamin Disraeli, the river has turned into “a hellish fetid pool, from which it carries inexpressible, mortal horror.”

The construction in the 1860s under the Victoria Embankment of an enormous and complex network of pipes, leading waste and feces outside London, revitalized London.

There is nothing to be done – an inexorable technological law is at work: the appearance of water closets inevitably requires the creation of sewerage systems! This became an engineering axiom already in the 19th century. “Pipes for carrying clean water and for draining sewage are almost always laid simultaneously and in parallel – the sewage system cannot be built without running water,” the Russian engineer Linzbach emphasized in 1899.

Finally, in London, after the “great stench” on June 30, 1858, when the miasma emanating from the catastrophically polluted Thames reached such intensity that Parliament had to suspend a meeting in Westminster, work began on a new sewage system. Track engineer Joseph William Bazalgett was in charge of this project. A legendary personality in the history of the city.

In 1860, according to his project, the construction of sewerage collectors from Portland cement began. Wastewater flowed along with them to the east, bypassing the Thames. In total, by order of the Metropolitan Board of Works, about two thousand kilometers of new sewer pipes were built. It was one of the largest civil engineering projects in the 19th century. By 1866, most of London was connected to the sewer network, and the work was completed in 1875. By that time (1874) Joseph Bazalgett had acquired the title of Sir.

The project, implemented by Basaljett, was considered one of the new wonders of the world. Contemporaries highly appreciated the efforts of the city authorities of London in the field of public sanitation. And how was it, these efforts, do not appreciate! Judge for yourself. In 1874, the death rate per thousand inhabitants in St. Petersburg was 34.15 people, and in London (1876) – 21.3.

As a result of these seemingly purely engineering measures, the effect was simply staggering: according to the UNDP report cited above, the proliferation of sewer systems in Great Britain contributed to the fact that in the four decades after 1880 life expectancy increased by 15 years.

But, by the way, the construction of sewage systems in European cities was accompanied by very serious scientific and technical discussions about the choice of the very principle of the functioning of such systems. This dispute at times acquired an almost geopolitical character.

The French, for example, who were seriously engaged in the construction of a sewage system in Paris in 1880, after the so-called “great stench” happened, chose the principle of complete isolation of wastewater for implementation.

The project, developed by a special commission, envisaged the creation of a completely sealed cesspool made of steel and copper: “The feces come from toilets into completely impermeable pipes with metal walls, without touching either the air or the ground. Connected together, these pipes will carry all the wastewater away from the city, to a special place where all the factories necessary for their processing will be located ”; “Their movement is provided by suction and discharge pumps, using a vacuum or in any other way.” However, the great microbiologist Louis Pasteur – so suggested abandoning sewage treatment plants altogether, and discharging sewage through pipes directly into the sea.

The idea is simple: to protect the population from any contact with waste. And, although, in essence, this concept was utopian from the beginning, it was embodied in a number of structures: in the Liermur system in Belgium, in the pneumatic outlet network established by Berlie in Lyon in 1880.

The strategy of British engineers in dealing with wastewater was fundamentally different from that proposed by their continental counterparts. No cesspools, pipes, drains, ammonium sulfate plants; all storage facilities should be destroyed; instead, “the fastest and most uninterrupted disposal of excreta” should be organized in the aeration fields, where the earth itself will perform the cleaning function. In addition to London, similar sewerage systems are being built in Brussels, Frankfurt am Main, Danzig. In Berlin, a commission headed by the eminent German pathologist Rudolf Virchow also gives preference to it. The United States also took the British experience as a model.

“It is clear that the rapid removal of sewage using running water is the most effective deodorizing technology for both public and private spaces,” writes French researcher Alain Corbin (1982). “The long-term resistance that French officials put up to her is the best explanation of why the stench was still in the country’s cities.”

This can be seen as a manifestation of the national French mentality because it is not for nothing that Paris is considered a trendsetter in perfumery. Hence – a logical decision for the Frenchman: to make fecal waters colorless and, ideally, odorless. It is known, for example, that in the period 1762-1853. in Paris, 57 methods were used to disinfect cesspools; most of them boiled down to recipes for flavoring excrement with bergamot, lemon and orange juice, lavender alcohol, orange blossom lotion, cloves, and various oils and essences. The Parisian goldsmiths only laughed: they say, “candy with orange blossom” is made for them.

For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that a serious struggle is being waged for the priority of the invention of a water seal for water closets. English historians claim that the first was their compatriot Alexander Cummings. Allegedly, it was he who in 1755 guessed to bend the pipe extending from the toilet in the shape of the letter V. Another applicant, also British, – Stephen Green: an inspiration about the “duck” visited him in 1849.

However, it is indisputable that the very term “toilet” is a product of an English genius. At first, this plumbing fixture was called the English closet. “The receiver of such a closet, together with a siphon, is made from the same mass of faience, which is why it is called a toilet bowl. The impurities first fall on an intermediate, constantly wet surface, to which the impurities do not stick, – then they are discharged downward by a stream of water.

The receiver has a polished wooden seat attached to brackets; its sides are left quite open. The seat can be raised and then the closet serves as a urinal, ”Linzbach noted.

“Sewerage is life!” There is no exaggeration in this slogan. Just over a hundred years ago, the child mortality rate in Washington was twice as high as in sub-Saharan Africa today. Waterborne infections – dysentery and typhoid fever – were responsible for one in ten deaths in US cities. Sewerage infrastructure has severed the link between infectious diseases and dirty water. According to UNDP estimates, it is water purification that explains the almost 50 percent reduction in mortality in the first third of the 20th century in the United States.

Lack of access to sewers means, for example, that in the slums of Kibera (a suburb of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi), people are forced to defecate in plastic bags, which they then throw into the sewers on the street … Progress, civilization – all this happens somewhere else, parallel world. Except, of course, that plastic bags are used. In some places, it has not yet come to this. Today, more than 800 million people are still without water and 1.8 billion without sanitation.

There are, however, radical technological proposals designed to cut this Gordian knot. Several years ago the Swiss company Geberit organized a design competition for the best design of the water closet of the future. The first prize went to the “Nebula” model. There is absolutely no water in this toilet. A laser device built into the lower handle detects the nature of the discharge, which is sprayed out in a few seconds. The ash is sucked off with the same handle and the laser sterilizes the seat.

But here, too, I think, we will run into a collision that is already familiar to us: technological improvement will inevitably create new problems, which will have to be solved with the help of new technological “gadgets”.