Technology and Culture

In the old days, a survey course in world history might be described as “Rome to Roosevelt.” This survey of sewer history could be called “tapered terracotta to the Thames Tideway Tunnel.” It begins with a short but gripping “Prelude” describing nineteenth-century cholera epidemics: a timely, grim reminder that it took six decades for humans to understand the relation between sewers and disease in order to bring cholera under control.

Then the book launches into an account of sewers in world history. The first two chapters describe sewer devices and systems used in antiquity (mostly in Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, with nods to China and India) and medieval Europe. But the core of the book is a tale of two cities: four chapters on Paris and London, focusing on the heroic sewage-related engineering projects overseen by Georges-Eugène Haussmann (Paris) and Joseph Bazalgette (London).

The subsequent two chapters return to world history. The process of global technological diffusion shows how municipalities elsewhere in Europe, Japan, the United States, and Australia constructed sewage engineering works based on the Paris and London models.

The next to last chapter discusses the chemical engineering involved in separating and treating sewage to render it harmless. The reader would benefit from reading this chapter first, as it clarifies what sewage is all about. The usual understanding is that sewage is human waste, both urine [End Page 965] and feces. However, many other kinds of waste (animal manure, dirt, sand, trash, garbage, gravel, storm water) commonly end up in sewer systems. Most of the famed sewers of Paris constructed under Haussmann’s direction did not remove feces at all, which was separated by filters in buildings and collected by teams of night soil men (p. 90). This is a vivid reminder of the interplay of technology and culture: the most important decision in designing a waste system is the definition of sewage.

The final chapter, on the future of waste treatment, kicks off with a provocative quote from Bill Gates: “We are on the cusp of a sanitation revolution” (p. 241). I wanted to hear more about this, but most of the chapter was devoted to the Thames Tideway Tunnel. This is hardly surprising, since a book note describes author Stephen Halliday as “a writer, lecturer and broadcaster with a particular interest in Victorian London and in the engineers who made nineteenth-century cities safe and habitable.”

The author gives credit to various individuals, especially a Cambridge University librarian, for help with his research. His text is rich with allusions to this research but tends to skip from topic to topic. It is lively reading that at times can become wearisome. There are few footnotes and no bibliography to speak of, nor is there any effort to analyze this research with reference to concerns of historians of technology.

But then Halliday is writing for a popular audience, not an academic one. So why review this book in Technology and Culture? Its strongest appeal lies in its lavish illustrations: maps, sketches, photographs, filling many entire pages and scattered among the rest. In concept, An Underground Guide to Sewers is a coffee table book, designed to be leafed through for striking images, with text as an auxiliary to browsing. Because the book is of average size, however, the illustrations are relatively small; many have light print on an off-white background, so it is hard to make out the image. The maps that are large and intense enough to be read can be informative, but too many are small and faint. Labeling is hard to follow, and images may be at some distance from the text alluding to them.

Despite these annoyances, the images and illustrations are fascinating. Think of this as a scrapbook: something of a jumble, but full of interest in its details, juxtapositions, and variety. If you leaf through it, you will be surprised at...