Should also point out as anyone who has visited Pompeii can attest - the sidewalks are close to a foot above the streets, and at the intersections there are “stepping stones” to cross the street and stay above the street itself (with gaps for cart wheels). It seems even the Romans had an “accumulation” problem with horse manure.
That is correct, most terrestrial nesting/territorial animals have a particular defecation area. Large roaming herbivores don’t have any need to be exclusive on where to poop, although still many species use feces to mark their territory. Similarly birds, flying high above, don’t have any instinct to poop in a particular location. I imagine humans, coming from arboreal ancestors, didn’t have any problem defecating everywhere unfortunately.
Horse urine was/is(?) used in the manufacture of circuit boards.
The point I read about once was that animals with nests or lairs had conscious control of their output to some degree, to avoid fouling their own nests. So humans (and I presume apes) would usually have a place where they would and would not go. I recall reading - no practical experience - that dogs in a yard will pick a corner to do their business away from where they usually hang out. Of course, the corridor a hundred feet from their Versailles bedroom was probably as fair game as anywhere else for some humans.
And of course, humans were initially nomadic tribes - so dealing with human waste in immobile groups of thousands is a relatively new experience; and the whole game theory of personal benefit vs. group benefit comes into play here…
I dunno why Versailles is always brought up. As I pointed out, the White House did not get plumbing until the middle of the 19th century ( and not decent plumbing until the end of that century ).
I think it was John Quincey Adams who pointed out the window when a guest wanted to pee.
There is still a government sewage farm for Melbourne. A side effect is/was that Melbourne has always been strict about what industry could pour down the sewers. Most of it wound up at the Werribee sewerage farm, and Werribee didn’t want it. In cpntrast, Sydney just piped it’s sewerage out to sea, and thw sewerage authority was happy to contract for industrial waste disposal. This was an issue in the later part of the 20th century, when it complicated efforts to pre-treat Sydney waste before it was pumped out to sea.
Melbourne was sewered in the ?? 1870’s ?? a project completed in the ?? 1970’s ?? Prior to that, disposal of nightsoil was contentious. It was dumped legally where people didn’t want it, or dumped illegally where people didn’t want it, or used by market gardens against government and social demands. In Melbourne the pre-1870’s market gardens quietly using nightsoil were mostly not operated by Chinese people.
PS: in cold climates, defecation into Chamber Pots was, of course, much more common than “open” defecation.
In fact most small animals will pick a corner away from eating and sleeping places. In my experience, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, rats, leopard geckos, bearded dragons, crested geckos (a borderline example), all have specific corners for their business and rarely stray from them. For the species that don’t have so specific corners, they still don’t defecate in the place they sleep. This is done both to keep the identifying scent away to avoid predators and minimize the risk of reinfection by parasites of simple lifecycles. Also to avoid flystrike. Humans very, very late figured out how to properly deal with the problem. And no, 5.000-8.000 years of immobile large group living isn’t a very recent time. They just accepted it. Is the avoidance of feces therefore a cultural thing and not a part of our biology?
“Paying the fines” is not always an option, at least in the U.S. Regulatory agencies at both the federal and state level will eventually force utilities to correct combined sewer overflows (CSOs).
I work for a public water & sewer utility, and we have been working for years to eliminate our CSOs. Note that CSOs are only an issue during storm events. Normal so-called “dry weather” flow and smaller stormwater flows are handled just fine. The problem is with larger storms that overwhelm the capacity of the collection system and/or treatment plant, resulting in overflows to streams and rivers.
One method is to actually separate the sewers (i.e. build a new sanitary sewer or storm drain line on each street). However, not only does this require building a whole new collection system for the entire city, but also requires sewer separation on each private property, and most of the older homes only have one sewer lateral leading to the street. Usually the rain leaders and footing drains tie in to this same sewer lateral, requiring extensive private property work. This is a real headache.
Another option is to build a large collection facility that can collect everything*, even flows from large storm events. Some older cities that have combined sewers are addressing their CSOs by building miles-long large-diameter tunnels that both transport and store wet-weather flows for later treatment. These tunnels are often hundreds of feet below grade, and constructed in the bedrock using tunnel-boring machines.
Some more info here:
http://www.narrabay.com/ProgramsAndProjects/Combined%20Sewer%20Overflow%20Project.aspx
*Technically speaking, it is impossible to design a system that can really accommodate everything. More precisely, they are designed to accommodate up to specifically-defined large storm event.
Minor note: Imperial Rome’s plumbing was far above what was later the norm for Europe. It was part of what fell into disrepair, due to ignorance and the lack of central authority attending to it, as the Empire dissolved.
So a LONG TIME before the 1800’s, human waste handling was actually much BETTER in Europe, than it was later.
Simple “combined sewer” systems were, of course, just storm water systems into which people poured sewerage. When a sewerage treatement plant is put at the bottom of a system like that, it’s not just the sewers that get flushed out by heavy rain: it’s the sewerage settling ponds as well.
A partial solution to that problem was a lovely bit of technology called a “constant flow valve”. I remember that canadian nickel was proud of them, because they were big and used a lot of nickel. At low flow, the sewerage just flowed gently through. At high pressure, only the same amount flowed through: flow was independent of head/pressure. Excess runs out a different channel. This protects the down-stream sludge ponds from overflowing due to a massive storm surge.
The principle is quite simple once you think of it: fluid enters along the side, and spins around the bowl. The higher the pressure, the faster it spins. But exit is only at the centre, where the pressure is idepdent of the entry pressure.
St. Joseph, MO?
little blog post:
Life in New York City before indoor toilets
LOL, I wonder how many of these things exist?
In the days of old when knights were bold, and rubbers weren’t invented
a sock around the cock, and babies were prevented.
(with my apologies for my rhyme not referring to the OP)
No running water does not equal no toilets. The White House was equipped with outhouses pre-plumbing. The problem at Versailles was an order of magnitude larger, with few facilities serving a massive area. The Palace of Versailles (not the grounds) covers over ten times the area of the White House (about 67 000 square meters compared to 5100 square meters). Also, Versailles regularly hosted thousands of courtiers at a time, with many living within the palace itself. (Link about the Versailles court here.) The wealthiest and most powerful people in the country lived in filth.
Apparently not. I have no interest in Versailles, but here’s a reddit dealing with this:
Versailles was built on and off from around 1664-1710, in a time when efficient sewage systems weren’t really a common thing, and Versailles was built in a small, rural village, so it wasn’t like there was an already established sewer system that the builders could have easily tapped into. Therefore, it can’t be called a critical flaw. What they did have in abundance were buckets/chamber pots/ fancy chairs with a whole in the seat and a bucket below it, as well as copious amounts of servants who would regularly clean up. Most people weren’t doing their business right on the floor, but it could have happened.
These rumors included the myth that these fancy, wealthy nobles were just shitting all over the floor of their fancy palaces. In actuality, through all the regular renovations of Versailles, it was modernized with the required facilities.
*The huge, HUGE fountains at Versailles were in fact a marvel of engineering for the time. They ran water from a not too close river and used the hydraulic pressure to run the fountains. Parts would be turned off and on as royalty walked around so the sections of the fountain they were seeing were in full effect.
*
This is the reasoning for the palace being in a very specific place. The sewage problem was a symptom of the location; there were no large reservoirs of water nearby to sustain the populace or drain sewage from the palace. This lack of water was a problem for Louis XIV and subsequent French kings using the palace; it’s been estimated that a third of the money spent on Versailles by Louis XIV was used in an attempt to solve the water issue.
And from there a link now 404 that was easy to track down, Prof. Mathieu da Vinha:
In fact, Versailles suffered from the preconceptions of the French hygienists of the ‘romantic’ nineteenth century, for whom anything pertaining to the Ancien Régime was to be vigorously shunned and denounced. The palace was, in reality, always at the forefront of modernity. Louis XIV invariably demanded the very best for his residence. Paralleling the development of modern-day Paris and above all the ‘birth of intimacy’ (in the words of Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, in her book La naissance de l’intime. 3 000 foyers parisiens, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, 1988), the royal residence – as a thoroughly modern building – was quickly fitted with every essential convenience. But like so many ‘banal’ artifacts of everyday life, very little remains today to testify to what was a very real concern for sanitation and hygiene.
In 1900 the horses in NYC alone produced 2.5 million pounds of manure per day. There were numerous empty lots in the city where manure was piled up as much as 4 stories high. Farmers were basically begged to come take as much as they could away for use as fertilizer- sometimes they were even paid to do so.
They were at critical mass and had the automobile not been invented the city would have had to take drastic measures.
For centuries most cities had poor people who stood on street corners with shovels or push rakes to move the waste out of the way for people crossing the street in exchange for tips. Similar to squeegee guys now, but probably more lucrative (I can wash my windshield with the push of a button, but getting horse manure out of the way while I’m in dress shoes is more problematic.)
I wonder if bodies or other incriminating evidence was ever hidden in the enormous piles of horse manure. It would be a good place for it- quickly covered and nobody’s likely to be looking through it.
The giant wings that now house art galleries in Versailles were originally filled with wood structures that allowed 2 stories of apartments for a massive number of courtiers; but without a lot of the amenities that should have accompanied them. The lack of hygiene may have been from entitled rich people wh were used to the servants cleaning up, a disregard for others’ property, or maybe also something as simple as sometimes you can’t wait.
I note that downtown Amsterdam has resorted to pop-up urinals to take care of the flood of night-time revellers in the central city who otherwise would pee in doorways and street corners. This sort of problem is everywhere.
Maybe, but the state of policing and detecting in that era was such that leaving a body where it lay probably wasn’t much of a risk.