WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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This is the Thames, the river that flows through London.

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Now, in the 19th century the Thames stank,

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literally.

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The flush toilet had been invented, but the sewerage system hadn't,

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which meant that all that waste got flushed straight into the Thames.

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Now, to make that worse, the Thames is tidal here,

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so, it didn't always just get washed out to sea,

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sometimes it came back.

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Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that,

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because salty water is heavier,

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so, it kind of went over the...

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Anyway, that doesn't matter,

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what matters is that Joseph Bagel...

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Joseph Bazalgette!

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I keep saying "Bagelgette", Joseph Bazalgette--

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a wonderful Victorian engineer with an enormous ridiculous mustache --

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built the massive sewerage system,

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that now flushes most of London's waste away,

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Including right here, underneath the Embankment,

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but that was built for a 19th century London

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and stayed during the 20th.

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And now, this is such a big city, such an enormous metropolis,

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that there is not enough capacity,

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so here is something you might not know:

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the Thames to this day

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still sometimes has raw sewage pumped into it.

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After a strong rain storm, if it's been raining for days

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and there's just too much crap for London to deal with,

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the Thames gets it instead.

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And that is something you might not know,

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that the Thames still has a bit of 19th century stink in to it now and again.

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[Closed captions by MM.
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