The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

With the help of the visionary engineer Joseph Bazalgette, the city embarked on one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century: a system of sewer lines that would carry both waste and surface water to the east, away from Central London. The construction of the new sewers was every bit as epic and enduring as the building of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower. Its grandeur lies belowground, out of sight, and so it is not invoked as regularly as other, more iconic, achievements of the age. But Bazalgette’s sewers were a turning point nonetheless: they demonstrated that a city could respond to a profound citywide environmental and health crisis with a massive public-works project that genuinely solved the problem it set out to address. If Snow and Whitehead’s Broad Street investigation showed that urban intelligence could come to understand a massive health crisis, Bazalgette’s sewers proved that you could actually do something about it.