OF ALL THOSE ACHIEVEMENTS, more than the underground trains and high-speed Internet cables, the most essential and the most easily overlooked is the small miracle that sewer systems in part make possible: enjoying a glass of clean drinking water from a tap. Just a hundred and fifty years ago, in cities around the world, drinking water was effectively playing Russian roulette. When we think of the defining killers of nineteenth-century urbanism, our minds naturally turn to Jack the Ripper haunting the streets of London. But the real killers of the Victorian city were the diseases bred by
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