Joseph Bazalgette Research Paper

I strongly believe that Joseph Bazalgette should be given an award. He was an amazing citizen in the Industrial Revolution and helped change the way our sewage systems run today. Bazalgette was born 28th March 1819 in England. Bazalgette started off his career working on railways. He gained a lot of experience in land drainage and reclamation works so he could set up his own consulting practice in London, 1842. 1845 Bazalgette married his wife Maria Kough. By that time, he was working so hard on shaping his business that he had a nervous breakdown, so at least we know he was a hard worker. In the time he was recovering, London 's short-lived Metropolitan Commission of Sewers ordered that all cesspits should be closed. The house drains were connected to sewers and emptied into the Thames. As a result, a cholera epidemic killed 14,137 Londoners in a year (1848–49). Once Bazalgette was recovered he replaced his predecessor who had passed away and so he became the new Engineer. At that time the river Thames was an open sewer. People had not yet figured out that the cholera was a result of the infected water, however the water was an obvious health issue. Bazalgette’s idea was to build an underground sewage system to intercept sewage outflows. Up until then the

In the stinking hot summer of 1858, (and I literally mean stinking) the themes started to give off and odour which overwhelmed any one that went near it, and so came the ‘Great Stink of London’. Because the parliament was so near the themes they finally started to realise that work had to be done on sewers and roads. Bazalgette managed to invent a system that intercepted sewage outflows and stopped them from going into the river themes. He created new low level sewers which were placed behind embankments on the river front and taken to new sewage treatment