Sometimes, you smell something so bad it makes you wonder what caused it to have that scent in the first place. Such smells are intolerable, but what if you had an entire summer of it?

Unfortunately, that is what the citizens of London were met with during the summer of 1858.

In June, London was hit with a heat wave, which was so strong that the nearby River Thames smelled absolutely horrible. A reason why it smelled so bad was that the River Thames served as a two-in-one:

• A beautiful sight
• London’s main sewer

So, in case you are a bit oblivious or are very mature, that meant raw human waste sat and baked in the sun, and eventually it became so powerful that members of Parliament wanted to hold sessions in less smelly spots, and they had to disinfect curtains to rid them of the smell, and people believed it caused diseases (which is true, if “diseases” means “heavy unpleasantness”)!

Eventually, the city of London called upon an engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, to do his magic and rid the smell. He did this by designing a modern sewage system, which gave everyone a breath of fresh air (no pun intended) and began a revelation in the sanitation field: Heat Wave + Outdoor sewage = Ew.

So let this be a message to any people who want indoor sewage in their (presumably outdated) cities: put them inside! Or otherwise be faced with a smell a thousand million billion dodecadillion times worse than rotten eggs!