Bazalgette pronunciation
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Joseph Bazalgette
Joseph Bazalgette saved thousands of lives by sorting the sewers. So why’s the ‘Sewer King’ who risked his own health to help others, whose system’s still used by millions today, largely forgotten?
Joseph William Bazalgette is born at home in Enfield, London on 28 March 1819. His father is a retired Royal Navy captain. Despite a French family background, his father saw active combat and was wounded during the Napoleonic wars. Joseph’s mother, Theresa Philo Pilton, has eight other children. But Joseph is their only son. He is a small child and will remain of small stature.
KILLER CHOLERA
When Joseph is 12, England has its first recorded case of cholera. It is a dangerous age. British people still need to take quinine to fight off the ever present threat of malaria. When Queen Victoria comes to the throne, only a half of London’s infants live to their fifth birthday. Urban life expectancy is 35 when Joseph is born. It’s down to 29 just a decade later.
Victorian understanding of disease is little more developed than that of the Romans. Most think disea
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Joseph Bazalgette
English civil engineer (1819–1891)
Sir Joseph Bazalgette CB | |
|---|---|
| Born | Joseph William Bazalgette (1819-03-28)28 March 1819 Clay Hill, Middlesex, England |
| Died | 15 March 1891(1891-03-15) (aged 71) Wimbledon, Surrey, England |
| Occupation | Civil engineer |
| Spouse | Maria Keogh (m. 1845) |
| Children | 10 |
Sir Joseph William BazalgetteCB (; 28 March 1819 – 15 March 1891) was an English civil engineer. As Chief Engineer of London's Metropolitan Board of Works, his major achievement was the creation of a sewerage system for central London, in response to the Great Stink of 1858, which was instrumental in relieving the city of cholera epidemics, while beginning to clean the River Thames.[1] He later designed Hammersmith Bridge.
Early life
Bazalgette was born at Hill Lodge, Clay Hill, Enfield, the son of Joseph William Bazalgette (1783–1849), a retired Royal Navy captain, and Theresa Philo née Pilton (1796–1850). His grandfather, Louis Bazalgette, a tailor and financier, was a Huguen
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Joseph Bazalgette
Sir Joseph William Bazalgette, CB (; 28 March 1819 – 15 March 1891) was a 19th-century English civil engineer. He invented the system for cleaning drinking water so as to eliminate cholera.[1]
As chief engineer of London's Metropolitan Board of Works his work was in response to the Great Stink of 1858. He invented the system for cleaning sewage which is basically the same as used today. It stopped the city from having cholera epidemics, and also reduced typhus and typhoid.[2] Until then, cholera had been endemic in all large cities throughout the world, beginning in Roman times.
Bazalgette's plan was for new, closed sewers to pump the waste away from the city. Bazalgette took the polluted water though sewage treatment plants, after which the clean water was returned to the Thames.[3]
Victorian London became one of the few large cities in the world to be free of epidemics carried by the water supply. The British later built the water and sewage systems in many other countries, especially those in, or connecte
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