S-Bend

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

• Episode: S-Bend
• Website: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
• Feed URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b1g3c/episodes/downloads.rss
• Duration: 00:10:15
• Published: 2017-09-02 05:00

If you live in a city with modern sanitation, it’s hard to imagine daily life being permeated with the suffocating stench of human excrement. For that, we have a number of people to thank – not least a London watchmaker called Alexander Cumming. Cumming’s world-changing invention owed nothing to precision engineering. In 1775, he patented the S-bend. It was a bit of pipe with a curve in it and it became the missing ingredient to create the flushing toilet – and, with it, public sanitation as we know it. Roll-out was slow, but it was a vision of how public sanitation could be – clean, and smell-free – if only government would fund it. More than two centuries later, two and a half billion people still remain without improved sanitation, and improved sanitation itself is a low bar. We still haven’t reliably managed to solve the problem of collective action – of getting those who exercise power or have responsibility to organise themselves.

Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Vadon and Richard Knight

(Image: S-bend, Credit: ericlefrancais/Shutterstock)