Flush and Forget
A Podcast Of Unnecessary Detail
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The Power of Scaling in the Construction of New Sewers
When Joseph bezel jet was designing the new sewers for London in the middle of the 1800s, they calculated like the rate of generation of poo. And then they worked out for that rate of having to get this much sewage out of the city, how big would the pipes have to be? They doubled the width of the pipes compared to what they thought they needed,. which meant they added four times the capacity to the sewer system. It means until this very day, I mean, they're building new sewers literally as we speak over 150 years later. We've been using that same old system despite the fact there's no way in the mid 19th century they could have predicted
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