The Great Stink of London
Stephen Halliday · 1999 · 210 pages
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About this book
It is a trait of human memory to forget, to take things for granted: especially those things pertaining to the "truth of the pipes", the infrastructure of reality, of the comforts of day-to-day existence. Joseph Bazalgette turned this melancholy aspect of human nature into a virtue of engineering: for him, an engineer should make things so well that the user may forget about their workings, about even the fact that they are there. Good engineering is synonymous to routine: after all, what good is a pipeline which breaks every other month? Or a space rocket which works 'most of the time'? Succinctly, good engineering is genuine freedom from material constraint. Anthropologists propose many definitions of 'civilization', most of them confusing it with any hodge-podge collection of human-made artifacts. From such a perspective, no difference can be made between pyramids, megalomanic expressions of political hubris and puerile transcendentalism, and those artifacts which seamlessly integrate into the human existence, projecting it to a different qualitative level, rendering it more... humane: such as the humble-but-well-made sewer... Bazalgette's take on engineering deontology allows, once and for all, a definite criteria for distinguishing what is genuine civilization from what is just a pointless burst of thymos. Thus, Joseph Bazalgette's implicit understanding of civilization complements that of Thomas Paine, who saw it not as **any** social order, but **a** social order built
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