ABSTRACT
Michael Faraday was a world-renowned physicist and chemist who made huge contributions to the understanding of electromagnetism, including producing the first dynamo and formulating the laws of electrolysis. Faraday was deeply religious and spent some time in the 1830s working as a deacon in the Sandemanian sect of the Church of Scotland but always maintained a high profile as a scientist and was much in demand. The country’s most eminent chemist describing the river as a “fermenting sewer” could scarcely be dismissed as journalistic hyperbole. However, with a government mindful of the significant costs of remedying this and Snow’s evidence that diseases like cholera were transmitted via water only just starting to be accepted, the campaign was initially resisted. The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer.
