In Steven Johnson's book, "How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World," he talks about many different innovations that made the modern world what it is today. It all started in December, 1856. A Chicago engineer named Ellis Chesbrough decided to travel across the Atlantic to visit European monuments, but instead, he ended up studying the underground sewer systems. Back in Chicago, in the middle of the nineteenth century, they desperately needed some sort of waste removal. "The city had gone from hamlet to metropolis in a matter of decades" (127). A lot had changed in only decades, it used to be a small community and then it turned into a suburb with many cities and towns. Chicago had unfortunately been built on flat land, and the main problem with that was the draining. Chicago's land also had suffered with the water having nowhere to go. When William Butler Ogden was in the soaking rain he said he was, "sinking knee deep in the mud"(128). Chicago had more than tripled in size in the 1850's and that meant that the rate of growth was going very fast. Because of a lot of the people were in the city, they generated a lot of excrement. A local editorial states, "the gutters are running with filth at which the very swine turn up their noses in supreme disgust" (129). Most can imagine how disgusting this predicament would be. Not only did Chicago have to deal with human waste, but with animal waste also.
             There are side effects from the filth in the street, for example, cholera and dysentery. Sixty people had died a day during the outbreak of cholera, specifically in the summer of 1854. The reason for that was the invisible bacteria that's carried in fecal matter polluting the water supply. The Chicago authorities made the decision to clean up the city to fight this disease. On February 14, 1855, the Chicago Board of Sewerage Commissioners wanted to address this sewage prob...