p://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/people/josephbazalgette.aspx Making Telecoms Work: From Technical Innovation to Commercial Success, First Edition. Geoff Varrall. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Making Telecoms Work bore pipes previously used. This allowed the system to cope with subsequent increases in volume. By 1866 most of London was connected to the network. The system was by no means perfect and still dumped tons of raw sewage into the Thames, which still happens today when it rains killing fish if not people by the thousand. When the Pleasure Boat Princess Alice sunk close to a sewage outflow in 1878, 640 passengers died, some from drowning but the rest were poisoned to death. The supply side (water mains) also needed a major redesign and rebuild. This resulted in a sewerage infrastructure that is still more or less serviceable 150 years later, albeit in urgent need of a £4 billion upgrade. On the supply side more than half of the water mains are more than 100 years old. Around a third are 150 years old. About a third of our water in London is lost through leaking pipes before it gets to our home. This is inconvenient. London gets less annual rainfall than Istanbul or Rome and we are profligate in the way we use water. Many people in the world exist on 10 liters of water per day. We use this in one flush of the toilet. Nevertheless, we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr Bazalgette. Apart from ensuring a reliable supply of clean drinking water he also managed to get the foul water from the legacy sew- erage system into new low-level sewers built behind embankments on the river front. If you stand on the Albert or Victoria Embankments opened in 1870 or the Chelsea Embankment completed in 1874 you are standing above an intricate system of sewers and subways and railways that remain serviceable today. Mr Bazalgette by the way started life as a railway engineer. Bazalgette went on to implement similar systems across the UK and in Budapest and Port Louis in Mauritius