Clean!

Hey Guys, it's Adventure Van here with a blog about Cleanliness, a minor thing that has effected the course of human history. We've had plenty of diseases prevented by science and tradition, and we've got to the point where 'Clean Rooms' exist! Overall, this is how we've changed how we view the world around us, and our crusade to make it clean. From sewers to phones, this is how 'germ freaks' and janitors helped change the world, and invent some really cool stuff along the way!

The first real attempt at extreme waste removal was Chicago in 1855, back when horses still were the main transportation devices. The main problem that plagued Chicago? It was built perfectly flat on a area where a glacier slow crawled. The problem about that? There was nothing to drain the city of waste. So, something had to be done. But what? The answer was proved to be obvious to one person, Ellis Chesbrough. The solution was: Raise the entire city using jack screws to put the sewer system in place. And he did it, raising the entire city a average of 10 feet and moving it onto platforms, which had to be towed using 4 teams of horses to move a wheeled building away from where they were building, which proved to hold up traffic. However, it worked and waste was no longer building up.

But Chicago wasn't the only city with problems when a cholera outbreak effected Soho, London., and scientists needed to find out why. Fortunately, John Snow stepped up to bat for this scientific discovery, and marked one of the most famous maps in history, the Soho Map. This map marked every outbreak of cholera in the entire county of Soho, and he discovered two things: That the disease clustered around water pumps, and that the only building to not have a signal outbreak was the brewery, where the workers drank beer. Because of this, Snow hypothesized that a process in the beer made it drinkable, seeing how it started off as the same water from the pumps that were killing others.

But why in 1856 was this finally discovered? Because before then, we had been drinking beer for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. We'd only recently begun drinking water again, unknowing of the problems of the water we'd polluted. Fortunately, Snow and his comrades made so that everyone knew that boiling water would make it drinkable, but not everyone wanted to do that. In fact, (but not in Chicago), some were willing to risk over 200,000 humans on a single experiment. John Leal wasn't a mad scientist, but if his hypothesis of chlorine being helpful in purifying water wasn't true, he'd be labeled as one of the few mass murderers that killed 200 million. He added a machine to the reservoirs he was supposed to be taking care of that fed the water thru a chloride washer before being sent out to the public. He himself drank the water, and it was found out after a while and he went to court three months after the task. However, he had proven his experiment that chloride didn't kill in small doses for humans, but it did for things like cholera. This helped 'clean' the water, and brought on new waves of swimmers, and people who drank water instead of anything else.

This chloride idea also made a wave of cleaning products, one of which was Clorox. Inventions such as vacuums and brooms, while already existing, were bought up by now clean conscious consumers. And the soon to be spotless areas became full off people who used to be killed off by diseases from dirt and dust, and brought on a population increase. However, the most important thing is that this allowed us to create computers. How? Clean Rooms could now exist, meaning that people could enter areas without any thing as small as dust. This allowed us to design motherboards, and other extremely delicate parts of machines and electronics that would have been contaminated and have problems, or not work at all. Because of some madman who proved that chloride could help us stay alive, you can read this on your phone. Funny, eh?

Adventure Van, dusting and cleaning aawwwwaayy!