Steven Johnson, host of the series said, "What we wanted with this episode (Clean) was to tell the stories basically of how we came to have things like clean drinking water that doesn't kill us with cholera or typhoid."
Chicago grew from tiny settlement to huge metropolis almost immediately with no infrastructure. It was "just this kind of muddy, mucky, overcrowded, incredibly smelly and disease-ridden place." All this occurred from the 1850s to 1970s.
There was no natural drainage because of its flatness. Even when the need to build sewers became much apparent, there was no where to build it. Most city have a natural flow down to a river, lake or sea which it is located by. Even with it being next to Lake Michigan, the flatness prevented that.
"And so this guy, Ellis Chesbrough, has this crazy but ultimately brilliant idea that you could actually just lift the entire city up and create an artificial flow by raising downtown Chicago by about ten feet. So, using thousands of guys with jack screws, he lifts up these buildings. They fill the roads with landfill, build sewers down the middle of the road, attach buildings to that."
--DaCoot
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