[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by rogue

HOW CHICAGO LIFTED ITSELF OUT OF THE SWAMP AND BECAME A MODERN METROPOLIS

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While the canal established Chicago as a major city, it also created problems whose solutions required still more engineering. One such issue arrived on April 29, 1849, when the John Drew, from New Orleans, carried cholera into the city. Within hours of the boat’s arrival, its captain and several passengers died. The disease spread rapidly throughout the city, sending physicians rushing from patient to patient to soothe fevers, cramps, and diarrhea. One-tenth of the city’s 29,000 residents contracted the disease and 678 died.
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So, in 1855, officials mounted a dramatic attempt to rescue their city with another massive engineering project by hiring Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, an engineer renowned for his work on Boston’s water system, to raise Chicago out of the muck.
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In 1865, Chesbrough and state officials decided to manage Chicago’s water pollution by enacting an old proposal: making a deep cut through the Illinois and Michigan Canal and, this time, actually reversing the Chicago River and sending the city’s sewage down the canal, away from Lake Michigan.
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There was a program on public television not long ago that included reversing the Chicago River as a modern marvel. One of the people described Chesbrough like this:

Ellis Chesbrough was the kind of guy who would propose things that people, when they’d hear it, they’d go, ‘You want to do what?'