The brand new flushing toilets that belonged to London’s upper class weren’t the primary cause of the great stink. The much bigger contributor was the other 99.9% of the population which had doubled in only 50 years preceding the stink. They had no flushing toilets, they just emptied their chamber pots into the street and it eventually found its way into the Thames after enough rain. The solution to the problem was to both upgrade the system and redirect more waste into the system instead of the surface gutters so it could be routed to an appropriate location. Its right there in the text you quoted!
The BBC podcast I recently listened to that was specifically on this topic doesn't agree with you, and I clearly don't read the same meaning as you do for that text.
Not that it really matters to my core point: what's the AI equivalent.
