History lesson for you today from Jos Biggs !!
I’ve just opened up and seen that I’ve not done anything new for this week! So you’ll have to make do with something from 2014.
Anyway, it’s very educational, so it will be good for you?!?!
There are many things in this life that we can do without, such as cold sores, and many things that we can’t do without, such as dustbins.
Which led me to wonder – who invented the dustbin?
My sense of national pride winced when I discovered it was a Frenchman - Eugène Poubelle.
It was in Caen in 1831 that Madame Poubelle first lamented the lack of some sort of receptacle for the disposal of rubbish as she struggled with the domestic refuse created by her new baby, Eugène.
Her trials must have made an impression on her offspring, because as he grew up Eugène became a very highly regarded figure in public life. So much so that in 1884, when he was prefect in charge of Paris, he decreed that all Parisian landlords must provide receptacles for their tenants’ rubbish.
He even went further than that, specifying that there must be three separate containers: one for biodegradables, one for paper and rags, and one for glass, pottery and oyster shells. So he not only invented the dustbin, he also invented recycling!
The average Parisian thought his idea was a load of rubbish. They shrugged their shoulders, spread their hands, pulled down the corners of their mouths, and muttered ‘Pourquio?’
However, by 1890, they had been won over, so much so that the word poubelle officially entered the French language.
So it was a Frenchman who invented the dustbin? Not so fast, Batman! Eugène put forward his idea in 1884; In the United Kingdom, the Public Health Act of 1875 authorised municipal authorities to ‘remove and dispose of waste’, and made it compulsory for household owners to take out their household waste once a week for collection in a 'moveable receptacle'.
Now according to my maths, that means that we had dustbins 9 years before the French! Eugène simply copied the English! Ah! That’s better!
So who did actually invent the dustbin? The bin as we know it today was invented by Jesse Dawes, born in Wolverhampton in 1878.
His dustbins reigned supreme until George Dempster invented the Dempster-Dumpster system in the 1930s for automatically loading the contents of ‘standardised mobile steel containers’ onto the dustcart.
This in turn led to the invention in the 1950s of the Dempster Dumpmaster waste collection vehicle, which in turn was shouldered aside when the Germans came up with the wheelie bin in the 1970s.
But why are they called dustbins? The last thing they contain is dust!
Not back then in the 1870s – then the most prominent forms of household waste at the time was coal fire ash, hence the name dustbin!
Did you hear the joke about the dustbin?
No? Never mind, it’s a load of rubbish!
