Let There be Light

Apparently, when Queen Victoria visited Cambridge, the Cam was just one big sewer. She asked the head of Trinity College what the little bits of paper floating in the water were, and he replied "Those are `Do Not Swim` notices".

Go back a little further, and Cambridge had a river through the south of town called the King's Ditch, which at one time was where plague bodies were dumped. And Cambridge was fairly plaguey.

At some point, they decided that Cambridge should have proper sewers, and they built a large steam-powered pumping station. That station is now the Cambridge Museum of Technology. On Sunday I went along for the museum's annual Tesla machine exhibition. I got there after the biggest machines were already being packed up, but I got to see a few.

I did some research, and the way they work is you take a couple of unlicensed nuclear accelerators and cross the streams. And then you feed that into a flux capacitor.

This is probably the Cambridge equivalent of an A&P Show.