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| The Big Bang Data exhibition at Somerset House in London. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images |
From The Guardian
The Future Cities Catapult aims to improve policymaking – be it for better flood defences, banking or medicine.
When London’s Soho was hit by a cholera outbreak in the summer of 1854 it took a maverick to pinpoint the cause and come up with a way to contain it.
Doctor John Snow rejected the established belief that cholera was airborne and he set out to disprove the miasma - or “bad air” - theory by plotting cases on a map. The physician’s findings proved his theory that the disease was in fact being spread through contaminated water. He traced the outbreak back to a water pump.
Snow’s story is one of the oldest examples of someone asking the right questions, analysing a dataset and throwing up new insights into previously stubborn challenges.
