99% Invisible - 394- Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

On this shelter-in-place edition of 99pi, Roman walks around his house and tells stories about the history and design of various objects Buy Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are and all Beauty Pill records on Bandcamp or wherever you can find it. Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Hello, beautiful, homebound nerds. If I sound a little different, it's because I'm recording this at home. You might even hear some cars passing by. I'm not sick. Hopefully, neither are you, but many of us are staying home so that we don't inadvertently become vectors to a virus whose impact we don't fully understand. This is the right thing to do. We are all part of one big ecosystem, and if any part of us get sick, we all suffer. We are in this together. So my job in this world is to tell stories about all the thought that goes into the things

most people don't think about. And since many of us are stuck at home, maybe alone, maybe lonely, I thought, we'd spend some time exploring this place we call home together. Just you and me. Sound good? If you answer back out loud, I won't think you're weird. I am starting in my bedroom. I'm sitting on a Casper mattress. This is not an ad.

We eat our own dog food in the podcast business, so I have a Casper mattress, but I digress. As I look around, I see I have five windows in this room. Now, if I were in England or France or Ireland or Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries, I would probably not want this many windows. That's because back then, the more windows you had, the more tax you paid. This was all variable from place to place and over time, but the principle was that a window tax was a good stand-in for a progressive income tax. The bigger the house, the more windows, the higher the tax you paid. When the window tax was instituted in 1696 in England and Wales, a home was taxed at a regular

flat rate and then taxed an extra amount for each window over a 10 windows that had. Like I said, the number of windows in the amount of tax varied a lot over time, but the tax was pretty easy to assess by an outside observer. It was certainly considered easier to assess than an income tax, and so it persisted for quite some time in some places into the 20th century. This had a funny side effect on architecture that you can still see today in some buildings in the UK and in Europe.

There are many instances of window spaces that are completely bricked up to avoid attacks from 100 years ago. Now, if you passed one in your neighborhood, it means some tax cheat lived there a long time ago, or an enterprising life hacker lived there, depending on your perspective. On a test of drawers next to my bed, it's an oscillating fan that I've had for about 35 years.

It still works really well. It's a windom year. I've done a little googling and honestly I cannot tell you if this company still exists. The fan mostly points away from the bed. I just use it for white noise when I sleep. If I were in Korea running a fan in an enclosed bedroom might be discouraged by older generations. There is by some accounts still a widespread belief in Korea that fans cause death. No one seems to know how this myth started.

Maybe fans are just an innocent bystander to too many he related deaths, but nonetheless, the fear persists. I remember when I was a kid growing up in the Southern US, I was told that if you slept with a fan blowing on you in the summer, you'd catch a summer cold, which is just as unfounded, but still nowhere does fan equal death like Korea. Well, I'm going to get up from the bed and let's go ahead and walk into the bathroom. Okay, all right, so there is the toilet. There's an extremely common misconception that the toilet was invented by a man named Thomas Crapper. Crapper was a sanitation engineer and entrepreneur in the UK in the late 19th century that held

a few patents and he's credited with improving indoor plumbing for toilets. He was a good businessman and by all accounts he installed and sold a lot of plumbing supplies with the name Crapper and company on them. No one is quite sure why he gets so much credit for the flushing toilet, but I think it's because his name was Crapper. Crap as a term for bodily excrement was already in use for decades before he made toilet parts, so sometimes destiny just smiles upon you. While we're here in the bathroom, let's wash our hands. That's good COVID-19 protocol. Soap is one

of those inventions that is so monumental. It's hard to even fathom. It's so ancient. No one knows who first discovered it. There was a very good explainer on soap recently in New York Times by Ferris Jaber. Soap molecules look like little sperm with a head that loves water and a tail that hates water. So when you put soap and water on your hands, these little soap tails find things that aren't water and they dig their tails in to try to get away. This breaks up bacteria and virus cell membranes and surrounds any debris with soap molecules and makes them easy to rinse away when more water and friction are applied. For the sake of your own health and for everyone else's, wash your hands regularly for

at least 20 seconds. That is longer than you think. So pick a song to keep you on task. Long before I had you in my dreams, you came and captured my imagination. Those some things are never what they seem. I never have to worry, cause I know you are. Better than a Venus, to my little energy string, better than the promise of a good one night thing, better than a big book of Betty Page Pictures, even if it comes with a used subscription.

Better than a ticket to a holy field ringside, better than a daughter for a Sultan, for a bride, better than a cherry on a whipped cream sundae, better than a weak fiddle, never have a Monday. Okay, that'll do. Okay, what's next? Let's walk down the stairs. And we are entering the hall. In his book at home, Bill Bryson wrote that no room has fallen further in history than

the hall. I always remember that line. I've been to Sterling Castle and Scotland a few times, and I love it there, especially the Great Hall, which has been painted a shocking and delightful, buttery yellow since its restoration in the 1990s. We did a story about it a few years ago. You should check it out. It seems impossible that a hall like the one in Sterling Castle and the hall in your house have a shared origin, but they do. The hall used to be everything.

From the Middle Ages to about the 15th century, the hall was effectively the house, with a central hearth that people used to warm themselves and cook over. All activity took place there, awake and asleep. As soon as a second room was added to Holmes, the hall has been on a downhill slide. Now, it is this dumb thing, a non-room room whose primary function is to connect other rooms. So, you know, pour one out for the hall. If I turn right, I enter the living room. TV, I have a bunch of article furniture. I have a all-in-one laser printer scanner computer in here. Printers are curious technology because they are amazing and everyone hates them.

There are mentally a lot of things they hate. The criminal price of ink is a big one, and paper jams are another. According to an article in New Yorker called Why Paper Jams Persist, desktop printers will probably always have paper jams. The problem isn't really the printer. It's the paper. Paper is an organic substance that has different properties of thickness and texture depending on what kind of tree it came from and how it's processed. Commercial printers like the ones you see in the movies, we've had newspapers where, you know, someone gets to say, stop the presses.

Well, they have these long stretches where the paper goes in a straight line and, you know, gets ink put on it. But a desktop printer has to do everything in a tiny box. So the paper is pulled off the tray and makes a tight turn, gets rolled onto an ink drum where the image gets put on. Then it gets heated to almost 800 degrees Fahrenheit to fuse the ink to the page. And if you're printing double-sided paper, it stops and turns and gets turned again,

and gets rolled and heated, and it gets spit out. It's like truly a marvel that it works at all. The first commercially available copier, the Hulkin Xerox 914, which everyone loved and made Xerox billions of dollars, caught fire so often that it it shipped with a small fire extinguisher. So things could definitely be worse. Light bulbs. So we have a really good story that John Wellam wrote about the oldest continuously glowing light bulb that's been in a fire station and live more California for over 100 years. I don't really remember the details, so you should just find that episode and listen. It's good, but I do remember this one light bulb joke. Okay, how many psychiatrists does it take

to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to change. All right. You can tell that one to the kids. I'm gonna walk into the kitchen. Oh, I've got one here. This is good. Okay, I'm going to open up this drawer here that you might recognize the sound of.

That is the silverware drawer. I have spoons, knives, and forks in here. Of these three common pieces of color, The fork is by far the most recent addition to the tableware family by probably like thousands of years. Straight to prong forks were used in cooking, for carving, and getting things off of a fire, but for a long time, they weren't on the different table itself. People use spoons, knives, and just, you know,

their fingers instead. Forks were introduced a few times, you know, by fancy people, andks were introduced a few times, you know, by fancy people, and they were often ridiculed for it, but they only really took off when they evolved to have a little bit of curve in them and the extra time, so they could be more versatile for scooping and spearing small things on a plate. The curious thing about the evolution of the fork is how it changed the design of the knife. For millennia, table knives always had pointed ends for spearing food, but with the fork there, that function of the knife was redundant, so it could be eliminated.

In 1669, King Louis XIV of France decreed all pointed dinner table knives illegal, you know, to stop people from stabbing each other, which I guess was a problem then. So all new knives were made to have rounded tips and all existing table knives were to be rounded off to reduce their potential for violence. This style of knives spread across the world, which is why knives in your drawer, unless they're a specialty knife, probably have blunt ends. Okay, so I'm gonna save some stuff for the kitchen for the next time we do this, if we need to do this.

And we're gonna end up back in the living room at the record player we do this, if we need to do this. And we're going to end up back in the living room at the record player. After this. One of the things I love about vinyl records is that you can see how they work. A needle reads the vibrations in a groove. That vibration moves a magnet that interacts with a couple of electromagnetic coils. And the signal that's generated is amplified a couple of times, and it's sent to the speakers. If my bone stops playing music, there is no hope of me getting it to work, but if everything in the world fails, I have this fantasy that I can put together a crappy record player if I had to, and that gives me some measure of comfort.

So I want to play the song Exit Without Saving by the BAM Beauty Pill from their album Beauty Pill describes things as they are, which is where I got the name for this episode. Chad Clark is the lead singer and songwriter of Beauty Pill. Over a decade ago his heart got infected by a virus that nearly killed him. Every sickness he's had since then has been a risk to his life and often involved him being hospitalized for days or weeks at a time. He has been blunt and sane that the new coronavirus would kill him if he got it. So, you know, I know it's hard to go through this quarantine and act in the collective good when the action that we're all taking is staying inside and minimizing

contact and not, you know, like gathering 10 people to lift a car off someone. But taking care in this way is how we can do the most good. So you can help me lift a car off my friend, Chad Clark, because I need him to stay in this world and keep making music. And what's amazing is, at the same time, we're lifting a car off your 70 year old mom and nurse working at 12 hour shift at the hospital. So, here we go. The A five-time master on frozen mid-snarl, It attends un-cube advice, says I don't know how I got in here, but if I get out, it ain't gonna happen twice. I'm not having twice The towel is just two kids in a coat That comes here at night We've established what you are

Now we're just haggling over the price No worries, right? You recognize that this is no one's right You recognize that this is no one's right You recognize that this is no one's right You still want it, no one's right You recognize that this is no one's right You recognize that this is no ice rind, you recognize it, this is no ice rind, you recognize it, this is no ice rind, you still run

Conny and I try, in a bottomless war, a hybrid of screaming yawn Whatever always happens here will always happen after you're gone. The care and fear of all of us causes can really save you of your precious, tall as right. You recognize this is no one's right. You recognize it, this is no one's right. You recognize it, this is no one's right. You still want it, no one's right.

You recognize this is no one is right You recognize that this is no one is right You recognize that this is no one is right You recognize that this is no one is right You still want it I'm not used to it But you still won't let me lie to myself I'm frozen with soul in a tent I'm keeping my voice I'm still not used to it, I don't know how I got it here But if I get it out, it ain't gonna happen to me Exit without saving.

From Beauty Pill describes things as they are. It's available on band camps. You can buy it right now without leaving your house. I think it's a masterpiece, but don't just take my word for it. Time magazine named it one of the best albums of the decade in amongst Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar, which is pretty amazing. But I also recommend that you use this time to support any artist that you enjoy, with your attention, and you know, if you can do it, your financial support.

It might be rough for a while, for many of them. 99% of visible was produced this week by me, Roman Mars. We collectively are Avery Troubleman, Katie Mingle, Kurt Colestead, Delaney Hall, Sharif Youssef, and at Fitzgerald, Sean Rial, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Leigh, Chris Baroube, and Sophia Klotzkar. Special thanks to our supporters, Tofer McCulloch, Steve Midgeley. That guy on a motorcycle. Houston Fortney. Stan, it's so loud.

Sarah Carrier in DJ Shanty. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows and all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find this show and join discussions about the show on Facebook, you can be tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PIorg, who on Instagram and read it too. If you're looking for more stuff to listen to, we have hundreds and hundreds of stories at 9i9pi.org. As one of my favorite broadcasters, Mark Kermode says, everything will be alright in the end. And if it's not alright, it's not the end.