99% Invisible - Mini-Stories: Volume 20

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Happy New Year! We're starting 2025 with four more mini stories about a sleepy button, electric signs, a very important sticker, and video you can smell.Mini-Stories: Volume 20 Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I am Roman Mars. Happy New Year, beautiful nerds. It is now the impossibly futuristic-sounding 2025, and we are ringing in the new year with our 20th edition of mini-stories, featuring tales about Cold War neon signs, Japanese fire escapes, the marvels of Smello-vision,, but first we must wake up from our holiday slumber. Brace yourselves. I live in a house with seven other people. I'm going to let that sink in for a second. That is a lot of humans under one roof with a lot of different schedules, which means a lot of alarms going off anywhere from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. There's the one that's like, but it goes for like an hour because it doesn't actually wake anyone up.

And then the one that really, really gets me is the duck. Now everyone has their own way of waking up. Personally, I don't really need an alarm because the fear, dread, and obligation of middle age keeps my consciousness right at the edge of alert at all times. But in my house, this morning chorus of quacks and bird songs exists because almost everyone sets their alarms early. Often, much earlier than they actually need to get up. And that's because they are building in time

to abuse the worst feature of their alarm. A feature so cursed and diabolical, it defeats the very purpose of any alarm. I'm talking of course about the snooze button. The snooze button is a bad solution to a conundrum that's existed for millennia. People need to sleep, but they also have things to do. In ancient Greece, Plato jolted himself out of bed with a system where a set amount of water slowly dripped into an airtight pot

until the pressure was so high it would let out a piercing sound, kind of like a teapot. And during the Industrial Revolution, some towns had gigantic whistles which summoned workers to the factory. Around the same time, whole job existed for people who would go around knocking on doors and windows to wake people up. But once the alarm clock entered the household with sounds like this... and this... a backlash was inevitable. And this? A backlash was inevitable.

It was only a matter of time. You can sleep soundly depending upon the snooze alarm clock, the GE Telecom. It wakes you each morning and then lets you snooze. Continues to wake you just as you choose. In 1956, GE invented the world's first alarm clock with a snooze button. On top of the clock, there was a big ol' fat bar labeled snooze. That's S-N-O-O-Z. And it could not be missed. One smack of the clock and presto.

You just bought yourself a little more sleep. The first snooze alarm clocks were built to let you snooze for 10 to 15 minutes. But mass production required some standardization. In the 1950s, a double-digit snooze was too complicated to program into the gears of a clock at scale. So GE cut as close as they could with nine minutes. A nine-minute snooze was the choice.

After a millennia of trying to get ourselves out of bed at a certain time-minute snooze was the choice. After millennia of trying to get ourselves out of bed at a certain time, the snooze alarm dared to ask, do you really have to get up right now? And across the country, people more or less said, no, I don't. The clock was a major hit and as technology improved, a few competitors ended up offering alternatives to the 9 minute snooze, like the West Clocks' Drowse alarm clock. Let's see now, do I want five minutes more sleep or ten? Five. The West Clocks' alarm clock gave people the option of snoozing two different amounts of time,

depending on if you hit the drowse button on the left side or the right side. Gee, I could use 10 minutes this time. Man, you just can't oversleep with this new west clock. But the drows button didn't have that sweet, sweet simplicity. Nobody wants to wake up and think about how much longer they want to sleep. People just want to sleep more. And the snooze button gave us that. Or at least that's what we thought. Despite the fact that many of our phones are still factory preset to snooze for nine minutes,

today we all know deep down that the snooze button doesn't really give us meaningful sleep. And it also doesn't let us rise. Instead, it catches us at our weakest moment when we are least capable of making decisions, when it's far easier to slap a button than to put two feet on the ground. In the end, the key to waking up might just rest in not giving yourself any other options. And the key to more sleep? Well, let me know when someone figures that out.

I'm here with 99PI editor Kelly Prime for a rare appearance on mic. So Kelly, what do you have for me today? Hi Roman. So I want you to imagine this very classic Americana neon scene. OK. So like if you imagine pictures of Broadway or vintage Las Vegas, like the street just lit up with signs sort of competing for your attention.

Can you picture that? Absolutely, I can picture that. OK, great, because that's not what I'm talking about. Okay, well, I'll erase that from my mind, okay. That's the neon that you and I are probably more familiar with, but I want to tell you a story about a different neon aesthetic.

It's one that was created in the Eastern Bloc right in the middle of the Cold War. And they basically took that flashy commercial Americana style of neon and they twisted it to make this new socialist style that's completely unique to this specific place at this specific moment of history. Okay, tell me more about it. So the story starts in the mid 50s,

about a decade into communism in the Eastern Bloc. At this point, people were starting to push back, to rebel. And so Soviet leaders got together and they were like, we have to work out a plan to quell some of this political unrest. And their plan was basically neon. It was called neonization was the state sponsored program. Okay I'm in tell me more. Okay neonization was a government program meant to push the idea of a brighter future. Since this is your first

time recording with me I will allow you that one once, but another one of those, and I'm pulling the plug. We'll see. The concept was like, okay, things are bleak, we get that, but shh, don't even worry about it. Look at these lights! So what they decided to do was change the landscape, turn things around, brighten up everything.

That's David Hill, he's the director of the NEON Museum in Warsaw, which is dedicated to documenting and preserving Cold War era NEON signs. The proponents certainly argued, this will placate the public, this will bamboozle them, this will make people happy again. So rather than provide things, you know, substantive things in their lives

to actually make people happy, they just decided to put lights in front of them. Exactly. Yeah, great use of resources. Okay. Okay. And so why neon specifically? Why not murals or, you know, I don't know, anything else? So the thing is that Eastern Europe actually had a history with neon and this was especially true of Warsaw. So before World War II Warsaw had been just like another modern European capital with everything that entailed including bright shiny lights. It was a shimmering pearl it was very famous for its neon signs from 1926 onwards so it had this

connection to neon. But the war just basically destroyed all of them. As you can imagine, these very delicate glass tubes would not fare well in all the bombings that happened. But even though they were gone, people in Warsaw still had a really positive association with them. It really represented modernity and just generally prosperity, like before things were destroyed. So the socialist government knew that and they figured they could sort of leverage that association to foster goodwill towards the current regime. So the communist government came up with this plan to neonize the city to make everyone happy. So what's step one in this process? How do they start?

So one of the first things the government did was to hire some of the best artists in the nation. And some of these people actually were already talented neon artists and electricians. But many of them weren't. These were groundbreaking visual artists who were used to working on paper and canvas. They didn't necessarily

have any pre-existing experience working with neon. So the only thing that was really limiting their imagination was the bounds of the material. They would just have a piece of cardboard and just draw lines all over it and then later realize, well, that's not really possible. We can't make that too zigzaggy or whatever the restrictions were. OK, so given that their imagination is wild and is unfettered by the constraints of neon, but there are actual physical constraints of building something in neon, what exactly did the artists end up making? I'm so glad you asked because I've been very into these since I discovered them.

And I think the best way to go about it is just to show you some examples. So the first one I'm about to ask you to look at was made to decorate a flower shop. So just describe what you're seeing here. So I'm seeing very bright neon and it's a green kind of vine, lots of flowers of a couple of different colors.

And the flower petals, like they're not uniform. It's a green kind of vine, lots of flowers of a couple of different colors. And the flower petals, like, they're not uniform. They're like, they're kind of, they're kind of scribbly. Exactly. They're like scribbly. It looks like a sketch pad, like someone has been doodling, but on an entire building with neon. This was designed by a graphic artist, Zofia Kostetska, Malchowkowska.

So she created this as a young graphic designer for a pavilion that sold basically carnations and roses. Nothing fancy there, except the building was covered in butterflies and flowers and grass. It was enormous. We're talking 20, 30 meters. Oh yeah, so these are big. They're huge. These are huge. Okay. So they're not like a Budweiser sign hanging in the window of a bar. They are not that. 20, 30 meters. That's the hundred feet of squiggly flowers.

That's amazing. It's crazy. Yeah. Okay. So the next one I want to show you is actually, the scale is not the same, but it is one of my favorites. It's a pink mermaid and she's holding up a sword and shield, which is like the mermaid with the sword and shield is the symbol of the city of Warsaw.

And she's hovering over an open book. Wherever you saw this beautiful pink mermaid sitting on an open book, she would denote your public library. So Biblioteca Publicina. Wonderful. So you would see the symbol all over the place in Warsaw. That's so cool. This thing is beautiful.

It's hard to imagine neon over municipal buildings. Exactly. I was in, I was in Socrates, New York, like literally yesterday, and there was a pink neon framing of this old industrial bridge. And I was just like mesmerized by that thing. And just that sort of juxtaposition of neon and just kind of pretty mundane municipal design and decay was lovely.

It was a revelation to me, I loved it. Yeah, I want more of that. And that was very much the thing here, like very much the thing. So by the late 60s, Warsaw had hundreds of thousands of these signs across the city. But what's really striking to me is the fact that all of these neon signs had this cohesiveness to them. If you cast your mind to that, again, American scene of a street covered in neon, what you're going to see is a big sort of mishmash of color.

But in Poland, that was not at all the case. We're looking at something as a very well thought out coherent project and I think that delivered a slightly different aesthetic, a different feeling. As if, my god, the city is a city of neon, it's a city of light and it all seems to work together. It all seems to be harmonious. And a big reason for that is the fact that this neonization process was run by the state. There was actually a central body that commissioned and signed off on every single sign. You'd think they'd have better things to do. Yeah, no, I guess not.

And all these signs were specifically designed to complement each other, so no one piece was approved unless it fit into the style of the whole. You can see how seriously the authorities took this in that eventually the chief city architect's title was abolished and it became the chief city graphic designer. So there was less importance on architecture and more placed on neonization and the urban aesthetic, the design. So after all this neonization, Warsaw is covered in neon. But did their ultimate goal actually bear fruit? I mean, were people actually happier?

Did they convince the people of Poland that everything was okay? Well, first of all, it's hard to say how people in Poland felt about neonization in general. Certainly the signs were really beautiful and it's easy to appreciate their beauty, but it's also safe to say that this tricked exactly no one into thinking that, you know, life under communism was really great.

By the early 80s, things had in fact gotten so bad that the socialist government instituted martial law. And that really took a toll on Warsaw's neon. These neon signs were switched off. The authorities said, well, you don't need them. You know, you're under house arrest. Why would you want to go out in the evening? So they were basically switched off and they were really the first rather obvious victims of this new political revolution that brought in democracy.

And what happened next, you probably know, communism in the Eastern Bloc didn't last. In 1989, Poland's communist state was officially replaced by a new democratic government. And when that happened, that was really the end for Warsaw's neons. The new democratic Polish government looked at the symbols from this period of occupation as they saw it, and neon was the obvious target. And so they set about destroying as many neon signs as they could in what they called the

Great Recycling Scheme, rather quaintly. And we lost so many, so many neons. Wow, the Great Recycling Scheme is quite a euphemism. Yeah, people were paid to go out into the city, find the neon signs and destroy them. So are any of the original signs left up? I mean, those pictures you showed me, are those contemporary or were all the signs destroyed?

So those pictures I showed you are contemporary. Those are photos of some of the few signs that did manage to survive all this time. But most of Warsaw's neons were either broken or taken down. And eventually the remnants of neonization just kind of faded into the backdrop of the city rather than being what they once were, which is, you know, a focal point of it. But I will say that in the last 20 or so years, there has been renewed interest among the residents of Warsaw in those signs and their history.

I do have some really good news and that is that Warsaw is undergoing a bit of a renaissance. Neonization has returned. Today people come from around the world to see what's left of Warsaw's neons. And David says that there are now new neon signs all over Warsaw. And some of them are directly referencing the work of Poland's great neon artists. You see these fantastic places that young people hang out. And you look and you think, I've seen that before. That's a neon design by Jan Młodzki,

this famous neonizer and Polish poster artist. And there it is on the streets of Warsaw, reinvented for the modern age, reinvented for the young people. Well, thank you, Kelly. Thanks, Roman. And if you'd like to see some examples of these Polish neon signs, we'll have some

pictures on the website. Coming up, our digital director Kurt Kohlstedt figures out how to escape from a burning building in Japan. News you can use. And our pal Gillian Jacobs talks to us about movies you can smell. That's after the break. We are back with digital director, Kurt Kohlstedt. Kurt, what do you have for us? Yeah, so I wanted to tell you about this small design element

that I first encountered in Tokyo. I was walking around and I started to notice these red stickers that were shaped like perfect equilateral triangles and stuck to the windows of a bunch of different buildings. Here's a picture to show you what I'm talking about. Okay, so let's see. Yes, it's a red triangle, the tip pointing down, and it's centered right in the middle

of every window that I see. Like it doesn't seem accidental or put on by the people, you know, haphazardly on the inside. Right, there's a certain consistency to it. There's like one upside down red triangle every couple of windows. And then, you know, once I noticed them, I started to see these stickers everywhere,

not just in Tokyo, but then later in Osaka, in Kobe, in Kyoto. You know, now that I've seen these pictures, I have to admit, I didn't see these when I was in Japan. So what's up with all these stickers? So they're called Fire Department Access stickers. And you shouldn't feel too bad about missing them. It really helped that I had one smack dad in the middle of my first hotel room window in Tokyo.

So I did some research and I found out that in an emergency, the red triangles indicate to firefighters where to lean their ladders. And then on the inside, they have explanatory text that tells people in the building where they should go and expect to find rescue. Do the triangles indicate that the windows are somehow different or that they're just the gathering point of a rescuer meeting rescuee? Well, yeah, so I looked into that and some of what I read indicated that these windows could be opened more easily, like either by firefighters from the outside or people from the inside. And one account indicated that they might be built out of more breakable glass too, so that like you can shatter them in an emergency.

And then I noticed under my window in my hotel room that there was this metal stick which clearly wasn't there to open the window. And I got to wondering like, is that so that I can smash the window? And I confess I did not test the theory. And so I cannot confirm if that's why the stick was there. Well, regardless of whether these arrows are indicators of any structural or physical difference about these windows, this is a place where you can go to get out of the building in an emergency. Yeah, exactly. It's a meeting point.

I guess I'm just kind of surprised that I missed these stickers. Like, are they only on certain kinds of buildings, or are they just all kind of high up? Well, yeah, you're on the right track there. Height is the key determinant, because if you think about it, like smaller buildings, including houses that only have a story or two, obviously wouldn't need these at all. And on taller buildings, they'd only be needed within a certain height range because of course, if a window is too high to be reached by a firefighter ladder, it would be dark to encourage people to congregate there, frankly.

I see. There's only a narrow band where these are functional. They have to be high enough that you wouldn't just get out by yourself on the first floor or second floor, but low enough that it'd be possible for a firefighter's ladder to reach you. Yeah, exactly. And from the regulation accounts that I was reading, of course, in translation and secondary sources, it appears that it's about 100 feet where these things cap out. Okay. So that's the reason why I missed them.

Because it's within 20 feet to 100 feet. Yeah, totally. And they're really, I mean, quite small. So unless you're looking for them, they're easy to miss too, right? And you know, this actually all kind of led me back to this little journey of discovery that I took when we first met, which was over a decade ago

now, if you can believe it. I mean, I can believe it. It's been a while. I can't imagine the show before you. So it's one of those things. So what did it remind you of though? Well, we had this lunch together in Oakland and and we were walking around, and you pointed out this little black box next to a building entrance, and then another and another and so on. And they all had these little red reflective stripes. And those are, of course, Knox boxes, which you've talked about a couple of times.

And if you don't remember those episodes or didn't read the book that Kurt and I co-authored, those contain a set of keys for the building building and then all those Knox boxes are held by firefighters. So if there is a crisis, they can open up this box, therefore have all the keys to the building and then get in and out more easily. Yeah, exactly. And so you were there for me 10 years ago, drawing my attention to something and then

filling in the backstory. So this is me returning the favor. Well, that was fun, Kurt. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Roman. Up next is actor and frequent 9iMPI contributor, Gillian Jacobs. Hey, Gillian, welcome back.

Thanks so much for having me, Roman. It's great to have you back. So what do you have for us today? Well, I wanted to talk about a very particular and peculiar movie. Roman, have you ever seen the film, Scent of Mystery? No, but I like the way you say, Scent of Mystery. I feel like it can only be said like that.

So tell me more about Scent of Mystery. Well, no judgment for never having heard of it because it's a very obscure movie from 1960. But as you may be able to deduce, it is a mystery film about a mysterious woman in danger. It has Peter Laurie, wine barrels, Spain, bad Spanish. Señor, por favor, young lady, in a big hat, muchos sombreros, uh, dandy.

Uh, the reason I want to talk to you about it today is because my friend Joan saw it when it first came out in theaters and is still talking about it because of something unique about scent of mystery. So what do you remember about that day and about the movie? Okay, so much about the movie. I think we got popcorn because, you know, this was a big event for us to go downtown. So back in 1960, when Scent of Mystery first premiered, Joan was a kid living in Chicago, and it turns out she and her siblings were part of a very small group of moviegoers who got to see it exhibited in its full intended experience, which was demonstrated by this one scene in particular. So all of a sudden, as I'm sitting there, this, the main character, some chase thing is going on and the main character all of a sudden goes into a flower market and this gush of sweet smell comes in our face and neither of us can breathe and of

course I had to rush over and get away from the smell. A gush of sweet smell. I'm not sure what word in that phrase I find the most objectionable. What kind of smell are we talking about here? So as it turns out, what Joan was experiencing in that movie theater was smell-o-vision. Roman, what do you know about smell-o-vision? I mean, not much other than the name. I'm sure it has something to do with the technology that allows you to smell a movie as you're

watching it. But I didn't think there was much more to it than that. Oh, Roman, buckle up. It was the brainchild of American film producer Mike Todd Jr. And Mike Todd Jr. was the son of, you guessed it, Mike Todd Sr., who was a hugely successful theatrical impresario and husband of Elizabeth Taylor. Oh, okay. Wow.

So Mike Todd Sr. was this big ideas guy who loved gimmicks and doing things on a grand scale like his hit Oscar-winning film Around the World in 80 Days. It was chock-full of cameos and stars and as you could guess, shot around the world. But then Mike Todd Sr. tragically died in a plane crash in 1958, leaving his son, Mike Jr. to run his production company when he was only 28 years old. And Mike Todd Jr. wanted to continue his father's legacy of spectacle. And in this moment of uncertainty, he remembered this technology that his father was intrigued by and had actually considered implementing in Around the World in 80 Days, this thing called SmellBrain.

That needs some work. I know. So, smell brain was this device invented by an Austrian osmologist named Hans Lobb, and it was essentially a conveyor belt full of vials containing smell cues. And when prompted, the smell brain would pump the scent cue to each seat in the theater individually using a series of tubes. So it was like this synced smell experience matching what was on the screen. Exactly. Mike Todd Jr. remembered the smell brain and lob and thought, okay, I'm going to invest all of my money and the resources from my dad's production company because what moviegoers really want is to smell the movies. And this is with no market testing to support it, just the firm belief people would be so

excited by the idea of sniffing stuff while watching a movie that they would rush to theaters. Well, history is made by dreamers, so go for it. Absolutely. So, Mike Todd, he's a marketing guy. So he decides to rebrand SmellBrain with a more attention-grabbing name, Smell-O-Vision. And he decided the way to debut this Smell-O-Vision technology was to produce and self-finance the first and only film made with the smell cues in mind during production, Scent of Mystery. Yeah, yeah.

The title is extremely on the nose. Bah bah. Oh, sorry. I actually didn't mean that. Okay, okay. So what was different about the film Scent of Mystery from other films? Like how did it showcase the smell-o-vision technology?

So deploying scents in the movie watching experience actually goes as far back as the silent era. So maybe a theater would show a film that had a scene at the Rose Bowl, and the theater owner would put a cotton ball soaked with rose oil in front of a fan to enhance that experience for the audience. So some audiences got to experience the smell of movies before they even heard them. Yes, but in those pre-smell-o-vision experiences, the smell cues were created by the theater owners and not necessarily how the filmmaker intended the movie to be experienced.

Smell-o-vision and scent-of-mystery were going to be different because it was the first time the scents were going to be intentionally embedded into the production of the film and the smells would be critical to the plot. So how does a smell-driven plot even work? Okay, so like I mentioned before, there is a mysterious woman character and everyone's trying to figure out who this mysterious woman is,

and every time you see this mysterious woman, you would smell her perfume. So the smell of the perfume was pumped into the audience, and then that smell is key to figuring out her identity. In that scene that you just heard, you would actually smell the perfume that you saw on screen. But dear listeners, you're just going to have to use your imagination. Sorry. So Mike Todd Jr. was so convinced that smell-o-vision was going to revolutionize cinema that he marketed it as a seismic advancement.

Ads for the movie read, first they moved, then they talked, now they smell. Anyway, to really try and get butts in the seats, Mike Todd Jr. convinced his stepmother Elizabeth Taylor to appear as the aforementioned mysterious woman. And Eddie Fisher, who was Elizabeth Taylor's then husband, even contributed the title track to the film, which actually did really well. title track to the film, which actually did really well. ["A Strange Excitement in the Air"] So I'm guessing since you mentioned that The Scent of Mystery was the first and only Smell-O-Vision film, the technology behind Smell-O-Vision was not a raging success. No, not at all. Sadly, no.

According to audiences at the time, including my friend Joan, the technology didn't really work all that great. I think I spent the entire time going, I don't Joan, the technologies didn't really work all that great. I think I spent the entire time going, I don't smell anything, I don't smell, do I smell anything? I don't smell anything. And we thought the whole thing was kind of a bust. Some of the smells were too strong.

Sometimes the smells came late. Sometimes you couldn't smell anything at all. And it cost a ton of money to install. So there were only three theaters in the United States running it in full Smell-O-Vision. So the film flopped and lost a ton of money. They later tried to recoup some of their losses by re-releasing the film under the title

Holiday in Spain, sans Smell-O-Vision. I tried to watch it for journalism, but it was not good. The film's scent of mystery and the name Smell-O-Vision became a joke in Hollywood. Just another goofy gimmick that didn't work. In hindsight, that seems inevitable, but I imagine in a moment that still felt sad.

Everyone likes innovation, to move things forward. Absolutely, and to that point, even though Smell-O--vision died, the idea of it lived on in different forms. In 1981, John Waters directed a film called Polyester. For that, he produced scratch and sniff odorama cards. And you would get a cue on screen when to, you know, scratch your smell cue, which allowed you to do the smell-o-vision in a more low tech way. Spy Kids 4, father of children.

Roman, have you watched Spy Kids 4? I don't know about 4, but I've certainly seen a couple of them. Okay, well, you missed out because Spy Kids 4 did their own scratch and sniff cards called Aromascope. And recently companies like iSmell and O-Phone have tried to introduce smells into computing mobile phones. And the latest and greatest is smells for video games. And it seems like people will never let go of the stream of smelling their media content. You know, I've been through different iterations of this where like, you know, 3D has come and gone in different waves.

And I just feel like mostly it's like we've come to the idealized form, big screen, you know, a bunch of people in a dark movie theater looking at it. Like to me, that doesn't really need to be improved very much. But are you craving Warren Gillian? I'm not craving smells. I'll say that. Fair enough. Thank you so much. Thank you.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Jason DeLeon, Kelly Prime, Kurt Kohlstad, Gillian Jacobs, and Vivian Leigh. Edited by Christopher Johnson and Nina Potuck. Mixed by Martine Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and George Langford. Cathy Chu is our executive producer, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Lashima Dawn, Jacob Medina Gleason, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family now headquartered six blocks North in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can now find us on the social media site. Blue sky is definitely the one to join. We are having some fun there. You can also connect with 5,000 other 99PI fans on our Discord server, where we talk about the PowerBroker, architecture, all kinds of fun stuff. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.