FACTORALY - E129 MIRRORS

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

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Hello listeners and welcome to Factorily. Now before this episode begins, I'm afraid it's my incredibly sad duty to inform you that my dear friend and co-host Bruce Fielding has sadly passed away. He was taken to hospital last week with some health complications. His family and close friends were around him in the hospital and yesterday, Thursday the 26th of February, he slipped away quite peacefully. I'm sure that all of our love and best wishes are with his family at the moment. But the episode you're about to hear is the last one that Bruce and I recorded together. I'm really sorry to have to break this news to you. But please listen to this episode, enjoy it, listen to Bruce's voice,

and remember what he has meant to you, whether you knew him personally or whether you only knew him through this podcast. I know that I will miss him terribly and I'm sure many of you will feel the same so please take a moment and then enjoy this episode. Thank you. Hello Bruce.

Hi Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling reflective, thank you very much. How are you? Oh, reflective. I'm feeling slightly misty. Are you? Yeah.

Who are we? Why are we? What are we? Yes, that. Well, we are. two voiceover artists, namely Bruce Fielding. And Simon Wells. Not necessarily in that order. We do voicing things.

We read audio books. We do character stuff. We provide e-learning and informative things through the power of the voice. Yes. If you've got a subject that you want a voice server for and these voices would be the kind of voices that you would like to use on your project,

then if you go to our website at factorily.com, you'll find links to our voiceover pages. Yes, you will. And when we're not doing that, we are both colossal nerds. That's true, actually. We love history, we love random facts, we love a good pub quiz. Oh, yes. And when you put all of those things together,

you get a lovely little podcast called Factorally. Yes. So each week we have a random subject generated for us. We do some research, and we chat about it for a bit. And all of you lovely folk get to listen. to that conversation. That's right. And this week, the subject that it chose for us was mirrors. Yes, indeed. Mirrors. How do they work? Well, science.

What I found interesting is that they'd keep everything on the same side. So you know, like on these Zoom conversations where I move my right hand and a hand moves on the left-hand side of the screen? Oh, I see, yes. Mirrors don't work that way. No. So that depends on whether you've got the mirror function engaged on the Zoom call or not. I actually have it so that I'm looking at myself like I'm in a mirror. Okay. And I don't. No, you don't.

And that's a weird thing straight away, isn't it? Because it seems like a really obvious thing. But when you look in a mirror, it's a mirror image. Yes. It's a reflection. If you were to turn that reflection around, it would be the wrong way around. So when you look in a mirror, you don't see yourself the right way around. You don't see yourself the way that every...

other person sees you. Exactly. You see yourself in reverse. Yes. And that's partly the reason why we all hate looking at photos and videos of ourselves because we genuinely don't look correct. That is not the version of our face that we are so familiar with. It's the wrong way around.

Yes. So in essence, they work by reflecting light, whatever the light source is, be it an actual source of lighter torch or a candle. or just light reflecting off everyday objects in the room. That light, those light waves hit a reflective surface. They bounce back at the same angle at which they hit the surface. They go into your eye. You see them.

That's a very, very basic scientific explanation of how reflections work. Yes. A mirror, I looked up a definition of a mirror, because it seems to me there are lots of different types of mirrors. I hadn't really noticed until I started poking. But the basic definition of a mirror is a surface, typically of glass coated with metal, which reflects a clear image.

Right. But gosh, that's broad, you know. Yes, yes. A very, very still body of water reflects your image. Yes. And it acts as a mirror. A shiny polished stone, a piece of cutlery, you know, anything like that that reflects an image,

is a mirror. A mirror isn't just a rectangle of glass surrounded by a frame that you hang in the bathroom and look at yourself when you're combing your hair. A mirror is more a description of what the thing does than an item in itself. That's true. So I've been trying to remember the name of those little daffodils for days now. Oh, Narcissus.

Thank you. Good welcome. And Narcissus was somebody who was fascinated by the sight of his own beauty as a reflection in a pond. That's right. Whence we get the word narcissistic? Yes. Completely obsessed with himself. Yes, he fell in love with his own reflection.

That's right. Yes. And he was made to do that by a nymph, echo. The goddess of revenge, nemesis, caused him to fall in love with his own image. Crikey. And then he ended up being transformed into a daffodil? Well, he basically pined away staring at himself

until he died of thirst and hunger. But where he died, a flower sprouted which bears his name. Ah, gotcha. So that's the origin of the narcissus. Well, there you go. Little bonus facts. You've tuned in to hear us talking about mirrors. You've ended up with a lecture on daffodils.

The word mirror I found comes from a 12th century French word, Millior, which comes from the vulgar Latin mirare, which means to look at or to watch. Oh, okay. Mirare gives us the word admire and admiration. Nice. That's vulgar Latin. I'm not sure I've come across the term vulgar Latin.

before. Volga Latin is kind of what the everyday folk spoke. Whereas classical Latin is what was written. It was a bit of posher. Exactly. The classical Latin word for a mirror is speculum, which is where we get spectacle and spy. Okay. So they're all connected to looking at and watching. Looking at things. And observing. Okay. For a few hundred years in this country, at least we called the thing a looking glass. Yes. Alice through.

Exactly that. Cool. They've been around for a while, though. Have they? How long a while? What's the oldest example you found? There's a thing called obsidian. I don't know if you know about obsidian, which is basically glass. I do know about obsidian purely because it's an item in Minecraft. Oh, is it? And my son will tell you about obsidian all day long.

So you can polish it to a mirror finish. It's sort of a natural mirror. Yes. And it was used by the Aztecs. Oh, right. as a portal to the underworld. So to get to the underworld, you went through a polished obsidian gateway. Really? That is exactly what happens in Minecraft.

I've always wondered about that. That makes sense now. Thank you. Oh, I'm going to have to tell my son that. That's really exciting. There you go. So the Aztecs were using obsidian. Various other cultures have used various other things over the years.

Yes. Mainly metal. Mostly, yes. Things like polished shields, the Gorgon myth. Oh, yes. Of course, yeah. With polishing the back of the shield to see the reflection of the gorgon. That's right, yes.

So you weren't turned to stone. That's it. In Mesopotamia, they used polished copper and in ancient Egypt as well. They used copper. In China, they were using bronze to make mirrors around 2000 BC. Yeah. Romans were using silver. Archimedes was using them as well.

There's the siege of Syracuse where he used polished shields to, okay, all apocrypha is true on this podcast. Yes. So there was a story that he had slightly concave shields, which he then polished, and then used the light of the sun to set fire to the sails. Oh, right. So he would actually focus the power of the sun onto the sails and set fire to them using polished shields. Oh, that's great. I don't care if it's true.

It's cool. No, exactly. But he definitely would have used them for signalling. Yes, sure. Again, another main use of mirrors for years and years and years. Yeah. The heliograph, as it's known. Oh, is that right?

Not come across that word. Helia for sun and graph for writing. Yeah, so you sort of tilt to your mirror back and forth and catch the sun. So they're used nowadays for actually sort of like emergency things. So a hiker, for example, will carry a small mirror with them. Usually with a little hole in the middle so they can sort of sight with it. If they're lost, ideally on a sunny day, if they're lost somewhere, they can signal to the people, the rescuers looking for them.

them where they are because it's a very bright light and it's noticeable. They reckon you can see a heliographic signal mirror for up to 40 miles. Really? Gosh, that's far. That's a long way. And it's only a small thing as well. Yeah, it's tiny. It's like a two inches high and about an inch and a half wide. Wow. You know, our old friend Pliny take it with a pinch of salt the elder. Can you imagine being Pliny the younger?

and going, oh, Dad is so embarrassing. What a legacy. I found the first thing I think I've ever seen Pliny the Elder say that actually sounds reasonable, which is a first. Pliny the Elder wrote about the fact that the Romans were one of the first groups of people to start putting glass on their mirrors up until now it was just polished stone or polished metal. Pliny the Elder wrote that in Sidon, which is modern-day Lebanon, they were producing glass mirrors coated with lead or gold leaf on the back.

Oh, right. And it stops there. And it's not an outrageous claim. It's historically and factually accurate. And it took me a back by virtue of the fact that it was just normal. So, yes. So around the first century, people started to put a metal coating on the back of glass. Yes. Rather than just looking into polished metal.

Well, that's when float glass sort of became a thing. so that it was actually flat. What's float glass? Float glass is you make a pool of molten metal. And then you pour the hot glass onto the pool of liquid metal. And that's what makes it go completely flat. I see. Rather than sort of taking a bit of rough glass and polishing and polishing and polishing.

You heat the glass up and you put it onto a liquid. And therefore, because the liquid is flat, the glass is flat. That's rather clever. Yes. I sort of remember as a kid being really confused by sort of looking at the hall mirror in my childhood home, assuming that it was the glass that was reflective. Yes. But actually you can see through the glass and the reflection seems to be coming off the back of the glass. Yes.

And that didn't make sense to sort of five, six year old Simon. But having looked through all of this process, that does make sense. It's the backing of the glass that's reflective, not the glass itself. Yeah. The glass is kind of there in part as a protective layer in front of the reflective metal. So they've used all sorts of things to coat the back of glass. They used to use a substance called speculum metal, going back to that Latin speculum for mirror, which is an alloy of copper and tin, which sort of makes a white, brittle substance that, again,

you sort of put on the back of glass as quite a thin layer. But you polish it really, really well. and it becomes very reflective. But that used to tarnish. If you see an old mirror, they sort of have these black spots and they're quite dim, you know, the metal tarnishing.

So part of the idea of putting it, putting glass on it, or putting it on the back of glass, was that the glass could form a protective layer shielding the metal from the elements and sort of increasing its longevity a bit. And then around the 15th century-ish, Venice came up with a method of alloying tin with mercury,

applying that to the back of some glass and then heating that surface so that the mercury evaporated. Right. And by the 16th century, Venice was a really, really popular place for making mirrors. Interesting. I hadn't realised this, but any palace, any old stately home where you see a mirror that's around that era, it's probably Venetian. They were just very, very good at making mirrors.

Well, they were very good at glass. I mean, Venetian glass was a bit. big thing. Yes, of course. So people think that mirrors are sort of like stay slightly liquid so that very old mirrors are sort of thicker at the bottom. The glass is kind of like, it's something that people believe it's wrong. Ah, it's a myth. We can actually say that one's wrong.

However, Mercury is being used as a liquid mirror. Right. So if you spin Mercury, it goes really flat. Yeah. And it's very useful in places where you need a flat mirror all the time. For example, in space. Oh.

So what they've done before is for reflecting signals and things like that from space and also light and what have you. They've usually put up and deployed these huge circular mirrors that kind of like, you must have seen animations of them sort of like coming out of the nose cone and then sort of turning into like a cone of. of mirrors. What you can do with mercury is you can get a much flatter mirror, you just fill a bowl kind of with mercury and you've got a perfect mirror. The other thing about mirrors in space is that

if anything hits a mirror and distorts it, you're screwed because you've got a distorted mirror. Whereas if anything hits a mercury mirror, it's fine. It's like it only sort of disturbs it for like a second or two. Yes. And then it's back to being perfectly flat again. So just the spinning force, the centrifugal force, displaying the mercury out across the surface of the dish, makes it flat and smooth and reflective. Yes. That's genius.

I hadn't really looked into the use of mirrors in science terribly much, but they are used quite a lot, aren't they? Yes, yeah. High precision equipment and lasers, especially, things like that. You know, there's an awful lot of very accurate, very precise mirrors going on. Which led me just to have a look at, generally speaking, where our mirrors used. You know, it's very easy to say, this is a mirror. I hang it on the wall, I comb my hair.

That's what a mirror is. We shave our beards. But I just sort of had a look at where mirrors are used. And, you know, obviously, as we say, there's personal grooming. So shaving mirrors, wall mirrors, pocket mirrors, the little things that you flip open and do your makeup. Yeah, sort of makeup mirrors. Yeah. There are mirrors on vehicles.

You rearview and wing mirrors in vehicles. Believe it or not, I'm going to go into that. in depth. I thought you might. Carry on. There are dentists' mirrors, those little mirrors on a stick that a dentist pokes into your mouth so that you see behind your teeth. Yes.

On roads, you get those mirrors on a blind corner so that as you're pulling out of a driveway, you can look in the mirror at the reflection of the oncoming traffic. Yes. They're used in periscopes in military and in submarines. They're used in telescopes. Obviously, this struck me as a bit weird when I first read it. I thought mirrors aren't used in telescopes. they're glass lenses.

But after you get the light going through the glass lenses to magnify it, of course it has to bounce off a mirror so that it can get up to your eye. Yes. So mirrors really, really highly precisely engineered mirrors used in telescopes. In cameras, in industrial machinery, they're just, they're all over the place. And it's so easy to just think mirror, reflective thing on the wall. Yes. But they're used all over the place.

Absolutely everywhere. They're on the moon. They're on the moon. I mean, I talked about these signaling mirrors being able to be seen from 40 miles away. Yeah. There are mirrors on the moon deliberately put there for laser ranging. Oh, really? So you fire a laser at the mirror on the moon and you time how long it takes for the laser to hit the mirror and come back.

Gosh, that must be a very, very precise laser. Yes. So because of that, we know that at the moment the moon is exactly 384,403 kilometers away. Is it? Yes. And this is accurate to within three centimeters. And we also know that the moon is receding away from the earth at 3.8 centimeters a year. Oh.

But we put mirrors deliberately on the moon to measure this stuff. Do you know what the hall of mirrors was? Have you come across this? Oh, I have. It's in France, isn't it, somewhere? It's in Versailles, the Palace of Versailles. Yes, that's it. It's a room in Versailles, yeah.

It was created in 1678 by Louis Cateaurs, Louis XIV. Oh, right. And it's a hall of 357 mirrors. How many? 357. Cricy. Can you imagine how much that would have cost? In the 1600s?

Yeah. Good, grief. Yeah. Wow. For the sun king, it's like, you know, you've got to have light and reflection. Oh, okay. So, you know, given that he thought he was the sun. Yes.

Yes, so the hall of mirrors. And then from that, you get the house of mirrors. Right. Now, that's interesting. I had a quick look at the house of mirrors. And I was looking it up and thinking, is it called the House of Mirrors or is it called the Hall of Mirrors? And I think I've sort of seen evidence that people call it both. But I wonder if that's become the Hall of Mirrors named after the thing in Versailles.

Well, it kind of, I mean, the thing in Versailles was 73 metres long. So it's a bit long for a fairground attraction. But yeah, those sort of House and Mirror things were invented for fairgrounds. And the idea is that you look at yourself in a mirror and you're sort of skinny or fat. or tall or short or whatever. Now, it's interesting, this term, House of Mirrors, refers to two completely different things because I looked at the House of Mirrors,

because I remember that as a kid. I remember going to a place on the Isle of White called Black Gang Chine. Very good. And one of the many things they had there was a room full of funny, squiggly, concave and convex mirrors. Yes.

And you do that thing where you sort of stand in front of this mirror and it elongates you at the top and bottom and squishes you slightly in the centre and you bob up and down and you have a whole room of people adults and children alike bobbing up and down to see their reflection go squiffy

I now do that whenever I'm on the London underground because the windows on some underground trains are slightly concave and I find myself sitting there looking at myself and my eyes suddenly disappear or my nose suddenly gets longer

like I'm in a house of mirrors. People will also look at me wondering what I'm doing. But then also you have a house of mirrors. Yes. Also known as a mirror maze. Oh yes. Like in films like Enter the Dragon. Right.

Very good. Well done. So this sort of came into my head as being just an abstract concept. And I also thought, oh, that's been used in so many films to sort of represent a character going mad or losing their way or having problems. with identity. The cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Oh, the was of who? The cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Very nice. I've not heard of that. It's one to look out for. Great. This thing was essentially created by a German fellow called Gustav Castan. And he produced something in 1873 called the Panopticum attraction in Berlin. And it was a mirror maze. It was lots and lots of vertical rectangular mirrors.

positioned together at funny, jaunty angles so that as you're walking through a path with these mirrors on either side of you, you get totally disoriented and lost, and every now and then there's a mirror that isn't a mirror. It's a doorway and you walk through it and it's a whole event. Great idea. And these things are just great fun. You can spend so long getting lost around these mirrors. And I had a quick look and thought, well, you know, I can think of one or two places where this has been used in movies or popular culture. they are just everywhere.

The first literary reference of a house of mirrors is in Phantom of the Opera, written in 1911. In movies, it was used in the circus with Charlie Chaplin, 1928. Orson Wells, the lady from Shanghai, 1947. Bruce Lee Enter the Dragon, as you mentioned, 1973, the man with the golden gun.

Oh, yes, the scaramanga. In 1974. Conan the Destroyer with Schwarzenegger in 1984. Woody Allen, Manhattan Murder Mystery, 1993. The Minions, 2015. Of course. John Wick 2, 2017. Yep, I remember that one.

It was used in TV shows like Stranger Things, The Twilight Zone, McGiver, Batman, the animated series, The Teen Titans, and Pretty Little Liars. Everywhere. They are just everywhere, and they're great, great fun, but they sort of have this, like I say, they have this metaphorical representation of being lost and not knowing who you are.

There's a great scene in a Batman cartoon where the Joker just goes totally mad inside a hall of mirrors. And it's just, it's a great metaphor for that. Another use of mirrors in that sort of way was used by Houdini in 1918. Oh, smoke and mirrors. Yeah, he made an elephant disappear.

Yes, he did, didn't he? And he used mirrors to do it. So what he did was he put an elephant in. to a cage. And what you couldn't see was there were mirrors behind each of the uprights of the cage. And then there was a flash with a load of smoke that came up. And as that happened, they turned the mirrors so that it looked like the cage was still open. But the elephant had completely disappeared. That's brilliant, isn't it? Such a simple thing to do. Yeah. And then what they would do is they would then walk the elephant behind the curtains at the

back of the cage. And then he would open up the cage. And they'd be a no elephant in there. Wonderful. It's really clever. So using mirrors to change the way that you perceive things is quite interesting. So Otis, the lift people, were told that their lifts

are a bit slow. And they looked at making them quicker. Right. And they sort of looked at, you know, changing the mechanism, increasing the strength of the cables and it was going to cost millions to do this. And then somebody said, said it's not actually the speed that the lifts go that annoys people it's waiting for the

lift that annoys people right why don't we put a mirror between the two lifts so that people can just stare into the mirror and look at themselves while they're waiting for a lift yeah which is why you see that quite a lot now you see like mirrors there's a mirror on the wall in between the lifts yes and it's psychological the idea is the psychology of it is that you're so busy looking at yourself that you're you don't notice time passing so that the lift appears to come faster. That's amazing. Wow, well done, notice. And then of course you get mirrors inside lifts as well. Yes, exactly. Again, making them appear that time is passing quicker. The amount of time my son and I have spent looking into an infinity mirror, you know, you sort of a mirror on opposing walls of a lift. Yes.

And it just reflects your reflection of your reflection infinitely. Yes. You almost feel a little bit sad when the lift arrives and you have to get out. They use those in table like those infinity tables as well where you have a two-way glass top. Oh yes. And then lighting underneath and then a mirror. Yeah. So the lights are reflecting the mirror

into the top mirror which is reflecting it into the bottom mirror which is reflecting it into the top mirror. So it looks like these lights go on forever. Do you like disco? I love a bit of disco, yeah. Do you? Yeah.

When you're dancing, John Travolta style. Oh, okay, actively taking part. Yeah, that's a slightly different thing. I thought you just meant listening to. No, no. When you're dancing like John Travolta, and you look up and you see this shimmering thing in the sky, a reflecting light everywhere. Oh, Bruce, you did mirror balls.

I did. Oh, I did. They were invented in 1917. 17, 17. 17. Really? They were called myriad reflectors. Oh, I like that.

And they were used by, they were invented by a guy called L.B. Verster. Right. And he used it in a jazz club in 1920. And they're originally called myriad reflectors, and then they were called mirables. And then they became known as disco balls. Yeah. That's wonderful. I mean, the other place where we experience mirrors in entertainment is,

I need to do a bit of echo in this. In love. Because vampires obviously don't like mirrors. Sure, yes. So the idea of a vampire not being able to see itself in a mirror is it's got two things. One, the idea that a mirror reflects the soul of the person is looking at it. And since vampires don't have souls, there's nothing to reflect. They can't see themselves in a mirror.

The other thing was that they used to be backed with silver. and again, vampires, although I think they're confusing because I think it's werewolves. We're having issue with silver bullets, don't it? Yeah, exactly. But evil doesn't like silver. Right, okay. Which is why in a lot of modern vampire stuff, they can see themselves in mirrors because they don't use silver as a reflective backing. Oh, right.

So there's a lot of vampire slash mirror thing going on there. Yes, I hadn't really thought of that, but you're right. And also in superstition as well, for some reason, I haven't looked into this, I don't know what the origin of this is. is but the breaking of a mirror is supposed to bring you seven years of bad luck, isn't it? Do you know how to get around that? Break another mirror? No. What you do is if you do break a mirror, you put it in a bag and you bury it or you throw it into a fast flowing river.

Okay. And that apparently negates all of the bad luck that you've done by breaking a mirror. Yeah. So just go and bury one. I mean, unless it's an enormous great mirror, but generally speaking, you can just bury a broken mirror. or throw it into a fast-flowing river. The producers of Factorally are in no way endorsing the littering and pollution of our waterways. Another place where you get mirrors in popular fiction is on walls.

That's where I usually keep my mirror. You keep your mirror, mirror, mirror on the wall. Oh, mirror, mirror on the wall. So there is a place called Law. Castle. Right. L-O-H-R Castle. We have show notes at factorily.com.

Oh, yes, we do. And if you go to the show notes this week, you'll find links to the real mirror at the Spezart Museum at Law Castle, which is believed to be the real mirror that was used as an inspiration for the Snow White story. Really? Yeah. Wow. And I'll put a picture of this mirror on the show notes. If you go to this town, there are dwarf signs around town, artistic souvenirs, there's a festival, there's homemade apple cider, apple crafts. And there's just absolutely everything in this place is to do with Snow White.

Excellent. And where is this, Prattati? It's in Germany. Right. It's in a place called Law and Mine. Right. And again, go to the show notes and you'll see links to the, you know, they've even got statues. of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves outside the castle.

Oh, it's wonderful. It's wild. It's a great place to go. I want to go there now. Now, I took a very brief look at the use of mirrors in vehicles. And then I got to a certain point where I thought, I bet Bruce will cover this better than I will. So I stopped.

What have you got on the use of mirrors in vehicles, Bruce? Oh, nothing. Lies. Okay. So mirrors. They were first used, well, actually, a woman called Dorothy Levitt, used a compact mirror like a hand mirror. Yes. In her car in 1906, which was the first recorded use of a mirror in a car. Having written about it in her book entitled The Woman and the Car. Yes. Great. Yes. That's very niche. And then the first guy to use it that we know about was a racer called. Ray Haroon who was racing in the Indy 500 in 1911 and he used a rearview mirror in his car. Right.

I mean, there are all sorts of people. There's Elmer Berger who, so Elmer Berger invented a thing called the cop spotter. Which is in 1921. Again, another rearview mirror. Great. And these were all inside the cars. Okay. And for a while, they were optional.

you didn't have to have any mirrors at all in a car and then in about the 1930s it was felt that a rearview mirror inside a car was felt to be useful but not the not side mirrors not door mirrors or wing mirrors no so they used to be optional extras you could pay extra to have a wing mirror how interesting and then and then they became part of the design of the car and the designers realised they weren't very aerodynamic and they made them more aerodynamic.

But it was only in the 1960s that they were actually legally required on a car to have a rearview mirror on the side of the car. That's quite a long time, isn't it? Yes. I'd sort of just naturally assumed they had always been there.

But, you know, if you look back to vintage cars, my main point of reference whenever I think of a vintage car is, of course, Mr. Toad. Yes. Poop, poop. He doesn't have mirrors on his car. No. Maybe, you know, maybe there was so little traffic you didn't really need to know what was going on behind you. It was only necessary to know what was going on in front of you.

That's true. But, yeah, the idea that they came about, I think Carl Benz created one of the earliest motorcars in the 1880s. Please see an episode on cars. Yeah. So a good 30 years after people started using cars was the very first hint of a mention of a suggestion of maybe using a mirror. There's a lovely scene in the cannonball run where the Italian driver gets into the Ferrari and he just rips the rearview mirror out of the windscreen

throws it over his shoulder and says, what's it behind me? Doesn't the matter. Very nice. But nowadays they have like inbuilt signals. You know, the repeater signal is in the mirror. They have blind spot stuff so that if there's something coming up on,

beside you, there's a light flashes in the mirror. They're not all flat. They have like a concave edge. Oh, yes, they do. To increase the blind spot. And now what's happening is that they're disappearing completely because modern cars are going for cameras. Oh, really?

So rather than having a mirror, which is jutting out of the side of your car, you have a screen inside the car showing you what's outside the car through a small camera mounted on the door. Right. Facing backwards. So they're taking the place of the mirrors. And even the rearview mirror is a screen from a camera on the back window. So the mirrors are turning into screens and cameras.

That feels odd. Yeah. But once you get used to it, it's very good. I mean, especially with things like trucks, because trucks have a very limited ability to see what's behind them, what's beside them. They do have a tendency to have a dirty great trailer behind them blocking the view, don't they? Yes. And if you're a cyclist or another motorist beside them, it's sometimes quite difficult for them to see. But if they have

screens as opposed to mirrors, then A, those screens can see what's happening. And B, the technology that analyzes what's on those screens can tell the driver to watch out. How clever. So it's really, really clever. Oh, there you go. I was right to leave that section to you. You know we talked a couple of episodes ago. We talked about pigeons not being able to give birth unless there was another pigeon around. Oh, yes.

So if you put a mirror where the pigeon is that's about to give birth, the pigeon thinks it's another pigeon and we'll give birth. And it will lay. Yeah. Who on earth was the first person to try that out? I don't know. But whoever it was, well done you. I mean, you get mirrors in bird cages all the time, don't you?

With birds looking at it. Yes. Yeah, that little image of a... of a canary sort of pecking at a mirror. Obsessed with its own reflection, yeah. Yeah, animals can see them. You know, there was also a myth that animals can't see themselves in mirrors. All right.

But they can. Yes, I think it's sort of been suggested that animals can't see in 2D. Yes. Yes, I think that's been fairly debunked, isn't it? Yes, it has. Absolutely. And then there's, okay, so we talked about the mirror mirror on the wall. There is actually a magic mirror.

Right. So the Chinese invented a thing called the, magic mirror. Okay. And what these things are is they're small mirrors with a design on the back of them. And you look at the design on the back and if you reflect light onto a wall from the front of this thing, the mirror part, you can see the same image. Oh yes. And you think, well, how is that image on the back getting through into a mirror on the front that I can't see anything on? And then reflecting the same image onto a wall. Yes. And there's a very technological reason how why it works. It's because the mirror isn't actually completely flat.

Ah, right. They've kind of almost like engraved the mirror. Yeah. And again, if you go to the show notes, there's a very fascinating video on how this works. Very good. Do you ever go shopping for clothes? Now and then. You know they have mirrors in the changing rooms?

Oh, yeah. Have you ever noticed that you look slightly thinner in the mirrors in the changing rooms? No, really. Oh, yeah. So they have a thing called skinny mirrors. Okay. For changing rooms. So when you put clothes on, you just look great.

Wow. And then you get home and think, why did I buy this? I'm not sure they still use them, but I'm pretty sure they were around for a while. Oh, that's naughty. Of course, then there's the mirror, as opposed to the sun. You went for the newspaper, the mirror. Yeah. So the daily mirror.

Right. was created by a guy called, well, he eventually became Lord Northcliff. And he started publishing in 1903 for gentle women. Oh. And the idea was it was a newspaper aimed specifically at women. Oh. And in 1904, he had to close it down because it wasn't doing very well. Oh, shame.

But he relaunched it the same year as a kind of like as a people's paper. Right. So it was very much more for everyone. Yeah. more for the working classes, left wing. And when he relaunched it, they gave away a free mirror with the Daily Mirror. Then they bought a thing called the Daily Herald. One of the reasons was he didn't want it to compete with the Daily Mirror.

Oh, right. So he basically rebranded the Daily Herald as the Sun. Oh, is that right? Yeah. So at one time, the Daily Mirror and the Sun were by the same people. Oh. And then the Sun split off. Yeah.

And then became the biggest rival for the Daily Mirror. And the Daily Mirror at one time was the biggest selling newspaper in the UK. I imagine there's probably a biggest mirror somewhere, Simon. Are there any Guinness Records for Mirrors? There are, yeah. The biggest mirror is quite a tricky one because there are subcategories. There's the biggest all-metal mirror. There's the biggest mirror made of this.

There's the biggest mirror for that purpose, etc. It's all techy and annoying. So I found a few slightly unusual records. First of all, the Guinness World Record for the last. largest mirrored building. This is a building called Mariah, which is in Al-Ula in Saudi Arabia. And it's an events venue, concert hall type thing. And it's just this really big square, ordinary building, except for the fact that it's entirely coated in mirrors. And it sits in the desert. So you look at this thing and all the desert and the bright blue sky is reflected all over

the outside of this building. It's stunning. and it has the record. It has 9,740 square metres of mirrors coating the outside of this building. Didn't they have a problem with a building in London that had reflections of the sun? And it was like focusing on cars down on the street and melting them.

That's right. It's the walkie-talkie building on Fenchurch Street. Is it? Because it's slightly concave. It was acting as a lens. And it was damaging the paint of cars on the street below. To fix that, They put loads of shutters on it.

If you look at the walkie-talkie now, it's got loads of sort of diagonal shutters that diffuse the sunlight, so it doesn't have that problem. So the mirror effect is reduced. Yeah, it's negated. Few. There's a record for the largest collection of pocket mirrors. Of course there is.

Of course there is. This is held by Irene Braun in Germany. She has a collection of 698 different pocket mirrors. Well, she had that record in 2010. One can only assume that she's acquired more since then but hasn't updated her record. Yes, yes. But specifically, every single one of those mirrors is

a promotional giveaway mirror with a brand name of a particular company or service or whatever it is on the back. So that's rather niche. And then I just threw this one in for fun. The farthest distance

to shoot a balloon backwards using a crossbow and a mirror. Yep. So you put it your shoulder. You look in a mirror and see where the balloon is. Exactly. So it's an old trope that I'm sure has been used in many a western

for sort of a sharpshooter to show his skills. You know, I can picture someone holding a little beauty mirror and firing over their back. This is a fellow called Doug McMannamam in Nova Scotia in Canada. And he set up a balloon, 25 yards

behind him. He holds a little hand mirror with a crossbow slung over his shoulder and he shoots the balloon with the crossbow. So he has that very, very specific record, which I'm sure was invented by himself for himself. Because otherwise that's a really odd record. Yeah, that is a very odd record. And he achieved that in September 2012.

Gosh. So no one has beaten that in the last 14 years. And those are my records. Fantastic. Well, I don't have very much else to say. about mirrors really. No, I think all of my facts are clearly seen in the rearview mirror. Very good. Yes, they're vanishing away from you as we speak. Indeed. Cool. So we've finished now, but before we go, we should reflect on what we need to say to our listeners. Yes, indeed.

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