Futility Closet - 001-Calendar Reform, Doll Mansions, and Hitchcock's Vertigo

Episode Date: March 14, 2014

Will New Year's Day fall on a weekend in the year 2063? If calendar reformer Moses Cotsworth had succeeded, anyone in the world could have answered that question instantly -- any of us could name the day of the week on which any future date would fall, no matter how distant. In Episode 1 of the Futility Closet podcast, we examine Cotsworth's plan and discover how it found a home inside one well-known American company. We also look at how an antique dollhouse offers a surprising window into 17th-century Dutch history, explore a curious puzzle in an Alfred Hitchcock film, and invite you to participate in the first Futility Closet Challenge.

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to our first episode. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host Sharon. This podcast will explore the same oddities and conundrums as the website,

but in a looser format and with greater interactivity. In today's show, we'll touch on some proposals that would make wall calendars obsolete, discover a tiny window into 17th century Dutch history, explore a curious puzzle in an Alfred Hitchcock film, and invite you to join in the first Futility Closet Challenge. We'll be reading some listener mail on each episode, so if you have any questions or comments about Futility Closet, the site, the podcast, or the book, you can write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. We'd love to hear from you. And since we don't have an email yet in this first episode, we thought we'd have Greg answer the question he's most frequently asked. Where do you find all the weird, obscure stuff that's on your site? The short answer is library research. I've always had an interest in odd and curious facts, and I suppose I've been collecting them informally my whole life. But my career has been as a magazine editor, and that required a lot of library research.

And as it happens, we live in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, which contains three major universities. Angle area of North Carolina, which contains three major universities, Duke University in Durham, NC State in Raleigh, and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And all three of those universities happily will grant access to their library systems to a civilian like me for an annual fee. So there are all kinds of libraries in this area. I suppose it's one of the best areas in the country in which to do this type of research. So finding material for a fertility closet, there are essentially two steps. One is finding likely prospects, and then the second is fact-checking them, because I found you have to fact-check everything, essentially. The fact-checking part is pretty straightforward. I think I know how to do that, but finding leads, finding potential prospects for story ideas is much more an art than a science.

And I don't think there's any way to do it systematically. At least I've been doing this for nine years and I've never found one. The way I've tackled it and the way I'm doing it now is to visit one of these university library systems each week and consult a list of books I've prepared on topics that I think will hopefully yield this sort of material, colorful, interesting anecdotes, facts, and ideas. They could be written up concisely for the website. I'll give you an example. Recently we ran a post called The Skeleton in the Bale

about a bale of cotton in Russia in the late 19th century was discovered to contain the skeleton of a U.S. Massachusetts Army captain. And the question was, how did it come to be there? This is based on a news account that appeared in the Atlanta Constitution in 1892. in the Atlanta Constitution in 1892. And they say what happened was the Massachusetts Army captain's unit was camping in Alabama outside a plantation, and this sort of disreputable captain started making advances on the 20-year-old daughter of the plantation owner. And apparently what happened was her two brothers and her lover

discovered him doing this, dragged him to the gin house, put him in a bailing press, and essentially crushed him to death inside the press, inside a bale of cotton, essentially. And then that bale just lay in the plantation for 20 years until the plantation owner died when it was finally shipped to Russia, and that's when his remains were discovered. So that's the type of material I'm looking for. It's colorful, it's reasonably concise, and it's interesting. And I was able to fact check it as far as confirming that the Atlanta Constitution did publish it. So that ran on Futility Closet but I discovered it only indirectly, I found it because I read Nigel Stark's 2006 book

Life After Death which is an entertaining account about obituary writers and obituaries which I had got out just sort of on the hopeful impulse that it might contain this type of material and he offers it at the beginning of chapter seven in that book on the way toward making another point.

And that's sort of a classic example of how I come across a futility closet story. It's an anecdote or sort of a footnote that's dropped on the way to some other point. So I like that story, but I could never have discovered it on my own. The only way I've found to turn up that sort of thing is to read books about obituary writing and about, you know, mineralogy and just learning all the time about all these various fields that I think might turn up interesting facts. So it's sort of looking under a bunch of rocks and just hoping to find something. Yeah. I mean, that's actually the image I have in my head is, you know, you just keep, if you look, you can find, especially in a field as rich as a university library, your

batting average is actually pretty good. I mean, I've been able to write three posts a day for nine years, so I guess I'm doing okay. But yeah, there's no other way to say it. You just sort of have to stumble backward into these things. So I just spend a lot of time stumbling backward and hoping to run into them. It seems to be working pretty well so far, but that's the answer to where the material comes from. I just sort of turn it up serendipitously through endless prospecting, essentially almost all the time in university libraries.

In each episode, we'll delve deeper into a topic recently covered on Futility Closet, as well as give updates on older posts. One of the more popular recent posts was about a proposal for an alternative calendar system. This was called Fixing Dates, and concerned alternatives to the conventional calendar system that we all use every day. And it was an interesting post to write and to research because our timekeeping system becomes so natural for us that we don't stop to think that it's arbitrary to some extent and could perhaps be performed to make it easier to use. You learn it when you're a kid when it confuses you,

and then you just get used to it and you use it for the rest of your life. But one of the things that makes the current calendar difficult to use is the months are all different lengths. And if you run a business, the quarters are all different lengths. And most troubling, a given date falls on a different day of the week in each year. So your birthday is like on a different day of the week every year. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be that way. There's a whole industry we've got of making wall calendars where they have to come out with a new one every year just so we can all keep track of where we are as we move through the year. So the post was about a man named Moses Cotsworth who, in 1899, proposed what he thought was a good alternative to that. He said instead of having 12 months in a year, we'd have 13.

But the great benefit would be that every one of those 13 months would have exactly four weeks. It would start on a Sunday and end on a Saturday. So every one of those 13 months had 28 days. And the great benefit of that is that a given date will always fall on the same day of the week. So, yeah, as you say, if your birthday was on a Wednesday, it'll be on Wednesday forever. You don't have to consult a wall calendar to know that. And in fact, the first of any month will fall on a Sunday.

The second will always fall on a Monday. So a lot of the things that we now have to consult wall calendars to calculate would just be self-evident. I mean, any child would know that the second of a month will always fall on Monday, which makes everything much easier right away. Under Cotsworth's system, the 13th month would be called Sol, and he'd insert that between June and July. And then just to make things line up with the actual solar year, he'd have to add one extra day, which he called year day, which would go at the end of the year, and that wouldn't belong to any month.

But that's it. That's the only changes he was essentially making, just adding one extra day and adding one extra month in the middle of the year. And then he observed leap year just as we do now, under the same rules. So it wouldn't take a big change or a lot of education to adopt this new system. And Cotsworth, it's kind of a sad story, devoted a lot of his life to sort of promoting this system and unfortunately didn't.

He got pretty far but wasn't able to finally put it over. There was just sort of an inertia because people are so used to the old system. But he got as far as the League of Nations. In 1922, they were looking for proposed calendar reforms and considered 130 different plans. And his came out on top, which is impressive, but it was just finally hard to get the public, who were so used to the old system, to actually

adopt the new one. And the International Fixed Calendar League that he had established to promote these reforms finally closed its doors in 1937. So he didn't actually get it off the ground. But I have to say, in researching this and thinking about it, it makes a great deal of sense to adopt something like this. It would just make life so much easier. One of the things that I thought was really interesting about this post is that the calendar system was actually used for a little while. Yeah, that was a neat footnote to the story. Cotsworth did manage to convince a number of people, a lot of people, of the value of his ideas. And one of them was George Eastman, the founder of people, a lot of people, of the value of his ideas. And one of them was George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak Company, who liked it so much that even though it wasn't able to be put out successfully abroad just in the nation, Eastman adopted it within his own company because he could, basically.

So it's my understanding that within Eastman Kodak, they were using the Cotsworth system up until 1989, actually. I'd like to know more about that. If there's anyone out there who works for Kodak or who knows anything about the history of the company, I'd like to know. I would think it would make things easier for the reasons that Cotsworth was promoting it, but I would think it would be difficult because the rest of the world is still using the conventional old calendar. And so if you're on the phone with anyone anywhere outside of Kodak, you're going to have to be doing some translation just so you both know what days you're talking about. Yes, I don't think most people would know what the third of Sol would mean.

Right. But evidently they used it for decades, even after Cotsworth's death, and Eastman's death for that matter, so apparently it was useful to them. I don't know why they stopped in 89, but if anyone out there knows any more details about that part of the story, I'd love to hear from you. There's another instance of calendar reform in my notes that I haven't written about concerning quite a similar system. In 1930, just as Cotsworth was sort of losing steam in promoting his own reform, a woman named Elizabeth Achilles of Brooklyn, New York offered a similar proposal that she called the World Calendar.

And actually, it's quite similar and follows the same ideas. She was setting hers up so that, again, dates fell on the same weekdays each year. But in her scheme, each calendar would have four quarters, and each of those quarters would have 91 days. So a given quarter, say January through March, would reliably start on a Sunday and end on a Saturday. So all four quarters had the same length. That's valuable in business because if you want to compare data quarter to quarter, you can't really do that now because the quarters are of different lengths. It's not quite accurate. And the quarters might contain different numbers of weekends versus weekdays, which would make a difference for your business.

And like Cotsworth, she added one extra day. She called it World's Day, but it's the same principle. And she observed Leap Day also. So it's very similar to Cotsworth's plan, but also, unfortunately, like Cotsworth, she wasn't quite able to put it across in a way that government-owned bodies and just the public at large would accept. Did she have months in her world calendar? She did, yeah. But not all the months in her calendar had the same number of days. It was lined up so the quarters each had the right amount.

Okay. But so she kept the same 12 months that we're used to? Yes. And each date fell on the same weekday. So it had the same virtues as Cotsworth's plan. They're, they're quite similar in a lot of ways. Um, and she, like Cotsworth also established an organization to help promote these. Hers was called the World Calendar Association. And the interesting thing is that association is still going and still hoping to promote calendar reforms,

which is interesting. So there's still people championing these ideas and there are still good reasons to consider, as difficult as it would be practically, adopting these reforms because it would make things a lot easier for all of us if we could accept them. It's kind of like the whole thing with the U.S. still not being on the metric system, which the rest of the world shifted to. I mean, some generation would have to bear the brunt of being confused as we shifted from one system to another. But the metric system has so many obvious advantages over the system that we currently use for weights and measures. We've got 12 inches to a foot, which makes all kinds of funny calculations, and 16 ounces to a pound, but it's just what we know, and so there's this resistance to changing it.

Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate, because I think a lot of people who oppose this sort of thing would agree in principle that if we could start from scratch, it would be, there are many good reasons to do it this way. It's just all of our systems are set up to observe the old way of doing things, and getting from there to here is the hard part. Yeah. But there are, it's very hard, you know, every, everyone in the country has learned doing it the old way and all the businesses operate that way. So there are, there are good reasons to think it would be a lot of trouble to get the new system adopted, but it's kind of a shame because on paper, at least like the metric system, it makes a lot of sense. Speaking of the metric system, system uh if you go down

to the level from of the calendar down to actual keeping of the hours of the day another interesting reform that i'd been researching concerns so-called decimal time which was very briefly experimented with around the time of the French Revolution in France. And they set it up so that, under the scheme at least, in principle, each day would have 10 hours, each hour would have 100 minutes, and each minute would have 100 seconds. So it's easier then to make calculations. For instance, if I ask you how many minutes under our current system, how many minutes are in 9 hours and 17 minutes, that's a whole arithmetic problem to figure out the answer to that

but under this decimal time you know immediately the answer is 917 minutes, you're just moving the decimal point there's no calculation at all and similarly that would be what, 91,700 seconds, all you're doing is moving the decimal point and since the day

has 10 hours, noon is five. I mean, midday is five. It's just you're using the same base now that we're all used to thinking in all the time. And so it just makes a lot more sense. But that's a similar instance where, though it makes sense on paper, it's just very hard to put across. And even in the idealistic days of the French Revolution, there were just practical reasons against it. Watchmakers didn't supply enough time pieces based on this new system that it was just very hard to overcome the inertia of people doing things the old way. And so it rapidly went by the way, which is unfortunate because that too, at least on paper, makes a lot of sense. We'll have a link to the World Calendar Association website as well as Greg's post on fixing dates in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com.

Readers often share other information with us in response to material published on Futility Closet. And since we're the only ones who usually get to see that, we thought we'd share some of this in these podcasts. On March 4th, we ran a post called Reduced Housing, which was about this enormous, sumptuous, 600-pound, nine-foot dollhouse created by a miniaturist named Elaine Diehl. And when I published that post, a reader named Don Hook wrote in to note that the Dutch were fond of creating elaborate dollhouses during the Golden Age in the Netherlands in the 17th century. And in fact, one reason we know about the daily lives of the well-to-do in 17th century Amsterdam is that it was recorded so carefully in these dollhouses there was one woman in particular Petronella Ortman who was the wife of a wealthy Amsterdam merchant worked painstakingly on this

elaborate dollhouse between 1686 and 1710 Don wrote that, quote, the plates are real porcelain imported from China. The paintings were commissioned from famous artists. The bookcase was filled with miniature books containing miniature stories. And he's right. And looking into this, I find she was commissioning special scale model French cabinets from French cabinet makers. But everything was made to these really exacting standards. So not only were they precise scale miniatures, but everything was made in the right proportions. And she spent an incredible amount of money on it, between 20 and 30,000 guilders, which I understand is about what it would have cost to build an actual mansion in Amsterdam at the time, which is mind boggling.

actual mansion in Amsterdam at the time, which is mind-boggling. One interesting side effect of that that I don't think Petronella had in mind is that in addition to making a dollhouse, she was also making this sort of careful, assiduous record of what the interior of a well-to-do Amsterdam merchant's house looked like in the 17th century. To her, that was just normal. It was just daily life, and she was just sort of representing what was around her. Well, it was just sort of a hobby she was doing. She probably wasn't doing it to preserve history. No, but the nice thing is, if she had actually spent that money on building a mansion, the mansion would have been gone by now. I mean, burned down. The china plates would be broken or something. Yeah, and it wouldn't be carefully and meticulously decorated the way her dollhouse was, because it was a dollhouse that's

been preserved. It's now in a museum in the Netherlands. So we have this sort of unwitting historical document that shows us what the interior of the dollhouse, of her house, essentially, looked like all those years ago. It's just interesting that she was doing history or recording history without quite understanding that that's what she was doing. Along the same lines, I published back in 2011 an item about a very similar episode in English history. In 1924, a similar dollhouse was made for Queen Mary, the wife of George V. It was created by her cousin, Princess Marie Louise. And a lot like the Amsterdam dollhouse was made for Queen Mary, the wife of George V. It was created by her cousin, Princess Marie Louise. And a lot like the Amsterdam dollhouse, it became a sort of unwitting historical document,

a snapshot of daily life for the English royal family during the 1920s. It was the same story. They had just a huge amount of resources to pour into this thing. And in a spirit of sort of playfulness they really uh worked hard on it a lot of the furnishings were replicas of actual items in windsor castle and they commissioned actual painters to create tiny miniature uh paintings and the best detail that i like best of all is that there's a little library in the dollhouse for which they commissioned actual books to be written by real authors and,

and quite, uh, impressive authors, Somerset Maugham, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle all contributed tiny volumes for the, the dollhouse's library,

each of which an inch and a half high. But that's actually the location of the shortest Sherlock Holmes story that Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote. It's 503 words long, and it's sitting in a tiny book in a dollhouse shelf. Didn't you also say that they even had little wine bottles filled with real wine? Yes, made by real winemakers. And it had, as I understand it, had running water. I mean, it was basically a house, just a tiny scale. I think it was 1 12th scale. So I'm back on that 2011 post.

I've got the actual text of Conan Doyle's, I can't call it a book. I guess a story is, if anyone wants to read that. We'll have a link to both posts and photos of the dollhouses in the show notes. Okay. Fact or fiction. Sometimes when I'm doing research for Utility Closet, basically I start out with a promising lead and one of three things happens. I can confirm it, in which case I can just publish something,

which is great, or I can authoritatively debunk it, in which case I can at least dismiss it. But there's this interesting gray area in between where I have a lead that seems plausible and promising, but that I can't confirm anywhere. And then it just sits in my notes for months and sometimes years while I keep researching it on and off, trying to see if I can put it in one folder or the other. So no one but me ever gets to know about those things, so when we started talking about doing a podcast, we thought it might be interesting if I started sharing them,

both because it might be entertaining to hear about them just in themselves, and also because possibly someone out there might be able to help us shed some light on some of these and dispose of them one way or the other. The one I wanted to talk about today concerns Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. And we just watched this last night. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart plays a San Francisco police detective who is engaged by an old friend of his to follow his wife, who he worries she's just been behaving strangely and he's not sure why.

So Jimmy Stewart sort of reluctantly agrees to follow her through San Francisco, and a good bit of the film involves what he observed her doing. And sure enough, she does do a number of... Odd things. Odd things, yeah. But the one I wanted to talk about is... There's an episode in the plot that just doesn't seem to make any sense. She arrives at a hotel, the McKittrick Hotel in San Francisco, parks her car at the curb, and he's in his own car just following her, and so he's watching this from the street.

So he watches her go into the hotel, and after a pause, she shows up opening the curtains on a on a second floor room above the entrance of the hotel. Jimmy Storitz gets out of his car, goes into the lobby of the hotel, and we can see that there's only one staircase to get from the lobby, from the first floor up to the second floor. There's no one in the lobby except the keeper of the hotel, who's standing at her desk and asks him if she can help him. And a strange conversation ensues. He says, he asks if she can tell him who's keeping that room. And she says, well, I can't give out that information. He shows her his police detective credentials and shows she agrees to cooperate with him.

And seems to be quite straightforward and earnest about what she's saying. And tells him there's no one up there. And he says, well, that's impossible. I just watched the woman go up there five minutes ago right and he clearly saw her in the window of the room she was very clearly visible yeah uh so he says can you give me your name and she she gives him a different name than the name of the woman he knows is up there and so they go back and forth and finally insists could you please just go up and check the room? I'm certain she's up there. And so the hotel keeper agrees to go up, goes up the stairs and then calls to him and asks if he wants to come up too. And he does. And she shows him that the room is empty. And then he looks out the window and sees that her car has gone from the

curb. So the puzzle is how did she get out of the hotel room? It seems impossible. She couldn't have gotten out from the second floor, except by going down the stairs, and he was at the bottom of the stairs the whole time. There doesn't seem to be any answer to this. None of it's ever explained in the movie. That's the curious thing. The story goes on from there,

and we'll, I guess, try not to spoil the movie. But it's not until you're going over it in your head afterward that you realize that they never explained how Kim Novak got out of the McKittrick Hotel. Now, the story goes that someone actually asked Alfred Hitchcock about this, asked him what the explanation was for how that happened. And supposedly he said it's an example

of what he called an icebox moment, which means that you don't realize that it hasn't been answered when you're watching the movie, but late that night when you're getting chicken out of the icebox, you say, hang on a minute, they never explained how Kim Novak got out of that hotel room. But if you think about it, okay, well, my question, I have two questions. One, how did she get out of the hotel room? The second one is, did Alfred Hitchcock actually say that? I've been sort of looking into this for, I don't know, most of a year now, on and off. And I cannot find any reliable actual verbatim quotation that Alfred

Hitchcock actually said that. Every resource I can find just sort of mentions in passing, by paraphrasing it, that he said that. But it would be interesting if he did say it, because then it would show that he realized himself it was an unsolved puzzle yeah but it's not an explanation that's the thing even if he did say it he's not saying yes here's how she did it he's just agreeing yes it doesn't make any sense right it doesn't make any sense but you won't realize that till after you've left the movie um so the whole thing is a puzzle we understand uh that the movie was based on a french novel which i haven't read but i understand the plot of that is quite similar i mean they didn't make any changes we understand that the movie was based on a French novel, which I haven't read, but

I understand the plot of that is quite similar. I mean, they didn't make any changes in adapting it to the movie, but the movie in any case ought to stand on its own. And again, without spoiling the movie, it seems there is an explanation for her strange behavior, but even when you find out what that was, it doesn't shed any light on this. Well, it doesn't make her into a magician or a bird who can fly out a window. Right, which it seems like... It seems like a physical impossibility for her to get out of the room. Yeah.

So I guess I throw that open to the listeners here. If there's anyone out there who knows, A, how Madeline got out of the McKittrick Hotel, or B, knows why the screenwriters chose to write it that way, that whole episode doesn't seem to... Well, also, you just also want to know if Hitchcock really did call it a nice box scene. And C, did Hitchcock actually say that? We'd love to hear from you,

because that's an example I've been hoping to write about this, and I just haven't been able to go one way or the other, because I just can't. It's such a riddle without a solution, and I just haven't been able to get one way or the other because I just can't. It's such a riddle without a solution and I just haven't been able to get anywhere with it for a few months now. So if you can explain any of that, please write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if we get an explanation, I'll certainly share it on a future show. Okay, the Futility Closet Challenge.

This is an idea I've had for years now. I know from corresponding with you every day that the people who read Futility Closet are a smart, playful audience. And I've always liked the idea of trying to find a way to play some sort of game together, but I haven't found a way to actually make that work on the website. But when we started talking about a podcast, it seemed like the perfect way to get this to work. A number of publications have done similar things to what I have in mind. Sharon and I both grew up outside

Washington, D.C., and for 20 years now, the Washington Post has run something that it calls the Style Invitational, which it calls a wordplay slash humor contest. Basically, they present a sort of challenge to the readers each Sunday. For example, imagine the first draft of some famous work and give us a quotation from it or come up with a dictionary definition for a nonsense word or alter a movie title or a proverb under certain constraints just just sort of to provoke uh creative thinking and offer a chance for the readers to to display their humor and cleverness basically and so that the readers the post of the style invitation will then have a week to submit entries and then on the next Sunday, they present their favorite entries and then offer a new challenge. And I like that idea so much that I've been saving up possible entries in it for years now on a little file.

But as I say, I haven't been able to actually get that to work on the site. So I'm thinking this is something we could do on the podcast. The one I have in mind for this first episode comes from New York Magazine, which had a similar reader competition going in the 1970s. The one they ran was called Miss Prince, and basically it involves taking a familiar proverb or quotation or any familiar phrase and then either omitting or changing one letter in it to produce a new phrase. So some of the examples that their readers came up with were the phrases,

Wish you were her, I've got you under my ski, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are deaf, and do unto otters as you would have them do unto you. So let's hear your ideas. Take a well-known phrase and change or remove one letter to make a memorable new phrase. Post your entries in the show notes on blog.futilitycloset.com and we'll announce our favorites on next week's show. Also, as I say, I've got a sort of little file saved up

of possible competitions for future shows, but I'm actively soliciting if you have an idea for this feature, we'd love to hear from you. Just write to us at the same email address. This concludes the first episode of our podcast. We invite you to see the show notes at blog.futility closet.com, where you can leave comments or feedback, ask questions, and see links and images mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you enjoy Futility Closet, you can find the book on amazon.com or visit us on the web at www.futilitycloset.com where you can browse over 7,000 time-killing posts. If you would like to support Futility Clility closet, you can tell your friends about us,

leave a review of the book or podcast on Amazon or iTunes, or click the donate button on the sidebar of the website. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Futility closet is a member of the boing, boing family of podcasts. Thanks for listening. And we'll talk to you next week.