Futility Closet - 007-Louisiana Hippos, Imaginary Epidemics, and Charles Lindbergh

Episode Date: April 28, 2014

Two weeks before Charles Lindbergh's famous flight, a pair of French aviators attempted a similar feat. Their brave journey might have changed history -- but they disappeared en route. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the flight of the "White Bird" -- and ponder what became of it.We'll also examine a proposal to build hippo ranches in the Louisiana bayou in 1910, investigate historical outbreaks of dancing, laughing, and other strange behavior, and present the next Futility Closet challenge.

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10% off, go 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 Episode 7. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host, Sharon. In today's show, we'll follow two French war heroes who may have crossed the Atlantic two weeks before Lindbergh, learn about plans to import hippos into Louisiana, explore some curious outbreaks of imaginary illness,

and present the next Futility Closet Challenge. We want to remind you, if you enjoy the type of material covered in these podcasts, you'll want to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements, which presents the same types of historical oddities that we've been covering in these shows, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other bite-sized amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon and iTunes. In our listener mail this week, Kristen Ackhurst wrote in to say, Having listened to your recent podcast concerning the American camel story, I think you may be interested to learn that a similar endeavor took place in Australia at around the same time.

Not only were camels imported to assist with the traverse of Australia's west and interior, Afghan guides were also employed to form great land trains like those in the Middle East and Asia. Margaret also notes that unlike the limited use of camels in the U.S., the camels in Australia were used successfully until the 1920s by teams of Afghan drivers. The difference may be due to lower population densities and the lack of railways. Australia's East-West Railway was not completed until 1917, and the North-South Central Line is a very recent invention. I have to admit that I had not heard of camels in Australia before,

so thank you, Kristen and Margaret, for that. Looking into it, on their website, the Australian government says, The introduction of camels and the so-called Afghan cameleers proved to be a turning point in the exploration and development of the Australian government is pretty positive about the camel chapter in their history. Apparently camels were imported into Australia starting in the 1840s, and from the 1860s to the early 1900s, they were basically considered to be one of the backbones of the Australian economy. They would cart supplies and mail and water to remote settlements, and they transported the supplies and tools and equipment that were needed for major infrastructure projects like the Overland

Telegraph and the Trans-Australian Railway. It's funny, that's about the same time period that they were being used in the American West. Yeah, it just went on for longer in Australia. And similar to the U.S., what happened was the advances in technology and transportation ended up making the camels less necessary. So it was the telegraph and the railway systems they helped to build which ended up making the poor camels superfluous in the end. Rather than see their camels killed, the cameleers released many of them into the wild. But camels have no natural predators in Australia, and they can live for 40 to 50 years. So the feral camel population kind of took off. Recent estimates are that there are currently about 300,000 feral camels in Australia. And this is after the Australian government has been taking various steps to

try to reduce the camel population, including exporting them back to the Middle East. Kristen says they are now considered a national pest. Also in response to our camel story, Zach A. wrote in to say that the story reminded him of how a group of politicians in the early 20th century proposed to import hippopotamuses to the swamps of Louisiana and convince Americans to eat them. It makes me wonder what species Americans will try to import next. I really enjoy your podcast and look forward to future episodes. Thanks, Zach. And no, I hadn't heard of plans for hippos in Louisiana either. So I looked into this and apparently in the early 20th century, the population of the U.S. was really rapidly increasing and the cities were exploding. And this led to a national meat shortage.

So the idea of hippo ranching was proposed for the bayous of Louisiana. Not only would that solve the meat shortage problem, because people would eat the hippos, Not only would that solve the meat shortage problem, because people would eat the hippos, but it would also solve a problem they were having with an invasive water hyacinth that was killing the fish and choking off the waterways. So we would eat the hippos, and the hippos would eat the water hyacinths. So in one stroke, you'd make good use of land that wouldn't support cattle, and you would solve this growing ecological problem they were having in Louisiana. Sounds good.

A bill was actually introduced about this in Congress, but despite some initial excitement, the movement ended up fizzling out. And instead of the swamps becoming homes to hippos, many just ended up being converted to more cattle-friendly grazing land. So no feral hippos in Louisiana, I'm afraid. Thanks to Kristen, Margaret, and Zach for their contributions. And if you have any questions or comments about something you hear on our podcasts, send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. In May 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew non-stop from New York to Paris. In doing so, he won a $25,000 prize. He inspired a generation of young people,

and he set off a wave of interest and enthusiasm in aviation in this country that significantly influenced the course of the 20th century. Most Americans know that part of the story. What a lot of them don't know is that two weeks before Lindbergh flew, a pair of French aviators had tried to do the opposite, flying nonstop from Paris to New York. If they had succeeded, it would have changed things considerably. It would have given France the national honors and sort of the momentum in developing an aviation industry. And arguably, since they had claimed the prize, it even would have discouraged Lindbergh from undertaking his flight at all. So Allat is riding on this French flight, and the question is, what happened to them?

And the answer, surprisingly, is no one knows. They disappeared en route, and to this day, no one knows what became of them. So because there was so much riding historically and symbolically on the outcome of that French flight, it's been called the most historically important lost aircraft in history. What happened is this. In 1919, a New York hotel owner named Raymond Orteig had offered $25,000 to the first person who flew nonstop between New York and Paris in either direction.

In either direction, okay. And that attracted a lot of well-financed, experienced aviators, none of whom were successful up to this one point where two heroes in France, decorated aviators from the First World War, named Charles Nungesser and François Colly, his navigator, decided to take off in May, flying from Paris to New York. And this was a big deal in France. They were already very well known. And there was a huge surge of patriotism and

enthusiasm for this, just as there was for Lindbergh in this country. If anything, it was even stronger in France. Hundreds of people showed up and camped out overnight at the airfield where they were going to take off drinking champagne and in fact had to be restrained with bayonets when the time came for the departure. The plane, which was called the White Bird, was very heavy. It weighed 11,000 pounds, which is more than twice what the Spirit of St. Louis would weigh. It was carrying 1,000 gallons of fuel. And it bumped a few times getting down the runway, but got off the ground and got safely on its way. And we know about the first parts of the flight because they were escorted for part of the way and witnessed. They got safely out of France, crossed the English Channel,

crossed the southern part of England, and then crossed Ireland. And the last confirmed sighting was as they were leaving Ireland and flying off into the North Atlantic. That was all according to plan. But strictly speaking, that's all we know because after that they disappeared. One of the downsides of having such a heavy plane is that they had to make some sacrifices, two of which are really important. One is that they jettisoned the landing gear when they got out over the ocean. The plane was not a hydroplane. It wasn't designed to float on water. Their plan was just that they

had to save the weight. And so they thought if they made it all the way to New York, they would land in New York Harbor in front of the Statue of Liberty and get out of the plane before it sank, basically. That's one sacrifice. The other one is that they didn't have a radio, which is a big risk to take. If you have a radio, you can communicate you're going along even if everything's fine. If you run into trouble, you can tell someone that and send out an SOS. And if you have to go down, then the radio signal itself can act as a sort of beacon to help rescue parties home in on you. They didn't have any of that.

All we know is that they got safely beyond Ireland and then vanished. These 1,000 gallons of fuel gave them enough, about 42 hours of flying time. So people were gathering in New York waiting for the arrival, and when 42 hours came and went, it was clear that they must have gone down somewhere, but no one knew where. It was assumed at the time that they'd probably gone down somewhere in the North Atlantic, and that's where the search, there was quite a big search undertaken for them. There were four different nations who all participated, but it's very hard to find such a small plane. The plane was made of plywood and canvas, but it was watertight enough that it was estimated that it could probably stay afloat in the ocean for about 24 hours.

But when that interval came and went, then it just became increasingly darkly clear that they probably weren't going to reappear. This was a cause of great shock and grief in France, as you can imagine, in part because the news getting back was so uncertain. A few irresponsible newspapers had published accounts of their successful arrival, which were just made up. Wow. So it was just a cause of great pain in France, partly because no one could understand whether they had made it or not. But as time rolled on, it became clear that they were gone,

and no one eventually did find even any wreckage of the plane. So that's what happened in 1927. Now, fully 50 years go by before anyone really seriously entertains the idea that they might have actually made it to North America. really seriously entertains the idea that they might have actually made it to North America. A writer named Gunnar Hansen published an article in Yankee magazine in 1980, which pointed out that there were some witnesses, sort of a pattern of witnesses in Nova Scotia and in eastern Maine,

who reported either seeing or hearing an airplane on that day, the day they would have arrived if they'd made it across the ocean. A hermit in eastern Maine named Anson Berry had been fishing in a canoe when he said he heard a plane overhead. And this is in eastern Maine in 1927. Hearing or seeing a plane was an unusual enough experience. I mean, they were still pretty rare then. That people would remember it and report it. Right. It was noteworthy. You'd remember that sort of thing. So he heard a plane flying, and he heard it sort of sputtering, and then he said what he called sort of a faint, rending crash in the hills.

But he didn't pursue it at the time, but just mentioned it to some other people. And this magazine writer, Hansen, looked into it and found that when the white bird had disappeared, the authorities in Nova Scotia had sort of put out a call to people in general to ask whether anyone had heard or seen a plane. Sixteen people said they had, and the interesting thing is if you plot those people's location on a map, it forms a line which sort of corresponds to the line that the white bird would have taken if it had been flying on down. The route would have taken if they crossed the ocean safely, they would have hit Nova Scotia first in North America, followed that down through Maine to

Boston, and then followed that the coastline down into New York Harbor. So that begins to make some sense, but it's still kind of spotty and there's no physical evidence. Hansen's article sparked kind of a wave of interest in searching for the plane in eastern Maine, but the problem is this is all unfolding 50 years after the disappearance. Yeah. So that creates a lot of problems. The whole thing is kind of receding in history. Some of the witnesses had died. Others obviously have faded memories after 50 years.

And most important, the plane itself was largely biodegradable. It was made of plywood and canvas, and it's in the woods. It's been rotting for 50 years at that point. The largest piece of it that would remain is the engine itself and possibly two aluminum fuel tanks. And that's sort of become the holy grail for people who are searching for it in the woods, finding this engine. That would really conclusively show that they had made it to North America, if indeed they had. The searches included some notable people.

Hanson, the magazine writer himself, searched for years for it and didn't ultimately find anything. But he said, he told the New York Times in 1987, the longer I've been involved, the more I've become convinced the engine is there and the less certain I am that we're going to find it. It's basically a needle in a haystack, and it's a decomposing needle in a very big haystack. Yeah. Another person who's been searching for it is the adventure novelist Clive Cussler,

who made sort of an avocation out of searching for it at the bottoms of lakes because the plane had jettisoned its landing gear if they were running out of fuel, which he suspects they either ran low on fuel or hit engine trouble or something, or headwinds perhaps delayed them. And so they realized they weren't going to make it to New York and just were looking for some place to ditch the plane. Some body of water. Yeah, there would have to be a pond or a lake or even a swamp somewhere.

They'd have to come down on water. And if that's the case, that means if the engine is out there, then it's at the bottom of the body of water, which makes it harder to find. Anyway, Kessler searched for it for close to 10 years and finally said, it may remain a mystery that will never be solved. It would be more wireless if the thing was found, but I think if it is, it will be purely by accident. So that's where we stand now. There seem to be good grounds for supposing that the plane did make it to North America and is waiting for us to find it somewhere in the woods. Other authoritative parties have looked at this

and thought that the evidence isn't strong enough and they favor the idea that it went down in the Atlantic Ocean, as the original searchers thought. In which case we may never find it. Right. But it's worth pursuing, I think, because there's so much riding on it. As I say, Lindbergh entered the history books on the basis of this, and a lot of the technological history of the 20th century

was based on the wave of investment and enthusiasm that attended his winning of the prize. If the French team had made it, there's a good chance that Lindbergh wouldn't have flown at all, and it would have... You don't want to overstate it, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it would have affected the unfolding of the 20th century to some significant extent. So there are parties right now tramping through the Maine woods, still looking for the engine of this plane and the technology is improving constantly. So we may yet find out how close Nungesser and Collie came to making the first non-stop trip from Paris to New York. We'll have a link to our post about the white bird, including an image of the plane and a map

of its intended route, in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and Thank you. templates for you to choose from. All their templates are extremely clean, allowing your content to be the focus of your website, and they scale automatically to look great on every device, every time. You can easily connect Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google, and many more web and social services. And Squarespace recently added e-commerce to their platform, so if you want to set up shop and sell things, you can do so in just a few minutes. It's really easy to use. You can use drag and drop to add content from your desktop and even to rearrange elements of content within a page. But if you want some help,

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It starts at just $8 a month and includes a free domain name if you sign up for a year. So start your free trial with no credit card required and start building your website today. Go to squarespace.com and enter the offer code CLOSET to get 10% off and show your support for Futility Closet. That's squarespace.com, offer code CLOSET, for a free trial and 10% off. Squarespace, everything you need to create an exceptional website. On April 22nd, we ran a post about a dancing plague that took hold in Stroudsburg in 1518, and which is now believed to be an example of mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness. Dr. Bob Dixon wrote in to say,

Congrats on launching the new podcast. Read the topic of mass hysteria. Have you come across Koro? It's the kind of thing that leaps off the pages of your psychiatry textbook in med school and fills the part of your brain that's supposed to be retaining more useful things, like medication dosages. It's a false belief in anxiety that your genitals are retracting into your body, and what's wild is that it occurs in epidemics.

Bob is quite right. It turns out that there have been a number of Koro epidemics. Bob cites as one example a 1984 to 1985 epidemic in China that lasted for over a year and affected over 3,000 people in 16 cities and counties. Basically, Koro is an extreme anxiety due to the belief that your genitals are shrinking or retracting or perhaps even disappearing altogether. It's more commonly seen in men, but it can sometimes be seen in women too. And you usually see it in cultures that believe that genital shrinking will lead

to impotence or sterility, and possibly even to your death, and in cultures in which reproductive ability is seen as like an essential part of a person's worth. So there'd be a lot of anxiety and stress tied up around that? Yeah, well I guess there would be in any case, but there'd be even more in these cultures, yeah. to get triggered by rumors that start spreading of genital disappearances. And these genital disappearances are supposedly caused by a number of different agents, some of which are female fox spirits in China, mass poisonings in Singapore and Thailand, and sorcery in Africa. And researchers have found that these epidemics are much more likely to appear during times of socioeconomic or political stress. So the population is just stressed to start with.

To begin with, that's one thing they were saying about the dancing plague in 1518, is there was a lot of famine and just hardship beforehand. So people are under a lot of stress to begin with. Koro has actually been seen for centuries. For example, in the late Middle Ages in Europe, it was commonly believed that witches would collect male genitalia. The Malleus Maleficarum, or the witch's hammer, was like a famous and widely published medieval treatise

on witches, and it had an entire chapter on this subject. So apparently there was a widespread concern among medieval men about this. Beyond Koro and the 1518 dancing plague, there have been a number of examples of mass psychogenic illness throughout the whole world, including the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, which lasted for about a year and affected several thousand people, and that involved fits of uncontrollable laughing or sometimes crying or screaming. In 1983, there was the West Bank fainting epidemic. That was in March and April of 1983, where there was a fainting and dizziness in large numbers of Palestinian schoolgirls and a smaller number of female Israeli soldiers who had interacted with them. And that was seen in multiple West Bank towns and led to 943 hospitalizations. Wow.

43 hospitalizations. Wow. There was a Tourette's-like illness that was affecting a number of students in upstate New York in the fall and winter of 2011-2012, and that involved the students having uncontrollable movements and tics and verbal outbursts. And in just February of this year, 30 students in Springfield, Minnesota were practicing for a student concert and started vomiting and passing out. So what's really happening there? There's not an actual physical illness? It's just these people are suggestible? Yeah, I'm just going to cover that.

Okay. Apparently, in general, mass psychogenic illness seems to come from a combination of stress, like we mentioned before, and the fact that humans are actually rather suggestible. So there was a study that demonstrated in 2011 at Stony Brook University, they found that you can deliberately induce psychogenic symptoms in normal healthy adults. You can cause normal healthy adults to have psychogenic symptoms. So what they did was they gave subjects placebos, inert pills that weren't going to do anything, but the subjects believed it was an experimental drug that might have mild side effects.

Okay. And then half of them, after taking the pill, half of them sat in a waiting room together, just the study subjects, or half of them sat together in rooms with actors who pretended to be having symptoms because of the pills they had taken okay and this study found that the subjects who sat with the actors were 11 times more likely to experience symptoms themselves including symptoms that hadn't even been shown by the actors really that's amazing yeah so and these were you know just normal regular people that they were able to have them feel that they were really experiencing symptoms.

So the lesson is that people will imagine symptoms if they just imagine that there's a predisposition. A plausible reason. They need to feel that there's like a plausible reason or a reason that they might be having these symptoms. That's the thing I remember from in researching that dancing plague thing. What happened in Strasbourg is that people just started dancing, apparently for no reason. And John Waller wrote a book in which he put forward this as an idea that it was a mass psychogenic thing and found that there was a belief abroad in Strasbourg at the time

that St. Vitus would cause people to dance uncontrollably if he was angry. So people were walking around with this predisposition in their minds to begin with right and that made them all the more suggestible it sounds like this is the same thing that's happening here right and it's similar to like this type of suggestibility can also be seen in many examples of people believing they've gotten sick due to chemical or toxic exposures. So, for example, after terrorists released toxic gas in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, many commuters experienced dizziness and nausea. But the doctors who were treating these people

found that more than 70% of the 5,500 people who came to the hospitals because they were sick with these symptoms, more than 70% of them turned out not to have actually been exposed to the gas in any significant way. So they were just believing that they were ill due to this exposure that they hadn't even had. So with this type of suggestibility, you've also seen there have been a number of outbreaks of physical symptoms in cases where there have been funny smells in buildings or people believe there's something have been funny smells in buildings or people believe

there's something funny about the air in buildings. You typically see this in people who have seen other affected people or who believe that what they're smelling is dangerous. An example of this is 40% of the staff in a hospital in Nice, France reported being ill in the fall of 2000. The sick workers blame their symptoms on poor air quality in the hospital, but investigators were never actually able to find a physical basis for these symptoms. Wow. So there are many examples of that. It's just the same thing.

There's just this plausible reason to think you might be affected and then you believe that you are affected. But people are a lot more prone to that than we think we are. We think we're these rational creatures. Right, right. We're not entirely. I do want to note that people experiencing these kinds of psychogenic symptoms really do feel themselves to be having symptoms beyond their control.

And there isn't any intention of producing these symptoms themselves. The symptoms are actually experienced and felt by the affected people. They really do feel themselves to be having these symptoms but overall it just seems to be an example of some of the amazing and sometimes scary things that our own brains can do to us thanks to bob for sending the information about coro and we'll have links to an article on coro the original post on the dancing plague and other articles on mass psychogenic illness in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com.

And now for the weekly challenge. Each week we give you a creative challenge and you can compete for a copy of our book. Last week's challenge asked you to create a Google Nope, a phrase that returns no hits at all in a Google search. Thanks to all who entered, and as usual, we really enjoyed reading everyone's entries and comments. Here are some of our favorites. Dave K. sent in, hippopotamus-grade trapeze.

Eric Harshbarger said, futility closet challenge winner, which I guess isn't a thing yet, but maybe it will be eventually. Patrick Quinn wrote in, reasons why the imperial system is better. Jordan Smith gave us, tragic rainbow accidents and my operatic criminal defense. Rachel R. wrote in, how can I set up an AOL email? Which apparently nobody wants to know. And Murray Mitchell gave us, futility closet is a time waster. Which I guess it's nice to know that nobody thinks that. No one anywhere thinks that. These are all great entries and as usual it's hard to pick a winner. I think just because we have sort of a hippo theme going in this episode,

I'll choose hippopotamus grade trapeze, which is a great visual image. So, Dave K., that's your entry. If you can email us and let us know your mailing address, we'll send you a copy of the Futility Closet book. As an addendum to last week's challenge, Jordan Smith added with his entries, Also, I really enjoyed this challenge because when something wasn't a Google Nope, as I had expected, it often led to an interesting bit of trivia. I've started calling these Google Nope Hopes. Some of my favorites are

Radioactive Garbage Trucks, The Lunar Olympics, Duck Build Platypus Poison, and Venomous Bananas. Which makes you really wonder what kind of hits these actually returned in Google. Someone's been writing about Radioactive Garbage Trucks. We'll have to look into that.

For this week's challenge, we'd like you to take any well-known title, it can be anything, a book, a movie, a song, TV show, and invent a question that it answers. For example, two and a half men, the question might be, how much can a hungry cannibal eat at one sitting? For yesterday,

you could ask, when would you like to see my vacation photos? And for Billie Jean Who won the Australian Open women's singles tennis title in 1968? So come up with your own question and answer And send them to us by Friday, April 25th We'll read our favorites on the show And the winner will receive a copy of the Futility Closet book

Where you can learn more about a doctor who took out his own appendix, a missing 7,600-pound nuclear bomb, and why Robert Louis Stevenson gave away his birthday. Well, that's it for this episode. You can see the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com, where you can leave comments or feedback, ask questions, and see the links and images mentioned in today's episode.

You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you enjoy Futility Closet, be sure to look for our book on Amazon.com or check out the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can browse over 7,000 time-killing posts. If you'd like to support Futility 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 Thank you.