Futility Closet - 014-The Unsinkable Violet Jessop

Episode Date: June 16, 2014

Stewardess Violet Jessop was both cursed and blessed -- during the 1910s she met disaster on all three of the White Star Line's Olympic class of gigantic ocean liners, but she managed to escape each time. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll accompany Violet on her three ill-fated voyages, including the famous sinkings of the Titanic and the Britannic, and learn the importance of toothbrushes in ocean disasters. We'll also play with the International Date Line and puzzle over the identity of Salvador Dalí's brother. Show notes: University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt discusses his coin-flipping experiment about halfway through this BBC podcast. The associated website is here. We first wrote about Violet Jessop on March 11, 2009. Maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham interviewed her in 1970 for The Only Way to Cross, his 1978 book about the era of ocean liners. When Violet died in 1971 she left a manuscript to her daughters, which, edited by Maxtone-Graham, came to light in 1997 as Titanic Survivor: The Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessop, Who Survived Both the Titanic and Britannic Disasters. A poetic note from Maxtone-Graham in that book: "One particular service commemorates the 1500 lost on the Titanic: Every 14th of April, a United States Coast Guard cutter comes to pay the homage of the Ice Patrol, which owes its inception to the disaster. With engines stilled and church pennant at the masthead, officers and men line the deck in full dress, while the commander reads the burial service. Three volleys of rifle fire can be heard, then the cutter passes on, leaving a lone wreath on the waves above the broken hull." Lewis Carroll underscored the need for an international date line with this conundrum, which he presented among the mathematical puzzle stories he wrote for the Monthly Packet in the 1880s: The day changes only at midnight. Suppose it's midnight in Chelsea; Wednesday has concluded and Thursday is about to begin. It's still Wednesday in Ireland and America, and it's already Thursday in Germany and Russia. That's fine. But continue in both directions. If it's Wednesday in America, is it Wednesday in Hawaii? If it's Thursday in Russia, is it Thursday in Japan? Mustn't the two days 'meet' on the farther side of the globe? "It isn’t midnight anywhere else; so it can't be changing from one day to another anywhere else. And yet, if Ireland and America and so on call it Wednesday, and Germany and Russia and so on call it Thursday, there must be some place, not Chelsea, that has different days on the two sides of it. And the worst of it is, the people there get their days in the wrong order: they’ve got Wednesday east of them, and Thursday west -- just as if their day had changed from Thursday to Wednesday!" Carroll normally presented the solution to each problem in the following month’s number. In this case he postponed the solution, "partly because I am myself so entirely puzzled by it," and then discontinued the column without resolving the problem. Further curiosities regarding the International Date Line: Why couldn't one orbit the world and advance the calendar indefinitely? Edgar Allan Poe, "Three Sundays in a Week" A time-traveling swimmer Softball at the North Pole Paul Sloane and Des MacHale have written a whole series of books of lateral thinking puzzles. This week's puzzle on Salvador Dalí's brother comes from their Ingenious Lateral Thinking Puzzles (1998). Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

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, portfolio, and online store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com slash closet and enter offer code closet at checkout. A better web starts with your website. 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 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 14. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host, Sharon Ross. Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host, Sharon Ross.

In today's show, we'll meet an unlucky stewardess who lived through three successive ocean liner accidents in the 1910s, play with the international date line, and puzzle over the identity of Salvador Dali's brother. Dan Cash wrote into us this week to say, you mentioned on episode 13 that when tossing a penny, it focuses the mind onto which way you hope it comes up. I was listening to a feature on BBC Radio 4 yesterday about a study which had been commissioned, whereby people who really were stuck on the horns of a binary dilemma tossed a coin and lived by the option they were confronted with. People who were told by the penny to go on a diet ended up happier and healthier. Who'd have thunk it? But there is a lot they have to say about being prepared

to switch directions in life if that's what you need. Dan sent a link to the interview he had heard, which was an interview with the behavioral economist Stephen Levitt, who's probably best known as being the co-author of Freakonomics. Levitt and his colleagues set up a website where people can go and help figure out which of two courses of action they should follow. So, for example, people were, you know,

should they get a tattoo? Should they quit a job? Should they go on a diet? Should they end a relationship? These sorts of things. Have a baby, get married, when you just couldn't figure out which one to do. Basically, the way they set the website up

is it takes you through some steps to help you think through and perhaps resolve your dilemma if you can. But if you find yourself still stuck, basically, they'll flip a coin for you. And then you're supposed to follow whichever path the coin indicates for you. That's good. Yeah. And then what they were doing is they were sending follow up questionnaires to people to see, did you follow the coins advice? And how did that work out for you? The goal of their project is to learn whether or not there are any systematic rules that they can figure out to help people with decision making. So like, do people who make changes

tend to be happier? Do people who keep the status quo tend to be happier? They just wanted to see, could they see any big patterns here? Stephen Levitt made the point that it's hard to do research on decision making in the social sciences. If you think about it, you can't really randomly assign people to get married or to have a baby. Yeah. And if you study groups who did one versus the other, the groups could differ from each other in significant ways. And in a lab setting, of course, you can't even study big decisions at all. You can only study very small decisions. Little arbitrary things. Yeah, or arbitrary decisions you've made people make. So they're hoping that this project will allow them to study people who are trying to make like

a significant decision, but are truly undecided and feel like they could go either way with it. When I checked the website earlier this week, it looked like over 46,000 people have used the coin flip to help them make a decision, which I thought was very cute. The goal of the project was to collect data on 30,000 people. So the site is still available to help people make their decisions, but it looked to me like they aren't still collecting the same amount of data. So if you go to the site now, they'll still help you try to make the decision. They'll flip the coin for you, but it looked like they're maybe not collecting the same amount of data as they were before. Stephen Levitt said that they're currently analyzing their data, and so far, the only finding that really stands out is that people who were told to go on a diet by the coin toss and did so were significantly happier than those who didn't, which Dan had referenced in his email.

That's the main finding they've found so far. So maybe the answer is always go on a diet if you're undecided. In the interview, Levitt said that he thinks that in general, people shy away too much from making changes. That he was saying that change usually has short-term negatives or costs that are usually very apparent. And there's just this hope of a long-term benefit that's a little more abstract. Yeah, because that's out of the distance. If you're going to start a diet, you know that's going to entail some short-term unpleasantness that you don't want to face.

Yeah. And it's balanced by some imagined, you know, I'll be happy sometime in the future, but that's not as immediate. Right. So he was saying, and that in general, people tend to weigh near future considerations more heavily than distant future considerations when they're making any kind of decision. So you see the near future consequences as more immediate, obviously, and weigh that more heavily. That makes sense.

Yeah. So he thought that doing this coin toss might give some people the push that they need to just break the status quo and finally make a change. Additionally, he said that people may tend to put off decisions in general. You have this idea of, well, I'll just, you know, keep doing what I'm doing today and I'll figure out tomorrow if I'm going to quit my job. Or I'll decide next week about going on the diet, you know, and you just keep putting off making the decision. And he thought that there might be a benefit to committing that I'm going to make the decision right now. Even if it's governed by a coin flip, I'm making the decision and I'm finally going one way or the other. So thanks to Dan for writing in to let us know about that. We'll have a link to the Radio 4 podcast that interviewed Stephen Lovett

and to the website on the coin flipping experiment in our show notes. And if you have any questions or comments for us, please email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com or leave a comment in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. Most people know that the Titanic was a member of the White Star line of ocean liners, but I think most people don't know that it was actually one of three of these colossal ocean liners in the second decade of the 20th century. Titanic had two sister ships in that line. One was called Olympic, and the other was Britannic. They were called the Olympic class of ships.

They were intended to be the largest and most luxurious ships to operate on the North Atlantic, just these unthinkably huge ocean liners. And the interesting thing about the three of them is that all three of them were under a cloud sort of. We know what happened to Titanic. And Britannic also sank, and Olympic was involved in an accident early in her career. What's amazing is that there was one stewardess who was involved in all three of those and present on them on all three accidents just by terrible bad luck. Her name was Violet Jessup, and she was marvelously stoic.

She was 23 years old when she signed on first with the Olympic in 1911. And Olympic was just leaving, just departing England on her fifth voyage when she got into this freak accident off the Isle of Wight with a Royal Navy cruiser called the HMS Hawk. This maritime historian I've been reading, John Maxton Graham, says it was one of those incredible convergences in full daylight on a calm sea with inside of land where two normally operated vessels steamed lively to a point of impact as though mesmerized. Wow. There seemed just no accounting for it. Basically, the cruiser just stove right into the side of this giant ocean liner and actually sliced open the second-class cabins, and it was only because it happened at lunchtime that they were empty.

People were up in the dining saloon one level up. So there were no casualties. It could have been much worse. It's just kind of alarming that it seemed to happen for no clear reason. Anyway, Violet wasn't hurt in that and doesn't even include that accident in her memoirs. Oh, because that was so trivial. But she transferred from there to another White Star liner. This is the Titanic the following year.

And we know what happened there. Yeah, I imagine if you've been on the Titanic, then actually a minor accident would be very eclipsed. Yes. She was in her cabin when the ship hit the iceberg and she writes this is what it sounded like crash then a low rending crunching ripping sound as titanic shivered a trifle and the sound of her engines gently ceased she and her uh the one she shared her compartment with were both in their bunks at the time and she looked down looked over into the bunk down at ann turnbull this friend of hers and ann looked up and said sounds as if

something has happened uh so they went out into the passageway and this passing steward told them the ship was sinking and she thought violet thought at first that they were pulling her leg because she told the crew on the titanic about her earlier misfortunes yeah and they had to convince her that no this ship was sinking too and the amazing thing is she doesn't ever mention that that seems like terrible bad luck to have this happen twice. She just tries to deal with it. So she got dressed and began helping passengers toward the lifeboats. And if you've seen James Cameron's film,

a lot of the problem was they knew there weren't going to be enough lifeboats for everyone, so they're trying to allay any sense of panic and succeed a little bit too well. It was hard to get the passengers to really understand how urgent this was. Violet says no one took the seriousness of anything. In fact, she has a little tiny, tiny bit part in that film. If you look at James Cameron's film Titanic, when the ship is sinking, the naval architect Thomas Andrews very briefly stops a stewardess in the passageway and tells her to wear a life jacket to set a good example. Apparently that really happened to the real Violet. It's really quick. In the film, they call her Lucy, and I don't think she even says a word, but that's based on a real little incident there.

So she helped as many passengers as she could and then got into a lifeboat herself. And just before she did that, someone handed her a baby, of all things. This is kind of a mystery. It was such chaos that she didn't even have time really to think about it. Right. But she was sitting in the lifeboat watching the ship go down and holding someone else's baby at the time. This is how she describes the sinking, finally. A tiny breeze, the first we had felt on this calm night, blew an icy blast across my face.

It felt like a knife in its penetrating coldness. I sat paralyzed with cold and misery as I watched Titanic give a lurch forward. One of the huge funnels toppled off like a cardboard model, falling into the sea with a fearful roar. A few cries came to us across the water, then silence as the ship seemed to right herself like a hurt animal with a broken back. She settled for a few minutes, but one more deck of lighted ports disappeared. Then she went down by the head with a thundering roar of underwater So that's the second ship, the second white star Olympic class liner that she's been on. Yeah, right. That's been in some dreadful mishap. She spent the night, as everyone else did, in the lifeboats

and was picked up by the Carpathia. And on the deck of the Carpathia, she was standing there sort of numb and freezing. And someone came and took the baby from her. And she said she was so just already bewildered that she didn't really register what had happened, but she did write later, I did wonder why, whoever its mother might be,

she had not expressed one word of gratitude for her baby's life. So she got through that okay, but endured a lot of teasing because the one thing that she couldn't find on the Carpathia was a toothbrush, which apparently she wanted very badly and complained about that and just took all kinds of teasing for that later on in her life. Her brother Patrick told her, never undertake another disaster without first making sure of your toothbrush. But that was all the complaining she would do.

She's had two ships in calamitous disasters around her, and she's sort of adapting to learn, okay, next time this happens, I've got to get a toothbrush. Right, carry a toothbrush. So now she's been on two of the three Olympic-class liners. She switched to the last one, the Britannic. It's amazing to me that she would be even willing to go back to sea again. Yeah. That's just amazing to me.

But she does, and meanwhile, World War I is starting. So this is November 1916. She's working on the Britannic, this other gigantic white star liner, which has been sort of enlisted as a hospital ship to work during the helping wounded soldiers during the war. And there was a nurse on board who was sick. So Violet was in the pantry making up a tray for her when she heard another terrible noise.

Suddenly there was a dull, deafening roar. Britannic gave a shudder, a long, drawn-out shudder from stem to stern, shaking the crockery on the tables, breaking things till it subsided as she slowly continued on her way. We all knew she had been struck. So that's three now. It had hit a mine in the Aegean Sea. She said the difference between this and titanic is that everyone cleared out now i think because it was wartime there was no need to

urge people to act quickly which is a good thing because britannic went down quickly went down in 50 minutes um so she she went below and helped the nervous got her into her life and then ran to her own cabin she said the passageways were already slop. And she sorted out the things she wanted to take, which were the things she said she treasured most, a ring, a clock that had been a gift from a friend, her prayer book, and a toothbrush. I was going to say, yeah, she had to get the toothbrush. She said she was determined not to be sunk without one again,

which is a very good attitude. And this was by far the worst. Each of the three sinkings, they get worse and worse as she goes along, unfortunately. When she reached the deck, there were only two lifeboats left aft on the port side. So she got into the last one, and the odd thing is when it went down, as soon as it hit the water, all the people in the lifeboats in that area jumped overboard into the water. And she couldn't understand why at first until she turned around and saw that the propellers,

these giant propellers, were spinning and drawing in the lifeboats and cutting them to pieces. What was happening is the captain, the ship hadn't quite sunk yet, and the captain was desperately trying to get it into shallow water before it could sink. And he didn't realize there were lifeboats back there that he was cutting up while he was doing this. So she wasn't hurt. What wound up happening is that she herself jumped overboard as well.

She said it was the first time in her life she'd been underwater. She sank. She came up, hit her head quite badly on the keel and then found a man's hand and came up. So she wasn't hurt there and managed to get into the lifeboat. And actually, they lost the ship, but their only 28 lives were lost on the Britannic.

The total was low because it wasn't carrying any patients at the time it hit the mine. But this historian, Max Dunn Graham, says if it had had the full complement of patients at the time, the death toll likely would have been even higher than Titanic's. Right. So she sat in another lifeboat, just as she had, what, four years before, and watched this ship sink.

She says, just like the Titanic, her stern rose straight into the air at the last and then slid quickly out of sight. There's a great last scene here. She writes in her memoir, afterwards, while I was brushing my teeth, trying to get rid of some of the oil and cork dust, there's a knock on the door. Assistant matron looked in. She evidently thought it superfluous to congratulate me on being still alive or to inquire if I were hurt. What she did say, however, was, and with that, that was the end of her bad luck. I think everyone gets a compliment of bad luck in their lives most of us sort of spread it out evenly

but some people it's all compressed into five years or so and you get it over with and you're done she lived for another 55 years and died of heart failure in 1971 i wonder if she still had all her teeth that's a good question uh the interesting thing is that she, this writer who I'm getting all this from, John Maxton Graham, was in that way much later in 1970 was writing, setting out to write a book about this era of the giant ocean liners. And asked his mother, who had spent a lot of time crossing back and forth on the Atlantic, if she knew anyone who we might interview for this book. And she remembered this stewardess, Violet, who had apparently sat up with her when she was feeling unwell on one of these crossings and they became friends basically so he recommended that uh her son talked to violet right but the interesting thing is at that point violet was at the end of her life she was 82 years old and she told maxton graham i was the first writer of

any kind to ask her about her experiences aboard either Titanic or Britannic. And she died the following year. Wow. So it's just a coincidence that he wound up talking to her. Yeah. And it sounds like if he hadn't, then no one would ever know any of this. This wouldn't have been recorded at all. Yeah. So there's sort of a double.

I'm kind of amazed at the story for two reasons. One, that this would happen to anyone. Yeah. Second, that she took it as well as she did. And third, that it almost was entirely lost. She wasn't going to share it with anyone. She had written up a memoir that did get published later, but he wound up editing it. So there's all sort of a tenuous link there that any of this got out at all.

Interesting. We'll have a link to the post about Violet, as well as a photo of her, in our show notes. well as a photo of her in our show notes. 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, portfolio, and online store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com slash closet and enter offer code closet at checkout. So maybe you've been thinking that you'd like to have your own website, but wow, that's really an overwhelming task. Where do you even start in creating your own website? Yeah,

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When you decide to sign up, go to squarespace.com slash closet, and make sure to use the offer code closet to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for Futility Closet. That's squarespace.com slash closet, and use offer code closet. Squarespace. A better web starts with your website. Back in 2006, I published a story on Futility Closet about this marvelous chance occurrence that happened in the middle of the Pacific about 100 years ago. And I've begun lately to have my doubts about it. It's still a great story, though. It concerns a New Zealand passenger steamer called the Waramu that was crossing the Pacific from Vancouver to Australia on the night of December 30th, 1899, when the captain saw this once-in-a-lifetime

opportunity. He managed to stop the ship at the intersection of the equator and the international date line just at midnight. Uh, so that at that moment, the ship was straddling two different hemispheres, days, months, years, and seasons all at the same time. And the passengers could stroll back and forth between them. Uh, and then the downside is, uh, December 31st disappeared entirely. If you, if you cross the you cross the dateline at midnight, you jump from sort of two days ahead. They went right from December 30th right into the new year. They skipped a day. The captain, John Phillips, is quoted as saying, I've never heard of it happening before,

and I guess it won't happen again until the year 2000. And you see this story repeated all over the place. Shipping and navigation maritime magazines tend to pick it up. I've found it in a journal of watch and clock collectors. And one reason I've been sort of growing suspicious about it is none of them quote the source. The only place I can find it that even attempted to find a source was a 1999 article in the London Times, which cites what it calls the long-defunct magazine Ships and the Sea. And if you track that down, that dates from 1953. So it seems fishy that such a wonderful story wouldn't have been reported contemporaneously. You know, I can't find any accounts from 1900.

Right, so nobody started actually reporting it until 1953. So I've been wondering where it did come from, and I think I have a guess at least. There was an actual ship called the Waramu, a New Zealand passenger steamer, just as in the story. And that's actually the ship that Mark Twain was taking across the Pacific to collect experiences for what would become his book Following the Equator. And there's a part in that book, chapter five, when he's sort of meditating about, they're approaching the dateline going west, and he's meditating on what that will mean, and that's actually an entertaining passage in itself. This is in September 1895, they're traveling west from

Vancouver to Australia. He says, September 8th, Sunday, tomorrow we shall be close to the center of the globe, the 180th degree of west longitude and 180th degree of east longitude, and then we must drop out a day, lose a day out of our lives, a day never to be found again. We shall all die one day earlier than from the beginning of time we were foreordained to die. We shall be a day behind hand all through eternity. We should always be saying to the other angels, find day to day, and they will always be retorting, but it isn't today, it's tomorrow. We shall be in a state of confusion all the time, and shall never know what true happiness is. And the next day he writes, and wholly unrealizable when one comes to consider it. While we were crossing the 180th meridian,

it was Sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were and Tuesday in the bow where I was. They were there eating the half of a fresh apple on the 8th, and I was at the same time eating the other half of it on the 10th, and I could notice how stale it was already. The neat thing about this is that this actually would work in principle. Ideally, you'd want to shift the whole thing up one year because the year 1900 belongs to the 19th century and not to the 20th. So it doesn't actually straddle two centuries either way.

If you did that, if someone did this with a ship heading southwest at midnight on December 30th, 1900, so that it crossed that intersection of the equator and the international dateline just at midnight the bow would be in 1901 tuesday summer january the 20th century and the southern hemisphere while the stern was in 1900 sunday winter december the 19th century and the northern hemisphere and you could sure enough walk back and forth between them. In fact, if you shifted the whole thing up from there another hundred years, you could throw the millennia in there as well. Yeah.

Which perhaps someone has done. The downside with all these schemes is that you lose New Year's Eve. You can't have a New Year's Eve party because you're jumping right from December 30th into January 1st. But this time story actually threw in, I hope this actually happened, I don't know, there was a Memphis couple, Kanzi and Cheryl Takayama, who had arranged to celebrate New Year's Eve in Sydney, and then when that was over, to take a morning flight to Hawaii across the dateline so they could celebrate it again. So they had two New Year's Eves. We'll have a link to our post about the Waramoo, to Mark Twain's meditation in following the equator, and to a collection of further puzzles and oddities regarding the International Dateline in our show notes.

So this week, we thought we'd try a lateral thinking puzzle and see if we can stump Greg. Greg and I have been big fans of lateral thinking puzzles for many years, and how they work is the person who is doing the guessing is given a story that seems inconsistent or unusual or doesn't make a lot of sense. And it's the guesser's job to ask yes or no questions and try to figure out what's the underlying story

that makes this all actually make sense. Right. Okay? But I can only ask yes or no questions. Only can ask yes or no questions. And because we need to be fairly brief, because we have a time limit of the show, Greg's only going to get about three minutes, and then he's going to get a hint. And then at four minutes, he'll get a second hint.

And if he can't get it by five minutes, we'll put a dunce cap on him, and he'll have to sit in the corner with it. Okay. So the puzzle we're going to use for this week, on him and he'll have to sit in the corner with it. Okay. So the puzzle we're going to use for this week I got from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 1998 book Ingenious Lateral

Thinking Puzzles. Okay? Are you ready? I'm suddenly intimidated. Yes, go ahead. Okay. as a surrealist painter. This younger brother had great international success and the word genius was used to describe him. His name was Dali and he did not change it. Yet today, the world remembers only one Dali and few people even know that he had a brother. Why is this? Okay.

The first thing with these things is to test every assumption. When you say Salvador Dali, you mean the artist, the painter? Yes. And he had the painter? Yes. And he had a brother? Yes. Not a half-brother or a robot or a werewolf or something?

Do you know the brother's name by any chance? Yes. Oh, you're not going to tell me. Is that important? Do I need to know it? Yes. Oh, crap. All right.

I can't just guess that outright. Okay. All right. I can't just guess that outright. Okay. Moving on. Okay. So this happened after Salvador Dali's death, right? What happened after Salvador Dali's death? The brother became famous. Yes.

Okay. So the brother wasn't famous at the same time as Salvador. Is that true? I can't answer the question as it's worded. Okay, Salvador Dali had this big celebrated career as a painter. Okay. And then he died. Okay.

And then some time passed. Okay. And then his brother became famous. Incorrect. Okay. Salvador Dali had a big celebrated career as a painter. Yes. And then he died. Yes. At some point celebrated career as a painter. Yes. Then he died.

Yes. At some point, his brother became famous. No. All right. All right, skip that. His brother participated in Salvador's fame? No. Is it that...

When we say they're brothers, you mean what I'm thinking of is what most people think of as brothers. Yes. Were they both painters? No. Do they have any other brothers? Are there other people involved? No. Just the two of them? Yes. And you said the brother, whatever his name was,

wasn't a painter right was the brother painting as salvador dali no which brother i'm the brother okay there's salvador dali i'm just wondering if his brother, whoever he was, was producing artwork under Salvador Dali's name. No. Because that would almost explain it. If I understand the question, no. Okay. So I think you said that the brother became famous.

Didn't you? Which brother? Salvador Dali's brother. We're running out of time here. Didn't you say that? Yes, Salvador Dali's brother became famous. After Salvador Dali's death? Yes.

But today the world remembers only Salvador Dali and not his brother, generally. Yes. So the question is, if his brother became famous, why is he not famous today? No. That's not the question. Give me a hint. Okay, first hint. Salvador Dali's younger brother was a brilliant surrealist painter, but his older brother never knew this.

Salvador Dali's younger brother was a brilliant surrealist painter, but his older brother never knew this. And this came to light only after Salvador Dali's younger brother was a brilliant surrealist painter, but his older brother never knew this. And this came to light only after Salvador Dali's death? Yes. Salvador Dali was the older brother of this other painter? Yes. I'm just confirming everything now. And it's not... See, the problem with these, I'm perseverating now on the idea

that he was painting under his brother's name. Right, yeah, you can't get stuck on one idea. You have to shift off. That's why it's lateral thinking. You have to be flexible in your thinking. Okay. You want a second hint? Yes.

You're really stuck. The two brothers had something important and unusual in common. Important? Or were they twins? No. Okay, they're both surrealist painters. No.

I know this is going to be obvious, but I'm not going to get it. Oh, I got one more minute. Important and unusual in common. Yes. Apart from being artists. No. They weren't both artists correct salvador dali was an artist yes didn't you just tell me that the younger brother was a brilliant surrealist fainter i'm missing just completely missing the point here let's go back to one of your very early questions that i said was going to be important you asked if something was important if the name of the brother was important and i said yes

well i can't just guess randomly at a name can i should i try to guess the name sure was it salvador yes oh you're kidding no Wait a minute. They both had the same name? Yes, they did. They did. Basically, there was a Salvador Dali who died at age seven. And then nine months later, his parents had another child and also named that child Salvador. So both brothers were named Salvador, but they weren't living at the same time. It was only the younger one, obviously, who went on to become a painter. Wow. And one of the very first questions you asked was, is the name of the brother important? And I thought, oh gosh, he's going to solve this in like 15 seconds. It's going to be

some puzzle. It's like, there goes that puzzle. All of 15 seconds. That was really good. Yeah. Okay. So we did stump Greg with our lateral thinking puzzle this week. Yes. And next week we're going to see if Greg can stump me. Well, that wraps up another episode for us. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com

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