Futility Closet - 028-The Real-Life Sherlock Holmes

Episode Date: September 29, 2014

Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, a physician who trained Arthur Conan Doyle at the University of Edinburgh. During his medical lectures, Joseph Bell regularly astonished his students with insights into his patients' lives and characters. "From close observation and deduction, gentlemen," he said, "it is possible to make a diagnosis that will be correct in any and every case. However, you must not neglect to ratify your deductions." In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll meet Joseph Bell and review the stories of his legendary acuity. We'll also take a tour through Greg's database of unpublished oddities and puzzle over how having your car damaged might be a good thing. Our segment on Joseph Bell, the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, was based on Northeastern Illinois University literature professor Ely Liebow's 1982 book Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes. Our original post on Joseph Bell ran on April 27, 2014. Harry How's 1892 Strand feature "A Day With Dr. Conan Doyle" is reprinted in the Conan Doyle Encyclopedia. Joseph Bell wrote the introduction to the 1892 edition of A Study in Scarlet -- Wikisource has a scan. Somewhat related: When Arthur Guiterman twitted Doyle for having Holmes denigrate other fictional detectives that had obviously inspired him, Doyle responded in kind. You can listen using the player above, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. 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!

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 29. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll meet Joseph Bell, the Edinburgh University surgeon who was the real-world model for Sherlock Holmes, sample some unpublished items from Greg's extensive database, and puzzle over how having your car damaged might

be a good thing. Sherlock Holmes is now one of the most famous literary characters in the world, but a lot of people don't know that he was based on, or at least largely inspired, by a real man. Arthur Conan Doyle had originally set out to be a doctor and had got his medical training at the University of Edinburgh, and there he met a lecturer named Joseph Bell, who would train his students to be aware not just of what the patient was telling him, but to actually look and see his appearance and mannerisms and just other things about him, because all

of that informs the clinical picture. You know, there may be things that he's ashamed of or embarrassed about that he doesn't want to tell you, and just things that he himself is even not aware are there that can help you to make the right diagnosis. Bigby clues, yeah. Here's an example. So Doyle witnessed all this, and apparently it really impressed him. The way this all worked is that at Edinburgh,

there would be a big amphitheater full of medical students, and Bell would be at the bottom, and they'd bring out an actual patient, and Bell would make the diagnosis there in front of them and explain how he was doing it. And sometimes, instead of doing it himself, he would call on a student. So this is the first example. This is from a former student of his named Harold Jones. What is the matter with this man, eh?

Then flashing a signal to one particular student with those piercing eyes, Dr. Bell would indicate he should pronounce the diagnosis. No, you mustn't touch him. Use your eyes, sir. Use your ears. Use your brain. Your bump of perception. And use your powers of deduction.

The student, totally perplexed, stammered, Hip joint disease, sir. Dr. Bell would lean back in his chair, put those long, delicate fingers together under his chin, and admonish the young man the same way he admonished the nurses and female medical students. Hip, nothing. The man's limp is not from his hip, but from his foot. Were you to observe closely, you would see that there are slits cut by a knife in those parts of the shoes where the pressure of the shoe is greatest against the foot. The man is a sufferer from Korn's, gentlemen, and has no hip trouble at all. But he has not come here to be treated for Korn's, gentlemen.

His trouble is of a much more serious nature. This is a case of chronic alcoholism, gentlemen. The Rubicon nose, the puffed, bloated face, the bloodshot eyes, the tremulous hands and twitching face muscles, with the quick, pulsating temporal arteries all show this. These deductions, gentlemen, must however be confirmed by absolute and concrete evidence. In this instance, my diagnosis is confirmed by the fact of my seeing the neck of a whiskey bottle protruding from the patient's right-hand coat pocket. Never neglect to ratify your deductions.

So he was just pouring out this method constantly, and Doyle in particular was really impressed by it. Doyle started out as a medical doctor in his career after he finished his training and wasn't very successful. He had a hard time getting patients. But he more and more began to think about writing fiction as an alternative career and was inspired by a lot of the detective stories that were being published at the time. But he writes in his autobiography, he was trying to think of how to write something more distinctive instead of just a generic whodunit. And he writes, I felt now that I was capable of something fresher and crisper and more workmanlike, but could I bring an edition of my And he writes, Here's another example that Doyle himself gives.

You see, gentlemen, he would explain, Long discharged? No, sir. A Highland regiment? Aye, sir. A non-commissioned officer? Aye, sir. Stationed at Barbados? Aye, sir. You see, gentlemen, he would explain, the man was a respectful man, but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He is an heir of authority, and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British. To his audience of Watsons, it all seemed very miraculous until it was explained, and then it became simple enough.

It is no wonder that after the study of such a character, I used and amplified his methods, when I later in life tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits. Sherlock Holmes, the stories were published in the strand magazine and really exploded immediately in the 1890s when they first came out. And as people tried to learn more about how Doyle had come up with the character, they interviewed him and he mentioned bell. And so they went after bell and bell acknowledged, I mean,

mostly modestly his contribution. Um, and wrote a little himself, uh, in the Pelmel Gazette, he wrote about Arthur Conan Doyle. I always regarded him as one of the Pell Mall Gazette. He wrote about Arthur Conan Doyle. I always regarded him as one of the best students I ever had. He was exceedingly interested always upon anything connected with diagnosis

and was never tired of trying to discover those little details which one looks for. Of the method, he said, the great majority of people, of incidents, and of cases, resemble each other in the main and larger features. Most men have a head, two arms, a nose, a mouth, and a certain number of teeth. It is the little differences, themselves trifles, such as the droop of an eyelid or whatnot, which differentiates men. Here's another example. This is from a classmate of Doyle's named Clement Gunn. One day a woman silently entered and, without speaking, handed to Dr. Bell a small vial stoppered with a plug of soft paper around which was wound some black thread. Joe immediately said,

Well, ma'am, so your man's a tailor, and how long has he been ill? The woman looked surprised and confirmed the information. When she left, Joe remarked, It was quite evident that this woman herself was not the patient. She was too well. She wore a wedding ring, but was not dressed as a widow. The vial was plugged with some of those stoppers of paper on which tailors wind their threads when in use. Bell said about Doyle, I don't know if I remember to say this, Doyle served as his clerk, so on top of being just an ordinary medical student, he had particular access to Bell and to these methods. So on top of being really impressed by them personally, he had a lot of experience with them.

Bell wrote, Doyle was always making notes. He seemed to want to copy down every word I said. Many times after the patient departed my office, he would ask me to repeat my observations so that he would be certain he had them correctly. I recollect one time when a patient walked in and sat down. Good morning, Pat, I said,

for it was impossible not to see that he was an Irishman. Good morning, Your Honor, replied my patient. Did you like your walk over the links today Well, Conan Doyle could not see that, absurdly as simple as it was. On a showery day as that had been, the reddish clay at bare parts of the links adhered to the boot, but a tiny part is bound to remain. There is no such clay anywhere else around the town for miles. Once the patient was gone, Conan Doyle made me explain about the boots and clay, and he wrote every word down in his little book. And in fact, in the Sherlock Holmes story called The Five Orange Pips, Holmes tells a client, you've come up from the southwest, I see. The client says, yes, from Horsham. And Holmes says,

that clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toe says, yes, from Horsham. And Holmes says, that clay and chalk mixture, which I see upon your toe caps, is quite distinctive. There's a famous episode when Bell challenged the students to identify a bitter drug. He had it in a tumbler, and they saw him put a finger into the tumbler and then pop a finger to his mouth. And he made each of them do this, and it was very bitter and a very unpleasant experience. He waited until they had all done this and then said, gentlemen, I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you has developed this power of perception, which I so often speak about. For if you had watched me closely, you would have found that while I placed my forefinger in the medicine,

it was the middle finger which found its way into my mouth. Uh, as I mentioned, um, uh, Doyle was interviewed quite a bit when Sherlock Holmes became popular. And he told a reporter for The Strand named Harry Howe, all this impressed me very much. He was continually before me, his sharp, piercing gray eyes, eagle nose, and striking features. There he would sit in his chair with fingers together. He was very dexterous with his hands.

And just look at the man or woman before him. He was most kind and painstaking with the hands, and just look at the man or woman before him. He was most kind and painstaking with the students, a real good friend. And within Edinburgh, actually, Bell had quite a reputation. He wasn't known just as medical students, but to other students who passed through Edinburgh University and just to people around town. Conan Doyle was part of sort of a cohort of writers who came up in Scotland at the same time. So among his fellow authors who knew of Bell were Robert Louis Stevenson and James Berry, who's the creator of Peter Pan.

They had both gone to the University of Edinburgh, and they knew him by reputation as a teacher. Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouting movement, recalls a patient who was brought limping into the medical amphitheater. And he writes, Dr. Bell asked one of the students the cause. I don't know, sir. I haven't asked him. The doctor replied, well, there is no need to ask him. You should see for yourself. He has injured his right knee, his limping on that leg. He injured it by burning it in the fire. You see how his trouser is burnt away at the knee. This is Monday morning. Yesterday was fine. Saturday was wet and muddy. The man's trousers

are muddy all over. He had a fall in the mud on Saturday night. Then, turning to the patient, he said, you drew your wages Saturday and got drunk, and in trying to get your clothes dry by the fire when you got home, you fell on the fire and burnt your knee. Isn't that so? Yes, sir, replied the amazed man. Bell wrote in Harper's Weekly in February 1894 about how he thought the experience of reading the Holmes stories may have benefited people in general about applying this method in their own lives. He said, I should just like to say this about my friend Doyle's stories, that I believe they have inculcated in the general public a new source of interest. They make many a fellow who has before felt very little interest in his life and daily surroundings

think that after all there may be much more in life if he keeps his eyes open than he had ever dreamed of in his philosophy there is a problem a whole game of chess in many a little street incident or trifling occurrence if one once learns how to make the moves and this is the real uh i think the most telling excerpt about dole acknowledging his debt to Bell's influence in creating the character. He wrote to him in a letter on May 4th, 1892, It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes, and though in the stories I have the advantage of being able to place him in all sorts of dramatic positions, I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in

the outpatient ward. Round the center of deduction and influence and observation which I have heard you inculcate, I have tried to build up a man who pushed the thing as far as it would go, further occasionally, and I am so glad that the result has satisfied you who are the critic with the most right to be severe. So we have JoBell to thank on top of training lots of medical students to being a strong inspiration for the character of charlotte combs it's kind of amazing it sounds like i mean not only did his mind contain so many details like you know what kind of clay could be found in what place but it sounds like he would spot these details almost immediately and then could immediately connect

it to just the right detail in his mind to make a deduction. So it's like so many different superpowers, you know, like immediately spotting the details and then having this great fund of knowledge and immediately linking them up to make the right conclusion. What struck me in researching this is it's not just Doyle who was impressed by this. It's not just that it was a turn of mind that he was pretty impressive it impressed a lot of people and particularly the medical students who went through there all many of them remember not just the fact that he was so acute but that he could apply this and it really showed benefits for his patients um after Arthur Conan Doyle died his youngest son Adrian sort of resisted the notion that Bell had been an inspiration.

He tried to say that Sherlock Holmes had been dreamed up more entirely by Doyle himself, just out of his imagination. But there are so many letters like this and interviews and stuff where it's not only does Doyle credit Bell, but all these other people came out and said there's just a very strong resemblance there. And I think there's no shame in acknowledging an inspiration. Doyle still gets all the credit, not just for fleshing out that sort of intellect as a detective, but coming up with the stories themselves, the mysteries and all the rest of it.

So there's no, this is not to take anything away from Doyle, but it is interesting. Yeah, right. Bell died in 1911, but he's remembered not just among Sherlock Holmes fans. The Japan Sherlock Holmes Club erected a plaque to him at the site of his home in Edinburgh on the centenary of his death, which was in 2011. And that building is now the Japanese consulate. We'll have links to further anecdotes about Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell in our show notes at futilitycloset.com.

If you haven't yet seen our book, you should head over to Amazon and check it out. Look for Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements. It's full of hundreds of short, intriguing tidbits, a tantalizing mix of historical oddities, Okay, I think we've done this at least once before. In writing Futility Closet, I do a whole lot of library research, and what I wind up with is a big database full of notes, some of which just sit around for years without ever getting used. So what I've started doing here on the podcast is just periodically giving you big bunches of miscellaneous notes. So here we go in no particular order. bunches of miscellaneous notes.

So here we go in no particular order. On June 19th, 1954, horticulture graduate student Fred Gall was doing research in the Great Smoky Mountains when a bear ran off with his backpack. In the backpack was a notebook, and in the notebook were seven years of thesis notes on azaleas that he'd been working on. They never found the bear, they never recovered the backpack, and Gall had to finally abandon his PhD program because he just didn't have anything to work on anymore. Can you imagine trying to explain to people why you didn't get your PhD and having them actually believe you that that's why you didn't finish your degree? Ever since I read about that, I've been trying to confirm it, and I haven't been able to, but I found it in Richard Howard's Almanac of Botanical Trivia, and Howard himself is a botanist, so I'm afraid that's likely to be true. I mean, I'm sorry, but I think it probably is.

The good news is the bear has a PhD. Last July, I wrote that Eric Clapton grew up believing that his mother was his sister, which is true. He was illegitimate, and in order to spare him the stigma of that, his family sort of came up with this story that his grandparents were his parents, and they said that their daughter, his mother, was his sister, and he discovered this later. When I published that last July, a reader named Rainis Kutris wrote in to say that, believe it or not, the same thing is true of both Jack Nicholson and Bobby Darin. Both of them grew up believing that their mothers were their sisters. I don't know Bobby Darin's story, but Jack Nicholson was 37

years old before he found this out. A Time magazine reporter was doing a story on him and looking into his background and realized that this was the case and called him up and told him, and Nicholson said, I was stunned. So you can imagine getting to 37 years old before finding that out. And to find it out from a reporter. Yeah, just a phone call just in the middle of some random day. I just wonder what that would do to you psychologically. I mean, just your whole universe, nothing is what you thought it was.

None of it, yeah. The most essential details of your childhood. So apparently that's unfortunately more common than I realized it was. This is just, I just think this is a charming detail from the biography blake bailey's 2009 biography of the short story writer john cheever uh in 1945 cheever was 33 and he moved his family his wife and his daughter to a ninth floor apartment on the east side of manhattan and every morning he had one suit and every morning he would put on the suit and take the elevator down to the lobby

with all the other men who were leaving the apartment building for the day to go to work. They'd all get out at the lobby, but he would take the elevator down into the basement where he'd go into a storage room, take off the suit, and write in his boxers till noon. And then he'd put the suit on again and go back upstairs for lunch.

He did that for five years. And there's nothing wrong with it, I guess. guess it's just i guess if you're a writer you have to work out what routine works best for you and i can't imagine how he came up with that i guess if his wife wanted to get a hold of him or had a question or something she'd just have to come down to the basement i'm just wondering if nobody ever discovered him in the storage room in his boxer shorts. That would be quite a surprise. I don't know. I couldn't find a quote from Cheever explaining why he preferred that routine. I don't know anything more about it than that, but that's the case anyway. Here's a detail from Brenda Rosen's Atlas of Lost Cities about Mirage in Malta.

She says, quote, There are many reports of sailors seeing floating cities. One of the best documented examples took place in July 1943 in the Mediterranean Sea east of Malta when 93 U.S. Navy sailors, the entire crew of a ship, saw a city floating in the sky. Sailors described the fantastic beauty of the city's white marble buildings, gardens, and tree-filled parks. Many people, including children and dogs,'s white marble buildings, gardens, and tree-filled parks. Many people, including children and dogs, could be seen walking, playing, and sitting on lawns. The mirage would seem to keep pace with the ship, lasted for several hours. That's a wonderful story. The reason I haven't written it for the blog is I can't find any substantiation for it at all.

She says it's one of the best documented examples, and it's certainly striking. I hope it is true, but I can't find anything. I think it must be a hoax that just got published anyway. If anyone knows different, please let me know, because I think that's a very striking story if it's true. Here is a random detail from the New York Times obituary of the mutual fund manager Philip Coray. Coray made his professional career founding and managing a successful mutual fund, but he had an odd, I guess you'd have to call this a hobby. This is from the New York Times. After seeing his first total solar eclipse in 1925 in westerly Rhode Island,

he traveled fanatically around the globe to view 19 more, the last in February in Barbados. Viewing a solar eclipse was, quote, a deeply religious experience, Mr. Coray said in 1981, but he also recognized that its attraction was somewhat mysterious even to him. Quote, I don't think I can explain it to any rational person, he said. I bet there's a word somewhere for having a passion for eclipses. There's got to be. Yeah, it made me think. I can't remember what put me onto this. It was some passing reference in another book. So I confirmed it in the New York Times, but I'll bet you there are other people who chase them around like that. And I bet you're right. There's probably a word for it. Ghosts in a Martian department store is an evocative phrase that was found when the science fiction writer

Cyril Kornbluth died. That phrase, ghosts in a Martian department store, was apparently found on a piece of paper that he had wrapped around a typewriter platen to improve its surface. Nobody knows what it means. It sounds presumably it was an idea for a story he was planning to write, but no one really knows for sure, and nobody knows what the story was that he had in mind. Frederick Pohl found it in the typewriter after he died. I think a number of other writers have found ways to work that phrase

into their own writings as tributes to Kornbluth afterward, but nobody really knows. As far as I'm aware, nobody really knows what he meant by it. That would be almost an amusing game, to try to find a way to work it in inconspicuously into a story. So it just looks natural, yeah. Ghosts in a marching department store.

Last year, I wrote about the Soviet MiG pilot named Nikolai Skuridin, who was in kind of an embarrassing incident in 1989. He was doing a training flight in Poland, and the afterburner on his jet failed, and he thought the whole engine had failed, and so the plane was going to go down. He ejected and realized too late that the plane, the engine was mostly fine because it went flying off to the west

across a huge 500 miles of Europe over several countries that was followed anxiously by a lot of other defense departments around the continent. And the Soviets had to tell them, please don't worry, I know this looks terrible, but we're not attacking you. It's just a runaway jet. It wound up crashing into a house in Belgium after covering 560 miles. After I published that last year, reader Bob Dixon wrote in to say, actually, there's an even stranger, or I guess more exaggerated, of the same type of thing that happened 10 years later in the United States. The American golfer Payne Stewart was flying in a Learjet from Orlando, Florida, headed for Dallas, Texas,

but apparently the cabin lost pressure because it turned right and just kept going, and they couldn't get, sort of the same thing, they couldn't get a hold of the pilot or anyone there, and that plane, believe it or not, covered all the ground between Orlando and wound up crashing in South Dakota, of all places. It had covered 1,500 miles, almost three times the distance that Scuridon's jet had covered, and that was, at the time, that was, I think, the peak of Payne Stewart's career. He was quite famous and very successful at the time. It's just kind of a strange and sad way to die. The ten ugliest words in English you'll be pleased to know.

This is according to a survey of the National Association of Teachers of Speech in 1946. Here we go, the ten ugliest words. words. Cacophony, crunch, flatulent, gripe, jazz, phlegmatic, plump, plutocrat, sap, and treachery. I bet you could come up with a way to work them all into one sentence if you really tried. I bet you could. Actually, it wouldn't be that hard. The trouble with lists like this is that it's hard to form an opinion about the sound of a word without having that opinion informed by what the word means. Yeah. Like I with if you told me a french word i don't speak french i could tell you more objectively i think whether the sound of it was beautiful but if you ask me you know is is cacophony a pretty word i'd probably wind up saying no uh the writer arnold

bennett once said that pavement was the most beautiful word in english and i think that's maybe not the most beautiful but it's the sound of it is quite nice. I've always thought, conversely, that tranquil is an ugly word just on the sound of it. If you didn't speak English. Tranquil. Yeah. It does have a very hard sound to it. Max Beerbohm wrote,

The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes. And there's a beautiful little story anecdote. I don't know if this is true, but I think it is. It's in David Cecil's 1964 biography of him. One day, Max Beerbohm and his friend Robert Hitchens were walking down the street, I guess, thinking about this. Beerbohm said, Do you think, Crotchet, that a word can be beautiful, just one word?

And Hitchens thought about it and said, Yes, I could think of several words that seemed to me beautiful. And there was a pause, and Beerbohm said, Then tell me, do you think the word ermine is a beautiful word? Hitchens said, Yes, I like the sound of it very much. Beerbohm let another silence pass, and then said, And what about vermin? Hmm. Which is a telling point, I think.

Yes. So that's a batch there. Thanks to everyone who's been writing and contributing to these over the years, and I'll try to share more of them in future episodes. If you can shed any light on any of these that I haven't been able to confirm or debunk, I'd appreciate it. Some of them are quite good stories, but I don't want to publish them without some stronger confirmation than I have.

You can write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. In our lateral thinking puzzle segment this week, Greg is on the hot seat for trying to answer a situation, only getting to ask yes or no questions to try to puzzle it out. And this week's is actually another true story like last week's. Okay. So here's your puzzle. Ready? Yep. A young woman purchases a car.

Soon after, the car is very badly damaged, but she ends up being quite pleased that this has happened. Why is that? Does it have something to do with insurance? No. Okay. Is the young woman's specific identity important? No. Is the time period important? No. Is her occupation important? No. When you say a car, do you mean like a full-sized automobile? Yes. And this really

happened? This really happened. Have I ever heard of this woman? No. You're saying her identity is important? No. I mean, I can't answer who you've heard of or haven't heard of, but you don't personally know her. Okay. Is the location important? No. In any way? I mean, the country or the... No. Other than, I mean, it happened in a real specific place, but it could have happened somewhere else. But that's not important to solving the puzzle. Right. And you say the vehicle is badly damaged. Yes. Do anything to the kind of car? No. Did it ask you say the vehicle is badly damaged. Yes. Do I need to know the kind of car? No. Did I ask you if the time period's important?

As long as cars have been invented. All right. Fair enough. Are there other people involved? Maybe. Maybe. I'm trying to think. Could you be more specific?

Involved in what way or in what part? I guess we'll get to that. Okay. Do I need to know specifically how the car was damaged? I'm sure I do. Was it in what might be called an accident? Not. A collision with another vehicle?

A collision with something else? Was the car moving when it was damaged? No. No, it wasn't? No, it was not. Is this a natural calamity of some kind like a disaster a comet hit it or something yes weather weather related but something natural yes okay so the car wasn't moving when it was damaged that's correct was it totaled i mean

was it just destroyed um i don't think it was completely totaled, but it was very badly damaged. Okay. But she was pleased. She was pleased. Was she pleased because she came out of this financially ahead somehow? Yes. But not because of insurance? Correct.

In the end of it, did she still have the car? No. Did she sell the car? Yes. She sold the car for a lot of money yes but she couldn't have done that before it was damaged that's correct that you're totally correct that's bullseye all right that's progress of a sort um all right so she she had the car. Yes. And it was a working, functioning car that she was using. Yes.

Driving around the way you or I might. As far as I know. It was damaged in some way. Could we say that she damaged it? No. Okay, so this happened to the car without her planning it. Correct. But she came out ahead.

Yes. By selling it. Yes. Okay, so I ahead. Yes. By selling it. Yes. Okay, so I need to know who she sold it to. Not necessarily. I mean, you could, and I could answer that and it could help, but that's not going to be the most fruitful line of inquiry. Alright.

She sold a damaged car. Do I need to know I don't know how to ask this. She sold it to some person or concern who wouldn't have bought it otherwise. That's correct. Would anyone have bought it? I mean, if it was just a normal working car and she'd wanted to sell it before it was damaged, she could have sold it, right? I presume.

To this same party that did buy it? Probably not. Because they wouldn't have been interested. That's correct. All right. Okay, so this party that bought the car, would they have bought it if it had been damaged in some other way? No. So they bought it specifically because of how it had been damaged?

Yes. All right, I think we're getting somewhere. So the car was damaged in some unusual way that made it noteworthy and thus more valuable. Yes. I'm getting everything but the coin. But you understand now what it is you need to figure out. All right. That's a big start.

Okay. So you said it wasn't in an accident or a collision. Right. No, I don't think what you would normally consider an accident. Okay. And I asked you if it was moving or just damaged. I think you said no. It was not.

It was stationary. So say it was just parked somewhere. Yes, it was damaged. I think you said no. It was not. It was stationary. So say it was just parked somewhere. Yes, it was, actually. And you said it was sort of a natural event that led to the damage, but not weather-related. Correct. So not a flood or a hurricane. Correct. Neither of those.

Or an earthquake. Correct. Nothing like that. Something struck the car. Yes. I feel like I'm getting some rants. I feel like I'm getting absolutely no. Something natural struck the car. Something of a natural origin struck the car. Something fell on the car. Yes. You're getting lots of yeses. I'm doing better than I usually do.

Was it a meteor or a comet or something that came actually out of the sky? Yes. Are you serious? Yes. This really happened? This really happened. Yeah, that's pretty much it. The car was hit by what's called the Peekskill meteorite on October 9th in 1992 in Peekskill, New York.

Oh, my God. 18-year-old Michelle Knapp had recently purchased a 1980 Chevy Malibu for $300. So it was this old, ratty, used car for $300. But it was hit by a 26-pound meteorite. And she sold the car

to the wife of a meteorite collector for $10,000. Wow. And sold the meteorite itself to a consortium for $69,000 for it hitting her little $300 car. Which was just like parked at the curb somewhere?

Yeah, parked in her driveway. The car has been on display in a number of museums around the world. And it's been estimated that the meteorite that hit it was traveling at about 164 miles per hour when it hit the car. So it was this really big 26-pound meteorite that just slammed into the car. And made her rich. And made her rich. So it worked out to her benefit. Very good.

Thank you. If anybody has a puzzle that they'd like to send in for us to use on the show, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. If you'd like to help support our podcast so that we can continue to produce it, there are a few things that you could do that could really help us out. For one, we appreciate everyone that has been spreading the word about us, and continuing to recommend us to others would be a big help for us. Also, if you or someone you know would like to be a sponsor or buy ads on the

podcast, please write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Another way to help support us is to click on the donate button on the sidebar of the website. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, check out our book on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample over 8,000 captivating diversions, perfect for filling five minutes or 50. You can also see our show notes for this episode of the podcast or listen to past shows. You can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.