Futility Closet - 038-The Thunder Stone

Episode Date: December 14, 2014

In 1768, Catherine the Great ordered her subjects to move a 3-million-pound granite boulder intact into Saint Petersburg to serve as the pedestal for a statue of Peter the Great. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll learn how some inspired engineering moved the Thunder Stone 13 miles from its forest home to Senate Square, making it the largest stone ever moved by man. We'll also learn whether mutant squid are attacking Indiana and puzzle over why a stamp collector would be angry at finding a good bargain. Our segment on the Thunder Stone is based on Yale linguist Alexander M. Schenker's impeccably researched 2003 history The Bronze Horseman: Falconet's Monument to Peter the Great. Here's an engraving by Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe, The Barge With the Thunder Rock Steadied by Two Cutters of the Imperial Navy En Route to St. Petersburg: Listener mail: Intrepid listener Dan Noland has found five newspaper articles on Indiana's oil pit squids -- his page includes background information and commentary. Wikipedia has an article on Lucian's early satirical science fiction story, which can be found in Greek and English here. This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 1994 book Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Please keep sending puzzles -- Sharon's becoming impossible to stump. Please consider becoming a patron of the Futility Closet podcast -- you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can listen to this episode using the player above, download this episode directly, 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 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 38. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll learn about Russia's heroic efforts to move a 3 million pound boulder to St. Petersburg in 1768. We'll also find out whether mutant squid are attacking Indiana and puzzle over why a stamp collector would be angry at finding a good bargain. Before we get into today's features, we want to tell you about a new initiative we're trying for the podcast.

We started the show in April with the idea that we could get enough advertising to pay us for the time it takes to make each episode. But unfortunately, we're finding that Futility Closet is more of a niche show than most advertisers are looking for. Our listeners like it, but the show doesn't really lend itself to selling products. We don't want to change the show, but this does mean we need another way to keep it going. Futility Closet is our business, so we need to be sure that each part of it is justifying the time it takes. Unfortunately, this just isn't being the case with the podcast. But we found a new model that we're hoping will allow us to continue making the podcast. Patreon lets listeners support the projects they value by pledging recurring donations, so you can choose an amount to contribute toward each episode of the podcast. It can be a lot or a little, and you can change it

or cancel it whenever you want. If enough of you do this, it'll give us enough support to keep doing the show. At the Patreon website, you can see more about how this works, and you can also see some rewards we've set up to thank donors for their help. You can learn more about all this at patreon.com slash futility closet. That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash futility closet, where you can see our show notes for the link. Thanks for considering this. With your help, we can keep bringing the show to you. Okay, the Thunderstone. I actually wrote this up in a post for the Futility Closet website in early November, but there's so much amazingness here that I couldn't shoehorn it all into one blog post. So I wrote it up here for the podcast just because I think it's this whole story. Everything about this story is fascinating, and most of it is almost impossible to believe, but this all actually happened. In a city square in St. Petersburg in Russia, there's a statue of Peter the Great.

The statue's called the Bronze Horseman, which is enormous. Most equestrian statues are just a guy on a horse, but the pedestal he's standing on is usually unremarkable. This is not that. The pedestal is huge. It's bigger than the statue, and they're both gigantic. The statue is 20 feet tall, and this pedestal is 25 feet tall, so the whole thing is 45 feet tall. And it's not just a pedestal, it's sort of a cliff. It was sort of conceived and fashioned by a French sculptor named Étienne Falconet for this purpose by Catherine the Great.

And he pictured it as the horse sort of running up this cliff and rearing dramatically right at the brink. Peter the Great was this great czar who modernized and sort of expanded and consolidated the Russian Empire and founded the city of St. Petersburg in 1703. So they wanted to have a suitably gigantic and dramatic monument to him. Impressive, yeah. And this certainly is. Anyway, the point of all this is that, great as the statue is, the pedestal remains to this day the largest stone ever moved by man anywhere ever. And it was moved in the middle of the 1700s with 18th century technology and an amazing feat of engineering. The whole thing is just basically impossible, but they actually pulled it off.

Catherine wanted to do this not just to honor Peter the Great, but because she herself wanted to sort of legitimize her reign. Catherine the Great wasn't Russian. She was German and had married into the Romanov line, and then her husband was toppled in this palace coup, and so she was on the throne but sort of didn't have any really legitimate claim to it. So one way to sort of improve on that state of affairs is to start a big patriotic effort by the people that'll sort of do honor to this great, admired early Tsar and in so doing sort of raise pride among the people

and sort of link her name to his. It was all kind of canny in an interesting political way. So she engaged this French sculptor, Falconet, and he conceived the whole thing. The problem is, where are you going to get a giant rock, basically a giant boulder, into the middle of St. Petersburg, because it weighs millions of pounds? It seems impossible to begin with. So they thought,

well, we're never going to get one giant monolith. What we'll do is get six field stones, just six suitably shaped stones, and fit them together with metal clasps, and that's the best we're going to do. But on September 8th of 1768, a local peasant showed up at the Bureau of Buildings saying, I think I have a whole big rock that's what you're looking for. He was a supplier of granite for various construction projects in St. Petersburg. And St. Petersburg is at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland. And this rock he was talking about was on the northern shore or a bit inland from there. So it's about eight miles, I think, as the crow flies from this rock to St. Petersburg. But the rock looked great. They went out and saw it. It was covered with moss. Only six feet were above the ground. It was sort of

in a swamp. Fifteen feet of it were under the surface. But it had the right shape and as they dug it out, they saw that it was a boulder, meaning it was detached. It wasn't attached to the underlying rock. So there was no way to move it, but it was what they were looking for. It was perfect, yeah. So Falcone was both pleased that it had been found and kind of dismayed

that there was no way to move such a big thing intact. And this is where Catherine's, I think, political genius comes in. She conferred with her planners and ordered that it be moved in its entirety, she said, first by land and then by water. And at the time, there was no way of knowing how to do this or whether it was even technically possible. As I was researching this and reading about it, I kept thinking about JFK in 1961 said that the nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before the decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. When he said that in 61, he couldn't possibly know whether it would succeed. So it's sort of his, any politicians, it seems to me that part of being a successful visionary politician is making these sort of calculated gambles and hoping that they come out well. If we hadn't made it to the moon, then JFK's legacy and reputation would have been changed from what they are now, you know. On 69, we make it to the moon, get someone back here, and people say, oh, look at that,

JFK had a crystal ball in 1961. He didn't. It was sort of a gamble in making that challenge. So if we hadn't made it to the moon, either people would have forgotten that he said it, or like you said, it would have just diminished his reputation. Yeah. But if he does do it, then it looks terrific, and it, you know, it's a source of national pride.

This is what everything Catherine wanted was to sort of a technological coup that would let Russia crow to the rest of the world and raise sort of the national morale and sort of consolidate her own legitimacy on the throne. So she said, move it, move it intact. So they started doing that. On September 26th, they started excavation and construction.

Carpenters began building housing for a workforce of 400 hired hands and 500 soldiers. They cleared the area around the rock, excavated it to a depth of 14 feet and a radius of 100 feet, and built a road, a 70-foot-wide road, all the way down to the Gulf. Their plan was to take it south from its position to the Gulf of Finland, and then somehow transport it by water around east to St. Petersburg on the eastern shore, without being quite certain how they were going to do any of this. This is all just completely impossible when you read about it, but they actually did this. The Unearthed Boulder was, get this, 42 feet long, 27 feet wide, and 21 feet high.

They had no way to measure the weight of something so huge, but assuming that a cubic foot of granite weighs about 175 pounds, that means the weight of the rock was 4 million pounds. Oh my. And it's sitting in a swamp eight miles from where it needs to be. And it's 1768. So it's not clear what to do. The first order of business was to turn it on its side because Falconet, the sculptor, decided that that would be the best position for it to get the shape that he wanted. And even just flipping it was a big order of business. They did reduce the size of it a bit, so the new bottom would be flat, so they reduced

it from four million all the way down to three million pounds. But it's still just enormous and unthinkable how they're going to move it. Interestingly here, Falcone wanted to reduce it even further, but Catherine stopped him because she wanted to magnify the drama of its transport, which is very interesting. That's another JFK echo. He said, we're doing these things not because they're easy but because they're hard. She wanted it to be almost impossible because it would be that much more impressive if they pulled it off.

Right, yeah. It's not what you'd expect a leader to do, but that turns out to be smart to do sometimes. They still didn't have any idea how they were going to move it. They offered a prize of 7,000 rubles for people to come up

with ideas, and they got some odd ones, and the prize eventually went to an aide-de-camp named Captain Carburi, who had this very ingenious mechanism that he came up with. Imagine cutting down a tree

and splitting it in half lengthwise and hollowing it out so you've got two sort of gutters. Right? he came up with. Imagine cutting down a tree and splitting it in half lengthwise and carving, hollowing it out. So you've got two sort of gutters, right? Line both the gutters with copper, put some big copper balls in one of them, and then replace the other one on top of it. So now the top one slides along, if you follow me. So you've got a sort of a track that's very low friction and will slide along. So if you build a platform, if you have a, do that with a number of trees and build a platform on the top, the whole thing will sort of hopefully glide along in these balls. Does that make sense? Yeah, but to support the weight of such a rock, you would need a great number of trees, wouldn't you? Yeah, they did. They had 42

of them, actually. No, they're 42 feet long. I don't have a record. 33-foot copper line wooden gutters placed 15 feet apart as guide rails. I don't think I know precisely how many they had. Okay. But they were enough to support it, and apparently this all... Well, I was just thinking you couldn't do it on one tree. I mean... No, no, no, no, no.

But they had a bunch of them, and then they built a platform on top. Right. But the whole thing that... What amazes me is this worked fantastically well. Cori Burry built a small model with a proportionally smaller load and assembled some scholars and military men and showed them he could push it along with one finger. It was just amazingly successful technological achievement. I'm getting a lot of this from the Yale linguist Alexander Schenker's 2000 book, The Bronze Horseman.

And he says this whole ball and guide assembly was, for all practical purposes, a prototype of today's ball bearing mechanism, but no one thought to take credit for it. So another hundred years went by before these ball bearings were applied in the same sort of thing. Again, that's sort of an echo to the space program or these spin-off technologies that no one would have thought of without the pressure of the problem to solve. Anyway, this worked very well. They got the boulder flipped up in the orientation that they wanted it and planned to raise it up on jack screws and get these things under it and get rolling along um and they had there were four turns in this road there's like a road of four miles you have to uh travel to get down to the bay uh so even there they could go along straight for a while on these things and then they'd have to raise it up and put under a similar mechanism that was circular so they could turn it a bit to aim for the next section of the road there were four of those

but they've got all this ready and we're just ready to go um it was 27 feet high and 21 feet wide at this point on april 1st and they were just starting to go out when the guide rails sank 18 inches into the mud the thaw had come too early so they had to wait for the next winter after all that preparation. So they spent the interval as productively as they could, strengthening the road with stones and pilings, and they built a forge on top of the stone so they could sharpen tools as they went along, and built a pier at the Gulf of Finland

so they'd be ready when it got down there. They just had to wait for the next winter. But that turned out fine. The winter of 1769 came early, and the road froze down to a depth of four feet. And on November 15th, this whole contraption, they called it a mountain on eggs, started moving. They advanced at 160 feet, pulling it along with capstans. So they'd sort of tie ropes from the rock to these sort of spools by the side of the road. And by trudging around the spools and circles, they'd reel in the ropes and pull the whole thing along. And this went, hard to believe, extremely well. An observer said, once it got started, it advanced with the greatest of ease, and the men could run while

turning the capstans almost without exerting themselves, which is just an amazing success, this technology that Carberry had come up with. They used more capstans on the upgrades and used them to slow it down on the downgrades, with drummers providing a beat to sort of coordinate all this effort. No animals and no machinery was used for this. This is all just human power just pulling the thing along in ingenuity.

But using all this, they advanced 500 to 1,300 feet each day. So they made their way all the way down these four miles from where they found the rock down to the Gulf of Finland the boulder was still at this time four times a man's height so you have to picture this thing rolling along its contour

similar to a ship's prow but it's advancing backwards down this path they've created on top there are two drummers drumming and behind them are two smiths working at a forge and there are hundreds of people accompanying it as it moves along some are walking some are turning these capstans some are checking on this chassis to make sure that the rock is still aimed where they need it to um and some have to run along as the as the thing rolls

along it emerges off i mean the track sort of emerges at the bottom back behind of it so there are workers who have to grab these gutters as they emerge and run around to put them in place again. So the whole thing has some place to keep rolling. But all of this worked amazingly. And then the cortege of sleighs that followed the stone after that. All of this, because it was working, was a huge sensation in St. Petersburg. And Catherine the Great herself visited the site on January 20th in 1770 and saw the boulder advance 84 feet. Here's another observer's account.

The forward progress of the boulder made for a rather curious sight. Forty stonecutters were continually working on top of the boulder to give it the desired shape. The forge kept on working. If one adds to this spectacle a cortege of sleighs, one can understand why, despite the rigors of the season, her imperial majesty, the Grand Duke, and the whole court wanted to see it. Every day there was a crowd of spectators from all social stations and ranks who came to view that mass in motion. They actually picked up speed as they went and arrived at the pier at the Gulf of Finland on March 27, 1770. They'd cover five miles in four and a half months, which doesn't

sound like much, but A, they're moving three million pounds. That's still a mile a month. And Schenker notes that in the northern latitudes, St. Petersburg is extremely far north. It's up close to the Arctic Circle. So in the winter, there's only about five hours of working time each day. So that's actually a pretty good clip. They didn't have much time to work. So that's only the first leg.

They've got the rock from where they found it down to the Gulf. Now they have to find a way to move 3 million pounds by water in 1770, which sounds also impossible. The way they accomplished it was to, they decided on building a barge, a very big barge, 190 feet long and 70 feet wide, to sort of distribute all this weight so it wouldn't sink too deep because there were shallows at the estuary of the river they had to get up. It was only 8 feet deep, so they couldn't afford to have it sink too deep in the water. Also, making it extremely broad would

reduce the chance of it capsizing. I kept thinking, if that would, the whole game is over if you don't plan this part well. Because if it goes into the drain, it's not coming back out. But it was, so they leveled the seafloor and put the barge down in the bottom and built a platform on it and carefully moved this giant rock onto it and then raised the whole thing again with jack screws. So anyway, it was afloat then. And they put it, this is almost comical, it looks so impossible. This is still in the 18th century, so they're still using sailing vessels. There's no steamships.

So they put the barge between these two cutters, these two sailing ships. I'll put an image in the show notes because it looks so impossible. There's two cutters with a barge between them and this giant rock on them, and then they have to travel to avoid, to stay in deep water. They had to sail with these ships, attending this rock, three miles south into the Gulf of Finland, and then start heading east, which they did in all of this work, believe it or not. They had to sail east to the mouth of the Neva River and then upstream on the river to St. Petersburg, which isn't too far.

And they did all this past Vasilyevsky Island, past the Winter Palace, which is the official residence of the Russian monarchs, under Catherine's eyes. She could watch it go up the river. She was celebrating the eighth anniversary of her coronation then. And on the following day, it sailed past the Admiralty

and docked at night at St. Isaac's Pier at Senate Square, which is where it is today. Total distance from the landing dock on the North Shore to St. Isaac's Pier is about nine miles by water. This had obviously never been done before, but it was a huge success. They pulled it onto land. The Empress watched this from a window of the Senate building, and a huge success. They pulled it onto land. The empress watched this from a window of the Senate building, and a large crowd of onlookers gathered outside. And then two

weeks later, visiting Prince Henry of Prussia looked on while the boulder was moved 145 feet to its final destination in the center of the square, which is where it is today. And that's where Falconet put the statue of Peter on top of it. So the whole thing succeeded, not just technologically, but politically. Schenker, this Yale linguist who wrote about this, say Russia was now able to claim a technological achievement that excited people's imagination no less than would Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic. It brought Catherine's rule almost as much acclaim as the first Sputnik brought to the Khrushchev regime.

So she got everything. She got her statue of Peter, but she also sort of cemented her own legitimacy and popularity with the Russian people by pulling all of this off. Well, isn't it interesting that she gets the credit? Yes. I mean, I don't know how much of it she actually did. She just said, let it be done. Go do something impossible, and then sing my praises if it works.

Patriotic pronouncements were made that the feet surpassed the building of the Egyptian pyramids, the creation of the Colossus of Rhodes, and the transportation of the ancient obelisks. All of which sounds like hype, but in a case like this, it's actually sort of, you could make a claim for all of that. People went nuts in general. They went back to the forest and picked up ships of the rock that had fallen on this path,

which were now sort of valuable mementos, polished them into cufflinks, jewelry, and knobs for walking sticks. Catherine awarded the crewmen, who were half frozen, with wine and beer, and she issued a medal, I guess sort of to herself, commemorating the whole adventure and her visit to the woods. On her side is her image and her name, and on the other side is the scene in the woods of her watching it move along, and the words, daringly performed, which I think you have to admit she actually earned that. That's not hype either. And this was sung in praises around the world.

One writer said, nothing equally great and marvelous is known in the history of the arts. The Gazette de France described it as incredible, and the English traveler John Carr said it astonished every beholder with a stupendous evidence of toil and enterprise unparalleled since the subversion of the Roman Empire. And they, just to finish the story, they unveiled the monument on August 7th, 1782, which was the day decreed as the centennial of Peter's ascension to the throne, so the timing here was perfect too. And the inscription on it says, to Peter I, Catherine II, which is a nice way of tying them together. It does honor to him, but it also gets her name in there. For posterity. Links them together. Yeah. So as I say, as much as it is impressive as a

feat of an engineering, kind of doing something impossible with inadequate technology. It tells you a lot about successful politics, I think, that you'd think, I would think, that the goal of a leader is to make things easier for the people and to try to find ways to work more smoothly and efficiently and with less effort. But sometimes it makes sense just to make a technological coup to challenge people to do things the hard way or to do something that's just so ambitious it seems almost crazy

because if they pull it off, then everyone benefits. Yeah. We'll have the photo that Greg mentioned plus a photo of the bronze horseman as it appears today in our show notes at futilitycloset.com. If you're still searching for the perfect holiday gift, or maybe a fun little gift for yourself, check out the Futility Closet books.

Both are filled with hundreds of quirky oddities and curiosities, plus offbeat inventions, odd words, and brain-teasing puzzles. Look for them on Amazon, and learn about the world's first arrest by telegraphed, a softball game played at the North Pole, and a magic square found in a multiplication table. In episode 32, Greg reported on oil pit squids, odd creatures that were supposedly found swimming in a sludge pit in a GM manufacturing plant in Anderson, Indiana, back in 1996. Dan Nolan, a very enterprising listener of ours, wrote in to say, My wife and I were listening to episode 32 on our long journey back to Indiana for Thanksgiving

when you happened to mention the very place we were headed, Anderson, Indiana, the town of my birth. You mentioned a difficult-to-check cryptozoological fact about some squid-like creatures being found in the toxic pits in one of the local factories. I recalled this report from my high school days and dug up everything I could on the microfilm at the local library. As a skeptic with a little bit of Fortean in me, I always secretly hope these things are true, but find the more plausible explanation drawing me back. Such is the case here where the operators of the plant claimed that the creatures were a type of bacterial mat that grew in the pit, which seems more likely than squid in a toxic pit 550 miles from the nearest ocean. The part that remains inconsistent seems to be that the workers report killing one of the creatures to put it in

a jar. I'm not sure anyone would use the word kill to describe what happens when you scoop up some tendrils of congealed bacteria. The story never comes to a proper conclusion. The newspaper is only interested in it for a few weeks, and we never learn what the environmental agencies ultimately determined. It is difficult to imagine that they learned much about the creature since the sample disappeared, likely taken home by one of the workers as a souvenir, and the pit had already been drained and cleaned by the time they arrived to investigate. But I filed Freedom of Information Act public records requests

with the EPA and the IDEM just in case. That's what I know so far. That's great. That was really good work by Dan. So Dan has a web page that he created and we'll have a link to it in our show notes he shows all the newspaper articles that he was able to find

along with some background and commentary on the whole situation that he provides if anybody's interested in more one of the funniest articles on Dan's page is about how a national tabloid called Sun had picked up the story the Herald Bulletin article notes that the sun doesn't shed a whole lot of new light on the subject, but it definitely

makes some tantalizing reading. The sun's story is titled, It Came From Plant Nine. And the story starts with squishy squid-like creatures that look like nothing else on earth are thriving in a place where nothing should, a pit filled with toxic waste. The Herald Bulletin notes that this story appears on the same page with a woman who lived for 19 years without eating and a burglar who choked to death on his own flashlight. In episode 36, Greg explained the Great Moon Hoax, in which the New York Sun in 1835 announced the news of the many life forms that astronomers had discovered on the moon. Greg said that this series of stories by the New York Sun looks today like old-fashioned science fiction, but it appeared years before Jules Verne's science fiction stories,

and we wondered if these stories might represent some of the first versions of science fiction. Dean Beretta wrote in on just that to say, just found your podcast and really enjoy it. I was listening to the Great Moon Hoax and thought you might be interested in the earliest sci-fi space story out there. The title belongs to True History by the ancient writer Lucian in the second century CE. The story isn't great by modern standards, but there's some interesting descriptions of the moon and its inhabitants, as well as a space war between the Moonites and the Sunnites. So I checked this out, and True History, or it's sometimes called True Story, was written by the Assyrian satirist Lucian, and Lucian wrote it to

be a satire of other works of the time that were presenting themselves, they were presenting like fantastic or mythic events as though they were really true. So he was just basically writing a satire of that style of writing. In true history, Lucian and his companions have a number of remarkable adventures, including warring with other groups of people while trapped inside a 200-mile-long whale. Part of the story has them caught up in an interplanetary war after being deposited on the moon by a whirlwind. And just in case you're wondering, apparently it takes seven days to get to the moon by whirlwind. True history has many elements in it of science fiction,

including travel to outer space and detailed descriptions of alien life forms. And it even talks about creatures that are the products of human technology. So many do consider it to be the first work of science fiction, although some others, like Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, give that honor to Johannes Kepler's Somnium from 1608, which also involves a trip to the moon and descriptions of the inhabitants, but it has more scientific elements than Lucian's story does. The English critic Kingsley Amis said of True History, I will merely remark that the sprightliness and sophistication of True History make it read like a joke at the expense of nearly all early modern science fiction

that written between, say, 1910 and 1940. So we'll have a link to Lucian's story in both the original Greek and an English translation, for those who don't want to read it in the original Greek, in our show notes. So if anybody wants to learn just what the inhabitants of the moon look like or who wins the war between the Moonites and the Sunites, you can check that out. Thanks to everyone who writes in to us. And if you have any questions or comments, you can write to us at podcast to everyone who writes in to us. And if you have any questions or comments, you can write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

This week, I'm going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to try to stump me with an odd sounding situation, and I'm going to have to try to solve it asking only yes or no questions. This is from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 1994 book, Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles. A keen stamp collector who specialized in U.S. stamps saw an advertisement offering a complete set of early U.S. stamps for a fraction of what it was worth. He quickly bought it. Although it was a genuine splendid collection and a real bargain, Okay. These are postage stamps? Yes.

Just to make sure I understand what we're talking about here. He... Were the stamps somehow different than he expected they were going to be? No. So the stamps were as advertised? Yes. And when they showed up, they were what he expected? Yes.

There wasn't something different about them like they had been used or canceled or... No, that's right. But he was angry anyway. Yes. Did he feel he'd been cheated or defrauded somehow or deceived? In buying the stamps? Yeah. No.

Was he angry because they turned out not to be worth what he thought they were going to be worth no okay are there other people involved that i need to figure out yes ah one other person no multiple other people yes a specific number of people yes a specific number of other people two people two other people two other people involved in this somehow um um are they are their occupations important no are they stamp collectors also no um are they related to him in some way yes are they both related to him no one is related to him one is oh they were his own stamps his wife had his wife had like stolen his stamps and and was selling his stamps somehow um do i need to figure out more is that pretty much it like there's a little

bit more yeah like his okay so his wife had taken his own stamps and was selling them at a fraction of what they were worth as a way to get back from him for him uh because he was cheating on her maybe is that the other person that's also involved? How do you do that? That was like 50 seconds. I only told you like a fraction of it. Oh, well, if you have a puzzle you'd like to send in for us to use and we need them. Yes, desperately. You can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. You can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com,

where you can sample over 8,000 absorbing tidbits. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the sidebar. If you'd like to support Futility Closet, please consider becoming a patron to help keep us going. You can find more information at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or in our show notes. You can also tell your friends about us or leave a review of the books or podcast on Amazon or iTunes. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast Thanks for listening.