Futility Closet - 044-Ballooning to the North Pole

Episode Date: February 1, 2015

In 1897, Swedish patent engineer S.A. Andrée set out in a quixotic bid to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon, departing from Norway with two companions and hoping to drift over the top of the world and come down somewhere in the Bering Strait. Instead the expedition vanished. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll learn what happened to the Eagle and its three brave passengers, and consider the role of hindsight in the writing of history. We'll also learn what the White House planned to do if Neil Armstrong became stranded on the moon, and puzzle over why seeing a plane flying upside down would impact a woman's job. Sources for our segment on S.A. Andrée's attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon: Henri Lachambre and Alexis Machuron, Andrée and His Balloon, 1898. George Palmer Putnam, Andrée: The Record of a Tragic Adventure, 1930. Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geology, Andrée's Story, 1930. Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geology, The Andrée Diaries, 1931. Alec Wilkinson, The Ice Balloon: S.A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration, 2011. Here's the Eagle after its downfall, as recorded by Nils Strindberg's cartographic camera. Even if he'd succeeded, Andrée's bid would have tested the limits of balloon flight: 750 miles separated Spitzbergen from the pole, and the three men would have had to cross another thousand miles to reach the Bering Strait. To get to the pole and then safely back to land in almost any direction would have meant traveling 1,500 miles aloft, and a balloon must travel almost always directly to leeward. Here's the eulogy that William Safire prepared for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the event they became stranded on the moon in July 1969: Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind. The last line is an allusion to Rupert Brooke's 1914 poem "The Soldier": If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener David White, who sent these related links (warning -- they spoil the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page 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 also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. 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 44. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll learn about S.A. Andre, a Swedish patent engineer who set out for the North Pole in a balloon in 1897 and disappeared for 33 years. We'll also learn what the White House planned to do if Neil Armstrong became stranded on the moon, and puzzle over why seeing a plane flying upside down would impact a woman's job. impact a woman's job. The second half of the 19th century was a heroic age for polar exploration.

That was just at the point in history when reaching the North Pole, the pole is one of the last inaccessible places on earth. And that was just at the point where tech like you just just be touching the limits of technology of reaching there at all. So it attracted a lot of romantic attempts. One of them was by a Swedish engineer for the Stockholm Patent Office named S.A. André, who advanced the idea of trying to reach the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. This was at the very end of the 19th century. He wanted to cross from Svalbard in Norway across the Arctic Sea, basically going over the top of the world and coming down somewhere in the Bering Strait, either in Russia or Canada. It sounds maybe odd to us today to try to get to the pole in a balloon, which is really at the mercy of the winds, but he hoped to get around that by using what are called drag

ropes, which are these very long ropes that the balloon would drag along, which the drag would orient the balloon in a certain direction, and then you could use sails to pull you forward. That was the hope. He had done some testing of that with an earlier balloon and sort of demonstrated that the concept of that could work. There was a lot of sort of national enthusiasm for this idea in Sweden, which had fallen somewhat behind the other Scandinavian countries in trying to reach the pole. And he was able to get actually a million dollars in today's money in funding for this project. And he got a lot of media attention as well from around the world, including Europe and America. He was very, Andrei's kind of a tricky character to understand. He's very optimistic in his claims for what a project

like this could accomplish and in his claims in the media for what he himself would do. And it's hard to know if that optimism was genuine. I think most of it was, or whether he was just sort of putting it forward as a way to help, you know, gain momentum for this idea that he was trying to accomplish. You mean whether he was overly optimistic? Yes, because of what happened. He didn't succeed, and it turned into kind of a tragedy, but that doesn't mean he was wrong to try it.

He ordered a big, varnished, three-layer silk balloon, 67 feet in diameter from a famous balloon maker in France, and named it the Eagle. His whole plan relied on the idea that the wind, of course, would blow from the proper direction and that no snow or ice would adhere to the balloon, which turned out not to be the case. He did a test run in 1896 that actually ended quite badly. The wind was blowing consistently from the north, so he couldn't even get started, and they just had to pack up and go home. And I'm guessing they had very poor

weather prediction skills back then to be able to predict what way the wind would be blowing. Yeah, and in that test run, he was going to go with two companions, and one of the men who was going to accompany him then noticed that the balloon was also, in addition to this wind problem, was leaking hydrogen more than they had expected and would just kind of lost confidence in the whole endeavor and declined to go on the next attempt the following year in 1897. So he got another companion to replace him. And that turned out to be a fateful observation

because that's sort of what happened. The balloon leaked more hydrogen than they planned on. But they went ahead with it on the next summer, July 11, 1897. They took off from Svalbard. Andrei's last admonition as they took off was, don't be uneasy if you receive no news from me for a year, and possibly not until the following year. He thought they would actually reach the pole relatively quickly, but then they'd have to go beyond it and reach some civilization there, and you can't really steer the balloon that well. So they'd come down somewhere and then have to probably walk quite some distance in order to reach someone, and then of course journey all the way home again.

So it wasn't too alarming that it could take them a year or two to actually get all the way back to Sweden. There was almost a disaster as they set off. The friction of these drag ropes, which were several hundred meters long, dragged the basket of the balloon down into the water of the Arctic Ocean. And then the drag ropes broke off and they had to dump a lot of ballast, a lot of sand overboard, more than a thousand pounds of it

to get aloft again. And that's a real fateful moment in the whole undertaking because at that point, if they've lost the drag ropes, they can't steer. And if they've lost a lot of their ballast, the whole craft is less stable stable so at this point it's really just an ordinary hydrogen

balloon but they kept going and it's hard to understand at that point what he was thinking about that the balloon sort of receded over the horizon slowly and uh basically wasn't seen again one writer alec wilkinson says and Andre was the first person to disappear into the air. That's a poetic way to put it. Yeah. You have to remember this is 1897. There are no flying machines. There's no radio.

So once you're over the horizon, especially going toward the North Pole, you're sort of unreachable and incommunicado. They might as well be almost on another planet. The balloon carried two means of communication, buoys and homing pigeons, and some of those were recovered later on as people started to search for him because he didn't return. Two of the buoys turned up, and one pigeon actually made it back to civilization. But the messages that Carrie just said, everything's going fine, spirits are high,

they had been released relatively early in the undertaking, and there was just not much you could infer from that. It's hard to understand why he kept going when they lost the drag ropes and so much ballast. The possibilities are that he really was as optimistic as he seemed to be and just thought, well, we'll keep going and we'll make it anyway. Also, there was this sort of impetus of Swedish national fervor behind this, which would have made it, I think, perhaps somewhat hard to back down so early in the going.

And his own bold claims in the media, I think, might have made it difficult to... It would be humiliating, like, to have to admit. In my research, I found this one interesting bit. After the first failure the previous year in 1896, André had had an exchange with the famous Norwegian explorer Fychov Nansen. He'd been written to him asking for some documents, and Nansen wrote later, I expressed the hope that as he had once had the courage to return when he saw

conditions weren't favorable, he would show the same courage again. He wrote back thanking me for the documents, but declared that he would not be able to show that courage a second time. So it's possible that Andre would have realized that the chances were much harder without the drag ropes, but he felt that he had to go on anyway. It's an interesting thing to think of that it would take actually more courage to admit defeat or to admit failure. Than to try to get to the North Pole in a bullet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true. So the balloon was never found. They searched for it actively for a couple years, and then for many years after that,

there were occasional glimmers in the media of people who thought they'd found some evidence of where it had come down, but it was nothing compelling. And in fact, 33 years went by before they found out what happened. In 1930, two ships who were sealing and doing research came upon, there's an island called White Island that belongs to Norway in the Arctic Ocean. It's normally bound by ice and fog. It's very inaccessible. But the summer

of 1930 was especially warm and they were able to get to the island. And there they found a boat under a mound of snow that was full of equipment, part of which was a boat hook engraved with the words Andres Polar Expedition, 1896. And on exploring the island, they found the skeletons of the three men. They'd gotten that far. And with them were a lot of their provisions, including three diaries, journals basically, that the three men had kept. And that helped everyone put the whole story together. Piece it all together.

Also, they'd taken more than 200 photographs, so it's kind of this whole time capsule that they discovered. It's interesting. The balloon, as it turned out, had been sailing much too high. After they dumped the ballast, the balloon rose aloft quite a bit more than they'd expected, and at the lower atmospheric pressure up there, the envelope was leaking hydrogen even faster than they had expected it to. Further, it was wet with rain, which means that ice was forming on it, so the whole business was less buoyant and more heavy than they'd planned on. They were throwing

things overboard to try to stay aloft, but finally, most of the trip, actually, they were just being dragged along the hummocks of the ice instead of actually soaring through the air. And finally, on July 14th, after only just a couple days, they just came to rest there. No one was hurt, and they still had all their provisions and equipment, but they weren't traveling by air anymore. The sources I've consulted differ a great deal about how far they got. I guess it's hard to know, but it looks like they covered altogether somewhat more than 200 miles from the point where they'd started

in a bit more than two days. So as I say, they used the camera and kept records in their diaries of what happened to them. At this point, they were just trying to get back to civilization, and they had basically two choices. They had set up two supply depots in case something like this had happened. One was in Russia, one was in Norway. They elected first to try to get to the Russian one, carrying these heavy provisions in sledges across very difficult terrain, carrying these heavy provisions in sledges across very difficult terrain,

and were making some progress but discovered that the pack ice that they were traveling on was actually drifting north as they were walking south, that they were actually moving backward. So they gave up on Russia and tried heading to Norway, and the same thing happened. The ice was carrying them in the wrong direction. So they resigned themselves instead to just wintering, getting through the winter in the the Arctic and then trying to figure this out in the following spring. So they set up camp on an ice flow and just resigned themselves to being carried wherever that took them. They had happily plenty of provisions and food and they could subsist on polar bear meat and seals. So they were doing okay there and none of them were injured, but Andre hadn't put a whole lot of thought into the provisions they would need to carry with them.

Their clothing was inadequate. They were just miserable and cold and went through all of this. That's interesting because they knew they were going to have to trek. Even if this was all completely successful, there was going to be a certain amount of outdoor living. That's right. And that's down to Andre's optimism again. I think he just wasn't counting on things going quite,

or the conditions being as punishing as they turned out to be. So they set themselves up on this ice floe and actually built a house there. They called it a home out of snow and frozen water, basically, to reinforce the walls. They had all the provisions. They had their food. And happily, the floe started to drift south, which is the walls. They had all the provisions, they had their food, and happily the flow started to drift south, which is the direction they wanted to go anyway, so things were looking pretty good for a while there.

But then the flow began to break up under the hut, and on October 2, they were forced to transfer everything onto White Island, which is where they were found. And Andre's journal grows incoherent a bit after that, but he's optimistic right to the last. The last coherent entry reads, morale remains good with such comrades one should be able to manage under, I may say, any circumstances. There's kind of a puzzle here because it appears from the records that all three of them were dead within a few days of reaching the island, but it's not clear of what. They had plenty of food, so they didn't starve to death, and they didn't appear to have been injured.

The bodies, when they were discovered, were taken back to Sweden, where they were celebrated as national heroes, but then the bodies were cremated without examination. So it's not possible to establish formally a cause of death for them, and it's become, since then, sort of an armchair pastime to try to sift through the evidence to try to understand what actually killed them. And it's become, since then, sort of an armchair pastime to try to sift through the evidence to try to understand what actually killed them. I must say this whole story was just a joy to research. It's mountains of extremely well-organized records of what was discovered and the whole history of the expedition. I'm interested in that his diaries seem to become kind of incoherent. Well, I think that's partly because his writing was less clear,

and also from the images I've seen, the diaries themselves were damaged somewhat, so I think the latter pages were just harder to understand. I was trying to decide if he was losing his mind or if he had some illness or some physical condition that was making him unclear. Well, that's possibly a clue. I don't know about that. The suggestions that have been put forward as to what may have killed him are trichinosis from eating undercooked polar bear meat, which is apparently something you can get. Is it? Vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bear liver, which is certainly a real threat, but one that we know they were aware of.

some misadventure like one of them may have fallen or an accidental gunshot wound or something. The bodies were just practically skeletons by the time they were discovered, so it would have been hard to recognize an actual injury. Yeah, but then all three of them would have had to have had accidental wounds or fallen or something. Possibly carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty stove, lead poisoning from the food cans, scurvy, although polar bear meat should have kept them safe from that, botulism, hypothermia, dehydration, suicide by opium. They had plenty of opium and that's a possibility. They had opium with them. Yeah. Interesting. And a polar bear attack. At least

one of the bodies showed some evidence of having been at least investigated by a polar bear, but it could have happened after they died. Yeah. Or something we haven't thought of. That's just an interesting sort of sidelight there that no one's quite sure what killed them. I wondered as I read all this whether it's possible to die of disappointment. Because apart from failing in their whole expedition there, they had been making headway on this ice flow. And it looked like they would get home before the winter hit. And then they found themselves having to decamp onto this island where they knew they'd have to get through a bitter Arctic winter before they could even try again.

And they were certainly already exhausted and miserable, even by that point. That was only October. I could also imagine if you had opium with you and you were in that state of mind, it might induce you to use more opium. Yeah. So I guess we'll never know at this late date.

As I say, it's kind of hard to read Andre's mind and what he was thinking through all this. Of all the voluminous documentation that came to hand on White Island when the bodies were discovered, there's really only one passage in his diary that kind of really gives you an insight into his own private thoughts. And that goes back to when the balloon was sailing in the early hours over the ice but sinking his they'd been struggling to keep it aloft and throwing things overboard and finally his two companions went to rest and apparently andre was just alone in the gondola writing in his diary and sort of communing with himself and what he wrote is it is not a lot it is not a little strange to be floating here

above the polar sea to be the first to have floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder, shall we have successors? Shall we be thought mad, or will our example be followed? I cannot deny but that all three of us are dominated by a feeling of pride. We think we can well face death, having done what we have done. And it just makes me think, these things are always judged in hindsight by history. I mean, at that moment when he was writing that, he could reasonably believe that they were going to make it

and become history-making heroes. And it's only when they hit the ice and couldn't get going again that he became more and more of the story turned tragic. But it seems to me he was proud of the fact that he'd even tried. Like he was saying, even if it doesn't work, we're still proud of ourselves for trying. Yes. Yeah. He wrote, is not the whole perhaps the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality, which cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a man in the ranks forgotten by coming generations. So it was a noble effort and one that could well have succeeded. And it's only

from our perspective that it looks less promising just because of what we learned since then. So I just think that's an interesting lesson that these attempts are worthy and it's only sort of a roll of the dice that determines whether they'll be successful or fail. A big thank you to everyone that has joined our Patreon campaign so far. We are so grateful to everyone that wants to support the podcast and be a part of our Futility Closet community. Yes. Everyone that has pledged at least a dollar an episode gets access to our activity feed,

where we post random musings, behind-the-scene peeks into how we put the show together, and occasional bloopers. So if you become a supporter, you can find out what part of the show tends to make Greg crack up laughing. Just not the one you'd think. Our amazing $20 a show supporters last week got their first bonus episode, where Greg and I challenged each other to a game loosely based on the game chronology. We came up with a set of events, and the other person had to put them in the correct chronological order. So if you pledge $20 a show, you can hear me attempt to figure out whether ice skates were invented before or after the Taj Mahal was built. Or find out what happened to the first traffic light. That's true. We also have some other rewards for the different levels between $1 and $20.

So you can see all the details of the Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or we'll have a link in our show notes. Greg and I put in many hours a week researching and creating the show, so we really appreciate everyone's support. On July 18th, 1969, two days before the first lunar landing, the presidential speechwriter William Sapphire got a call from Frank Borman. Borman was himself an astronaut. He'd been the commander on Apollo 8, and he was calling with sort of, I guess, a delicate suggestion is what you'd call it. What was going to happen in two days was that the astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, were going to go down to the surface of the moon and then afterwards try to come back up again and rejoin the command module.

And Borman said, there's a chance something will go wrong technically, and they won't be able to do that, in which case the two of them will be stranded on the surface of the moon and die there, which no one had really thought that through before. But if that happened, they didn't want to be caught flat-footed. They had to have some provision set up, some way to mark that happening and honor their sacrifice and sort of announce this in some gracious way to the nation and the world. So Borman was calling saying, we have to come up with something that we hope we'll never

have to use. So Sapphire had only about a day to think something up, but he came up with, I think, what is a good plan. President Nixon in that event would call the astronauts wives and then appear on television and read this text. Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery, but they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in

mankind's most noble goal, the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends. They will be mourned by the nation. They will be mourned by the people of the world. They will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one. In their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked

at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied, but these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind. Sapphire also suggested that there be some sort of public ritual in which a clergyman would commend the astronaut's souls to what he called the deepest of the deep, sort of modeled on a burial at sea. Happily, they never had to do this.

In fact, the whole plan was forgotten until it was rediscovered in 1999. There's kind of an interesting footnote to this, too, though. Sapphire, many people know, was a journalist by trade and styled himself as something of a language expert. In addition to writing this text, he had another contribution to that mission, and that was to write the text for a plaque that they left, Armstrong and Aldrin left on the moon, and it's still up there. The plaque reads, hear men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind. And Sapphire found out after it was too late to do anything about it, that that's ungrammatical. It should be, instead of July 1969 AD, it should read July AD 1969. Sapphire said,

can you imagine the first piece of writing sent into space contains a grammatical error, and I made it. It's been a little while since we've mentioned that there are Futility Closet books. If you enjoy the kinds of things that we do on this show, then you should check them out on Amazon. They are a little different than the show in that everything in the books is short, unlike some of the pieces on this show. But the books are just fun little chunks to fill your spare minutes. Like the show, the books have quirky history, but they also have things like bizarre inventions,

quotes, odd words, and various puzzles to challenge your brain. So head on over to Amazon and check them out. This is our lateral thinking puzzle segment. And this week, I will be giving a puzzle to Greg, who will have to try to solve it asking only yes or no questions. We always feel like we're just about to take a scary exam. We are. Okay, so I don't about to take a scary exam. We are. Okay. So I don't have to take the exam this week. It's Greg's turn. Uh, this is another David White puzzle.

Okay, good. I like those. We have had some really terrific David White puzzles and here's another one. Catherine is out shopping one day when she is astonished to see a plant, an airplane flying upside down soon afterwards because of the events triggered by this incident, Catherine no longer has her job. Wow. Is this true? No. Okay.

Does it matter that she's out shopping, or is it just that she sees a plane flying upside down? No, it matters that she's out shopping. Is shopping part of her job? No. Okay. Okay. Uh, no, it matters that she's out shopping. Is shopping part of her job? No. Um, okay. Does she serve as some formal kind of witness to this event? In other words, does she... No.

All right, so it's not that her giving testimony or something betrays that she was shopping when she should have been doing it. Oh, correct, yes. Is she... That's a good thought. Should she have been shopping? Should she have been doing her job and was instead shopping? No, that's not correct.

I'm just jumping around here. Alright. Catherine is out shopping when she sees a plane flying upside down. Yes. And as a result of the series of events, she loses her job, did you say? She no longer has her job. Is she fired? No.

Wow. Alright. It matters that she's shopping. Yes. I don't know even where to start with this one. Okay, let's start with the plane. That seems like the significant thing. Okay.

Airplane meaning what I think of as an airplane? You know, an aircraft? No. You hesitate. Yes, I am hesitating. Could you be more specific or detailed in your question? An airplane. Frame a whole question. You're just saying you're starting with an airplane.

She sees an airplane that's an aircraft of some kind. She sees a man-made craft flying through the air. No. Okay. Can you read it again, just that section? Catherine is out shopping one day when she is astonished to see an airplane flying upside down. So it would be accurate to say she sees an airplane flying upside down. Yes. Would we say she sees the image of one? Yes. Okay.

Is this like a film? No. Some work of fiction? No. But an image, like a picture? Yes. A picture of an airplane flying upside down? Yes, that's what it says in the puzzle. I mean, is it a picture? I don't even know how to ask this. Is her perception accurate? Is she really seeing a picture of an airplane flying upside down?

She is actually seeing a picture of an airplane that is upside down. Does she take it to be the real thing? She doesn't realize it's a picture? No, that's incorrect. She sees a picture, recognizes it's a picture, and sees on it the image of an airplane flying upside down. Yes. Okay, and is that connected to what she's shopping? To her shopping?

I mean, she wouldn't have seen this, obviously, if she weren't shopping. Correct. Is that because she's in just some shopping district vaguely, or she was actually shopping for something specific? I don't know that she was shopping for something specific, but it's not because she was in vaguely some shopping district either. Is this like an art auction or something like that? No.

Okay. Was she considering buying this picture, perhaps? Was she considering buying it yeah like is she shopping for i don't understand what you mean by considering if was she shopping for pictures or art of some kind and she this is one of several pictures that she saw um that's as you're phrasing that that's no not what's going on which means maybe no no no just as i'm understanding your question that that's not. Okay. You're not kind of approaching this right.

Is the location important? I guess it is. Is she, by shopping, you mean she's looking for things to buy? Correct. Is there anyone else involved? Are there other people involved in this story? Not importantly. Okay.

Is a picture a photograph? No. That would help you to know what the image is. Is it a painting? No. It's two-dimensional? It's not like a sculpture or something? Correct.

Two-dimensional. It's not a painting? It's not a photograph? Is it a drawing? No. But it's flat. Yes. Is it, I mean, made by a human artist?

Would you call it a work of art? No, I wouldn't call it a work of art. Was it made by someone she knows? No. Painting. Not a painting. No, I know. I'm thinking if it's not a painting, not a drawing, an illustration.

It's a representation of a plane flying upside down. Yes. That is correct. And it would help me to know what the medium is. Is that what you would call it? I wouldn't really call it a medium, no, because it's not a work of art. But I guess I understand what you mean, and yes, for what you mean. And it's not photographic, so it's not even like a slide or a...

That's correct. Negative. That's correct negative that's correct she sees it do i need to know the um sort of the venue where she's seeing this is it a store like a retail store um do you know the answer it's a store um i can i'm not sure on the exact definition of retail. Okay. So that might just be my limitations. Okay. My vocabulary here, but it's not like a retail store like a Walmart. Okay.

I'm still trying to get what the... But it's definitely a store. What the image is. Would it help me to know the size of the image? Yeah. Can I call it an image? Sure. Is it the size of, say, a television screen?

No. Smaller than that? Yes. Smaller than that? Yes. Like a postage stamp? Yes. It's a postage stamp?

Yes. Oh, oh. That's the inverted Jenny. It is the inverted Jenny. Let me see if I can remember this because I don't quite have it. I think there's a famous postage stamp that shows an image of an aircraft upside down. Uh-huh. And it's valuable and rare because I guess it's a misprint or something right exactly so they only did a few of them and

then so how did this lead to her no longer having her job when she saw this image while she's out shopping was she looking at postage stamps i mean was she not specifically or something that she was pursuing but you saw that and no longer had her job. Oh, did she use it as a postage stamp? No, no, no, no, no. No, so she's out shopping. She sees one of these stamps. Is it for sale?

Yes. Okay, but you said she didn't get fired. I thought... She didn't get fired. She sold it? Yes. She sold the stamp? Yes.

While shopping? No, not while shopping no no no no she sold the stamp she bought the stamp and then sold the stamp and then why would she no longer have her job because it was very valuable and she didn't realize that okay no she did realize that she you say she bought the stamp and then sold it yes and how much would she sell it for um but i'm just confused who would who would she sell a stamp to a famous misprint stamp well did she reckon did she know that it was yes okay yes i'm still not. You sounded like I was almost there, but I don't feel like you were anywhere close to the finish line. Because she sold it for a whole lot of money.

And then she no longer has her job. Oh, I see. Okay. She quit her job. I was still hung up on her somehow having been fired for this. No, I already told you she wasn't fired. Okay, yeah. So she's rich. So, David says,

the upside-down airplane is not a literal airplane, but a postage stamp. It is, in fact, the inverted Jenny, the most famous misprinted stamp in the world. Catherine discovers this misprinted stamp in an antique store as she's looking through a collection of old letters and paraphernalia.

She buys the stamp from the owner, who is unaware of its value, sells it for a fortune, and retires from her job. I see. David goes on to say, Admittedly, I'm taking a bit of a liberty here. I'm assuming Catherine sells the stamp in short order and makes enough money to retire.

It appears the most an inverted Jenny has sold for has been slightly under $1 million. But perhaps Catherine's stamp was sufficiently desirable, or Catherine's living standards modest enough that its sale gave her enough to retire on. Yeah, I would think $1 million. You could probably do that. Yeah, depending where think a million dollars, you could probably do that. Yeah, depending where you lived and how much you needed to buy. Good. I like that one. Thank you, David. So thanks so much to David. And if you have a puzzle for us, you can send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

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