Futility Closet - 068-The Niihau Incident

Episode Date: August 2, 2015

After taking part in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese fighter pilot Shigenori Nishikaichi crash-landed on the isolated Hawaiian island of Niihau. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll recount the six days of escalating drama that unfolded between the desperate pilot and the terrified islanders. We'll also hear a list of open questions from Greg's research and puzzle over why a man can't sell a solid gold letter opener. Sources for our feature on the Niihau incident: William Hallstead and Raymond Denkhaus, "The Niihau Incident," World War II 14:5 (January 2000), 38. Andrew Carroll, "A Japanese Pilot Brings World War II to Hawaii's Farthest Shore," American History 48:5 (December 2013): 29-30. Richard B. Frank, "Zero Hour on Niihau," World War II 24:2 (July 2009): 54-61. "U.S. Won First WWII Victory Just Days After Pearl Harbor," Associated Press, Dec. 27, 1991. One particularly gruesome account of the whipping of Emmanuel Dannan appeared in The Living Age in 1855: Accordingly, the man procured six whips -- the toughest kind of swamp willow -- which, by his own confession, were four feet in length, and as large at the butt as one's little finger and about 9 o'clock at night took Emanuel -- who still persisted in telling the truth -- to the loft of the cabin, and having stripped him to his shirt, wound that around his neck, and tied him up, by a cord, by both wrists, to a rafter, so that his feet but barely touched the ground. Here he whipped him for two hours, only resting at intervals to procure a fresh whip, or to demand of his victim that he should own that he told a lie. The boy's only answer was, 'Pa, I told the truth. Pa, I did not lie.' The girl [his sister, the only witness] said that Emanuel did not cry much; and it is probable that he fainted during a portion of the time, as the injuries upon his body, testified that there was not a spot, from the armpits to the ankles, large enough to place your finger upon, but was covered with livid welts; and that in very many places the skin was broken! In this account, which is explicitly directed "to the Sabbath school children of the United States," the foster father tries to "whip the lie out of" Emmanuel -- that is, persuade him to agree that he had imagined his mother's crime. In other tellings the lie is whipped into him -- he's urged to tell a cover story to protect his mother, and he cries, "Pa, I will not lie!" Sources for this week's lateral thinking puzzles: Kyle Hendrickson, Mental Fitness Puzzles, 1998. Erwin Brecher, Lateral Thinking Puzzles, 2010. 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]. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. 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 68. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese fighter pilot crash-landed on an isolated Hawaiian island. In today's show, we'll describe the escalating drama

that unfolded between the desperate pilot and the terrified islanders. We'll also hear a list of open questions from Greg's research and puzzle over why a man can't sell a solid gold letter opener. Okay, this is... I think, actually, you suggested this one. Oh, I did? I think actually you suggested this one. Oh, I did? I think you did. Someone did. This is called the Ni Hao incident. It's a sort of tense drama that unfolded in Hawaii immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

One of the Japanese pilots who participated in the attack was a 22-year-old airman named Shigenori Nishikaiichi, who participated in the second wave of the attack on Pearl Harbor and attacking targets in southeastern Oahu. And the attack itself, from his perspective, went fine. But afterwards, the plan was that the Zeros they were flying, the fighter planes where they were flying, were supposed to rendezvous back and then accompany the bombers back to the aircraft carriers where they had come from. And unfortunately, on their way back to the rendezvous, these fighters were attacked by nine American fighter planes. And as it happened, Nishikaiichi's fighter was hit, puncturing his gas tank. So the plane was still flyable, but he was losing fuel and the plane

was running rough. So by the time he actually managed to get to the rendezvous point, he was losing fuel and the plane was running rough. So by the time he actually managed to get to the rendezvous point, he was alone. Everyone else had gone. So fortunately, there was a plan for this. In the morning briefing, they said, if your plane is crippled but flyable, fly to Niihau, which is the westernmost of the seven main islands in the Hawaiian chain, and land there and assemble along the coast

and we'll send a sub on rescue duty to pick you up. So he flew over to Nihao and found, to his surprise, that it was inhabited. They'd been told that it wasn't. Oh, that's a big difference. You don't hear much about Nihao even today, and the reason is that it's privately owned. In 1864, King Kamehameha had sold the island to a family named Robinson, who I believe still own it.

So as a result, they don't do tourism there. They just, you know, they make honey and they have some small industries and are mostly focused on their work, but they don't interact as much as the other big islands do with the outside world. Nishikai-ji didn't know any of this, but he could see that it was populated. There are about 180 people who live there. It's a small island. It's 18 miles long and six miles wide. But at this point, he was solo on fuel and he had no choice. There was nowhere else to go. So he searched for a place and found a pasture that was relatively level and uncluttered

and brought his fighter plane down into it. On the way down, his wheels struck a wire fence and the plane nosed in hard. His safety harness tore loose and he slammed into the instrument panel, but he wasn't badly hurt. Watching all this from his front yard was a 29-year-old native Hawaiian named Howard Kaleoano, who was one of the few native Hawaiians on the island who was fluent in English. And you have to remember this is 1941, so news didn't travel nearly as fast then as it does today. And remember also that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise. So at this moment when his plane came down, Kaleo Anno, who witnessed the plane arrive in his pasture,

didn't know that the base at Pearl Harbor had been hit. He knew that relations between Japan and the United States had been sinking, but he didn't know that there was anything like a state of war between the two countries. So it was kind of unclear how to respond to a Japanese fighter plane coming down in your passenger. So what he did was Kaleiwano rushed to the plane when it came down, hauled Nishikaiichi out of the wreckage, took away his sidearm and would look to him like official papers, but he didn't know exactly what they were.

And then he took the pilot into his house where his wife actually served him breakfast. I mean, there was no reason not to do that given what they knew at the time. They couldn't communicate with him because Nishikaiichi had very limited English and Kaleoano spoke Hawaiian and English. So they had really no way to communicate with each other and ask where this man had come from. There were three Japanese people who lived on Nihao at the time. One of them was a 60-year-old beekeeper named Ishimatsu Shintani, who they summoned first. Shintani had lived in Hawaii for 40 years, but he wasn't an American citizen. He'd been born in Japan.

So they brought him in to talk to the pilot, which he did in Japanese for some time. But then they found that Shintani just turned pale and left without saying much. Then they found that Shintani just turned pale and left without saying much. And the reason is that he, too, knew that relations were going south between Japan and the United States, and he felt insecure about his status as a Japanese national not being a citizen and sort of didn't want to be dragged in what was starting to look like it might become some incident. Like this international incident, yeah. So he preferred just to keep out of it. That must have been really perplexing.

Yeah, it's a strange morning for the Kaleoanos. So puzzled, they summoned the other two Japanese who lived on the island, a couple named Yoshio and Irene Harada, who were U.S. citizens. And they spoke Japanese, so they introduced them to the pilot. And he told them in Japanese about the attack that had just happened and demanded that his pistol and these documents be returned to him. And this is kind of a delicate thing that has big repercussions. The Haradas, this Japanese couple, knew that the people on the island they'd been living with, Nihao,

regarded them as more Japanese than Hawaiian, and so they kept what the pilot told them to themselves. Oh. Which sounds like a small detail, but it's going to have big repercussions, not just for what happens on the island, but in fact for the whole U.S. policy coming on. I'll get to that in a second. It's a small decision that has big repercussions. So, believe it or not, they're still unaware that the United States is now at war with Japan,

so the people on the island, being friendly, treated the pilot to a luau that night at a nearby house. I couldn't believe that when I first read about it. It's true. Nishikaiichi, the pilot, even sang a Japanese song at the gathering, accompanying himself on a borrowed guitar. That's sort of the high point of the whole visit. He must have been wondering where his rescue sub was, point of the whole visit. He must have been wondering where his rescue sub was. And the answer is, unfortunately, the sub had been called away to intercept incoming American relief ships. So there wasn't a way off the island. He was for the moment on good terms with everybody,

but it wasn't clear how he was going to get off again or just come bring this whole thing to a successful resolution. I'm assuming he didn't know that, though. He wouldn't have any way to know that the sub had been called off. And before he even had time to find that out, by nightfall they'd received word by radio of the attack, so they knew that there'd been this big attack on the base at Pearl Harbor. Yeah, and that's going to change everything. Yeah, and that the U.S. was either at war now or imminently at war with Japan.

So they questioned Nijikaichi, the pilot, again, and Yoshio Harada, the Japanese who lived in Hawaii, realized he'd better report what had been told to him. So he sort of came clean and said, he told me this afternoon that there had been this big attack, and he participated in it. Weren't they a little annoyed, the guy, for not passing on the information? Yes.

Well, the whole thing unravels in a really sort of gripping way. This would make a great novel or a movie or something, because it takes place on this little island that can't communicate with any of the people around it. It gets more and more tense as you go along. So the question now is what to do with him. They have, I guess you'd have to call him an enemy combatant who's come down in a plane on their island,

but they have no way of communicating easily with the rest of Hawaii. They're on this little island, and they're not, they don't have any kind of, you know, jail or arms or anything. It's not clear what they can do with him. I mentioned that Niihau is privately owned. At the time, the owner of the island was a man named Aylmer Robinson, who actually lived on another Hawaiian island. He lived on Kauai and made weekly visits to Niihau just to look after the family's interests there. So while the islanders were debating what to do, they had to keep the pilot somewhere. So they kept him for the night at the home of John Kelly, who was the host who sponsored the luau. And the Harados, this Japanese couple, stayed there as well. And then they took the pilot to this, the next day by tractor,

to a landing at the northern tip of the island, again with the Harada, so he had a lot of time to talk with them in Japanese. They took him to this landing hoping that Alma Robinson, the owner of the island, would appear there on December 8th for part of his, one of his weekly visits. He didn't because, as it turned out, with these new wartime restrictions, they'd cut off all commerce between the islands in Hawaii, so that made it even worse because there was no way for islands to communicate with each other. Anyway, so the pilot, Nishikaiichi and Harada, the Japanese who lived on this island,

were talking at the house and talking on the beach, and the pilot was leaning on, it turns out, leaning on Harada to sort of turn sides. He said, we just attacked a big military base in America and found it relatively easy to do. It's possible Japan's going to win the coming war, and if so, you might want to think about which side you want to ally yourself with. You've been living here for years in America, but you're Japanese by birth, and that may turn out to be something you want to sort of think about. It seems like that worked somewhat on Yoshio Harada,

less so on his wife, but certainly on Yoshio, which had big consequences. So on December 11th, the pilot was staying at Harada's home, and the beekeeper, who's also Japanese, Shintani, that's four of them now, all four Japanese, I guess, now on the island, met privately with them at this house. And it looks like more and more they're sort of thinking as a group. The following day, Shintani, the beekeeper, appeared at Howard Kaleano's house, that's the one who saw the plane come down and who now has the sidearm and the papers, and demanded the papers that he'd taken from the plane, and offered him a bribe, actually, of $200, which is a huge sum, both in 1941 and by Niehaus standards. That's just a lot of money.

The reason they're so concerned, the pilot is so concerned about getting these papers back, is they contain sensitive information such as attack details and radio codes. So he was really desperate to get them back. If he left the island, he wanted to bring them with him, and it turned out also he was not seeing a way out. He was also considering destroying the papers and then committing suicide. But he had to get the papers back in either way. He didn't want to leave them behind, yeah. Because they were really vital to the war effort,

and it was sort of his duty not to let them go. The only reason Kaleoano had got them away from him in the first place is because he was still stunned from the crash landing. But Kaleoano refused got them away from him in the first place, because he was still stunned from the crash landing. But Kaleoano refused to give the papers back. Shintani muttered a threat, and Kaleoano threw him out. So there's this widening rift between the Hawaiians on the island and these four Japanese, or at least two of them in particular, the pilot and Yoshio.

So things get worse and worse, I'm sad to say, from this point on. The same day, Harada had stolen a shotgun and a pistol and hidden them in a honey warehouse nearby. And he returned home and told his wife and the pilot what he'd done. And then he was being guarded, the pilot was at this point, but they managed to overcome the guard and lock him in this honey warehouse and retrieve the guns. but they managed to overcome the guard and lock him in this honey warehouse and retrieve the guns.

Yoshio's wife, Irene Harada, played loud music on the phonograph to cover up the sounds of the struggle. So things are getting more and more heated. Now the Japanese have guns and a man locked up in a honey warehouse, and the Hawaiians have no way to defend themselves and aren't sure what to do. At that moment, the guard's wife, the one who's locked up in the Honeyware house, appeared in a horse-drawn wagon, and they commandeered the wagon and ordered her to drive them to Kaleoano's house, still trying to get these papers back. And they later flee on the horse.

They discovered that Kaleoano wasn't home, so they went to the plane nearby, tried to work the radio, but couldn't get anywhere with that, and then saw Kaleo on a rush from the outhouse behind his house where he'd been hiding, and he just ran away. He was just trying to go in because they're armed now. They

fired at him, but missed. He got away and rushed to the village to warn the residents, and then borrowed a horse to head to the northern tip of the island, intending to build a signal fire. First, he had the presence of mind to stop at his house, pick up these hidden papers that he'd gotten on a plane, and take them to his mother-in-law's house. So those are still safe.

Then the guard escaped from the warehouse and dashed to the village, and he corroborated Kaleoana's story. At this point, all of the villagers flee to remote parts of the island. So there are now two armed Japanese and two sort of somewhat sympathetic Japanese with them. And everyone else on the island is just hiding because they don't have any weapons. The only weapons are in the hands of these Japanese. A group of alarmed men set a bonfire on Mount Paniau, which is the highest point on the island.

Still, again, trying to reach anyone elsewhere. Yeah. Paniyau, which is the highest point on the island, still again trying to reach anyone elsewhere. But Kaleoano, who's sort of a hero of this story, decided that relying on signals was too chancy and actually set out shortly after midnight with five

others in a lifeboat from this landing to try to row to Kauai in the middle of the night, which is a ten-hour row against the wind. Oh, wow. Which they succeeded in doing. They're trying still to reach Elmore Robinson, who is the owner of their island. They got all the way to Kauai

after rowing all night and found Robinson, who was astonished to find them there, but he heard about the signal fire and had been pleading with officials to let him try to get back to his island to help people there, at least find out what was going on. So he was given permission at that point to organize a rescue effort,

but now they had to assemble some soldiers and get all the way back across the 17-mile reach between the islands to try to bring help to the islanders on Nihao. In the meantime, unfortunately, things were getting even worse on the island. Nishikaiichi and Harada had recaptured the escaped guard and were parading him through the deserted village, making him call to other Hawaiians to come out of their houses, which they refused to do.

One of them did, and they took him as a prisoner. So now I've got two prisoners. Yeah. They returned to the plane, stripped off its machine guns and remaining ammunition, and put them on a wagon, tried to burn the plane, but failed in that. Nishin put them on a wagon, tried to burn the plane, but failed in that. And then, apparently drunk with power, Harada and Nishikaiichi walked through the village firing their weapons and yelling for Kaleoano to surrender. So it's hard to think how things are going to get worse than this. Along the way, they intercepted and captured a six-foot-tall sheep rancher named Ben Kanahele and his wife,

who had been evading them all day but finally got caught trying to return to the village to get some food. After nightfall, Nishikaichi and Harada searched Kaleoano's house for these missing papers again, failed to find them, and burned the house down in frustration. And then they forced this big sheep rancher to search for Kaleoano, keeping his wife as a hostage. Kanahele knew that Kaleoano had rode off the island, but pretended to search for him just to keep them, you know... Right, and they don't want them to know that outside help might be coming. Yeah, so he put on a show of calling for him. Nishikaiichi, the pilot, with a pistol in his boot and a shotgun in his hands,

finally, I guess impatient and desperate, told Kanahele that if he didn't produce Kaleoano, everyone on the island would be shot. And at that point, the sheep rancher said, I got mad. Speaking in Hawaiian, so the pilot couldn't understand him, he demanded that Harada take away the pilot's pistol. Harada refused, but he indicated to Nishikaichi that he needed the shotgun. So of the two guns that Nishikaichi had, he took one of them off his hand. The pilot handed it over to him, and then at that moment, this is kind of the climax, Kanahele, the sheep rancher, and his wife lunged at him. Nishikaichi pulled this pistol out of his boot

and was quick enough to shoot Kanahele in the chest, the hip, and the groin, which was enough to injure him badly, but not enough to stop him. He was apparently a big, very angry man at this point. He grabbed the pilot, hoisted him in the air, and threw him against a nearby stone wall. His wife grabbed a rock and began to bash his head, and Kanahelei then drew a knife and slit his throat. So that's the end of the pilot.

Harada, who is this Japanese who had been sort of talked into supporting the pilot, but who has basically spent his life on this Hawaiian island, realized he'd backed the wrong side, put the shotgun against his stomach and pulled the trigger. Oh. Because there was no way out of this. Wow. And that was the end of it. All of this unfolded six days after the Pearl Harbor attacks of some people call it the

United States' first victory of World War II. This army rescue party from Kauai finally arrived, but didn't arrive until the following morning with Alma Robinson, the island's owner, and 12 armed soldiers. So they did arrive in time to hurry Kaneheli, who'd been shot three times, back to Kauai for medical treatment. He recovered, and in August 1945 was awarded two presidential citations, the Medal of Merit and the Purple Heart. The reason I said this had big repercussions is that the country was still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbor to begin with, but also they were struck by the fact that of the three Japanese who were living on the island when the plane came down,

all of them to varying degrees turned over to the pilot's side. Yeah. Which, for a shaken country, is enough to make you, if you're paranoid enough, to think, well, maybe every American of Japanese descent is a potential traitor, which is, I guess, maybe somewhat understandable, but also terribly unfair. There was a 1942 Navy report indicated that the fact that those had turned, the three Japanese had turned over, saw that as indications of, quote, the likelihood that Japanese residents previously believed loyalty to the United States may aid Japan. And as I guess most people know, in February 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 with love to the internment of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent, many of them American-born citizens. I should stress that

this at-one-accident incident on a Hawaiian island wasn't the sole cause of that decision, but it certainly was part of it. So that's, it's just a very dramatic, but I guess ultimately very sad, intense story of what happened unfolding on this island. In Hashihama, Japan, which is the hometown of the pilot, there's actually a 12-foot granite column that was erected in his honor. It was erected at a time when they thought he had died during the actual battle over Pearl Harbor. So it's maybe a bit more laudatory than he probably deserves. I guess it would have taken Japan a long time to find out actually what did happen to him. What happened.

So that's understandable. Yeah. Engraved on the column is what was believed at the time. It says, having expended every effort, he achieved the greatest honor of all by dying a soldier's death in battle, destroying both himself and his beloved plane. His meritorious deed will live forever. Our podcast is brought to you primarily by our magnificent patrons, who are the main reason we are able to keep making the show. If you would like to join them and help ensure that we can keep bringing Futility Closet to you each week, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset,

or look for the link in our show notes. Every pledge we get is really appreciated, and if you pledge at least a dollar an episode, you get access to our activity feed, where you can read behind-the-scenes comments, listen to outtakes and extralateral thinking puzzles, and find out what Sasha, our show mascot, has been doing lately. Thanks so much to everyone who helps support Futility Closet. I guess I haven't done one of these in a while. I'm continuously doing research for the Futility Closet website, and sometimes I run into questions that I can't... It's just sort of a blind alley.

I can't either confirm or debunk what I'm working on, and it just sits in the database and sort of looks at me. So periodically on the podcast, I just read lists of these things in hopes that someone out there... Hopefully they're interesting on their own, but maybe someone out there also can shed some light on them. So here's just a list of those things in no order. President William McKinley was shot on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York by an anarchist assassin in September 1901. That's definitely

true. We talked about this in the Robert F. Lincoln episode. In some tellings of the story, though, they say that he habitually wore a red carnation for good luck. And just before the shooting on this day, a young girl had asked him for it and he'd given it to her, which makes a nice story. That does make a nice story. But I can't find an authoritative telling of this that actually sounds like it really happened, so I'm just kind of throwing it out there. If anyone can confirm that this did or definitely didn't, please write in and let us know.

Emmanuel Dannen, it's said at least, was an eight-year-old Wisconsin boy who was allegedly whipped to death by his foster parents in 1851 because he refused to lie to hide their crimes. There are different accounts of this that I found. One is that his foster mother did something unspecified. Another is that his foster parents killed a traveling peddler in order to get his wagon and his money. But anyway, eight-year-old Emmanuel witnessed this, and his parents, realizing that he had this incriminating evidence, tried to whip a lie into him, tried to convince him not to tell anyone about their crimes. I have my doubts about this because the tellings of it are so lurid. I'll put one in the show notes. It seems like they're almost designed to scare the daylights out of kids in Sunday school. But there is a monument in Wisconsin to Emanuel Dannen.

I'm just wondering where the truth ends and where the fabrication starts. I don't know. I don't know why you'd want to scare kids in Sunday school to make them want to lie. I don't know. I don't know. The famous line here is, Pa, I will not lie, which apparently he said over and over during the two hours it took to whip him to death.

Aw, so he's like a little hero. Yeah, exactly. Laurentium. This is from Sylvia Tasher from her 1985 book called The Chemistry Trivia Book. On Valentine's Day 1961, Al Giorso of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory climbed a ladder to paint on the wall the discovery of a new element. That element was Laurentntzium, which is named for Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron and founder of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. Here again, the basic facts are definitely true. Al Giorso was a nuclear physicist, and he was instrumental in the discovery of Lorentzium

at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in 1960s. But I can't find any reference to paint or to a ladder. And I'm just wondering, she doesn't give in that book any more details about what exactly he painted or what it looked like. Or why he would want to do that. But I think her book is otherwise trustworthy, so I'm just wondering if anyone has the rest of the story or what Al Giorso painted on the wall at the radiation laboratory.

Gene Tunney, the American boxer of the 1920s, apparently was a thoughtful, reflective, and quite bookish man for a boxer. Reportedly, he lectured on Shakespeare at Yale in the late 1920s. That's what I'm trying to find out. I think it was 1927. I can't quite track that down. Different accounts say different things. He might have lectured on Troilus and Cressida. I'm just trying to get details about what that lecture was

and what the background is about how he wound up doing that. Apparently, he was. I mean, it's true enough that Tunney was quite a bookish and reflective man. There are a number of different accounts that say before his 1926 fight with Jack Dempsey, Dempsey sent a spy into his camp who came back and said, it's a setup. I've seen the lug reading a book, which I hope is true. But again, that might just be a story. The Marquis de Condorcet,

the French philosopher and mathematician, died after fleeing from the authorities of the French Revolution. This was submitted, I'm sorry to say, way back in 2012 from reader Joe Antonini. Joe, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get to this. That much is true that he died then under those circumstances. But the story goes that he was holed up for several months hiding from the authorities and finally decided it would be unsafe to stay in Paris and so tried to flee the city, entered a cabaret on the outskirts of Paris and asked for an omelet. They asked him, how many eggs will you have in it? And not knowing really quite what an omelet was, he ordered a dozen, which made everybody very suspicious. The cook asked him what his trade was.

He said he was a carpenter. The cook said, let me see your hands. You're no carpenter. And that was pretty much the end of the Marquis de Condorcet. He died two days later in his prison cell. All because he didn't know how many eggs go into an omelet. Well, that's the part I don't know. I don't know about the omelet part. That's what I'm interested in, whether that's true or whether that's just sort of an entertaining fabrication. Related to that, it's sometimes said the French administrator who built the Bastille in the 14th century became its first prisoner, allegedly because of charges leveled against him by his enemies after his patron Charles V died.

For all I know, that's true. I just haven't been able to track it down authoritatively. I'd like to know. That'd be an ironic story if it's true. This one I'm pretty sure is true. In 1960, artist Stanley Brown mailed out invitations declaring the shoe stores of Amsterdam as his artwork. He wasn't claiming to have invented the shoe stores,

but I guess he was laying claim to the notion as a piece of conceptual art that conceiving of these shoe stores as a group or unit or arrangement was his concept, and he was claiming that as his artwork. Okay. If anyone knows more about that,

I'd like to hear it. I'm pretty sure that one's true. Samuel Morse developed the telegraph and in his early career was actually a painter and it sometimes said that he received the news of the death of his 25-year-old wife.

He was away when she died. She died quite suddenly and he was so overwrought at having been absent when she died that that inspired him to try to improve long distance communication. That's what led to his work on the telegraph. I can't confirm that either. He was definitely a painter. He was painting a portrait of the Marquis de La Fayette in Washington, D.C. in 1825. When she died, he received two successive messages from his father. The first one said, your dear wife is convalescent. And the second one said she died.

So he was understandably devastated at her death. But I've been through a lot of biographies of Morse, and I can't find anyone saying that that directly inspired him to work on the telegram. This is from Fred Rickson's 1989 large and excellent book, Code Ciphers and Secret Languages. It's about steganography, which is basically sort of the art of hiding a message

within another message or concealing it so that the enemy doesn't even suspect that the message exists. The kind of example that's given is that in antiquity they had to get a message through enemy lines, so they got a slave, shaved off his hair, tattooed a message onto his scalp, let the hair grow back, and sent it through enemy lines, and the enemy never even suspected that there was a message there. That would make a good lateral thinking puzzle. Yeah, but this sort of thing apparently makes you paranoid, as you can imagine. The paragraph from Rickson's book that I like says, during times of war, counter-respionage sensors have been so concerned about the possible transmission of information through steganographic means that they've gone to sometimes extraordinary lengths to verify information. Such practices escalated in the U.S. during World War II. Wartime counter-spy units changed the arrangements of the hands-on clocks in deliveries meant for timepiece dealers. So they'd open up

boxes full of clocks and just rearrange the hands just in case there was a message in there. Oh, that's clever. When the Office of Censorship was in full force after Pearl Harbor, it interdicted large groups of certain types of objects, newspaper articles, and even comments about children's report cards. Other examples include loose stamps, which were replaced with new postage, reports of sports statistics, which were studied by sports experts, the number and frequency of X's and O's on lovers' letters, and even knitting directions. I like Rickson's book, and I trust his research,

but he didn't happen to cite a source for that passage, and I haven't been able to confirm any of that stuff in other sources. So if anyone knows anything more about that, I'd love to hear it. And the last time I have concerns, a man named Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, who was a Yale scholar who studied the life of Horace Walpole, who was a man of letters in the 18th century and a voluminously prolific one. Walpole was the son of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of Great Britain, and wrote tons and tons of letters, among many other things. Lewis compiled all these letters,

and his published collection runs to 48 volumes. So what fascinates me about this is that you've got one man in the 20th century who spent his life sort of organizing and documenting the life of another man who'd lived 200 years earlier. What makes it interesting is there's so much of that life to document. This is from Robert Hendrickson's 1994 book, The Literary Life and Other Curiosities. Scholar and biographer Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis filled a library at Strawberry Hill in Farmington, Connecticut, with what amounts to a day-by-day account of everything known of every day of British author Horace Walpole's life. Starting when he was 26, Lewis amassed a collection at the Lewis Walpole Library that includes 7,000 Horace Walpole letters, five miles of microfilm, and a million file cards.

By his energy, his persistence, his lavish care, wrote historian J.H. Plum, W.S. Lewis has collected more information about a single human life than has ever been done before. The sentence that caught my eye, this is the same historian Plum wrote, It's an odd thought that we know more about the fact of Horace Walpole's life than we know about any other human being. But he wrote that 50 years ago in 1960, and I'm just wondering now who holds that record, who has the most assiduously documented human life. A cynic would say that all of us do, that everything we do now is recorded somewhere, but that's not public information. The thing about

Walpole is that you can go up to Yale and look up Annie Davis' life in a book and see what he did and thought that day, and I'm was wondering who today has the most extensively documented life. Anyway, if you know any answers to any of this stuff or just have any thoughts about it, please write to me. I'm at podcast at futilitycloset.com. I'm going to be solving a lateral thinking puzzle today. Greg is going to present me with an odd sounding situation and I have to figure out what's going on asking only yes or no questions. I know you always feel like this slight nervousness like oh what's it going to be? How hard is it going to be? This one's from Erwin Brecker's 2010 book Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Okay. Both Brian and Bill were going from Marble Arch to Victoria Station.

Brian was driving at normal speed, while Bill started on foot. Traffic was light, and although Bill ran part of the way and Brian reached an average speed of 25 miles per hour, both arrived at Victoria Station at the same time. How was this possible? Okay, are they both humans? Yes. Okay, well, one of them could have been a dog or something. I'm assuming they could have just taken different routes.

No? They could have, but they didn't. Oh, they didn't. Okay. Because if you're on foot, obviously you can go places that a car can't go. Yeah. No, that's a good thought, but that's not the solution. Oh, okay.

So did they start from the same place? Yes. And they ended up at the same place? Yes. And they took the same route? Yes. Yes. So how did the guy on foot manage to...

Oh, oh. Was the guy, I don't know, on foot, like at the back of a truck that the first guy was driving? Like he was in the same vehicle as the guy who was driving? Yes. Yes. Brian was a bus driver, and Bill was running to catch the bus, which he did. Oh. So he started on foot.

Okay, and then ended up in the vehicle. And so obviously they arrived at the same destination. All right, so much for that. I've got another one. Let's try this one. Okay. This is from Kyle Hendrickson's 1998 book, Mental Fitness Puzzles. One day, Ted finds a solid gold letter opener along the side of a busy highway.

Although he is poor and would gladly pawn it for money, Ted knows that he will not be able to do so. Why? Solid gold letter opener? Is it attached to something? No. Does it matter where this is uh what do you mean by that oh anything i mean any anything about the location important or germane uh i guess yes i guess somewhat yeah somewhat? Okay, so does it matter for geographical features? No.

No. Does it matter what country or city or something this is in? No. No. But it sort of matters where it is. Does it matter what planet it's on? I suppose, yes. It's not that the letter opener is attached to something or part of something else.

That's right. Finds a solid gold letter opener. By a letter opener, do you mean an implement that opens envelopes? Yes. I wasn't aware they had solid gold ones of these. Read it again

about he knows it won't do him any good? Although he is poor and would gladly pawn it for money, Ted knows he won't it won't do him any good or uh the last like although he is poor and would gladly pawn it for money ted knows he will not be able to do so oh he wouldn't be able to pawn it because it's too distinctive no because there are no pawn shops uh no because like if he's in the middle of a remote desert and there are no pawn shops. Yeah, no, these are all good guesses. Is pawning legal wherever he is currently? Yes. Let's assume it is?

Yes. Because you said it didn't really matter what country or state or something this is in? That's right. It doesn't really matter. But something about the location you seem to think might sort of matter. Something about the climate?

No. Something about something else that's nearby? Yes. Are there other people involved? Yes. Are there other people nearby? Yes. So there are people...

Okay, you said he found this in a street? I'm trying to remember what you said. Along the side of a busy highway. Along the side of a busy highway. Oh, so there are... Is he on foot? Yes. Is he near the letter opener?

Yes. But it's alongside a busy highway. I'm so confused. Okay, so there are other people nearby that are specific people, not just the busy people, the people driving on the busy highway. That's right. There are specific people nearby that are important. They own the letter opener?

No. Would they see it too? Presumably, yeah. Is he with a group of people? Is he part of a chain gang? Prison chain gang. Yes. Where did you get that from?

I don't know. That just came out of nowhere. Okay. It's like witchcraft. Okay, keep going, though. Oh, oh, oh, well, obviously he can't get to the letter. Well, he either can't get to it because he's chained to other people or he'll be in prison and he can't do anything

with the letter opener in prison. That's basically it. Ted was working on a chain gang. I want to know how you got that. Ted was working on a chain gang when he found the letter opener. He knew that he would be searched, and the item confiscated before he was placed back in his prison cell. Well, that has to do with divergent versus convergent thinking.

Talk about that. Yeah, I keep meaning to mention this this and I keep forgetting, which is... This is where I go wrong. Yeah, well, our strengths and weaknesses is you're better at convergent thinking, which is when you're systematically working your way towards an answer. Like math problems, you use convergent thinking on them. You're systematically working your way towards a specific answer in very systematic stepwise ways. Divergent thinking is like creative solutions. So like if I ask, what are all the things you can do with a brick? You know, you come up with as many

creative different answers as you can. And I tend to do more divergent thinking, but sometimes that gets me in trouble because then I'm not systematically working my way towards something. I'm just all over the place. Is he a vampire? Is it on the moon? You know, like I'm just all over the place, but sometimes then I do jump to the right answer that way, but sometimes I need to be more systematic than I am. Because here there is a specific answer. Yeah, but you need to be kind of creative to see it. You tend to work your way systematically towards something, but then if that doesn't work, you have trouble jumping to another path. Yeah, that's one thing I've noticed you do that I don't, is you'll occasionally just stop. And I think of myself as working toward the center of... Right, exactly. A circle or something. Right. And you do the same thing,

but occasionally you'll back out and come in from another angle. Yeah. And I never think to do that. Yeah. So it's like... Because like here, you thought, okay, it sounds like location or geography is important. But I couldn't get how. And I would keep working on that even if I wasn't getting anything. Right. And then you might get stuck. Whereas I'm like, okay, I don't get this. Let's just go from a completely different direction.

Yeah. It's hard to remember to do that. Well, if anybody else has puzzles they'd like to send in for us to use, regardless of what kind of thinking we use to try to solve it, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you do send a puzzle and you don't hear it, as I know that must happen to people and it must seem disappointing, different things go wrong with puzzles. Sometimes we go to give a puzzle to the other person and the other person already knows it. Yeah, we just did two of those. If you saw us recording this thing, the features,

I mean the actual research, the written pieces, are... Predictable. I guess they're more work, but they're much less... They're predictable, yes. Yeah. We just did several puzzles here this morning

because I solved a few of them like almost immediately. Lickety split, yeah. One I already knew or I knew something very similar to it, so I jumped to the answer. And the other I just guessed on my first question. Yeah. With my divergent thinking, I jumped to the right answer.

So please keep sending them in. We love what you're sending, and they're really fantastic, but we just, it's so unwieldy, we can't tell how it's going to go. And a lot of times, what we wonder about is just something that, for one reason or another, we just can't. Yeah, so we are sorry if you don't ever get to hear your puzzle on the show, but we do appreciate all the puzzles we get. Yeah, so we are sorry if you don't ever get to hear your puzzle on the show, but we do appreciate all the puzzles we get. That's another episode for us.

If you're looking for more Futility Closet, check out our books on Amazon. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook, or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample over 8,000 intriguing 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. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by clicking the donate button on the sidebar of the website. If you have any questions or comments about the show, 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.