Futility Closet - 085-Raising Chicago

Episode Date: December 14, 2015

  In 1868, visiting Scotsman David Macrae was astonished to see Chicago transforming itself -- dozens of buildings were transplanted to the suburbs, and hotels weighing hundreds of tons were raised on jackscrews. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the city's astounding 20-year effort to rid itself of sewage and disease. We'll also learn how a bear almost started World War III and puzzle over the importance of a ringing phone. 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. Sources for our feature on the raising of Chicago: David Young, "Raising the Chicago Streets Out of the Mud," Chicago Tribune, date strangely withheld (retrieved Dec. 7, 2015). Robin Einhorn, "Street Grades, Raising," Encyclopedia of Chicago (accessed Dec. 6, 2015). Josiah Seymour Currey, Chicago: Its History and Its Builders, 1918. Alfred Theodore Andreas, History of Chicago: Ending With the Year 1857, 1884. David Macrae, The Americans at Home, 1870. There's a very extensive collection of contemporaneous news accounts here. Listener mail: Aaron Tovish, "The Okinawa Missiles of October," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oct. 25, 2015. Wikipedia, "Norwegian Rocket Incident" (retrieved Dec. 12, 2015). Wikipedia, "Volk Field Air National Guard Base" (retrieved Dec. 12, 2015). Chris Hubbuch, "False Alarm: How a Bear Nearly Started a Nuclear War," La Crosse [Wis.] Tribune, Jan. 30, 2009. This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Matthew Johnstone's 1999 book What's the Story? 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. 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 85. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1868, visiting Scotsman David McRae was astonished to see Chicago transforming itself. Dozens of buildings were transplanted to the suburbs,

and hotels weighing hundreds of tons were raised on jackscrews. In today's show, we'll follow the city's astounding 20-year effort to remake itself. We'll also learn how a bear almost started World War III, and puzzle over the importance of a ringing phone. For anyone who is still looking for a last-minute gift idea or who might like a little gift for themselves, we want to remind you that there are two Futility Closet books. Both books have hundreds of short bites of mental candy, entertaining oddities, weird inventions, fun quotes, and brain-teasing puzzles. Perfect for anyone who would like to learn more about an invisible student at Georgia Tech

or a baby carriage modeled after a tank. Look for them on Amazon and see why other readers have said they are awesome and addictive and full of wonderful discoveries for the curious mind. In the middle of the 19th century, the Chicago area wasn't much higher in elevation than the shore of Lake Michigan, so there wasn't much natural drainage from the surface of the city. Rain would just fall into it and pretty much stay there. Also, the city was built on a soil of clay and loam that didn't absorb much of the moisture,

so it just got pretty muddy, particularly in the spring. There was a joke that went around back then that said there was a passerby came upon a man whose head and shoulders were sticking up out of the mud in the middle of the street, and the passerby said, can I help? And the man said, no, thank you. I have a fine horse under me. So the streets would become terribly muddy all year round, but particularly in the spring, and so they became impassable there.

You just couldn't travel around by street. But worse than that, the mud invited pathogens that started spawning epidemics. There were epidemics of typhoid fever and dysentery that struck the city six years in a row. And cholera in particular was terrible. It swept through the city repeatedly and killed 6% of the population in 1854. So no one wants to live in a city like that. They tried grading the streets to sort of put them on a slope so that the water would run off into the Chicago River, but that didn't work very well. So in desperation, finally, they just tried putting planks over them so at least people could get around, even though the water was still there. But the planks only warped and rotted due to the moisture underneath them. Here's a description from John Lewis Payton in a book called Over the Alleghenies and Across the Prairies from 1870.

To render the streets and sidewalks passable, they were covered with deal boards from house to house, the boards resting upon cross sills of heavy timber. This kind of track is called the plank road. Under these planks, the water was standing on the surface over three-fourths of the city, and as the sewers from the houses were emptied under them, a frightful odor was emitted in summer, causing fevers and other diseases foreign to the climate. This was notably the case during the summer of 1854 when the cholera visited the place, destroying the population at the rate of 150 a day.

It not unfrequently happened that a loose plank would give way under the weight of a passing cab when the foul water would spurt into the air high as the windows. So on top of just rainwater and regular water water and pathogens, people were dumping sewage as well in there and just putting planks over the top of it. And it was three-fourths of the city. Just delightful. So on the last day of 1855, a newly created board of commissioners finally came up with a plan that they hoped would solve the problem once and for all. They'd hired

a Boston engineer who studied the problem, and he suggested installing a citywide storm sewer system, which was actually the first comprehensive sewer system in the country. The problem here, as I said though, is that the whole city itself, the level level it was only three or four feet above the level of lake michigan in order to get the water to drain out if you picture like a plate that's brimming with water what you want to do is tilt it up to pour the water off okay so what they would have to do here crazy as it sounds today is do that with the city of chicago raise the grade of the whole thing so that water in this sewage system, the sewer system, would run off into the river or into Lake Michigan. And that is what they resolved actually to do. The plan was this. They would actually build these storm sewers

on top of the existing streets and then bury them by filling them up with 4 to 14 feet of earth. and then bury them by filling them up with 4 to 14 feet of earth. And so now the buildings that had been facing on the streets would be partly underground. It would have to be literally jacked up to the level of the new streets, which sounds crazy, but there's really no other long-term way to solve the problem. Everyone agreed that this was pretty much what had to be done, but there was a lot of skepticism, as you can imagine. The Chicago Tribune in 1857 wrote, what effect is this new grade going to have on buildings already erected in this city?

The streets and sidewalks must be raised some seven feet above the natural surface level. In other words, every house now built must be raised about the height of the mayor above its present foundation, or be entered through doors cut in its second story. Because everything's going to be off now. Yeah. The front door is going to be below or mostly below the street level. Everything will be basements now instead of like a street level. But it won't be low enough that you can walk in the second floor. It's just you'd have to literally jack up every building that's affected. The Tribune also noted that this whole plan financially would hurt citizens

who'd invested in building expensive, magnificent brick and stone buildings within the past three years that were now going to turn out to be at the wrong level. And they wrote, quote, the grade would throw their floors some four feet below the sidewalks, while their second floors would be five or six feet above the street surfaces, and their cellars would become dark pits or dens underground. dark pits or dens underground. The newspaper also asked, they said this would cover, the space drained by the sewers would be a space of about 1,200 acres, which is pretty big. They asked where would the millions of cubic yards of earth come from to fill the streets up, to bury the sewer pipes and raise the streets to this new grade that was planned.

As it turned out, finding the earth wasn't a problem. In jacking up the buildings, they excavated enough earth that they could just use that to fill the roads up to the appropriate level, which was useful, because I don't know where they would have got it otherwise. To raise the larger buildings, an enterprising newcomer named George Pullman, who later became famous creating Pullman cars for railroads, invented a technique in which hundreds of men would turn thousands of large jack screws to literally jack up large buildings, even though they weighed hundreds of tons, on screws.

And this worked, to my own surprise, amazingly well. Yeah, I'm sitting here feeling really skeptical. Like, if you told me you were going to do this, I'd say, yeah, I don't think so. And you think, I mean, not an engineer, but you can think of how that could have gone badly wrong. I could think of lots of ways, yeah. That there'd be all kinds of stresses on a building that's just not done quite evenly, and it would just ruin the building. But that didn't happen. It's amazing how well this whole project worked. The first masonry building that they tried this with was a four-story brick structure on the corner of Randolph and Dearborn streets. It weighed

750 tons, and they raised it successfully 6 feet 2 inches in January 1858, quote, without the slightest injury to the building. So they just kept going with this technique, which worked very well. They raised more than 50 masonry buildings about that size just in that year. And in fact, as they got good at it, they would sometimes raise whole lines, whole rows of shops all at the same time. And I've been through a lot this week of newspaper accounts of this whole period, and it's hard to find any mishap in any of it, which is astounding considering the scale of this and that it hadn't ever really been done before. Right, and I mean, just imagine if a building fell on somebody.

Yeah. Wow. Let me just imagine if a building fell on somebody. Yeah. Wow. In 1861, this is sort of a landmark one, there's a six-story brick hotel called the Tremont House, which covered more than an acre, and they wanted to raise that.

That actually continued to operate as a working hotel as 500 men used 5,000 jack screws to raise it six feet high. There's a wonderful book called The Americans at Home. There was a visiting Scotsman who must have been very bewildered who came to Chicago by chance at this time and just watched all this happen and wrote a book about his experiences later. He writes about this hotel. The work was done so smoothly and so gradually by 500 or 600 men working in covered trenches below

that Mr. Beecher, who was a guest in the hotel at the time, said the only personal knowledge he had of the process of elevation was derived from the fact that the broad flight of stairs from the street seemed to be getting steeper, and that the lower windows, which were on a level with his face when he arrived, were three or four feet higher when he went away. But other than that, he spent his whole time in the hotel not even aware that it was slowly being reached higher.

The problem, problem though as the tribune had feared is that all this piecemeal raising of buildings around town played hell with the sidewalks uh if you owned a shop in chicago and you had the money to get it raised up six feet you'd want to have the sidewalk outside your front door so people could get into the building right otherwise everybody's gonna have to go up six feet of stairs to get in and out of your shop. But if you raise your sidewalk, but your neighbors haven't raised their buildings, then their sidewalks are six feet down.

And people who just aren't interested in anyone's business, but just want to walk down the street are continually going up and down. The sidewalk just won't stay on one level until when all the work is done, it'll all be hopefully uniform. Right. And it seems like it's going to take a long period of time to get all the buildings done. Yeah, all of this, I should say, all this work took about 20 years to get it all done. 20 years!

It's a huge undertaking. So how did they manage the sidewalks? Well, it was just very difficult to be a pedestrian in Chicago in the 1850s and 60s. Here's a description from Putnam's Monthly Magazine. This is from 1856. The sidewalks of Chicago are as remarkable in their way as the bridges. With almost every block of buildings, there is a change of grade, sometimes of one foot, sometimes of three feet, sometimes of five. These ascents and descents are made by steps or by short, steep, inclined planes of boards with or without cleats or cross pieces to prevent slipping, according to the

fancy of the adjoining proprietor who erects them. The profile of a Chicago sidewalk would resemble the profile of the Erie Canal, where the locks are most plenty. It is one continual succession of ups and downs. And people just had to live with that for a couple decades until all the buildings were accommodated. I'm just thinking in the winter with ice and snow. Yes, yes, Chicago.

Yeah. As I said, this all went, I mean, despite all my skepticism, this went amazingly well. In all my reading of newspapers this week, I found exactly one account of a mistake, of an accident. And that one, no one was hurt, and it's a relatively small accident. This is from the Press and Tribune of June 15, 1859. It's called Narrow Escape. Yesterday morning, between the hours of 9.30 and 10 o'clock, the ponderous vault on the

first floor of the bank building of J.M. Adsit, 39 South Clark Street, which is being raised to grade, fell, with a tremendous crash, through the floor into the chasm intended for a cellar, and out of which the whole building had been raised. The vault, which is now a perfect wreck, had been built on

the floor and was much too weighty to attempt to lift without some extra propping and securing. A great number of men were working all around it when it fell, and we need not say were much alarmed. The boss of the job was struck on the arm, but fortunately escaped without injury. And that's the worst of it. That's the worst I could find. I mean, I'm sure there are things that went wrong, but it's amazing how much went right. In fact, this was reported around the country at the time. Here's an excerpt from the San Francisco Times that was sort of admiring all this as it unfolded. This is hard to believe. In raising the exchange, not a wall has cracked,

nor has there been the least warping of the door sills or other parts of the woodwork. So silently and beautifully has the machinery done its work that an occupant might have remained in ignorance that the raising was going on from any jarring or other indication of motion. Indeed, any breaks caused in the walls of a building by its settling after being erected are remedied by the restoration of the edifice to its original exact level, thus closing up any cracks which may have existed. Anyone who owns a house knows that you're going to get some cracks. That's just natural. It's what happens as the house settles.

So what this is saying is that if you had a're going to get some cracks. That's just natural. It's what happens as the house settles. So what this is saying is that if you had a building where there was some cracks appearing, sometimes when they raised it, the cracks would close up again because the building was given a new firm level foundation. So in some ways, some small ways, they were actually improving the buildings. San Francisco Times goes on, This hydraulic machinery has been in use in this city since 1853, and some 30 buildings have been raised with it to grade. No accident has ever yet occurred, nor does it seem probable. Interesting thing here is that the buildings I've been describing so far

are the big expensive ones, hotels and banks and things that people have invested a lot of money in. But there were also buildings in this area that were just built pretty hastily in the city's early years and weren't really worth the investment of building going to the trouble to raise them which would probably want to do in that case was just move the building to the outskirts of town or out into the suburbs and build a new proper modern building in its place so that meant that while all this was going on people were actually moving buildings through chicago to get them out of the way um here is poor david mccray this bewildered scotsman encountered a lot of these apparently on his visit, and he wrote about this in the same book.

He writes, It was early morning when I entered Chicago from the Rocky Island Road, and the great city was just wakening into life for the day. The first thing that attracted my attention when driving from the station to one of the hotels was the sight of a two-story house moving up the street before us. I pointed it out in amazement to the driver. Did you ever see a house moving before, he said unconcernedly. No. Do your houses move about like that? Well, he said, there's always some of them on the move. Which turned out to be the fact. Never a day

passed during my stay in the city that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine going out Great Madison Street in the horse cars, we had to stop twice to let houses get across. All these were frame houses, and in some of them I could see people sitting at the windows. One of those crossing Madison Street was a double shop, cigars at one end, confectionery at the other, and as it moved along, the shopkeeper stood leaning against the doorpost, smoking a cigar.

I wondered how this was accomplished, and so I looked into it. If you want to move your house in 1850s Chicago, what you did was put it on a rolling platform and then set up a windlass further down the street in the direction you want to go and get a horse to turn that and would sort of reel you in. And then when the house catches up with the windlass, you just move the windlass and keep going. And by that method, you can take the house anywhere you want to pretty much, which is what lots and lots of people did. The Chicago Daily Tribune on April 18, 1856 says, At noon yesterday, we saw a large framed dwelling house traveling along a street while the family were eating their dinners

with as little concern as when the house stood on its original foundation. The art of house moving has been brought to great perfection. David McRae, the Scotsman again, says, The machinery thus called into existence makes house moving so easy that the Chicago people think nothing of it. If a man with his frame house and cigar shop at one corner finds business dull, he moves house and all the way to some other street where he thinks it will be a brisker. In other words, everything's moving everywhere now, and so if you just want to find a better location for your little corner shop,

you can move it to another corner sometimes, which makes sense, I guess. I mean, if everything else is moving. The last example I've found here, that this is also from McCrae, says that in some cases, if you were raising your building, you could actually arrange to have new tenants put in on the bottom floor to make more money,

which has happened at least once. He writes, I was told of a congregation in the city which being in want of money, had their church lifted so as to allow the insertion of shops below, got these let, and speedily relieved the church of its embarrassments. So everything is moving in every possible direction.

But the amazing thing about all of this is how little it's remembered today. Most people haven't heard of this. Yeah, I hadn't heard of this. This is in the 1850s and 60s, but they'll remember, for example, the Great Chicago Fire, which is only in 1871, just a few years later. So that's a mark, I think, of its great success as an engineering project that no one remembers it. If it had gone badly wrong, everybody would remember it. If hundreds of people had died because a bank fell on them or something.

Or if the buildings fell apart or just aged very badly or the whole thing was found to be profoundly unsafe, which honestly I would have kind of more expected to be the case. or the whole thing was found to be profoundly unsafe, which honestly I would have kind of more expected to be the case. So it's a tribute to the whole project and its great planning that relatively few people have even heard of this now. One early historian at the time noted, quote, nothing better illustrates the energy and determination with which the makers of Chicago set about a task

once they have made up their minds than the speed and thoroughness with which they solve the problem of the city's drainage. Our podcast is brought to you by our wonderful patrons, who we are quite convinced are the best patrons in the world. We really appreciate every pledge we get from our fans, and if you want to join them and pledge at least a dollar an episode, you'll get access to our activity feed where you'll find outtakes and extralateral thinking puzzles, as well as our behind the scenes comments on the show.

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In episode 83, Greg told us about some nuclear close calls that occurred during the Cold War. And it turns out that there were a really scary number of these near misses, many more than we had realized. Nick Hare sent in a link to a recent story in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and said, This is a new story and obviously still needs to be bottomed out. But for my money, it's at least as scary as the Petrov and Arkhipov cases. Keep up the good work. The story Nick sent is told by a John Bordney who had to keep his story secret for more than 50 years and was only recently given permission by the U.S. Air Force to finally tell it. In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile

Crisis, Bordney was serving at one of four U.S. secret missile launch sites on the island of Okinawa. There were eight launch crews on Okinawa with four missiles each, and tensions were extremely high in late October. The U.S. Strategic Forces were at Defensive Readiness Condition 2, or DEFCON 2, with everyone prepared to move to DEFCON 1, like at any minute. At DEFCON 1, a missile could be launched within one minute of instructions being received to do so. And by Borden's account, in the early morning of October 28th, the usual mid-shift radio transmission contained the official special launch codes instructing the crews to launch all

32 missiles. Oh my God. The launch crew captains were a little confused by the orders since they were still only at DEFCON 2 and not at DEFCON 1. But everything else points to that just being what it seems. Yeah, I mean, everybody was pretty alarmed. This had never happened. I mean, they receive a code, and if it matches happened. I mean, they receive, like, you know, a code,

and if it matches, you go to the second code, and it almost never happened that even the first code matches. Never happened ever that the second code matched, and with that match, you go to a third. And it's like, everybody was like, oh, my goodness. So, but they were only at DEFCON 2 and not DEFCON 1. So then they started to think, well, maybe the enemy had jammed the order to go to DEFCON 1. Or maybe an attack was already underway and they only had, like, minutes to get their attack launched and there just wasn't time to raise the DEFCON to 1.

So there was this Captain Bassett who was Bordney's captain and the senior field officer for the shift. And he called Missile Operations Center and pretended that the transmission hadn't come through clearly and asked for it to be repeated. Because they're thinking, okay, this has to be a mistake. It has to be a mistake, right? But to everyone's distress, the code was repeated exactly as it had been the first time. That's horrifying. Yeah, it's pretty horrifying. Because they designed that whole system specifically so that it would be unlikely to happen by chance or by accident.

Right, exactly. So at this point, you know, now they've had the code come in twice telling them they're supposed to launch. So the launch officer of one of the other crews, who was a lieutenant, ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of its missiles based on what seemed to be this obvious confirmation of the order. seemed to be this obvious confirmation of the order. Okay, so Bordney states that this Captain Bassett then ordered someone to, quote, send two airmen over with weapons and shoot the lieutenant if he tries to launch without either verbal authorization from the senior officer in the field or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center. So, I mean, this is how high tensions were.

I mean, he apparently literally ordered someone to go shoot the lieutenant if he tried to launch his missiles. There were just too many details about the situation that didn't make sense to Bassett. It just didn't, I mean, including the fact that the major who issued the codes did it in this completely matter-of-fact way.

We knew there was no urgency about it. There was no stress about it. It was just this completely matter-of-fact transmission. So it's not, I mean, first I was thinking, well, maybe this is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Maybe everyone's nerves are so on edge that someone just jumped the gun. But you're saying that's not even the case. Yeah. The major just issued, I mean, they get this standard, this is a normal thing,

that they would get these codes during their mid-shift, and then they would check them to make sure, you make sure whether they were the real code or not. And the Major just issued it in this totally calm, matter-of-fact way, like any boring task that he had to do that day. So that's one of the reasons why Captain Bassett, between that and the DEF CON level being wrong, he was like, this doesn't make sense. So he actually took it upon himself to call the major responsible for sending out the

codes and told the major that he either needed to raise the DEFCON level to one or issue a stand down order. And that major immediately issued the stand down code and the situation was over. So clearly it had been a mistake. Now, Bordney, who's telling this whole story, he never learned what exactly had gone wrong that night, why the wrong codes were issued. But Bordney reports that a month or so after the incident, the launch officers were required to participate in a court-martial of the major, who was demoted and forced to retire.

So, the fault lay with him somehow. Yeah, somehow. But no one to this day knows quite exactly what happened. No, and Bordney and now others that he's told his story to, they're trying to locate any still living crew members who were there that night. And they're seeking a release of official documents related to the incident. I mean, everybody was told, you must never speak of this. And like I said, Bordney wasn't given permission by the U.S. Air Force to even tell his story for more than 50 years. Yeah, I was going to say, that was 50 years ago, so a lot of people are, wow.

And people want to know what the heck happened. So there are people looking into this, you know, they're filing papers for the reports and stuff, but it's hard to know, you know, when it might come out, what exactly went wrong that night. But that's about as close as you can come. Yeah. I mean, this one lieutenant was ready to launch his missiles, you know. And that would have, it was like with the other two stories, that if all it would take is 32 missiles, then the Russians would have responded.

Exactly. Full force, probably. Especially at that time in history. Right, when everybody was on sort of a hair trigger anyway. God. The author of that whole story in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists sent the story before he published it. He sent it to Bruce Blair, who is a nuclear security expert and research scholar at Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security.

And he asked if Blair thought the story should be run given the lack of independent verification. The story is hinging mostly on this John Bourdain's recount of it. So Blair responded that he thought the story should be run as it was a firsthand account from a credible source. Blair stated, It also strikes me as a plausible sequence of events based on my knowledge of nuclear command and control procedures during the period. Frankly, it's not surprising to me either that a launch order would be inadvertently transmitted to nuclear launch crews. It's happened a number of times to my knowledge and probably more times than I know. Yeah, that's another good point.

If this one took 50 years to get out, there's probably others we don't know about. Right. And so Blair, who actually, he studies this kind of thing, he cited several such incidents. I mean, it's really scary how many of these incidents there were. And I won't go through all of them, but said that for example during the 1967 middle east war a carrier nuclear aircraft crew was sent in an actual attack order instead of the intended training order so these like these orders and codes and things just got mixed up sometimes apparently um according to blair the closest the u.s came to a mistake and launch decision by the president of the U.S. occurred in 1979 when a NORAD early warning training tape that showed a full scale Soviet strike was accidentally sent through the actual early warning network.

security advisor was called twice during the night and told that the U.S. was under attack by the Soviets, and the national security advisor was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that he needed to immediately authorize a full-scale response against the Soviets when a third call came in telling him it was a false alarm. It's almost surprising that this didn't result in war. You know, the Cold War was so long. Right, and tensions were, and there were points where the tensions were so high and everybody was so like, if they're going to get me, I'm going to get them first, you know, kind of thing. But it is amazing that with all these near

misses, we're all lucky that we are actually still here today. On both sides, because really the same thing was happening in the Soviet Union. Yeah, exactly. Sean Chappell also wrote to us and said, I enjoyed the most recent episode on nuclear close calls.

In high school, I competed in debate competitions, and our topic one year dealt with U.S.-Russia relations. As I'm sure you can imagine, I came across a great number of interesting and frightening stories regarding the nuclear arms race. Here are two of my favorites that you didn't mention on the show. And Sean says, in 1995, a Norwegian research rocket was mistaken by the Russians as a submarine-launched nuclear missile. It got to the point of Boris Yeltsin being handed the nuclear briefcase before they realized their error. And what Sean's referring to here is an incident where a rocket was launched from Norway,

carrying scientific equipment to study the Aurora Borealis. So it was completely innocent. That's pretty benign. And the Norwegian and American scientists behind the project had notified 30 countries, including Russia, of the launch. But apparently the information had not been passed on to the radar technicians in Russia, who then saw this missile, this rocket, excuse me, this rocket being launched. And as a result of the incident,

Yeltsin's nuclear briefcase that would be used to authorize a nuclear launch was activated for the first time during his presidency. Russian submarine commanders were ordered to enter into a state of combat readiness and to prepare for nuclear retaliation when it was recognized that the rocket was actually not heading towards Russia. But there's another, if they just... Right, you know, if he'd acted, you know, one minute sooner before they realized, hey, wait, that's not actually heading towards us, you know? That could have been the end of the world.

Well, yeah, like the stories that said yeah initially that started this all off i mean that's all it takes any of them could have been the end of the world yeah um sean sent also sent in this story in his email he says perhaps the most ridiculous nuclear close call of all time took place during the cuban missile crisis a bear yes a bear climbing the fence of a military base was mistaken for a human intruder. The guard set off the intruder alarm, which had very unfortunately been incorrectly wired and sounded the alarm for the nuclear armed planes to take off. So we almost went to World War III over a bear.

This incident occurred around midnight on October 25th, 1962. So that was right around the time of the close call reported by Bordney, when everybody was on really high alert. And Arkhipov, the sub guy. Yeah, yeah. That's three of these in one week. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, yeah. A guard at the Duluth Air Base saw a figure climbing the fence

and set off the sabotage alarms for all the bases in the area, because they just presumed it was a Russian coming to sabotage things, right? alarms for all the bases in the area because they just presumed it was a russian coming to sabotage things right um at the nearby volk airfield the wrong alarm rang as as sean indicated and the nuclear armed jets were actually starting down the runway when a truck raced out from the command signal signaling them to stop um so the pilots of those jets didn't actually learn until more than 25 years later what had happened that night. All they knew is they were, like, woken up and, like, go, go, this is it, get in your jets, go. Yeah, there's no time to reply.

They were in their jets going down the runway, yeah. And it was just, you know, because of the technology of the time, there was no way to get to tell them to stand down without a truck racing out to say, no, no, don't fly. Yeah, that's really scary. Sean says, hope you enjoyed the follow-up stories as much as I enjoyed the show. Thanks and keep up the good work. And we definitely did enjoy the follow-up stories. Thanks to both Nick and Sean. And if you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Okay, I'm going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to present me with an interesting-sounding situation, and I have to try to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from Matthew Johnston's 1999 book, What's the Story? A woman jumps off a 44-story building. As she sails past the 22nd floor, she hears a phone ringing and instantly

regrets her decision. Why? Oh. Alright. She hears a phone ringing. Was it her own phone? Unknown. Unknown if it's her phone or somebody else's phone. Does she know where the phone is?

You mean specifically? Yeah. No. No, okay. Oh, oh, oh. Did she think that she had lost the ability to hear or didn't have the ability to hear and then she does hear because she hears the phone ringing? No, that's a really good answer.

Man, I thought she'd gone deaf and was trying to commit suicide and then she hears a phone ringing. It's like, oh no, I'm not deaf after all. You just wrote your own puzzle. That's great. Yeah, that was a great puzzle. I'll give that to you next time. Okay, okay. So she hears a phone ringing and, okay.

Let's back up. Is she trying to commit suicide? Yes. Okay. Does it matter the time period? I suppose not. Does it matter where this takes place? No. No. So she's jumped off the 44th floor. Is that floor number significant? No.

Intending to hit the ground and commit suicide? Yes. Okay. As she goes past the 22nd floor, is that number significant? No. No. She hears a phone ringing. Yes. Is it vital that it's a phone that she hears?

I mean, as opposed to something else? Meaning she hears a different noise altogether. Yes, it is. It's important that it's a phone. Okay. But she doesn't know where this phone is. That's right. It's not like a phone in her pocket or a phone in her apartment or a phone in somebody else's specific apartment.

It's not in her pocket. It's in the building. The phone is in the building. Yes. Okay. It's a landline phone. Somewhere in the building. Presumably.

But she doesn't know which apartment it's in even. That's right. Okay. So it's not like a phone in her own apartment, and she knows it somehow. Okay, she hears a phone ring. Did she think, let's see, there was an apocalypse, and everybody's dead, and hearing a phone ringing means that somebody's still alive somewhere else? How do you do this?

Is that it? That's it. Oh, my gosh. The woman thought she was the last person on earth. Why? She just did. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

She was killing herself for that reason and realized halfway down the building that she wasn't. Somebody else has to be alive. Either that or it's a robocall. It's a robocall calling a cell or siding or something. Well, if anybody has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us.

If you're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 8,000 Ostrobogulous Esoterica. Thank you. 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.