Futility Closet - 099-Notes and Queries

Episode Date: March 28, 2016

In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll take a tour through some oddities and unanswered questions from our research, including whether a spider saved Frederick the Great's life, a statue with the wrong face, and a spectacularly disaster-prone oil tanker. We'll also revisit the lost soldiers of World War I and puzzle over some curiously lethal ship cargo. 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 this week's feature: The story about Frederick the Great is from Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's The Reader's Handbook of Famous Names in Fiction, Allusions, References, Proverbs, Plots, Stories, and Poems, 1899. The footnote about spiders and flashlights accompanies J.D. Memory's poem "The Eightfold Way, Lie Algebra, and Spider Hunting in the Dark" in Mathematics Magazine 79:1 (February 2006), 74. The case of the self-abnegating heir is cited as Beamish v. Beamish, 9 H.L.C. 274, 11 Eng. Rep. 735 (1861) in Peter Suber's 1990 book The Paradox of Self-Amendment. John Waterhouse's 1899 proof of the Pythagorean theorem appears in Elisha Scott Loomis' 1940 book The Pythagorean Proposition. My notes say it's also in Scientific American, volume 82, page 356. The story of the ill-starred oil tanker Argo Merchant is taken from Stephen Pile's 1979 Book of Heroic Failures. For an exceptionally well-reported history of the ship, see Ron Winslow's 1978 book Hard Aground. Physicist Leonard Mlodinow recounts the story of Antoine Lavoisier's statue in The Upright Thinkers (2015). A contemporary description of the unveiling is here, but it mentions nothing amiss. Ross Eckler addresses accidental acrostics in Making the Alphabet Dance, 1997. F.R. Benson's iambic ponging is mentioned in Jonathan Law, ed., Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre, 2013. William Kendal's accomplished blanching is described in Eric Johns' Dames of the Theatre, 1975. In The Book of the Harp (2005), John Marson notes that Luigi Ferrari Trecate's Improvviso da Concerto (1947), for the left hand, is dedicated to harpist Aida Ferretti Orsini, described as grande mutilata di guerre. Mable LaRose's 1897 auction is recounted in Pierre Berton's The Klondike Fever, 2003, and Douglas Fetherling's The Gold Crusades, 1997. Listener mail: Here's the scene in which the dead of World War I arise in Abel Gance's 1919 feature J'Accuse: This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Price Tipping. 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. Enter promo code CLOSET at Harry's and get $5 off your first order of high-quality razors. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from robot tortoises to man-eating trees. Welcome to episode 99. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll take a tour through some oddities and unanswered questions from Greg's research, including whether a spider saved Frederick the Great's life,

the surprising name for turkeys in Turkey, and a spectacularly disaster-prone oil tanker. We'll also revisit the lost soldiers of World War I, and puzzle over some curiously lethal ship cargo. Our podcast depends on the support of our listeners to be able to keep going. We just wouldn't be able to keep putting in the amount of work that the show takes if it weren't for the donations and pledges that we get. If you'd like to pledge some ongoing support to help us be able to keep making the show,

please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the link in the show notes. And thanks so much to everyone who's been supporting Futility Closet and helps us celebrate the quirky and the curious in our world. This is a collection of what I guess you'd call notes and queries, oddities and curiosities from my research, and some open questions that perhaps some listener might be able to help me with. There's no theme here, there's no particular order, here we go. The first two have to do with spiders. I've seen in a number of places a reference to a story saying that Frederick the Great's life was saved when a spider fell into his drinking chocolate.

Frederick the Great's life was saved when a spider fell into his drinking chocolate. This account that I'm about to read comes from Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, who's the one who wrote Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. This is from 1899. While Frederick II of Prussia was at Sanssouci, his palace in Potsdam, he one day went into his ante room, as usual, to drink a cup of chocolate, but set his cup down to fetch his handkerchief from his bedroom. On his return, he found a great spider had fallen from the ceiling into his cup. He called for fresh chocolate, and the next moment heard the report of a pistol. The cook had been suborned to poison the chocolate, and supposing his treachery had been found out, shot himself. I would suppose this a legend, but on the ceiling of his room in Sanssouci, a spider has been painted, according to tradition, in remembrance

of this story. To me, that just sounds like a completely fanciful story, but I've seen pictures of this. They have, apparently, in a room at the palace, painted pictures of spiders and spider webs commemorating this story. So now I don't know what to think. It's possibly just that it's still just a fanciful tale, and they've just put spiders up there because the story is well-known. But if anyone knows more about that, I'd like to know if there's any truth to it or if it's based on something that actually happened. I think it would make a great lateral thinking puzzle. I think you should have turned it into a lateral thinking puzzle and have given it to me. We always think of that too late. You're right. That would be great. Certainly, stories like this can last a long time. It's

said that the English courtier Henry Wyatt stayed alive in prison in the 1400s by befriending a cat that brought him food. That also seems very unlikely to be true, but that story has been alive for 600 years. That's one spider story. The other one is just a footnote that I noticed in Mathematics Magazine the other week. This is from the February 2006 issue. It's a footnote to a piece by the North Carolina State University physicist J.D. Memory. It goes like this. For those unfamiliar with this childhood pastime, one could locate a spider at a considerable distance at night by looking down the beam of a flashlight. He says they gleam brilliantly.

I was very sad to read that because I got through my whole boyhood without knowing that. I would have loved that when I was a kid. You could have gone spider hunting when you were a kid. Yeah, that would be fantastic. Did he say whether that's all species of spiders or just some of them? No, that's all I got. Huh. We should go out with a flashlight and find out.

Let's see, yeah. Kaya Halil Sumer, who's a reader of the Futility Closet website, wrote to me, Living in the West, I'm often asked by English-speaking individuals upon the realization of my Turkish heritage whether Turks eat the bird turkey in Turkey. I respond, yes, of course, especially on New Year's Eve. She writes, the same cross-purpose oddity exists within the linguistics of modern Turkish. You see, in Turkish, the word for the foul turkey is Hindi, the root of Hindistan, or the name for India in Turkish. So she says, in Turkish, India is literally translated to the land of turkeys. There's just kind of linked oddities there.

In fact, she writes, in actuality, the bird has nothing to do with either nation or peoples as it is commonly known as native to the American continent. I suppose the irony comes full circle as, of course, the European explorers who colonized the continent originally mistook the land

for India or the East Indies. So the people in Turkey thought that the bird Turkey came from India? Or at least that's the word they used. That's the word they used. Or that's the word they used. They're all just sort of meaningless coincidences, but it's odd that they're all linked together like that. So, Kaya, thank you for writing in with that.

The philosopher Peter Suber wrote a book in 1990 called The Paradox of Self-Amendment, which is a book of puzzles in the philosophy of law. Self-amendment itself, just for example, says that if you have a constitution or other legal document that contains a provision for its own amendment, the question is, can you use that authority to amend that provision itself? So, for instance, in the American Constitution, Article 5 explains how to amend the Constitution. The question is, can you use that to amend Article 5 itself, for instance, to change the requirements? And is that legitimate or isn't it? I think the argument goes that because there's some self-reference in there, in effect, Article 5 says, here's how to amend this document, but once you start actually doing that, it's not clear what the word this refers to anymore.

You see what I mean? Anyway, that's a puzzle or question in the law that people argue about. Yeah, I don't see why you couldn't, although I guess if you do a thought experiment and you say, like, somehow you use Article 5 to amend it, that anybody named Greg Ross can amend the Constitution, you know, and you get that passed somehow. Which could happen, or someone could try for that, and the question is, is that okay? Is that legitimate? Anyway, if you like that sort of thing, I really recommend Super's book. It's full of all sorts of things like that. My question here actually doesn't concern self-amendment, but rather the law of inheritance. He mentions at one point a situation like this. You and I

are married. Suppose we have a daughter and then I die. And suppose the daughter is evil or greedy and wants to cut you out of the picture to get more of the inheritance for herself. And she does that by showing somehow that our marriage had been invalid and succeeds at that. So that cuts you out of the picture because you weren't my wife, we weren't married in the eyes of the law. There's a twist at the end, though. By showing that our marriage had been invalid, she's shown herself to be illegitimate, which means that at least in some jurisdictions, she's not eligible to inherit anything. So this is just interesting legal comeuppance that just arises out of nowhere

and takes care of the situation. I thought that was just an amusing point of the law and just sort of theoretical, but it turns out, I think, that this has actually happened at least once to an actual person. Suber cites a case called Beamish v. Beamish from 1861, where apparently, I think, this actually happened to someone. And ever since I've read his book, I've been casting about trying to get my hands on that case and I haven't had any luck. So I'll put the whole citation in the show notes. If there's anyone who can help me find it, I'd appreciate it because I'd really like to know what happened to someone in that connection. While I'm begging for things, there is a celebrated

proof of the Pythagorean theorem put forward by a New York City engineer named John Waterhouse around the turn of the 20th century. He came up with it. I think it first appeared in a New York paper in July 1899. And I've been trying to get my hands on that. I've been wanting to put it on the Futility Closet website, but I can't get the diagram in any digital form. It shows up also in Elijah Scott Loomis's 1940 book, The Pythagorean Proposition. And it's kind of a shame it seems to have been forgotten. It made a splash at the time. The Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers says it, quote, interested instructors of geometry all over the country, bringing many letters of commendation to him from prominent teachers. But the diagram that goes with it is too elaborate

for me to redraw myself, so I'm just trying to get my hands on that. The most popular source that I think anyone might be able to find it in is Scientific American, which apparently ran it in volume 82, which I think is the year 1900 on page 356. And it's got to be in the public domain now because he came up with it in the 1890s. But as I say, it seems to have been forgotten or lost for the most part. The Argo Merchant was a fabulously ill-starred or ill-managed oil tanker from the 1970s. I read about this in Stephen Pyle's 1979 book called The Book of Heroic Failures, which is about all kinds of disasters and mishaps related to human ineptitude. And I can't do better than just read his account of it, but this is all true. He calls it the worst ship.

Between 1953, when it was built, and 1976, when it sank, the Argo merchant suffered every known form of maritime disaster. In 1967, the shipgo merchant suffered every known form of maritime disaster. In 1967, the ship took eight months to sail from Japan to America. It collided with a Japanese ship, caught fire three times, and had to stop for repair on five occasions. In 1968, there was a mutiny, and in 1969, she went aground off Borneo for 34 hours. In the next five years, she was laid up in Curacao, grounded off Sicily, and towed to New York. In 1976, her boilers broke down six times, and she once had to travel with two red lights displayed, indicating that the crew could no longer control the ship's movements

because both the steering and the engine had failed. She was banned from Philadelphia, Boston, and the Panama Canal. To round off a perfect year, she ran aground and sank off Cape Cod, depositing the country's largest oil slick on the doorstep of Massachusetts. At the time of the final grounding, the ship had been lost for over 15 hours. The crew was 18 miles off course and navigating by the stars because their modern equipment had broken down. What is more, the West Indian helmsman could not read the Greek handwriting showing the course to be steered. A naval expert afterward described the ship as, quote, a disaster looking for somewhere to happen. A word, oh, also appallingly, I've managed to confirm most of that in other sources. That all

actually happened. A word about the book of heroic failures. The author Stephen Pyle had founded a club in London in 1976 to bring together British people of notable ineptitude. He called it the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. And the book included a membership form that asked for your name, address, exams failed, main areas of incompetence, subsidiary areas of incompetence, and cases of sustained chaos occasioned by any of the above. Unfortunately, the book's success brought 30,000 applications, and the club held a couple of meetings that were described as disastrously successful. Pyle himself was deposed for, quote,

showing alarming competence by preventing a disaster involving a soup tureen. And accordingly, and I think with admirable integrity, Pyle closed the club, declaring that as a failure it had been a failure. I have seen in several sources the assertion that in 1900, France erected a bronze statue of the chemist antoine lavoisier in paris uh but and at the at the unveiling there were all sorts of laudatory things said about lavoisier but when they actually took the veil off the statue it was revealed that it had the wrong face it had the face of the philosopher and mathematician

the marquis de condorcet the same man who in episode 68, we said, had been betrayed by an omelet. Apparently, there was just a mix-up there. The sculptor, Louis-Ernest Barillat, had copied the head from a sculpture made by a different artist. And there was just some confusion, I guess, about what Lavoisier's features had looked like. So they unveiled a statue to him that had another man's face. I have managed to confirm enough of this to see that there was a statue of Lavoisier that was unveiled in Paris in 1900, but unfortunately, it turns out that the statue was scrapped during the Nazi occupation and recycled for use as bullets,

so I can't find an image of it. I'm not sure that one even exists. And it's such a good story that it makes me doubt whether it's all perfectly accurate. I don't know. I was going to ask if anyone can help me to confirm that, but I don't even know how you quite could without an image of it. Maybe there's some way. If anyone knows more about that, please let me know. In reading Ross Eckler's 1997 book, Making the Alphabet Dance, which is about wordplay,

he talks at one point about accidental acrostics, which are an acrostic is just a word or message spelled out by taking the initial letters of succeeding lines or paragraphs. Sometimes that's done deliberately. Lewis Carroll did a lot of it in his poetry. Sometimes it just happens by accident where someone writes, say, a novel, and if you take the first letter of successive paragraphs, it happens to spell something. I was looking around to see what the record was for accidental acrostics and couldn't get very far, to my own surprise. The most recent time I can find that anyone looked into this in any depth was way back in 1980 when Games Magazine ran a contest asking readers to find the longest example they could of this in some naturally occurring text somewhere. That's 36 years ago. Yeah, that's interesting.

So nobody's run a contest since. Not that I've been able to find. I could just be wrong about that, but I haven't found anything. The longest word, just for the record, back in 1980 that they found was the word synonyms, which occurs on page 10

of Elizabeth Graham's 1978 novel, Heart of the Eagle. And that's actually pretty good. That's eight letters that she just happened to type in the right order, apparently by accident. But that's 1980, which was before the widespread advent of personal computers and before we had a huge corpus of digitized text to search. So I'm wondering whether anyone's found anything. You know, Moby Dick could contain a whole sentence just by accident that no one's happened to stumble upon yet.

And now we have the means technologically to find that relatively easily. So it just surprised me that no one's apparently looked for upon yet. And now we have the means technologically to find that relatively easily. So it just surprised me that no one's apparently looked for this in the last 30 years. So if anyone knows of a better example than eight letters or wants to go looking for it, let me know.

I'd like to know what the longest naturally occurring one is. The Matthew and Drama Dictionary of the Theater tells us that the word ponging in the theater refers to ad-libbing or improvising, especially when one has forgotten one's lines. And it says that the actor F.R. Benson, who was active chiefly at the end of the 19th century,

could pong in blank verse. Blank verse is unrhymed by iambic pentameter. So, for instance, what that seems to mean is that if F.R. Benson was acting in one of Shakespeare's plays and forgot his lines, he could ad-lib in iambic pentameter until he got back on track again, which is amazing, but it's true. I haven't been able to confirm it, and I haven't found any examples, but I hope that's true. While we're talking about odd talents in the theater, I have one more here while we're at it. This concerns William Kendall,

another actor who was working at about the same time, who apparently could blanch on cue. He could go white whenever you asked him to or whenever he chose to. This is from Eric John's 1975 book, Dames of the Theater. Mrs. Margaret Kendall had a high opinion of her husband's talent as an actor and would often recall the scene in The Queen's Shilling in which he displayed his remarkable gift of turning pale whenever he wished, just as Eleonora Duzet had been able to blush at Will on stage.

Mr. Kendall played a wounded soldier, and at one point in the action, the colonel gripped his arm where he had been wounded, and the soldier visibly blanched with pain, often causing women in the audience to faint. That's pretty dramatic, if you can cause people in the audience to faint. I wonder how you discover a talent like that. Like, maybe I could do that that and I don't know him. It's a good thing he became an actor and wasn't just an accountant or something because you wouldn't have any occasion to use that.

Oh, you could really freak people out. You could be like, look at your book and then make yourself go stark white. This is an interesting one. John Marson published a book in 2005 called The Book of the Harp, which is a collection of notes and anecdotes and curiosities about the playing of the harp. And he notes that one-handed playing of the harp is rare. There are technical exercises just to improve your technique with either hand,

but there aren't many pieces written for the harp that are intended to be played with one hand alone. But he gives a list of some of the exceptions, some pieces that have been written like that. And one of them that stood out for me was a piece called Improviso da Concerto from 1947 by the composer Luigi Ferrari Tricate, which Marston says bears a poignant dedication

to harpist Ida Ferretti for Orsini, described as Grande Mutilata di Gere. And my Italian isn't quite good enough to know what to make of that. It seems since the piece came out in 1947, I think what it might mean is that either the piece, the concerto, is written entirely for the left hand, and I think that means either that it was written to commemorate people who had lost limbs, perhaps in World War II, or that the harpist

herself, Orsini, had lost her right hand. But in any case, the piece apparently is a concerto for the harp written entirely with the left hand. I've been looking all over for either a copy of the concerto or any more written about it and haven't been able to find anything. If anyone knows anything about that, please let me know. And this last piece is just a paragraph that stood out to me, a vignette or an episode from Pierre Burton's 2003 book, The Klondike Fever, about the Yukon Gold Rush of the late 1800s. And it concerns just a, I don't even know what to call it, just a little picture of something that happened in Dawson City in the bitter winter of 1897. He writes, it was in the Monte Carlo dance hall and saloon that winter that a 22-year-old French-Canadian girl named Mabel LaRose auctioned herself off to the highest bidder. She offered to live with him all winter as his wife and do his housekeeping, the money to be

held by neutral parties and paid over when the bargain was completed. Up she stood on the bar, a wistful and diminutive figure with plaited auburn hair, and was promptly purchased for $5,000. This is largely confirmed in Douglas Featherling's book, The Gold Crusades, but I haven't been able to learn anything more about it. Perhaps there's nothing more to learn. If you can shed any light on that or on any of these other questions, please write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. This episode is brought to you by our patrons and by Harry's, who are celebrating their three-year anniversary as a business this month. I've mentioned Harry's before. For years, I used an electric shaver until Harry's had me try their German-engineered razor blades, and I'd forgotten what a close shave a good blade will give. Harry's is the only shaving company that has both amazing quality and low prices. They make German-engineered five-blade cartridges that offer a close, comfortable shave with no cuts or burn.

And the quality's guaranteed. You'll get a full refund if you're not happy. Best of all, Harry's offers factory direct prices. They cut out the middleman by shipping direct to your door, which lets them sell their blades at half the price of the leading brand. More than a million men have already made the switch, and thousands more switch every day. So why pay $32 for an eight-pack of blades when you can get them for half the price at harrys.com? The Harry Starter Set is a great deal. For just $15, you get three of their expertly crafted German blades, a handle, and moisturizing shave cream. Harry's doesn't like to discount because their prices are already really low,

but they've worked out a special offer for first-time buyers. Harry's will give you $5 off your first order with promo code CLOSET. Stop overpaying for a great shave. Go to Harryrys.com right now. That's H-A-R-R-Y-S dot com and enter code CLOSET at checkout. In episode 94, we talked about how one of the horrible consequences of World War I was the large number of French soldiers who just disappeared, as either they were never found or their bodies couldn't be identified. Stan Ryerson wrote to us about this,

saying, related to episode 94, The Living Unknown Soldier, you might be interested in a film by the great Bertrand Tavernier called La Vie et Rien d'Autre, unfortunately translated to Life and Nothing But for the States. The literal translation is Life and Nothing Else, which sounds better to my ear, but that's a minor quibble. It stars the wonderful Philippe Noiré as a major charged with the identification of missing and or dead soldiers based on family descriptions. After the war, families would wander the battlefields desperately looking for whichever family member was last heard from at a given battle or village. Noiré's character abhors the idea of a monument to the

unknown soldier since it glorifies what he thinks is one of the great tragedies of warfare, not knowing what has happened to your loved ones. There is pressure from his superiors to find a soldier who cannot be identified at all in order to have a body to inter under the monument. A wonderful movie, lots of great performances, beautiful cinematography, highly recommended, especially for the ground view of the aftermath of World War I. And that was like a really interesting aspect of episode 94 that I hadn't really considered before, which was all of these soldiers who just went missing and the families never knew what had happened to them. Yeah, it was terribly wrenching for everyone in the country emotionally for years and years after the war itself was over. Yeah, and I think it's not an aspect of warfare that

many people would really recognize. I mean, you think of the horror of the people that died and the horror of what happened, but it's not really an aspect of World War I that I had really heard talked about much. When I was doing the research for that episode, I didn't get a chance to put this into the feature, but there's another famous film by Abel Gance called Jacuzzi that came out in 1919, just after the war, in which it's a famous anti-war film. He said he was accusing the war, accusing men, accusing universal stupidity. And in the climax of that film,

the dead actually rise and come back into a village, basically accusing the living of forgetting them and not valuing their sacrifice adequately enough. It's really powerful. Wow. Gantz said just the filming of that was really moving. He said, the conditions in which we filmed were profoundly moving. These men had come straight from the front, from Verdun, and they were due back eight days later. They played the dead knowing that in all probability they'd be dead themselves before long. Within a few weeks of their return, 80% had been killed. Wow. That's even more powerful to know that about the movie.

Yeah, as you're watching it. And regarding the Tomb of the Unknowns, it was typically done in France on war memorials. They wouldn't distinguish between the missing and the dead. It would just say beloved missing because, as one author said, to separate them would be to sever the unity of their sacrifice. It's easier – it's certainly easy to commemorate the dead, but we shouldn't forget that all those, as you're saying, who just vanished and were never, it wasn't understood what had happened to them. Well, it sounds nice to hear that the dead were remembered, unlike the filmmaker who was basically accusing everybody of forgetting. It sounds like maybe people didn't actually forget,

which is maybe a nice thought. Yes. Sten ends his email with, thanks to you both and the kitty for all your hard work. And Sasha does work really hard on the podcast. Yes, it's very inspiring. We should acknowledge that. So, for example, she often has to put up with being sequestered in the back room when we're recording.

And she seems to think that's pretty unfair and asking quite a lot of her. So it was very nice of Sten to acknowledge all of her efforts. to acknowledge all of her efforts. In our last episode, episode 98, I explored Charles Darwin's use of the word griffin in one of his diary entries, and we questioned whether he had used the word mistakenly. Douglas Liao wrote, greetings, I discovered your podcast a couple of months ago, and I'm enjoying listening to it. I love the lateral thinking puzzles and listening to you feel your way towards the answers. Or away from the answers. Yeah, I like that sort of feeling our way towards the answers. On today's podcast, you talked about Darwin's use of griffin to describe someone who was going over the equator

for the first time, which you referred to as line crossings. The first several times you used the phrase, I heard lion crossings, which put me in mind of what a griffin is, a lion crossed with an eagle. So perhaps Darwin misunderstood line crossings in the same way. I never thought of that. Yeah. So I mean, that would explain his use of the word and that wasn't an explanation that we had considered ourselves. So thanks, Douglas. That was very helpful. And thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. If you have any questions or comments, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation,

and I have to try to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Price Tipping. Okay. On two separate occasions, months apart, workers on ships bring devices aboard which could destroy their ships. They then use these devices, sinking or disabling the ships and killing many men on board.

What was the nature of these devices and why were they used? Oh. Okay. Ships. Things made out of, I don't know, wood or metal that are intended to float on water? Yes. Okay. And they have people in them. Yes. In the ships. Was this during a war? Yes. Okay. Was this during the 20th century. No. Yes.

Yes. Okay. So people brought devices on ships during the American Civil War, and the devices did something that caused the ships to be damaged or sink, you said? That's right, yes. And killed people that were on board? Yes. Were the workers slaves? No. No. So were they people just trying to sabotage the ships of the other side?

Like somebody from the south would put this on northern ships or the north would put it on southern ships? Yes. Sort of like that or? Sort of like that. Sort of like that. Okay. The people putting the devices on the ships. Yes.

Were they from the U.S.? Whether they were in the north or the south. Yes. Okay. So this wasn't like intervention from another country. Yes, that's right. People from England or something. Okay, so let me just stick to that. Okay, you said this happened on two incidents.

The people who put the devices on the ship in both incidents, would you say they were fighting on the same side of the war? Yes. Okay, were they fighting on the side of the North? The people who put the devices on the ships were fighting on the side of the North. Were they fighting on the side of the north? The people who put the devices on the ships were fighting on the side of the north. They were fighting on the side of the north. Now, the ships that they were put on,

were they northern ships? Yes. Okay, so that's the confusing part. And I can understand they would sink the ships like if they didn't want them captured. Oh, were the ships being overrun by Southerners? And so they sunk them because the South overran the ships or were threatening to take the ships. This was like a booby trap or a sabotage thing so that if the ships were taken by the other side, I don't know, you could detonate them or do something or something would happen.

No. Oh, so I like that answer. I'll say the Northerners brought these devices onto northern ships, but it was unwitting. They didn't intend to. Oh, seriously. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. So there goes my sabotage. And so that would be great if you booby trap the ships and then the other side takes them and then you blow them up or whatever. I don't know. Um, okay. So the northerners put something on their ships. Was this by southern design?

Yes. Oh, so the southerners cleverly did something. Yes. And the northerners installed these or put these devices on the ships, and then by southern design, the devices caused the ships to be damaged. Exactly. Ah, this's clever. So what did they do?

So, okay, would you say that they were putting something on the ship that you would call defective? No. No. I wouldn't say that. Okay. So it wasn't just that they were installing something that the Southerners had tampered with or made in poor quality so that they would no

that's a good thought but that's not it were these were these something that they had taken from the south like taken from the south um you mean imported no like they took something from the south from from the southern army or the southern ships and you tried to use it themselves. Oh, no. No. Okay. Was this something... So somehow the South managed to... Would you say that the South changed these devices in some way that the North was unaware of? Yes. Okay.

Hmm. The nature of the damage to the ship, did the devices blow up or cause a fire, something along the lines of an explosion or fire? Yes. Do these devices blow up or cause a fire, something along the lines of an explosion or fire? Yes. Were these devices that in the normal course of business would be expected to blow up?

No. Okay. So would you call them bombs? Yes. So the northerners put something on their ships unaware that they were bombs. Correct. And the South knew, or somebody in the South at least, knew that they were bombs. Correct. And the South knew, or somebody in the South at least, knew that they were bombs. Yes.

Ah. So what do you bring on the ship and it's a bomb and you don't know it's a bomb? Is it some form of weaponry? Well, yes, in the sense that it's a bomb, but... No, no, no, but I mean not intended. Like you burn cannonballs on a ship and you don't realize it's a bomb

rather than a cannonball. Yeah, the Northerners didn't realize it was a bomb. Okay. No, no, no. I know, but I'm saying they didn't think it was a weapon of any kind. I'm just trying to think what would be on a ship that would be a bomb without you knowing it's a bomb. Was it disguised as something else? Yes. So I could say, was this a sack of flour? And you'd say, yes, it was disguised as a sack of flour or whatever. You're on the right track. So it was disguised as something else. Was it food related?

No. Would you call it general supplies? Yes, I think I would. Would you call it like something that you would normally use in the sailing or maintenance of a ship? Yes. You're doing well. Oh, wow.

I'm glad to hear that um so this is something you would normally bring on a ship would you call it an instrument no so it would normally be sort of an inert object yeah i think i'd say that um would it normally be used in the navigation of the ship no or to steer it or maneuver it no so it's not like a rudder or a sail or anything like that? No, not like that. And it's not an instrument. Would you call it equipment of some kind? No.

I'm trying to think of a hint that won't give it away. So you said supplies, but something that would normally be on a ship. Yes. Yes. So not, I'm thinking not like clothing or something, right? Because something more ship-related than that. Okay, was it made out of wood? No, I have a hint, but it's going to...

All right, something not made out of wood. So something made out of metal? No. Glass? No. Paper? It was needed specifically on northern steamships. On northern steamships. On northern steamships.

Shovels? No. Coal? Yes. Coal. Seriously, coal. So they somehow disguised, they somehow put bombs in the coal? Yes.

And then they would shovel them into the engine or the fire and the thing would blow up? Yeah, that's basically it. Are you serious? I never heard of this. I never heard of this. They were called coal torpedoes. Here's Price's write-up. This occurred during the American Civil War.

A member of the Confederate Secret Service, Thomas Courtenay, invented what was called the coal torpedo. At this time, the term torpedo referred to an explosive device as generally not to what we think of as torpedoes. The device was a gunpowder bomb made to look like a lump of coal with the idea that it would be snuck into Union fleet coal supplies and used unwittingly in steam engines. Though the explosive itself wasn't powerful enough to sink a ship, its explosion would rupture the boiler and cause catastrophic damage. A lot of Confederate Secret Service documents were burned at the end

of the war, so there's some uncertainty as to how many times it was used, but there are two likely cases, the sinking of the Greyhound and the disabling of the U.S. Chenango. He quotes Wikipedia, which says, The manufacturing process was similar to that used for artillery shells, except that actual pieces of coal were used as patterns for iron castings. The walls of the coal shell were about three-eighths inch thick, creating a hollow space inside sufficient to hold three to four ounces of gunpowder. After filling, the shell was closed with a threaded plug,

then dipped in melted beeswax and rolled in coal dust, creating the appearance of a lump of coal. Finished coal torpedoes were about four inches on a side and weighed three to four pounds. And how did they get them? They just put them in the Union Coal Supply, and it looked like, it was fashioned to look exactly like a lump of coal. Right, no, I mean, I think that's incredibly clever. So they would just have to sneak them into to the union coal supply somehow? Yes, and I don't have the details on that. But then they just shovel it into under the boilers, and in some cases, at least, they'd boil it. That's extremely clever. It's very low-tech, but it's very effective.

I thought it was a really clever solution. When I said coal, I'm thinking, okay, it's not going to be coal for sure, but I was just trying to think what else to guess. Wow. So thank you, Price, for that. That was a very good puzzle. Yes, and if anybody else 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's another episode for us. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, you can check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample more than 9,000 absorbing tidbits. At the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 absorbing tidbits.

At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the sidebar. If you'd like to support Futility Closet, please consider becoming a patron to help keep us going. You can find more information at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by clicking on 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. you