Futility Closet - 105-Surviving on Seawater

Episode Date: May 8, 2016

In 1952, French physician Alain Bombard set out to cross the Atlantic on an inflatable raft to prove his theory that a shipwreck victim can stay alive on a diet of seawater, fish, and plankton. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll set out with Bombard on his perilous attempt to test his theory. We'll also admire some wobbly pedestrians and puzzle over a luckless burglar. 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 Alain Bombard: Alain Bombard, The Voyage of the Hérétique, 1953. William H. Allen, "Thirst," Natural History, December 1956. Richard T. Callaghan, "Drift Voyages Across the Mid-Atlantic," Antiquity 89:345 (2015), 724-731. T.C. Macdonald, "Drinking Sea-Water," British Medical Journal 1:4869 (May 1, 1954), 1035. Dominique Andre, "Sea Fever," Unesco Courier, July/August 1998. N.B. Marshall, "Review: The Voyage of L'hérétique," Geographical Journal 120:1 (March 1954), 83-87. Douglas Martin, "Alain Bombard, 80, Dies; Sailed the Atlantic Alone," New York Times, July 24, 2005. Anthony Smith, "Obituary: Alain Bombard," Guardian, Aug. 24, 2005. John Scott Hughes, "Deep Sea in Little Ships," The Field, May 27, 1954. "Will This Be Another 'Kon Tiki'?" The Sphere, June 7, 1952. "Mishap And Survival At Sea," The Sphere, April 2, 1955. Bryan Kasmenn, "Teach a Man to Fish ...," Flying Safety 57:5 (May 2001), 20. Listener mail: National Public Radio, "In The 1870s And '80s, Being A Pedestrian Was Anything But," April 3, 2014. Wikipedia, "Edward Payson Weston" (accessed May 7, 2016). Wikipedia, "6 Day Race" (accessed May 7, 2016). This week's lateral thinking puzzle was adapted from the book Lateral Mindtrap Puzzles (2000). Here's a corroborating link (warning -- this spoils the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music 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 the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from the dancing plague of 1518 to the dust devils of Mars. This is episode 105. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1952, French physician Alain Bombard set out to cross the Atlantic on an inflatable raft, trying to prove that a shipwreck victim could stay alive on a diet of seawater, fish, and plankton.

In today's show, we'll set out with Bombard on his perilous attempt to test his theory. We'll also admire some wobbly pedestrians and puzzle over a luckless burglar. And just a quick programming note, we'll be away next week. Episode 106 will be coming out on Monday, May 23rd. We're working on redesigning our website and hope to launch the new look before our next show.

I have to thank listener Rini Ricca for suggesting this one. It concerns a French physician named Alain Bombard, who was working in the early 1950s. He found being a physician rewarding, but he wanted to help humanity in a larger sense and came to focus on shipwreck. He wrote, shipwreck became for me the great, the very expression of human misery, a synonym for despair, hunger, and thirst. And in researching it, he found some, actually, I thought, horrifying statistics. This is in the early 1950s. He found that each year throughout the world in peacetime, more than 200,000 people suffered shipwreck, meaning their ships go down and they find themselves trying to stay alive in lifeboats. More than a quarter of these people, 50,000 of them, died after reaching the boats. It was just this horrible, grim death

sentence where you'd probably die of thirst in a few days before you had any realistic prospect of reaching land or finding a ship that could help you. He thought this was an attractive research target because, for instance, if you addressed yourself to trying to help people who were suffering famine, even if you came up with some breakthrough that would help them, there are all these intervening political layers of actually trying to get your help to the people who need it. With Shipwreck, he felt that if he could reach some kind of new breakthrough or principle that would help them, all he had to do was just get the word out. And then that available new information would help anyone who needed it. It was a really attractive target for him to try to focus on,

or that's how he felt about it. He was already working on this problem and turning it over on his mind when in 1951, it sort of came home to him personally. He and already working on this problem and turning it over on his mind when in 1951 it sort of came home to him personally. He and a friend of his had crossed the English Channel from France into England to attend a wedding, and on the way back, the motor in their boat conked out, and they were left drifting for a few days. His friend drank nothing during that period and was desperately thirsty when they were finally picked up, but Bombard, who had drunk a little bit of seawater, found that he was not. He'd been thinking for a while that perhaps drinking seawater in small amounts might be the key to helping people who had suffered shipwreck. He said the principal problem for

people in that position was water. A man will die after 10 days at the most without water, but he can survive for 30 days without food. And he thought in the long term, if you're in a lifeboat, the key to staying alive is fishing. He found that a fish is 50 to 80% water by weight, and that's fresh water. You can drink it and that'll sustain you. So if you catch a fish, you can squeeze the water out of it and drink that. And that way avoid drinking seawater, but it'll just keep you going. He calculated that if you could catch an average of six to seven pounds of fish each day and do that, squeeze out what he called fish juice, drink that, and then eat the flesh of the fish, you can sustain yourself for quite a period of time. It's not very appetizing.

Yeah, I know. I'm making faces here because I'm not picturing fish juice like the newest product in your supermarket. But it's better than dying of thirst, which is what a lot of people are facing now. The trouble is that when your ship goes down, you're all traumatized and disorganized and trying to figure out what to do. And you don't have fishing equipment with you probably. Or you'll have some rudimentary things, but you can put something together. But you probably won't actually get into the business of fishing for about three or four days, or typically that's what he found is what it took. And the problem is during those three or four days, you're steadily dehydrating all the time and you're in pretty bad shape even by the time you get your hook in the water. He said that

three or four days is a critical period. He said it's critical to establish a water supply while the body is in the normal condition. And he concluded that the only solution was to drink seawater. Let me say immediately, please don't try this yourself. Don't drink seawater. Bombard's theory was controversial even when he proposed it. In fact, he named his boat the Heretic because he understood how contentious these ideas were. But this is what the idea was. Seawater is dangerous because it's so salty. If you drink seawater, your body needs to use that water to try to flush out all the sodium if you're just drunk. And it's not enough. So your body has to go to its own stores of water to flush out the rest of it, and you're left even more dehydrated than when you started. That's why it's generally so harmful. Sailors know this, and down through

the ages, when they found themselves in lifeboats, they do one of two things. Either they drink nothing at all and wind up dying of thirst, or they wait until they're just desperately thirsty and drink way too much seawater at one time, in which case it's more sodium than your body can even handle, and it just destroys your kidneys, and you die for that reason. Bombard thought he saw a middle way. He thought what you ought to do when you find yourself in a lifeboat is start drinking seawater immediately, from day one, before you're even thirsty, but to drink it in small amounts, no more than one and a half pints of seawater a day. That way, he said, you can maintain the body's water content while still taking in a manageable amount of salt on any given day, not enough to damage your kidneys.

You're still drinking seawater, so you can't get away with this for long, but he calculated that it would buy you about five days, which he thought would be long enough for you to recover from the trauma of the wreck, to organize your resources, and to start fishing. Once you're fishing, then you're in business. You can stop drinking seawater. You can just catch fish, press the juice out of them, and then eat the flesh of the fish. And if it rains and you can catch some rain water, so much the better. I'm still thinking, I don't know that I could catch fish. You stuck me in a lifeboat with very little equipment. But okay, maybe I just don't have very good fishing skills. I think you developed them. I mean, he found, I'll come to that in a second. It's actually

easier than you think. Oh, okay. Even once you've got this fishing business going, in the longer term, you still have to worry about vitamin deficiency, particularly vitamin C. If you don't get that, you'll get scurvy, and that'll kill you on its own. But here he reasoned that whales, like people, need an external supply of vitamin C, and whales subsist almost entirely on plankton, these microorganisms that live in the ocean. So he thought humans could use the same source. You can scoop plankton out of the sea literally in a net and eat that. And he hoped that that would supply the vitamin C that you needed. Okay. Enough to allay scurvy. It's not, again, that's not very appetizing, but he just wanted to, the overall point he was trying to establish was that

shipwreck doesn't have to be this hopeless, agonizing death sentence. You can subsist entirely off the sea on a combination of seawater, fish, plankton, and maybe rainwater and sustain yourself for perhaps weeks. And that's long enough to realistically hope that you can either reach land or encounter a ship that can rescue you. That's what he was trying to do. And that would give people hope, which was the other really debilitating thing about shipwreck that he found he found that 90 of the survivors of shipwreck die within three days which is less time than you'd expect uh to be due to thirst or hunger apparently just the emotional trauma of facing this bleak prospect you know most people in those days at least when they found themselves in lifeboat thought they were just going to slowly die of thirst and over the course of about a week and there was nothing to be done about it and just the emotional trauma of that was enough to debilitate you and to hasten your own death. So he'd at least give them hope by giving this prospect of somehow staying alive on the water. He was working on

these ideas while working at an ocean institute in Monaco, and did as much research there as he could and tested these ideas, including the diet, in the laboratory. But he came to believe that the only real way to test this for sure is to actually try it out on the sea, to try to stay alive in the conditions that a castaway would face and see if it actually worked. He wrote, two or three of us wanted to place ourselves in the situation of shipwrecked survivors in a lifeboat or life raft without food or water in order to prove to the world that survival was possible under such conditions. So he resolved to do this. They were going to do a trial run first in the Mediterranean, and if that was encouraging,

they tried to get all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. He had a 15-foot inflatable rubber dinghy that he was going to do both of these trips in and figured if he could stay alive himself following these principles, then he would have demonstrated that this is something that that the world should try to uh to give these resources to castaways to try to improve their prospects uh so with he undertook the the mediterranean leg of this adventure with a friend of his name jack palmer they left monaco and sailed eventually arriving in tangier stopping at minorca and majorca on the way and he did everything I've just described. He scooped plankton out of the sea and ate it and found actually it wasn't that bad.

He said it has a flavor like crab or lobster puree. He called it really quite a feast the first time he tried it. His opinion on that would change as it got more familiar, but he said it's not as bad as it sounds. It sounded better than fish juice to me off the bat. And he drank, Bombard drank seawater from the first according to his principles. His friend Jack, he found, was understandably reluctant to drink it at first, but he explained that eventually you'd sort of have to do this or you'd face dehydration. Bombard himself had been trained as a physician and could assess the signs intelligently and saw on examining Jack that eventually he showed incipient signs of dehydration jack finally drank some seawater bombard examined him the next morning

and found that the signs of dehydration had disappeared or so he reported eventually they caught a perch and squeezed the juice out of it and went through all of that business uh and he brought a fruit press for the business apparently that that works very well. If anyone ever wants to press a fish, you can use a fruit press for this. The things you learn on this show. Yeah, right. Where else are you going to learn that? Basically, but he found they arrived in Tangier eventually, and he decided that the whole thing would work. It took him about two weeks to make the whole trip, and they both arrived in good condition.

He said, out of 14 days, we drank fish juice for four and seawater for 10. And that was the other interesting thing he learned about this with regard to his theory. They only drank seawater for the first few days, but then he found if you switch to fish juice, which is basically fresh water, that'll help to flush the excess sodium out of your body. And then if you need to, and you're not catching any fish, you can go back to drinking seawater judiciously as little as possible thereafter. Again, these are all very controversial ideas, but this is what his thinking was. So that's the end of the Mediterranean leg, and now Bombard is willing and wants to cross the whole Atlantic. His plan is to sail west from Europe to the West Indies or from North Africa to the West Indies with the trade winds all the way across the Atlantic in the same little 15-foot inflatable rubber dinghy to prove these ideas. Jack got cold feet and didn't want to go with

him on this, but he resolved to go on his own and departed Casablanca that fall. They loaded some emergency, a crate full of emergency provisions for him, but he got them to seal. The consular authorities sealed the box so that it would be evident if he opened it. The theory there was that if he got halfway across the ocean and realized his theory was just wrong, he was willing to acknowledge that, but then he didn't want to just die pointlessly on top of that. So he had that with him if he needed it. He departed Casablanca, landed in the Canary Islands, and was making his final preparations there when he got word from his wife back in France that she had given birth to their baby daughter. So he flew back from the Canaries to France to meet his daughter and to see his wife again. But she didn't try to stop him.

He was still bent on making this expedition, which I think is telling. He keeps most of this off stage in the book. I'm getting most of this from his 1953 book about this whole thing. But he says he was focused on proving his theory so he could save thousands of lives. And he said his wife made no attempt to stop him, which I just thought was interesting because she must have known it was incredibly dangerous and this might kill him just after he'd started this family with his wife. She might not ever see him again either. But he went back to the Canary Islands and went on with it. Once he left the Canary Islands, it would be impossible to return to them, and the minimum distance he'd have to cover across the ocean was 3,750 miles. He estimated it would take 50 or 60 days to get to the West Indies if everything went well. And in all that time, his wife wouldn't

actually know how he was doing. Yeah, that's right. I'm assuming he doesn't have the means of communication. He had a radio receiver, but not a transmitter, so he could listen to the BBC and things like that briefly, a few hours a day. That was his big treat. But he couldn't communicate. No, he couldn't get word out to other people. So he left the Canaries on October 19th and began drinking seawater. On the 25th, he caught his first fish and he writes, from then on, I had all the food and liquid I needed every day and was never in danger of starving. Apparently, a lot of the advice they gave castaways at that time was just turned out to be completely wrong. And one of them was, a lot of people told him, once you're at sea, you're not going to catch any fish at all. You know, this will be the end of you.

That was my fear. I'm picturing myself not catching any fish. He says, contrary to predictions, he was positively surrounded by fish. He wrote, I had never seen so many fish in all my life, even in the aquarium tanks in Monaco. He said he needed no tank in which to store them. He wrote, my larder followed me wherever I went. I did find one paper that speculated that the zone of the Atlantic he was going through was particularly rich in nutrients. And so there was more plankton and fish there than he might find if he tried this experiment elsewhere in the world. That may have contributed to it. But anyway, he had fish following him. He had some fish that followed him so far that he gave them names. He made little friendships with these fish. So that wasn't a problem. And I'm actually going to condense his trip across the Atlantic because it's so

uneventful. The most striking thing about his book is how little he talks about food and water because it's just not a problem. His bigger problems are navigation and the durability of the equipment because he's in this little rubber inflatable raft and he keeps getting visited by sharks and swordfish that he thinks are going to puncture the the raft that didn't happen but he was worried about it also navigation became a problem he had a self-winding watch a watch that was wound by the motion of his wrist but one day the the strap broke so he couldn't impart enough motion of it to it to keep it wound and eventually it stopped which meant he didn't know what time it was and without the time he couldn't calculate his longitude he knew he was still headed west but he had no way anymore to assess his progress.

He didn't know how much progress he was making across the ocean. So those are big problems, but they have nothing to do with food and water. His theory seemed to be working. And in fact, as it happened, it didn't rain for the first three weeks. That was bad news for him, but it's helpful in proving the theory because during those three weeks, all he drank was seawater and fish juice. There was no rainwater, and he stayed alive through all that time. When it rained, it rained in torrents, and so he drank his fill and stored three or four gallons in his rubber mattress, and thereafter, he had all the fresh water he needed just because of the rain. But for those three weeks, he proved that he didn't need rain to stay alive. During all this time,

he was examining himself, you know, as a physician each day and keeping careful written records of how he was doing. And he said he was basically fine. He said his skin was fine, his mucous membranes had not dried. He would assess the quantity, odor, and color of his urine and said basically he seemed like he was in pretty good shape. He wrote, I had proved conclusively that a castaway could live for three weeks and even longer because I could have continued perfectly well without fresh water. So he was, the worst, most stressful part of it is close to the end of the journey, he just ran into these doldrums where there just wasn't a breath of wind. He was hoping on sailing all the way across the sea.

So day after day would pass with him just sitting there in the water, not making any progress. just sitting there in the water not making any progress. Finally, he encountered a ship, a big passenger cargo steamer out of Liverpool, and asked them for the time and the longitude and discovered to his shock that he was 600 miles from his estimated position. He'd been making much less progress than he'd thought. He said, I felt as if someone had hit me

over the head with a hammer. The captain said he was headed for British Guiana and offered to take him, but he said he'd already invested 53 days in this, and if people heard that he'd been picked up, he thought he'd already established the theory after three weeks, but he thought if people heard that he'd been picked up, he thought he'd already established the theory after three weeks, but he thought if people heard that he'd been picked up by a ship, that they would just decide that the theory had been invalidated,

and he didn't want that to happen. He went aboard, he took a shower, he sent a telegram to his wife, and at the urging of the captain, he accepted a small meal because he thought he'd already proved his point. It was a very small meal. It was a fried egg, a little piece of liver, a spoonful of cabbage, and some fruit. And he regretted that not because it brought him some criticism, which it did, but because it woke up his digestive system. And apparently that was terrible.

Not only psychologically is it hard to go back to eating raw fish after that, but it woke up his system and it thought things were back to normal. He said, so as a result, he lost more weight in the 12 days remaining in the trip than in the 53 days before that. He'd been sort of a starvation mode and should have kept into it. It's too late to learn that lesson apparently until after he'd already done it. Anyway, early on day 65, he saw some lights in the clouds and that turned out to be a reflection of the light of the Barbados lighthouse where he was able to land shortly afterward. The fishermen on the beach there started going through the things in his boat, which he didn't need anymore. But one of the things they found was the crate of food, which was still sealed. And they saw the words rations on there and started shouting food, food. And he was worried they would open it up, which would destroy the whole experiment because

he couldn't prove that he hadn't eaten the food himself. Fortunately, a policeman arrived and he got him and two other witnesses to agree. He said, can you just please certify that I haven't opened this box? And they agreed to do that. So that danger was allayed. He was briefly a celebrity when people learned what he had accomplished and finally flew back home to France. On the flight home, an air hostess said, if we ever have to put down in the sea, let us hope it is today when you are there to look after us. And he wrote, perhaps after all, I had accomplished something. So what to make of all this? Bombard claimed flatly that he had proved his theory. He wrote, any survivor of a disaster at sea should be able to reach land

in as good physical condition as I did. Mine was a perfectly normal case, my health being that of the average man. Altogether, it had taken 65 days to get from the Canary Islands to the West Indies. He had a thorough physical when he arrived there and found that he had lost 55 pounds, which is a lot, and become seriously anemic, but he had made it. His physical showed that he had no vitamin deficiency, so he was apparently right about the plankton because he had no other source of vitamin C. He'd had no rainwater for the first 23 days and drunk only fish juice and seawater. In fact, if you count the Mediterranean leg, then altogether from Monaco to the West Indies,

he'd drunk seawater for a total of 14 days and fish juices for 43 days. He said, I had conquered the menace of thirst at sea. There was quite a bit of skepticism and pushback about this from the medical establishment. A man named T.C. McDonald, who was director of hygiene and research for the British Air Ministry, wrote in the British Medical Journal in 1954. He said, no one doubts Bombard's courage or the nobility of his purpose, but the science on this is quite well established. Drinking seawater in any amount is dangerous and you shouldn't do it. He wrote, there has as yet been no public denial of Bombard's claims, and this might suggest that his theories have been accepted. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it seems appropriate to say, again, that the bulk of experimental evidence has shown that seawater drinking must do castaways more harm than good.

A German physician named Hannes Lindemann, who was also a canoeist and a sailing pioneer, expressed the same opinion. He said that he must have been drinking rainwater earlier than he'd said. Lindemann suggested he might even have brought some fresh water with him and didn't acknowledge that. We don't know. In the end, the only account of Bombard's voyage that we have is his own written account.

So he's the only one who really knows what happened out there. And nobody's tried since. I mean, obviously not crossing the Atlantic in a dinghy, but you could replicate these conditions on land, just try drinking small amounts of seawater for several days with no other freshwater. I mean, I wonder if anybody's tried it. In 1955, the French Navy tried to replicate the results,

and actually they said they had good success with it. They concluded that a man can survive for six days by drinking only seawater, but he has to drink only a pint at a time and must drink a quart of fresh water on the sixth day to help get rid of the excess salt. So they didn't think he was crazy. It looks from what I can assess now that no one thinks he was a crackpot. In fact, he went on to be an environment minister in the French government. But the overwhelming consensus now is you shouldn't – I mean that seawater will dehydrate you when drunk in any amount. And I don't – I frankly can't make perfect sense of his theory he seemed to think that the idea was that as long as you drank took in only a permissible amount of salt then you'd have the benefit of all the water that came along with it when you drank seawater

but that's not how it works you your body needs all that water to try to expel the sodium so the theory doesn't make perfect sense to me and and apparently it's not widely accepted now. But no one disputes that he made the voyage himself. He sailed alone in a 15-foot dinghy from the Canary Islands to Barbados alone, and that fact alone should give Castaway some hope that it's possible to make a voyage like that on your own, regardless of how you keep yourself alive.

At one point when he's telling the story, when he's out in the Atlantic, he's just looking sort of idly at the boat that he's in and comes up with the idea that perhaps people who make lifeboats should print on the fabric of them a map of the prevailing winds and currents of the world's oceans. And he thought to give Castaway's hope, he might also like to see the words printed, remember the man who did it in 1952. on you if you plan to be shipwrecked, then please consider becoming a patron to help support the show. If you pledge at least a dollar an episode, you get access to our activity feed where you'll find outtakes and extralateral thinking puzzles and learn what's going on behind the scenes of the show. For higher pledges, we also offer special thank yous and a weekly email telling you what the upcoming topics will be. For our super patrons, we have a monthly bonus episode where Greg and I try to stump each other in a brain-teasing game that you can play along with us.

So if you want to help us keep making Futility Closet, check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link in our show notes. And thanks so much to all of our quirky and curious fans who help support the show. fans who help support the show. In episode 102, Greg told us about the Bunyan Derby, a 1928 foot race across the United States. Sten Ryason wrote about what he called an antecedent to the Bunyan Derby. Sten said, it might interest you to know of an English tradition from the Victorian era known as a six-day race. There are still six-day races, but back then the rules were a little flexible. The basic concept was how far could you walk in six days. These were held on indoor tracks with hundreds if not thousands of spectators, most of whom were interested in the sport in and of itself, with quite a few folks there waiting simply for accidents. At one point,

there was no specific rule about which direction you had to walk or run. So after four or five days, some of these fellows were so completely exhausted, they would often walk smack into each other. This rule was eventually changed to the disappointment of the more cynical spectators, requiring a specific direction for a given race. Participants had some difficulty walking a straight line after a while, leading to the unofficial name of the races, wobbles. Participants in this sport were called pedestrians. I learned of this peculiar sport from a British mystery novel, Wobble to Death, by Peter Lovesey. His Sergeant Cribb novels are wonderful snapshots of late Victorian society, as well as being cracking good mysteries. Once again, thanks for all your hard work, Greg and Sharon and Furball,

whose name I keep forgetting. Thanks, Sten. And Sasha does always appreciate having her hard work acknowledged, no matter what she's called. We actually call her several different things ourselves, so Furball is totally fine. From what I was able to find out about the sport that Sten was writing about, it actually appears to have started in the U.S.

Edward Payson Weston of Rhode Island lost a bet about who was going to win the 1860 presidential election. And by the terms of the bet, he had to walk 478 miles from Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. in 10 days from February 22nd to March 4th, 1861. That's some bet. Yeah. And those who know the U.S. winter weather conditions will know that they can be pretty rough in that area of the country in those months. And the feat was even more impressive given the lack of decent roads back then. Oh, yeah.

So this stunt garnered Weston quite a lot of attention, and he capitalized on the publicity by undertaking a variety of other walking feats, some even longer distances than his first one, such as walking from Portland, Maine to Chicago, Illinois, over 1,200 miles in 26 days. But he also performed different indoor stunts. So, for example, he might endeavor to walk around a roller rink for a total of 100 miles within 24 hours. And people would pay 10 cents just to come and watch him walk in circles for an entire day. I thought people must be pretty bored. That's the best thing they can find to do.

100 miles in 24 hours? Yes. Wow. According to an NPR story on the topic, Weston was a pretty flamboyant character who would make a spectacle of the whole thing. He had apparently quite a lot of stamina, as you can imagine. But on top of that, he had an eye towards the sheer entertainment of the whole thing. So he would like wear ruffled shirts with sashes and capes and carry a flamboyant cane and just made like a whole spectacle of it. But yeah, apparently he was really known for his stamina. These walking spectacles evolved in the 1870s into the six-day races that Sten wrote about.

And they apparently moved from the U.S. over into England. Because public amusements were illegal on Sundays, the races would start just after midnight Sunday night and go until just before midnight on Saturday. And that's why six days specifically. And as Sten noted, the contestants might get very little sleep during this time. There were cots that were set up for them and they could take little naps on them, but they mostly just walked. And according to the NPR article, many of them consumed very large quantities of champagne during the races, as it was erroneously believed at the time that champagne was a stimulant. So I imagine that might have contributed to the wobbling and accidents that Sten noted.

That would be entertaining to watch. Yeah, it would get apparently more and more entertaining as the time went by. These races were quite popular spectacles through the 1870s and 1880s. were quite popular spectacles through the 1870s and 1880s. They drew very large crowds of spectators with some competitions recording as many as 70,000 paying customers. And the crowds would be entertained not only by the races themselves, but also with brass bands and food vendors and lots of betting on the races, like who would be the first to drop out, who'd be the first to make 100 miles, and so on. So it was like a whole event. And then Sir John Dugdale Astley, a member of the British Parliament and avid sportsman, actually set up a series of international six-day races in which the pedestrians competed for the Astley Belt

and the title of Long Distance Champion of the World. title of Long Distance Champion of the World. The 1879 World Championship was won by George Guillaume of Canada, who walked 480 and a quarter miles. But by the 1890s, bicycles were becoming the rage and interest in the walking races was fading in favor of bicycle races, which also included six-day bicycle races. Of course. With people precariously cycling with very little sleep. I didn't see anything about whether they were drinking champagne or not too. It'd be even more fun to watch. Apparently

these six day bicycle races still continue though primarily in Europe but now it seems that the racers no longer actually cycle day and night. They do take time off and I gather sleep. In the 1980s, interest picked up again in the old six-day walking races, and there have been some held sporadically since then, though it seems like the more recent ones tend to be held outside rather

than just going around and around a track. In the 1980s, the old records were broken and a pedestrian first passed 600 miles. In six days. Yeah. And according to Wikipedia, the current record seems to be 644 miles, if anyone is interested in trying to test themselves to see if they can beat it. Wow. Yeah. I actually wondered if being able to sleep might have made you be able to go further. You know, like they weren't able to make it to 600 miles back in the 1800s, but then they were also doing it with no sleep and possibly a lot of champagne. So maybe-

That makes sense. That's a good point. If maybe the sleep might, even though you lose some of the time, maybe you just make up for that in stamina. So thanks to Sten for bringing this to our attention. And if you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if there's any possible way that I can manage to mispronounce your name, please let me know how I should be pronouncing it. I'm going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an interesting sounding situation, and I have to figure out what's actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. I adapted this from the book Lateral Mind Trap Puzzles. A burglar is midway through robbing an

apartment when he makes a loud noise alerting the neighbors. The burglar flees. Though he wore gloves and no one saw him, police are able to identify the burglar within minutes. How? okay is he are they able to identify him visually no ah that's so many theories going for that okay like he covered himself in flour accidentally like that was what the loud noise was right um is he injured in some way yes whatever made the loud noise injured him yes Yes. Okay. Was he shot? Yes. Did he shoot himself? Yes. He shot himself? Doing pretty well so far. With a gun? Yes. Okay. Was there anybody in the apartment that he was robbing? No. And he was robbing an apartment that presumably wasn't his own apartment? That's right. Was it booby trapped in some way? No. Was he trying to steal firearms? Yes. So he was like trying to steal some firearms that he thought were valuable. Yes. And somehow in the process shot himself. Yes. And that's how the police were able to identify

him? More to it than that? More to it than that. Okay. Was it where in his body he was shot? Yes. Okay. So he shot himself in some very specific location. I'd say yes. Was he able to walk, would you say? Yes. Was he bleeding copiously? He was, but that's not how they- That's not how they attended.

Well, the guy covered in blood, it's like a big clue. Okay. Do I need to know the nature of the firearms? More specifically than like say their guns or something? Do I need to know what type or- Not more than that. It was a their guns or something? Do I need to know what type? Not more than that. It was a shotgun, but you don't really need to know more than that. Was the shotgun booby-trapped in some way?

No. Is his age important, the age of the robber? No. Like he wasn't a child or – No, no, no. I don't know why that would matter. Okay. Is the location important?

Not really, no. Time period? No. Okay. Is it the manner in which he was shot that I'm trying to work out? Or why he was shot? Or what he was... I'm trying to figure out what's important here.

What he was doing while he was shot? Go for the location where he was shot. Where he was shot. Okay. Below the waist? No. Above the waist? Yes.

At the waist? In his head? No. In his chest? No. In his arms? Sort of, yeah. One arm? Yes. Hand? No. In his chest? No. In his arms? Sort of, yeah. One arm?

Yes. Hand? Yes. He shot himself in the hand somehow. More specific than that. He shot a finger off. Yes. He shot off one of his own fingers

while trying to steal a valuable shotgun. Yes. And there's more to it than that. Do I have to figure out how he, how he just happened? No, you basically got it. How did they catch him? How did they catch him? Not beyond the guy missing a finger.

I mean, there's more to it than that. Well, they caught him within minutes. You've practically got it. They caught him within minutes. Was he trying to hail a cab? And he's like, trying to flag down a cab. No, that'd be pretty good though. Okay.

Is his means of escape important? Like how he tried to escape or No, that would be pretty good, though. Okay. Is his means of escape important? Like how he tried to escape or why, what means? Not really, no. No. It was something that he did, some action that he took or that he couldn't do because, like, he couldn't dial the phone. No, no, no, not that. It's something he did after he left the apartment. You basically got it.

Did he go to the hospital? Yes. Ah, so he showed up at the hospital missing a finger. Yes, this is true. This happened in Miami in 1996. This is from an article in the Deseret News. A burglary suspect was arrested after police found his missing thumb inside the apartment he was accused of robbing, Metro-Dade police said Saturday. The suspect, Rafael Santiago, shot his thumb off while he and his accomplice were trying to steal a shotgun from the apartment in a Miami suburb Friday, police detectives Dorothy Diaz said.

The suspect fled, but Santiago 34 was arrested when he showed up at Jackson Memorial Hospital for treatment of his wound. He was charged with armed burglary and grand theft and was held under guard at the hospital's jail ward. Basically, he was trying to steal a shotgun that was zippered in a carrying case, and when he put it down, it fired and shot his thumb off, and a neighbor heard that and called the police. Officers recovered the severed thumb, packed it on ice, and called hospitals until they found Santiago. Doctors attempted to reattach the thumb, but it was too fragmented. They're still looking for the accomplice, who's believed to have driven him to the hospital. He probably has a lot of blood in his car, Diaz said. Crime does not pay. I think that's a theme

on this show. Crime does not pay. 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. Just a reminder, we'll be off next week and back on May 23rd. And in the meantime, if you like our podcast and want to help support it so that we can keep making it, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futility closet.

The show is a big commitment of time to research and produce each week. So we're really grateful to everyone who has pitched in to help keep us going. If you're looking for more quirky entertainment, check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 handpicked esoterica. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. 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.