Futility Closet - 109-Trapped in a Cave

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 a mint julep at Oxford to a man who mailed a bank. This is episode 109. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1925, Kentucky caver Floyd Collins was exploring a new tunnel when a falling rock caught his foot, trapping him 55 feet underground. In today's show, we'll follow the desperate efforts to free Collins,

Starting point is 00:00:37 whose plight became one of the first popular media sensations of the 20th century. We'll also learn how Ronald Reagan invented a baseball record and puzzle over a fatal breakfast. I have to thank listener Bill Bowser for suggesting this one. Floyd Collins was a cave explorer in central Kentucky in the early 20th century. He had only a fifth grade education, but he knew what he wanted to do with his life from a very early age. He loved caves. only a fifth grade education, but he knew what he wanted to do with his life from a very early age. He loved caves. He started caving at age six. And in 1917, at age 30, he actually discovered a cave on his father's farm, which he dubbed Crystal Cave. That part of Kentucky apparently is just

Starting point is 00:01:15 shot through with caves. And it's a big part of the tourism in that area. People will just come from out of the area just to visit all these beautiful caves. Crystal Cave, which he discovered was beautiful. Also, its walls were encrusted with gypsum flowers, but they were off the main road. A lot of the tourists would come to another local famous cave called Mammoth Cave, and few of them would turn off the main road to get to this Crystal Cave that he discovered. But he didn't give up hope. Seven years later, in 1925, he started looking for another commercial cave that he could exploit for profit. And he thought he'd have the best luck on land belonging to any of three farmers whom he knew in that area. So he struck a deal with them saying, if you give me permission to explore in your land looking for a cave, if I find something that I think we can actually turn into a tourist attraction, then I'll split the profits with you. And so they said, sure, go ahead.

Starting point is 00:02:03 And he started looking around on their land. attraction, then I'll split the profits with you. And so they said, sure, go ahead. And he started looking around on their land. He was working alone for three weeks, most recently on the land of a farmer named Beasley Doyle on basically a hole in the ground that the news media later dubbed Sand Cave. On January 30th, 1925, he had been exploring that cave for a couple of hours and he'd gotten a little deeper into it than he normally had. It was quite confined, getting into it and out of it. It's a torturous, twisty, narrow little passage. He was finished and was on his way back out of it when he was passing under a large hanging limestone block and his lantern went out.

Starting point is 00:02:39 So he was wriggling through in the dark and just kicking at the sides of the cave when he accidentally kicked out with his right foot and struck this limestone block, which broke loose and fell across his left ankle when it just happened to be lying in a V-shaped crevice. He wasn't hurt, but he was caught. He couldn't pull his foot through this now narrow little channel where it was held by the limestone block, and the tunnel he was in was too small for him to turn around or reach down to free it himself. He was just basically trapped 55 feet below the surface and 115 feet from the entrance of the cave. He was reclining as if in a barber's chair. This is all very confining. People who visited him later found it terrifying. So he's on his way out of the tunnel when this happened. So his head is toward the cave's entrance at the bottom of a 10-foot chute, but his feet were pinned.

Starting point is 00:03:26 His left hand and forearm could move only slightly, and his right hand and arm were basically useless, and he couldn't roll over. Fortunately, he'd entered the cave at 10 a.m. and was trapped at noon. The farmer whose land this won, Beasley Doyle, knew where he was. He'd stopped by there before he'd gone to the cave that morning, and when he didn't appear after a while, Doyle went to the entrance of the cave and called for him but didn't hear any answer. So he went to bed and when Floyd still hadn't showed up the following morning, he finally went back to the cave with a friend of the family, a 17-year-old boy named Jewel Estes, who was small enough to get most of the way into the cave and discover Floyd who had been waiting there all night. Even Jewel couldn't get through the final squeeze the cave was just very very narrow so floyd must have been a really small man himself yes and he was a very expert caver apparently you can get good at getting through narrow spaces also he wasn't terrified of being trapped in this enclosed space which would really affect most people psychologically apparently floyd was in decent shape the rock still held his, so he couldn't get out, but he was mainly just cold and hungry and explained

Starting point is 00:04:28 what had happened and asked them to free him. So they told Floyd's family, and his brother Homer came in and managed to wend his way all the way through the cave into where Floyd was. But even he couldn't get into the tunnel far enough to free Floyd's legs, which is what had to be done to free him he had to feed his brother like a baby since he couldn't raise his hands and uh homer tried to dig him out but as fast as he removed the gravel more of it would come sliding down he just couldn't actually free him from the cave by sunday at dinner time but floyd had gone into the cave on friday so he'd been trapped now for two days more than a hundred people were milling around the entrance

Starting point is 00:05:04 to the cave most of them not contributing. It was just kind of a sensation locally. And one of the unfortunate things they did was to light fires on the hill. This was in January, remember, so that would melt ice, which would run down into the cave and make Floyd even more miserable. In hindsight, this is the really tragic part here is that the early efforts at helping him were all sort of desultory and disorganized. There was no real strong leadership or organization at the beginning, and it really slowed things down. The other thing that you find in reading all these accounts is how terrifying the conditions

Starting point is 00:05:34 were where he actually was located in the cave. Ellis Jones, who was a foreman, who was a garageman in Cave City, said, I wouldn't go back in there for a cold thousand bad as I need money. So a lot of these people are just drinking and milling around and talking about the problem without really being able to offer any constructive help. The media started to get involved. In particular, a newspaper reporter named William Miller of the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal. Miller had the nickname Skeets because of his small size. Skeets stood for mosquito. He stood five foot five and weighed 120 pounds. He was only 21 years old. Normally being of a small size is

Starting point is 00:06:09 not a particular advantage if you're a newspaper reporter, but it is if you're interviewing a man who's trapped in a cave underground. And Miller took a big part in covering this whole story. He reached the cave on February 2nd on the third day of Floyd's entrapment there, and said he went up to Homer Collins, Floyd's brother, and just asked him what was going on. And Homer basically said something about seeing for yourself. Miller said later, I guess I was ashamed not to. So he had arrived at the site, not sure that he was actually going to go into the cave, but he wound up doing it that morning. He said he was able to get all the way in there, thanks to his small size. And he said later he could not imagine a more terrifying place.

Starting point is 00:06:43 able to get all the way in there thanks to his small size and he said later he could not imagine a more terrifying place i think people just generally have this atavistic horror of being trapped particularly underground in a narrow space but he got all the way in there and formed almost immediately a bond with floyd who was still trapped there uh robert murray wrote a book about all this and he said there followed the most unusual interview in the history of american journalism never before had a newspaper reporter been able to touch and talk with a man who was so hopelessly buried alive. Apparently, the two shared an empathetic bond almost from the beginning. And we're talking not just about his immediate circumstances, but what had led Floyd in there and what it had been like to pass the last few days trapped underground with no one able to help him. And Floyd really apparently opened up to him.

Starting point is 00:07:22 He'd said, among other things, that on Sunday night after he'd been trapped for two days, he'd lapsed into a stupor. He said, I saw white angels and trays of chicken sandwiches and smelled fried onions. Anyway, this really affected Miller, the reporter. When he emerged from the cave, he was crying. He had entered at 10 a.m. and emerged at 11.15. He later said these 75 minutes altered his life. And he resolved to do everything he could to get him out, not just as a reporter, but just as a fellow human being to try to save him. He said, this was the first of many trips down the narrow hole to Collins. I fed him, interviewed him, and tried a number of suggestions that had been telephoned or mailed to Sand Cave. And this is a big part of this story. This was just at the beginning of what would become

Starting point is 00:08:02 the era of the 20th century media sensation. Before this, presumably people were getting caught in caves now and then, but the media weren't fast enough to report the story in real time as it were. They could report it in newspapers and similar things, but those didn't reach people quickly enough for them to follow it as the story unfolded. That was changing now. The first commercial radio station had been established in 1920, just five years earlier, and all these other technologies were coming online. Newspapers, radio, film, telegraph, long-distance telephone, wire photo facsimile machine, fast trains, and the motorized newspaper delivery truck. All these new technologies were sort of forming a

Starting point is 00:08:37 new web that enabled stories like this to be reported in real time. So now, if you lived in California, for example, you could follow Floyd's story, a man you'd never met who was trapped in a cave underground, and sort of follow, particularly by radio, as the story unfolded, which was a new thing. Yeah, rather than hearing about it like a day or two later. Yeah, so it was a lot more compelling and a lot more of a national sensation. The cave temperature, he's now been in the cave for three days, and the cave temperature was 54 degrees. A normal man immersed in water of that temperature will die of hypothermia in a little more than four hours, and he'd been in the cave for three days. He was in very good shape when

Starting point is 00:09:13 he went in, but I mean, it's very punishing to stay in those conditions for that length of time, and it's not clear how they're going to get him out. So he sort of begins to fade in and out while they're trying to help him. The basic problem is that no one could reach his feet if they could reach this limestone block that had fallen across his ankle presumably they could find a way to raise it and that's all that would be necessary to free him and get him out of there but no one could get that deep into the tunnel because it was so narrow one of the few things they could think to do was to put a harness on his upper body which they could reach and just pull him out by main force that's what the doctor said they said his shoulder

Starting point is 00:09:45 or chest muscles or his internal organs might tear first or his leg might rend at the ankle or the knee if any of those things happened he was likely to die before they could get him all the way out of the tunnel and get him to medical help but they just couldn't think what else to do and you would imagine that would be a very painful way to die well that's what happened they did try it they got a harness on him and started to pull on it and uh he would cry out alternately when they pulled he said don't pull me out you'll pull off my leg and when they let up he said do anything but get me out of here and so they kind of went back and forth miserably like that for a while skeets miller reported he would cry out like a child when they exerted pressure and they finally had to stop miller himself spent so long in the cave

Starting point is 00:10:20 trying to help with this effort that he collapsed on reaching the surface and was hustled off to a hotel to ward off possible pneumonia himself just from witnessing this anyway they finally had to give up on the harness idea and homer floyd's brother at this point was just emotionally wrung out and gave up he offered 500 to any doctor who would go in and amputate floyd's left leg the trapped leg at this point but even that was impossible there was no way to get yeah they couldn't reach his leg, yeah. So there's just no solution to this problem. They couldn't think what else to do.

Starting point is 00:10:49 Floyd's caving friend, Johnny Gerald, who had opposed pulling him with a harness, advised instead just maintaining his body heat while trying to dig around and over him. But even that's hard to do because a lot of this is solid limestone. It's just very awkward to try to dig in there. He made some heroic progress in trying to dig him out. He freed his right leg a bit and moved overall more than half a ton of rock, which is very impressive. But even he couldn't get past Floyd's knees, which was the basic problem. Skeets Miller, the reporter, brought in a light cord that was a series of light bulbs were set up on it to sort of illuminate the area and maybe lend a little bit of heat for him. That didn't

Starting point is 00:11:23 help much. And he worked very hard trying to dig into the tunnel over Floyd's body to get to his ankles. He said the vertical distance above Floyd's body was no more than five to six inches. So there's just no room to work there. He couldn't reach further than Floyd's calf. The last thing they tried to do was jacks, the jacks you would use to raise an automobile to change a tire. They tried a bunch of different sizes. None of them were quite good enough. The best they could find is a relatively small one where Skeets Miller went in and tried to set up a little tower of wooden blocks and put the jack on top of that to try to raise the ceiling of the cave just enough that he could get past him and

Starting point is 00:11:57 free his foot. That didn't work because the wooden blocks kept tumbling out. All this time, he's now been trapped for four days. By February 3rd, the story is front page news in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. So the media frenzy is still continuing, which again is sort of a new thing in the world. All this time also, because of all this traffic in the cave and the warming weather outside, rocks were beginning to slump downward and some debris was falling. The rocks in the ceiling were loosening. It had been raining for the past several days. All this human traffic was rubbing on the walls. There was a midwinter thaw and there was dripping groundwater all the time. So the whole cave is beginning to

Starting point is 00:12:32 sort of sag ominously. And finally, there was a cave in. Floyd wasn't hurt. The collapse happened about 12 to 14 feet in front of him, but it was about four feet thick. They could still yell to him through the cracks, but they couldn't reach him anymore uh they worried that digging through this would only cause more of the ceiling to collapse and they thought too late tragically that they could have provided him with a feeding tube and a field telephone that communicated with the outside and still managed to still feed and communicate with them but they thought of that too late they were hoping now to shore up the cave enough so that a small man could slip through. It's now been five days. But then there was a second cave in front of the old one. They decided

Starting point is 00:13:09 that trying to dig any further in this cave would just be suicide. They just didn't fight the whole thing to collapse. Floyd's last intelligible words to them as they were working on all this desperately were, you're too slow, too slow. So only now, finally, the state of Kentucky felt a responsibility to take over. There are now 250 people milling around on the site, and chaos is hampering the rescue efforts. So Kentucky sent a detachment of the National Guard to keep order, and there was a camp of 100 tents full of geologists, engineers, and miners. Finally, Henry Denhart, who is leading the National Guard, ordered a shaft sunk. They're not going to try to dig a vertical shaft straight down until it's sort of even with where Floyd is and then break through

Starting point is 00:13:47 the wall on the side and see if you can get to him that way. They all realize the chances of rescuing him now are remote, but they're sort of committed to doing everything they can until they're positive that he can't be helped. He might even at this point, since they can't communicate with him after the second cave-in, he might already be dead of a cave-in or died of shock, despair, thirst, starvation, or pneumonia. He's been in there for a long time, but they've resolved to keep trying. Just a sort of stunning mark of the power of this media sensation, on Sunday, February 8th, when he'd been in there for nine days, it was relatively fair weather and brought out just hordes of people, just tourists, to see at least the area and perhaps to witness his rescue. An estimated 10,000 to 50,000 people visited the site on that Sunday. I think 50,000 is way too high a number, but 10,000 sounds like

Starting point is 00:14:35 it might actually be right. People who lived in the area said they hadn't seen this many people in their whole lives. By nightfall, an estimated 4,500 cars had visited the site, bearing license plates from 20 states, and some of these people parked and had to walk two miles just to reach the site. The railroad sold an estimated 2,500 extra passenger tickets that weekend. Interesting little side note here. There were a whole series of planes standing by so that if he was rescued, the first photographs of him as he emerged from the cave could be sent quickly to newspaper editors around the country. One of the pilots who was standing by waiting, hoping for this to happen, was Charles Lindbergh, who would cross the Atlantic just a couple years later. The digging went on appallingly for 12 days and nights.

Starting point is 00:15:17 They were only digging at a rate of about half a foot per hour because it kept threatening, the shaft they were digging kept threatening to fall in, so they had to shore it up periodically as they went along. But after 12 days and nights, on February 16th, when Floyd had been in the cave for 17 days, a little miner from Cincinnati named Ed Brennan finally worked, they broke through into the cave where Floyd was, and he saw Colin's head. Floyd, unfortunately, was dead at that point. Doctors said he died to a combination of exposure exhaustion and starvation and had been done at least for 24 hours but one doctor said

Starting point is 00:15:50 it had probably been no more than three days now he had gone into the cave two weeks earlier and died probably on friday the 13th so he'd been in there a total of 14 days and had died only maybe two or three days before they managed to reach him so the whole whole time, most of the time when they were digging this vertical shaft, he was still alive. They just got there just a little bit too late. Unfortunately, his left foot was still held by the rock, so they couldn't retrieve the body even though he was dead now. And the whole cave was closing down,

Starting point is 00:16:16 so they finally, to avoid risking any further injury to anyone else, they just filled the cave with timbers and cement and just closed his body in with it. There was just nothing else to be done, and they held a service outside the cave later on. Skeets Miller, the reporter, turned down a $50,000 lecture tour for this. The Courier-Journal, his newspaper, eventually gave him a dinner and $1,000, and on May 4th, 1926, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the best reporting of 1925, one of the youngest Pulitzer winners in history.

Starting point is 00:16:43 There's kind of a sad epilogue to this that as we covered in episode 72, humanity has this sort of ghoulish fascination with celebrated remains. So they didn't even leave Floyd's body alone. It had this whole history after he had died. Later in 1925, a miner dug into the cave finally behind his position and found that the rocket had been holding his foot. Floyd had originally guessed it weighed 100 pounds. The people who were helping him later estimated it was maybe 50 to 75.

Starting point is 00:17:09 It turned out it weighed only 27 pounds. That was all that was holding his foot in place. Oh, wow. It had just fallen at exactly the right position. Just the wrong way, yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:16 And just the wrong time to hold him in there. His body was raised to the surface on April 23rd and embalmed and buried near a crystal cave, the cave he discovered in 1917. Then they dug it up, I'm sorry to say say in 1927 and placed it on display in the cave as part of a sort of tourist attraction gets even worse in 1929 the body was snatched the left leg the one that had

Starting point is 00:17:35 been trapped was removed and then they left the remain remainder of the body 800 yards away on the bank of the green river that leg was never recovered. Somewhere, someone has Floyd Collins' left leg. This is a souvenir. Finally, they returned the body to his coffin. And until 1948, visitors to the Crystal Cave, you could view Floyd Collins through a little window in his casket in the cave. It wasn't until 1989 that he was reburied in a country church cemetery. His nephew, Eugene Collins, said, let the man rest in peace. He was begging to get out of that cave, not begging to stay in it. He doesn't belong in a cave. So that's sort of the story of the first modern media sensation of the 20th century. It affected everyone who worked on it,

Starting point is 00:18:14 particularly William Miller, who went on to an illustrious career after winning the Pulitzer Prize, but this really haunted him for the rest of his life. He said much later, after his own retirement, I will regret it all my life that we didn't save Collins. I worked so hard and did not accomplish a thing. It still makes me shiver. would not still be here if it weren't for the support that we get from our listeners, and that just really is the case. If you've been listening to our show, you'll know that there's a Patreon campaign to support the podcast, and that is the main thing that keeps this show going. But if you like the show and you'd like to support us in other ways, there are several other things you can do that could really help us out. You can make a one-time donation on the website at futilitycloset.com. And we can always use help spreading the word

Starting point is 00:19:05 about our show. So if you like the podcast, please consider recommending it to your friends or giving it a rating on iTunes or other podcast directories. And if you'd like to join our Patreon campaign, for a dollar an episode, you can get access to our activity feed, where you'll get outtakes and extralateral thinking puzzles and find out what's going on behind the scenes of the show. You can find more information on that at patreon.com slash futility closet, or you can use the link in our show notes or on the supporters page of the website. And thanks so much to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. We have some listener updates on some lateral thinking puzzles from previous episodes.

Starting point is 00:19:45 These are from episodes that came out three or more weeks ago, but if you're very behind and don't want to have any puzzles spoiled for you, you might want to skip ahead a few minutes. Stefan Goodrow wrote and said, I started listening to the Futility Closet podcast about a year ago. I began at the beginning and have slowly caught up by listening to two a week at work. It was just my luck to finally have a comment on one of your episodes when I'm only one behind. In episode 105, the lateral thinking puzzle involved a criminal who was caught at a hospital when he sought treatment after shooting off his finger while committing the crime. This reminded me of a story I read in some dumb criminals collection in which a burglar shot himself in the finger mid-burglary, threw down his glove, presumably in reaction to the pain, and fled.

Starting point is 00:20:28 He was later caught, not because he went to the hospital, but because he left enough of his finger behind that investigators could match his print to one in their records. I tried and failed to find this story online, but I found a similar one where a man stealing copper wire severed the tip of his left ring finger. He took the wire, but left his finger behind and was likewise caught. Thanks for your work. It has helped many a workday go by easier. I'm just sorry that I'll have to cut back now that I've caught up.

Starting point is 00:20:55 And Stephan sent a link to a page on a People magazine website that listed the story of a 29-year-old man named Joshua Government, who, as Stephan said, apparently severed the tip of his finger with some copper wire that he was trying to steal from an air conditioning service truck in Glendale, Arizona. The serviceman returned to his truck to discover that the spool of wire was missing and there was a severed fingertip

Starting point is 00:21:18 that had been left behind. People Magazine quotes a sergeant from the Glendale Police Department who said, investigators retrieved the finger, put a popsicle stick into it, and rolled a print. It was kind of humorous. Like standard procedure. That's just what they do in this situation. Yeah, you carry around a popsicle stick as a policeman now.

Starting point is 00:21:36 You never know when you might need one. Government not only neglected to take his incriminating fingertip with him when he left the scene, but he later posted photos on Facebook of his injured hand. Not surprisingly, he was arrested and pled guilty to the theft. That helps a lot. They might not have got him otherwise. Yeah, it helps a lot if you post incriminating photos of yourself on Facebook that lead the police to know that you've corrected, yeah, to connect you to the crime. In episode 106, the puzzle involved a sports announcer who had

Starting point is 00:22:08 to make up most of a soccer game that he couldn't see. While it's strange enough that that has happened once in history, several listeners wrote in to say that for a while they thought the puzzle referred to another true story about a sports announcer making up part of a game during his broadcast.

Starting point is 00:22:24 This was completely news to Greg and me, but this actually happened to Ronald Reagan, the former U.S. president who was a sports announcer for a Des Moines, Iowa radio station when he was a young man back in the 1930s. There are a couple of versions of this story, but I'm going to be using the one in Reagan's 1990 autobiography, An American Life. Reagan would announce the baseball games played by the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox as though he were actually at the stadium, when in reality he was in a broadcast studio in Des Moines. A telegraph operator at the

Starting point is 00:22:56 stadium would be sending brief messages in Morse code to another telegraph operator at the radio station where Reagan was. As Reagan explained in his autobiography, after each play, he decoded a burst of dots and dashes from the stadium and typed out a few words that described the play and handed it to me through a slot in a sheet of glass separating the studio and the control room. I then described the play as if I'd been in the press box, even though the slip of paper might say only out four to three. Four was second-based and three was first, so it was a grounder to the second baseman who threw the batter out at first. Reagan would embellish a bit on what he imagined was happening at the ballpark and add in details

Starting point is 00:23:36 to keep it all interesting. He describes frequently needing to fill in dead time between pitches or innings with descriptions that he'd invent of the players, the stadium, and the weather. But one day his imagination got put to the test even more than usual. The Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals were in the ninth inning of a scoreless game with Dizzy Dean pitching and the Cubs' Billy Jurgis at bat. Reagan describes Dean winding up for the pitch and then releasing it towards Jurgis and then read the latest slip of paper passed to him by the telegraph operator to see what he was supposed to say next. Only the paper said, the wire's gone dead. It's a good thing you didn't read that. Read it out loud, you're on the air. Reagan says that since he'd already said the pitch was on the way to the plate, he was locked into doing something

Starting point is 00:24:19 with it. He didn't want to let on that the wire was down as the games were covered by multiple radio stations and he didn't want to lose his audience to a competitor station. So thinking quickly and knowing that there's one play that doesn't get recorded in the scorebooks and thus couldn't be compared to his broadcast, he had Jurgis hit a foul ball. He was stalling for time, waiting for Western Union to fix their wire and inventing whatever he could think of. He described kids in the stands fighting over the foul ball and he had the pitcher stall in several ways before the next pitch. But as the wire stayed dead, Reagan did the only thing he could think of, and that was that he had Jurgis hit an incredible string of foul balls. That's kind of clever, though, to think of something that people couldn't check later against the official score. Right, right. Reagan wrote,

Starting point is 00:25:05 I described Dean winding up and hurling another pitch. Jurgis hit a foul ball and then another and another. A redheaded kid in the stand retrieved one of the fouls and held up the ball to show off his trophy. By then I was in much too deep to admit the wire was dead, so I continued to let Jurgis foul Dean's pitches and his string of foul balls went on for almost seven minutes. I don't know how many foul balls there were,

Starting point is 00:25:27 but I'm told someone reported the foul slugging spree as a record to Ripley's Believe It or Not column. When the wire was finally restored, Reagan grabbed the first slip of paper handed to him and learned that Jurgis had actually popped out on the first pitch sent to him. Yeah, this guy standing there swinging at balls for seven minutes, and he was actually out on the first pitch. Reagan said, for days, people stopped me on the street and asked if Jurgis had set a record for foul balls. I'd just say, yeah,

Starting point is 00:25:54 he was there a long time. I never admitted a thing. That's really interesting, too, that I guess they were broadcasting ballgames by telegraph at that point, but not by radio, or at least not in any consistent way. Well, he was broadcasting it on the radio based on what he was seeing. But he was getting it from a telegrapher. Right. They hadn't knitted the whole thing together yet.

Starting point is 00:26:15 Well, some stations did, but just some stations as a cost-cutting way. Yeah. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Which is, I mean, that's kind of a clumsy way to try to relay what's going on in an actual time situation. I guess it works, though.

Starting point is 00:26:28 Like a sporting event, yeah. If he could pull it off, I mean, people would be none the wiser and they'd get their ballgame. Right, yeah. So apparently, I mean, he did this for like four years, so apparently it was working out mostly for him. Yeah. So thanks to Stefan for the story about the fingertip, and thanks to everyone who wrote in about Reagan's broadcast. Stefan, for the story about the fingertip. And thanks to everyone who wrote in about Reagan's broadcast.

Starting point is 00:26:48 I really appreciated the explanations and links and references that people sent as they helped me get a good understanding of the background on the story. And we'll have some of the links in the show notes for anyone who wants more of the details of the Reagan story. And if anyone else out there has any questions or comments for us, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And I really do appreciate when people tell me how to pronounce their name. I'm going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd sounding situation,

Starting point is 00:27:18 and I have to try to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Stephen Harvey. A keen outdoors woman and adventurer celebrates her latest achievement with a hearty breakfast. A week later, she is dead. Uh-oh. Stephen writes, hooray, another fatal puzzle. Another fatal puzzle. What happened?

Starting point is 00:27:36 Okay. Ha-hum, ha-hum. A week later, she is dead. Okay. I mean, presumably somehow the death is related to either the achievement or the breakfast? Yes. Okay. I mean, presumably somehow the death is related to either the achievement or the breakfast? Yes. Okay. Because I mean, that wouldn't be much of a puzzle if she just was hit by a bus a week later. It would have nothing to do with anything. It might be a good puzzle someday.

Starting point is 00:27:54 It might be a good puzzle. Okay. So is the death related to the hearty breakfast? Yes. Okay. And it's a week later, so it's unlikely to be an allergic reaction to something in the hearty breakfast? That's right. Okay. Is it important specifically what she ate? Yes. Okay. And it's a week later, so it's unlikely to be an allergic reaction to something in the hearty breakfast. That's right. Okay. Is it important specifically what she ate? Yes. Aha.

Starting point is 00:28:11 Specifically what she ate. Is it a typical breakfast food that she ate? Yes. And it kills you a week later. Did she get some kind of food poisoning? Yes. From eggs? Yes. She got food poisoning from the uh from eggs yes she got eggs food poisoning from the eggs aren't you doing well do i have to figure out what her achievement was yes is it related to

Starting point is 00:28:32 eggs i don't know what that would be i don't know either but uh no okay it doesn't matter where she is yes ah someplace without refrigeration i I wouldn't say that, no. Oh, okay. All right. Is she up someplace high, like on a mountain or something like that? Yes. Yes. And is that germane?

Starting point is 00:28:53 Yes. Okay, so she's eating eggs at the top of a mountain. How are you getting this? I don't know. It looks like you have notes or something. So she's eating eggs at the top of a mountain. Well, I'm just trying to go for what's the most likely fruitful avenue. So just follow that through.

Starting point is 00:29:07 Why would that make a difference? Well, that's what I'm trying to think. Does it have to do with how eggs would need to be cooked at high altitude? Yes. So the eggs weren't properly cooked through because they cook differently at high altitude. Yes. So she's eating undercooked eggs, basically. Basically, you've got it.

Starting point is 00:29:22 Do I need to know what mountain she's on? I really don't understand how you got that. Stephen writes, her achievement was summiting Mount Everest, and among other things, she ate poached eggs for her breakfast. The eggs were infected with salmonella bacteria, which are usually killed by heating

Starting point is 00:29:35 for at least 10 minutes to 75 degrees Celsius. However, due to the low atmospheric pressure, the boiling point of water at the top of Mount Everest is only around 70 degrees. Fatal consequences, therefore, ensued. Note that poaching or boiling eggs at the top of Mount Everest is only around 70 degrees. Fatal consequences, therefore, ensued. Note that poaching or boiling eggs at the top of Mount Everest probably wouldn't actually work terribly well, as the water temperature would be only just high enough for the proteins to start to coagulate.

Starting point is 00:29:54 You would have to be a brave or foolhardy person to eat the likely unappetizing mess of semi-liquid egg. Yuck. Stephen says, I did say she was an adventurer, though. So thank you, Stephen, for saying that. And there's a life lesson in that. If you ever make it out there, don't make poached eggs. Well, thank you for sending that in.

Starting point is 00:30:11 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 entertainment, check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com That's another episode for us. If you're looking for more quirky entertainment, check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com and Extonius Florilegium of Selkuth Esoterica. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast

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Futility Closet - 109-Trapped in a Cave

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