Futility Closet - 114-The Desperation of Donald Crowhurst

Episode Date: July 18, 2016

  In 1968 British engineer Donald Crowhurst entered a round-the-world yacht race, hoping to use the prize money to save his failing electronics business. Woefully unprepared and falling behind, he resorted to falsifying a journey around the world. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the desperate measures that Crowhurst turned to as events spiraled out of his control. We'll also get some updates on Japanese fire balloons and puzzle over a computer that turns on the radio. Intro: The stones at Pennsylvania's Ringing Rocks Park chime like bells when struck with a hammer. Sand dunes that "sing" when walked upon are found at 35 sites around the world. In 1884 two scientists notated the sounds on a musical scale. Sources for our feature on Donald Crowhurst: Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen, 2001. Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, 1970. Associated Press, "Briton Missing in Global Race," July 10, 1969. Associated Press, "Mystery Shrouds Lone Sailor's Fate," July 12, 1969. Associated Press, "Search Ends for Voyager," July 12, 1969. Associated Press, "Lost Yacht Racer Sent Fake Reports," July 25, 1969. Associated Press, "Log Shows Yachtsman Never Left Atlantic in Race Round World," July 28, 1969. AAP-Reuters, "Lost Sailor 'Stayed in Atlantic,'" July 28, 1969. "Mutiny of the Mind," Time 94:6 (Aug. 8, 1969), 59. Ed Caesar, "Drama on the Waves: The Life and Death of Donald Crowhurst," Independent, Oct. 27, 2006. Robert McCrum, "Deep Water," Guardian, April 4, 2009. Alex Ritman, "First Look: Colin Firth Cast Adrift as Ill-Fated Amateur Sailor Donald Crowhurst in 'The Mercy'," Hollywood Reporter, June 17, 2016. Listener mail: Bob Greene, "The Japanese Who Bombed Oregon," Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1988. Nicholas D. Kristof, "Nobuo Fujita, 85, Is Dead; Only Foe to Bomb America," New York Times, Oct. 3, 1997. Ross Coen, Fu-Go, 2014. James sent these additional links on Nobuo Fujita: Tatiana Danger, "Visit the Samurai Sword of the WWII Japanese Pilot Who Bombed Oregon," Roadtrippers, April 25, 2014. Larry Bingham, "Oregon Coast Trail Dedicated for World War II Bombing," Oregonian, Oct. 2, 2008. Finn J.D. John, "The Flying Samurai Who Attacked Oregon," Offbeat Oregon History, May 12, 2013. Finn J.D. John, "A Town's Special Friendship With Its Onetime Would-Be Destroyer," Offbeat Oregon History, May 18, 2013. William McCash, Bombs Over Brookings, 2005. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Doug Shaw. 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. 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 on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. 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 ringing rocks to singing sand. This is episode 114. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1968, British engineer Donald Crowhurst entered an elite sailing competition in an attempt to save his failing business. But woefully unprepared and unable to keep up, he resorted to trying to fake his journey around the world. In today's show, we'll recount the desperate measures that Crowhurst turned to as the situation increasingly spiraled out of his control. Roher's turn to as the situation increasingly spiraled out of his control. We'll also get some updates on Japanese fire balloons and puzzle over a computer that turns on the radio.

Our podcast is supported primarily by our amazing patrons. We just wouldn't be able to keep putting in the amount of time that the show takes if it weren't for the donations and pledges that we get. If you would like to help support the show so that we can keep on making it, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the support us section of the website. And thanks so much to everyone who helps support Futility Closet. Donald Crowhurst was a British electronics engineer born in 1932. He was brilliant by all accounts, but he hit a rough patch in his early life. When he was 16 years old, his father died, and he had to leave

school early due to his family's financial problems, and he got a bit of a reputation as a troublemaker. He got a pilot's commission in the RAF, but was asked to leave in 1954 for reasons that aren't clear. Eventually, he started an electronics firm selling marine navigation equipment he was a bit of a weekend sailor and tinkering around came up with a navigation device that he tried to sell on his own but the business wasn't going as well as he'd hoped it would and his sponsor an english entrepreneur named stanley best finally asked for his money back crowhurst promised he could reinvigorate the company by an unusual means he was going to set out to win a round-the-world yacht race sponsored by the Sunday Times. The race was inspired by Francis Chichester, who in just the previous year had circumnavigated the globe alone by what's called the Clipper Route,

which means going through the Southern Ocean at the bottom of the world where there are very strong winds. This was the era of the space race, so there was great enthusiasm for human achievement. Some quarter of a million people lined the south coast of England to cheer Chichester home. The Chichester had circled the whole world in a yacht alone, but he'd stopped once. He stopped in Australia along the way, so the Sunday Times figured the next achievement in line would be to sponsor a race to see who could circle the world without stopping alone. They didn't know quite whom to support, so they just opened a race to all comers without requiring them to demonstrate single-handed sailing ability. Anyone who wanted could enter. And there were two prizes. You could depart at any time in the summer of 1968, actually any time up

to October 31st. Whoever made it back to England first would win a trophy, but whoever completed the whole trip in the shortest time would win 5,000 pounds, which, as I say, Crowhurst was hoping to use to reinvigorate his business. He was convinced he could win with a trimaran, a novel new ship design that had multiple hulls. He'd never sailed it before, but he was convinced that would be faster

than the conventional yachts that sailed in these types of races. And he discussed it with Best, his sponsor, and they hit on an agreement. Best said he would back him in the race and would pay for the boat if he finished the race. But if he didn't finish it, then he'd have to pay for the boat himself. Best later said he was just seduced by the glamour of the whole conceit. Uh, and Crowhurst was confident enough that he just accepted the idea. But if you think about it, it puts him under a lot of pressure because he's mortgaging both his business and his home, his, his whole life really to, to finishing this race. And he'd never done anything remotely so ambitious before on the sea. Uh, the, in 1968, nine men finally set out on this race.

As I said, they could depart anytime before October 31st. Crowhurst, uh, hit a lot of trouble getting the boat finished being built and then getting it ready. They didn't have time to do proper sea trials. In fact, when they launched it, his wife tried to break the customary champagne bottle across the bow and it didn't break, which is considered a very bad omen. And he left on the very last day, October 31st, that under the rules he was allowed to leave. He set sail in such haste that there was unsorted equipment strewn across the deck

and discovered afterward that they'd actually left many important items on the dock. That's how much of a hurry he was leaving. And he left much later than the others. The front runners who'd set up weeks earlier were nearing New Zealand and he was still back in the others the front runners who'd set up weeks earlier were nearing new zealand and he was still back in the north atlantic so he was well behind he could still hope to get the 5 000 pounds because he'd started so late he just needed to have the shortest time uh and everyone had a very difficult time with this race it's just a very punishing thing it's sort of climbing mount everest is the equivalent one of his competitors retired in South Africa, and four more of them dropped out before they reached the Indian Ocean, either because of damage to their vessels or illness. So it was just a very difficult thing for any of them to complete. But he had quite a lot of trouble. After only 11 days, he wrote in

his logbook, this bloody boat is falling to pieces. The boat had started to leak. He'd hoped he could cover 220 miles a day, but after two weeks, he hadn't averaged more than 130 and barely passed the coast of Portugal. So he faced this difficult dilemma whether to give up, whether to compete altogether. If he entered the Southern Ocean, where the seas could be as high as 100 feet, it's just a very terrifying place to sail anything, he gave himself only a 50-50 chance of surviving at all. But if he went back to England and didn't complete the race, he'd have to pay for this boat, this expensive boat, and would face essentially ruin and a lot of sort of public humiliation. So I think it's not clear, because he was alone in all this and he wasn't recording all his thoughts, we could only sort of piece together what he was thinking after the fact. It's not

entirely clear what he was thinking. There's just a lot of torment in what he was writing down at this time. On December 10th, after six weeks at sea, he cabled Rodney Hallworth, who was his press agent back home, saying he'd sailed 243 miles in one day, which is possibly a speed record and was much faster than he'd been managing before that. Chichester, who had just set the record the previous year, was immediately skeptical because that was such a change. It's not entirely clear what Crowhurst himself thought he was doing with that. In his notes, he called this a game. Possibly it was just a motivational thing where he just imagined some better progress than he was making

and hoping if he reported that he could motivate himself to actually achieve it later on. It's just not clear what he thought he was doing quite at that point. But in mid-December, his logbooks ceased to show this inner torment and began recording just neat calculations. On December 6th, he started a new logbook where he privately recorded his actual positions, which weren't very good. And in this first logbook, he began to plot fake positions that made it look as if he was doing much better than he really was. In effect, he'd created this sort of ghost version of his own boat that was performing much better than his was, and recording very detailed notes about that imaginary

voyage, including descriptions of his days, food, difficulties, and all these were false. It was just a false record of this much more successful voyage. When he was still 180 miles north of the equator, he said he'd crossed it. On December 20th, he said he was off the coast of Brazil and averaging 170 miles a day when he really made 13. So the gap between his actual progress and this fanciful, successful progress was widening. Whether this was a real deception at this point or just a study of the feasibility of some kind of ruse is unclear. Again, we don't know quite what was in his head. But his projections were quickly extended to thousands of miles. It was getting to the point where it would be impossible for him to catch up to this imagine better progress if you see what i mean yeah he's just created two versions of himself

one of which is failing and the other which is false but succeeding by the way this is all impossible this could never happen today this was only 50 years ago but the technology has changed radically back then there was no gps or communication or internet. You would just dial in periodically with this fuzzy radio link or perhaps report your position by Morse code, and the people on shore would just have to accept your account of what you were doing out there. There was no way to confirm any of this. In fact, all the people in this race calculated their positions using sextants, which is amazing because it's not that long ago. It shows how quickly things have changed. On January 5th, relying on these reports, the Sunday Times reported that he was past Tristan de Cunha in the South Atlantic and

covering more than a thousand miles a week, which he wasn't, but that's what he was reporting. Chichester doubted this, but the paper was in this awkward position. They were both reporting the news and sponsoring the race. They couldn't very well ignore their own competitor because they doubted his progress. So they would just add an equivocal statement at the end of each story saying Crowhurst reports that he's in such and such a position. Actually, he was still off the coast of Brazil at this point. On January 19th, he said he was sealing the cockpit floor hatch over his generator and that as a real future, radio transmissions would come much less frequently. And in fact, he made no further communications for 11 weeks. At this point, he was 4,000 miles away from the position he was

giving in his reports. And again, it's not quite clear what was in his head at this point, but it was increasingly clear he could never catch up to these false reports he was giving. Compounding the tragedy here is that there were two honorable reasons to just drop out of the race at this point. One was that his wife, Claire, was getting desperate for money and would soon be on the dole, and there had been a fire in the converted stable behind their house. So it would have been perfectly respectable for him to say, I'd love to continue in this race, but I have to drop out. My wife needs me. That's one reason.

The other is that his boat really was badly damaged, and he hadn't even entered the Southern Ocean where the really bad seas were yet. A lot of the other competitors had just dropped out for exactly that reason. Their boats just couldn't handle the punishment, and there's no shame in that. The problem was that because he'd already been reporting that he was much further ahead than he was, if he dropped out, he'd probably wind up limping into some Brazilian port, and people would want to know what he was doing in Brazil. He went backwards, yeah. So he couldn't really give up at this point without exposing the whole sham. He certainly hadn't entered the race intending it to be a deception or a fraud,

but he was sort of backing himself into this undefensible position and had to pretend to keep going. He didn't, I don't imagine, had any idea of how he's going to get out of this predicament. For most of January and February 1969, he dawdled off Brazil and Uruguay, making only 20 to 30 miles a day. He must at this point have abandoned any attempt to circle the world, but it's not clear he knew what he was going to do. The vessel was taking on water and the bilge pump was inoperable, so finally on March 6th, he went into an Argentinian port, which, if it wasn't already clear, would immediately at that point have taken him out of the race because that was against the rules. No one discovered he had done this until much later when people investigated it, but at

that point he was officially out of the race. After the repairs, he went back out to sea and headed south, planning at this point to rejoin the race. What would happen is the others, who had actually circled the Earth, would come up under Cape Horn, under South America, and head up into the Atlantic on their way back to England on the last leg. And he planned just to quietly rejoin them, even though he'd never left the Atlantic. He would just quietly fall into their train

and pretend he'd circled the Earth and just sail back to England with them. Yeah. Which would at least, that's sort of a way out. I mean, just leaving aside sort of the morality of all this. If he could get back to England, he could say to his sponsor that he'd finished the race and so he wouldn't have to pay for the boat and he'd be safely home again. He would all be alive, but it would be a way out of his troubles.

Exactly. So that appears to have been his plan at this point. He got far enough south to take some film footage of what are called the Roaring Forties, the very strong winds in the 40 degree latitudes, and maybe of the Falkland Islands. So he'd have some tenuous record that he'd been at least down that far, and that might convince some people. And now his plan was just to race the others back home. There weren't many of them left. A lot of them had dropped out at this point.

But at this point, there's a terrible irony. The man who finally finished the race was Robin Knox Johnston, who finished on April 22, 1969, circled the whole earth, got back to England, and won the trophy as a result for coming first. But he'd taken a relatively long time to do this, 312 days. So there are only other two men on the water at this point, Nigel Tetley and Crowhurst, and whichever of them comes in first will win the

5,000 pounds, because they'll almost certainly finish before the 312 days record that Knox Johnson had just set. So Crowhurger's plan at this point was to let Tetley win and get all the scrutiny, because every sailor on the world would want to see his logbooks. There'd be a lot of scrutiny from professional sailors on the details of what he'd done. If he won, yeah.

But Kroger's figured, well, let that spotlight fall on Tetley, and I'll just come in quietly to park behind him, and people will clap me on the back, and I'll go back to Tenmuth. You know, he'll be an also-ran, which is exactly what he wants at this point. The irony is that Tetley, thinking that they'd both circled the earth together and that they were neck and neck, pushed his boat too hard to stay ahead of him and it gave out actually and sank just a thousand miles from home. He himself was okay. Air Sea Rescue picked him up safely on May 21st. But that meant that Crowhurst was now the only one afloat, which is the worst thing that Oh, no. no way out of this now. He can't go forward because he'd face ignominy and financial ruin and a lot of shame, public shame, if he goes back home. He can't go back. He can't go sideways. I

mean, there aren't many options open to him, but he sort of dug himself into this hole that there's now no way out of. He wrote voluminously at this point, more than 25,000 words, including poems, quotations, and random thoughts. A lot of people say he went mad at this point under the pressure. One British psychiatrist later said, I believe he was suffering from early schizophrenia and a manic state, presenting grandiose ideas. And I'm not a psychologist, but it seems to me you don't have to be mad

to sort of fall apart in those circumstances. Right, just under the pressure, yeah. It seems to me that what he was doing, what he wrote didn't make a lot of sense. It was about playing chess against this cosmic mind. And I think all he was doing is reconciling himself to the notion that he was going to have to end his life. That was the only way out of this. There was just no other way to solve his problems. He wrote on July 1st on the final entry in this long journal,

It is finished. It is finished. It is the mercy. I will play this game when I choose. There is no reason for harmful. And that sentence just was never finished. The 10th electron, his yacht was discovered on July 10th by the Royal Mail vessel Picardy in the middle of the Atlantic. There were dirty dishes in the sink, a filthy sleeping bag in his bunk and two log books and a radio log. The last navigation entry was from June 23rd, which is two weeks earlier. The life raft was still lashed in place, which means that he probably hadn't hit a bad emergency. And in fact, on a table in the cabin, there was a soldering iron that was still balanced on a milk tin, which means that it hadn't hit any really bad weather or any shock that would have knocked him overboard by accident.

It appears that he just stepped off the boat and into the sea. A search was begun but stepped off the boat and into the sea. A search was begun, but called off the next day. Robin Knox Johnston, who it turned out in the end was the only man who finished this race, thus won the 5,000 pounds for the fastest time, but immediately, and I think gallantly, donated it to an appeal fund for Crowhurst's wife and children. He had four children. And the newspaper contributed another 5,000 pounds. Nigel Tetley, whose boat had sunk, was awarded a consolation prize and used it to build a new trimaran. Generally, at this point, people believe that Croesus actually had circled

the earth, and he was within 2,000 miles of completing this nine-month, almost 30,000-mile voyage. He was just a couple weeks sailing, which would have made him the second man to circumnavigate the globe without stopping. An interesting thing I found in researching this, if you go back and look at the actual newspaper accounts of reporting his disappearance at the time, Lloyd's shipping exchange in London said that three other boats had been found apparently deserted in the mid-Atlantic in the 12 days preceding his disappearance. All of them were drifting within a 250-mile radius southwest of the Azores. So it looked to people as though he'd circled the whole earth and was just within a couple weeks of getting back home and just vanished for no apparent reason with these three other boats in the middle of the Atlantic.

No one makes anything of that now. Apparently, it was just a coincidence, but there were a lot of comparisons to the Mary Celeste and other ghost ships. It looked like some invisible force had just whisked them all away. uh so what he had left enough uh evidence aboard the ship with his uh old records and his actual positions that people could put together the fact that he'd never left the atlantic he hadn't circled the earth and was just hoping to get back to england with some dignity and and it just fell apart at the last minute and the newspaper finally published the facts about this it wrote it has not been an easy decision to publish this information the sunday times has been in close consultation with Mrs. Crowhurst and she too has come to the conclusion that the story must be told. He left behind four children ages six to 11.

Rodney Hallworth, his press agent, one of the last communications between them, he was just telling him how proud he was of him and how much his hometown was going to have all these festivities and there'd be all this attention for him thinking that was a good thing. he read the logbooks he said my god i think i may have killed donald crowhurst with that telegram because attention was the last thing he wanted right uh the last thing is in uh researching all this i found out they're actually making a movie about this so uh you can watch colin firth go through all this apparently that comes out next year and is called the mercy i'm hoping that's good it seems to me a bit of a tricky thing to make a film about because almost the whole drama takes place inside one man's

head and he's alone so he doesn't have anyone to talk to it's just tricky to show on film what he's doing and why he's doing and they don't know for sure what he was thinking yeah that's true uh but we'll see that should come out in 2017. In episode 111, Greg told us about Japanese fire balloons that were intended to drop bombs to start forest fires on the west coast of North America during World War II. Kevin Thomas, who hopes that I can pronounce his name without a phonetic guide, and he can let me know if I didn't manage to, wrote and said, I enjoyed your podcast a few weeks ago about the Japanese firebombs, which is certainly a fascinating page in World War II

history. I am not sure if you are aware that the excellent podcast Radio Lab also covered the Fugo story back in March 2015. Their coverage fills in some of the holes in your information and also has a chilling eyewitness account from a woman who was operating the telephone switchboard in Bly, Oregon when Elsie Mitchell and the children were killed. Their podcast explains how the military determined the origin of these bombs. The military could tell that the bombs were of Japanese make, but it was the USGS who pinpointed the origin by analyzing the sand from bags attached to one of the Fugos and determining that only three beaches in the

world have such sand and all are located in Japan. I listen regularly to your podcast during my walks to and from work in Wellington, New Zealand. I love the stories and lateral puzzles keep up the great work. Thanks, Kevin. And you raise a really interesting point that Greg didn't have the time to go into in his story about how the U.S. military intelligence determined where the balloons had come from. As Kevin said, one thing they had to go on was the sand in the sandbags that had helped control the height of the balloons. The U.S. Geological Survey analyzed the sand and found many clues, such as microscopic algae, fossils, and marine protozoa, and plus some uncommon combinations of minerals.

So given these clues and the notable lack of coral in the sand, they were able to narrow down the sources of the sand to some very specific beaches in Japan, which to me seems pretty impressive given the lack of computer databases and such in the 1940s. which to me seems pretty impressive given the lack of computer databases and such in the 1940s. That whole episode just seems so, I don't know, interesting to me. It doesn't seem like something that really happened because it's also the attack, just the whole idea behind it I think was really interesting and the way they figured it out is also just clever. It's clever on both sides.

Yeah. There was some other evidence that they analyzed to help them determine the origins of the balloons and of that we thought the most amusing evidence was some papers that were found. One of the balloons contained several slips of paper that had been wedged between the fuses of the altitude control mechanisms, probably to help prevent electrical shortening in the system. A translator determined that they were sales receipts belonging to a Mr. Kagamasu and a page torn out of a construction material catalog. I guess it was just whatever random paper had been

lying around when the balloon was made. It seems random to them, but it's actually really incriminating. Well, it's kind of funny, sales receipts, you know. Even more specific, though, was a postcard that was found in the sandbag of another balloon. This postcard had been sent from a schoolboy to his father in one of the coastal towns that the USGS believed to be a source of the sand. So this, I guess, helped confirm for them where the sand probably had come from. But U.S. Army intelligence was pretty stumped about why this postcard had been in the sandbag. But their eventual best guess was that the father had worked on the balloons and put it in as a sort of a good luck charm for the balloons mission.

James wrote to tell us that the fire balloons were not Japan's only attempt at bombing the US. James said, I am not sure if you were aware of the Japanese pilot Nobuo Fujita, who made two bombing runs over Oregon in September of 1942. He dropped four incendiary bombs of a planned six in an attempt to start massive forest fires and interfere with the U.S. war effort. He started two small fires, but the late summer had been wetter than usual and the bombs were dropped early in the day. So one fire was put out easily and the other fizzled out on its own. There was almost always dew in that part of Oregon or early in the day. Both Nubuo's attempts and the results of the later balloon project show that lighting big forest fires there is not very easy. It is not called a temperate rainforest for nothing. But that is only

the beginning. What happened later is even better. My late father grew up in coastal Oregon and remembers these events from childhood. He told me the story back in the 1970s. And the story James is writing about is acknowledged to be the only time that the American mainland has been bombed by an enemy combatant who was Nobuo Fujita, who was the pilot of a seaplane carried across the Pacific Ocean by a Japanese submarine. Fujita's target was the forests around Brookings, Oregon, a small logging town of about 5,000 people. During his bombing runs, Fujita's plane was spotted from the ground, but no one around had anything better to shoot at it with than a hunting rifle, so they really couldn't do much about it.

And though the bombings did provoke some alarm in the area, as James noted, they didn't do nearly as much damage as had been hoped for by the Japanese. And in the end, Fujita ended up having quite a relationship with the town of Brookings. In 1962, he was invited to come to the town to be the grand marshal for the annual Azalea Festival. And according to a New York Times article written on Fujita's death in 1997, his daughter said that he was quite nervous about the reception that he would get in Brookings and carried with him to the festival a samurai sword that had been in his family for 400 years so that if the townspeople were still angry with him, he could take responsibility for his actions by disemboweling himself with the sword in traditional Japanese fashion.

I can't imagine what the people of Brookings would have made of a public disembowelment like that. So luckily the visit went very well. Fujita ended up giving the sword to the town, saying that it was his final gesture of surrender. And as far as I can tell, it's still on display today at the Chetco Community Public Library for anyone who wants to go see it. Churches and businesses in Brookings had paid for Fujita's trip. And while he was there, he promised that in return, he would finance a trip to Japan for several Brookings had paid for Fujita's trip and while he was there he promised that in return he would finance a trip to Japan for several Brookings youngsters unfortunately soon after that his company went bankrupt and Fujita then spent the next 20 years trying to

repair his finances and save enough money to fulfill his promise which he finally did in 1985 Fujita also made three more visits to Brookings over the years to plant trees in the area and to take part in a 1994 ceremony that dedicated a state historical marker near the bombing site. He also gave $1,000 to the local library to purchase children's books about Japan with the goal of promoting peace between the two countries. So the New York Times reported that for such a small town, the library has an excellent selection of Japan books. In a couple of recent episodes, we discussed ways of marking the exact time. And one of our Canadian listeners, Dan McIntyre, wrote,

Dear Greg, Sharon, and Sasha, Further to episode 108 and listener comments about time guns and balls in episode 111, I believed you'd be pleased to know CBC Radio in Canada is now in its 77th year of regularly broadcasting the National Research Council's time signal. Every day, the beginning of the long dash following 10 seconds of silence signals exactly 1 o'clock p.m. Eastern Time. So that's good to know. Apparently, you can still set your chronometers in Canada without resorting to the internet or a lady coming around with a watch in her bag dan notes uh while the nrc time signal has been a regular cbc feature since 1939 the canadian national railway's ckch radio broadcasted the

dominion observatory's time signal as far back as 1924 wow so yeah that goes way back he also says i'll be sure not to approach any balloon wreckage I may encounter in the mountains this summer. Oh, good. Which is good advice. In episode 111, I discussed that one problem with time guns is that there is a bit of latency for sound travel. So mariners might choose to focus on the puff of smoke from the cannon rather than the sound. to focus on the puff of smoke from the cannon rather than the sound. And Bennett Todd wrote and said, sailboat races still start with the race committee signaling the boats via cannon. Tenths of a second are critical and we most emphatically synchronize on the sight of the smoke, not the

sound of the pop. And finally, on the subject of time synchronization, Ross Hosman wrote, in the last few podcasts, you talked about ways of keeping time accurate. And I thought I'd email you about a Ross Hosman wrote, The clocks would simply run off of the cycles in the power instead of having a quartz or some other method. This was kept extremely accurate by law. At the power plant, they would have two clocks side by side, one connected to the outgoing power lines and one connected to the atomic clock. In the middle of the night, they would speed up or slow down their generators so the clocks would be the same. So a clock may drift a bit throughout the day, but it would be accurate day to day. The government removed this mandate a few years ago since almost no one used it, and it cost time and effort to keep the cycles accurate. One of the only industries that still use the time coming through the power lines was the traffic

signals, which is what I work with. Many signals are coordinated with each other so you can, hopefully, travel down a corridor and not stop at every light. Not all signals are physically interconnected with wires or radio signals, however. In many places, they were simply running travel down a corridor and not stop at every light. Not all signals are physically interconnected with wires or radio signals, however. In many places, they were simply running their own clocks, which could be assumed to remain accurate to within a couple seconds for months at a time. It caused a few issues in the industry when they stopped keeping the cycles accurate. Many areas now have to have a maintenance technician set the clock at each intersection every month. The clocks at intersections on the same electricity circuit will drift together, but longer corridors can

span several circuits, each drifting at different rates and in different directions. Thanks again for making this great podcast. I always look forward to episodes with Sasha. And that is actually kind of amusing because she actually came in here and has been meowing a bit while I've been reading Bob Ross's email. She says hi. She does say hi. With the new recording setup that we have

that we switched to a few months ago, it's actually much harder for her to be heard on the podcast, though she has made her attempts to do so. And thanks to everyone

who writes in to us. If you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And unless it's extremely obvious, please do let me know how you like to have your name pronounced. This week, I'll be solving a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to present me with 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 Doug Shaw. Okay. He says, this really happened to me. Ooh. About 10 years ago, my stepfather called and said there was a problem with his computer. He said that it would frequently freeze up and turn on the radio. When he turned off the radio, the computer would behave normally.

As I said, this is a true story. When I explained to him that his computer could not turn on the radio, he got angry and insisted he was correct. When I next visited him, I went into his office. As any normal person would guess, his computer was not connected in any way to his radio. So I turned on the computer and started to do my own work on it. Shortly, the problem happened. I laughed my butt off and fixed the problem in a minute. What was the problem?

That's pretty funny. Okay. Does it matter what kind of radio it was? Was there anything about the radio that I need to know? No. Okay. So I'm going to guess there's something involving wireless somethings here? No.

No, not wireless signals of some kind from the keyboard or – and you said this was 10 years ago. Is that kind of germane? Does it involve a technology that we don't use as often anymore? I'll be honest and say I'm not sure, but possibly that's the case. Okay. Because I was just trying to think, you know, things were set up a little differently 10 years ago. Does this have anything to do with the computer connecting to the internet? No.

Okay. So if this computer was a standalone computer not in any way connected to the internet, you would still have the problem with the radio turning on? Yes. Okay. I'm just trying to narrow down here. Does it matter what country this is? No.

Okay. And you said the time period may or may not be terribly important. That's right. Okay. And you said, I don't need to know anything else about the radio. Do I need to know something about the computer? Yes. Was it a desktop computer? Yes. Is that important? No. No. Okay. So that's not what I need to know about the computer. There's something else I need to know about the computer? Yes. Does it matter what model or brand of computer it is? Yes. Oh, it does. Is it an Apple computer? Yes. It's an Apple computer and that matters. That matters? Yes. Yes. Do I need to know more than that, that it's an Apple computer? Do I need to know something else more specific about the brand or the model? It was a Mac. It was a Mac. And yeah,

there's one more thing about it that you need to know. One more thing about it that I need to know. Which I might, because you and I use Windows machines. I know, so I don't know a lot about Macs. Does this have anything to do with the mouse or an input device similar to a mouse? No. No. So there's something about Macs that I might not know because we've never used one. Is that the case?

Yeah, but I think you may be able to guess this. I may be able to guess it. Why don't you thrash around for a little bit longer and then I'll just give it to you. Okay. Does this have anything to do with, I'm trying to remember, were Macs all like built in together?

So like the screen was built into the processor? I'm not sure when this was but yeah you don't so i don't need to worry about something like that okay um so something about the mac does it have something to do with the location of the mac and the radio how they're located to each other or their location vis-a-vis each other or? They're near each other. I guess you need to know that. I'm trying to figure out how it would turn on. Are they both plugged into the same power strip? Does it matter? It doesn't matter and possibly they're not. Okay. And it doesn't matter what they're plugged into?

What either of them is plugged into? No. Okay. So this isn't just a question of power somehow electricity that's right okay so how do you and you said it doesn't matter what kind of radio it is because i'm trying to figure out how do you turn on a radio i mean let me let me say this okay the radio was never on oh it just sounded like the radio was on yeah his stepfather was confused i didn't even think to ask that okay i was just taking you at face value that the radio was on. Yeah, his stepfather was confused. Oh, I didn't even think to ask that. Okay, I was just taking you at face value that the radio was on, but okay, got it. So he was somehow picking up radio signals on the Mac? No. Okay. He was, some piece of software on the Mac

or program on the Mac was playing that sounded like a radio. Was it music? It could have been. It doesn't matter. Okay. So something was, would you say it was a program that was playing? That's not the word I would use. Software? Yeah. A piece of software?

Yeah. So there was some kind of software. And is that why it's Apple? Was this a piece of Apple software? Yes. iTunes? No. No. Does it matter what the

software was? Should I try to guess specifically what the software was? I want to say yes to that, but I don't want to just send you that whole rabbit hole. And you're saying this would have happened even if he wasn't connected to the internet, so it's something local on his machine. Yes. Okay, and it has to do with it

being a Mac. Does it have anything to do with any disks or other paraphernalia or peripherals or accessories that are plugged into the machine? No. No, okay. And I'll give you one other clue. So it's a piece of software on the Mac itself that's opening up and playing. Yes, and he – I don't want to give away too much here. Well, you know, I'm going to keep working on this.

Okay. Do you want to try? I'm trying to think of a hint that'll sort of... Yeah, I mean, Mac users out there are probably, like, jumping up and down, like, how does she not know this? Okay, so is it a piece of software that I might have heard of? Like, obviously, I've heard of iTunes. Well, it's part of the OS.

It's something that the computer's trying to indicate something. The computer's trying to indicate something, The computer is trying to indicate something, but it's doing it in such an extended way that he actually thinks it's the radio, so it can't just be a beep or a ding or something, right? It actually is a beep. It's the computer. Like it's telling him he has mail or it's telling him. Let me just give it to you.

Okay. You're closer than you think. Doug writes, my stepfather had a Mac. Back in the day, it was easy to record your own beep for the Mac. So if you didn't like the factory default error beep, you could record yourself saying beep or whatever. Pop had accidentally done that, but he didn't know that he had done it. So he had started the recording process not knowing he'd done so. So what was recorded?

The sound of his radio going in the background. Oh, my goodness. So whenever any error of any kind was made on his computer, the error beep was a 20-second clip of his radio going in the background. Oh my goodness. So whenever any error of any kind was made on his computer, the error beep was a 20 second clip of his radio playing in the background. The computer would freeze during the duration of this clip. How long is 20 seconds? 20 seconds is the amount of time it takes for an elderly person to swear,

stand up, walk to the other end of the room and turn the off dial on a radio that is already off. Doug writes in a postscript, I never told Pop the problem because I did not want to embarrass him. So the bad news is he has a big I told you so because I told him his computer couldn't turn on the radio and he thinks I was wrong. The good news is he thinks I'm a genius because I was able to fix the problem without using the speaker wire and soldering iron he'd

gotten from the garage in case I needed them to fix his problem. That is really funny, but I don't know if I would have thought of that. And he says that's all true. That actually happened. Well, thank you for sending that puzzle in. That was very cute. 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 our show for today. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, check out the Futility Closet books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 delightful distractions.

At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. If you like our podcast and want to help support it, either with a one-time donation or through an ongoing pledge, please see the support us page of the website. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by leaving a review on iTunes or other podcast directories. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can always reach us by email at podcast at futility closet.com. Our music was written and performed by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.