Futility Closet - 169-John Harrison and the Problem of Longitude

Episode Date: September 11, 2017

Ships need a reliable way to know their exact location at sea -- and for centuries, the lack of a dependable method caused shipwrecks and economic havoc for every seafaring nation. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll meet John Harrison, the self-taught English clockmaker who dedicated his life to crafting a reliable solution to this crucial problem. We'll also admire a dentist and puzzle over a magic bus stop. Intro: Working in an Antarctic tent in 1908, Douglas Mawson found himself persistently interrupted by Edgeworth David. In 1905, Sir Gilbert Parker claimed to have seen the astral body of Sir Crane Rasch in the House of Commons. Sources for our feature on John Harrison: Dava Sobel and William H. Andrews, The Illustrated Longitude, 1995. William J.H. Andrewes, ed., The Quest for Longitude, 1996. Katy Barrett, "'Explaining' Themselves: The Barrington Papers, the Board of Longitude, and the Fate of John Harrison," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 65:2 (June 20, 2011), 145-162. William E. Carter and Merri S. Carter, "The Age of Sail: A Time When the Fortunes of Nations and Lives of Seamen Literally Turned With the Winds Their Ships Encountered at Sea," Journal of Navigation 63:4 (October 2010), 717-731. J.A. Bennett, "Science Lost and Longitude Found: The Tercentenary of John Harrison," Journal for the History of Astronomy 24:4 (1993), 281-287. Arnold Wolfendale, "Shipwrecks, Clocks and Westminster Abbey: The Story of John Harrison," Historian 97 (Spring 2008), 14-17. William E. Carter and Merri Sue Carter, "The British Longitude Act Reconsidered," American Scientist 100:2 (March/April 2012), 102-105. Robin W. Spencer, "Open Innovation in the Eighteenth Century: The Longitude Problem," Research Technology Management 55:4 (July/August 2012), 39-43. "Longitude Found: John Harrison," Royal Museums Greenwich (accessed Aug. 27, 2017). "John Harrison," American Society of Mechanical Engineers (accessed Aug. 27, 2017). J.C. Taylor and A.W. Wolfendale, "John Harrison: Clockmaker and Copley Medalist," Notes and Records, Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, Jan. 22, 2007. An Act for the Encouragement of John Harrison, to Publish and Make Known His Invention of a Machine or Watch, for the Discovery of the Longitude at Sea, 1763. John Harrison, An Account of the Proceedings, in Order to the Discovery of the Longitude, 1763. John Harrison, A Narrative of the Proceedings Relative to the Discovery of the Longitude at Sea, 1765. Nevil Maskelyne, An Account of the Going of Mr. John Harrison's Watch, at the Royal Observatory, 1767. John Harrison, Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by the Rev. Mr. Maskelyne, 1767. An Act for Granting to His Majesty a Certain Sum of Money Out of the Sinking Fund, 1773. John Harrison, A Description Concerning Such Mechanism as Will Afford a Nice, or True Mensuration of Time, 1775. Steve Connor, "John Harrison's 'Longitude' Clock Sets New Record -- 300 Years On," Independent, April 18, 2015. Robin McKie, "Clockmaker John Harrison Vindicated 250 Years After 'Absurd' Claims," Guardian, April 18, 2015. Listener mail: Charlie Hintz, "DNA Ends 120 Year Mystery of H.H. Holmes' Death," Cult of Weird, Aug. 31, 2017. "Descendant of H.H. Holmes Reveals What He Found at Serial Killer's Gravesite in Delaware County," NBC10, July 18, 2017. Brian X. McCrone and George Spencer, "Was It Really 'America's First Serial Killer' H.H. Holmes Buried in a Delaware County Grave?", NBC10, Aug. 31, 2017. Daniel Hahn, The Tower Menagerie, 2004. James Owen, "Medieval Lion Skulls Reveal Secrets of Tower of London 'Zoo,'" National Geographic News, Nov. 3, 2005. Richard Davey, Tower of London, 1910. Bill Bailey reads from the Indonesian-to-English phrasebook Practical Dialogues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZZv6D4hpK8 A few photos of Practical Dialogues. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Oskar Sigvardsson, who sent these corroborating links (warning -- these spoil 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. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, 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 crevasse etiquette to an astral MP. This is episode 169. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. This is episode 169. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross.

Ships need a reliable way to know their exact location at sea. And for centuries, the lack of a dependable method caused shipwrecks and economic havoc for every seafaring nation. In today's show, we'll meet John Harrison, the self-taught English clockmaker who dedicated his life to crafting a reliable solution to this crucial problem. We'll also admire a dentist and puzzle over a magic bus stop. We note our position on the Earth's surface using latitude and longitude. Latitude gives your position north or south, and longitude east or west. It's been done that way at least since Ptolemy compiled the first world atlas in AD 150. At sea, sailors could generally learn their latitude by observing the north star or the noonday sun and then just measuring its angle above the horizon. That would tell you how far north or south you were. Longitude is trickier. Because the world is constantly spinning, one

place tends to look like another. If you know the accurate local time aboard your ship and also the time back at your home port, then you can work out your longitude. The earth makes one complete rotation in 24 hours, so in one hour it turns 15 degrees. That means if your ship clock, the local time, is one hour different from the time at your home port, that means that you're 15 degrees of longitude away from home. And at the equator, that's about a thousand miles. So in principle, that's a solution. The navigator brings two clocks with him on a voyage. The first one he sets to the time at his home port as he's leaving, so he'll always know the time there. And the second one he sets to the local time on the ship as it travels across the sea. And he can do that by just observing the sun. So each day he resets the

ship's clock to local noon and then compares it to the home port clock, and the difference between the two will tell him how far east or west he's traveled from the home port. The trouble with all of this is that a conventional pendulum clock is useless aboard a rolling ship. It slows down or it speeds up or it stops altogether. Changes in temperature can cause its metal parts to expand or contract. The salt air can affect the workings of the clock, and so can changes in barometric pressure and even subtle variations in gravity between latitudes. If your clock is wrong, then the estimate of your longitude will be wrong too, and potentially by a lot. At the equator, the Earth moves at about

1,000 miles an hour, or 17 miles a minute. At the latitude of London, it's 11 miles a minute. So even if your sun sighting on the ship is perfect, and you know the local time accurately, if your home port clock, the clock that keeps track of the time at the port you left, is off by even a minute, then your estimate of your position could be off by 10 miles or more. That can easily get you killed. On the night of October 22nd, 1707, a fleet of Royal Navy warships were driven far off course in wind and rain and struck the rocks of the Silly Isles off the coast of Cornwall. They lost four ships and 2,000 men in one of history's greatest naval disasters. And there are literally hundreds of other cases where ignorance of longitude caused shipwreck.

And the problem only got worse as trade and navigation increased. There had been serious attempts to solve the problem of longitude as early as Galileo, who proposed a so-called lunar distance method that would let a navigator reckon time by observing the moon or the motion of Jupiter's moons. The trouble with that is that Jupiter wouldn't be visible during daylight hours, and it would be visible at night only for part of the year, and only when the skies were clear. In Britain, Charles II founded the Royal Observatory in 1675 explicitly to address this problem. He charged the astronomer royal, John Flamsteed, to apply what he called the most exact care and diligence to rectifying the tables of the motions

of the heavens and the places of the fixed stars so as to find out the so much desired longitude at sea for perfecting the art of navigation. There were some cranks who proposed ideas as well. This gets fun. In 1687, someone proposed what was called the Wounded Dog Theory, which was based on a material called the Powder of Sympathy that supposedly could heal a wound at a distance. You just had to get an item that belonged to the ailing person and apply the powder to that.

So if I had a wound and you got anything, a key or a book or something, that belonged to me and applied the powder to that. So if I had a wound and you got anything, a key or a book or something that belonged to me and applied the powder to that, then it would heal my wound. The trick here is that supposedly the wounded person would feel some pain when the powder was applied. So the idea was that you would put a wounded dog aboard a ship, but keep its bandage ashore, and then dip the bandage into the powder every day at precisely noon. And the people on the ship would know that when the dog yelped, it was noon in London, which is clever. Then the captain could compare that with the ship's local time and work out his longitude.

Only if the dog never yelps for any other reason, right? Good point. Some of my sources say that that example was satire, but if it was, it was satirizing a serious thing, that the desperation and the lengths to which people would go to try to solve this longitude problem. Here's another nutty idea. Some mathematicians suggested setting up stationary gunships at strategic points all across the ocean. These would fire enormous cannon at regular intervals. Navigators who heard that sound could correct for the propagation of sound and then know

the correct time. When the mathematicians were told that sound doesn't travel that reliably at sea, they suggested firing cannon shells into the sky, I guess somewhat like fireworks, where they would explode, and then sailors could then gauge the distance by comparing sight and sound, which is also clever. Needless to say, neither of those proposals took off. In fact, by 1714, 40 years after the Royal Observatory had been established, there still had been no useful solution to the problem of longitude, and many people had begun to consider the problem impossible. In May of that year, Westminster Palace received a petition by merchants and seamen pressing for some kind of action on this matter. It was just a solution

would be too valuable not to make some organized effort to go after it. A parliamentary committee sought advice from Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley, and they said that they thought that the two most promising possibilities were an astronomical method, like the one I described earlier, or a timekeeping watch, which could keep time reliably at sea, although Newton said that such a watch hath not yet been made. The committee made note of all this and urged Parliament to invite solutions to the problem and to extend this invitation as widely as possible. It could come from any field of science or art, from individuals or groups, and from anyone of any nationality. They also recommended

offering a substantial reward. Accordingly, in the Longitude Act of 1714, the British Parliament offered prizes in three amounts for what it called a practicable and useful way to determine longitude, and they were very big prizes. You get 20,000 pounds for a method that would determine longitude to an accuracy of half a degree on a great circle, 15,000 pounds for one that was accurate to within two-thirds of a degree, and 10,000 pounds for one that was accurate to within a degree, which is actually not that accurate. One degree is 60 nautical miles or 68 geographical miles at the equator. So you could get $10,000 for a solution that would let you note your position within only that degree of accuracy, which is off by quite a lot, I think.

But I guess it's better than what they had. Which is nothing, yeah. And yet still the government offered this huge sum, which is several million dollars in today's currency. Basically, it was large because the problem seemed impossible, and because a practical solution would be almost incalculably valuable to the nation and to society in general, and they'd been looking for hundreds of years and hadn't found anything. The act established a panel of distinguished judges known as the Board of Longitude in Effective World's first official research and development agency, and the board was responsible for judging any technique with those submitted.

The prize attracted interest, understandably, from people all over the world. One of them was a self-taught clockmaker named John Harrison. Harrison had been born in 1693 and became a master craftsman in wood. There's a story that's probably apocryphal, that when he was six years old, he was sick with smallpox, and he entertained himself with a watch that his parents put on his pillow. Watches in those days were very large, and he would have been able to see the relationship between the ticking of the watch and its mechanical action. Whether or not that's true, he conceived a fascination with clocks, and he found that he had a great talent for designing them,

despite having no formal education or apprenticeship to a watchmaker. His father was a carpenter by trade, but occasionally he repaired clocks, and John would assist him when he was old enough. As he grew older, he combined his interest in woodworking with his interest in clocks and built his first long case clock, essentially a grandfather clock, in 1713 at age 20. It's constructed almost entirely of wood, which was the material that was available to him. Harrison's long case clocks were thought by some to have been the most accurate clocks in the world at that time. They never aired by more than a second in a month, where the finest watches in the world

drifted by a minute a day. That is a big difference. And he was self-taught. Wow. Working with his younger brother James in 1720, he designed and built a clock tower for a wealthy landowner's estate that's been running continuously for almost 300 years.

It runs without oil because the parts that would normally need it were made out of a tropical hardwood that exudes its own grease. And a clock without oil in those days was absolutely unheard of. No one knows how Harrison heard of the Longitude Prize, but it would have been famous at the time as an unsolved scientific problem. The prospect of solving it with a marine chronometer, a sea clock, would have appealed to him,

and the prize itself would have been as prestigious as a Nobel Prize today. To win that prize, his clock would have to keep a ship within half a degree of longitude on a voyage from England to the West Indies. That meant it would have to stay accurate within 2.8 seconds a day, despite the ship's motion, salt, air, and the temperature changes at sea. He started with a land clock that was much more accurate than the others that were in use at the time. Like the tower clock, he fashioned it so that it didn't need lubricating oil, which was a leading reason for clock failure. Oils tended to dry out in the summer to get thicker in the winter.

And he envisioned a new mechanism to use in place of a pendulum. This was a pair of counter-oscillating weighted beams connected by springs that would maintain their accuracy even in rolling seas and get past this problem of pendulums just not working at sea. After five years of work, he made the 200-mile journey to London in 1730 to present his work to the Board of Longitude. When he got there, he found the board had never even met. The responses to their challenge had been so mediocre that individual members had simply sent rejection letters to them. In fact, the board would never meet unless a quorum of five members required it, and so far no entry had attracted that much interest. Oh, the wounded dog thing didn't come. I wonder about that.

Harrison had heard of Edmund Halley, the Astronomer Royal at this point, and went to see him. Halley received him kindly and was impressed with his drawings, but he knew that the board wouldn't like a mechanical solution. They were more inclined, most of them were astronomers, and they were inclined toward one of these astronomical solutions where you would observe the sky and reckon the time and your position by that. So Halley sent Harrison to see George Graham, who was the country's foremost clockmaker. Graham was very impressed, though. In fact, he invited Harrison to stay to dinner and even loaned him money on their first meeting, which is pretty good.

When the clock was ready, Harrison undertook a sea trial to actually try this out, sailing with it to Lisbon. It performed well, and in fact, it proved its worth dramatically on the voyage home. As the ship neared land, the master assumed the point of land they were seeing was something called the start, which is a well-known point near Dartmouth. And Harrison was able to correct him. He said that according to his reckoning, it must be the Lizard, which is a peninsula on the coast of Penzance, which is more than 60 miles from the start. The master was greatly impressed and gave him a certificate to confirm this. When the board of longitude met to

consider the clock, Harrison should have extolled it and asked for a trial to the West Indies. He certainly earned it. But instead, he modestly pointed out the flaws of the clock. He was the only one there who did so. The clock hadn't lost more than a few seconds and 24 hours on the journey to or from Lisbon, but he said he wanted to improve the mechanism and make the device smaller. I gather he was a perfectionist. This became a problem for him, as we'll see, but no one says this about him in the writings about him, but if you read between the lines,

it seems like he's just a very patient man and wanted to get this perfect. He produced a second clock, which is known as H2, but then he told the board he didn't like that one either and asked for permission to try again no one was objecting as far as i can tell he just presented it and said this isn't good enough i just want to show it to you unfortunately though it's for some reason it took him 19 years to build the third clock maybe for that reason and when he started he was already 48 years old. It's not clear why this took so long. He had made his turret clock in just two years

with little experience and he'd made two innovative C clocks at this point in just nine years. He wasn't delaying. It appears he was working on this almost non-stop and the Board of Longitude was funding his work. Here again I think he was just being meticulous. He could afford to do that somewhat.

He didn't have any serious competition from other clockmakers. No one else was really trying to do what he was doing. But he did have some competition from the astronomers who were still trying to devise an instrument that could reckon time by the sky. In time, they produced one. A navigator could stand on deck, take a measurement, and consult a table that gave the expected observation in London or Paris at a given hour, and so he could reckon his longitude in that way. So others were working on it. He didn't have unlimited time to work on this. When Harrison finally produced his third clock, it had 753 separate parts. One of the innovations was a bimetallic strip, which is a strip of brass and steel that were riveted together to accommodate changes in temperature without affecting the

clock's rate. It just prevented it from expanding or contracting because these two things were riveted together. The new clock couldn't be tried at sea because now the Seven Years' War had broken out and it was too dangerous to send such a valuable instrument

out to sea where it might be captured by an enemy. So Harrison spent the time while he was waiting completing a fourth clock, which he finished in the summer of 1760.

He was particularly proud of this one, which was a pocket watch much smaller than the others, just five inches in diameter that weighed only three pounds. He wrote, The board decided to test both of these latter two watches, clocks, together on the same voyage,

but that voyage was postponed for months. In fact, there's some evidence that the astronomers deliberately delayed the voyage so that they had time to prove their own lunar distance method. Harrison and his son William met the Oxford astronomer James Bradley in an instrument maker's shop at one point, and William later wrote in his diary, the doctor seemed very much out of temper and in the greatest passion told Mr. Harrison that if it had not been for him and his plaguey watch, Mr. Meyer and he should have shared 10,000 pounds before now. That's the problem with setting up.

This wasn't the first time someone had offered a big purse for a scientific advance. And there are a lot of good reasons to do that. It does attract people like Harrison in this case. But the trouble with offering too much money is that you're sort of pitting people against each other. So ideally, you'd want all the competitors to just want the best idea to win.

And maybe work collaboratively if possible. Yeah, or at least acknowledge each other's merit. But here, you can sort of see they're just competing for the money. And the winner might be something that's just politically expedient or well-funded rather than actually the best solution. As the Astronomical Royal,

Bradley served on the board and was therefore a judge in the prize. William finally departed in November with Harrison's watch on this sea trial. They arrived in Jamaica after three months on January 19th, 1762, and found that the watch had lost only five seconds after 81 days at sea, which is amazing. They sailed back through stormy seas and found that it was still ticking on their arrival on March 26th. The adjusted total error sailing out and back was just under two minutes. Wow. That should have won the prize outright, but it didn't. There followed a period of fully 10 years in which the Board of Longitude insisted on rechecking the data and running new trials while it also considered this lunar method it was working on. At one point in

1765, they made him take the watch apart over six days and explain under oath the function of each part and how they work together. Afterward, he had to give the watch to the Admiralty and then begin building two replicas without the original watch to use as a model and without his diagrams. The best known account of this whole saga is Davis Sobel's 1995 book Longitude, which is admirably well-researched, but I fear that might paint the board as unreasonable and prejudiced toward an astronomical solution. It just sounds like they're crazy, like they're just throwing up arbitrary roadblocks just to slow him down. And there may be some degree of truth to that. Harrison Sea Watch did meet the requirements of the prize. In fact, in its second sea trial, it was three times more accurate than the prize

demanded. But there were also some good reasons to oppose it. It was complicated and it was expensive. The whole point of this undertaking was to come up with a solution that could be used widely around the world. But watchmaker Larkham Kendall said, I am of the opinion that it would be many years, if ever, before a watch of the same kind with that of Mr. Harrison's could be afforded for 200 pounds. By comparison, a good sextant and a set of lunar distance tables cost a tenth of that, and the sky was available for anyone to use. So for that reason, this astronomical method, if they could get it to work reliably, would have been preferable. I mean, there was a good argument to be made there.

Anyway, it took Harrison five years to make the first of the two replicas that the board had asked of him. He spent another two years making adjustments to it, and by that time he was 79 years old. He didn't tell how he could possibly make the second watch, so in January 1772, his son William wrote to King, George III, telling him the whole story and asking him to intercede. The King's private science tutor put Harrison's clock through an indoor trial of six weeks and found that it met the requirements. George said, by God, Harrison, I will see you righted. He appealed directly to the prime minister and to parliament, and by the end of June, Harrison got 8,750 pounds as a bounty,

awarded by the benevolence of parliament. He didn't actually win the prize itself. Parliament was just giving it to him out of their own benevolence, but it was nearly the amount that was still owed to him. So it comes to the same thing. In fact, sadly, the prize itself was never claimed. Parliament laid out the requirements that were so onerous that in the end no one chose to attempt them. And after all his travails, Harrison lived long enough to hear Captain Cook sing the praises of his invention after he used it to map the South Pacific. Cook wrote that the watch, quote, exceeded the expectations of its most zealous advocate, and by being now and then corrected by lunar observations has been our faithful guide through all vicissitudes of climates.

Harrison died on his 83rd birthday, March 24th, 1776, just three years after Parliament paid him. For decades, he'd been virtually the only person in the world seriously seeking to design a clock to solve the longitude problem, but after his success with his fourth clock, a flood of new inventors took up marine timekeeping. By the 1780s, the cost of a marine chronometer had dropped to between 65 and 90 pounds. Naval officers had to pay for the metal in their own pockets, but they were glad to do so as they worked well and they lasted a long time. Over time, their credibility grew so that they were more precise than the lunar method and easier to apply. As the price gradually came down, the world supply of marine chronometers grew from one in 1737 to about 5,000 by 1815.

So oddly, all of this was a revolution, or amounted to one, but one that unfolded so slowly that it was hard to recognize. After Harrison learned of the prize, it took him 47 years of patient work before he finally won his reward. And even after he died, it was another 230 years before a memorial was created for him. But his invention was a key to the modern age. It made sea travel safe, reliable, and orderly. It saved countless lives, and it accelerated the pace of exploration, colonization, and commerce that would mark the centuries that followed. Some people have credited it for the success of the British Empire.

Harrison's recognition came slowly, but it did come. In 2002, when the BBC conducted a poll to determine the 100 greatest Britons, Harrison came 39th between William Blake and Henry VIII, and there's now a memorial to him in the floor of Westminster Abbey. Salman Rushdie, one of the greatest storytellers of our time, is back with a new novel called The Golden House. Written in a style that only a master like Rushdie can pull off, The Golden House is a contemporary novel about identity, truth, terror, and lies. Set against the exuberant backdrop of current American culture and politics, ripped from today's headlines, The Golden House is a thrilling story about a real estate tycoon and his mysterious, powerful, corrupt family. The Goldens have recently moved into a pocket of New York City and seem to be hiding in plain sight until an aspiring filmmaker decides their family will be

the subject of his next project. Overflowing with inventiveness, humor, and a touch of magic, The Golden House is a celebration of human nature, a great American novel, a tale of exile wrapped in a murder mystery, a meditation on the nature of good and evil, a thrilling page-turner, and a coming-of-age story for the ages. Buy your copy of The Golden House now. Available wherever books are sold. We finally have an update for those who have been breathlessly waiting since episode 156 to learn the fate of H.H. Holmes, America's first documented serial killer whose story we covered in episode 144. Thanks very much to John Burns, we now know that it was Holmes, after all, that was buried in Pennsylvania, finally putting to rest all the rumors and theories that Holmes had managed to escape his execution. all the rumors and theories that Holmes had managed to escape his execution. John saved us from having to sit through an eight-part History Channel series to learn both that Holmes was in his grave where he belonged,

and that there doesn't appear to be any really convincing evidence to tie him to Jack the Ripper, despite the strong beliefs about this by one of Holmes' descendants, who was one of the main forces behind and host of the History Channel show. John sent us some helpful links about the exhumation and findings for anyone who wants to see more about this, or who wants to see Holmes's skull, which was found not only intact, but apparently with the brain still inside it. Yeah, really? Yeah, apparently that's pretty unusual, but they did. Harriet Reid wrote in about episode 160. Hello, I recently listened to the amazing

story of the Birmingham sewer lion and it reminded me of another lion story with a happier ending. Before it was infamous as a prison, the Tower of London was known for its menagerie, which featured hundreds of exotic animals including leopards, polar bears, and lions. At some point, to entertain some king, somebody had the bright idea to send a spaniel into one of the lion's dens, where it would be rather gorily eaten. However, things did not go quite to plan, as the lion took a liking to the plucky little spaniel and refused to eat him. After befriending the spaniel, the lion would not let anyone separate them, and that was that. They remained buddies until the spaniel's death and even then the lion refused to have his body removed. I read this story in Daniel Hahn's book

The Tower Menagerie. Thank you for all the work you put into the podcast. I really enjoy the different stories you cover. My name isn't tricky to pronounce but there's a good pun in it as I'm an English teacher called Reed. The Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London was started in the early 13th century by King John and was basically the king's private collection of exotic animals. Jeremy Ashby, a former Tower of London curator, said of the menagerie, lions were particularly prized as the living emblems of the royal arms of England. And the earliest written record of an English lion is a reference to the ups of the royal arms of England. And the earliest written record of an English lion is a reference to the upkeep of the King's Lion, dating from 1240. Harriet's

cute story is about King James I, who apparently was a big fan of watching animals fight, and for his and his court's amusement, different combinations of animals would be placed together in the hopes of witnessing some violent sport. It does seem that James was disappointed on a few occasions when the animals didn't quite cooperate with his plans. According to Richard Davy in his book, Tower of London, one day in 1609, several members of the royal court gathered to watch a lion fight with a bear who had killed a child and thus was sentenced to be punished. Davy says, several lions were brought out, but they won it all, seeing the bear turn tail and hid in their cages.

Perhaps English lions are not quite the most fearsome of beasts. Meredith Ray Lee had some more to say on the topic of bad English phrase books that we last discussed in episode 166. Since you were talking about the famous terrible book, English as She Is Spoke, in the last episode, I thought you might enjoy this. It's Bill Bailey, an English comedian, reading from an Indonesian to English phrase book that he found called Practical Dialogues. There was actually more in the original show, including, I think, a discussion of nuclear power, very practical for the average tourist,

but this gives you some idea of how impractical the dialogues are. And Harriet sent a link to a very funny clip that contained a couple of terrific practical dialogues. I won't be able to match Bill Bailey, but one of them was, I am going to see the dentist. Right now? By five o'clock. What for? To have a tooth out. What is the dentist's name? Thaddeley. He is also an actor, isn't he? Yes, he is. You are lucky. Why? You have handsome dentist. And I'm so sure we can all relate to having had just that conversation with someone because isn't everyone's dentist also an actor? Yeah, and you're having a conversation,

and that's such a useful phrase that you have to pull out your booklet and look it up. So I was so tickled by the examples in Harriet's clip that I tried to find more on this online and was able to find a Tumblr post that had a couple of other pages of the book visible. If anyone else can find more of this book, please do send it in to us. But here's another dialogue that I was able to make out from the Tumblr post. And remember, these are supposed to be practical dialogues. Is smuggling forbidden? Yes, it is. Why? It gets goods secretly and illegally. What do you call a person who smuggles? A smugglers. There are many smugglers in the world, aren't there?

Yes, there are. What will happen if I smuggle opium into Malaysia? You will be hanged. So there you go. A totally useful book if you are Indonesian and were just desperate to be able to ask in English, what would happen to you if you smuggled opium into Malaysia? Or if you needed to inform some of the consequences of smuggling opium.

Because who doesn't need that, right? Right. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. If you have any questions or comments for us or examples of other bad phrasebooks, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange-sounding situation,

and I have to try to work out what is going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Oskar Sigvardschorn. In the German town of Dusseldorf, there's a bus stop that no buses ever stop at. Even so, people still wait at the bus stop trying to get home, and they do eventually arrive at their destination. What's going on? But you call it a bus stop.

Yes. Did buses used to stop there? No. It's called a bus stop even though buses never stop there. That's right. Do they call something else in Germany a bus other than what I think of as a bus? Good question, but no. Okay. Does some other form of transportation stop there? No. Regularly or ever? Ever. No. But they do get home. You said they stop at the bus stop and then they

get home eventually. They arrive at their destination. They arrive at their destination. Okay, let's back up. Are these human beings? Yes. Yes. Are they a particular demographic? Yes. Ah, a particular demographic.

Oh, oh, does this have something to do with women giving birth? No, but that's interesting. Babies arriving into the world? Oh, good. All right. No. It's like the the world? Oh, good. All right. No. It's like the name for like a maternity ward somewhere at the bus stop. No, you get a lot of credit for that.

Oh, okay. Okay. So it's human beings, a particular demographic of human beings, a particular gender? No. A particular age group? Yes. Kids? No.

Oh. Okay. age group? Yes. Kids? No. Oh, okay. They're euthanizing older people when they arrive at their destination. They call it the bus stop, very euphemistically. No? Because it sounds innocuous. Yes. Okay. So it's not kids. Adults? More specific than adults? Yes, more specific than adults. When you say they arrive at their destination, is that sort of metaphorical? Do they actually travel anywhere? No, they don't. They don't travel anywhere? No.

Ah. Okay, so a group of adults that isn't actually traveling anywhere. A specific age group of adults? Yes. Young adults? No. Older adults? Yes. Young adults? No. Older adults? Yes.

More specific than that? No, not more specific than that. Are they alive when they go to the bus stop? Yes. Are they still alive when they reach their destination? Yes. Okay. Does this have something to do with some kind of convention in Germany that when you reach

a certain age, you attain a certain status of some sort? No, but that's a good question. Okay. I'm sorry. Did you say it's a specific age, more specific than older adults? No, elderly people. Elderly people go to the bus stop and then arrive at their destination. Is this specific to German people in some way?

Not because they're German, but this happens to take place in Germany. Could you envision it taking place in America? Yes. Okay. So elderly people go to what they call the bus stop. Yes. Would that be located inside of a building?

No. So it's located outside of a building and then they metaphorically arrive at some kind of destination. No, they arrive... At a destination. Yes. Okay, all right.

Elderly people. Does this have anything to do with health? Yes. Would you say that the bus stop is some sort of a medical facility? No, but it's outside a particular building. A building associated with health in some way? In some way, yeah. Associated with a medical facility in some way? I'm stuck on medical facilities?

I'm going to say yes. This is all related to their health. This is all related to their health. Do they all, would you say that they all have roughly the same thing? Like some kind of ailment or disorder, all of them that go to the bus stop? Yes. Would you say that it's more physical

than cognitive? No. It is cognitive. They all have some kind of cognitive impairment? Yes. Do I need to know more specifically than that? Yes, It is cognitive. They all have some kind of cognitive impairment? Yes. Do I need to know more specifically than that? Yes, I'd say so. Do they all have like dementia? Yes. Okay. So elderly people with dementia go to the bus stop. Is this designed to let them think they're going someplace, like they're going home when they're not? Yes. Is there more to it than that? You've basically got it. The members of the Benroth Senior Center in Dusseldorf are 84 years old on average, and often their short-term memory is impaired while their long-term memory is still active. This means there's a danger that they'll leave the center trying to return to a life that

they remember elsewhere. To protect against this, the center has built an exact replica of a standard bus stop. The seniors recognize the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home. So these patients tend to wait at the bus stop rather than leave the center. The center's director, Richard Neuweider, said, We will approach them and say the bus is coming later and invite them in for a coffee. Five minutes later, they will have completely forgotten they wanted to leave. The idea has worked so well that it's been adopted by several other homes across Germany. That's actually a very good idea. Yeah. Wow. Especially if it works. So thank you,

Oscar. Yes, thank you so much. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us, and we really do depend on the support of our listeners. While we do have some advertising on the show, that doesn't by itself cover the big commitment of time that it takes us to make the podcast each week. So if you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, then check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the support us section of the website. At the website, you'll also find over 9,000 concise curiosities, the Futility Closet store, links to the Futility Closet books, and the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and

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