Futility Closet - 174-Cracking the Nazi Code

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 fairy coffins to a Coltrane poem. This is episode 174. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1940, Germany was sending vital telegrams through neutral Sweden using a sophisticated cipher, and it fell to mathematician Arne Borling to make sense of the secret messages. In today's show, we'll describe the outcome,

Starting point is 00:00:38 which has been called one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of cryptography. We'll also learn about mudlarking and puzzle over a chicken-killing dame. In the spring of 1940, Sweden was in a precarious position. Germany had occupied its neighbors Norway and Denmark, and the Soviet Union had invaded Finland. In fact, by that summer, Sweden was one of the few Western European countries that hadn't been invaded. The country couldn't afford a big military buildup, so they needed to find a way to anticipate Germany's intentions in order to hold them off. In the meantime, they allowed Germany to ship supplies

Starting point is 00:01:17 through their country in sealed trains, and in April 1940, they agreed to let the Germans use a Swedish telegraph cable to pass messages between continental Europe and occupied Norway. Once German messages were passing through their territory, Sweden tapped the line to listen in. They heard the German operators talking about something called a Geheimschreiber that was about to come into use, and shortly after that the traffic just became completely unreadable. Geheimschreiber means secret writer. Apparently the German Foreign Office was using some new technology to encrypt the traffic on the line so that outsiders couldn't understand it.

Starting point is 00:01:50 This was frustrating. The Germans were sending top-secret messages through Sweden on Swedish telegraph lines carrying information that was vital to Sweden's future, and they could even tap the line, but they couldn't make sense of the messages they were seeing. The Geheimschreiber had been developed by the German company Siemens in the 1930s using its best engineering and cryptography experts. It was a cipher teletype machine. You'd type your message in plain text, and the printer at the far end would print out the message in plain text. But anyone who tapped the line in between would see the message in its enciphered form. And the enciphering was very sophisticated. The number of possible encodings was very much bigger than the total quantity of information exchanged over the whole course of the war, with nearly a

Starting point is 00:02:28 quintillion different variations. So the Germans, understandably, felt very secure sending these messages through neutral Sweden. Even if they were intercepted, they'd be practically impossible to decipher. The Swedes thought about this for a while and then called in Arne Böhrling, who was a professor of mathematics at the University of Uppsala, who had helped them in the past. Böhrling was brilliant, intense, and irritable. His fellow math professor, Lennart Carleson, said he had an intense gaze as if coal fires burned in his face. He had a relationship with mathematics which was mysterious. It was as if he had a direct line to God with knowledge that we had not. Cryptographer Okja Lundqvist said, I have met many highly talented people, but only one genius. Who that was, I don't have to say. Berling examined the

Starting point is 00:03:11 telegraph traffic that they'd collected and took the printouts for a single day, May 25th, 1940, because they thought they seemed to be the cleanest, the freest of transcription errors. He'd never seen a machine like the Geheimschreiber. He knew nothing about teleprinters. He had no computers, and he was working alone with no staff to do calculations for him. He had no plain text, meaning he didn't know the actual message that lay beneath any of these transmissions. And he didn't even know what kind of mechanism had done the encoding or its logical construction. No other group had made any progress in breaking the code. He had only a single day's printouts, some graph paper, and a pencil.

Starting point is 00:03:50 And he cracked the code in 14 days. He announced that the Geheimtreiber contained 10 wheels with a different number of positions on each wheel, and he deduced exactly how the code was set. This was the more impressive because he had no idea what kind of machine was doing the encoding. There's a more famous German cipher machine called Enigma that was defeated by Polish and British mathematicians during the war, but they had the benefit of foreign intelligence and some captured hardware. Böhrling was reasoning entirely from scratch. The Swedish mathematician Bengt Beckmann calls it one of the most remarkable success stories in the history of cryptanalysis. In his foreword to Beckmann's book about all this, Peter Jones writes,

Starting point is 00:04:22 To this day, no one knows exactly how Böhrling reasoned during the two weeks he spent on the Geheimschreiber. In 1976, he was interviewed about his work by a group from the Swedish military and became extremely irritated when pressed for an explanation. He finally responded, a magician does not reveal his tricks. And in fact, he never did explain it. He took the secret to his grave in 1986. But other mathematicians had gone over his work and reconstructed what probably happened. The telegraph lines that the Germans were using were noisy, so occasionally they had to retransmit parts of a message. When that happened, what they were supposed to do was switch to a new code before they retransmitted it, but sometimes out of laziness or inertia or time pressure, they would use the same one. Jones writes,

Starting point is 00:05:01 the cardinal sin of cryptography is to send the same message with small changes several times Jones writes, After he announced his solution, they tested it on the traffic they'd intercepted on another day, May 27th, and confirmed that he was right. Olaf Thornel, the supreme commander of the Swedish armed forces, said it was the happiest day of his life. Thousands of secret German telegrams now lay open to them. At first they tried deciphering these by hand, but it became clear that they need to build a machine of their own just to keep up. There were so many of these. That created an interesting problem. up. There were so many of these. That created an interesting problem. Berling had described the cipher mathematically, but they still didn't know what the actual German machine looked like or how it was constructed. But Berling worked with an engineer named Viggo Lindstein to build a replica

Starting point is 00:05:55 sight unseen. It looked monstrous and it made a racket, but it printed out the German messages that the Swedes wanted to read, and by the fall of 1942, they had more than 40 of these machines in operation. Now when the Supreme Commander asked, what's the news from Germans today, they could usually tell him. They deciphered 7,000 messages in December 1940, and that number rose to 120,000 in 1942. In all, thanks to Berling's breakthrough, the Swedes decrypted almost 300,000 secret German messages during the war. On a single day in October 1943, 678 deciphered messages were delivered to the Swedish government and to military commanders. So now the Swedes had front row seats. They knew what was happening not only in Norway,

Starting point is 00:06:35 but throughout the war, since the Germans were sending regular updates to their staff officers in Norway. And it turned out that some of the correspondence sent from Berlin to the German embassy in Stockholm was encrypted with the same type of cipher machine, so now the Swedes got advance notice of the Germans' intentions towards Sweden itself. This gave them a kind of clairvoyance. Twice the Germans moved their troops in Norway to threaten the Swedes, and both times they found the Swedish troops opposing them. The cryptography historian David Kahn says their commander, General Niklaus von Falkenhorst, later extended

Starting point is 00:07:05 congratulations to Tornel on the brilliance of his tactics. Tornel passed the felicitations on to the cryptanalysts, since those were the ones who'd given him advance warning on these threats. On another occasion, the Swedish deciphering team intercepted a demanding diplomatic request that the Germans were preparing, and they called their foreign minister to warn him it was coming. He immediately went on a hunting trip, so the Germans couldn't deliver their demands until after the weekend. And in the meantime, the Swedes worked out a new policy so that when the demand came, they could tell the Germans that they just weren't able to fulfill it.

Starting point is 00:07:33 So by artfully anticipating Germany's move, Sweden was able to maintain its neutrality while the war raged all around it. And Germany didn't catch on. They didn't suspect? They did eventually. That's a funny thing. They were so confident in the unbreakability of the cipher that they sort of relaxed their vigilance. Because why

Starting point is 00:07:50 would you be really worried about that if you were just positive that this thing was unbreakable? That it was just impossible. And it seems like it was just sheer luck that the Swedes had a brilliant mathematician on their side. Yeah, you can't really say the Germans were wrong in thinking that, because it's literally almost a quintillion possibilities. There's one especially important outcome, or I guess the lack of an outcome, more of a missed opportunity. In spring 1941, the Swedes learned that the Germans were planning to invade the Soviet Union between June 20th and June 25th in what's called Operation Barbarossa. Erik Bøyman, the Secretary General of the Swedish Foreign Office, passed the news to Sir Stafford Cripps, who was the British ambassador to the Soviet Union, at a dinner in Stockholm, and Cripps passed this news on to the Russians.

Starting point is 00:08:31 Unfortunately, since the Swedes wouldn't say how they got the information, the Soviets didn't treat it as credible, and the invasion actually went forward, which became a catastrophe for Russia, but the Swedes had actually known about this weeks in advance. for Russia, but the Swedes had actually known about this weeks in advance. For most of the remainder of the war, Sweden was completely surrounded by Germans. Germans were in Norway, Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and Denmark, as well as, of course, Germany itself. 350,000 German troops were stationed in Norway alone, but by monitoring German plans and changing their own policies accordingly, Sweden was able to keep from being drawn into the war. They managed to do this until the tide turned in 1942-43 before any attack had materialized, and soon the war's outcome could be foreseen. At the same time, toward the end of 1942, the Germans finally did realize that their communications must have been compromised,

Starting point is 00:09:14 and they began to change their system, but by that time the danger to Sweden was diminishing. Apparently, the importance of Berling's contribution in keeping Sweden out of the war was known only to a small circle of people until comparatively recently, but it's been increasingly hailed as a major accomplishment. It's generally considered that the cipher in the Geheimschreiber is more complex than that that was used in the Enigma machines, and its intelligence is certainly of much greater importance to Sweden. Enigma was used for operative and tactical information, and Geheimschreiber was used for strategic communications. tactical information, and Geheimschreiber was used for strategic communications. Historians and mathematicians have called Böhrling's work astonishing, a stunning mathematical feat, a magnificent accomplishment, possibly the finest feat of cryptanalysis performed by the Swedes, and one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of cryptography.

Starting point is 00:09:57 Böhrling himself certainly didn't crow about it. He went back to his research, and a few years after the war, he went to Princeton, where he inherited Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study. This was a distinct honor, but in a way it made an odd finish to his research, and a few years after the war, he went to Princeton, where he inherited Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study. This was a distinct honor, but in a way it made an odd finish to his career. His fellow math professor, Lennart Carleson, said, he was the most Swedish person I've ever met. We want to thank everyone who helps us to be able to keep making the show. And this week, we're sending out an extra special Futility Closet thank you to Daniel Rios, our newest super patron. If you would like to join Daniel and all the other wonderful supporters of our show to help us keep bringing you your weekly dose of the quirky and the curious,

Starting point is 00:10:41 then check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. If you join our Patreon campaign, you'll get access to extra discussions on some of the stories, outtakes, more lateral thinking puzzles, peeks behind the scenes, and of course, updates on Sasha, our trusty show mascot. Again, that's at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of the website. And thanks so much to everyone who helps make Futility Closet possible. Tobias, whose name can be pronounced entirely as I like, wrote to say, Hello and a scratch behind the ears where appropriate to you three. And first of all, thank you for an endlessly and reliably diverting podcast.

Starting point is 00:11:27 I've just been listening to episode 168 about the Doves Press and the drowning of its unique typeface. In the episode, you mentioned that the only decoration in the Doves Press books was calligraphy by Edward Johnston. As a Londoner, I know Johnston's work well, as it's how I find my way around. He designed the typeface used by London Transport on all its signs and literature, on the tube, buses, trams, and boats, very much now the printed voice of London. Moreover, I think some of the woodcuts used for printing Johnston's calligraphy for dubs was cut by his friend and protégé Eric Gill, who went on to perfect, as he saw it, Johnston's type to create Gill's Sands.

Starting point is 00:12:05 London Transport refused to let anyone else use their type, so as a commercial alternative, Gill Sans became hugely popular in the 20th century and is a common font in Britain, until recently, for example, having been the official font of the BBC. Gill, sadly, while a brilliant type designer, sculptor, and artist, appears also to have been an utter monster in his private life, quite possibly sexually abusing his children. At the time they were working for Doves, they all lived close by each other in Hammersmith,

Starting point is 00:12:32 the future of British typography, all being forged in a few streets down by the river. There was a recent and excellent documentary on Johnston and Gill on the BBC, but sadly I don't think it's currently available on their online iPlayer, but hopefully it'll come around again soon. Thanks so much for all your hard work. Always a pleasure to have you keep me company on my ride to work on A Bus Decked Out in Johnston's Font. And we'll have a link in the show notes to the documentary in case anyone wants to check on it to see when it becomes available again. It is amazing. I've been corresponding with some other

Starting point is 00:13:04 listeners. What a small geographic area it is when all these great names in British typography were all working at the same time. And was it maybe just a coincidence that they were all in the same place? As I understand it, largely it was. But it's amazing how, like, I mean, he's right. That font, one font is just all over London now. I mean, it's amazing how influential just a small group of people were.

Starting point is 00:13:24 Yeah. One faun is just all over London now. I mean, it's amazing how influential just a small group of people were. Yeah. Nick Moffitt wrote about the same episode, and especially about the part of the story where Robert Greene set out in 2014 to try to find some of the drowned type in the riverbed of the Thames. Good evening to Sasha, Sharon, and Greg. delighted to catch the latest episode of Futility Closet shortly after it was podcast and imagine my delight when the main topic was that of Dove's type, the core intrigue of which all took place on the path of my weekly cycling commute into central London. I used to live in the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham where the story took place, but after moving further west a few

Starting point is 00:13:59 years ago, I began regularly cycling a particularly scenic stretch of the Thames past the Dove pub as a pleasant link between the Fuller's Brewery and Hammersmith Bridge. Despite being considered a river, the Thames is, as was noted several times in Greg's retelling of the story, subject to the tides as far up as Teddington Lock. It once flowed even further. Hampton Court Palace, which is on the far southwest of modern Greater London, has a celestial clock that tour guides say predicted the tides and thus the arrival of Henry VIII's riverboat fleet. This

Starting point is 00:14:30 means that while I live in what's generally considered outer west London and well inland from the sea, I am technically right on the coast of Britain. It can seem strange to think of, right until your inland garden suburb is thick with seagulls. When I cycle past the Fuller's Brewery along the Chiswick Mall, the river has typically either swamped a corner of the road or run out enough to walk out to the Chiswick Iot. While the local rowing clubs don't enjoy the low water quite as much, it does allow for the long-standing London tradition of mudlarking. It's not so unusual for the authorities to have told Green to have a go at digging up treasure in the riverbed. The famous Millennium Mulch is nowhere so rich as on the

Starting point is 00:15:11 embankment silt of central London at low tide. People occasionally turn up treasures such as silver coins or necklaces, but more often it's a medieval beer bottle or a bag of Victorian marbles or something. A quick trip out in high Wellington boots to check the mud for hunks of metal isn't too far out of the ordinary, even for Hammersmith. Unfortunately, mudlarks do need to take care as the banks of the Thames still contain a particularly deadly find, unexploded ordnance from the Blitz. Many of the explosive and incendiary bombs that landed in the river sank to the bottom without detonating, and every few years or so a small area in London needs to be evacuated while experts work to dispose of a World War II bomb.

Starting point is 00:15:49 Just last year, they evacuated part of the Brent Navigation, which is upriver from Hammersmith. Thanks again for such a reliably fascinating podcast. And I had never heard of mudlarking before, but I found out that this really is a thing. For centuries, people have lost items or deliberately thrown them into the Thames, and thanks to its tides, these items continue to turn up in the mud at low tide. Mudlarking began as a rather lowly profession in the late 18th century when desperately poor people, often children, would scavenge the riverbank for anything they could sell for a few pennies. But now mudlarking is mostly pursued as a pastime,

Starting point is 00:16:26 though some mudlarks take it pretty seriously and have found some historically important objects. For example, Thames mudlarks have found a number of medieval toys, and Hazel Forsyth, one of the curators at the Museum of London, said, Made mainly from pewter, these medieval toys are exceptionally rare and have helped transform perceptions of childhood during the Middle Ages. These acquisitions are terribly important to the museum. Over 90% of our medieval metals collection comes from mudlarkers, and we have developed a special relationship with the Society of Thames Mudlarks over the years.

Starting point is 00:17:00 Roy Stevenson, the manager of the Archaeological Archives at the Museum of London, said, Mudlark discoveries help fill gaps in the museum's collection. That's because on land, metal objects were often melted down and reused. But if something fell in the river, it essentially vanished. And also, the anaerobic mud of the Thames has a preservative quality, and so artifacts are often found in pretty much the same condition as when they went into the river, which I guess is why Green was able to find the dove's type in such good shape.

Starting point is 00:17:28 I was just going to ask about that. So some medieval child dropped a toy accidentally into the river like hundreds of years ago, 400 years ago. Yeah. And it didn't just dissolve by them. They find stuff from the Romans. I mean, there's just, there's centuries of stuff that's just made its way into the Thames. It's like this major archaeological

Starting point is 00:17:45 dig site, basically. Yeah, that's interesting. Alex Baumans wrote about the Practical Dialogues phrasebook that we discussed in episode 169. Your item about the useful phrasebooks made me remember a bit I'd read about the phrasebook the Germans prepared in 1940 for the invasion of Britain. Apparently, it included useful phrases such as sewage works, submarine contours, and lunatic asylum. And of course, where is the next tank? I can just see a Monty Python skit with John Cleese in German uniform digging out his phrasebook and asking, where is the next tank? With a heavy German accent. I'm afraid that is all I know about it. It is just the one paragraph in Operation Sea Lion by Peter Fleming, a good read. However, there is apparently a modern English version of the guidebook, which probably includes

Starting point is 00:18:36 the phrasebook. I haven't seen this myself. Now, we were able to actually get a hold of an English version of German Invasion Plans for the British Isles, 1940, which was written by the Military High Command Department for War Maps and Communications. The modern introduction to the version we got explains what was contained in this report, which was descriptions of the different areas of the British Isles and the economy, transport systems, and communication networks. transport systems, and communication networks. The last section of the report was, as Alex noted, a collection of supposedly useful phrases which contained, as the author of the introduction says, notes on English weights and measures, a topic which seems to have confused even the compilers. The invasion plan was codenamed Operation Sea Lion, and while it was obviously fortunate for the British that it was never enacted, it might have been fortunate for the Germans, too. The book's introduction makes note of how many errors there were in the report,

Starting point is 00:19:29 which was likely compiled primarily from the libraries in Berlin and appears to have been assembled hastily based on outdated information. So, for example, in the sections of photographs of objects of military value, there was included a number of old timber railway viaducts which no longer existed, and a map of part of the Thames included a landmark of a flour mill in an area that had been gardened since at least 1890. In the surprisingly small list of words and phrases at the end of the book, it's kind of funny to see what they chose to include, as we would have to assume that they considered these to be some of the most important things to be able to say.

Starting point is 00:20:03 we would have to assume that they considered these to be some of the most important things to be able to say. So they have the clearly important words of sausage and coffee, as well as a 10-word German phrase that is translated in English as title datum. The coffee I saw didn't have lunatic asylum, as Alex had noted, but it did indeed have submarine contours. And there are little sections of Gaelic and Welsh words too. So possibly the lunatic asylums were in one of those sections. And I just couldn't read the Gaelic and the Welsh. That makes me wonder what would have happened if the invasion had actually gone on. Especially if they were looking for a flower mill that wasn't there or viaducts, you know, that weren't there anymore. There's also a section of model questions

Starting point is 00:20:43 in the phrasebook, which does indeed include where's the next tank as well as where are the barracks? But I'm not sure who the German military thought they'd be asking those of. Were they expecting the local English to know where the next tank and the barracks were, as well as to know a whole lot about submarine contours? I just found it all kind of unclear. And for those who have been thinking, gee, it's been a while since we've mentioned the hermits of the world and wondering what's up with them,

Starting point is 00:21:11 well, you're in luck because Carol Smulders has sent us an update on Stan von Otrecht, who hasn't been discussed for at least a whole 11 episodes now, not since episode 163. Carol said, Dear Sharon, Greg, and Sasha, a magazine we're subscribed to is running a series of articles on modern day hermits, and guess who's first on the list? Right the first time, Stan the Zalfeldenman. I can't provide any links this time around. It's all on paper or behind a paywall and in Dutch to boot. Got a new angle on this particular hermit,

Starting point is 00:21:42 though. I learned that in his earlier days, Stan was a soldier, an ambulance driver, a surveyor, and presumably in his spare time, a glider plane instructor. Not what you'd expect from your run-of-the-mill hermit. And being a hermit isn't what it used to be. Not only does Stan have the company of his beautiful border collie, despite the absence of electricity, he also has a laptop with internet connection and a cell phone, both depending on a solar-powered battery and thus limited in their use. During the height of the summer season, he has visitors

Starting point is 00:22:09 continuously, and he does actually descend to the village below to get provisions twice a week, so by no means does he lead a secluded life. Due to tourist attention, he was even asked to sell a local beer at his hermit's dwelling. He's almost a tourist attraction. Only when the working day fades and the village below becomes quiet does Stan really become a hermit. Though the old hermits used to be on their mountain all year round, nowadays he isn't allowed to stay during winter because of the danger of avalanches. With a winter vacation visiting his family, Stan expects to remain the hermit of Zalfeldin for years to come. Just thought I'd keep you all posted untilmit of Zalfeldin for years to come. Just thought I'd keep you all posted until the next Zalfeldin hermit report.

Starting point is 00:22:54 And I didn't realize that it was the dangers of avalanches that required the hermit to leave during the winter. I just assumed it was the cold temperatures coupled with the lack of electricity for heat. Avalanches sound even worse, though. So thanks so much to everyone who sends us email. We really appreciate hearing from you. So if you have any updates or comments for us, please send them to podcast at futility closet.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him a strange sounding situation and he has to work out the backstory of it, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Karsten Hammond. Dozens of chicks and chickens were painfully and creatively killed by a prominent Dane.

Starting point is 00:23:35 When others heard about his actions, not only were they not horrified, they praised the Dane for his ingenuity and imagination. Why? And Karsten adds, P.S. Yes, all the chickens died. No, no humans died. And no, this did not take place in outer space, which is actually a hint, I thought.

Starting point is 00:23:56 It saves me a question. That saves you a question. All right. Is it important that this person is a Dane in particular? No. It's just to say that this has really happened. It's true. It really happened, yes. Is the time period important no no it wasn't present day but it's not it's not

Starting point is 00:24:12 it's not vital when it was exactly all right so one person killed a lot of chicks and chickens what were the two words painfully and creatively killed painful toful to the chickens, right? I would assume it was. Unpleasant, at least. Did he kill them all in the same way? Yes. Was this some kind of form of artistic expression, would you say, in any way? No.

Starting point is 00:24:38 And the people who saw this didn't object? Right. They weren't horrified, and they praised the Dane for his ingenuity and imagination. Okay. So nobody was horrified by this. Were they diseased? Were the chickens diseased?

Starting point is 00:24:55 Yes. No. Was he accomplishing some greater good by dispatching the chickens? I guess you would say yes. That was his motive in doing this. He was trying to help or accomplish something that was valuable or useful. Yes. By killing chickens in a creative way. Would it help me to figure out exactly how he killed them? Not necessarily. That would be difficult. And do I need to know, would it help me to know the number of chickens? No. Or is it just like

Starting point is 00:25:19 some enormous number? I don't know the number of chickens. Okay. Are there other people involved besides this one particular Dane and the people who sort of knew about it? Nobody important for this story. Was he famous? Someone I've heard of? You might not have heard of him, but he was famous in his way at the time. All right. Why would you kill a lot of chickens to accomplish something good?

Starting point is 00:25:44 How do you even approach a problem like that? Wait. It would be more helpful to figure out what sort of endeavor, you know, what, I don't know how to phrase this. This is part of some larger effort. Yeah, I mean, in what way was he trying to create a good by horribly killing chickens?

Starting point is 00:26:03 Was this connected with medicine or science in some way? Yes. Was he vivisecting chickens? No. Was he trying to develop a new drug or treatment for a human illness, human condition? No. Was he trying to learn specifically about chickens?

Starting point is 00:26:23 Somewhat, I mean... About biology? Yeah, he was trying to learn something in the field of biology yes um okay so would you say he was studying chickens uh he was studying something in particular about chickens but he wasn't studying it only to apply it to chickens something about so would it help me to pursue that? Like something, was there something to do with reproduction or something? No, not to do with reproduction. But some process that chickens share with other creatures

Starting point is 00:26:52 and we're supposed to learn by studying the chickens. Is that fair? Right, yes, yes. But do I need to know more than that about exactly what it was? I'm not sure. It's, yeah, more like, just if you get the general gist of the whole thing, I'll give it to you because I don't think you're going to get the exact specifics.

Starting point is 00:27:12 Okay, but was he pursuing some advance in medicine then? He was hoping that the good that would come of this was some therapy or treatment that he could apply to other things. No. No, that's not correct. Was this to do with disease somehow, that he was trying to eradicate some disease of chickens or other people? No, actually. So it sounds like he was just trying to learn something? Would you say that?

Starting point is 00:27:30 Yeah. And studying something in chickens that's shared by other creatures, he just happened to be studying it in chickens? Yes. Was he opening them up when they were alive? No, he wasn't. Was he, I don't want to just go down the list, poisoning them? He was not poisoning them. Was it violent what he did?

Starting point is 00:27:51 No. But it was painful. Well, I mean, I'm not a chicken, so I don't know if the chickens felt pain, but it might not have been painful. It just was kind of a horrible way that they were dying. Was he studying death itself, the process, or was someone drowning them or something, trying to study that? No. Does he have anything with reproduction? No.

Starting point is 00:28:16 I'll give you a hint that he wasn't actually deliberately trying to have the chickens die. That wasn't his goal or something he set out to do. Okay. What I have in my head is that he's subjecting to some condition

Starting point is 00:28:34 that would harm humans and is studying its effects on chickens. But it sounds like maybe I don't have that right. That's not quite right. I mean, that's in the general ballpark, but... Like cold or something. Right. You could subject a chicken to cold and see what happens and apply what you learn.

Starting point is 00:28:49 That's a good point. But that's not what this is. That's not terribly far off, but it's not quite right. It's not the mode of death that he was interested in. Wait, and again, I said... The death was sort of an accident, a byproduct of what he was doing. Accident's a good word to keep in mind here. You'd say he accidentally killed these chickens.

Starting point is 00:29:13 I would say he accidentally killed these chickens. And could have accomplished what he set out to do without killing them. Well, what he ended up accomplishing probably only came about because the chickens were dying. But accident's an important word. You say he discovered something by accident in doing this. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Starting point is 00:29:36 That's exactly right. Okay. But we know that's nothing to do with the death or the... Yeah. He wasn't setting out. His goal was not to kill chickens. Yeah. And he wasn't studying a disease process.

Starting point is 00:29:48 I'm just trying to think what else you could be learning by accident. Right. Would you say he set out to study something else? Yes. And the chickens died as a result of that? Yes. And the deaths led to the discovery?

Starting point is 00:30:04 Yes, exactly. All right. Okay. So, but it's not a, it sounds like he's discovered a disease or something, not a disease. Not a disease, yeah. Some mechanism that was killing chickens. Yes. And that it was important because it could be implied to humans.

Starting point is 00:30:16 And in discovering that, that's what the greater good was. Yes. And I'll tell you, he had no idea the chickens were going to die. Like it was a big discovery that the chickens died. What kills chickens? It's not, it's not. It's not something common, not something you would commonly think of as a cause of killing chickens. I feel like I have most of this, but like the nut of it.

Starting point is 00:30:39 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess I have to go. It's not a disease. It's go... It's not a disease. It's not... It's not a disease. It's not something that you would normally think of. It's probably something that chickens almost never die of.

Starting point is 00:30:56 I mean, so like if you thought of all the things, you know, the 50 ways to kill a chicken, you probably wouldn't think of this normally, but... Yeah, see, I don't want to... That means I'm not likely to guess it. Would it to to to guess at how this was applied to humans like that how it was beneficial no maybe i should just give it to you because you're right it is very hard to guess um he discovered vitamin k by withholding certain uh something certain substances from chickens feeds and then they were dying from lack of vitamin K. This was Heinrich Dam,

Starting point is 00:31:27 who was a biochemist and physiologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1943 for discovering vitamin K. Vitamin K is a fat-soluble nutrient and is required for blood coagulation, or the forming of blood clots, yes. And Dam was researching cholesterol metabolism in chickens in the 1930s

Starting point is 00:31:44 and discovered if you fed chicks food that had been stripped of certain fat compounds, the chicks would develop widespread subcutaneous hemorrhages and that any physical trauma would result in continuous oozing of blood from the wound site. It was Dam's attempts to figure out why this was happening that led him to discovering what we now call vitamin K. Isn't that horrible? So they just started dying. Yeah. And he worked out why. He was just trying to study cholesterol metabolism, right? So it's like those weird things started happening to the chickens, and it was just like, whoa, what is going on here?

Starting point is 00:32:17 That's interesting. And Karsten adds, another interesting side note is that vitamin K received the letter K not because A through J were already taken, but because the initial discoveries were reported in a German journal in which the vitamin was called coagulations vitamin, all one word and starting with K. And the K just stuck. And Karsten closes with tip, do not Google image search subcutaneous hemorrhages chicken. So that's a very good tip. So thanks to Karsten for the puzzle and the useful tip. And if anyone else has any puzzles they'd like to send in for us to try,

Starting point is 00:32:51 please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's our show for today. If you like this podcast, please tell your friends about it or give it a rating in your favorite podcast app. And if you want to be more of a part of the Futility Closet community, see the Support Us page at our website, or pick up some penguin-themed swag at the store at futilitycloset.com. At the website, you'll also find the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics from the show, as well as over 9,000 concise curiosities for your browsing pleasure. If you have any questions or comments for us,

Starting point is 00:33:24 you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Greg's exceptional brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 174-Cracking the Nazi Code

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