Futility Closet - 177-Averting a Catastrophe in Manhattan

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 sandpaper records to Hemingway's punctuation. This is episode 177. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. New York's Citicorp Tower was an architectural sensation when it opened in 1977. But then engineer William LeMessur realized that its unique design left it dangerously vulnerable to high winds. In today's show,

Starting point is 00:00:38 we'll describe the drama that followed as a small group of decision makers tried to ward off a catastrophe in midtown Manhattan. We'll also cringe at an apartment mix-up and puzzle over a tolerant trooper. You'd recognize the Citigroup Center even if you don't know it by that name. In the Manhattan skyline, it's the building whose top looks like it's been cut off at a 45 degree angle. When it was built in 1977, it was called the Citicorp Tower, and it was the seventh tallest building in the world at 900 feet. The top is distinctive, but what makes the tower really remarkable is the bottom. The corners are missing. The building is square and cross-section, and each of the four bottom corners has been cut out from the ground level up to a height of about nine stories. That leaves the remaining 50 stories looking like

Starting point is 00:01:29 they're standing on stilts, which gives the effect that the whole building is somewhat floating in the air. This design was necessary because the builders had promised to avoid St. Peter's Lutheran Church, which occupies the northwestern corner of that site. The deal was that Citicorp could build on the site if the skyscraper wasn't attached to the church in any way, so the solution was to cut out these bottom corners of the office tower so that the higher floors are cantilevered out over the corners of the plaza so they don't touch the church. That decision led to a unique structural system for the skyscraper. They added an enormous bracing column 35 meters tall in the center of each face and a series of reinforcing steel braces inside the building.

Starting point is 00:02:09 The steel frame made the building much lighter than a conventional skyscraper would be. It weighed 25,000 tons, which is still a lot, but it's nothing compared to the Empire State Building, which weighs 60,000 tons. And that meant it was vulnerable to swaying in the wind, so they lifted an enormous block of concrete to the top to help destabilize it. This innovative design was worked out by the building's architect, Hugh Stubbins, and in particular by its chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier, who was an adjunct professor at Harvard and MIT and an expert on the structure of high-rise buildings. The American Society of Civil Engineers calls the building one of New York City's most distinctive skyscrapers. The triumph lasted for about a year. Then, in June 1978, after the building had been completed

Starting point is 00:02:51 and occupied, LeMessurier's firm got a call from a Princeton engineering student named Diane Hartley. She wanted more information about the design. Her professor had said that the building's supporting columns had been placed incorrectly. LeMessurier was pretty sure they hadn't, but he went over his calculations again, and he found a problem. The trouble lay in the wind. The city's building code required that a building had to be secure against what are called perpendicular winds. Those are winds that blow straight into one side of the building, say north, south, east, or west. LeMessurier was used to that, and he'd planned his design accordingly. But this building's unique design left it unusually vulnerable to what are called quartering winds, which are winds that come in at an angle, say,

Starting point is 00:03:28 from the northeast or the southwest. And it turned out to be very vulnerable indeed. LeMessurier found that a quartering wind could increase the strain on the building's structure by as much as 40%. In normal circumstances, even that wouldn't be too much cause for worry, but just a month earlier, LeMessurier had learned that during construction, a cost-saving measure had been made without his knowledge. These enormous steel braces that helped the building to withstand strong winds had been bolted together rather than welded, and that left them somewhat weaker. That meant that the building was now vulnerable to what are called 16-year winds, which are winds that arise on average once every 16 years. In this case, that meant a storm creating winds of 70 miles per hour

Starting point is 00:04:05 for five minutes, basically a hurricane. If winds like that hit this building at a 45-degree angle, the bolts would shear and the building could collapse. It's not exactly clear to me, I should say, what that would mean. LeMessurier said the building could fall down or break off in the middle and fall over. He said that his numbers indicated that sooner or later this was bound to happen. One New York Daily News reporter said that, quote, it could wipe out 18 blocks of Manhattan if a high wind came along. And a Red Cross official said that the worst case he'd heard was that the buildings would fall like dominoes as far as Central Park. I am choosing to believe that some of these descriptions are exaggerated, but it's clear enough that if a 59-story building falls down, it's bad. The Red Cross estimated that 200,000 people could die. The building had the benefit

Starting point is 00:04:51 of this giant block of concrete I mentioned, which is called a tuned mass damper. It was actually the first time this was ever used. Taking that into account would reduce the risk to a 55-year storm, but the tuned mass damper needed electricity to operate, and in a hurricane, you might well have a blackout, which would prevent that safety measure from operating. In that case, you're back at looking at 16 years again. LeMessurier said, that was very low, awesomely low. To put it another way, there was one chance in 16 in any year, including that one. Normally, engineers didn't even consider catastrophic collapse. When architects tried to keep a building from swaying, it was for the sake of the occupant's comfort, not their safety. If a building can resist perpendicular winds, it can typically resist quartering winds, too,

Starting point is 00:05:33 so LeMessurier hadn't considered those to be an unusual danger, and neither had the design engineers under him. In fact, in examining the problem, LeMessurier wrote up a 30-page document that he called Project Serene, where Serene, where Serene stood for Special Engineering Review of Events Nobody Envisioned. To make everything worse, he discovered these problems in June, the start of hurricane season. LeMessurier was 52 years old. If he announced the problem, he faced litigation, bankruptcy, and professional disgrace. He considered keeping silent, and he actually considered committing suicide, driving along the main turnpike at 100 miles an hour and steering into a bridge abutment. But in the end, he said, quote, I had information that nobody else in the

Starting point is 00:06:12 world had. I had power in my hands to affect extraordinary events that only I could initiate. I mean, 16 years to failure, that was very simple, very clear cut. I almost said, thank you, Lord, for making this problem so sharply defined that there's no choice to make. He approached another architect and then Citicorp itself. He advised them to take quick remedial action. He said they could fix the wind braces by welding two-inch thick steel braces over each of more than 200 bolted joints, providing in effect a permanent band-aid solution. Also, he said they should install electric generators to power this mass damper and install stress gauges throughout the structure to monitor its condition continuously.

Starting point is 00:06:49 Certainly, they were worried about hurricanes, but they also needed to worry about just unpredictable small storms, and they needed a plan for evacuation. They worked out a plan with the Red Cross, the mayor's office of emergency management, and the police. In the event of a wind alert, they'd evacuate the building and the surrounding neighborhood, and the Red Cross would mobilize 1,200 to 2,000 workers to provide food and temporary shelter. Everyone commended LeMessurier's courage and candor in coming forward. One project manager, Arthur Nussbaum, said, it wasn't a case of we caught you, you skunk. It started with a guy who stood up and said, I got a problem. I made the problem. Let's fix the problem. If you're going to kill a guy like LeMessurier, why should anybody ever talk? And they kept the crisis quiet. They put out a press

Starting point is 00:07:28 release, but they kept it as boring as possible, saying only that the engineers who had designed the building had recommended that some of the wind bracing be strengthened through additional welding, but that the engineers, quote, have assured us that there is no danger. They just said that they were enhancing the building's safety through an excess of caution. One Citicorp official told a reporter, We wear both belts and suspenders here. A Daily News reporter later called the public communication stone-cold lies. For the next three months working at night,

Starting point is 00:07:54 construction crews welded a two-inch steel plate on either side of each joint that had suspect bolts. The Department of Buildings fast-tracked the certification of welders to meet the demand, and they worked at night seven days a week. When the building was first designed, LeMessurier had wanted to put the steel supporting structure on the outside of the building, but the architect had rejected this. That turned out to be good because it meant that the bad joints were accessible now. The welders could work inside the building at night, and during the day, the company's business went on just as usual. At the same time, they had three different weather services giving them notices every day of any approaching weather system that had winds over 40 miles an hour.

Starting point is 00:08:27 And they maintained their silence to the general public. If reporters called, they just told them the work was only in response to new meteorological data, which indeed had come in. A few small news items showed up, but no one really paid attention. But finally, a New York Times reporter heard that something was wrong with the building and began calling LeMessurier persistently. He hesitated, but finally returned the call at 6 p.m. He got an answering machine saying that the paper had gone on strike at 6 p.m. In fact, all the newspapers in New York had gone on strike at that time, and they stayed on strike until October.

Starting point is 00:08:56 The architect, Hugh Stubbins, later said, If the newspapers hadn't been on strike, I dread to think what would have happened. It would have been pure hell, I think. But there was more trouble to come. Six weeks into the work, on September 1st, word came that a major storm, Hurricane Ella, was forming off Cape Hatteras and heading for New York. The work was only half done. LeMessurier said, nobody said we're probably going to press the panic button. Nobody dared say that, but everybody was sweating blood. City Corp worked with local officials to create a special evacuation plan for the immediate neighborhood. The welders kept reinforcing the joints, and by the time Ella approached, the

Starting point is 00:09:28 building was strong enough to withstand a 200-year storm. And as it happened, that test never came. Ella turned eastward and headed out to sea. The rest of the work went smoothly, and when it was finished, instead of a 16-year storm, the building could withstand a 700-year storm, even without the tuned mass damper, making it one of the safest structures ever built. The welding was completed in October, several weeks before most of the city's newspapers started publishing again. This project manager, Arthur Nussbaum, said, There were no bad guys. Everybody was wearing a white hat. Sometimes emergencies make people behave better. The architect, Hugh Stubbins, agreed. He said there was no blame and no recriminations. He said, We as architects didn't have to pay anything. I always thought that Citicorp behaved in a very professional and

Starting point is 00:10:07 wonderful way about that. They didn't sue anybody. It was all handled by negotiation. In the end, LeMessurier's liability insurer paid $2 million to Citicorp. Citicorp eventually turned the building into a condo and actually sold the office space to Japanese buyers at a profit. The public didn't know about any of this for almost 20 years. In 1991, a writer named Joe Morgenstern overheard a conversation about it at a dinner party and called LeMessurier, who finally told him the whole story, and Morgenstern's article, The 59-Story Crisis, appeared in The New Yorker in May 1995. Before this, engineers had generally known that costly changes had been made to the building after it had been occupied, but the full urgency of the situation in 1978, that, as someone said, the Citicorp building could fall on Bloomingdale's, had never

Starting point is 00:10:49 been revealed. When the story came out, LeMessurier came under criticism for insufficient oversight, which had led to these bolts being bolted rather than welded, for actively misleading the public about the extent of the danger during the fix, and for failing for 20 years to inform other engineers about the problem and its solution. But his alerting Citicorp to the problem is now cited in textbooks as an example of ethical behavior, and the story is now legendary among structural engineers. Incidentally, Diane Hartley, the engineering student whose phone call had started all this, only learned about the fix when she saw a BBC documentary about the repairs in 1996. She had never spoken with LeMessurier, only with a junior staffer, and apparently no one had ever called her back. As I understand the facts, if she hadn't alerted them

Starting point is 00:11:29 to the problem in the first place, the building might well have fallen, which is alarming. It was vulnerable to 16-year winds, and this was all happening 40 years ago. After the article appeared, LeMessurier said he'd heard from professionals all around the country. He said, they have written me letters confessing similar events in their lives. Others have written to me and said, would I be this good? He once told a class at Harvard, you have a social obligation. In return for getting a license and being regarded with respect, you're supposed to be self-sacrificing and look beyond the interests of yourself and your client to society as a whole. And the most wonderful part of my story is that when I did it, nothing bad happened. He died in 2007, and his obituary in the New York Times called him a hero to other

Starting point is 00:12:04 structural engineers. But there's also been a re-examination of the ethics in all this. Eugene Kramer, an architect at Kansas State University, published an analysis in 2002 that raises six key ethical points. One, wind loads. LeMessurier had designed an unconventional building and hadn't considered the effects of quartering winds until the building was occupied. He had a duty to guard against such dangers, even if the building code didn't require it. Two, LeMessurier's firm approved the use of bolted joints rather than welded ones. Without his knowledge, he found out about it only a month before Hartley had called him to warn of the danger. Three, professional responsibility.

Starting point is 00:12:38 LeMessurier had considered remaining silent and considered killing himself. He wrote later, I didn't think about it very long because if I did that, I would miss finding out how the story ended, and that might be a rather stimulating experience. He had a duty to warn the public. Four, the public statements weren't truthful. While they were working to fix the problem, the team set out deliberately to mislead the public. Kramer says that both the National Society of Professional Engineers

Starting point is 00:13:00 and the American Society of Civil Engineers have the same canon in their codes of ethics. Issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner. Speaking at MIT in 1995, LeMessurier had said, we had to cook up a line of bull, I'll tell you. And white lies at this point are entirely moral. You don't want to spread terror in the community to people who don't need to be terrorized. We were terrorized, no question about that. Just imagine how that would have sounded if the building had, if he'd stayed quiet and and the building had fallen and there was an inquiry and they found out that he'd said that to a group of students that he'd known about and they deliberately hushed it up it puts a different cast on the whole thing yeah but you can also see it the other way like if they panicked

Starting point is 00:13:36 the city yeah about it unnecessarily unnecessarily that's one of those situations where you could see you know really being censured no matter which course you take. This is the sort of thing that's really judged almost entirely in hindsight, which is not good. A reader of Civil Engineering Magazine in 1996 wrote in to say that in questions of ethics, the important question is, is it the truth and does every interested party know it? Other factors are extraneous, including keeping the good opinion of others, avoiding punishment, and rationalizing the extent of the danger. Kramer's fifth point is public safety.

Starting point is 00:14:10 Since the public was kept in the dark, they weren't able to make their own decisions and ensure their own safety. And the sixth is by concealing the problem for 20 years, LeMessurier had prevented his fellow engineers from discussing it and learning from it. If all of this isn't alarming enough, I'll close with two quotes by William LeMessurier. The first is from that 1996 BBC documentary, the one that finally showed Diane Hartley that they'd heeded her warnings. LeMessurier says, there's been a whole evolution of standards and understanding of the wind that's gone on over the last 40 years, and one wonders, I don't mean to speculate, I'm not going to pick any examples, but there might well be buildings that were built from the old days that have never yet been subjected to the wind that would knock them down, and they might go. The other is a quote from the Kramer article. In my notes next to it, I've written the words,

Starting point is 00:14:48 good lord. In his 1995 presentation to an audience of MIT engineering faculty and students, LeMessurier claimed he knew of an important 50-story building that was likely to collapse that was, quote, totally underdesigned. After declaring that he would not identify the endangered structure, he concluded with the assertion, there are a lot of them out there. Futility Closet is supported primarily by our incredible listeners. We just wouldn't be able to commit to the amount of time that the show takes to make if it weren't for the donations and pledges we get. If you'd like to contribute to the celebration of the quirky and the curious that is Futility Closet,

Starting point is 00:15:33 you can find a donate button in the supporters section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or if you'd like to join our Patreon campaign, you'll get access to our activity feed, where you'll get extra discussions on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, and learn what's going on behind the scenes of the show, as well as what Sasha, our hardworking show mascot, has been doing lately. You can check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the link at the website. Thanks again to everyone who is a part of Futility Closet. again to everyone who is a part of Futility Closet. Last week, I covered several updates from episode 171 and promised a couple more. Eric Cohen wrote about the complicated system of Roman timekeeping that I had discussed. I'm just now listening to podcast number 171,

Starting point is 00:16:21 which includes your description of the difficult way in which the ancient Romans calculated their hours, while some people nowadays still do. Jewish law includes many time-dependent obligations, what counts as morning for morning prayers, for instance, or as afternoon for afternoon prayers. The hours used to calculate these times are, just as you described for the Romans, the amount of daylight in that place on that particular day divided by 12. Good luck with that, which is why Orthodox synagogues print the required time limits in each week's synagogue bulletin, and there are online calculators as well. This system is described in the Talmud, codified circa 200 to 500 CE, so where both the Romans and the rabbis got this system would be an interesting question, which I'm sure someone has researched. Yours with, again, thanks for the great podcast. And looking into this a bit, I discovered that just like Eric says, the Jewish system of calculating hours is similar to the Roman one, with 12 hours assigned to each the day and the night all through the year, regardless of the number of hours of daylight, meaning that the length of an hour changes throughout the year.

Starting point is 00:17:24 regardless of the number of hours of daylight, meaning that the length of an hour changes throughout the year. Traditionally, in this Jewish system, the first hour began with the break of dawn, noon, or when the sun was at its zenith, was considered to be the sixth hour, and the first hour of night began when the first three medium-sized stars could be seen in the sky. So there would always be 12 hours of variable length between the break of dawn and the appearance of the first three medium-sized stars. I don't know why both the rabbis and the Romans chose this idea of 12 hours in a day and night, unless it has something to do with the significance of 12 for various measuring systems, like we discussed in the last episode. As for the rest of the Jewish system, it seems to be based on carefully defining various times, relying on characteristics of the sun or other heavenly

Starting point is 00:18:05 objects, as I guess that would have been really all they had to work with. So dawn was defined as the time when the light of the sun first starts to be noticeable on the eastern horizon. Other times of the day were defined by things such as when the top edge of the sun becomes visible at sea level, or when there is just enough light that you can recognize a casual acquaintance from a distance of four cubits. Given the lack of other forms of measuring devices, I guess you can see why they would need to resort to these sorts of definitions. And as Eric said, these distinctions were important because several observances of Jewish laws and rituals are supposed to be performed at specific times of the day. But still, I imagine that it would be a little unwieldy to try to determine just when you'd be able to recognize this person versus that person from a specific

Starting point is 00:18:49 distance. And it seems to me that some people are much more recognizable at a distance than other people would be. Plus, what do you do when it's cloudy? I'm sure there must have been answers worked out to these questions, and I just didn't see them in my reading on the topic. out to these questions, and I just didn't see them in my reading on the topic. Unlike many other systems, in the Jewish timekeeping system, a day actually goes from nightfall to nightfall. So the problem there is that the exact moment when night falls and one day ends and the next begins is a bit uncertain. There's a kind of iffy period between sunset and the appearance of the first three stars, which is considered neither day nor night. Sabbath and all holidays are considered to begin at sunset, the earliest possible definition of night, and to end when three stars appear in the sky the next evening, the latest definition.

Starting point is 00:19:34 If certain events occur in the in-between period, such as the birth of a boy or someone's death, then a rabbi has to be consulted to determine which day the event is considered to have occurred on, so that you can then determine the correct day for scheduling the baby's circumcision or for observing the anniversary of the death. I don't—the more you talk about this, the more I wonder how the Romans just coordinated anything. Like, today, if I tell you, let's meet at 1030, you know what that means, and we'll both be there at 1030. But in those times, it sounds like the closest you could get is just,

Starting point is 00:20:03 let's meet tomorrow morning in the afternoon, or at midday. Yeah, I don't imagine they would have used phrases such as 1030, that wouldn't have really existed. No, but like if you wanted to just wait some time to meet someone for any reason in the city or anywhere in the empire, I think we talked about this

Starting point is 00:20:19 way back in talking about railway time, it's a fairly recent invention that time was measured that precisely that you could actually coordinate your activities with any specificity. How would you coordinate with people? But they administered this whole big empire. They must have had to do that. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:20:33 It kind of interests me. Well, I'm just, I like the Jewish way. It's like, well, we'll meet when the light is just strong enough that you could recognize a casual acquaintance at fewer cubits. On a completely different topic from

Starting point is 00:20:47 episode 171, Toby Wardman wrote, Hello, Futility Closet team. Thinking about the extended discussion of finger counting in episode 171 and how impressive it sounds that there are methods which allow you to count to 100 or 1000, it occurred to me that, of course, there is a family of languages

Starting point is 00:21:03 that allows counting infinitely high using just fingers, or hands I suppose, strictly speaking, sign languages. Different sign languages use different techniques, but as a student of British Sign Language, BSL, I was taught a method of counting and signaling numbers which used only one hand. Basically, you count from 1 to 5 in one direction along the fingers by raising a digit for each, then from 6 to 9 in the other direction, again raising a digit for each. 10 to 19 have special signs, which are basically 1 to 9 again, but with some movement, and then 20 upwards work by displaying the digits of the base 10 number in quick succession. So to count, for example, 63, you would flash 6 and then 3.

Starting point is 00:21:40 There are special signs for the milestone numbers 100,000 and so on. I suppose this idea of adding a time and sequence dimension to finger counting might be considered cheating, but it does obviously enable counting to arbitrarily high numbers. It is actually much faster to sign something like 1-2-8-4-6-1-5 than it is to say 1,284,615 out loud in English. That makes sense. And Toby says that he doesn't actually have a hearing impairment, but that he uses BSL finger counting as an amateur orchestral percussionist

Starting point is 00:22:10 when he needs to count measures to know when to hit his drum or cymbal at the right moment. He said, accuracy is obviously very important here, and my old method of whispering numbers to myself under my breath was very susceptible to errors. But now that I know BSL and can count out rests mechanically on one hand out of sight of the audience, my chances of hitting the big drum at the wrong time have been substantially reduced. Since I tend to save up five or six episodes and then binge on long journeys, it's possible that someone else may have already made this point about sign languages, in which case you can imagine that I am just writing to say, keep up the excellent work on the podcast and thanks for all the work you do. In episode 172, I read an email from Simon Grimes and his kitty,

Starting point is 00:22:52 Boris the Burmese, about how on a BBC radio show someone correctly guessed the subject of washing up after only two questions. Stuart Armstrong wrote, I didn't find the example of getting washing up in two questions, but there's one example of getting the right answer in zero questions. And Stuart included a link to a Wikipedia article on the old parlor game 20 questions, which was made into a radio show in the U.S. in 1946. Panelists had to guess subjects by asking no more than 20 yes or no questions. And according to the article, listeners sent in subjects for the panelists to guess subjects by asking no more than 20 yes or no questions. And according to the article,

Starting point is 00:23:25 listeners sent in subjects for the panelists to guess, with Winston Churchill's cigar being the subject most frequently submitted. So make of that what you will. The show was created by Fred Van Deventer, and apparently the Van Deventer family had played the game at home for years and were so good at it that they could usually guess the answer after only six or seven questions. But their 14-year-old son, Robert, who was known on the show as Bobby Maguire, on one occasion, as Stewart said, managed to get the correct answer without asking any questions at all. The New York studio audience cheered wildly when they were shown the answer in advance, so Maguire was able to correctly guess that the subject was Brooklyn, as he knew that Brooklynites tended to react that way

Starting point is 00:24:05 whenever their borough was brought up in any context. So pretty good lateral thinking on his part. So they just started cheering and he said, Right, right, right. They were shown a card that said Brooklyn, and he heard them cheering for no reason and thought, okay, that's got to be Brooklyn. And spoiler alert for a puzzle here, but speaking of Brooklyn,

Starting point is 00:24:23 the puzzle in episode 172 was about neighbors in a Brooklyn apartment building changing their locks after realizing they had the same key. Ishu wrote, hello, futila trio. As soon as I heard Sharon mention that they were in an apartment building, I knew exactly what the answer would be. I used to live in Manhattan and struck up a conversation with a guy many years ago who was excited to tell me about his first day in New York City, which involved being in handcuffs. He was visiting from out of town and his sister Katie said that he could use her apartment while she was away. She mailed him her key and he remembered the apartment number as 3A. When he got there, there was already a girl in the apartment, so he assumed that his sister had a roommate she forgot to mention. He told her he

Starting point is 00:25:02 was Katie's brother and was staying for a few days, and while she expressed that she didn't hear about it from her roommate, neither of them gave it much thought. He proceeded to take a nap on the couch, but was then awoken to police coming into the apartment to place him under arrest. arrive, to which her roommate Katie responded, in classic horror movie style, I don't have a brother. That is creepy. Yeah. Naturally, she freaked out and called the cops. It turned out that he had remembered the apartment number incorrectly, as his sister lived in 3C, but the key worked for both apartments. Also, Katie was a rather common name that the other girl just happened to also have. After he explained his story, the police were very quickly able to verify that the key he had did in fact work on the apartment down the hall, which luckily for him had a photo of him and his sister somewhere in the apartment. I don't think they found out exactly how many apartments in that building had the same key, but I think they both changed their locks pretty soon afterwards. Needless to say, he felt terrible about the stress placed on the residents of 3A, so he slipped a gift card under the door, but he could still see its shadow a few days later, so he thinks they probably went off to stay with friends or boyfriends for the next week.

Starting point is 00:26:08 I don't blame them. Having lived in New York, it didn't surprise me one bit that this puzzle was set in Brooklyn. I'm just glad that none of my neighbors in any of the apartments I've lived in have ever tried to enter my apartment that I know of, either on purpose or accidentally. As always, thanks for your great work. And we've lived in several apartment buildings, not in New York City, but still, it never occurred to me to try our key on anybody else's door. Yeah, maybe you wouldn't know, right? Right, for all we would know, right, we had the same key as someone else. And lastly, I have a quick update from episode 174, where I read an email from Tobias, who wrote in about the Doves Press story from

Starting point is 00:26:45 episode 168. He mentioned a documentary on the Johnston and Gil Sands type from the BBC called Two Types, the Faces of Britain, but noted that it wasn't currently available. Andrew Thomas and Ralph Green both wrote in to let us know that the documentary is currently available on YouTube. And of course, we'll have a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to see it. So thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate hearing from you. So if you have any updates or comments for us, 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 situation, and I have to try to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Kelly Bruce.

Starting point is 00:27:31 Okay. A man is traveling in a car at 95 miles per hour and is recorded on a state trooper's radar gun. Before the man stops, he crosses the state line and is then clocked by another state trooper, still going faster than the speed limit posted on the road. The man then crosses back to the first state and gets out of the car where he is met by the first officer who gives him a high five. What's going on? Okay. Was the man a police officer himself? No. Did he have some other occupation that's germane here?

Starting point is 00:28:02 It's not important. It's not important what his occupation was. Was he testing a car? No. Okay. All right. Okay. Is the time period important?

Starting point is 00:28:13 Not really. Is the specific location important? Yes. Ah. And you said a state. Do you mean one of the United States? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:28:21 And I have to guess which one? No, you don't need to do that. Oh, but I need to know what part of the country? No. Okay. And I have to guess which one? No, you don't need to do that. Oh, but I need to know like what part of the country? No. No. Oh, something else about the location, like whether it's mountains or something like that about the location? You said something about the location was important. I'm trying to figure out what part about the location. It's important that he crosses a state line, but I guess... Oh, oh, oh, I see. But it doesn't matter which state and which state line. Yeah, you don't...

Starting point is 00:28:45 I mean, you could work that out, but you don't have to have that. It's important that he crosses a state line. His occupation is not important. Was the specific car important? Yes. Ah. Okay. Was this a full-size car that I would think of like a car?

Starting point is 00:29:01 No. No. Ah. Smaller than a regular car? not sure what direction to go in oh like a little model car would it be okay would it be something that i could easily pick up no that small no bigger than that did it have a person inside it yes he the driver the man that you said was driving the car was he inside the car while the car was going 95 miles an hour? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:27 And this was on the earth. You said it's in the United States, right? Yes, that's right. But it's smaller than a normal car. That's right. Okay. Was this something other than what we would call an automobile? Yes.

Starting point is 00:29:41 Ah, something else that you would call a car. You would call it a car. Oh. Oh. Was it like on a roller coaster? Is there some roller coaster that goes over state lines? Yes. Where do you get that?

Starting point is 00:29:53 I don't know. I was trying to think of what you'd call a car that goes really fast. That's it. The Carowinds Amusement Park straddles the border between North and South Carolina, and riders of its Fury 325 roller coaster pass from one state to the other as they cross over the entrance plaza. Kelly writes, this is probably too easy as it is in your backyard, but for a Kansas boy, I thought it was good. I hadn't heard of it, so it wasn't too easy, apparently. Thank you, Kelly, for sending that in. Yes, thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they would like to send in for us to try,

Starting point is 00:30:21 you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's our show for today. This podcast would not still be here if it weren't for the generous support of our listeners. If you'd like to join them in supporting the show, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. While you're at the site you can also graze through greg's collection of over 9 000 concise curiosities browse the futility closet store learn about the futility closet books or see the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered if you have any questions or comments you can email any of us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and

Starting point is 00:31:06 performed by the exceptional Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 177-Averting a Catastrophe in Manhattan

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