Futility Closet - 182-The Compulsive Wanderer

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 10,000 quirky curiosities from a puzzling tombstone to a Pythagorean tree. This is episode 182. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In the 1870s, French gas fitter Albert Dada started making strange, compulsive trips to distant towns with no planning or awareness of what he was doing. His bizarre affliction set off a 20-year epidemic of mad travelers in Europe,

Starting point is 00:00:40 which evaporated as mysteriously as it had begun. In today's show, we'll consider the parable of pathological tourism and its meaning for psychiatry. We'll also contemplate the importance of sick chickens and puzzle over a farmyard contraption. One morning in July 1886, a 26-year-old patient was found crying in his bed in the Saint-André Hospital in Bordeaux, France. He had just returned from a long journey on foot, which had left him exhausted, but that's not why he was crying. He was crying because he knew that he would do this again. In the words of Philippe Attissier, his doctor, he wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when the need took him. He deserted family, work, and daily life to walk as fast as he could,

Starting point is 00:01:23 straight ahead, sometimes doing 70 kilometers a day on foot, until in the end he would be arrested for vagrancy and thrown in prison. The man's name was Jean-Albert Dada. He was a gas fitter by trade, but he was seldom able to hold down a job. At the age of 12, when he was an apprentice to a manufacturer of gas equipment in Bordeaux, one day he just left town abruptly. The neighbors watched him pace up and down for a long time in front of his door, and finally he'd set out in the direction of Arcachon. The neighbors told his father, and his brother set out and eventually found him at La Teste, where he was working for

Starting point is 00:01:52 a traveling umbrella salesman, of all people, traveling on his route. His brother tapped him on the shoulder and said, what on earth are you doing? And he came to with a shock. He later said, I was astonished to learn that I had been apprenticed to a traveling salesman. His brother took him home, but this was just the beginning of an exhausting and chaotic existence. A month later, his family was discussing an inheritance that his father had come into Edvalance d'Ajon, and Albert suddenly found himself in that town without knowing how he'd got there. A friend of the family sent him home to Bordeaux. One day, his employer sent him to get some coke for the gas company. Albert later told his doctors, the next day I was astonished to find myself on the train and to hear the announcement tour. When they asked him for his ticket, he found that he had one and saw that it was for Paris.

Starting point is 00:02:33 He couldn't remember whether he had any money or what happened after this. He said, whatever transpired, I was found one night lying on a bench at the Orléans station in Paris. When he couldn't explain how he'd got there, the authorities sent him to the police who held him while they contacted his family in Bordeaux, and then they gave him a travel warrant to return on foot. To pay his way during the journey, he worked as an agricultural laborer and a house servant. This kept happening. Albert seemed to be the victim of a bizarre malady. He would overhear the name of a place and feel compelled to go there. Then at some point, he'd wake up and feel astonished at where he found himself, often penniless and sometimes arrested by the authorities. Then he'd have to find odd jobs and struggle to get home. It got almost comical. At one point he heard someone speak of Marseille

Starting point is 00:03:13 and he set out at once to go there. In Marseille he heard people mention Africa, so he took a ship for Algeria, working as a kitchen boy in the ship in exchange for food. Once he was in Algeria, he had all kinds of desperate adventures until someone kindly suggested that he go home, and that seemed to break the spell. He scraped together some money and begged the ship's captain to take him back to France. He spent the journey scrubbing pots in the galley. He arrived at harvest time and went to work as a transient laborer, but he was arrested again because he had no papers and had to do a month's forced labor. He returned to Bordeaux to find that his mother had died, and he went back to work at the gas factory. labor. He returned to Bordeaux to find that his mother had died, and he went back to work at the gas factory. His longest trips began in April 1878, when he enrolled in the 127th Infantry

Starting point is 00:03:50 Regiment at Valenciennes. He served as a cook, but then he and a friend of his deserted the army and just wandered together through Belgium and Holland, living by begging. They headed for Amsterdam, hoping to embark for the East Indies, but this was the middle of the severe winter of 1879, and they lacked bread, shoes, and clothing. Baptiste, his friend, was exhausted and was finally admitted to a hospital in Maastricht where he died. Other doctors tried later, much later, to keep up with Albert on his trips and found that he just walked at an incredible rate and just wore people out. Albert said, this death saddened me a lot. Moreover, because I did not have a cent and could not find work, the Dutch police sent me to the Belgian frontier.

Starting point is 00:04:27 After a term in prison, he went to Vienna by way of Linz, rowing down the Danube on a raft. In Vienna, he got work at a gas factory, and then he heard of a general amnesty for French deserters and went home. There are maps of Europe with dotted lines all over them showing everywhere he had traveled, and most of this was on foot. Eventually, he took off again and wandered east through Prague and Berlin to Moscow, I think that's as far as he'd gotten east, where he arrived shortly after the

Starting point is 00:04:51 Tsar's assassination in 1881. When the authorities asked, why are you in Moscow? He said, I'm embarrassed to tell you. Here is how it goes. I have terrible headaches. I become upset. I feel a great need to walk and I leave. I always go straight ahead and when I come to myself, I am far away. The proof of this is that a few months ago, I was in Valenci walk and I leave. I always go straight ahead and when I come to myself, I am far away. The proof of this is that a few months ago, I was in Valenciennes and I am now here. The police mistook him for a nihilist they were looking for, unfortunately, and he spent three months in prison there. And afterward, he was marched with other prisoners to the Turkish border and told that if they returned to Russia, they'd send him to Siberia.

Starting point is 00:05:21 After more long weeks of walking and begging, he reached Constantinople, where the French consul gave him a train ticket to Vienna, and he finally returned to France and turned himself into his regiment on September 21, 1880. They sentenced him to three years hard labor for desertion. When he finally got back to Bordeaux and reunited with his family, he seemed to be ready to settle down, finally, to a normal life. He went back to work for the gas company, he met a young woman, they got engaged, they set a marriage date, but then he disappeared again on June 18, 1885. He turned up in Verdun in early September with no memory of how he'd arrived there and no memory of what he'd been doing since June.

Starting point is 00:05:54 When he got home, his girlfriend told him never to speak to her again, understandably, and on January 17, he entered the hospital of Saint-André. There he fell under the care of Philippe Tissier, a young physician who would document his case in his dissertation. Tissier found that Albert didn't even know how old he was. He guessed 29. He was really 26. He actually couldn't recall all his travels directly. Much of his story was obtained under suggestion and hypnosis. That raises obvious questions about its reliability, but many of the doctors who examined him had been well-trained in detecting malingerers. One of them says they corroborated his story by writing to French consuls abroad and by means of what they called indubitable external proofs. For example, TCA

Starting point is 00:06:33 invited Albert to meet a friend of his who had lived in Friedrichsdorf at the time when Albert claimed to have passed through that town. Albert told him that he'd entered the town by a shortcut coming from Hamburg. He said that a cross stood in the center of the village and that there was a cafe that faced the main street. He said, I went to knock at the door of a boarding school where I was admitted and where I was given food. It was a brunette aged about 30 who opened the door and had me fed. She wore a hairpin in the shape of a sword. Tissier's friend, who knew the town, confirmed all of that. Tissier was at a loss to explain Albert's illness, which seemed to amount to a madness for traveling. He would often forget the details of his own life. He'd forgotten his own age,

Starting point is 00:07:09 as I said. He forgot the fact that he'd been expelled from Moscow, and at one point he'd been attacked by a dog and spent two weeks in the hospital. He didn't remember that either. But TCA said he always remembers the fine landscapes he has seen and the monuments that he's admired. He's like a caricature of a tourist, I suppose. Here's how Tissier described the typical course of an attack. Albert experiences, he tells us, an irresistible impulse to walk two or three days before the attack that forces him to leave. His character changes. He becomes more morose and taciturn. He experiences a violent headache accompanied by profuse sweating. He has a ringing in the ear, dizzy spells, and a nervous trembling that forces him to walk. He becomes absent-minded. For example, he holds out a knife instead of a glass when he is served drink. Finally, without

Starting point is 00:07:49 being able to reason through the deed, he leaves on the spur of the moment, but not without gulping down great quantities of water and then two or three glasses of barley water or any soft drink, whatever, that is served to him at the first bar he comes across. Once he was walking, Albert no longer knew what he was doing. He didn't know if it was raining. He didn't remember whether he'd eaten or drunk. He said he didn't feel alive. At one point when he was idle in the hospital because there was no gas work, Albert asked another patient whether he'd like to visit a nearby town because there was work there. The other patient turned him down, but at midnight he heard Albert reciting the route he would take to travel there. In his sleep, he was once discovered moving his legs as if he were pedaling or walking. At one point, he hallucinated that he'd traveled to Liège.

Starting point is 00:08:27 He'd walk in a lively way throughout the hospital, saying it calmed him down. When they asked, why do you walk so much? He said, I have a terrible headache. I would be more at ease on the open road where I can walk freely. Occasionally, they'd actually agree to let him walk to some nearby town, come back, and he'd be overjoyed at being allowed to do that. All of this is strange enough, but it's only the center of a larger phenomenon. Tissier wrote his doctoral dissertation about this case, which he published in 1887, and this was followed by a little epidemic of mad travelers that spread to Paris,

Starting point is 00:08:53 then through all of France, Italy, and later Germany and Russia. In Germany, it was called Wundertrieb. The Italians called it determinismo ambulatorio. Albert's strange condition had become a recognized medical disorder. Italian doctors started diagnosing it in 1889, and it reached Germany in 1898. But just as strangely, after 20 years, the epidemic subsided, and today no one displays a sort of compulsive tourism that basically ruined Albert Dada's life. One of the people who's tried to make sense of all this is a Canadian philosopher of science named Ian Hacking. He refers to Albert's condition as a transient mental illness, meaning one that exists only in a certain time and place.

Starting point is 00:09:27 That can seem like an odd idea. If you think of mental illness as basically a disorder of the brain, then you'd expect it to appear everywhere, not breaking out and spreading like an epidemic, as this one did. What Hacking says, or what I take him to say, is that the patients who were diagnosed with this traveling madness all did have real conditions. They had head injuries, for example, or temporal lobe epilepsy, but they were grouped together mistakenly and misdiagnosed with this new condition because the society they were living in was conducive to it. Hacking identifies four factors, what he calls vectors. The first is just medical. Albert's condition found a place in the existing medical taxonomy, so it made sense to them. The second is cultural polarity. This was

Starting point is 00:10:01 an age of tourism for the masses in France. Tissier himself was a cycling enthusiast. And at the same time, there was an anxiety over vagrants. So the idea of a strange compulsion for travel tapped into contemporary enthusiasms and concerns. Albert's condition seemed less out of place in this culture than it might have elsewhere. The third vector is observability. This is an interesting one. The French bureaucracy made people's movements traceable. You had to present papers to travel from one part of the country to another. so a person whose movements were erratic, like Albert, would be unusually conspicuous. That wasn't the case in the United States, for example, so if people were wandering around erratically there, no one would really notice it, and in fact, no cases of Albert's disorder were recorded there.

Starting point is 00:10:37 Similarly, France had enforced military conscription at the time, and deserters would be detected. There, too, this meant that generally people who were traveling afield, so to speak, would be more conspicuous and a diagnosis that would explain that would seem reasonable. Is that why maybe this didn't spread to the U.S.? Yes. Because maybe people were doing it and nobody even knew. Yeah, and it shows the boundaries of this epidemic.

Starting point is 00:10:59 I'm not quite sure what to call it because other countries, even one's neighboring France, didn't have a culture that was quite as conducive to it, which makes some sense. The fourth vector is what Hacking calls release. The typical patient who was diagnosed with a traveling madness was a member of the working poor. He was urban or had a trade like a shopkeeper, which meant he couldn't easily travel or get time off work. So this illness had a function within the society. It offered a way for working class males to escape a life of dull monotony. Also, some young men who had deserted the military faced cruel punishment, and if they were understood to have this madness, then they served a function like. Yeah. Hacking uses the metaphor of an ecological niche.

Starting point is 00:11:41 An illness like pathological tourism shows up when the social and cultural surroundings are hospitable to it, and it sticks around only for that length of time. But the fact that it required a niche to survive and didn't appear everywhere suggests that maybe it's just a mistake. When TCA published his dissertation, he'd made the illness visible and gave it respectability, and other practitioners started to look for cases of this interesting new ailment and debated how it fit into their medical taxonomy as if it were a real thing. It took on a life of its own, at least for a short time. In truth, Albert Dada had fallen out of a tree when he was eight years old and had got a concussion. It's possible that that head injury accounted for all his symptoms, but once he was diagnosed with the traveling madness, the diagnosis itself started to affect his behavior, and this

Starting point is 00:12:22 sort of feedback loop sets up where he's been given an expectation of what's really happening. He starts to start to conform to that understanding. It's very hard to understand from this historical remove. That raises another phenomenon that Hacken calls indifference. If I see a bird in our yard and dream up some scientific theory about it, the bird doesn't know or care that I've done that. It doesn't change its behavior or its perception of its place in the world. But that's not true of humans. If I tell you, I think you have a hitherto unrecognized mental illness, that will affect your idea of yourself, your place in the world, and your behavior. As your doctor, I'll view your behavior in light

Starting point is 00:12:56 of my diagnosis. So between us, we build up this shared understanding of what's happening, even if I'm wrong. I'll tell my colleagues I've discovered this interesting new illness, and they might start seeing it in their own patients. My colleagues in Italy might read about my discovery and ask themselves, why don't we see that here and start looking for cases in Italy? All of this is built on sand. There's nothing really there, but it takes a while to realize that, especially if the illness is at home in the society. It fits in with the culture. It's observable somehow, and it might even serve some useful function. So you could convince somebody that they had this, maybe somebody takes off and wanders on one trip, and a doctor says, oh, you have this traveling madness that

Starting point is 00:13:30 you're going to keep doing this. And then they have that expectation. You plant the idea in their head that they're going to keep doing it. And eventually you'll figure out that you're just mistaken, but it takes time. In the case of the mad travelers in France, we don't have access to their consciousness, so there's no way of being sure what was really going on. Again, this doesn't mean that anyone was deliberately faking or shaming. This can happen even if everyone involved has the best earnest intentions, but it could simply be that Albert's case was a mistaken diagnosis created and created a phantom disorder that spread through the culture because it found a home there. Social factors can also explain

Starting point is 00:14:00 how the diagnosis spread to other countries. One factor was just competitiveness within the medical profession. One country didn't want to seem to fall behind another in its acuity in finding cases. For example, the Germans might say, we must not fall behind the French, but there was not always an ecological niche in which the illness could thrive. This was apparently the case in Germany, for example, and so fewer cases were discovered there. Because there was really no underlying disorder, the Vogue peaked after 20 years and the phantom diagnosis just started to fall apart as people tried to study it, especially at the French Psychiatric Conference in Nantes in 1909. Academics started to analyze it closely and broke it into six or

Starting point is 00:14:32 seven different forms to be studied by different specialties. They wanted to know, for example, was it a branch of epilepsy or hysteria? Should it be treated with hypnosis? And eventually they just studied it to death. It came apart in their hands because there was really nothing there. That's heartening because it shows that science will correct itself over time, but it did nothing for poor Albert, the gas fitter who had started all of this. He married eventually in July 1887 and had a daughter, and the family settled in Paris. His wife died of tuberculosis, and the daughter was adopted by a family of market gardeners. He visited them regularly, but continued to go on his compulsive journeys. He finally died in November 1907,

Starting point is 00:15:05 apparently without ever really understanding what had been happening to him or why. So really the tragedy is that he never got the help that he needed and might have had, but at least he can serve as a warning so that we can try to prevent it happening again. Tony Hart wrote in about the puzzle in episode 174, spoiler alert, about how vitamin K was accidentally discovered when chickens were fed an altered diet. Hi, Sharon, Greg, and Sasha. While listening to the lateral thinking section of your podcast, I assumed you were referring to the discovery of vitamin B1, thiamine. I had read about this decades ago and knew the gist of the story. Basically, chickens fed a diet of processed white rice developed symptoms of beriberi. These were reversed by feeding them unprocessed brown rice.

Starting point is 00:16:00 Looking this up on Wikipedia revealed more details. The scientist involved, Christian Eijkman, was Dutch rather than Danish. Like the discoverer of vitamin K, he also won a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1929. And I had mentioned previously on the show that guinea pigs were important in the early research on vitamin C, but I honestly had no idea how important chickens had been in the discovery of different vitamins. Berry berry is a serious disease that causes cardiac and neurological damage and eventually death in many patients. In the 1880s, the disease was quite prevalent in Southeast Asia, and Dutch scientists trying to find the cause of it in their colonies were focused on bacteria after the tuberculosis bacterium had been discovered

Starting point is 00:16:46 in 1882. So they tried infecting different animals by injecting them with blood and urine from animals who had beriberi. What they found was that some of the animals never got sick, but chickens at a research institute in Indonesia were developing beriberi. The problem was that all of them were getting it, not just the ones that had been injected. Eichmann, who was running the experiment, figured that the injected chickens had infected the others, so he brought in new chickens and kept them apart from each other. Only they still all got sick, and then, inexplicably, all the chickens got well. Eichmann discovered that the chickens had been eating cooked white rice during the period when they all became ill,

Starting point is 00:17:26 and after being switched to uncooked brown rice, they had all recovered. It took him a number of trials to determine that it was definitely the polished white rice that caused the disease and the brown unpolished rice that could cure it, and to rule out other factors like toxins in the water that the rice was being cooked in. It's obvious in retrospect now that we know that unpolished brown rice contains vitamins that are lost when you process it into white rice, but when you don't know what you're looking for and vitamins aren't even a known concept yet, then it's a little harder to see the answer.

Starting point is 00:17:57 Even after establishing such a clear link between diet and beriberi in both chickens and then humans, Eichmann still thought that the disease was the result of a pathogen and that there must be something in the brown rice husks that was protective, and he called this unknown ingredient the anti-beriberi factor. It wasn't until several years later in 1901 that another Dutch scientist, Gerrit Rins, articulated clearly that the disease was caused by the absence of some critical substance found in the husks of brown rice. Eichmann didn't come around to agreeing with that view until 1906, the same year that the British biochemist Frederick Hopkins started demonstrating that

Starting point is 00:18:36 foods must contain some necessary components in addition to the proteins, carbohydrates, minerals, salt, and fat that had previously been known about. In 1912, the Polish chemist Kazimierz Funk thought that he had finally found Eichmann's anti-Berry-Berry factor, which Funk named Vitamine, a combination of vital and amine. This name later came to stand for all vitamins, with the original final E dropped. Funk hadn't actually found the right component, as he had discovered vitamin B3, or niacin, which is an important vitamin, but not related to beriberi. So it wasn't all the way until 1926 that thiamin, or vitamin B1, was finally isolated, and 1936 when it was finally able to be synthesized. Eichmann and Hopkins shared the Nobel Prize for their discovery

Starting point is 00:19:24 of vitamins, although there are some who feel that Krinz's contribution was unfairly overlooked, as he was on the right track when Eichmann was still focusing on bacteria. According to an article in World Neurology Online, although Krinz's work was overshadowed by that of Christian Eichmann, Krinz developed a new pathophysiological concept, dietary deficiency of a micronutrient causing neurological disease, while Eijkman recognized a role of dietary factors but never fully moved beyond increasingly improbable bacteriological mechanisms. Unfortunately, Hrins' work had been published in Dutch and wasn't widely recognized at the

Starting point is 00:20:02 time. It did gain a wider recognition after it was finally translated into English in 1935, but that was six years after Eijkman and Hopkins had won the Nobel Prize. This whole story ended up teaching me two things. One, don't overlook the importance of chickens. And two, the people who end up winning the Nobel Prize might not have made their significant contributions without the crucial work of several others in their field. In a way, it seems a little unfair to single out one or two people when there are actually several people who contributed important elements to a new discovery.

Starting point is 00:20:35 Yeah, or a whole lineage of people who made small contributions that made it possible. Yeah, and then you just pick one or two of those and say, okay, we're going to count him or her as the important one. Yeah. It's also striking how simple it is now. You can tell a school child these things called vitamins that are nutrients that everyone needs to have. The actual idea there is quite simple, but actually discovering it and proving it took so much effort and imagination. It really did.

Starting point is 00:20:58 And, I mean, it seemed like before I read this whole story, it didn't even occur to me that there was a time when people didn't know if there were vitamins. Like that they had to actually figure that concept out. It's also hard won, you know. Yeah. Tony also sent a follow-up to episode 176 about the bear who inspired Winnie the Pooh. about the bear who inspired Winnie the Pooh. Following your episode on Winnie the Bear, I thought you might be interested in how White River, Ontario commemorates its most famous resident. Almost 25 years ago, my family took a road trip from Ontario to Manitoba to attend a wedding. One of our stops along the Trans-Canada Highway was in White River, where there is a

Starting point is 00:21:40 children's playground and a large painted statue of Winnie the Pooh sitting in a tree with his red shirt and pot of honey. My two kids were very young at the time and fans of the New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh television series. Seeing the statue of one of their favorite characters was a big thrill for them. And on this topic, Dan McIntyre said, Greetings, Futility Closet Pod Trio. And I like that. We're the pod trio. After listening to episode 176 about Winnie the Bear Cub, I decided I should share some pictures from my past vacations,

Starting point is 00:22:12 which for about a decade involved purchasing a Greyhound Unlimited Ride Discovery Pass and exploring North America aboard their buses. Now, anyone who travels between Western and Eastern Canada on a Greyhound can expect a 26-hour trip on the Trans-Canada Highway between Winnipeg and Sudbury. Okay, that's not at all a selling point of the journey. But in summer, there's some great views of Lake Superior and Huron along the way. And Dan explained that one of the meal stops of the bus trip is 100 meters away from the Winnie the Pooh Monument in White River. And he included some photos that we'll have in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:22:42 from the Winnie the Pooh monument in White River, and he included some photos that we'll have in the show notes. Dan ends with, I hope that you enjoy them and that Sasha mascot bombs an upcoming podcast. I miss hearing what she has to say. Daryl Francis wrote, Hi, Greg and Sharon. A few years ago, my mom gave me a German translation of Winnie the Pooh as a way of practicing the language.

Starting point is 00:23:03 I was amused when Christopher Robin explained how Winnie the Pooh is a boy's name. Don't you know what the means? This statement actually makes some sense in German. In the translation, Winnie the Pooh becomes Winnie Dare Pooh, as dare is the definite article for masculine words. Using dare could imply that Winnie is a boy, as Christopher Robin suggests. However, this left me perplexed as to how Winnie the Pooh's name was originally explained, as the statement doesn't make sense in English. So I found an English copy and confirmed that the German was a direct translation of the English, but due to German grammar, the translation turned indecipherable children's logic into a reasonable supposition.

Starting point is 00:23:42 Anyway, I have been listening to your podcast ever since you first started and have enjoyed every episode. Yeah, that makes no sense in English. Maybe he was thinking in German. I guess he was. And lastly, we received an email from Harriet Rogers with the subject line of, love for your show from a nine-year-old in England.

Starting point is 00:24:01 Dear Greg, Sharon, and Sasha, my name is Harriet and I am the proud mother of Elizabeth, who is nine. We listen to your show every Tuesday on the way to and from Elizabeth's swimming lesson. Elizabeth always asks to listen and though some of the content is a little obscure for her, she really enjoys the lateral thinking puzzles. She thinks aloud along with you and although she doesn't get the answers, she doesn't often get the answer spot on, she usually thinks of at least a couple of your theories and lines of questioning,

Starting point is 00:24:28 often exclaiming, I said that. It's a real joy to hear her thinking about things in new ways and never being disheartened by failure, but learning to love the joy of the journey to the answer. Thank you so much for all the hard work you obviously do to bring us the podcast. It's truly appreciated. I know she'd love to hear her name mentioned on the podcast,

Starting point is 00:24:47 along with those of her little brother, William, and our two cats, Hoppy and Spadge, who send purrs to Sasha. So greetings to Elizabeth, William, Hoppy, and Spadge. And Elizabeth, do keep trying on the lateral thinking puzzles. We usually guess a lot of wrong answers before we get to the right one, and maybe that's a good guide for life to realize that it's okay to make mistakes or to not understand something right away. But as your mom said, to love the joy of the journey to the answer. So thanks to everyone

Starting point is 00:25:16 who writes into us, human or otherwise. And if you would like to be one of those who do that, you can write to us at 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 puzzle out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. sounding situation and I have to try to puzzle out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. The English wit and cleric Sidney Smith built a strange object in a field on his property in Yorkshire. Two posts of different heights with a pole set across them. The pole had sharp edges. What was its purpose? Okay. Is the time period important? No. Is the location, is anything about the location important? No.

Starting point is 00:26:07 Well, that's very hard to answer. It's hard to say no resoundingly to that, but I'll say pretty much no. Pretty much no. You could say there's one part of it that's important. There's one part of the location that's important. But the fact that it's in Yorkshire or even in England isn't important. Right, but is there something about the terrain or the geographical features or... Something like that.

Starting point is 00:26:30 Something like that. Is it positioned in any particular way with regard to any heavenly bodies? No. Okay. Good guess. Is it positioned in any particular way with regard to anything like rivers or mountains or valleys? No. No.

Starting point is 00:26:49 With regard to any man-made objects? No. Okay. Is it positioned purposefully to be away from man-made objects? Like it needs to be in like a sort of outdoors or a field or a... I think I'll say yes to that. Okay. Does it need to be outdoors? Yes. Well...

Starting point is 00:27:10 Is it better if it's outdoors for some reason? Yeah, I'm going to simplify this somewhat. Yes. Okay. Is it better if it's in like sort of like a field so there's not much else around or... Yes. Yes. Okay. I don't know why I'm asking all these questions. They haven't led me anywhere, but it seems like I'm making progress. Okay. Let's go with, there are two posts of different heights. Are they of specific heights, particular heights? No. Are they in a particular ratio to each other? Not really, no. No. Do they need to be different heights?

Starting point is 00:27:46 I wouldn't say they have to, but it's helpful. It's better if they're different heights. Yeah, it helps serve their purpose. Is that because then the pole between them, is it on incline? Do you want the pole between them to be on an incline? Is the pole between them in an incline? Yes. Yes, it is.

Starting point is 00:28:00 And is that helpful, useful? Is that important? Yeah, it's useful. The fact that the pole is, okay, is the pole of any particular size, shape, or dimension? Not really, no. Not really. But it has sharp edges. Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:14 Sharp ends. That's important? Yes, that is important. That is important. Oh, wow. Is anything, is it hoped that some, any things will be hurt by this? No. Whether it's birds or...

Starting point is 00:28:29 No. Nothing. Okay. Not sharp edges like to hurt things. That's right. Does the pole stay attached to the posts without moving? Yes. And nobody moves it?

Starting point is 00:28:41 That's right. And it doesn't get moved when it's doing its purpose. That's right. Okay. All right. Would you say its purpose is primarily entertainment? No. Educational? No. Defensive? No. Satirical? No. That would be pretty cool. Artistic? No. That would be pretty cool. Artistic. No.

Starting point is 00:29:07 Wow. Okay. Why else would you put something up and it's not for any of those things? Informational? No. No. I'm sorry. I'm giving you nothing but- Is it still there?

Starting point is 00:29:17 I don't know. It could be. Could it be still serving its original purpose? Yes. And you said it doesn't need to be in England. This could have been pretty much anywhere. This could be anywhere, yeah. Anywhere.

Starting point is 00:29:26 Or any when. It could have used this 500 years ago or even today. Did the owner himself expect to make use of this? No. Ah. So it was, did he expect others to make use of it? Yes. Specific others?

Starting point is 00:29:41 No. No. So not like specifically his family or a specific group of people that you could be defined by some kind of demographic? No. And in fact, I'll give you a hint by saying it's not people at all. I was just going to, that was my next question. Okay. So this is to benefit animals?

Starting point is 00:29:59 Yes. Specific kind of animals? No. Animals in general? Yes. By scaring of animals? No. Animals in general? Yes. By scaring away people? No. But just animals in general are benefited by having this structure.

Starting point is 00:30:17 I mean, it would benefit animals in general, I suppose, mostly, but he intended it for his livestock that were in the field. Okay. They're going to make use of it? Would you say they make use of it yes i would do they use it to scratch themselves yes they do i'm just delighted with this puzzle i was just reading about sydney smith and it just popped up on one page he called it his universal scratcher and basically the idea was that any animal could walk up to it the pole was at an angle so that animals of different sizes could use it. He told his daughter, I am all for cheap luxuries, even for animals. Now all animals have a passion for scratching their backbones.

Starting point is 00:30:51 They break down your gates and palings to affect this. Look, there is my universal scratcher, a sharp-edged pole resting on a high and a low post, adapted to every height from a horse to a lamb. Even the Edinburgh reviewer can take his turn. You have no idea how popular it is. I have not had a gate broken since I put it up. Wow. So it did benefit him though, not just the animals. I suppose so, yes. If anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, whether it benefits animals or not, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:31:23 Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported primarily by our wonderful listeners. If you would like to help support the show, you can find a donate button in the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign where you'll get outtakes,

Starting point is 00:31:39 extra discussion of some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, and updates on Sasha, the Futility Closet podcat, who rounds out our pod trio. Patreon gives us a good way to share some extras with the show's supporters. Like this week, we'll be putting up an extended discussion of the social influences on mental health diagnoses. If you're interested, you can check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the website for the link. If you have any questions or comments for us or Sasha, you can email us at podcast at

Starting point is 00:32:11 futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by my amazing brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. you

Futility Closet - 182-The Compulsive Wanderer

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