Futility Closet - 188-The Bat Bomb

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 presidential misgivings to an invertible minuet. This is episode 188. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. During World War II, the U.S. Army experimented with a bizarre plan, using live bats to firebomb Japanese cities.

Starting point is 00:00:39 In today's show, we'll describe the crazy history of the bat bomb, the extraordinary brainchild of a Pennsylvania dentist. We'll also consider the malleable nature of mental illness and puzzle over an expensive quiz question. In 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle Adams had a unique idea. He had just returned from a vacation in New Mexico where he'd seen millions of bats at Carlsbad Caverns. He thought, couldn't those millions of bats be fitted with incendiary bombs and dropped from planes? What could be more devastating than such a firebomb attack? He did some research and worked out a plan. If these bats were released at daybreak over a Japanese city, they'd seek shelter in buildings, factories, attics, power plants, and other structures.

Starting point is 00:01:22 His research suggested that 80% of the structures in central Osaka were highly combustible, made of wood, paper, fiber, and bamboo. When the firebombs went off, they'd start thousands of fires in hidden places. That would give the fires time to get established and would also give the people time to flee. Ideally, this would save lives while crippling Japanese industry, spreading chaos, and straining the nation's resources. And that would give the Americans a fighting advantage. Normally, it would be hard to get an idea like this to the president, but Adams had a way in. In the late 1920s, he'd invented a way for airplanes to pick up mail sacks without landing, and he demonstrated that for Eleanor Roosevelt. Now he used that connection to get a memo to the president. He sent a proposal to the White House on January 12, 1942, and it

Starting point is 00:02:03 reached FDR's desk. It said, among other things, the lowest form of life is the bat, associated in history with the underworld and regions of darkness and evil. Until now, reasons for its creation have remained unexplained. As I vision it, the millions of bats that have for ages inhabited our belfries, tunnels, and caverns were placed there by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life. Roosevelt surprisingly liked this idea. He sent the proposal to Colonel William J. Donovan, the head of wartime intelligence, with the following note.

Starting point is 00:02:36 Memorandum for Colonel William J. Donovan, U.S. Government Coordinator of Information. This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea, but is worth looking into. You might reply for me to Dr. Adams' letter, FDR. Donovan forwarded the letter to the staff of the National Research Defense Committee. Many of them were skeptical, but the idea did have some influential supporters. Donald R. Griffin, a bat expert at Harvard, wrote, this proposal seems bizarre and visionary at first glance, but extensive experience with experimental biology convinces the writer that if executed competently, it would asked what about the bats. This was designed in part to be humane to Japanese people,

Starting point is 00:03:15 but it's obviously going to destroy millions of bats if it works. Jack Cofer, who was a high school bat enthusiast who got caught up in this project, later wrote, who got caught up in this project, later wrote, At no time did anyone challenge the idea from an ecological or moralistic point of view. The nation had just been attacked, and Americans were afire to win the war. Some of the team later felt chagriner about this. Griffin, the bat expert, wrote,

Starting point is 00:03:37 It is sobering and salutary to read what one said under wartime conditions. Anyway, the U.S. government set aside $2 million for what was called the Adams Plan. There were two things to figure out, how to get the bats to perform and how to design a firebomb small enough to attach to a bat. Two separate teams worked on these tasks and they came together periodically to test their work. The first step was finding bats. They need several million of them. Adams, the inventor, and a group of naturalists drove all over Texas and New Mexico looking for them. Adams wrote later, we visited a thousand caves and three thousand mines. Speed was so imperative that we generally drove all day and night when we weren't exploring caves. We slept in the cars taking turns at driving. One car in our search team covered 350,000 miles. They finally decided on the Mexican free-tailed bat because that variety

Starting point is 00:04:20 would be strong enough to carry a tiny bomb. They caught hundreds of these at a cave near San Antonio, Texas and sent them back to Washington in refrigerated trucks. The trucks were refrigerated to keep the bats quiet. The other advantage of using Mexican free-tailed bats is that they hibernate. When the time came for the actual attack, it would take a long time to fly the bats from American air bases to Japan, so they planned to put them into hibernation. They'd be kept at a temperature just below 40 degrees until the plane was approaching its target. The plane would also be flying at high altitudes, and bats aren't high-altitude flyers, so they needed a way to release them close to the ground. For that, Adams designed a canister made of perforated sheet metal. This would be

Starting point is 00:04:57 packed with bats roosting upside down in a stack of trays. A B-25 could carry 25 of these canisters, and each canister could hold 1,030 bats for a total of almost 26,000 bat bombs. Each bat would wear a little incendiary device with a time delay. The canister would be dropped like a regular bomb, and when it entered the warm air near the ground, a parachute would open and the canister would fall away. The stack of trays would extend like an accordion, which would free the bats, and hopefully they'd wake up, take flight, and look for nesting places in the buildings below. That's all actually rather complicated, if you think about it. It is, but it was all necessary because of the way the bats work.

Starting point is 00:05:35 That brings us to the incendiaries. The problem of designing the miniature bat bombs fell to the Harvard organic chemist Louis Fieser, who had just invented napalm. He designed a tiny firebomb that would be attached to each bat with surgical clips, which they hoped would feel like baby bat claws. Each little bomb was only a couple of inches long, but it could produce a 22-inch flame that would burn for about eight minutes. Each bat also carried a timer. When the bats flew out of their trays, each bat would pull a pin that would set its timer going. The timer allowed 15 minutes for the bats to find a

Starting point is 00:06:04 roosting place, hopefully in a building, and then set off the explosive. By the way, if you think this is a crazy story, I'm actually leaving out details. Here are a few of them. The steel canister that would hold the bats was manufactured by a research foundation run by Bing Crosby and his brother Larry. The mechanical timers were made by the same Connecticut toy company that made erector sets. The team's mascot was a live tiger, and one of its members was Tim Holt, who would go on to star with Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend Kofor's book, Bat Bomb. He joined the project again when he was barely out of high school. Once the bat team and the bomb team were both ready, it was time to test their work together. The first tests were conducted

Starting point is 00:06:42 at the Army Air Force Base at Muroc, California. They gathered bats at Carlsbad and drove them to Muroc with Kuffer adjusting ice on the bat cages to keep them from overheating in the Mojave Desert. This test was a failure in almost every way. Fieser hadn't finished his work on the safety mechanism, so the pilot refused to allow the incendiaries on board the plane, and they were reduced to clipping weights to the bats instead of bombs. The container holding the bats, which was just a prototype made of cardboard and glue, came apart in the bomber's slipstream. That released bats all over the sky, and instead of flying, the bats dropped straight to the ground. Oh, no.

Starting point is 00:07:14 The team tried flying the plane higher for a second test, but again, the bats just fell to the ground. Fieser wrote, eventually, it became clear that the bats were not in hibernation, but dead. Instead of freezing them to hibernation, we had frozen them to death the night before. So both teams agreed to go back to work and try again a month later. They met again in June, this time at the Army's Carlsbad Air Force Base near the bat caves in New Mexico. The base commander there had just built a new auxiliary landing field that he was very proud of, but the team showed him that they had orders marked top secret and said they needed to use it, and he agreed to postpone its grand opening for a few days. This time the metal canister was ready. The bats were chilled more carefully this time, and the canister contained both a cooler to keep the bats in hibernation

Starting point is 00:07:51 and a heater to revive them when they got close to the ground. You're right, this is very complicated. Fieser still hadn't finished the safety system, so they used dummy bombs again. They dropped the canister from 25,000 feet, and his parachute opened at 4,000 feet. Kofar wrote, soon tiny motes began to flutter across the sky, flying in all directions, most born northward in a fluttering clump by the breeze. The researchers sped off in jeeps trying to follow the bats. After miles of driving over rough country, they arrived at the barn of a rancher. Trying to act nonchalant, they asked him if he'd noticed anything unusual, and he said, like bats flying around in broad daylight? Unusual like that? To find out what he knew, they swore him to secrecy, and he said, like bats flying around in broad daylight, unusual like that?

Starting point is 00:08:28 To find out what he knew, they swore him to secrecy, and he pointed to a bat peering down from a niche between the ceiling boards on his porch. The bat was straddling a dummy bomb. So the system worked. The team spent hours tracking down other bats, and they found them in eaves and barns even miles from the drop zone. They dropped a second canister, and that one worked too. They should have stopped there, but all of this was being documented by photographers from the Army Signal Corps, and Fieser wanted to demonstrate the bombs. He put six chilled bats on a table with live bombs attached to them and began to demonstrate how the trigger mechanisms worked. But the bats woke up in the hot New Mexico sun, and they took off.

Starting point is 00:09:00 Exactly 15 minutes later, a barracks burst into flames, followed by towers, offices, and hangars across the airfield. Even worse, in order to preserve secrecy, the team hadn't brought any fire equipment. The base commander eventually saw plumes of thick black smoke coming from his precious new airfield, and he sent three fire engines, but by then many structures had burned to the ground. And the BAT team had to deny access to the fire engines because the project was top secret. In fact, when it was over, they had to ask the base commander for a bulldozer to tear down any structures that were still standing. This was a fiasco, but it also validated the whole plan. The two halves of the project were

Starting point is 00:09:32 working perfectly. The bats released from the plane woke from hibernation and carried their fake bombs into local buildings, and bats carrying real bombs that were released accidentally by Fieser also found their way into buildings and successfully set fire to them. In fact, it took only six bats to burn down the Carlsbad airfield. After what happened at Carlsbad, the Army decided to drop the project, but one of the observers at that test had been the Marine General Louis de Haven, and he was impressed. The Marines took over the project in fall 1943 and named it Project X-Ray, and the Marine Air Station at El Centro, California, became its headquarters. They posted armed guards at two large bat caves near San Antonio, Texas, and assigned a twin-engine Lockheed Lodestar airplane

Starting point is 00:10:08 to the project. Adams, who had conceived the whole project, was forced out, but his role had been increasingly tenuous anyway. On December 15, 1943, the plan went through further tests at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. They built a special village full of Japanese-style houses and then released bats by hand while a team of observers recorded what happened. They worked pretty well. The wood was wet and the temperatures were cold, but the chief incendiary officer concluded that bats could indeed plant bombs inside buildings, often without being detected. One report concluded X-ray is an effective weapon. There were still concerns that the bombs weren't strong enough. Of the 30 fires that started during one test, 22 went out by themselves. They ordered stronger incendiaries and scheduled further

Starting point is 00:10:47 tests for August 1944, but then the whole project was suddenly canceled after a total expenditure of about $24 million in today's dollars. The brass gave various reasons for this. Some leaders didn't trust the tests and still thought the whole idea was crazy. Also, the bats lived in Mexico in the winter months and wouldn't be strong enough to carry the incendiaries in the spring, which put some constraints on the timing of an attack. And some people thought the whole project was taking too long. Even though the progress was promising, they still wouldn't have been fully ready until the middle of 1945. It seems pretty clear that the real reason for the cancellation was that the military had decided to focus its efforts on the atomic bomb, but that was never explicitly given as the reason. In any case,

Starting point is 00:11:24 in the end, the bats were released without being used. Lytle Adams, the dentist who had come up with all this, never lost his faith in the project. He noted that BATs had scattered up to 20 miles during the tests and said, think of thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously over a circle of 40 miles in diameter for every bomb dropped. Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life. He later said, we got a sure thing like that bat bomb going, something that could really win the war, and they're messing with tiny little atoms. It makes me want to cry. The rest of the team split up and went on to other things, but they all remembered the project as a vivid chapter in their memories of the war. At the end of his book, Kofor writes,

Starting point is 00:11:57 in looking back, one might view the whole plan simply as a romantic notion, only valid because we were grasping at any straw to save our country from extermination. But bat incendiaries were more or less proven a year and a half before Hiroshima, and their deployment might have slowed down the Japanese even if it didn't stop them. We were so close, it seems a pity that we didn't try. I will never forget Tim Holt's words when he brought us news of the project's cancellation. You know, the crazy thing is, I think it would have worked. This episode is brought to you by our supporters and by Detach. According to market research, 62% of email users lose important email attachments. But Gmail, which is the world's most popular email client,

Starting point is 00:12:50 doesn't let you directly browse, search, or manage your attachments. That's where Detach comes in. It's a Chrome extension for doing just that, that CBS's tech review website ZDNet called freaking awesome, and a shockingly good solution to one of Gmail's biggest hassles. It's 100% free, and you can find it in the Chrome web store or at detach.com. That's D-I-T-T-A-C-H.com or see the show notes for the link. In our last episode, I promised that I would finish the follow-up to the story of Albert Dada from episode 182 and address the cultural aspects of the epidemic of compulsive wandering that his case seemed to spark. On this topic, Pat Weedorn wrote, Hello, Sharon, Greg, and Sasha. I am a regular listener to your show and usually use it to pass

Starting point is 00:13:36 the time on interminable minibus rides here in Zambia. I am a Peace Corps volunteer teaching fish farming. I listened to episode 182 today about the compulsive wanderer, and I'm a little worried about how you guys characterized his mental illness. I don't know if you meant to, but it sort of seemed to me that maybe you implied that his illness, or the illness other people were diagnosed with, maybe weren't real but were a result of overzealous diagnosis by mental health practitioners. This brought to mind some things I had read in the past about the westernization of mental health, a modern-day phenomenon where, as the West's definition of mental health is being exported around the world,

Starting point is 00:14:13 the mental illnesses experienced by other cultures are starting to conform to how they are expressed in the West. What I think that lends itself to, in the context of the compulsive wanderer, isn't that his mental illness wasn't real, but was just an expression of it particular to his culture and circumstances, which you also alluded to. I just want to stress that it doesn't mean his illness wasn't real, or that the illnesses of the people subsequently diagnosed wasn't real, but was a particular manifestation of a very real illness. And Pat raises some really good points and sent some very helpful links in his email. We did not mean to imply that all of the people diagnosed with compulsive wandering had no mental health disorders. I think Greg was trying to say

Starting point is 00:14:56 that a mix of things likely happened that created that little epidemic and that possibly some people who had other disorders were misdiagnosed with this new trendy diagnosis that the doctors were looking for. Some people perhaps started claiming that they had this new disorder they'd heard about to use it as an excuse for their behavior, and some people actually began displaying this new disorder after hearing about it. And after reading the articles that Pat sent, I can see that this last possibility, that a relatively unknown mental illness can suddenly spread through an area, is actually a fairly well-established phenomenon. Cultural expectations have a significant effect on the expression of psychological phenomena, affecting both what disorders are seen in a given society and the specific symptoms that are displayed with the disorder. So for example, some traditional societies don't even have a word or a concept for depression, despite that being considered rather common in many other cultures. Similarly, suicide and self-harming behaviors,

Starting point is 00:15:55 eating disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, are also almost completely unheard of in many developing countries, even though all of these would not be considered uncommon in many other places. Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, writes, we might think of the culture as possessing a symptom repertoire, a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict. So in some places in time, certain symptoms, such as the sudden inability to speak or paralysis of the legs, might figure prominently in a society's repertoire, while in other cultures, patients might draw more on symptoms like false estimates of body weight or lethargy as an expression of their mental distress. In all

Starting point is 00:16:41 of these cases, the distress is real. What's changing is how it's expressed. As Pat mentioned, a striking example of how social factors can influence the expression of mental health issues is seen in the westernization of some disorders, such as anorexia. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Dr. Sing Lee, a psychiatrist and researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was documenting a rare and culturally specific form of anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong. Unlike American anorexic patients, most of Dr. Lee's patients weren't intentionally dieting or expressing a fear of becoming fat. Instead, they weren't eating due to specifically somatic complaints, such as feeling like they had bloated stomachs. Dr. Li was working on understanding this particular variant of anorexia,

Starting point is 00:17:28 as well as why the disorder was seen so much more rarely than in some other places, when in November 1994, a teenage girl with anorexia collapsed and died on a busy Hong Kong street. The girl's death was featured prominently in local newspapers, and in trying to explain the disorder, local reporters often simply copied information about anorexia from American publications, and this spread of the Western understanding of anorexia ended up changing the illness itself in Hong Kong, both in its prevalence and in the expression of its symptoms. Whereas Lee had been seeing maybe two or three new cases of anorexia a year,

Starting point is 00:18:05 by the end of the 1990s, he was seeing that many new cases every month. The increase in the incidence of the disorder in Hong Kong sparked another round of media reports, which in turn seemed to increase the incidence even more, and the presentation of the disorder transformed into the more virulent form that was typically being seen in the U.S. Also, whereas previously most of Lee's patients hadn't mentioned the fear of being fat as a symptom of their anorexia, by 2007, about 90% of his patients reported it. So this is one clear example of how the expectations and beliefs of sufferers can shape the expression of their

Starting point is 00:18:40 suffering. As Lee said, culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology. So there's just some underlying distress or suffering that's inchoate and just sort of takes its shape based on the culture. Takes whatever form, right. That's what he was saying with the symptom repertoire. That's funny because that's not how we tend to think in the west about how illness works it's all been scientific where there's a manual that lays out exactly how to expect these things to express themselves but even even there if you look at the diagnostic and statistical manual that psychiatrists use

Starting point is 00:19:19 they'll give you like a number of symptoms and say you have to look for five of these 11 symptoms for example. Even there, they recognize that not all patients are going to display the exact same symptoms. But we do expect sort of a particular subset, which apparently is rather culturally shaped and maybe more than people tend to realize. Pat also suggested in his email that we look at the concept of culture-bound syndromes, which are very related to this. And those are psychological disorders that are seen only in certain cultures, and they usually seem to be culturally idiosyncratic expressions of anxiety or stress-related disorders. One of these is Koro, which we actually covered in Episode 7.

Starting point is 00:20:00 Koro, which tends to be seen primarily in men, is an extreme anxiety that your genitals are shrinking or retracting or perhaps even disappearing altogether, and that that will lead to impotence or death. There have been various Koro epidemics seen in parts of Asia and Africa, in which the fears become so widespread among a local population that some have characterized them as a form of mass hysteria. And that appears only in certain cultures. Only in certain cultures, right.

Starting point is 00:20:27 Like you don't hear about that usually, like in places like the United States. Yeah. In a similar vein, Bo Stuckey wrote to say, Hello to all the inhabitants of the closet. The recent episode about compulsive wandering reminded me of another odd syndrome or disease that seems to be the product of the limitations and worries of its time. The 1880s brought the dawn of a new mode of shopping, the department store. These were opulent merchandise palaces designed to dazzle the senses with their decorations and wares. We are well accustomed to this idea now,

Starting point is 00:20:59 but this was quite a shift from the typical utilitarian markets and shops the world had hitherto known. Les Bon Marchés in Paris was among the most famous, and it was shortly after its opening that there was a rise in shoplifting cases, particularly from wealthy young women. Many of the women apprehended claimed to be overcome by a sort of frantic desire to take something for the thrill of it. They described spells of dizziness and feeling as though they were drunk, a monomania of possession. They seemed to take items at random, not caring whether the items had any real monetary or practical value. Aside from shocking the public and making newspaper headlines,

Starting point is 00:21:36 the department store disease became the topic of many studies and was instrumental in changing the way psychiatrists understood and diagnosed mental illness. Before, mental illness was considered to be an hereditary defect, a problem of physiognomy. But the thieves in question seemed to steal only in these grand new stores, and they seemed to be mostly upper-class women of good breeding. So the idea emerged that it was the environment and overstimulation of the department store which triggered the behavior.

Starting point is 00:22:02 In short, here was created the idea that sensory overload could make one sick. I hope you find it interesting. I took it from the excellent book, Wonderland, How Play Shaped the Modern World by Stephen Johnson. Many thanks for dosing all of us listeners with regular anecdotes and ideas. The show is a happy part of my life. This department store disease is really interesting and very relevant to our discussion, and the more so because it seems to have occurred just a few years before the compulsive wandering epidemic hit France. In the same place, yeah. In the same place, yeah. In his book, Johnson notes that kleptomania had been an obscure medical diagnosis

Starting point is 00:22:38 since a wave of predominantly female thieves had begun stealing items from stores in the early 19th century. Early essays on the topic attributed the shoplifting to a lesion of the will or to hysteria, menstruation, masturbation, or epilepsy. But in the 1880s, a huge wave of shoplifting seen in the new Parisian department stores changed the thinking on the topic, and as Beau noted, brought the new idea that disorders could actually be affected by environmental factors. And on the idea that if people are looking for a particular disorder, perhaps they will be more likely to see it, whether it's there or not. Alex Bauman sent an email with the subject line, knowing is seeing. Just some more thoughts on the case of Albert Dada and the short-lived epidemic of compulsive

Starting point is 00:23:25 traveling that followed it. I've always been fascinated by the extent to which what we perceive is influenced by what we know. Especially in the more fuzzy fields, such as diagnosing mental illnesses, there is a tendency to make observations fit pigeonholes and to fill a pigeonhole once it is created. But the effect also is noticeable in other fields, which are often considered to be more rigorous. One of my favorite stories is the case of the Heinkel He 113. I am a bit of a military history buff. The story starts just before World War II, when the aircraft manufacturer Heinkel proposes the He 100 fighter as a successor to the Messerschmitt Bf 109. The German Air Force, however, decides to stick with an upgraded version of the Messerschmitt, so the He 100 is not adopted. By then, a small pre-series of 12

Starting point is 00:24:14 He 100s has been constructed for development work and demonstrations to export customers. Japan actually bought three of these for evaluation. The outbreak of World War II prevents any exports of licensed production, so now the German Air Force has a small number of advanced fighters on their hands, which they can't really use operationally, so they use them for propaganda instead. They are given the new and completely fictitious designation HE-113. They were painted up in different color schemes and were extensively photographed and presented in the press as the new advanced fighter of the Luftwaffe, which would dominate the skies of Europe. The Western allies

Starting point is 00:24:49 fell completely for this, and the He-113 was incorporated in the aircraft recognition profiles. So it wasn't very long before sightings of the He-113 started to appear. The allies were long convinced that there was such a thing as the He-113. Even in a 1971 book about the Schweinfurt raids of 1943, the author John Sweetman notes sightings of the HE-113 by the U.S. bombers and helpfully provides a photo of the plane, noting, however, that it was a prototype only. Even by 1943, they ought to have known better, let alone after the war. The conclusion would seem to be that if you put a type

Starting point is 00:25:25 in an aircraft recognition manual, people will see it, even if it doesn't actually exist. Also, once people are convinced that something exists, it is difficult to get them to change their minds. And it seems to me that there's likely some valuable lessons in there for all of us. Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us and continued thanks for the pronunciation help. If you have anything that you'd like to send to us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange sounding situation and I have to work out what is actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Alexander Rogers. In 2008, the Australian quiz show Spicks

Starting point is 00:26:11 and Specks posed a question about a children's song. Because this question was asked, one party lost a fortune. What happened? Oh my, because the question was asked. Yes. So it doesn't matter what the answer was or who answered it or how it was answered. It was just the asking of the question was asked yes so it doesn't matter what the answer was or who answered it or how it was answered it was just the asking of the question strictly speaking i think i will have to say that yeah the answer was immaterial no no the answer was oh had to be given in order for the result to the answer had to be given Does this have something to do with a court case? Did the person who lost the money lose it in a court case? Ultimately, yes.

Starting point is 00:26:49 Okay. Hmm. So did somehow it being asked on the show, like, give legitimacy to something so it helped bolster somebody's case in a court case? No, that's not it. No, that's not it. in a court case? No, that's not it.

Starting point is 00:27:02 No, that's not it. Was it what the answer was that was, like what exactly they said the answer was that made a difference? You could say that. I'm not quite sure what you mean. Well, I don't know. If somebody's arguing something in a court case and they point to like,

Starting point is 00:27:19 look, they said the answer was X. Oh, no, not that it gave it some authority, no. No, okay. All right, so they asked a question about a children's song. Yeah. Does it matter what the song was? Yes, you don't need to know that to solve the puzzle. Okay, and so do I need to figure out

Starting point is 00:27:36 what the court case turned on? Or, hmm, how, asking this on a children's show, on a quiz show. Yeah, I guess the heart of it is, if you can figure out what the question might have been or what it might at least have addressed what the question addressed okay did the question have to do with who wrote it no what the lyrics were no uh what the subject matter was no when it was written no who first recorded it coming up with good questions i'm gonna think of all

Starting point is 00:28:05 the things you could sue about you know yeah no it's not who wrote the music um is this like a really old song does it matter like whether it's a really old or a more recent song um it's relatively old it was written in 1932 okay is that matter because like it's in the public domain versus it's not in the public domain? That does matter. That does matter. What you just mentioned is... That matters.

Starting point is 00:28:31 Yes. Okay. Was it in the public domain? No. No. It was not in the public domain. Right. Was somebody trying to sue to make it be in the public domain?

Starting point is 00:28:38 No. No. So it was not in the public domain. Were they suing the quiz show or anybody connected with the quiz show? No. Not the contestants or the writers of the quiz show or anything else? That's right. Okay.

Starting point is 00:28:53 And people weren't, were they, they weren't suing over ownership of the song or who had the right to, did the contestant who answered the question have to sing part of the song? No. No. No. Okay. So it didn't hinge on the song actually being sung on TV. No, that's right. Or the lyrics being given.

Starting point is 00:29:12 No, that's a good thought, though. And I'm trying to figure out what the question was. So the question, you said the question was about the song itself. Yes. I'm trying to think of a hint that won't just totally give it away. Okay. The song itself and something else, like the writer of the song or the movie it appeared in or something, or just a question completely about the song. No, the question was about- The song. Something else. Something else. Yeah. It concerned the song, but was about- Also about something else. Yeah. It concerned the song, but was also about something else.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Yeah. I'm sorry to be so vague, but I have to dance around. Yeah. Okay. All right. Is there anything about this song that I need to know about? Like that I should try to understand that's something that's unique about this song? Not about the song itself.

Starting point is 00:30:01 The way it's normally performed? Is it a song with words uh i think so actually i don't it doesn't matter i don't know that and maybe that's helpful the the fact that it appeared on a quiz national quiz show is important because someone was watching the show, and that has an important factor here. Okay, the person watching the show, they were connected to the song in some way? Yes. They wrote it or were related to the person who had written it? No, didn't write it.

Starting point is 00:30:39 They had performed it or were related to a person who had performed it. They were connected to the person who had written it. They were connected to the person who had written it. They were connected to the person who had written it. I asked that. You said related. I wasn't sure what you meant. Oh, they were connected. Oh, oh, oh.

Starting point is 00:30:54 Okay. Sorry. They were connected to the person who had written it. Married to the person who had written it? No. Friend of? No. Does it matter?

Starting point is 00:31:03 Yeah, they had a business relationship. Business relationship to the person who had written it did they not know that the song had become like popular or was it a question about how much money the song had earned yes and they didn't realize oh my gosh this song that i had this relationship to earned so much money right it was the publisher of the song i'll say that, was watching this quiz show and heard this question asked and answered and realized something they hadn't known.

Starting point is 00:31:31 And it's more than just how much money the song had earned. Yeah. That the song had been used in a particular way, like in a movie or something. That's basically it. Oh. The 1980 song Down Under

Starting point is 00:31:40 by the Australian band Men at Work based its flute section on the children's song Kookaburra, which was written in 1932 but remained in copyright. The owners of Kookaburra, Larrick and Music, only realized this 28 years later when the quiz show asked the question, what children's song is contained in the song Down Under on national TV? Larrick and sued and ultimately won 5% of the royalties for the song, which must have been a lot since it reached number one and sold 2 million copies in the U.S. alone. Oh, okay. So I don't know if you're old enough, you remember that song was all over the world in 1980.

Starting point is 00:32:11 Yes, yeah. But somehow the publisher didn't put it together that the children's song had been used in it. Huh. I should say, too, from what I understand, Colin Hay and Greg Hamm, the writer and flute player on that song, apparently disputed that even after they ran out of appeals in the court case. They didn't agree that that's what they were using. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:31 But it took 28 years for the publisher even to realize that it had been used. Wow. Putatively. So thanks, Alexander, for sending that in. Yes, thanks, Alexander. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. We really want to thank everyone who helps support us in all the ways that you do. We really appreciated all the emails and comments that we got last week.

Starting point is 00:32:58 So thank you so much for letting us know that you care. And if you have any questions or comments for us, you can always email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Greg's incredible brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 188-The Bat Bomb

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