Futility Closet - 196-The Long Way Home

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 an imaginary prison to an untranslatable poem. This is episode 196. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the crew of an American seaplane were caught off guard near New Zealand. Unable to return across the Pacific, they were forced to fly home the long way, all the way around the world. In today's show,

Starting point is 00:00:39 we'll follow the adventures of the Pacific Clipper on its 30,000-mile journey through a world engulfed in war. We'll also delve into the drug industry and puzzle over a curious case of skin lesions. In the late 1930s, when flying across oceans was still a thrilling new experience, Pan American World Airways created a fleet of seaplanes to carry the rich and famous to exotic destinations in the Pacific. These planes were called Clippers, and they were beautiful, luxurious, and huge. A Model 314 Boeing Clipper was 106 feet long with a 152-foot wingspan and weighed 82,500 pounds, and it could carry 74 passengers, cargo, and mail over hops of 3,500 miles landing in the water at each destination. On the morning of December 7, 1941, Pan Am was operating four of these planes in the Pacific. One of them, the

Starting point is 00:01:31 Pacific Clipper, was in the air between New Caledonia and New Zealand when the radio operator picked up an AM radio broadcast announcing that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Immediately after that, the ground station in New Caledonia sent them an urgent message telling them to implement Plan A. The pilot, Robert Ford, removed a legal-sized envelope from the breast pocket of his uniform and opened it. The message said that if hostilities broke out between the U.S. and Japan, Pan American Airways had agreed to place its clippers at the disposal of the American military. That meant the plane was now a strategic military resource, and they had to keep it from falling into enemy hands. They were to maintain radio silence, watch for enemy aircraft, proceed to their destination, and wait for further instructions.

Starting point is 00:02:08 So they did. They landed in Auckland, where they had to wait a week before those instructions came in. When they came, they were stunning. They told the crew to strip all company markings, registration numbers, and insignia from the plane, and proceed westbound, avoiding hostilities, and return the plane to LaGuardia Field in New York by what it called the most practical route. Ford thought this was crazy. It meant going all the way around the world to get back home, but he could see there was no alternative. They couldn't go back across the Pacific, and they couldn't just sit here in Auckland where the war might eventually come to them. Still, it seemed incredible. They had no suitable navigational charts, no reliable way to get fuel, food, or service, and they'd have to make their way through war zones in the Far East, the Middle East, Africa, the South Atlantic, Brazil, and the Caribbean

Starting point is 00:02:50 under a radio blackout and a veil of secrecy. Not even Pan Am headquarters would know exactly where they were until they arrived in New York. In his book The Long Way Home, Ed Dover says this was the earthly 1940s equivalent of the first Apollo lunar missions and that it ventured into unknown territory in the face of overwhelming odds. But those were their orders. Part of the crew got to work tearing all the identifying marks off the plane and picked up an extra engine to use for spare parts, while others went to the Auckland Public Library to scrounge maps from geography textbooks, atlases, and marine charts. As they were doing this, they got word that the company wanted them to return to New Caledonia to evacuate all the Pan American personnel and their families and take them to Gladstone, Australia.

Starting point is 00:03:29 They loaded up with fuel, took off late at night on December 15th, and reached their destination just after dawn. Ford told the Pan Am employees they had one hour to pack one small bag apiece. From there, they flew to Gladstone, already making history because this was the first flight ever between those locations. There, they released the Pan Am personnel, but they discovered two due problems. The first was that they couldn't find any 100-octane aviation fuel. They decided to fly to Darwin and look for it there. The second problem was that they'd already spent most of their cash in Auckland, and from here on they wouldn't have many Pan American bases to support them.

Starting point is 00:04:01 Ford later said, We had money enough for a trip to Auckland and back to San Francisco, but this was a different story. In Gladstone, a young man who was a banker came up to me and out of the blue said, how are you fixed for money? Well, we're broke, I said. He said, I'll probably be shot for this, but he went down to the bank on a Saturday morning, opened the vault, and handed me 500 American dollars. Since Broad Brown, our navigator, was the only one with a lockbox and a key, we put him in charge of the money. That $500 financed the rest of the trip all the way to New York. Between Gladstone and Darwin, they flew for 11 hours over the Queensland desert without ever seeing a river big enough to land in. Darwin was one of the northernmost cities in Australia, which put it closest to the conflict, and women and children

Starting point is 00:04:37 were being evacuated from the city as they arrived. The harbormaster had 100 octane fuel, but it was stored in five-gallon jerry cans, which had to be hauled exhaustingly one by one over the wing and emptied into the plane's 4,000-gallon fuel tank. They didn't finish until 2 a.m. From Darwin, they crossed to the Dutch East Indies, what's now Indonesia, hoping that Java and Sumatra remained in friendly hands. As they approached the city of Surabaya, a squadron of fighters from the Royal Dutch Air Force rose up to meet them. a squadron of fighters from the Royal Dutch Air Force rose up to meet them. Darwin was supposed to have notified the Dutch that they were coming, but they'd never received the message, and the Japanese had been harassing them almost daily with air raids, and they'd never seen one of these big Boeing seaplanes before. Worse, Ford's crew had stripped all the ID marks

Starting point is 00:05:16 off the clipper, and they couldn't explain themselves because they couldn't transmit on the channel that the Dutch were using, so they had to listen helplessly as the Dutch pilots debated whether to shoot them down. Finally, the Dutch pilots spotted the remains of an American flag on the top of the wing, and the fighters escorted them in. Ford landed just outside the harbor entrance. He said later, there was a launch that had come out to meet us, but instead of giving us a tow or a line, they stayed off about a mile and kept waving us on. Finally, when we got further into the harbor, they came closer. It turned out that we had landed right in the middle of a minefield, and they weren't about to come near us until they saw that we were through it. They'd intended to stop only for fuel because Java was now a war

Starting point is 00:05:52 zone, but the Dutch could give them only 90 octane autogas. They had limited amounts of 100 octane aviation fuel and needed to save it for their fighters. Ford knew that anything less than 100 octane could cause misfiring and cylinder damage to their engines, but they had no choice, and he accepted it. The Dutch insisted on inoculating them against typhus, dysentery, and cholera, since their next stops would be in Ceylon and India. There were no accommodations on the island, so the men ate with the Dutch and then returned to the plane for the night. From Surabaya, they headed for Ceylon, or what is now Sri Lanka, the engines backfiring and popping all the way. The flight took 20 hours, and they had no charts, only the coordinates of their destination. Ford said, we had to fly on

Starting point is 00:06:29 dead reckoning alone, for we'd had an overcast all night, which prevented our getting celestial fixes, and we had to estimate what the wind allowance should be. As they crossed the sea, they flew under the clouds so they'd be able to spot the coastline at the earliest moment. They didn't want to overshoot the island. As they did this, a Japanese submarine happened to surface right in front of them. They could see the crew running for the deck gun and firing at them as they climbed into the clouds again. Fortunately, they weren't hit. About 45 minutes later, they spotted the harbor at Troncomalee, and a British tender came out to meet them. They'd been told they were coming. A rather arrogant British officer told them they couldn't possibly have seen a Japanese sub,

Starting point is 00:07:02 and Ford chose not to press the point. Fortunately, the British could give them 100 octane fuel and told them there were navigation charts on the other side of the island. So while the others slept, Ford and the second officer took a car and driver and crossed the island to get the charts, a journey of three or four hours each way. They left Ceylon on Christmas Eve, but after about 30 minutes, there was a loud explosion. The number three engine had blown a cylinder. They needed all four engines in order to fly safely, so they had to return to Trincomalee. They had a spare engine aboard, so they had the parts they needed, but it would take two days to do the work. They even made a special tool for themselves in the blacksmith shop of a British warship. Two days later, all the engines were working, and they flew across India to Karachi in what is now Pakistan. They

Starting point is 00:07:42 topped off there with 3,100 gallons of aviation fuel and set off next for Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, where there was a British garrison. They arrived there safely after eight hours to find it insanely hot and humid, but they couldn't just refuel and go because their next stop would require a landing on the Nile, and they wanted to do that in the daylight. In Bahrain, they could find only automobile gas, and there was another problem. They were told that they couldn't fly straight across the Arabian Peninsula as they'd intended because that would take them over Mecca. The Saudis were very sensitive to any flights over their sacred areas. Instead, they'd have to fly north to Kuwait and then turn west.

Starting point is 00:08:16 Ford agreed to that, but after flying north for about 20 minutes, he found they had a solid layer of clouds under them, and he turned west and headed straight across Saudi Arabia anyway, gambling that the Saudis wouldn't be able to tell they were there. He said later, we flew for several hours before there was a break in the clouds below us, and damned if we weren't smack over the mosque at Mecca. I could see the people pouring out of it. He said they were probably firing rifles at us, but at least they didn't have any anti-aircraft. They flew on, crossed the Red Sea, reached the Nile late in the afternoon, and followed that to the confluence of the White and Blue Niles just below Khartoum in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. They spent New Year's Eve on board the plane in the middle of the Nile. The British base there had 100 octane fuel,

Starting point is 00:08:53 and the RAF gave them charts that covered the route from Khartoum to their next stop, Leopoldville, in the Belgian Congo. So at least they were no longer dependent on the atlases and maps they'd picked up at Auckland. In order to get enough speed to get away from Khartoum with a full load of fuel, they had to mark out a three-mile safe section of river from which to take off. They got off safely, but the takeoff put a strain on the plane, and the number one engine lost the aft section of its exhaust stack and started making a loud hammering noise. The plane flew okay, though, and there was no point in returning to Khartoum

Starting point is 00:09:22 since there were no spare parts there and they didn't have one on board. They decided to go on, putting up with the noise and keeping a close eye on the engine. Pan American had just established a new base in Leopoldville, and Ford chose to fly down there because the alternative would be to cross the Sahara in a seaplane, which seemed to be courting disaster. But to reach the Congo, they had to rely on dead reckoning for a time because the tropical forest became so dense that it hid the landmarks they were trying to use for navigation. Eventually, they sighted the Congo River, whose sheer size made it unmistakable, and followed that to the city, where they landed on the water. The Pan Am base was still under construction and hadn't yet established an inventory of spare parts, so they wouldn't be able to repair the engine, but they had plenty

Starting point is 00:10:00 of aviation fuel. Flying out of Leopoldville was one of the most harrowing experiences of the whole trip. The temperature was high, and so was the humidity. The engines were tired, and they were carrying a full load of fuel because they hoped to fly all the way across the South Atlantic next. The current was strong, so they had to take off down the river toward a series of waterfalls. But because of the heat, humidity, and their tremendous gross weight, Ford couldn't get the plane to take off. He pushed the throttles all the way forward, but the engine manual said he could keep them there only for one full minute at most. He went over that limit because he had no choice. If they couldn't get airborne, they'd be swept over the falls and killed. 1,700 yards from the cataract, Ford lifted the nose,

Starting point is 00:10:36 but the plane wouldn't leave the water. He tried again and got aloft, but couldn't gain altitude. The plane hovered just a few feet above the surface as the gorge came closer. The engine's now been at full power for 91 seconds, and the cylinder head temperatures were over redline. They soared over the rim of the gorge, the river dropped away and turned to white foam, and the plane dropped into the gulf. Now they were flying through a canyon, still not far above the surface, but the extra separation allowed Ford to drop the bow a bit and pick up airspeed. Now they had to turn right to follow the canyon, but the aileron cables jammed due to the hot climate. Ford found he could turn with the rudder alone, and slowly they climbed to a safe

Starting point is 00:11:09 altitude. The engines had been at full power for three minutes, but they sounded good except for the hammering, which had never stopped. So they headed to their next destination, Natal, Brazil. This would be the longest flight leg the Clipper had ever covered, 3,100 nautical miles, most of it over open ocean. There was no place to refuel, and it turned out that the upper winds had pushed them farther north than they'd thought, so they'd need all the fuel they had to get across. Ford directed that everyone review procedures for forced landings at sea in case they didn't make it. In the end, after a flight of 23 hours and 35 minutes, they did reach Natal safely. The station manager at the Pan Am base was expecting them. He'd received a dispatch from the U.S. consulate office there a few hours earlier. He said they could refuel fairly quickly,

Starting point is 00:11:48 but a new health regulation required that every arriving aircraft be sprayed for mosquitoes to control an outbreak of yellow fever. He said they'd have to seal the plane for at least an hour. The crew had lunch while that was being done, and Ford arranged a replacement exhaust stack from a different plane since they were the first B314 to fly through Natal. When they took off from Natal, the jury-rigged exhaust stack blew off almost immediately, so they were stuck with the hammering again, and they discovered that their safe had been opened and all the gas and food receipts and trip logs had been taken. Apparently, the fumigators had taken them. Possibly they'd been German or Japanese spies, but the receipts wouldn't have told them much of value. Ford reported the theft anyway. Now they were in the home stretch. They flew out of the Amazon basin, across the Guianas,

Starting point is 00:12:28 and the northeast corner of Venezuela, and after 13 hours they set down in the harbor at Port of Spain Trinidad at a fairly well-established Pan-American base. Here they finally got a proper exhaust stack, but by now they were broke and exhausted and their clothes were filthy. They just wanted to get home. They passed into winter as they headed north and reached New York Harbor on January 6, 1942, 31 days after leaving Auckland. Ford radioed, Pacific Clipper inbound from Auckland, New Zealand. Captain Ford reporting, do arrive Pan American Marine Terminal LaGuardia seven minutes. The officer on duty in the control tower hadn't been told that anything out of the ordinary was expected, so Ford's message astonished him. World War II had just started for America a month before,

Starting point is 00:13:07 and there was no flight planned for a Pan-American seaplane to arrive at that time. He wondered if this was a coded message or if Germans were flying an American plane. A Pan Am rep arrived to tell him he wasn't hearing things, but seaplanes were forbidden to land at the Marine Terminal at night, so Ford had to circle the field pointlessly for an hour until the sun came up. In the meantime, the flight watch operator notified Pan Am's transatlantic manager and PR director, as well as Army intelligence and the immigration service. No one else knew it, but history was about to be made. When the Pacific Clipper touched down, they completed the first round-the-world flight by a commercial airliner, as well as the longest

Starting point is 00:13:40 continuous flight by a commercial plane and the first circumnavigation following a route near the equator. In fact, they'd crossed the equator four times. They had touched five of the world's seven continents, crossed three oceans, flew 31,500 miles in 209 hours, and made 18 stops under the flags of 12 nations. They'd also made the longest nonstop flight in Pan American's history, crossing 3,583 miles of the South Atlantic between Africa and Brazil, and they'd flown more than 6,000 miles over desert and jungle in a seaplane, where a forced landing would have been disastrous. When they landed, the water that splashed up on the sea wings froze solid. Ford and his crew were still wearing tropical clothes and shivered so badly they could hardly talk. A man who saw the extra engine they'd been using for spare parts

Starting point is 00:14:23 said that it looked like a New Year's turkey does at this time in January. Because these were the early days of the war, all of this made a fairly small splash. No one had known about this trip until it ended, except for Pan American and a few officials of the government whose territories they'd crossed. Ford couldn't say much even now because of secrecy imposed by the Army and the Navy. A heavily censored press release went out the day after they got back, and there was a small write-up in the Pan Am Company magazine. Ford was debriefed by Pan Am and then by the Army Air Force Intelligence Team, and each member of the crew got two weeks leave before returning to regular flight duty. Steve Sears, the son of John Steers, the fourth officer, later said, the crew wasn't given any citations or awards that I know of for what they accomplished.

Starting point is 00:15:01 Actually, adventures like this one were a lot more common in the early days of aviation. And as often happens in situations like this, the people involved don't even realize what a big deal it is at the time. They're just thinking of the challenge, and they're all involved in meeting the challenge. It's only later, looking back, that we can now see how historic and heroic what they accomplished really was. The plane was returned to duty in the Atlantic Division and never returned to San Francisco, which means that technically it never completed a full circumnavigation. Its ultimate fate remains unknown. Some reports say it was scrapped, others say it was sold. According to Ed Dover, the only existing remnant of it is a tattered piece of fabric with the NC number on it, pinned to the wall of the Pan-American display at

Starting point is 00:15:38 Boeing's Museum of Flight in Seattle. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported primarily by our wonderful listeners if you become a patron of our show at patreon.com slash futilitycloset not only will you be helping to support your weekly dose of the quirky and the curious, but you will also get bonus segments for some of our episodes, more lateral

Starting point is 00:16:10 thinking puzzles, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on Sasha, our quite furry podcast mascot. We are moving into shedding season here in North Carolina. Again, our page is at patreon dot com slash futility closet, or see the supporters section of the website. And thanks again to everyone who is a part slash futilitycloset, or see the supporters section of the website.

Starting point is 00:16:25 And thanks again to everyone who is a part of Futility Closet. In episode 193, I discussed that many common drugs have unknown mechanisms of action, meaning that exactly how they achieve their therapeutic effects is unknown. Greg and I discussed a bit how many drugs are discovered by chance, and Reed Savory wrote in to let me know that my conceptions on this topic might be a bit outdated. Sharon wanted to provide you and Greg a small bit of information about the modern pharmaceutical industry. While it's true that for most of history, drugs were discovered either by chance or by

Starting point is 00:17:05 mixing various chemicals and seeing what the results were in animals and people, it obviously hasn't been that simple in a long time. Even going back to the 1940s and 50s, scientists had a fairly complex idea of how various substances would react in the human body and set about creating chemical combinations with specific intent. The early forms of drugs like chemotherapy wouldn't have been possible without this research. In more modern times, Greg's statement about companies working to create specific molecules is literally true. Pharmaceutical research companies like Vertex Pharmaceuticals began using supercomputers starting in the mid-1990s to create computer-generated models of drugs in order to allow the companies to eliminate those

Starting point is 00:17:45 millions of chemical combinations that had no potential and focus actual laboratory work on those that looked promising. During my time with Vertex back in 1999 to 2001, I contributed to the design of their second-generation supercomputer, which for a brief time was the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world. Always proud to be a patron, and please give a good rub from me to Sasha the Futilicat. And thanks to Reed for this insight into the drug industry. I'm sure my remarks were a bit too glib about the modern state of affairs in the industry, though it does seem to me like a lot of drug development is still surprisingly hit or miss, though the computer modeling likely does help cut down quite a bit on some of the potential misses. As I was thinking about this, though,

Starting point is 00:18:29 after getting Reid's email, it occurred to me that a big part of the problem with drug development might be that there isn't a clear enough idea of what exactly the underlying cause is for many different diseases. It might be known what the signs or symptoms are, or some of what seems to be going wrong in various complex diseases like heart disease or signs or symptoms are, or some of what seems to be going wrong, in various complex diseases like heart disease or diabetes or Alzheimer's, but it seems like it's still unclear what the full picture is on the underlying issues or causes. And this means that for many diseases, drugs are targeted to symptoms or more proximal causes, but might not be targeting the underlying causes, and therefore might not be as effective as drug manufacturers would like.

Starting point is 00:19:06 You can't design a solution if you don't quite know what the problem is. Exactly. In another perspective on this topic, Will Denahan wrote, Dear slash meow, Sharon, Greg, and Sasha. The follow-up in episode 193 regarding drugs whose mechanism of action we don't fully understand reminded me of another interesting pharmaceutical phenomenon that I thought you and other listeners might enjoy, that of drug repositioning, i.e. using drugs for reasons

Starting point is 00:19:33 other than that which they were first created for. And Will notes that there are many examples of this phenomenon, but his favorite one is that of sildenafil, which was initially intended to treat angina. During its testing trials in the 1990s, it showed mediocre therapeutic results, but was found to have a very strong side effect that enabled the drug company Pfizer to rebrand the drug as a treatment for erectile dysfunction and to begin selling it in 1998 under the brand name Viagra. And Will says,

Starting point is 00:20:03 many thanks to you all for your fantastic show and to my friend Andy the Jolly Rogers who recommended it to me in the first place. I greatly look forward to sampling more quirky curiosities. So thank you to Will for that and his helpful pronunciation tips. And thank you to the unknown Andy for recommending the show. I had heard this story about Viagra, though I hadn't connected it to our discussion. And until I got Will's email and looked into it, I hadn't realized how common drug repositioning or repurposing actually is. I found several articles stating that drug repositioning is becoming increasingly common. For example, a 2016 article in Nature states that

Starting point is 00:20:43 there were 30 articles a month being published in scientific journals on cases of drug repositioning, which represented a six-fold increase over the previous five years, and that in 2015, a journal dedicated to the topic of drug repurposing was being launched. The article says that repurposed drugs might account for about 30% of all drugs approved each year. Similar to Reed's analysis, drug repositioning used to be more a matter of trial and error, or serendipitously stumbling onto another use for a drug. But more recently, big data analytics and computational models are being used to systematically search for drugs that might be more likely to be effective in

Starting point is 00:21:21 other conditions. This is a big help to drug companies, as developing a drug from scratch can take a great deal of time and expense. It can take on average 13 to 15 years and between 2 to 3 billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, and only a minority of drugs will prove to be safe and effective enough to be approved for sale. For example, a large study of drug development success rates that examined almost 10,000 clinical drug trials from 2006 to 2015 found that the likelihood of eventual approval for potential drugs that made it to early clinical trials was only 9.6%. Wow.

Starting point is 00:21:58 So you're right. It makes a lot more sense to just try to find a way to adapt one of your existing... Right, because then a few steps at least have already been done, and it saves you at least some time and effort. It does seem like everyone's favorite example of drug repositioning is Viagra, and that's possibly because a billion-dollar blockbuster drug was discovered basically by accident, and because it does make an amusing story.

Starting point is 00:22:21 I recall at the time reading that when the drug was being tested for heart conditions, the study coordinator started to catch on that something was going on when their male test subjects didn't want to give back their unused pills at the end of their trials. But Viagra is definitely not the only medication to be discovered serendipitously. I actually found an article entitled The Role of Serendipity in Drug Discovery, published in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience by Dr. Thomas A. Ban. Dr. Ban's article discusses the various roles that serendipity has played in the history of medications, focusing mostly on psychiatric

Starting point is 00:22:55 drugs. He mentioned several drugs that were discovered while looking for something else, such as the discovery of chlorpromazine, marketed as Thorazine, as one of the first drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, and which was discovered while searching for drugs to kill parasitic worms. There are also drugs that were discovered when a completely wrong conceptualization of a disorder actually led to good empirical results, such as the discovery of lithium as a mood stabilizer because of the theory that mood disorders might be a kind of gout of the brain that lithium should be able to treat. Or the discovery of potassium bromide as an early anticonvulsant due to the belief that epilepsy was caused by masturbation and this compound would curb the sex drive. So those drugs happened to work against the conditions they were intended

Starting point is 00:23:39 to treat, but just by entirely different mechanisms? Right, exactly. Their thought of the underlying theory of what was causing the disorder was completely wrong. But it still worked. But the drug still worked anyway, yes. Dr. Ban also notes drugs such as Viagra that ended up being useful for their side effects, and some that are discovered by sheer chance alone, such as Librium, which was one of the earliest benzodiazepines or tranquilizers, and it was left on a laboratory shelf by a chemist who'd been experimenting with similar compounds

Starting point is 00:24:09 and then was discovered a few years later during a laboratory cleaning. There are apparently quite a number of drugs that owe their discovery to a certain amount of serendipity, and that extends further to medical devices. In 1956, Wilson Greatbatch was working to create a device that would record heartbeats when he accidentally installed the wrong kind of resistor and realized that his device was now producing regular electrical pulses. After a little refinement, Greatbatch had the first implantable pacemaker. And lest the medical industry feel that we are overly picking on them,

Starting point is 00:24:44 Simone Hilliard wrote in to note, On the subject of innovations that we still don't know the workings of, bikes are still largely a mystery to engineers. Simone sent a link to an article in Fast Company that says, A bicycle is surprisingly stable for an upright two-wheeled vehicle that needs to be propped against a wall when it's not moving. But perhaps a bigger surprise is that no consensus exists on why the bike is as stable as it is. So if you simply push a riderless bike, it's able to balance itself. And apparently after 150 years of study, it's still rather a mystery as to how it does that. Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, wrote an article in New Statesman titled, We Still Don't Really Know How Bicycles Work, and said,

Starting point is 00:25:28 Forget mysterious dark matter and the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe. The bicycle represents a far more embarrassing hole in the accomplishments of physics. That's always amazed me. Ever since I was a kid, it just seems so... Implausible? Yeah, like, how can that work? It just seems very unlikely. Who was the first person

Starting point is 00:25:46 who even thought that might work? That I couldn't tell you. But as with many drugs, bicycles relied on just sheer trial and error engineering to eventually produce these stable versions that weren't prone to toppling. But since we don't exactly know how or why they work this well,

Starting point is 00:26:01 that means it's very possible that an even better version of a bicycle is still waiting to be constructed. Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We really appreciate your feedback, comments, and updates. So if you have anything that you'd like to say to either us or to the Futilicat, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:26:32 podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to present me with a strange sounding situation, and I have to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Arabo Avanes. In 2014, a 15-year-old boy appeared at a trauma center in new delhi with ulcers on his forearm the doctors found that he'd injected mercury there at least three times why had he done this so he did this deliberately yes apparently he got the mercury from a thermometer and a sphygmomanometer um was he trying to cure another illness? No. Oh, mercury has been used like in the past to cure different things. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:12 Okay. Was he laboring under some false belief? Yes. Some misapprehension about something. So he believed that by injecting himself with mercury, there would be some outcome. Yes. That he desired. That's right.

Starting point is 00:27:28 Okay. Was this outcome, I guess there's two things it could be. It would either be that the outcome would be ameliorating something negative or causing something positive. So was this outcome, he hoped, causing something positive? Yes. As opposed to reducing something negative. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:47 So he was hoping, was he hoping to like, I don't know, make himself radioactive like Peter Parker and become Spider-Man or something like that? Well done. That's basically it. Are you serious? He'd seen the movie X-Men Origins Wolverine and believed that injecting mercury would convert his bones to metal, similar to Wolverine, whose skeleton is reinforced with adamantium in the movie.

Starting point is 00:28:06 Okay. Deepji Sukhchiga and colleagues wrote in the Journal of Laboratory Physicians, Interestingly, he had a past history of multiple bites by spiders to simulate Spider-Man. Surprisingly, he had no other psychiatric problems and had a normal IQ. Doctors found that mercury was only under the skin, so they were able to fix him up with a skin graft. Interestingly, a 15-year-old girl did the same thing for the same reason in Sri Lanka in 2016. Those doctors wrote that the movie, quote, gave the wrong impression that injection of liquid metals to the bones can convert bone to metal.

Starting point is 00:28:35 They added, we suggest to include a warning saying injection or ingestion of mercury can cause serious bodily harm at the start of this type of movie. So in the movie, Wolverine has metal, liquid metals? Yeah, the character has, it's called adamantium, but basically metal fuses to the skeleton, as I understand it. And he somehow thought mercury would be close enough? Yeah, that he could do that to himself. Oh my gosh.

Starting point is 00:28:57 So thanks, Al Robbo, for sending that. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. This podcast would not still be here today if it weren't for the generous support of our listeners. If you'd like to help support 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. Or see the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:29:30 While you're at the site, you can also check out Greg's collection of over 10,000 quirky curiosities. Browse the Futility Closet store to see the cool penguin adorned items you can get. Learn about the Futility Closet books and see the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us. You can email us at podcast. At futilitycloset.com Our music was written and performed. By the ever impressive Doug Ross. Thanks for listening. And we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 196-The Long Way Home

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