Futility Closet - 206-The Sky and the Sea

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 Herbert Hoover's workout to William Taft's diet. This is episode 206. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard opened two new worlds in the 20th century. He was the first person to fly 10 miles above the earth

Starting point is 00:00:33 and the first to travel two miles beneath the sea, using inventions that opened the doors to these new frontiers. In today's show, we'll follow Piccard on his historic journeys into the sky and the sea. We'll also admire some beekeeping serendipity and puzzle over a sudden need for locksmiths. Auguste Picard and his twin brother Jean were born in 1884 into a remarkable Swiss family with a predilection for inventing and tinkering. Their relative Rodolphe Piccard, had invented an exploding cannonball, their uncle Paul had built the first Grand Prix cars with brakes on the front wheels, and their father, a professor of chemistry at the University of Basel, had installed the first telephones in Switzerland. Both boys immediately rose to this tradition, reading Jules Verne, discussing science with their father's friends, and playing in a little lab that

Starting point is 00:01:23 he made for them. They had been born at an exciting time. Gas ballooning had been invented in France in the 1780s and was becoming popular as the boys were growing up. By age 10, they were making crude paper balloons of their own. These didn't work well, but their father encouraged them to persevere. He said the effort is a most vital part of any experiment. Without continued trial and error, you can never hope for success. The popularity of balloons was permitting new investigations into the ocean of air over our heads. The boys followed the progress of the French meteorologist Léon Tesseronc de Borde, who used balloons to carry instruments into the sky. He'd begun to suspect that the atmosphere was divided into two parts, a lower part, the troposphere, and a higher one, the stratosphere.

Starting point is 00:02:04 Balloons and science continued to captivate the Picard boys as they advanced through school. Auguste started ballooning for fun in 1912, in his 20s. He called it the most beautiful of sports, the one which offers man the most pure of pleasures. Jean felt the same way. In 1913, the two of them made a 16-hour flight together, departing from Zurich and flying over France and Germany. As night fell, they called out to their mother as they passed over her house. She couldn't see them and told her doctor she was hearing voices. Auguste had the heart of an adventurer, but he was solidly a scientist, almost comically so. He lived in Brussels at the same time as Georges Prosper Remy,

Starting point is 00:02:37 better known as Erge, who created the Adventures of Tintin in the 1930s. At six foot six, Auguste was a distinctive figure in the city, and Erge turned him into a character, Professor Cuthbert Calculus. Erge said, Calculus is a reduced-scale Picard, as the real chap was very tall. He had an interminable neck that sprouted from a collar that was much too large. I made Calculus a mini-Picard, otherwise it would have had to enlarge the frames of the comic strip. Others agreed. Time magazine said in 1932 that Picard looked, quote, precisely like a cartoonist's idea of a scientist. Incidentally, the character Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek The Next Generation, was named after the Picard

Starting point is 00:03:14 brothers. Around this time, Auguste told Jean that he wanted to study cosmic rays, which were poorly understood at the time. Radioactivity had been discovered in 1896, and in 1906, Theodore Wolff had found higher levels of radiation at the top of the Eiffel Tower than at ground level. It was suspected that some kind of radiation was entering the atmosphere from above, but it was difficult to study. The only way to do it was to send instruments up in a balloon and wait for it to come down. And those instruments were rather primitive. That gave Auguste an idea. If he could build an unusually large and light balloon, one that could carry both the necessary instruments and some human observers,

Starting point is 00:03:47 he might go up into the sky and take the measurements himself. No one had ever tried that. To observe the cosmic rays, he figured he'd have to go up about 10 miles, where many people thought that exposure to thin air would kill him instantly. He later wrote, The specialists of the day considered my suggestion as unrealizable, but the single objection that they were able to make was that up till then, no one had ever done it. Instead of a basket, he realized, his balloon could carry an airtight aluminum ball, a pressurized cabin that would be the first of its kind.

Starting point is 00:04:14 His son Jacques later said, I never step across the threshold of a modern airplane's cabin without remembering that my father invented the first one. Auguste made his cabin about two meters in diameter, large enough to carry two observers and their instruments. They could look out on the world through round portholes. He had the cabin built at Liège, at a factory where kegs were made for storing pressurized beer. When the owner delivered it, he said it was rather unconventional for a beer barrel. Auguste always downplayed his courage in making this experiment, but the truth was that no one could be sure what might befall him in the upper atmosphere. He thought that the metal of the gondola would protect him

Starting point is 00:04:47 from ultraviolet rays, but he thought that gamma rays might tan his face and hands. He had decided to paint half the gondola black and half white so that as it turned in the sun it might regulate its temperature, but he joked that his feet might get cold. They were finally ready in the spring of 1931, and Auguste and his assistant, Paul Kiepfer, took off from Augsburg in Bavaria early in the morning of May 27th. If Auguste's plans had been followed carefully, it looks like all would have gone well, but during the confused takeoff, two things went wrong. First, the wind blew the cabin off its lorry and knocked it slightly out of shape. And second, the ground crew attached another rope to the hoop without informing Auguste.

Starting point is 00:05:24 There was no time to address these problems. They were climbing before they knew it. In fact, Kieffer was still completing his preparations when he noticed a factory chimney passing below them. But a few minutes after launch, Picard noticed that when the gondola had been knocked from its transport, it had created a small aperture in the wall, and now their precious air was escaping. He told Kieffer, If we don't become airtight immediately, we must pull the valve and land if we don't want to suffocate. As he said this, they were already two and a half miles up

Starting point is 00:05:49 and rising. He managed to plug the leak, and they continued soaring upward. By 425, their altitude was 51,200 feet. They'd risen nine miles in less than half an hour and had silently entered the stratosphere. From the portholes, they could look over 246,000 square miles, an area larger than France, and they were the first humans to see the curvature of their planet. Auguste wrote later, nothing disturbs the clearness of the stratosphere, no mist, no cloud. It is unchangeable fine weather and eternal peace. A bright sun rises over the horizon and travels the unsullied majesty of a purple sky. No sooner has it set in the evening than stars light up and sparkle as no earthly spectator has ever seen them. This land of dreams,

Starting point is 00:06:30 this paradise, is the stratosphere. Twenty minutes, half an hour's ascent in a free balloon separates us from it. That is all, but that is a great deal. When they'd finished their observations, Auguste tried to open a valve to release hydrogen from the balloon, and he got another shock. It was jammed. The confusion with the ropes at takeoff now prevented him from operating it, and if he couldn't operate the valve, then they couldn't descend. They were prisoners of the air, as he wrote in his logbook. Of course, the balloon must come down eventually, but they must now wait until the sun had faded and the gas in the envelope cooled,

Starting point is 00:07:00 and in the meantime, they'd have to float aimlessly over Germany, Austria, and Italy. Outside, the temperature varied between minus 50 and minus 75 degrees Celsius, so the interior was soon covered with frost. But the sun, which was twice as powerful here as at sea level, also heated the gondola, so the frost dropped from the walls and it began to snow in the cabin. In fact, it soon became uncomfortably warm. The rope that had been attached at takeoff was keeping the cabin from turning, so the side that Auguste had painted black was continuously facing the sun. As the temperature rose to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, they huddled near the floor in the coolest part of the cabin and licked the water that flowed along the wall on the shady side of

Starting point is 00:07:37 the gondola. Finally, as the sun passed its zenith, the balloon began to descend. To save oxygen, he and Kiepfer said nothing, just sat and looked at each other in the spherical cabin. By 8 p.m., they had finally left the stratosphere, but they were still seven and a half miles off the ground. Down below, no one could understand why they weren't returning. They'd been expected to land at noon. Throughout the afternoon, thousands of people had watched them wander across the sky. Two planes had taken off but couldn't reach their altitude. Scientists feared that a leak had killed them. A New York Times reporter wrote that the balloon was, quote, drifting aimlessly over the glaciers of the Tyrolean Alps,

Starting point is 00:08:12 apparently out of control and occupied only by the dead. They weren't dead, but they were increasingly desperate to reach the ground. At 15,000 feet, when their barometer told them there was equal pressure inside and outside the capsule, Picard opened the cabin door for the first time in 17 hours. He could see they were high in the mountains but approaching a flat glacier. Quickly he opened a panel in the balloon to release some hydrogen, and they came down, roughly but safely, on the ice. There was only one hour of oxygen left in their tanks. That night they camped on the mountain, and in the morning they hiked down to the village of Obergorgl, where Picard sent a telegram to his wife. It said with characteristic understatement,

Starting point is 00:08:45 After a long, difficult trip, Kiefer and I have landed. We reached the height we desired. All my love. Before August's flight, the highest altitude anyone had reached was 43,166 feet, which was achieved in a plane in 1930. He and Kiepfer had just reached 51,775 feet, and once since they traveled only 10 miles, but in another they changed everything. The flight was reported around the world. Picard told his innkeeper that the world seemed a strange place now, though he'd been away for only 16 hours. When a reporter asked what did the world look like from such a height, he said, first of all, details disappeared and the world became flat and colorless. Then, as we rose above the blue sky, we saw the world through it in a fairy-like

Starting point is 00:09:23 bluish haze of extraordinary beauty. Generally, Picard understated his accomplishment, but in his journal he wrote, I have succeeded in my dream of being the Columbus of the stratosphere. He and Kiepfer were driven back to Innsbruck in a car decked with laurels, and every village and town along the way turned out to see them. The French made Picard a commander of the Legion of Honor, and the Belgians gave him the Order of Leopold. Auguste's wife had been so worried during the flight that she made him promise never to make another ascent. Even Albert Einstein told him, you must never go up yourself again. Think of your

Starting point is 00:09:52 wife and children. But he went up again only a year later in August 1932, and in fact made another 25 balloon flights, the highest reaching 23,000 meters or 14 miles. His new celebrity opened doors for him, and he met other aviators and explorers. On a trip to America, he met Charles Lindbergh at Amelia Earhart's house. He told Lindbergh, you are a great aeronaut. I am a mere balloonist studying penetrating radiations. Our territories almost touch, but they are not the same. And on the same trip, he met the American naturalist William Beebe, who had descended 922 meters under the sea in a bathysphere, a sphere that was lowered into the ocean on a cable. That might seem like a very different

Starting point is 00:10:28 endeavor from climbing the sky in a balloon, but in fact Picard's mind had been moving in that direction for some time. He'd first begun thinking about deep sea exploration as a first year student in Zurich, where he'd read about the bizarre fish that were hauled up in deep sea nets. He wanted to see those fish in the normal environment, as he put it, to transport his laboratory into the environment to be studied, just as he'd done with the balloon. As a student, he'd had no way to realize that dream, but now it didn't seem so impossible. In 1937, the University of Brussels held a reception for King Leopold III, who asked Picard what he was working on. Somehow cosmic rays didn't seem interesting, so he said,

Starting point is 00:11:00 Your Majesty, I am planning to build a deep sea research submarine, a bathyscaphe, for diving to the very bottom of the sea. The king was impressed and asked for details. The next AP car told his assistants, Gentlemen, I told the king yesterday they were going to build a bathyscaphe. We have no choice now but to do it. He had promised his wife he'd stop ascending, but he'd said nothing about descending. His wife, I gather, was rather long-suffering. Tom Cheshire, who wrote a book about all this, says that when Auguste was decorated by the king, so was she for putting up with such a husband. He began working with his son Jacques on the Bathyscaphe, whose name is Greek for depth ship. Jacques had studied economics and social sciences, but he'd taken up the family tradition of

Starting point is 00:11:37 inventing and exploring. He once wrote, it never occurred to me that my early life was anything but normal. I was aware that not everyone had a father and an uncle who disappeared into the sky in balloons. This is something the Picards did, though. Some people were wine merchants, some shopkeepers, and others local officials. The Picards made experiments. Together, they decided that, as with a stratospheric balloon, the best shape for the bathyscaphe would be a sphere, since that would distribute the pressure most efficiently. William Beebe had lowered his sphere on a cable. Auguste would suspend his below a float, so it would operate like a balloon underwater. The most advanced conventional submarine at the time had descended to 383 feet, and an armor-clad diver had once reached 525 feet, but he could barely see or move. In the bathysphere, Beebe and the engineer Otis

Starting point is 00:12:20 Barton had gone much deeper, reaching 3,028 feet in 1934. Beebe had written, only dead men have sunk below this. Auguste and Jacques admired that accomplishment. Auguste wrote, it is no exaggeration to say that it is he who opened the doors of the abyss to man. But Jacques pointed out that the bathysphere was lowered by a cable and so was limited to descents of only half a mile or so. The bathyscaphe, by contrast, would not be tied to a cable and could navigate independently. They had worked out the requirements and begun constructing the bathyscaphe when, unfortunately, World War II broke out and they had to suspend their work. By the time the war ended, Auguste was more than 60 years old. If he were going to go, it would have to be soon.

Starting point is 00:12:56 He made his first historic dive in October 1948 with Theodore Monod, another member of the team, off the coast of Africa near Dakar. It was a seemingly sedate affair. They played chess on the way down, spent a quarter of an hour on the bottom at 14 fathoms, or 84 feet, then jettisoned their ballast, 12 tubs of scrap iron, and rose again to the surface. But with that trial accomplished, they could move on to another island in the Cape Verde group and try some deeper dives with an unmanned submersible, and those got as low as 759 fathoms. That broke the record that Beebe had set, and, Auguste wrote, a new era of deep-sea exploration had been opened.

Starting point is 00:13:30 Encouraged by their successes, in 1953, Auguste and Jacques launched a second bathyscaphe named Trieste, which was much larger than the first and had a thicker-walled spherical cabin. And the Trieste father and son made many deep dives together along the southwest coast of Italy. In September, they dove to 10,300 feet, two miles down, a new record. Auguste wrote that, like the aviation pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont, we too were entering a virgin sea. My feelings were like those that I felt on May 27, 1931, when, with Kiepfer, I entered the stratosphere. But the analogy stops there. Here there was neither sun nor moon nor stars, nothing but opaque shades. For the second time in his life, he was witnessing something no one else had seen.

Starting point is 00:14:08 He wrote, the seafloor was a featureless and lifeless colored plane fading into the distance to blackness. That would be Agut's final dive, but Jacques kept piloting the Trieste for six years, and on January 23, 1960, he took it to the bottom of the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, 35,800 feet down. There, he said, by far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole. We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all. That achievement created a public clamor for a larger submersible in which groups of scientists or even tourists could witness the undersea world he described. So he sold the Trieste to the Navy and built the world's first tourist submarine for the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition at Lausanne. It had large

Starting point is 00:14:50 windows, airline-style seating, and uniformed hostesses, and during the year-long fair, it carried 33,000 tourists 1,000 feet under Lake Geneva. He named it the Auguste Picard. Auguste died of a heart attack at home in Lausanne in 1962. He was 78. He had never stopped inventing. At his death, he was working on a new diving ship, and he left behind a family in which the tradition was going strong. His brother Jean and his wife and son all made their names as high-altitude balloonists. His son Jacques had visited the lowest point on earth, and his grandson Bertrand would become the first person to circumnavigate the globe by balloon. Bertrand used some of Auguste's discoveries in planning his own flight, and he said that Jacques, quote,

Starting point is 00:15:28 passed on to me a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common assumptions, a belief in free will and confidence in the face of the unknown. Jacques was 81 when Bertrand completed his round-the-world flight in March 1999. He said, you know, I was proud and happy to be the son of my father, and now I am proud and happy to be the father of our listeners to be able to keep going. If you'd like to contribute to our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or if you'd like to support us in a more ongoing way, you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll also get access to more lateral thinking puzzles, extra information and discussion on some of the stories, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on what Sasha, our hard-working podcast mascot, has been doing lately. You can check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link at the website.

Starting point is 00:16:36 And thanks again to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. We really couldn't do this without you. it going. We really couldn't do this without you. David Bismarck wrote to us on the topic of medical treatments discovered by chance that we've discussed a few times in episodes 193, 196, and 201. Dear Sharon and Greg, on the thread of medications that we don't understand how they work, I thought you might find this interesting. I am a beekeeper out here in Krihanstad in southern Sweden and have to help my bees survive an ever-present infestation of Varroa destructor.

Starting point is 00:17:14 The beekeeping world trembled with the news this year that lithium chloride may be the sadly latest silver bullet against the mite. This was discovered when researchers used lithium chloride to deliver a different active substance to test its effectiveness as a miticide, but achieved similar results in a test group of colonies. Surely the delivery agent turning out to be an effective drug must count as serendipity, as no one anticipated it or yet understands how it works. Because it is funny that Sharon worries about mispronouncing names and my name is so easy to pronounce, I have included the name of my municipality above,

Starting point is 00:17:50 and it is a hard one. If Sharon has a healthy hatred for the international phonetic alphabet, as anyone would, I am attaching a wave. So I do appreciate that if David wanted to challenge me to try to say Krihansta, that he did send an audio file to help me out, as I can't make any sense out of the International Phonetic Alphabet. David also sent a perhaps unwitting pronunciation challenge in the Varroa destructor, a parasitic mite whose pronunciation seems to be quite debated among beekeepers and varies among the different references that I

Starting point is 00:18:25 checked. But however you pronounce it, though, this mite has been of great concern to honeybee keepers. There was a quote in an article in the American Bee Journal, a periodical that I was delighted to learn existed, that said, if you don't worry about Varroa, you're either wildly ignorant or not a beekeeper. And all of us who like to eat should be concerned about honeybees, as they play a central role in agriculture, with their global economic contribution to food production estimated as being between $235 and $285 billion annually. Honeybees pollinate more than 90% of plants that rely on insect pollination, and there have been growing concerns among farmers and beekeepers in the last several years as losses

Starting point is 00:19:09 of bee colonies have been reported in almost all countries in Europe and North America. It seems that there may be several factors contributing to the collapses of the honeybee colonies, but certainly one big factor has been the Varroa mite. Unfortunately, there have been very few effective treatments available against the parasite, and the mites have been developing resistance to those few compounds used. No new treatments have been found in the last 25 years, so when German researchers recently published an article identifying a promising new treatment, it was pretty significant news in the beekeeping community. As David noted though, this potentially huge breakthrough was discovered entirely by accident. The researchers were testing a process

Starting point is 00:19:50 called RNA interference or RNAi, which basically involved identifying unique genes that are essential for the mite survival and introducing RNA that would interfere with or silence those specific genes, hopefully without affecting the bees. So some mite-infested honeybees were fed a sugar syrup containing synthetic RNA of potentially essential Varroa genes, and happily all those mites on those bees died within three days. Only rather confusingly, all the mites also died in a comparison group that had been fed a syrup containing synthetic RNA based on jellyfish genes that were chosen to have no effect on either mites or honeybees.

Starting point is 00:20:31 Bees fed a plain syrup with no RNA continued to show mortality due to the mites. As David said, further testing finally determined that the answer to this conundrum was that the lithium chloride used in the production of the synthetic RNA was itself apparently a very effective miticide. So this will hopefully be very good news for bees and indeed for all of us who eat crops, especially as lithium chloride is more readily available than synthetic mite RNA, though some are cautioning that more long-term study is still needed at this point to be sure of the efficacy of lithium chloride in a variety of situations and the long-term safety for the bees. But certainly a case of complete serendipity in the discovery of a potential new treatment. That's an amazing story. So they just chose lithium chloride just as a vehicle or something?

Starting point is 00:21:20 In the production of the synthetic RNA. Yeah, right. With no idea at all. No one expected it would have any efficacy at all. Definitely. Yes. And it just happened to. Right. And it was a good thing that they did this control with the jellyfish genes, right? So they could see.

Starting point is 00:21:33 It'd be very confusing. It's like, oh my gosh, the mites are dying. You can do anything at all and it works. Yeah. And Orion Sauter wrote, In episode 202, you discussed Rufus the Wimbledon Hawk, which reminded me of my brother's alma mater, Vassar College. They used to have a serious problem with geese making a mess of their fields and attacking visitors, until they hired Ben, a specially trained border collie. And Orion included a link to a 2004 article from Vassar College's Miscellany News all about Ben, the official

Starting point is 00:22:05 Vassar director of geese. According to the article pre-Ben, Vassar had a serious problem with the hordes of geese flocking around Sunset Lake. The birds eventually invaded the golf course and Prentiss athletic field, making the players slip on their droppings and scaring the audience members and passers-by by hissing and chasing them. Ben was a bit expensive but was quite successful in chasing the geese off the fields and scaring them out of the lake by making flying leaps into it. Similar to Rufus, Ben was issued an employee ID card that had his picture on it and presumably his official job title. As the Miscellany News article is now 13 and a half years old, I tried to find anything more recent about Ben or his possible successor. I did find an article from 2010 about how the

Starting point is 00:22:53 State University of New York at New Paltz was considering purchasing their own specially trained border collie to deal with their goose problems. And that article had several quotes from Ben's handler about how wonderfully Ben had been working out for Vassar. So he was apparently still on the job at that time. But I couldn't find anything more recent than that on Ben, though, in case you're wondering, SUNY New Paltz was inspired enough by him to get their own border collie Augie in 2011. Oh, good for them. So they have a director of geese, too, presumably.

Starting point is 00:23:22 And Paola Cognini let us us know bird scarer is a legitimate profession for humans too collisions with birds are a problem for aircraft and can be quite frequent in airports which have undeveloped or rural areas nearby so a friend of mine drives a sound system equipped four by four truck around a local airport and is tasked with spotting, identifying, and disposing of any birds on the runway. He tells me that some raptors actually take advantage of the open surface of the runway as a clear hunting ground and get themselves squished. One of the jobs is to try and classify birds in their post-incident state, which is called snarge. One of the reasons why it's important to identify the birds is the way in

Starting point is 00:24:05 which the sound system works. While my friend has access to recordings of predator calls and also something called a sonic cannon, the best way to get rid of a flock of birds, apparently, is to play the warning call used by that species, sort of like broadcasting get out in Starling or Gull or Goose. That's a clever solution. I bet that works really well. I bet it does too. And it's good to know that if our show has inspired anyone to want to be a bird scarer, that option is available for humans. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate the feedback, updates, and information that we get from our listeners. So if you have any that you'd like to send to us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:24:53 It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him an intriguing situation and he has to figure out what is actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle is based on something that I read in Dan Lewis's Now I Know e-newsletter. In 1998, about 700 Denny's restaurants nationwide suddenly needed to hire a locksmith. Why? Oh, no. How many? 700?

Starting point is 00:25:20 700 nationwide. So they're not all in one location. It's like a power failure or something. Needed hire a locksmith. Okay, is that because they were unable to operate their locks? That is not it. That's not it? That's not it.

Starting point is 00:25:35 Okay, they all hired locksmiths to perform the same function? Yes. In the restaurant itself? Yes. Did that involve working on a lock of some kind not like the lock to get into the restaurant but you could hire a locksmith because he has skills to do any number of things i see so ask your question again i'm trying to understand your question all these locksmiths showed up at all these denny's yes and did something yes were they working on opening a door let's's start with that. No. No.

Starting point is 00:26:05 Were they opening a lock of some kind? I'll say no. Were they all performing the same task? Yes. Was this occasioned by some computer malfunction? No. I think what would induce all of these things to happen at the same time? All right.

Starting point is 00:26:24 That's a tangent. Were they doing something that I would normally associate a locksmith with doing? I think that's, yes, probably safe bet. Installing something? Yes.

Starting point is 00:26:36 Installing a lock? Yes. On a, do I need to know on what? On a door? On a door. 700 locksmiths installed 700 locks

Starting point is 00:26:45 on 700 doors in 700 Denny's across the country. Yes. Do these doors formerly have locks? No. All right, is this that- And that's important. Denny's, the chain, realized it was vulnerable to something. That's not exactly it.

Starting point is 00:27:09 Were all these restaurants essentially the same, designed the same, built the same? I would say yes. Okay, so if one of them had this vulnerability, I'm imagining. Yeah, that's not quite right. But someone who ordered this, the president of Denny's, said we need to have locks installed on all these doors.

Starting point is 00:27:27 No. Actually, the owner of Denny's did say something, but he, it was up to the 700 restaurants themselves suddenly realized

Starting point is 00:27:36 they were going to need locks on their doors because of something that the owner decided. Okay, that's a good hint. Um, what the heck?

Starting point is 00:27:44 But they all decided it independently, not knowing that there were 700 other restaurants doing the same thing. Okay, so there's some new policy that Denny's is... That's close, yeah. That leaves them open to some... Like, if they didn't install these locks, would they be vulnerable to some crime or something? They would have been.

Starting point is 00:28:06 Does that have anything to do with the hours? Sort of. Okay, so Denny's changes the hours that they're open? Is that it? That's close. Does that have anything to do with the way that money is handled? No. That's close.

Starting point is 00:28:18 That's close. Is this a door that's normally used by the public? Yes. Is this a door to get into the restaurant? That didn't before used by the public? Yes. So it's just a door to get into the restaurant? That didn't before have locks on it? Yes. Oh, my gosh. Were they going to be open like 24 hours now?

Starting point is 00:28:34 And so... Denny's are usually open 24 hours. Oh, and if they're going to stop doing that, they need to actually lock it up when they leave. That's right. Denny's is usually always open all day, every day. But in 1998, the corporate office decided that all 1,221 restaurants nationwide would close for Christmas for the first time ever. I never thought about that. You don't need locks if you're always open.

Starting point is 00:28:56 That's right. The restaurants had never closed before, so they didn't have locks on the front doors. That's a good puzzle. We are always on the lookout for good lateral thinking puzzles. So if you have any that you'd like to send in for us to try, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And as a reminder, if you want to, you can specify in the subject line who you would like to have solve the puzzle.

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Starting point is 00:29:44 Browse the Futility Clos amusements, browse the Futility Closet store, check out the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast with links and references for today's topics. If you have any questions or comments for either of us or our director of mice, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. All of our music was written and performed by the incomparable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 206-The Sky and the Sea

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