Futility Closet - 223-The Prince of Forgers

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

Denis Vrain-Lucas was an undistinguished forger until he met gullible collector Michel Chasles. Through the 1860s Lucas sold Chasles thousands of phony letters by everyone from Plato to Louis the 14th, earning thousands of francs and touching off a firestorm among confused scholars. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll trace the career of the world's most prolific forger. We'll also count Queen Elizabeth's eggs and puzzle over a destroyed car. Intro: In 2011 Australian architect Horst Kiechle sculpted a human torso from paper. English historian Thomas Birch went angling dressed as a tree. Sources for our feature on Denis Vrain-Lucas: Joseph Rosenblum, Prince of Forgers, 1998. Michael Farquhar, A Treasury of Deception, 2005. John Whitehead, This Solemn Mockery, 1973. James Anson Farrer, Literary Forgeries, 1907. Rebekah Higgitt, "'Newton Dépossédé!' The British Response to the Pascal Forgeries of 1867," British Journal for the History of Science 36:131 (December 2003), 437-453. Stephen Ornes, "Descartes' Decipherer," Nature 483:7391 (March 29, 2012), 540. R.A. Rosenbaum, "Michel Chasles and the Forged Autograph Letters," Mathematics Teacher 52:5 (May 1959), 365-366. Ken Alder, "History's Greatest Forger: Science, Fiction, and Fraud along the Seine," Critical Inquiry 30:4 (2004), 702-716. Bruce Whiteman, "Practice to Deceive: The Amazing Stories of Literary Forgery's Most Notorious Practitioners, by Joseph Rosenblum," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 39:1 (2001). "Missives Impossible: Fake News Is Nothing New -- Even Isaac Newton Was a Victim, Says Stephen Ornes," New Scientist 236:3157/3158 (Dec. 23, 2017), 76-77. Steve Kemper, "Signs of the Times," Smithsonian 28:8 (November 1997), 134-140. Cullen Murphy, "Knock It Off," Atlantic Monthly 294:5 (December 2004), 187-188. Paul Gray, "Fakes That Have Skewed History," Time 121:20 (May 16, 1983), 58-61 Matthew Adams, "Archivist Talks About History of Forgery," University Wire, Oct. 24, 2014. Charles Whibley, "Of Literary Forgers," Cornhill Magazine 12:71 (May 1902), 624-636. "Literary Frauds and Forgers," Washington Times, Aug. 13, 1907. "Literary Forgers," New York Times, May 17, 1902. "Personal Gossip," Charleston Daily News, Oct. 20, 1869. Listener mail: Ben Zimmer, "Particitrousers of the Revolutionary Movement," Language Log, Sept. 7, 2015. Ben Zimmer, "Incorrections in the Newsroom: Cupertino and Beyond," Language Log, Feb. 1, 2008. Ben Zimmer, "Hugh Jackilometresan," Language Log, Jan. 4, 2017. Ben Zimmer, "It Was As If a Light Had Been Nookd ...," Language Log, June 1, 2012. Eddie Wrenn, "eBook Replaces All Mentions of the Word 'Kindle' With Rival 'Nook' -- and Ends Up Destroying War and Peace," Daily Mail, June 7, 2012. "Poor Mr Anus, the Council Candidate Given a Bum Deal by Facebook," Guardian, Sept. 28, 2018. Kevin Jackson, "Illusion / Right Before Your Very Eyes: Penn and Teller Do Magic, but the Real Trick Is That They Like to Give the Game Away," Independent, Jan. 30, 1993. Wikipedia, "Japanese Name: Imperial Names" (accessed Oct. 25, 2018). Wikipedia, "Akihito: Ichthyological Research" (accessed Oct. 25, 2018). Russell Goldman, "5 Things to Know About Japan's Emperor and Imperial Family," New York Times, Aug. 8, 2016. Akihito et al., "Speciation of Two Gobioid Species, Pterogobius elapoides and Pterogobius zonoleucus Revealed by Multi-Locus Nuclear and Mitochondrial DNA Analyses," Gene 576:2 (2016), 593-602. Rob Beschizza, "Joachim Rønneberg, Saboteur Who Wrecked Nazi Nuke Program, Dies at 99," Boing Boing, Oct. 22, 2018. "Joachim Roenneberg: Man Who Stopped Nazi Germany's Nuclear Ambitions Has Died, Aged 99, Norwegian Authorities Confirm," Reuters, Oct. 21, 2018. "Joachim Ronneberg: Norwegian Who Thwarted Nazi Nuclear Plan Dies," BBC News, Oct. 22, 2018. Robert D. McFadden, "Joachim Ronneberg, Leader of Raid That Thwarted a Nazi Atomic Bomb, Dies at 99," New York Times, Oct. 22, 2018. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Christopher McDonough. Here are three corroborating links (warning -- these spoil the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a paper torso to a fishing tree. This is episode 223. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Denis Vran-Lucas was an undistinguished forger until he met the ideal mark. Through the 1860s, Lucas sold him thousands of phony letters

by everyone from Plato to Louis XIV, earning thousands of francs and touching off a firestorm among confused scholars. In today's show, we'll trace the career of the world's most prolific forger. We'll also count Queen Elizabeth's eggs and puzzle over a destroyed car. Denis-Vran Lucas was born in 1818 to a peasant family at Chateaudon in northern France. He got little formal education, but he spent hours inhaling the knowledge in the great library there. For many years, he worked as a law clerk, copying deeds and wills, but his dream was to work with books. In 1852, at age 34, he traveled

80 miles to Paris with a letter of recommendation to the head of the Imperial Library. But he didn't know Latin, and he had no diploma, so they turned him away. He tried to find work at publishing firms and retail bookshops, but here again his lack of education ended his chances. At length he fell in with a dubious genealogical firm run by a man named Letelier, who would provide doctored family pedigrees to anyone who would pay a fee. If you wanted to find out whether you were related to some illustrious person in the past, you'd pay me a fee and we would discover that indeed you were, and I'd give you documents and letters that seemed to prove this. In a job like that, the temptation to forge is obvious, and Lucas became unusually good at it. Eventually,

he managed to fake some letters by Montaigne, the 16th century essayist, so convincingly that a respected scholar cited them in his source material. By 1854, he'd become a master forger and was selling his creations for money. This was a good time to do so. After the Napoleonic period, a lot of important libraries had been dispersed, and there was a thriving market among collectors for important documents. One such collector was a renowned mathematician named Michel Schaal. He held the chair of higher geometry at the Sorbonne and was respected around the world for his work in both pure geometry and the history of mathematics. It was said that all the geometers of Europe are the disciples of Monsieur Schall. Schall may have been brilliant, but he was extraordinarily gullible, or at least

captivated by the idea that he'd stumbled onto a treasure in the documents that Lucas showed him. Beginning in 1861, he bought tens of thousands of forged letters, supposedly written by Pascal, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Rabelais, Louis XIV, and other luminaries of science, philosophy, royalty, and literature. Charles paid him hundreds of thousands of francs for these, millions of dollars today. It's hard to see how anyone could have been this credulous. All the letters were written in French on watermarked French paper of the same age and quality, apparently because Lucas couldn't afford parchment.

And many of them absurdly praised the glory of France because Lucas was a patriot who wanted to exalt his homeland. Here's one striking example from Cleopatra to Julius Caesar. My dearly beloved, our son Caesarian is doing well. I hope that soon he will be in condition to endure the voyage from here to Marseille, where I intend to have him instructed, both because of the good air that one breathes there and the fine things that are taught there. I ask you then to tell me how long you will remain in these provinces, because I want to escort our son there myself,

and I beg on this occasion to tell you, my dearly beloved, the contentment that I feel when I find myself near you, and while waiting for this I engage the gods to have you in mind. Apparently Charles accepted these letters because Lucas was an extraordinarily good salesman with a very convincing cover story. He said that before the revolution, a certain French count had been an avid collector of letters. His collection included five or six thousand given to him by Louis XVI. The count had emigrated to America in 1791 and perished in a shipwreck. Most of his letters had been recovered from the sea after a few days in fair condition,

and these were scattered now with the rest of the collection in the attic of a townhouse in Paris owned by a descendant of the count, whom Lucas would identify only as the Old Man. The Old Man loved the letters, loved them like his life, he said, but they were wrung out of him one by one by the stress of poverty. When he needed money, he'd instruct Lucas to sell one of these precious letters at a commission of 25%. This was a tragedy within the family, he said. At one point, another relative, a retired soldier, had found out about the sales and was outraged. To placate him, the old man offered Shal all his money back if he would only return the letters. That only convinced Shal, he must be genuine. He refused to return them, and he begged Lukad not to sell the documents to

anyone else. In fact, Lukad was forging the letters himself and aging them artificially by immersing them in water, holding them over a smoking lamp, or burning their edges. He'd soaked the first batch too long, which was why he'd invented the story of the shipwreck. He made crude attempts at Carolingian script and archaic spelling, but essentially everything he wrote was in modern French because he knew no other language. This wasn't quite as ridiculous as it sounds. Schall thought the most recent letters, those from the 16th century onward, were genuine, but he thought the older ones were copies that had been transcribed, translated, and modernized as they'd made their way down to him. That's why he accepted a letter from Cleopatra written in

French, for example. Schall was so excited at all this that he started writing a book about his finds, and in July 1867, he began to present some of the letters to the French Academy of Science, where he'd been a member since 1851. The first were some letters ostensibly from the poet Jean Rotroux to Cardinal Richelieu, proposing the establishment of an academy in Paris. But a week later, he dropped a bombshell. He presented two letters from Blaise Pascal to Robert Boyle, which seemed to show that Pascal had discovered the law of universal gravitation in 1652, 35 years before Isaac Newton. That threatened to revolutionize not just French history, but the whole history of science, and it brought on two years of controversy. Schall, who apparently wanted to protect his golden goose, refused to say where he'd got the

letters. To support his case, he appealed to Newton's biographer in England, David Brewster, but Brewster immediately denounced the letters as spurious. One immediate problem was that Pascal couldn't have done this work without calculus, which Newton had developed. Lucas, behind the scenes, tried to help by forging a letter in which Newton described calculus to Pascal. The trouble with that is that Newton would have been 11 years old at the time. Quite precocious. Yeah. This quickly turned into a comedy of errors. Schall would present a letter, critics would attack it, and Luká would forge new letters to address their objections. Fresh letters came pouring in week by week until the Academy had 381 of them,

but they only compounded the confusion. For example, Schall offered a letter from Galileo dated 1641 that mentions that his eyesight is failing. But Galileo is known to have been blind by the end of 1637. When that objection was raised, Lucas forged more letters trying to show that Galileo's blindness was intermittent or that he'd exaggerated it to pacify the Inquisition. That set off another storm. But Shaw was steadfast. He was convinced that the 3,000 Galileo letters he'd bought were authentic, even though they were written in French and Galileo always wrote in Latin or Italian. This gets openly ludicrous. In April 1869, one of Schall's

skeptics came forward to show that six notes by Pascal and two fragments of a letter by Galileo matched the text of a history book by Alexandre Saverian. That seemed to show conclusively that someone was forging the letters by simply copying books at the library. But Schall had an answer for that, too. He argued that Severian had borrowed text from the letters rather than the other way around. And Leucas backed him up by forging letters that seemed to show Severian returning letters he'd borrowed from Pascal, Newton, and Galileo, thanking them for their use as he'd compiled his book. All of this went on much longer than it might have because Schall was highly respected and

much loved. He was not the only one fooled. So was the historian Louis Adolphe Thiers and the permanent secretary of the Academy. The Academy at one point even did give Chal a sanction of sorts. It said that the letters of Louis XIV had a noble simplicity that no one could have faked, and they were free of the blunders that any forger would have made. It said that was a moral proof of their authenticity. Another scholar wrote, The letters read today by Monsieur Chal are astounding, overwhelming. One no longer knows where one is, and the forger becomes absolutely impossible. He would be more than a demigod. A certain number of the 2,000 letters in the possession of Monsieur Schall are dated from a place, with a year, with a month, with a day. When one consults the history or the memoirs of the period, one will confirm that at the period

designated, the person who wrote or who was written to was indeed at the place indicated. How could the forger know the actual place of residence of so many correspondents? It would be more than a miracle. Just to answer that, these people seem to believe that Lucas was composing every forgery from scratch in his own words, when in fact some were only copied and slightly altered, sometimes from existing French translations. So there wasn't as much original work as it might seem. In any case, Lucas could sustain the fraud only another couple of months. It finally came apart in June 1869. The director of the Paris Observatory, Irbon Le Verrier, was able to show the sources that Lucas had borrowed from in making the forgeries, and this time whole passages had been used without alteration. At the same time, Galileo's real signature was compared

with the forged ones, and on September 13th, Schall finally had to admit that the documents couldn't be authentic. Yukai was arrested and met his charges with indifference. At the trial, his defense attorney called him, quote, a man of assiduous reading who, through praiseworthy desire and indomitable energy, was torn away from an inferior position. He knew a little about everything, but not having had a guide in his labors, his knowledge was not organized. It formed in his head a disorderly encyclopedia. It's hard to fault Schall for doubting that forgery could be conducted on such a huge scale. Of the letters, he said, whatever they may be, it is certain that their composition, if they are not authentic, must have demanded an extended effort using many references. And if one considers that they match so well with

others from all periods up to the last century and treat so many different subjects, one cannot believe that they are the work of one person, one forger, who, among other considerations, knows neither Latin nor Italian or the slightest bit of mathematics or the other sciences with which a considerable portion of these documents deal. A mystery remains to be solved, and until it is, nothing can be concluded with certainty. It's true that for a largely self-taught charlatan, Lucas had held off the French intelligentsia single-handed for an impressively long time. Those in the Academy who argued for the authenticity of the documents pointed to their extraordinary number and the excellent style of some of them.

Schall said, One cannot allow that one person alone would have been able to compose such a great mass of writings and of correspondences between the most eminent people in the sciences, in literature, in philosophical, theological matters, etc. What fertility of imagination, what skill would not such a task presuppose? His disbelief became understandable as the full size of his collection came to light. Between 1861 and 1869, Lucas had sold Schall 27,472 false documents, including letters by Roman emperors, apostles, Plato, Pliny, Seneca, Pompey, Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander. He forged letters from Lazarus to St. Peter and from Mary Magdalene to Lazarus, Pythagoras, Sapphoge, St. Jerome, Boethius,

Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, St. Augustine. The list went on, maybe a thousand correspondents altogether. For all of this, Schall had paid Lucas between 140,000 and 150,000 francs. At the trial, Lucas said he'd spent it all, though it's hard to see how since he spent all his time forging documents. The presiding judge said he worked like a monk. The prosecution offered a sad summary of his daily routine. Quote, he would leave his house at 11 o'clock and lunched, sometimes at the Café Riche when he had money, sometimes at a small restaurant when money was lacking. All day he would work at the Imperial Library, and at night he would return to his house after having dined. He would not speak to anyone, and he went only to the house of Monsieur Chal. If you do the math, Lucas would have had to forge four letters a day on average for the 17 years he'd spent in Paris, probably more than

that during the eight years when Schall was actively buying from him. I have at least two sources calling him the most prolific forger of all time. He made some obvious mistakes. There were letters from Strabo to Juvenal, though Strabo was 92 when Juvenal was born. There were letters from the venerable Bede to Alcuin, though Alcuin was nine when Bede died. But considering that he forged letters by hundreds of people, there are surprisingly few mistakes. One writer says in the 381 letters submitted to the Academy and filling 400 pages of its proceedings, the only striking mistake occurred in a letter signed by the mother of Newton in her maiden name. But that's only among the letters that Schall shared with the Academy, which were largely transcriptions from scientific sources

and thus relatively free from error. Lukak contended that in addition to the counterfeit documents, he had also delivered authentic ones and that these were worth the price Schall had paid, but experts found that they were only worth about 500 francs. The court returned his judgment after an hour's recess. It sentenced Lucas to two years in prison and a fine of 500 francs. Schall never got his money back. Lucas showed no remorse. He said, historical facts forgotten and even unknown by the majority of scholars. I taught while amusing. The proof is that during the entire time that the discussion at the Academy of Sciences lasted, many people paid attention to the sessions and became interested in what was going to be read there. Here is testimony that the reading of these documents interested the public as much as,

and perhaps more than, certain reports and figures that are usually read there. Never has Monsieur Shaw been more heeded. Yes, whatever happens to me, I shall always be conscious of having acted, if not with wisdom, at least with rectitude and patriotism. It's not quite clear what happened after the sentence. Some sources say that while Lucas was in prison, he wrote to Chal, who visited him regularly and prayed for him. If he survived his term of two years, he left prison at the age of 54.

A few sources say that after his release, he returned to jail twice more and was finally banished to his hometown, where he became a secondhand bookseller. If that's true, then it's ironic. That's all he wanted in the first place. Futility Closet is now supported entirely by our amazing listeners. Futility Closet is now supported entirely by our amazing listeners. We just wouldn't be able to keep putting in the amount of time that the show takes to make if it weren't for the donations and pledges we get. If you'd like to make a one-time donation to help us out, you can find a donate button in the supporters section of the website at futilitycloset.com.

We appreciate all the donations we've gotten, including a recent one that was specifically earmarked for podcat food, which is a pretty important item around here. If you'd like to provide more ongoing support for our show, you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll also get access to some extras like outtakes, more discussions on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, and updates on Sasha, our hardworking but well-fed Futility Closet mascot. You can check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link at our website. And thanks again to everyone who helps support the show. We really couldn't do this without you. There was apparently a lot of interest in the discussion from episode 217 about how names and rude words are handled by different software programs. We appreciated all of the really interesting emails we got on various aspects of those topics,

and I'm sorry that I can't read all of them on the show and had to just pick a few. Daniel Sturman sent an email on overzealous censorship software and overzealous word replacement. Dear Greg, Sharon, and Sasha, the only thing worse than overzealous censorship software is overzealous censorship software that doesn't bother warning you that it exists. I encountered this issue in my very first task at my very first job as a technical writer some seven years ago. I was given a document to edit that described a program that interfaced with Twitter. The programmer who wrote it was not a native English speaker, so instead of referring to individual Twitter posts as tweets,

he repeatedly referred to them as twits. I still remember this as the funniest document I've ever worked on, a full 70 pages with sentences like, any displayed twits are removed and the new twits are then displayed in their place. After I fixed up the document, I sent it back to the programmer and wrote a short note in the email explaining the issue, but he didn't receive it and called me a few days later to ask why I was taking so long. It took us a while and a lot of trial and error to discover the problem. The company email system was rejecting any emails containing the word twit.

I'm still not sure why the word was disallowed, as it seems to me a relatively harmless insult, but in particular I wasn't happy that the email system deleted the email silently. Had I been notified that the email was rejected, it would have saved me from an uncomfortable first impression. In the same episode, you also discussed software that overzealously replaces parts of words where it shouldn't, such as but-oseated press. This mistake doesn't only happen when you're trying to remove obscenities. It can also happen for many other reasons. UK book publishers often replace a book's American English with British English. When one tried to do so automatically, it ended up publishing the phrase, the Partissa Trousers of the Revolutionary Movement.

And it actually took me a minute to figure out that the Partissa Trousers should have been participants. But in British English, pants usually refers to what Americans call underwear. So apparently the editor of a UK Kindle edition of an American book had used auto-replace to swap the words. Without checking afterward? Apparently not. Oh my gosh. And Daniel sent several other examples of this kind of thing from the Language Log website, which looked to me like a delightful way to kill lots of time if you should have some to spare. Some other examples from Language Log were that as the Reuters style guide favors using the full name of Queen Elizabeth instead of the Queen,

that resulted in a 2006 Reuters story about honeybees containing such gems as, with its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth. And Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day. In an edition of the board game Trivial Pursuit, an apparent auto-replace of KM with kilometers resulted in Hugh Jackman's name becoming Hugh Jack-kilometerson in one of the questions, which was rather confusing when you just see it like that.

And there was an edition of War and Peace customized for the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader, where a publishing company apparently used search and replace to change Kindle to Nook. But unfortunately, Tolstoy frequently referred to igniting flames in the book, leading to numerous phrases such as, it was as if a light had been nuked in a carved and painted lantern, and nuk in all hearts the flame of virtue. And thanks also to Pete Wine for sending in another great link for that example. I guess it's almost surprising that doesn't happen more often than I think about it. Yeah, I mean, there were a number of examples on language log, but maybe there are even more that people aren't catching or sending

in. And Daniel ended his email with, it just goes to show that you should never blindly rely on technology to do something that requires human judgment. And I would add to that, at least not yet, right? Maybe one day, but not yet. Gary Henderson wrote to us about the Scunthorpe problem. I used to work as a software developer for one of the big job sites. At one point, I worked on the code that scanned incoming resumes for questionable language. Our customer service department got some furious calls when our automatic system starred out the word breast in resumes for people who conducted breast reduction or breast augmentation or studied breast cancer. Also, poor Jennifer Penniston could not submit her resume at all because we kept telling her that her name was an unacceptable foul word. And Gary said, I think often about Jennifer Penniston. I wonder if she ever found a job. Yeah, seriously. I mean, that must be...

It's not her fault. Nathan Cross, who is thankful to have no profanity in his name yet, wrote, Regarding the complexities of web forms with respect to unfortunate, potentially offensive names, I am a web developer who used to build websites for PBS many years ago. Considering the wide audience for PBS content, with all age ranges and sensitivities represented, they were understandably meticulous to ensure their site content was above reproach. For all web forms, any submitted content had to be automatically vetted against what we called the dirty word list. The dirty word list was a long text document with hundreds and hundreds of potentially offensive words. It was hilarious to read through. Obviously, the list had grown over

the years from meager beginnings to a glorious tome of profanity, as they never removed entries, only added new ones as time went on. The early entries were all the common offenders you would expect, which in this context became completely banal. It also contained puzzling phrases and obscure words that were the source of much discussion in the office kitchen. What does this mean? How did that even get on this list at in the office kitchen. What does this mean? How did that even get on this list at all? Someone actually typed this into a form? You get the idea.

It was enlightening. I had forgotten about the list until hearing your pieces about the pitfalls of automated profanity screening systems. Keep up the great work. I always look forward to your next episode. You know, that does seem, on the face of it, like sort of a reasonable way to address that problem. But if you just keep adding to the list and never take anything off, that might be how you end up like deleting email that contains the word twit. Like maybe twit used to be more offensive years and years ago, and now nobody blinks at it.

But then it ends up still screening it out, which could be a problem. Jordan Barnes wrote to let us know that Luc Anous, a candidate running for office in Belgium, whose last name is unfortunately spelled A-N-U-S, was not allowed to create a Facebook page using his actual surname. He was forced to drop the S so that he could create the page. A recent article in The Guardian had a lot of fun with the situation with the title, Poor Mr. Anoos, the council candidate given a bum deal by Facebook. And going on to say, A local election candidate in Belgium has been forced to change his name by the social network on the grounds that it is offensive and inappropriate. The cheek of it.

There was a fair amount more in that vein if anyone wants to read the article. Fair amount more in that vein, if anyone wants to read the article. It did say that the Facebook flap has given the candidate a decent amount of publicity and that his election poster was quite a hit on social media. So possibly it's even worked in his favor. But he's having to go by a new? Yeah, instead of his actual name. All right. Stephen Jones wrote,

In a few episodes, you discussed names and entering them on web forms and databases. You might be interested to know that the magician Teller, of Penn and Teller fame, has Teller as his legal name. His driver's license reads NFN Teller for No First Name Teller. He also has one of the very few U.S. passports issued in a single name. I wasn't able to find much on Teller's passport situation, but I did find several sources for the fact that his driver's license does say NFN Teller, including a quote from Teller himself in an article in The Independent. So apparently if you're in the U.S. and want to change your name to a mononym, you need to be prepared to have your name listed as NFN, which I imagine must confuse people in some situations.

I'm surprised they let you do that at all. must confuse people in some situations. I'm surprised they let you do that at all. Jason Bukata let us know that the Emperor of Japan also has only one name. Unlike in England, where apparently at least some people think saying Queen Elizabeth is preferable to saying the Queen, in Japan, the Emperor is traditionally referred to by his title only, out of respect and politeness. Japan's Emperors don't have surnames, only a given name that is used mainly outside of Japan. And actually, the emperors are renamed after their deaths, but that's another topic. Japan's current monarch, Emperor Ekihito, as we call him in the West, shares his late father's interest in marine biology, is considered to be an expert on goby

fish, and has published a number of scientific papers. But Jason directed at us a tweet that shows for the online version of one of the emperor's recent papers, when you click on Akihito to access his full name and address, the name comes up as Undefined Akihito, which didn't seem very respectful or polite to me, or I guess even correct, right? Because if Akihito is his given name, then I suppose that technically he should be Akihito Undefined. And we want to thank everyone who let us know recently about an update to a story we did last year on the daring and arduous World War II commando raid

that helped prevent Germany from developing nuclear weapons. For example, John Reinbold wrote, Hi pod people and podcat. This boing boing article popped up in my feed today reporting on the death of Norwegian resistance fighter Joachim Ronneberg. Even before reading the article, I knew the name sounded familiar. You spoke about his top secret raid back in episode 181, Operation Gunnerside. The best part is still Rononeberg's quote. With a wry smile, Roneberg described it as the best skiing weekend I ever had. Thank you for all you do in making my commute an enlightening part of my day. And Roneberg, the leader of the raid, died on October 21st at age

99. Listeners sent us stories commemorating him from the Australian ABC, the BBC, and U.S. media outlets. I thought it was really nice to see that he was remembered in several countries, and hopefully the news stories have helped spread the word a little more about his story and the story of Operation Gunnerside. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We really appreciate hearing your comments and updates. who writes in to us. We really appreciate hearing your comments and updates. So if you have any that you'd like to send to us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him an odd sounding situation and he has to try to figure out what is going on,

asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Christopher McDonough. A man is accused of destroying another man's car. Despite having a perfect alibi for the day the damage occurred, he chooses to pay off the other man rather than go through legal proceedings. What happened? Is it that he wants to stay out of legal proceedings, like he's a criminal or something and doesn't want to come to the attention of law enforcement or- No, but that's a good thought. That's a good thought. Okay. By car, we mean car, just a regular car. Yes. And do I need to know how it was destroyed? Damaged.

Damaged. Yes, but that might be hard to guess. It's relevant, but it might be hard to just guess. Okay. Are there other people involved besides these two men? Let's say no for simplification. All right. So one man owns a car, and the other becomes responsible somehow for damage to it. Yes.

Pays him off. Okay. So let's say he does pay him off. Yeah. And that's the end of it. There's nothing more I need to know afterward. Right. So why wouldn't you want to...

Despite having a perfect alibi for the day the damage occurred, he chooses to pay the other man off. Does this have anything to do with publicity? Like he doesn't want this to come to public knowledge? No. Is either man's identity important? I mean, did this really happen?

Yes. Okay. So it's not like one's a i don't know how this would happen a politician or something who doesn't want that this is embarrassing somehow and doesn't want it to come to light i think that's correct i mean i think i think they probably didn't want the publicity but that's not that's not the only motivation that's not the only reason why okay and is this does the is the time period important or location, anything like that? Cars exist. Okay. So is either man's occupation important? Yes. The man whose car took the damage? No.

The other man? Yes. Has some occupation that's related to how the car was damaged? Yes. Was the man doing his occupation when a car got damaged? No. Okay, but he had done something in his job that led to the car's damage. Yes. And it's going to be hard for me to guess exactly what that was. Well, we know it's hard to guess people's occupations. Were other cars damaged in this event? Not that I'm aware of. Do I need to know more about the actual incident, like where the car was or what kind of car it was, anything like that?

No, I don't think so. I mean, the car was parked outside on the street. Did something fall on the car? No. Did it burn? That's close. Did it explode? No.

Burning is close. Yes. Was it hit by something that was burning? No. What's close to burning? Is there a natural factor here, like a natural disaster? Yes. Oh, really? Not a natural disaster, but there is a natural factor. That caused the damage? Yes. And that involves fire or flames or heat or burning. Yes. One of those things. Okay. Is this just the sun, like the heat of the atmosphere?

Yes. Really? Well, it's not just the sun, but that's the natural factor. Okay. The sun had some... It was a factor in the incident. Effect on the car that heated the car enough to damage it. Yeah. And somehow this other man was involved was the son's power focused

somehow yes i'm guessing he's expecting me to say no no i think you're doing great all right so the first man the guy whose job was doing his job yes did something yes that focused the son's ways on this car actually yes all right so was that the guy who's doing his job was above the car in some way? No, no. If you remember, you worked out that he wasn't actually doing his job at the time. It was something he had previously done in his job. All right. But something was overhead between the sun and the car.

Okay. Right? Not exactly, but along those lines, but not quite. Because I'm picturing like a lens or something. Yeah, that's not quite right. Yeah, it's not like he put up a big magnifying glass. Well, that's what I have in my head. But it's a, you said something focused, I said, something focused the sun's rays on the car.

Yes, but it's not like it was directly over the car. Were the rays reflected? Yes. Off something that the first man had designed? Yes. Like a building? Exactly. That's exactly it.

This is true? This is true, yes. Christopher said, This is a simplified reference to an event in 2013 when a skyscraper in London designed by Raphael Vignoli due to its concave mirrored surface would focus the sun's rays on a very small area, allegedly melting parts of a man's expensive Jaguar car and damaging a nearby building. Supposedly, Raphael and the owners of the building paid the owner off rather than face any legal proceedings. Amazingly, the

same architect had supposedly also designed a building in Las Vegas, which created a similar death ray. So I looked this up and I was able to easily find several news stories on this. Apparently people found this a very interesting topic. So apparently the building has a curve with a series of flat windows that act like mirrors with all the reflections converging at one point, which caused it to be focused enough to actually melt part of the part of the Jaguar and to set fire to a carpet in a nearby building. Yeah, I mean, if that's true, that could be an awful lot

of energy. Yes. And as Christopher noted, it's not the first time that this has happened and not even the first time for this particular architect. There's even a story on Gizmodo entitled, A Brief History of Buildings That Melt Things. And it turns out that people can have some pretty unpleasant experiences if they happen to live near or be hanging out near the wrong building at the wrong time, including people who got burns on the tops of their heads from Vignoli's Las Vegas Hotel. Wow. Yeah. So I'll have some links in the show notes if you want to learn more about buildings that can melt things. And thanks so much to Christopher for that puzzle, which I think is the first one we've ever had involving what people were actually calling a death ray.

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