Futility Closet - 257-The Sledge Patrol

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 poetic chemistry to a sleeping cyclist. This is episode 257. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1943, an isolated sledge patrol came upon a secret German weather station in northeastern Greenland. The discovery set off a series of dramatic incidents that unfolded across 400 miles of desolate coast.

Starting point is 00:00:40 In today's show, we'll follow this arctic struggle, an often overlooked drama of World War II. We'll also catch some speeders and puzzle over a disastrous remedy. And just a quick programming note, we'll be off next week, and we'll be back with a new episode on July 29th. with a new episode on July 29th. When Germany invaded Denmark in April 1940, the Danish king ordered his people to submit. His order didn't exclude the Danish colony of Greenland, but the governor there, Eske Brun, was independent-minded, and he decided to rule himself over the 22,000 people on the largest island in the world. The west coast of Greenland was safely under American control, but there was nothing to stop the Germans from landing in the east, which was almost uninhabited, particularly the 700 miles of mountainous coast in the northeast. So Brun got

Starting point is 00:01:34 15 volunteers and dubbed them the Northeast Greenland Sledge Patrol. As a headquarters, he gave them a wooden house on a point of land called Eskimo Ness on the northeast coast, 600 miles above the Arctic Circle. Seven men lived in that house, four Danes, one Norwegian, and two Inuit. Except for the radio, they were cut off from the rest of the world. Their nearest neighbors, so far as they knew, were 200 miles to the south, in another house on an island called Ella. North of them was nobody at all. The loneliness didn't depress them. They rather liked it. The Inuit had been born to it, and the Europeans had all spent earlier winters in the Arctic. They had learned to be happy there, enjoying their mastery of living in the extreme cold and driving dog teams on the sea ice in the northern darkness. In the Arctic, all men were

Starting point is 00:02:19 friends because they had a common enemy in the climate. In all the recorded history of the northeast Greenland coast, no man had ever died at the hand of another man. Each member of the group had a sledge and a team of dogs, and their job was to patrol the coast from Scoresby Sound, 150 miles below Ella Island, to the farthest navigable northern point, about 70 degrees north. As the crow flies, the range was 500 miles. Their leader was a 32-year-old former bookseller named Ib Polson. He passed the dark winter with his companions Kurt Olson and Marius Jensen, while the other members patrolled the coast and made weather observations. Now, when Polson had assumed command, Greenland was still making its weather broadcasts available to anyone who wanted them,

Starting point is 00:03:00 including the Germans. And the Germans needed them badly to help plan the war both on land and at sea. Polson cut them off. He enciphered the weather reports so that only the Allies could read them, and that had consequences. At the beginning of March 1943, as the sun reappeared and the sledging conditions improved, all the men at Eskimo Ness except Polson were preparing to start on journeys. Marius Jensen was planning to take some stores to a hunter named Peter Nielsen who had spent the winter in the far north. Polson asked him to make a detour on the way to have a look at Sabina Island, which hadn't been visited recently. Jensen set out on March 8th, accompanied by two Inuit sledge drivers. They spent that night at an old hunter's hut, and they planned to spend the next at another hut on the south side of Sabina Island. But as Jensen crossed the frozen sound toward the island, his dogs pricked up their ears and

Starting point is 00:03:48 began to carry him toward the hut as if someone were living there. He was sure that no one had been there in nearly a year, but he looked through his field glasses and saw a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney. He thought at first that it might be Peter Nielsen come south to meet them, but then one of his companions who had been checking a nearby island, came running up, shouting, footsteps, human footsteps, boots, boots with heels. No one Jensen knew wore boots with heels. He looked again through the glasses and saw two men run into the hills behind the hut and disappear. Jensen's party approached the hut cautiously. It was empty. The stove was alight, and there were two half-empty mugs of coffee on the table. Lying on a bunk were two daggers, and a jacket hung on a hook on the door.

Starting point is 00:04:30 On its breast was a swastika. Jensen realized that the men he'd surprised had probably been on a short hunting expedition from a base not far away. He realized he had to tell Polson as soon as possible about this German base. But Eskimo Ness was 60 miles away. They didn't want to overtire the dogs, and none of them really understood the extent of their danger. They stopped at the first hunting hut they reached, and that night they neglected to black out the windows,

Starting point is 00:04:54 which was a mistake. At midnight, the dogs began to howl. They blew out the light and fled into the darkness. Jensen shouted to the others to run for it, and they climbed the hill behind the hut. He told his companions to get to Eskimoness if they could and tell Polson what they'd found, and they went ahead. Jensen reached the top of the hill at two in the morning. Beyond it were ranges of white mountains. He had only half his clothes and no food at all, and the snow was waist deep, but he had no intention of being captured. He struggled ahead, planning to meet the shore again in 10 miles. He reached it at dawn. There was no telling what had happened to the others, and the Germans now had dogs and sledges and the diary he'd left in the hut. He had to keep going to warn his

Starting point is 00:05:34 comrades at Eskimoness, but he'd already been on his feet for a night and a day, and the station was still 50 miles away. Eskimoness was in a quiet period. Most of the patrol members were out on sledges. By March 12th, they traveled as far north as Dove Bay, 300 miles up the coast, and found no intruders. Within a few weeks, they'd have checked all the spots that had been neglected during the winter. At 11 a.m. on March 13th, a speck appeared on the ice. It was a lone man about three miles to the east, walking. Polson sent a man out to bring him in. It was Marius Jensen. He had lost his boots and was walking in his socks. He had covered 56 miles in 34 hours with

Starting point is 00:06:11 no food at all and somehow passed his companions along the way. Even he couldn't explain how he'd done it. He told Poulsen that the Germans had established a base at Sabina Island, that they had the sledges, and that they might be here at any minute. Polson quickly sent an enciphered message to the Greenland governor asking what to do. The two Inuit arrived later that day, and Polson called in the others who were available. They blacked out the windows and built breastworks of sandbags inside them, and that night they put a man on watch outside the house, the first time such a measure had ever been necessary in Greenland. Eskibrun's wired instructions were to gather information and to eliminate enemy forces by capture or shooting.

Starting point is 00:06:48 Brun worried that in giving these orders, he was inciting civilians to murder, so he took a creative step. He founded the Greenland Army. He assigned ranks to all the men and told them to make armbands to wear in place of uniforms. This was the smallest army in the world. At its greatest strength, it had two officers,

Starting point is 00:07:04 one sergeant, and six corporals, as well as six noncombatant Inuit sledge drivers. But if they were captured, now Polson's men could claim the right to be treated as prisoners of war. The Inuit were loath to fight, and Polson sent them south to Ella Island. He had managed to account for most of the other patrol members, but he realized that Peter Nielsen, far to the north, was still in the dark. He was still expecting Maria Zientzen to visit him, and in time he might come south to look for him. The way to prevent that was to go north and find him. After some discussion, Jensen and Eli Knussen went north

Starting point is 00:07:34 to do that. That left three Europeans at the station, hoping to be rejoined soon by these three returning from the north. That reunion might take a week, but once it happened, they might think about attacking the German camp. In the end, there was no time for that. On the evening of March 23rd, a patrol member named Henry Rudy came to Polson and said, I think there's somebody on the ice. Polson went out and shouted, who's there? A voice shouted back in broken Danish, who are you? Polson shouted in German, what do you want here?

Starting point is 00:08:01 And the voice answered, I want to speak to Herr Polson. Polson said, you can't talk to him tonight. You can come back in the daylight. The voice said, can I speak to Herr Olson or Herr Rudy? That told Polson that the Germans knew exactly who was at the station. They would also know how few men he had and how poorly armed they were. Polson said that one man could come across to them. The voice said, do you intend to offer armed resistance? And when Polsen answered yes, machine gun fire burst out from the ice. The battle lasted 10 minutes. The Danes were woefully overmatched and had to abandon the hut and scatter. Ib Poulsen ran up the hill behind the station. He was wearing only a shirt and trousers and a pair of sealskin boots he'd been

Starting point is 00:08:39 using as bedroom slippers. The temperature was 13 below zero Fahrenheit, and the nearest help was at Ella Island, 200 miles to the south. He managed to find a cache he had laid earlier. It contained no clothing, but it did have a tent, so he fashioned that into a kind of cloak. He put some food in a sleeping bag and hoisted it on his back. And then he did a remarkable thing for a Danish bookseller. He walked alone to Ella Island, 230 miles in 11 days, a journey that no native Greenlander had ever attempted, much less survived. He met no one on the way, but he managed to gather some clothing and equipment from hunting huts, where he found some messages left by the other men who had fled the station, and he left signs for anyone who might follow him. He had some hope that the others were together and headed south somewhere ahead of him. But when he finally

Starting point is 00:09:24 reached Ella Island, his feet sore and bloody, he learned that he was the first man from Eskimo Ness to come that way. Apparently, he had passed the others on his trek. And one of them had even managed to send a message to the Greenland government from one of the huts. So Polson's remarkable journey had been unnecessary. Throughout all this, everyone had assumed that the three men in the far north, Peter Nielsen and the two men who had gone to look for him, were entirely out of the picture now. So the two men Polson had passed on his trek, Henry Rudy and Kurt Olson, were now greatly

Starting point is 00:09:52 surprised when Peter Nielsen himself caught up to them in Mosk-Ox Fjord, and he told them an even more dramatic story. Eli Knusen and Marius Jensen had succeeded in finding him. They had told him that Ibb Polson needed everyone to return to Eskimonas to defend the station. But as they traveled south, the worst possible accident befell them. They ran into the party of Nazis who had just attacked the station on their way back to their base. Nielsen and Jensen had been captured, and Eli Knudsen, apparently through a terrible accident, had been killed. One of the Nazis' machine guns had jammed, he'd been shot in the chest, and despite their best efforts, he couldn't be saved. The Danes couldn't have known it, but the killing of Eli Knussen caused a profound personal crisis for the German commander, Hermann Ritter. He was an

Starting point is 00:10:34 Austrian naval officer, deeply religious and out of sympathy with the Nazi cause, and this unexpected conflict had wracked his conscience. His orders had only been to establish a meteorological station on the Greenland coast, not to engage the sledge patrol or to carry war into the Arctic. As a younger man, he'd spent time at Spitsbergen and had felt the same love of peace and beauty that had united the Danes at Eskimo Ness. The Nazis under his command sensed his ambivalence and distrusted him, and he felt lonely and bewildered. When Marius Jensen had discovered their base, he'd been forced to approach the station at Eskimo Ness, but he'd only wanted to disable their radio and convince them not to help the Americans. During his parley with Polson, he had fired his machine gun only to frighten the

Starting point is 00:11:13 Danes into surrender, but they had scattered and now there was no way to talk. And now Eli Knussen was dead. Though his death had been accidental, it only deepened Ritter's personal crisis, and now in his distraction, he made a series of fateful decisions. He announced that he would travel north on reconnaissance, taking Jensen with him to drive the sledge. In return for Jensen's cooperation, he agreed to let Peter Nielsen drive a sledge back to Eli Knussen's body to bury it properly. And separately, he gave permission to a party of five Germans to head south to attack Ella Island to prevent it from giving any weather reports. Peter Nielsen buried Knusen's body as they'd agreed, but then rather than wait for the Germans to join him, he set off immediately to the south, where he eventually caught up to Henry

Starting point is 00:11:53 Rudy and Kurt Olsen at Muskock's Fjord and told them his story. The three of them traveled south to Ella Island, where they found Ib Poulsen and told him everything that had happened. That left only Marius Jensen in the north, driving a sledge for the German commander 300 miles from his friends. Ostensibly, they were looking for huts the Germans might occupy if they had to abandon their weather station, but the truth is that as soon as they were away from the Germans, Ritter recalled the Arctic peace that he had felt years earlier at Spitsbergen and felt his crisis of conscience deepen. The two of them toured the country for 10 days, checking huts and finding them all deserted. Ritter found he grew to like Jensen, and Jensen held to his agreement and made no attempt to escape. Finally, on April 12th, Ritter faced his responsibilities and ordered

Starting point is 00:12:34 Jensen to take them south to Mosquito Bay, the site of the last hut they hadn't checked. There, they met the German party who were headed south, and Jensen discovered for the first time that they were planning to attack Ella Island. That put a different cast on things, and Marius Jensen set himself to stop them. When they asked him for the best route, he gave them deliberately terrible advice. Then, left alone with Ritter, he managed to get the rifle and made his escape, leaving Ritter in the hut at Mosquito Bay. Jensen was now free to rejoin his friends and warn them of the danger, but the time he had spent in the wilderness with Ritter had apparently affected both of them, and he found himself uneasy, leaving Ritter helpless in the hut behind him. At length, he stopped, turned, and

Starting point is 00:13:13 backtracked 90 miles, a tremendous risk to himself since the Nazis would be coming down behind them now with weapons. At the hut, he told Ritter to get his clothes on and said they were going south. Before they started, he asked Ritter simply to promise not to give him any trouble. Then they began what's been called the most curious journey recorded in the Arctic. Over 15 days, he escorted Ritter alone across 290 miles that the enemy, if anyone, controlled. There were times when Ritter could have escaped, but he could do it only by killing Jensen, and he found himself unwilling to do that. He had grown to admire the Danes' simple steadfastness, and he began to abandon his hope of any future with the Nazis.

Starting point is 00:13:49 The two traveled in a kind of unspoken truce, and one evening Ritter told Jensen simply, well, the war is finished now for me. Jensen understood him. Now they were just companions. He even allowed Ritter to use the rifle again. When they arrived in the South, all the surviving members of the Sledge Patrol were together again. They knew that their six rifles would not be enough against five men with machine guns and grenades, but as it turned out, the climactic battle never came. The spring thaw had made the ice treacherous, and the German party decided to return to their home base. The Americans finally bombed that base on May 29th. None of the Germans were hurt, and sometime in July, a flying boat flew in to withdraw them. All these remote dramas had important consequences

Starting point is 00:14:29 for the wider war. The loss of its Greenland weather stations put Germany at a disadvantage both in the European theater and at sea. Most fatefully, weather observations from Greenland allowed the Allies to predict a tiny window of high pressure over Normandy on June 6, 1944, a factor that's been called the most important weather forecast of all time. The U.S. government awarded the Legion of Merit to Ibb Polson, to Marius Jensen, and posthumously to Eli Knussen, the only Greenlander to die in all of World War II. And the decent, conflicted German commander, Hermann Ritter, was picked up by seaplane and taken to a prison camp in America. Though arguably he had brought war to a region that had known only peace, he seems to have been liked and respected by all the Allied servicemen who met him,

Starting point is 00:15:13 including the British naval officer David Howarth, who interviewed him for a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post in 1957. Howarth wrote, I think he would like me to add that he blames himself for what he did far more than I can bring myself to blame him. His ex-enemies all wish him well. We all recognize the old truth which was shown again in that Arctic spring of 1943, that it is proper for all true men of every nation to act together in opposition to evil and oppression, wherever and whenever they arise. If you enjoy hearing these forgotten stories from the pages of history,

Starting point is 00:15:56 please consider becoming a patron to help support the show. You can check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link in our show notes. And thanks so much to all of our supporters who help us to be able to tell these stories. The puzzle in episode 250, spoiler alert, is about a man who gets a speeding ticket because the police had noted his car at one point and determined that he must have gone over the speed limit to have gotten to a second point

Starting point is 00:16:29 in the time that had passed. Greg and I thought this was just a clever hypothetical scenario, but several of our listeners let us know that this method is used in various places. Dave Nichols wrote, I got this week's puzzle slightly quicker than you because I had the benefit of a real-world example. When I was at university in Aberystwyth in the early 80s, a friend went to visit family in Shrewsbury, about 75 miles away. During that day, a post office was robbed by someone on a motorcycle, and as he set off to come back, my friend was stopped and questioned by police on the outskirts of Shrewsbury. They satisfied themselves that he wasn't involved and let him go on his way. When he arrived back in Aberystwyth, he was stopped by police again. That's clever. He was really annoyed, but clearly had no way to argue his case. The fine he had to pay put a bit of a dent in his social life for a couple of weeks. That's clever.

Starting point is 00:17:29 And I want to mention that Dave provided some very useful pronunciation help for the bewildering-looking Welsh name of Aberystwyth, and also said, For Shrewsbury, some people pronounce it shrews, some people use shrews. I can never remember which one the locals use. Whichever way you pick, you'll probably annoy someone. And I found that he's not kidding. The pronunciation of that town is a topic of actual debates in the UK. I went with Shrewsbury because that was voted the winner of one debate that I read about from 2015. The BBC even has a little video compilation of short clips of different British newscasters saying it both ways. That's interesting that they're both alive. I guess that happens.

Starting point is 00:18:10 Kevin Fox wrote, Hello from Toronto. Love the podcast. A wonderful antidote to the ongoing blood sport of American political podcasts that suck me in. I heard your lateral thinking puzzle where one cop noted the time a car went by and passed the info to a cop up ahead. I know a guy that got a speeding ticket in the mail in New Jersey because he went through a toll booth, which is time-stamped. Unfortunately, he got to the next toll booth quicker than he should have. Go figure. I'm trying to think if there's some argument.

Starting point is 00:18:37 I guess that's the point. There isn't. There's no conceivable way you could. Unless you want to argue an equipment malfunction? Yeah, I guess. Oh guess that's a good idea. Johan Rundström wrote from Stockholm to say, Hello and thank you for the show. Regarding the most recent lateral thinking puzzle

Starting point is 00:18:54 about catching a speeder by clocking the time between two policemen, this system is used in several countries in Europe, recording the time of each car by a road camera or a toll station. The cameras are connected and can calculate the average speed between them to know if you had to be going too fast to make that time. In Norway, it is used to catch a lot of us Swedes going to Oslo. We are not as familiar with the system. And Johan sent a link to an article on Travel Blog Europe about how interconnected speed cameras are used in Norway to catch speeders who might

Starting point is 00:19:25 otherwise just slow down as they approach a single speed camera, and how because this system isn't used in Sweden, quite a number of Swedes are getting caught. The article notes that these cameras are marked with signs that say distance measurement in Norwegian, but that many motorists might not be aware of what that means. I saw several sources that said that Norway is a particularly bad place to be caught speeding, as they have some of the lowest speed limits in Europe, but some of the highest fines. Being caught driving 13 miles or 21 kilometers per hour above the speed limit, for example, can cost you a fine of $768, and the fines even go up from there. So I saw fines of 1,183 euros or over $1,300 for 25 miles or 41 kilometers above the limit. And excessive speeding will net you a minimum 18 days in jail.

Starting point is 00:20:15 So be careful driving in Norway. I bet that works. Chris Rimmer wrote, Dear Closet Dwellers, Just listen to the lateral thinking puzzle in episode 250. It seemed very obvious to me, but then I live in the UK where we have had speed cameras using this principle for 20 years. They come in pairs, one set of cameras at the start of the monitored area and another at the end. They time how long you take to cover the distance and then send you a ticket if your average speed is too high.

Starting point is 00:20:42 And Chris sent a link to a Wikipedia article on an average speed measuring camera system that was introduced in the UK in 1999. So apparently we are way behind the times to have not heard of this. According to the article, these kinds of systems are being used in several other countries, including Poland, Italy, Belgium, Australia, and the Netherlands, which it says was the first country to use this. From the Wikipedia article, it looks like at least in the UK, drivers have attempted to find ways around getting nabbed by the cameras, including trying to change lanes between the first and second camera,

Starting point is 00:21:17 and the system has had to advance in various ways to make it harder to circumvent it. I keep thinking, you know, that's where my mind immediately goes, is how could you trick the system? How could you get around this? While attempting to find in what year the Dutch did start using their fixed average speed checks, what I found instead was an article in Dutch News from 2018 that said that in the previous year, 2.1 million tickets had been issued to speeding motorists in the Netherlands based on speed cameras. Interestingly, that was very close to the number of speeding tickets given in England and Wales in 2017, according to The Telegraph, at slightly over 2 million tickets, with 96% of them resulting from speed cameras. I feel like the U.S. is just way behind the times on this.

Starting point is 00:21:54 I think we are. Kevin Kerr and his feline overlords, Chaos Bear and Felix, wrote from Salisbury, North Carolina. Hello, Sasha, I know who really runs the show and your people, Greg and Sharon. I am writing regarding the lateral thinking puzzle in episode 250 about the speeding ticket being issued to the motorist based on the fact that he couldn't have made it from point A to point B during the amount of time available without speeding. I work in auto racing and that is exactly the method used by NASCAR officials to determine whether a driver is exceeding the speed limit on pit road. And for those who are as woefully auto racing ignorant as I am, I'll explain here that my

Starting point is 00:22:32 best understanding is that pit road refers to a lane next to the track that contains the pit stalls where the drivers make their pit stops during the race. Kevin explained that timing wires installed at regular intervals let NASCAR officials see whether a car has exceeded the set speed limit on pit road. Though Kevin says, if a driver knows they have sped through a given section, they are able to slow down to below pit road speed and give back the time to keep their average speed for that section below the posted limit. This can be taken advantage of to accelerate past other cars on pit road once they reach the section that holds their assigned pit stall. Since they're going to be stopping in their stall for service anyway, the average speed for that section is going to be very low.

Starting point is 00:23:14 By accelerating to above the speed limit before and after the pit stop, but still in the same section, a team can gain valuable seconds on pit road and not get nabbed for speeding. I really enjoy the podcast. Keep up the great work. That makes sense because it's the average speed that's going to be counted. Yeah, so we were talking about trying to find a way around the system, right? I wonder if people can use that somehow with the speed cameras. Like, you know, there's a spot where you're going to be, I don't know, taking a restroom break and you figure, well, I can just speed the rest of this section. Stephen Harvey from Wellington, New Zealand wrote, greetings esteemed pod folks. The average speed enforcement technique from episode 250's lateral thinking puzzle has an analog in computer security. Anti-fraud measures are triggered if the same user logs into their

Starting point is 00:23:56 online banking account from two different locations within an infeasible time window. So for example, if there is a login to my account from New Zealand, and then within the space of eight hours, another login from North Carolina in the US, my bank can be all but certain that at least one of those logins is fraudulent. In the organization where I used to work looking for patterns like these was known by the delightful name of superhuman anomaly detection. And for a very different lateral solution to the puzzle we heard from naomi oprecht in malawi and i don't think we've ever heard from someone in malawi before so that was a new country for us naomi said hello hello i just listened to the lateral thinking puzzle about the man passing a cop going the speed limit but being fined anyways i actually thought that the solution

Starting point is 00:24:41 was in the phrasing the cop was going the speed limit, but not necessarily the man. Thank you for the entertainment and wishing you all a lovely week. And the original puzzle phrasing was, a man drives past a cop going the speed limit. So Naomi's answer is totally valid, meaning there are now two good answers to this puzzle. And if you think about it, if the cop is going the speed limit and the man drives past him, then he must be speeding.

Starting point is 00:25:05 And when I confirmed with Naomi that she lives in Malawi, And if you think about it, if the cop is going the speed limit and the man drives past him, then he must be speeding. And he's speeding. And when I confirmed with Naomi that she lives in Malawi, she said, I'm originally from Switzerland, but I've been living in Malawi since 2012. I'm building up a homestead and have a small community organization that works with children with disabilities. I live in the middle of nowhere, so your puzzles are a nice way to check if I still have my sanity. And on the topics of auto racing and puzzle updates, Graham Clayton wrote, Hi Greg, Sharon, and Sasha. I'm catching up on past episodes and listened with interest to your lateral thinking puzzle in episode number 216 about the racing driver who died of a heart attack while competing in the 24 Hours of Lemons race. There is a famous example of this occurring.

Starting point is 00:25:45 1967 Formula One world champion Denny Hulme was competing in the Bathurst 1000km touring car race in Australia in October 1992. His BMW was seen to pull over to the side of the track and park neatly next to the Armco safety barrier. When there was no sign of Hulme exiting the car, track marshals approached and found Hume dead, still strapped into his seat, having apparently suffered a heart attack at the early age of 56. The puzzle in episode 216 was about Court Summerfield dying in 2008, but Dennis Clive Denny Hume's death in 1992 was apparently a pretty famous event in auto racing. Hume was the first and so far only, New Zealander to win the Formula One World Championship. And one source that I read said that Hume was traveling at just over 300 kilometers an hour, or about 187 miles an hour, when he

Starting point is 00:26:35 suffered his heart attack in 1992. After veering into the wall on the side of the track, he somehow managed to bring his car to a relatively controlled stop before he died. Though it sounds like he died rather young, at age 56, in Hume's time, the life expectancy of race car drivers was not that high, as the cars and tracks lacked many of the safety features used today. So Hume's death is notable for his being the first Formula One champion to die of natural causes, which is kind of astonishing. And I have a possible correction for the story on Rin Tin Tin, the famous Hollywood dog from episode 255. I had said that only a last minute rule change kept him from winning the first Academy Award for Best Actor after he received the most votes. Moxie Labouche and Phil both wrote to let us know that that story might not be true.

Starting point is 00:27:24 Moxie Labouche and Phil both wrote to let us know that that story might not be true. This incident is recounted in Susan Orlean's 2011 book, Rin Tin Tin, The Life and the Legend, and has been reported by numerous other sources, who apparently all got it from her book. However, there is at least one differing account by Bruce Davis, a former executive director of the Academy, who adamantly states that the story is nonsense. He says that Rin Tin Tin received a vote for best actor from Jack Warner of Warner Brothers Studio, the studio that produced Rinty's films, as a joke, but not from anyone else who voted. Davis speculates that Orlean encountered what he called a folkloric expansion of the story of the Warner ballot when researching her book and included

Starting point is 00:28:05 the story as a fact. I wasn't able to discover what sources Orlean was basing her account on, but in an article she wrote for the New Yorker in August 2011, she prefaces the Academy Award story with, according to Hollywood legend, suggesting that perhaps at that point she was not as sure of the veracity of the story. In her book, she doesn't use the phrase about Hollywood legend. So that's what we know about this for right now. If anyone uncovers anything else on this topic, please do let us know. And thanks to Moxie and Phil for their follow-up on this. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us.

Starting point is 00:28:41 We're always sorry that we can't read all the email we get on the show, but we do appreciate getting it. So if you have any comments, follow-ups, or questions, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to figure out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. When the Titanic sank in 1912, she had enough lifeboats to accommodate only half her passengers. The United States passed a regulation requiring more lifeboats, but just three years later, this regulation itself was blamed for costing lives. How?

Starting point is 00:29:29 itself was blamed for costing lives. How? Okay. So was there like a specific incident in which a ship had more lifeboats and somehow that cost lives? Yes. So it's not like an abstract or it's like a specific thing happened? Yes. Is this a specific incident that I need to work out like that I would have heard of? I doubt you've heard of it, but yeah, it would help you to work out like that i would have heard of i doubt you've heard of it uh but yeah it would help you to work out what happened it would help me to work out what happened okay theoretically there was a ship and it had some lifeboats on it that's correct and people died yes uh did it happen in a specific year like was world war one going on or like was was there some specific circumstance that i need to know about not it's in 1915 but that's not okay you don't need to know do i need to know where this took place no okay do i need to know anything else about the ship um yes there's something i need to know about the ship was it like a ship that floats on the water it's not like a submarine or something

Starting point is 00:30:22 that's right okay was it like a passenger liner like the titanic was yes okay the passenger ship um uh does its size matter um i'm gonna say no like was it like really big like the titanic or does it matter it this was very big okay and you're saying where it was didn't matter no uh or where it was heading or anything like that um was there anything else about it that i need to know besides that it was a passenger ship um well you need to know what happened so in that sense yes but no so the manner of its sinking is important yes did it sink because of the weight of the lifeboats um yes it did i know the lifeboats were too heavy or it toppled over because of the weight of the lifeboats or something. Appallingly, that's what happened.

Starting point is 00:31:10 Is it really? Oh, my. On July 24th, 1915, the American passenger ship Eastland rolled onto her side at a dock in the Chicago River, killing 844 passengers and crew. She was top-heavy in part because the Federal Seaman's Act had required adding additional lifeboats. The Eastland disaster is the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck in the history of the Great Lakes. Why have we not heard of that? Yeah, I know, you'd think it'd be much better known. I have never heard of it. Oh, my gosh. So it's a terrible puzzle, but you got it. Wow. Whoa. We're all really, really, really fatal puzzles this week. I'm sorry about that.

Starting point is 00:31:44 We're always on the lookout for more lateral thinking puzzles. So if you have one where hopefully fewer people die than that, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Just a reminder that we'll be off next week. In the meantime, if you'd like to become one of the awesome supporters of our celebration of the quirky and the meantime, if you'd like to become one of the awesome supporters of our celebration of the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futility closet, or see the support a section of the website at futilitycloset.com. While you're at

Starting point is 00:32:16 the site, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 10,000 bite-sized distractions. Check out the futility closet store, learn about the two 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. The music in our show was all written and performed by my very talented brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you in two weeks.

Futility Closet - 257-The Sledge Patrol

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