Futility Closet - 258-The First Great Train Robbery

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 a pump in bird song to a dilemma of consent. This is episode 258. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1855, a band of London thieves set their sights on a new target, the Southeastern Railway, which carried gold bullion to the English coast. The payoff could be enormous, but the heist would require meticulous planning.

Starting point is 00:00:39 In today's show, we'll tell the story of the first great train robbery, one of the most audacious crimes of the 19th century. We'll also jump into the record books and puzzle over a changing citizen. In the 1840s, a man named William Pierce saw a unique opportunity. He was working as a ticket printer for the Southeastern Railway Company in England when he learned that the railway regularly carried consignments of gold out of London bound for Paris. To his colleagues, Pierce looked like an ordinary worker, but in fact he was a career criminal, and these gold shipments were an intriguing new target. No one had ever accomplished a theft like this from a moving train. The payoff could be huge,

Starting point is 00:01:23 but the heist would be complicated, and he knew he'd need a small group of reliable accomplices. He started by approaching another career criminal, a thief and check forger named Edward Agar. Agar considered the idea and told Pierce it couldn't be done. There were just too many safeguards to overcome. The gold was loaded into boxes at three London bullion merchants, where each box was closed and impressed with a distinctive wax seal that would break if the box were opened. The boxes were conveyed aboard guarded vans to the railway, where each one was weighed and then placed into a custom-built railway safe made of steel plate an inch thick. Each safe had two locks, and as a safety precaution, the keys were always held by two different men. The safes were loaded into the train's luggage car, where they were watched over by a dedicated guard throughout the journey to

Starting point is 00:02:08 Folkestone on the English Channel. There, the safes were opened and each box was weighed again. Only if its weight was unchanged was it put aboard the steamer Frouboulon, where officials would weigh it yet again before sending it on to Paris. In the face of all these precautions, Agar told Pierce flatly that he thought the job was impossible, and the two dropped the idea until 1854, when Pierce saw a new glimmer of hope. An acquaintance of his named James Burgess was a guard on the Folkestone line and had recently grown discontented with a drop in his wages. Pierce thought that by playing on his grievances, he could enlist him as an accomplice in the robbery.

Starting point is 00:02:42 If Burgess were assigned to guard the gold during its rail journey, then the thieves could join him in the luggage car and work on opening the safes during the trip to Folkestone. As a fourth partner, Pierce enlisted William Tester, a young man who had just been appointed to the traffic department at the London Bridge station. Even with these new advantages, Agar still didn't like their chances. In order to get the safes open, they would need copies of the two keys, and there didn't seem to be any way to get these. But he agreed to participate if they could solve that problem. By this time, Pierce was no longer working at the ticket office, which made the task even more difficult. In May 1854, Pierce and Agar went to Folkestone, where they spent two weeks watching trains and steamboats arrive and depart. They learned that one of the two keys they needed was

Starting point is 00:03:23 kept in the ticket office there. Agar tried befriending the two clerks who worked there, but he couldn't get any information out of them. It seemed there was no way forward, but that autumn they had another stroke of luck. William Tester learned that one of the railway's keys had gone missing, and so as a security measure all the safes would now be given new locks. By an absurd coincidence, Tester himself was the one who wrote the letters ordering this work, and when the new keys arrived, they were briefly in his hands. Quietly, he took them to a nearby beer house, where Agar made an impression of each one in a tin of green wax. This seemed to give them everything they needed, but their joy was short-lived. They discovered that, in his

Starting point is 00:03:58 nervousness, Tester had brought two copies of the same key rather than one of each, so now they had only one of the two keys they needed. The other one was in the Folkestone ticket office they'd been watching. To get it, Agar shipped a box of gold sovereigns to himself at Folkestone under an assumed name. Then he went to the office to claim it. He knew that the sovereigns would have been transported in the double-locked safe, so now Agar could observe where the key was held. As he watched, the clerk drew a key from his pocket and used it to open a wall cupboard. From this, he took the safe key and left to get Agar's gold. While he was gone, Agar took an impression of the key to the cupboard. A few weeks later, Agar and Pierce returned to Folkestone, slipped into the ticket office, opened the wall cupboard,

Starting point is 00:04:39 and found the safe key. Agar took an impression, and now they had impressions of both keys that were used to open the railway safes. The next step was to have duplicate keys made from these impressions. Agar did that himself in late 1854 using blank keys, files, a hammer, and a chisel. When the keys were ready, he needed to test them. He did that by riding the train as a passenger when James Burgess was guarding the safes in April and May 1855. During the journey, he'd sneak into the safe car with Burgess and test and refine the keys while the train was in transit. It took seven or eight tries, but at last he had a pair of keys that would open the safe. And I just want to pause here to remark on how audacious and ambitious this whole thing is.

Starting point is 00:05:18 This is essentially the first train robbery in history, and the whole thing was just, you can hear how complicated it is. And if any part of it had gone wrong, it would just stop them dead. For example, if either of these two safe keys hadn't been made correctly, it would have stopped the whole robbery completely. And it sounds like, I mean, just the amount of time that it took, you know, just to even get to this step. They started this whole planning phase a whole year before the night of the robbery, which is amazing. The other thing is that they didn't do, well, two things. One, because this was the first robbery, they didn't have the benefit of their own experience, because no one

Starting point is 00:05:53 had done this before, or of anyone else's. And if they were caught, the penalty would be 14 years transportation to Australia, and they knew that. So there were huge stakes here. But still, it amazes me the amount of discipline and planning and sort of ingenious forethought that went into this. I know I'm rooting for the bad guys, but it's just, it's impressive. The final concern was the weight of the gold. They knew that the boxes of bullion would be weighed several times on their way to their destination. If their weight dropped during the trip, the theft would be detected immediately. So they bought about 200 weight of lead shot to carry with them onto the train and replace the stolen gold. They packaged that in parcels of eight and four pounds using blue check bags that they made themselves.

Starting point is 00:06:34 To carry all this, they designed strong leather courier bags that could be concealed under a cloak or cape, and carpet bags to carry the shot and Agar's tools. Now they just needed to choose the right night to undertake the robbery. In order for the plan to work, they needed to be sure Burgess had been assigned to stand guard over the gold, so he altered the guard's work roster to be sure he'd be working on the train through May. After all this preparation, they wanted to wait for a suitably large shipment of gold, but even with inside information, they couldn't be sure when this would come through. So Agar and Pierce began to make the trip to London Bridge Station every night, each time ready to enact the whole plan. They made this trip about five times without success, but on Tuesday, May 15, 1855, Agar arrived at London

Starting point is 00:07:15 Bridge Station and saw Burgess lift his cap and wipe his face. That was the signal that the job was going ahead. Burgess had learned that consignments from the three London bullion merchants would be transported on that night's train, and it was a large enough haul to suit their purposes. Agar told Pierce the job was on. As they approached the station, they passed Tester, who said briefly, all right, and then headed back toward the ticket office. Agar bought two first-class tickets, and Pierce got into the first-class carriage. Agar watched the porter put the two carpet bags full of lead shot into the luggage car, where James Burgess was standing guard over two iron safes. Agar waited on the platform until no one was looking, and then slipped into the luggage car

Starting point is 00:07:53 himself. He hid in a corner, and Burgess threw an apron over him. He had to wait in that position for five or ten minutes while Burgess took in more luggage. He said later that the time passed very long. But finally the train started to move. Now they had 35 minutes before the train arrived at the next station, Reigate. Agar left his place and immediately tried his duplicate keys on the first safe. He was prepared to open both locks, but as it happened, only one of them was in use. For their own convenience, the railway employees had left the other one open. Inside the safe were two wooden boxes. He removed one of them and

Starting point is 00:08:25 retrieved his tools from a carpet bag. He used a pair of pincers to remove the iron bands that bound the box, and he used a mallet to break it open. Inside were six bars of gold. He put one into a black bag and handed it to Burgess, who placed it in the front part of the carriage. Agar put the remaining bars into one of the courier bags. Then, from the carpet bags, he took some of the parcels of lead shot that he and Pierce had prepared and put them into the box to make up the weight of the stolen gold. He refastened the iron bands around the box, took out a stick of red wax, and used a stamp to emboss a seal on the box to replace the one he'd broken. It wasn't the authentic seal of the bullion merchant, just an ordinary stamp he'd bought at an ironmonger's in

Starting point is 00:09:01 Tooley Street, but he knew that in the dim light, the railway police would assume that any good seal was genuine. By this time, the train was approaching Reigate. Agar put the box back in the safe and hid himself again. When the train had stopped, William Tester, who'd been traveling as a passenger, appeared at the luggage car and said, where is it? Burgess handed him the black bag containing the first bar of gold. Tester would take that back to London on the next train, sharing the burden and allowing the thieves to steal even more gold. Before the train left Reigate, Pierce got out of the first class carriage and joined Burgess and Agar in the luggage car. Then they were off again, toward Tunbridge. When the train was safely moving, Agar removed the remaining box from the first safe. He forced it open and found that it contained American gold coins worth $500.

Starting point is 00:09:43 This was even better than bullion. The coins could be exchanged easily and couldn't be traced. He replaced them with lead shot as before, returned the box to the safe, and locked it with the key. Now he unlocked the second safe. This one contained only a single wooden box, but it was larger than they'd expected. Inside were rows and rows of gold bars, and the gold was of a different color. Agar recognized it as Californian. There was so much that they ran out of lead shot long before they'd emptied the box. Pierce wanted to take more, but Agar reminded him that the weights of the boxes would be checked while they themselves were still aboard the train, and the stolen gold was in their bags.

Starting point is 00:10:18 So they took as many bars as they could replace with lead shot, closed the box, and put it back in the safe. Their takings were now in the bags. They swept up the stray bits of wood and wax from the floor. Agar and Pierce hid, and the train pulled into Folkestone Harbor Station, where the railway staff removed the safes which would be sent on to Boulogne on the morning steamboat. The train carried the thieves on to Dover, the end of the line, where Agar and Pierce got off, shouldered their bags, and tried to walk nonchalantly to the Dover Castle Hotel while each was carrying almost a hundredweight in stolen gold. At the hotel, they ordered supper, and then Agar walked out onto the pier and threw his tools and the duplicate safe keys into the sea.

Starting point is 00:10:55 On the train back to London, they had a carriage to themselves where they congratulated themselves with brandy. When the train arrived at London Bridge Station at about 5 a.m., a railway policeman opened the door and offered to help with their luggage. They took a succession of cabs to hide their trail and then returned to Pierce's house in Crown Terrace. The next morning, Agar met William Tester at Borough Market and collected the first gold bar from him. Pierce converted some of the gold into cash at a money changer's in Leadenhall Street. The manager thought the tall man looked tired, as though he had been traveling. Hall Street. The manager thought the tall man looked tired, as though he had been traveling.

Starting point is 00:11:27 When Pierce had sold the rest of the coin at another money changer, he was carrying enough money in his pocket to buy a suburban villa. They hid the remaining gold in a trunk in Agar's bedroom, where in time they built a makeshift furnace and melted it down into bars of a new size. Then they sold those through Agar's contacts and finally divided the spoils with Burgess and Tester. As time passed, it seemed increasingly sure that they'd carried off one of the most sensational robberies of the 19th century. The total value of the theft was calculated to be between 12,000 and 14,000 pounds. When the theft was discovered, the railway's own police force went to work immediately, as did the Metropolitan Police Force, various other English police forces, and the French

Starting point is 00:12:01 authorities. Hundreds of people were questioned, including employees of the railways, harbors, and ships along the line, but after a year, the authorities had made no arrests and seemed to have no credible suspects. The thieves might have gotten away with this entirely except for a petty and completely avoidable squabble. Agar was arrested for forging a check and sentenced to be transported to Australia. He asked Pierce to look after his family, but Pierce reneged on that agreement, and Agar's wife, angry and desperate at the loss of support, finally went to the authorities and said she knew of a plan that had been carried out against the Southeastern Railway. They confronted Agar, who was angry that Pierce had betrayed his family. He turned Queen's evidence and began to talk. And now the whole happy ending fell apart. Pierce, Burgess, and Tester were

Starting point is 00:12:43 arrested and placed on trial, where Agar told the whole story of the train robbery. The jury took only 10 minutes to reach a verdict. All three men were guilty. Pierce served two years hard labor, and Burgess and Tester got harsher sentences because they had been employees of the company. Each was transported for 14 years. Because Agar had turned Queen's evidence, he was not charged in the theft, but his conviction for check forgery stood, and that meant transportation for life. Interestingly, while the public saw Pierce as a villain, Agar was looked on almost with admiration. The judge said,

Starting point is 00:13:13 The man Agar is a man who is bad, I dare say as bad as can be, but that he is a man of most extraordinary ability no person who heard him examined can for a moment deny. I do not entertain a doubt that it was because he was an old, experienced thief, noted for his extraordinary skill, that he was applied to by you for the purpose of getting this robbery effected. He gave to this, and perhaps to many other robberies, an amount of care and perseverance, one-tenth of which, devoted to honest pursuits, must have raised him to a respectable station in life, and would have enabled him to realize a large fortune. To prevent future thefts, the railway started conveying safes in a purpose-built bullion van

Starting point is 00:13:47 rather than the luggage car, and it built a stronghouse at Folkestone to hold the safes when they arrived there. Though they were caught, Pierce, Agar, Burgess, and Tester had inaugurated a new type of crime, and a new era of train robbery had begun. Given its influence, it's surprising how little known the story is. It's probably best remembered through the 1975 novel The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton, who would go on to write Jurassic Park. Crichton heard the story while lecturing at Cambridge and later turned the novel into a movie starring Sean Connery in 1978. Unfortunately, he fictionalized a lot of it, which is a shame because it's a cracking good story on its own. Even in its own day, the robbery was as much admired as condemned, and largely for the

Starting point is 00:14:25 patience, discipline, and ingenious planning of Edward Agar. In 1859, just four years after it took place, the Welsh financial journalist David Morier Evans was referring to it as high art. He wrote, what shall be said of the display of ingenuity, perseverance, and artistic skill which accompanied the entire proceedings as revealed in the history of the Southeastern Bullion robbery. The acute cunning with which it was planned, the number of persons directly or indirectly concerned in it, the careful painstaking with which all the preliminaries were carried out, the wonderful skill with which the actual robbery was effected, and the curious way in which it was discovered, these circumstances combined to make the gold robbery stand out in bold relief, and hand down the names of Pierce, Agar, and Burgess as having acquired doubtful preeminence in criminal history. And George Augustus Noakes,

Starting point is 00:15:09 the founding editor of the Railway magazine, called the robbery, without exception, the most daring and ingenious theft ever perpetrated in the annals of railway history. We want to thank everyone who helps us to be able to keep making this show. And this week, we're also sending out a special thank you to Mike Dean, our newest super patron. If you'd like to join Mike and all our other wonderful supporters of our show to help us keep bringing you your weekly dose of the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. If you become a patron, you'll get access to some bonus content, such as extra discussions on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on what Sasha, our trusty mascot, has been getting up to lately. Again, that's at

Starting point is 00:16:05 patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of our website. And thanks so much to everyone who helps make Futility Closet possible. We've talked a few times about AI-created art, movies, ads, etc., most recently in episode 251, after which Hanno Zulo wrote, Hi Sharon, Greg, and Sasha. I work in IT and went through several hype cycles of my industry, and the current rediscovered hype about artificial intelligence, or machine learning, is troubling to watch. In your recent letter segments, you mentioned several amusing examples of art or creative work made by an algorithm. I cringe when hearing those.

Starting point is 00:16:52 To explain it in simple terms, these are usually just the results of an algorithm or recipe that mixes random choices from a set of possible outcomes, a result filter to remove invalid results, and statistics over an input set of existing outcomes, a result filter to remove invalid results, and statistics over an input set of existing valid examples. The bigger the better, hence big data. As you can see, all of these are things a computer is very good at. While the result filter is often written by a human, machine learning usually is just a fancy word to describe that the result filter was trained automatically, with little to no human supervision.

Starting point is 00:17:30 The results are impressive, but often misleading. To survive in danger, humans have evolved to be very good at finding patterns and explanations. But humans find it very, very uncomfortable when there is no pattern or explanation in a random event. So we must search for meaning even when there is none. We will find faces in random objects or Mars canals on blurry telescope pictures, or we will explain a freak weather event through superstition. The other thing humans are good at is empathy and trying to guess our counterparts' intentions. So when a randomly generated thing is presented as art, these deep psychological effects make us want to see a deeper meaning and intelligent intent when there is neither, and make us want to see a deeper meaning and intelligent intent when there is neither, and make us want to forgive even obvious faults of the art. Much of current AI isn't really

Starting point is 00:18:12 that artificially intelligent. Much computer-generated art may have been made by an algorithm, but is often curated by the programmer who wants to present the best results. I did that myself 20 years ago when I wrote a simple Markov chain text generator using German election campaign programs as input to create a virtual politician who gave realistic but slightly drunk-sounding campaign rally speeches. My friends and I sent out press releases to German journalists, and of course we chose the silliest results only. The same is true for commercial AI. In my time in IT, I have seen startups that use a simple statistical algorithm inside, but human curation slash

Starting point is 00:18:52 filtering before presenting the best results to their clients, while not telling the public about this. This would never scale, but the founders usually excuse this to themselves by saying that they will develop the actual AI later, when they have sufficient funding, then fail because that's impossible, and the company falters or pivots. Some supposed AI products are actually using cheap labor click workers through services like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to crowdsource the intelligence needed for a task to a human. There are many examples, but a very recent one is the wheeled KiwiBot food delivery drones in San Francisco, which aren't autonomous but actually remote-controlled by click workers in Colombia for $2 an hour. So Hanno, with his IT background, is able to speak more broadly

Starting point is 00:19:38 and knowledgeably about a trend that I've noticed just in doing the research for this show. For example, as I mentioned about the Harry Potter story discussed in episode 238, although it is widely said to have been written by an AI, if you dig into it, you learn that it actually was written as a collaboration between humans and a predictive text program. It's still amusing and fun, but it wasn't truly written by an AI. Similarly with the KiwiBot food delivery robots that Hanno mentions. These cooler-sized four-wheeled robots that deliver food in some circumscribed areas in California seem to be commonly described as being largely autonomous. But workers in Colombia,

Starting point is 00:20:17 the home country of the company's co-founders, plot waypoints for the robots, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where they should go next. And I'll note that like the Harry Potter story and some of the other AI stories I've covered, I actually had to spend a little time trying to find articles that included mention of the human collaboration. The little robots don't tend to go very far right now. The average distance that one travels for a delivery is about 200 meters or 656 feet. The KiwiBots do rely on their own programming to navigate the short distances between waypoints, avoid pedestrians, and stay centered on a sidewalk. So the company that makes them bristles when others call them remote-controlled. They prefer to call it parallel

Starting point is 00:21:01 autonomy. But whatever you call it, as with most of the other AI examples we've covered, for now at least, humans are still an essential part of the equation. I wonder how sophisticated those KiwiBots would have to get before we agreed that they were intelligent. You know, like if you took the humans out of the equation, and they got to the point where they could negotiate pretty sophisticated obstacles. You know, they get to the point where you'd sort of, there must be a point where you'd sort of, there must be some point where you'd say, okay, they're intelligent.

Starting point is 00:21:27 Maybe it depends on like how much problem solving they can do on their own rather than just execute a very specific task. Yeah. A recent article in Forbes titled Today's Deep Learning

Starting point is 00:21:40 is Like Magic in All the Wrong Ways made many of the same points that Hanno did, saying magic is at its heart about creating the circumstances is like magic in all the wrong ways, made many of the same points that Hanno did, saying, magic is at its heart about creating the circumstances under which audiences can suspend their disbelief and ascribe their imaginations and dreams to the events they are witnessing. The physical reality of magic is far more mundane, combining an assembly line of developers creating new tricks and a logistical and artistic chaining of those discrete tricks into complex shows. The article argues that when algorithms that are each designed to perform a

Starting point is 00:22:11 single narrow task are grouped together, we stop thinking of it as code and start to anthropomorphize it into something intelligent that can understand. Further, the public doesn't get to see the limitations of the programs, but instead is shown what the article calls a carefully choreographed magic show, and one that is designed to maximize ideal situations. And only the machine's successes are publicized while many of the failures are hidden. State of AI in 2019, notes that while technology is doing more than ever, there is a fair amount of what that article calls hype and bluster with which AI is discussed by tech companies and advertisers. And it notes that the phrase artificial intelligence is commonly being rather misleadingly used by both companies and the press, at times to an extent that the article calls gibberish, and warns against exaggerating either the

Starting point is 00:23:05 intelligence or the abilities of current AI systems. Hanno ended his email with, So when someone praises an advanced machine learning AI to you, remember, don't look for meaning or intelligence. There's just statistics, a filter, and a random number generator inside, and probably also a click worker. I take his point, but I keep being reminded that we don't really understand our own intelligence. So we're comparing this to something we don't really

Starting point is 00:23:29 understand ourselves. Maybe, yeah. How can you tell if something qualifies as intelligent if we don't really know what that is? I guess so. And I guess, and that probably is, we're looking for the machines to be more human-like before we want to call them intelligent, or if they do things that seem human-like, then we call them intelligent. That's a little anthropocentric, right? Because by human, we mean sort of enchantingly mysterious. On the other hand, I do think there is a real tendency to anthropomorphize these things, when they are doing really specific tasks without really what we would call understanding the task. They're just performing it as they've been trained to. And I take the point of the Forbes article that when you chain a bunch of those tasks together,

Starting point is 00:24:16 it suddenly looks like understanding and intelligence, when maybe it's really not. The puzzle in episode 251, usual spoiler alert here, was about an Olympic athlete who set a world record in the long jump but didn't win a medal because, it turned out, he was competing in the decathlon and did poorly in the other events. Alan Morgan wrote, Your recent podcast about the long jump world record reminded me of this quirk in the rules. It is possible, although it has never happened, for a competitor in the long jump to set a world record but lose to someone who did not set a world record. It has to do with wind. For an event to be legal for world records, the wind must be under two meters per second, but jumps made over the legal limit are still valid for that competition.

Starting point is 00:25:00 So a world record setting athlete could, in theory, lose to another athlete who jumped further, but with a wind-aided jump, ineligible for the record books. So that's a bit of a variation on the puzzle, and would make a good puzzle in itself, in that you can set a world record in long jump, or from what I understand, many of the track and field events, but still not win the event because another competitor did better than you, but due to the wind assistance, as it's called, was not able to count their performance for a record. Since wind speeds don't affect the results within a competition, that wind-aided performance would be perfectly

Starting point is 00:25:34 valid for the competition, thus costing you the medal. And for those who don't think in metric units, the disqualifying wind speed is about four and a half miles per hour or higher, which doesn't seem that high. So it sounded to me like this might not be a too uncommon issue. Yeah, I guess not. I'd never heard of this before. No, I hadn't either until people wrote in. Tuvia Pollack from Jerusalem, Israel also wrote on this topic

Starting point is 00:25:56 and provided the very appreciated tip that he is a male, despite Americans often presuming otherwise based on his name, which he says is the Hebrew originator of Tobias. Tuvia wrote, Dear Greg, Sharon, and Sasha, At the beginning I was sure that the lateral thinking puzzle about the long jump was an actual event of 1991. Then I remembered that it wasn't the Olympics but the world championship. Plus he, Lewis, did get a medal, just not gold. The existing world record at the time was 8.90 meters, established in the 1960s, and Carl Lewis surpassed it with just one centimeter, jumping 8.91 and setting a

Starting point is 00:26:31 new world record. He, however, had to settle for the silver medal, as Mike Powell did 8.95, setting a new world record that is still in effect today. I actually remember this happening. I was nine years old and my parents were watching it on TV. It was amazing. Lewis had not lost a long jump competition in a decade before then, and Powell had been his main rival for many years, often getting the silver just below Lewis. Later measurements, however, noted that the 8.91 leap of Lewis was aided by the wind, so under the rules, it turns out that had he won, that jump would not be established as a world record, even though it would count for the competition. Powell's jump, on the other hand,

Starting point is 00:27:09 was winless, and the 8.95 was established as a valid world record. That world record of 1991 is still in effect. Since then until today, the furthest anyone has ever been able to jump is 8.74. There is a short segment of this on Wikipedia in the article about Lewis. And Wikipedia says that Frederick Carlton Carl Lewis is an American athlete who won nine Olympic gold medals, one Olympic silver medal, and 10 world championship medals in track and field from 1979 to 1996 when he won his last Olympic event in the long jump. He's one of only three Olympic athletes who have won a gold medal in the same individual event in the long jump. He's one of only three Olympic athletes who have won a gold medal in the same individual event in four consecutive Olympic Games, so a pretty impressive

Starting point is 00:27:50 athlete. As Tuvia noted, at the time of the 1991 World Championships, Lewis hadn't lost a long jump competition in a decade and had won the previous 65 meets in which he'd competed. When he jumped 8.91 meters, it was the longest jump recorded under any conditions, though since it was determined to be wind-aided, it couldn't count for the record books. But Mike Powell's next jump was 8.95 meters and under legal wind conditions, so Lewis's record would have been short-lived anyway. And as Tuvia said, no one has been able to come close to those distances since. According to the Wikipedia article, that competition is considered to be one of the greatest ones in the sport of long jump, or some contend, in any sport. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate your comments and follow-ups,

Starting point is 00:28:36 as well as pronunciation and gender pronoun tips. So if you have any of those to send, 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's going to try to work out what's actually happening by asking yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Wayne Ewan with a minor rewrite by me. A man went to work. When he returned home, he was now a citizen of a different country. What happened? All right. Citizen of a different country.

Starting point is 00:29:21 Oh, gosh, where do you even start with something like that does he work for okay does this involve some travel yes i ask that without even understanding why i'm asking it so he travels he crosses like let's say a border between nations not necessarily oh yeah that's not He might stay within the same country. No. I can't say really yes to either one of those exactly. You said a citizen of a different country, so it's not that he started without any citizenship.

Starting point is 00:29:56 Correct. He was a citizen of a country. Would it help me to know which country? Maybe not. Maybe, but yeah. Okay, so he... It would be more interesting to figure out what he does for a living. He goes to work and travels.

Starting point is 00:30:08 Yes. Does he go up? Yes. Does he go into space? Yes. Well, that doesn't help me at all. Except that this really happened. So that might help you narrow it down.

Starting point is 00:30:22 He goes into space. So is he American? No. Soviet? Yes. Soviet? Yes. All right. You're beaming at me as if I'm making progress. You're making great progress, actually.

Starting point is 00:30:36 A Soviet cosmonaut goes into space. Yes. And does he interact with other people up there? Presumably. Of like Americans, people of another nation? I'm not actually sure. So he might just go up alone? No, he wasn't alone.

Starting point is 00:30:49 This really happened. Okay. So he goes up with, I guess, other cosmonauts. Yes. But he might go up just with other Soviets. Sure, yes. And then come right back down again. No. No?

Starting point is 00:31:01 Oh my gosh. Did he stay up there? Yes. Did he die? No. Do you become a citizen Did he stay up there? Yes. Did he die? No. Do you become a citizen of a different country when you die? That's kind of a metaphysical question. Okay, so when you say he goes to work, you mean he goes up into space?

Starting point is 00:31:14 Yes. And it's in space where he changes his citizenship, would you say? He was in space, yes, when his citizenship changed. You say that very carefully. All right, so when he took off, he was a Soviet citizen. Yes. Is this... Okay, would it help me to know what country he became a citizen of?

Starting point is 00:31:41 Yes, but I'm thinking more just sort of put it together. This really happened. This really.... This really? Oh, oh, oh. The Soviet Union fell. Yes. While he was in space. Isn't that cool?

Starting point is 00:31:53 The man was Kosmanov Sergei Krikalov, who was on the Mir space station when the Soviet Union was dissolved on December 26, 1991. And because of the political upheaval and uncertainty, Krikalov ended up having to stay on the space station for months longer than he had planned to until they were able to work out the details, for example, of his having to land in what was the now newly independent Kazakhstan. He was finally able to return on March 25, 1992 after being on Mir for more than 10 months.

Starting point is 00:32:23 Oh my God. Because his country just dissolved while he was in space. That must have been pretty scary. So thanks to Wayne for that puzzle set in outer space. I always used to ask while solving puzzles if they were in space. Do you remember that? I used to always do that. And I don't think we ever hit one where they were, but I've given you two puzzles now where

Starting point is 00:32:41 the answer is that they were in space. So maybe I need to go back to asking that. If anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to have us try, set on Earth or not, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. If you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, please check out the support us section

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Starting point is 00:33:24 Learn about the Futility Closet books and see the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any comments or feedback for us, please email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. As always, our music was written and performed by Greg's extraordinary brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 258-The First Great Train Robbery

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