Futility Closet - 292-Fordlandia

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 11,000 quirky curiosities from notated bird song to an adaptable elegy. This is episode 292. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1927, Henry Ford decided to build a plantation in the Amazon to supply rubber for his auto company. The result was Fordlandia, an incongruous Midwestern-style town in the tropical rainforest.

Starting point is 00:00:46 In today's show, we'll describe the checkered history of Ford's curious project and what it revealed about his vision of society. We'll also consider some life-saving seagulls and puzzle over a false alarm. In 1927, Henry Ford was the richest man in the world, the creator of the world's first affordable mass-produced automobile. But he was increasingly concerned about the world's supply of rubber, which was controlled by the British, grown in their colonies in Southeast Asia. Latex was the one important natural resource that Ford didn't control. He needed it not just for tires, but for the increasingly complex engines, steering assemblages, and shock absorption systems in his cars. He asked his personal secretary to find the best place to grow rubber himself, and the secretary told him it should be grown where it had originated, in the Amazon. Since 1924, Ford had considered growing rubber in the Everglades.

Starting point is 00:01:39 Now he began seriously to consider establishing a rubber plantation in the Brazilian forest. Apart from eliminating his reliance on foreign sources of rubber, the idea appealed to Ford because it offered a way to test his ideas about social organization. He believed that encouraging workers to live wholesome lives outside the factory would make them more loyal and efficient within it. Good living would make them both responsible citizens and good customers. He had tried to apply these ideas on the factory floor in America, but he wanted to test them on a larger scale. The Amazon rubber plantation, which would be called Fordlandia, was a chance to do that, to establish an ideal

Starting point is 00:02:15 city in the Brazilian forest. The project appealed to him also because Brazil was uncorrupted by the unions, politicians, and lawyers he felt had thwarted his progress in America. The forest had a profusion of natural resources, and the people there, he thought, could benefit greatly by his civilizing influence. He sent a researcher to Brazil who wrote back, The people are everywhere poor and forlorn. Most of them are penniless and without hope for the future. Many of them have not even had a piece of money in their hands for years. Ford himself did not visit Brazil, and he had little curiosity about the existing culture. The vision that took shape in his head was a peculiarly American ideal based on his youth in Dearborn, Michigan. It would be a Midwestern town with modern amenities where drink and other forms of immorality were discouraged

Starting point is 00:03:00 and that combined generous wages, humane benefits, and moral improvement to create health and wealth for its people. He said, what the people of the interior of Brazil need is to have their economic life stabilized by fair returns for their labor, paid in cash, and their mode of living brought up to modern standards in sanitation and in prevention and cure of disease. And he added, there will not be any great difficulty in accomplishing these things. disease. And he added, there will not be any great difficulty in accomplishing these things. For $125,000, he got the rights to two and a half million acres, an area nearly the size of Connecticut, on the Tapajos River, a tributary of the Amazon about 600 miles from the Atlantic. And the experiment began. One German newspaper wrote, if the machine, the tractor, can open a

Starting point is 00:03:42 breach in the great green wall of the Amazon jungle, if Ford plants millions of rubber trees where there used to be nothing but jungle solitude, then the romantic history of rubber will have a new chapter. A new and titanic fight between nature and modern man is beginning. In the summer of 1928, two ships were dispatched, loaded with materials, to start the plantation. Generators, road building machinery, steel, concrete mixers, prefabricated buildings, an entire disassembled warehouse, clothing, medicine, and food. A million dollars worth of goods altogether. But the forest site they had chosen for the plantation was at the top of a rise to protect it from flooding, and that meant the ships couldn't reach it until the rainy season, when the river would be deep enough to accommodate them. They would wait for two months and wouldn't be fully unloaded until late January. In the meanwhile, workers started to clear the jungle. The planners had

Starting point is 00:04:33 envisioned a great industrial city with 25,000 workers and 100,000 residents, but Ford's dreams of cleanliness and order seemed far out of reach. The first progress report read, No sanitation, no garbage cans, flies by the million, all filth, banana peels, orange rinds, and dishwater thrown right out on the ground. About 30 men sick out of 104, no deaths, but plenty of malaria. That stopped work for nearly the whole month of August. While the heavy machinery was delayed for months on the ships, workers managed to clear only a few hundred acres of trees. Also, again inauspiciously, they had undertaken this clearing during the wet season, so the trees they felled wouldn't burn. They had to douse them with kerosene, and the resulting blaze burned for days and sent terrified wildlife fleeing. The managers put up some makeshift buildings to serve while the jungle was cleared and a street grid laid out, but they had trouble retaining workers.

Starting point is 00:05:27 The work was difficult and unpleasant, and there was nothing to buy in Fordlandia, so the workers tended to take their pay and return to their families. By the beginning of 1929, Ford had spent more than $1.5 million and had little to show for it. As 1930 unfolded, there was still no dock or reception hall to receive new workers, and a shantytown of homeless laborers had begun to grow up along the riverfront. Fordlandia was becoming a mockery of Ford's vaunted values—orderliness, efficiency, discipline, and self-reliance. The plantation manager was having trouble even keeping the string of bulbs lit that hung over the few streets that he'd managed to cut from the jungle. The housing they'd built was still inadequate,

Starting point is 00:06:05 and the hospital had sunk on its foundations and leaked in wet weather. The workforce now numbered more than a thousand, but the facility could not keep food fresh because its refrigeration plant had yet to be assembled. Just as they had unwisely cleared the forest in the wet season, they had commenced planting in the dry, the worst time to plant rubber, and by the end of 1929 the results were so meager that it was clear they'd have to plow the planting under. But Ford installed yet

Starting point is 00:06:30 another manager who set about building a railway to the sawmill, as well as some provisional houses, schools, and a receiving building, and at length a recognizable town began to take shape. By the end of 1930 it was employing nearly 4,000 people. Work was underway on a dining hall. A new clinic had replaced the sagging hospital, and pipes and wires were being laid to support water, sewage, and electric systems. But Fordlandia was entering its third year, and permanent housing still had not been built. Worse, the regimentation and discipline that Ford had imposed were generating tensions with the Brazilian workers, whose input was not heeded. The Michigan managers kept to themselves and rarely learned much Portuguese. One Brazilian who visited the plantation as a boy said, they were very white, blonde with blue eyes, and spoke

Starting point is 00:07:14 a different language. It was as if the earth had been invaded by beings from another planet. One observer called this a wall of provincialism. The managers' wives found themselves entirely idle. One staff member wrote to Michigan, frankly, I believe that one of the troubles with the ladies is that for them it is a listless, useless life, nothing to do, and they have not the energy to do anything due to the climate, which is undoubtedly of an insidious nature. They too spoke only English, and so could not communicate even with their servants. They complained of heat rashes, skin fungus, and dysentery,

Starting point is 00:07:45 and were plagued at night by vampire bats that worked their way past the window screens. Even 20 years after she returned home, one wife said she recalled black ants with claws just like lobsters and the largest flying cockroaches I've ever seen. With time, the social tensions abated somewhat, and there were no major incidents in 1930. By that time, most of the building had been done. Land was being cleared, rubber planted, and roads built.

Starting point is 00:08:08 It looked as though a workable routine had been established. But that December, a fight broke out in the new eating hall, where Ford had imposed a diet of brown rice, whole wheat bread, and tinned peaches. The resentment at this foreign paternalism boiled over when the workers were required also to stand in line to serve themselves, and they rioted, destroying the eating hall and every vehicle on the property, as well as manufacturing equipment, generators, and even their own homes. Damages from the riot were estimated at $25,000,

Starting point is 00:08:38 and the plantation's prospects seemed to dim further as the reality of the Depression reached the Amazon forest. Ford's company was running a deficit for the first time, and rubber prices were tumbling. But Ford decided to double down, perhaps unwilling to give up on a project that bore his name, and he allotted even more resources to the plantation. He began to talk it up in the press, emphasizing what he called its civilizing mission, and the Ford company would keep up this emphasis in its public pronouncements for the next decade. Gradually, the plantation's population was built up again, and within six months it had reached 1,500 workers and their families, about 5,000 people. Under manager

Starting point is 00:09:15 Archibald Johnston, it finally began to come into its own, an incongruous Midwestern American town in the Amazon jungle. Johnston contracted with concessionaires to open a barbershop, a bakery, a tailor, a shoe store, two grocery stores, a vegetable and fish market, a butcher, and even a store that sold notions and perfumery. He got someone to run the reopened dining hall. He arranged for better housing, establishing more than 100 adobe houses with water and electricity. The streets were graded, paved, and named, and he added sidewalks, street lamps, and even fire hydrants. Because Henry Ford thought that gardening would enforce a sense of propriety and personal pride, the planting of flowers and vegetables was incorporated into the school curriculum and encouraged among the workers.

Starting point is 00:09:59 The managers laid out tennis courts, swimming pools, and a nine-hole golf course and promoted hunting, competitive sporting events, and a vaudeville show staged by the managers. Residents could attend square dances, Hollywood films, and recitations of poetry by William Wordsworth and Henry Longfellow. A water tower with Ford's cursive logo painted on its side became the tallest man-made structure in the Amazon, the center of an elaborate system that pumped half a million gallons of filtered and chlorinated river water throughout the town each day. Altogether, one traveler said, Fordlandia was a miniature but improved Dearborn, Michigan in the tropical wilderness. The American military attache Lester Baker wrote, after traveling through hundreds of miles of jungle, to come into Fordlandia is like a dream. Here is a little corner of the United

Starting point is 00:10:44 States. There are six sets of staff houses and four foreman's quarters. All are equipped with modern plumbing, electric lights, telephones, electric refrigerators, washing machines, screens, pianos, and Victrolas. The town was a strange and admirable achievement, but the plantation was there to grow rubber, and that prospect was still in doubt, though they'd invested nearly four years of work and planted more than 3,000 acres. This reflected the central absurdity in Ford's plan. The Amazon is distinguished not by the simplicity and regimentation that Ford loved, but by complexity and perfusion. About 10% of the world's species live in the Amazon,

Starting point is 00:11:21 and there are, as one observer put it, more species of lichens, liverworts, mosses, and algae growing on the upper surface of a single leaf of an Amazonian palm than there are on the entire continent of Antarctica. This meant that the forest reacted in complex, unpredictable ways to everything the engineers did. For example, as they cleared the forest to plant rubber, they admitted sunlight to the local creeks. This enriched the algae, which increased the snail population, and this served as a vector for a parasitic worm that causes schistosomiasis, a disease that had been unknown in the Brazilian Amazon until it appeared in Fordlandia. Greatly compounding this unpredictability was Henry Ford's aversion to

Starting point is 00:12:00 experts. Incredibly, in planning this whole undertaking, he had made no effort to consult botanists, agronomists, or commercial rubber growers. He believed that experts would talk forever if you let them. It was best to learn by doing, to get a plan quickly off the drawing board so that practical experience can show you what works and what doesn't. That's a risky strategy. The aviator Charles Lindbergh, who once worked with Ford's aviation division, said, their policy is to act first and plan afterward, usually overlooking completely essential details. This was why Fordlandia had planted its first rubber trees in the dry season. No one had consulted a botanist.

Starting point is 00:12:35 And now, managers were planting trees in tight rows away from a steady flow of water, which they soon learned promotes fungi and pests. Leaf blight set in and destroyed the saplings. In the face of this setback, Ford finally consulted plant pathologist James Weir, who'd written the authoritative reference on South American leaf blight. He arrived at Fordlandia in March 1933 and suggested they move the whole operation 70 miles downriver to Belterra, a plateau with richer soil and better drainage. Ford listened to him. The company had spent six years and seven million dollars on Fordlandia, but in May 1934 it traded half a

Starting point is 00:13:11 million acres of that plantation for an equal area in Belterra. Fordlandia would be maintained as it was and would serve as Weir's research station. Belterra was set up like another transplanted Midwestern town, with a city square, a church, an outdoor movie theater, a swimming pool, a golf course, a water tower, and even windmills to produce electricity. Model Ts and As rolled down its streets, which were lined with sidewalks, street lamps, and hydrants, and the workers' bungalows had neat lawns and front gardens. By late 1936, this second facility had planted 700,000 trees. Blight had begun to appear here too, but the soil was better and flatter,

Starting point is 00:13:49 and it was easier to fumigate and prune the plants. Still, the jungle would not be tamed. Lace bugs began to thrive among the trees, and workers once spent five hours removing 250,000 caterpillars by hand, enough to fill 50 one-gallon containers. The managers experimented with growing different varieties of the rubber trees, as well as with grafting and varying the rate of planting. They had some success. Over the next two years, work crews cleared more than 20,000 acres,

Starting point is 00:14:16 and by late 1940, Belterra had planted nearly three million trees. But finally, the leaf blight turned epidemic and killed most of them. That would be the end. Henry Ford's strangely misplaced Amazon towns may have stood as examples of his American dream, but as plantations, they were economic failures. By the end of World War II, Ford was in poor health and low-cost latex was flooding the world, supplied by Asian plantations and now also synthesized from petroleum. Under pressure to rebuild the company for post-war production, Ford's grandson, Henry Ford II, decided to sell off the plantations, and on November 5, 1945, he turned over Fordlandia and Belterra to the

Starting point is 00:14:57 Brazilian government for less than a quarter of a million dollars. Altogether, Ford had invested $20 million in the project, but Fordlandia had never produced a rubber harvest, and Belterra had produced only 750 tons of latex, none of which ever made it into a Ford car. The Amazon had represented one of Henry Ford's biggest hopes, and it had become one of his biggest failures. The Americans returned home, leaving the plantation standing in the forest. A visitor several years later said the jungle was, quote, beginning to creep back over it and blot out the signs and lines of a super-civilization which men had transported and transplanted at the cost of incredible effort, money, and human life.

Starting point is 00:15:36 It stood in the forest for most of the 20th century, with a population of only a few dozen. Since the early 2000s, the site has grown more active, and today about 3,000 people live there. But Henry Ford's dream of a utopian society in the jungle has receded entirely. The water tower still stands, empty, and its logo has long since faded. The main story in episode 285 that came out on February 24th was about the grasshopper plagues, where farmsteads in the American plains were beset by enormous swarms of locusts in the 1870s. Just three days later, on February 27th, a story appeared in several media outlets about China intending to send ducks to help combat locust swarms in Pakistan, and a couple of our listeners sent us a heads up on that.

Starting point is 00:16:36 So the very serious part of this story is that for much of this year, there have been hundreds of billions of locusts swarming through parts of East Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in the worst infestation seen in decades, threatening food supplies and livelihoods and leaving at least 20 million people at risk of not having enough food. Nature reports that these types of swarms typically occupy about 100 square kilometers and contain between 4 and 8 billion locusts. But in Kenya, for example, where the problem is the worst it's been in the last 70 years, one of these swarms covered 2,400 square kilometers, which is more than three times the size of New York City or about the size of Luxembourg. Unusually warm and wet weather has allowed for much of the extreme population increase in these locusts.

Starting point is 00:17:22 The desert locust breeds after periods of rain, and for example, a cyclone struck the desert between Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman in 2018 that caused very favorable breeding conditions for several generations of the locusts. Just as the conditions were drying out and the breeding was slowing, a second cyclone hit the area, leading to a new round of heavy breeding. Instead of the population increasing the expected 400-fold for one cyclone, it increased 8,000-fold. In addition, the ongoing war in Yemen has been another important factor. Yemen is considered a frontline country for the desert locusts, as they are typically present there throughout the year, but the war has greatly hindered the country's once-effective locust control program. And just as I was writing up this story, I started seeing news reports about

Starting point is 00:18:09 a second wave of these locusts hitting East Africa, so this very serious situation is definitely an ongoing one. The less serious side to this story, though, is that for a little while, the idea was floating around that ducks were going to be used to help combat the locusts. Irene Liberale wrote, Hello Sharon and Greg. I've just listened to your most recent episode about the grasshopper plague, so today's article in The Guardian caught my eye. Actually, it says Duck Army in the title, so I would have clicked it even without the podcast. But it's quite a coincidence to see this story right after listening to the episode.

Starting point is 00:18:44 The photo showing a modern-day locust swarm was particularly striking. Greg's story painted a vivid picture, but it's something else to see an actual image of it. I thought you might be interested in this article as a follow-up to the locust story, and also as people who might have a general interest in armies of waterfowls. There's quite a long list of animals with interesting jobs, from the cat station masters of Japan to the bug-eating library bats, and now we can add duck armies to it. I hope you also enjoy the short video of ducks marching along, underscored with suitably dramatic music. Thank you as always for your very informative podcast, and have a very good day.

Starting point is 00:19:19 And Irene sent a link to an article in The Guardian that I didn't get to see before they amended the article. The link says, China to dispatch army of ducks to Pakistan to devour locust swarm. But when I clicked on it, the title had been changed to, China will not send ducks to tackle locusts in Pakistan, says expert. Since they changed the article, I also didn't get to see the video that Irene mentioned. Although I did find an article in The Independent on the same story, and it did have a video of a great many ducks, possibly a whole army of them, marching along, although without the dramatic music. The photos that accompany many of these stories are truly striking, as Irene said, seeing, for example, people standing in the midst of such a swarm of

Starting point is 00:19:59 insects. The whole duck story started when the Ningbao Evening News reported that 10,000 ducks were going to be sent from Zhejiang province to Pakistan, and this report got picked up rather widely before being refuted. The Ningbao Evening News had quoted a researcher from the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Agricultural Technology as saying that using ducks would be much less expensive and environmentally damaging than the use of pesticides. He also favorably compared ducks to chickens, saying that since ducks like to stay in groups, they're easier to manage than chickens, and that a duck can eat more than 200 locusts a day, compared to only 70 for a chicken. So a definite superiority for the ducks there. And this whole idea of sending in ducks to combat the locusts is not as completely far-fetched as

Starting point is 00:20:43 it initially sounds, as I actually saw several mentions of China having reportedly deployed ducks to eat locusts during an infestation in the Xinjiang region in 2000. Some accounts only mention the ducks and that they were supposedly effective against the locusts, and other accounts say that both ducks and chickens were sent and that the ducks were more effective than the chickens, but I didn't find much more information than that. The idea of China sending ducks to Pakistan received a great deal of popular support on Chinese social media, getting more than 500 million views and thousands of comments on China's Weibo platform in just hours after the story broke. But a professor from the China Agricultural University told reporters that it really wouldn't be such a great idea after all, sending waterfowl to such a hot desert region.

Starting point is 00:21:31 Alex Baumans had also sent a link to a BBC story about sending ducks to Pakistan and said, this just appeared in my news feed with the title, Release the Quacken. And then later, helpfully let me know that the story had been refuted. Alex did some quick calculations based on the weight of grasshoppers and adult ducks and how much they eat to determine that the estimate of ducks eating 200 or so locusts a day did seem reasonable, and then said, as for the practicality of deploying 10,000 ducks and ensuring that they eat locusts and not much else, that is a different matter entirely. One thing is for certain, if you did this in a French village, people would sue you because of the noise. And based on what I had covered in episode 262 about people suing over

Starting point is 00:22:14 the noise made by one French rooster, I have to assume that he's correct. Even if you could transport 10,000 ducks from China to Pakistan. And even if they ate 200 locusts a day, that's still, the numbers you were talking about before, billions of them. The numbers are so big, it's hard even to conceive. Yeah. And that's some other people who weighed in on this, you know, in the news reports were basically saying that, yeah, it sounds like, you know, it's a lot of locusts that they'd be eating, but with the numbers of locusts that they have, it might just take too much time. And then you've got a whole bunch of ducks. And then you have the ducks to deal with. And yeah, and ducks probably aren't going to do very well in a desert anyway. And on the topic of birds helpfully eating problematic

Starting point is 00:22:58 insects, Jordan Johnson wrote, I assume you have already heard this story, and it does not have to do with grasshoppers exactly. But here in Utah, there is a famous episode of a plague of Mormon crickets that was ended through the intervention of seagulls. It was significant enough that there is a statue of a seagull on Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City. And Greg and I hadn't heard this story before, Jordan, so thanks for sending it and the helpful link. Apparently, if you live in Utah, it is very well known. A 2017 article in the Salt Lake City Weekly calls this story, known as the Miracle of the Gulls, pervasive and entrenched in the Utah culture. According to Wikipedia, the Miracle of

Starting point is 00:23:37 the Gulls is an 1848 event often credited by Latter-day Saints, Mormons, for saving the Mormon pioneers' second harvest in the Salt Lake Valley. While absent in contemporary accounts, later accounts claimed seagulls miraculously saved the 1848 crops by eating thousands of insects that were devouring their fields. As the story goes, a late frost in the spring of 1848 destroyed some of the pioneers' crops, and then swarms of insects, now called Mormon crickets, threatened what remained. After fervent prayer, or possibly a three-day fast and prayer, legions of seagulls arrived and ate massive quantities of the crickets, gorging until they

Starting point is 00:24:16 were full, regurgitating the insects, and then devouring more, over a two- or three-week period, depending on the source. The gulls demolished the crickets, saving the rest of the crops and ensuring the survival of the pioneers. To commemorate the event, the LDS Church erected Seagull Monument in Salt Lake City in 1913, and the California gull was officially named the State Bird of Utah in 1955. While no one seems to doubt the great difficulties faced by the Mormon pioneers in the spring of 1848, which did include an invasion of insects, there do seem to be many who question exactly what role the gulls played. For example, an article on the LDS Living site notes that LDS historians consider some aspects of the story to be over-dramatized. to be over-dramatized, and one such historian wrote, like numerous other popular accounts of important and unusual historical events, the details of the cricket war of 1848 over the years have been oversimplified, improved upon, and given somewhat legendary characteristics.

Starting point is 00:25:17 One important fact noted by both the LDS and other historians is that the gulls aren't mentioned in the contemporaneous accounts of the crickets. Although the cricket plague was much written about, the descriptions of the events in early accounts and people's journals and diaries don't mention the gulls. One LDS historian who researched the events concluded that frost, crickets, and drought in 1848 all contributed to serious crop damage and that gulls, which are common enough in Utah, did appear and eat some of the insects, but that the actual benefit of the birds was probably not as extensive as the popular story goes today. Another LDS historian said, the gulls did appear on a smaller scale than we sometimes envision and that was a miracle to many of the early pioneers. I am not

Starting point is 00:26:02 ready to tear down the seagull monument on Temple Square because the gulls are only a symbol of the greater miracle that the pioneers were able to survive in the valley at all, given the conditions they lived in. The modern lesson might be constantly scanning the horizon for a flock of gulls when help might be before us in a smaller, more simple way. That's a nice way of putting it. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate getting your comments, feedback, and follow-ups. So if you have any of those that you'd like to send to us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Starting point is 00:26:41 It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him a strange-sounding situation, and he has to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Florian from Stuttgart. On the night of November 4, 2017, dozens of people called emergency services in the German city of Leipzig, concerned they were experiencing a natural disaster. However, they were told not to worry, and no firefighters or police were deployed.

Starting point is 00:27:09 What was going on? November 2017. Yeah. Is that significant? Would it help me to know what was happening in... No. Okay. So they, you said dozens of people.

Starting point is 00:27:17 Yes. All in the same city. Yes, all of them in Leipzig. So they all experienced the same thing that they interpreted as a natural disaster of some kind. Yes, yes. And were all wrong. Yes. It was not a natural disaster, but they all thought it was. So it would help me to guess either what they felt or what they thought the disaster was. They all obviously thought it was the same thing. Yes. An earthquake? Yes. So they felt the ground move. Yes. Or their houses shake. Yes. So something was happening in Leipzig in November 2017. Yes.

Starting point is 00:27:46 Wasn't an earthquake. Correct. And it wasn't anything to be concerned about at all. But it shook the ground. Yes, I know. So, but it wasn't like some kind of other disaster, you know, it's like, okay, it's not an earthquake. It's just, we've got bombs going off. You know, it's not like that. All right. Well, was it an explosion of any kind? No. Not like that. All right. Well, was it an explosion of any kind? No.

Starting point is 00:28:08 Was it planned, would you say? Define planned. Well, was it some man-made event? I would say yes. Okay. Was that planned by whoever? Yes. There was a planned event that was occurring.

Starting point is 00:28:26 So whoever knew about that event, whoever organized that event, wouldn't have been surprised to learn that the ground had moved? Is that safe to say? Yeah. So it wasn't that this was some mishap? It wasn't a mishap. The event went off as expected. Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:38 But these people just hadn't been aware that it was going to happen. Right, the citizens of Leipzig. All right. The intent was not to make it seem like an earthquake. I mean, that was a byproduct of something else. But whatever it was, it was big enough to... Yes. Okay. I asked you if it was an explosion?

Starting point is 00:28:52 It was not an explosion. It was nothing you would consider like a disaster or a mishap or an accident or anything like that. Well, what would shake the ground? Was something leaving the surface of the earth? You know, like a rocket or something. Oh, like permanently leaving the surface of the earth. Well, even temporarily.

Starting point is 00:29:13 Temporarily. Yes. Yes. Okay, that's helpful. That's a good thought. But you're saying not permanently. Something went up and then came down? Yes, more than one something.

Starting point is 00:29:24 Oh, really? Okay. Multiple things went up and came down. yes more than one something oh really okay multiple things went up and came down and was it the landing that had shook the ground yes so they're massive things heavy things no not necessarily was it more than 10 such things yes oh really yes All went up and came down. Yes. Why do I want to ask this? Were they people? Yes. Why do I even want to ask that? I'll tell you it was 12,000 people. 12,000 people jumped in the air? Yes. And came down again? Yes. And that shook the ground. I guess it was. Kind of jumped up and down. Was this in Leipzig? It must have been. It was in Leipzig. Yes. What would make 12,000 people start jumping up and down simultaneously? Some entertainment event? Yes. With like a concert or something? It was a concert. Oh my gosh. Florian said, the German band Kraftklub were playing a concert nearby and

Starting point is 00:30:15 encouraged their 12,000 fans in attendance to simultaneously jump up and down during a song. Owing to the unusually high groundwater in Leipzig, these oscillations were transferred to nearby houses, causing walls to shake and the occupants to suspect an earthquake, triggering between 30 and 50 emergency calls. In fact, the same thing had happened two years earlier, so authorities were aware of the issue and had even discussed placing a jumping ban on the concert. Well, I was going to ask, how would the emergency personnel know that that was the real cause? I guess because this had happened previously. The band later posted a video on Facebook, which was called How to Make an Earthquake.

Starting point is 00:30:51 So thanks so much to Florian for that alarming but ultimately non-disastrous puzzle. If you have a puzzle you'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. If you'd like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support a section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll not only get to support our show, but also get more discussions on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and peeks behind the scenes. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see our website for the

Starting point is 00:31:36 link. At our website, you can graze through Greg's collection of over 11,000 concise curiosities, browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast, with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. All our music was written and performed by the incomparable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 292-Fordlandia

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