Futility Closet - 305-Cast Away in the New World

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 circular warships to a chemical traffic light. This is episode 305. I'm Greg Ross.. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Marooned in Florida in 1528, four Spanish colonists made an extraordinary journey across the unexplored continent. Their experiences changed their conception of the New World and its people. In today's show, we'll describe the remarkable odyssey of Alvar

Starting point is 00:00:42 Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his reformed perspective on the Spanish conquest. We'll also copy the Mona Lisa and puzzle over a deficient pinball machine. In 1526, King Charles of Spain approved an expedition to explore and permanently occupy Spanish Florida, which was a large area stretching from modern Florida around the Gulf Coast to northern Mexico. Five ships departed in June 1527, and after many reverses, they entered the Gulf and reached the mainland, where the colonists disembarked and claimed the land for Spain. They thought they were near their goal, Rio de las Palmas, in modern Mexico, an area that was valued for its strategic location and

Starting point is 00:01:30 reputed riches. So the expedition's leader, Panfilo de Narvaez, ordered that the able-bodied men and horses would proceed on foot toward Rio de las Palmas, which he hoped was not more than 30 or 45 miles away, while the crew members and women would sail directly to the mouth of the river and meet them there. That would have been a sensible plan, except that due to a disastrous error, they had really landed near what is now Tampa Bay on the western coast of Florida. They were 900 miles off target and didn't know it. As the ships sailed away, 300 colonists and 40 horses were left stranded in a completely alien world. They headed north and walked for two weeks.

Starting point is 00:02:09 When they pressed the local indigenous people for food, they learned about a province called Apalachee, far to the north, which held gold and valuables. They set out to find this, but after a month of marching, the vision faded before them. The natives had probably invented the story to get rid of them, and they'd abandoned their ships to pursue this phantom. They marched south again through deep swamps and began to fall ill, and the group dwindled to a little more than 250 people. They pressed onto the coast but emerged at a shallow bay whose water was only waist deep and where they worried that no ship would find them. That worry was well founded. After their own ships had put to sea again, the captains had quickly realized they were on the wrong coast. They'd returned to the point

Starting point is 00:02:48 where the colonists had debarked, but in four months of waiting, they'd seen no sign of them. Finally, as they themselves were running out of food, they had to conclude that their friends had died, and they left the area. This left the colonists in dire trouble. They spent a month and a half at the shallow estuary, which they came to call the Bay of Horses because they were reduced to eating a horse there every three days. With no hope of being rescued, they decided to build five rafts and sail them into the Gulf of Mexico. To make the necessary tools, they had to melt down their weapons, which was a significant gamble. Horses and firearms had been their most valuable advantages against hostile natives. Without them, they would have to survive by their wits. They cut logs of pine, lashed them together

Starting point is 00:03:30 with the manes and tails of dead horses, and fashioned their shirts into sails. After five or six weeks, they were ready. They crowded precariously onto the rafts, worked their way through the sandbars, and reached the open sea. Then they sailed west for a month, hugging the coast and husbanding their dwindling supplies of food and fresh water. This might have looked promising until they reached the Mississippi River, whose mighty outflow began to separate the rafts. They had covered 370 miles, but their goal, the Spanish settlement at the Rio Panuco, was still 620 miles away. The expedition's royal treasurer, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, guided his own raft close enough to the leaders to say that he didn't think he could keep up and

Starting point is 00:04:11 to ask Narvea's orders. Narvea's answer was dire. He said that, quote, it was no longer time for some men to rule over others, but that each one should do whatever seemed best to save his life. Then they too were separated. Cabeza de Vaca's men sailed on for several more days. Then, near dawn one day, they heard surf, rode in through the waves, and landed on a beach. Here they found water and maize and began to recover their strength. They were on an island off the coast of what is now Texas. The five rafts had landed along different parts of the same coast. Three of the parties perished, but by coincidence the remaining two had landed on opposite sides of the same island. This was probably either Galveston Island or the island immediately to its south. Cabeza de Vaca's contingent of 40 men were

Starting point is 00:04:55 soon surrounded by a hundred natives. They exchanged gifts, and the following morning the natives brought them food. At length, having regained their strength, the castaways tried to relaunch their raft, but disaster struck again and a huge wave overturned it. Three men died and they lost all their remaining possessions. And the men had removed their clothes to keep them dry, so they were left literally naked in November. The natives responded with incredible generosity. They shared their grief, built bonfires to warm them, and literally carried them to their homes, where they fed them and celebrated through the night. They themselves had only just arrived at the island, where they traditionally spent the winter, and they numbered only a few dozen families,

Starting point is 00:05:33 so feeding these 40 unexpected additions would have been a significant drain on their food supplies. The two groups of Spaniards were soon reunited, but they had both lost their rats and would have to spend the winter here. They would become the first outsiders to live in the territories north of Mexico and to mix with the people there, two contingents of humanity reconnecting after 12,000 years. If the Spaniards were miserable at the start, they were soon wretched. That winter was extremely harsh and it reduced their numbers from 80 to 15. The natives had been kind at first, but the Europeans were useless to them and weren't even pulling their own weight. They were given menial work, digging for roots, carrying firewood, and fetching water, and with no hope of rescue, their stay there gradually lengthened to six years.

Starting point is 00:06:15 Finally, 12 of the remaining castaways decided to try again for Panuco, and they crossed to the mainland and headed south. Cabeza de Vaca couldn't accompany them. He was lying inland with a prolonged illness at the time. Instead, he began a bold new chapter in his own odyssey. After another year on the island, he became an itinerant merchant among the indigenous people of that area, collecting items such as pearls and shells from the coast and taking them as much as 120 miles into the interior to trade them for hides, red ochre, flints, glue, and the hard canes used to make arrows. He wrote, this occupation served me well because practicing it, I had the freedom to go wherever I wanted and I was not constrained in any way nor enslaved. And wherever I went, they treated me well and gave me food out of want for my wares. And most importantly,

Starting point is 00:06:59 because doing that, I was able to seek out the ways by which I would go forward. After two years, he got word of three Christians to the south, all that remained of the twelve who had left the island. He made his way to them, and they were reunited in the fall of 1532. They hadn't seen one another in three and a half years. Cabeza de Vaca wrote, We gave many thanks to God upon finding ourselves reunited, and this day was one of the days of greatest pleasure that we have had in our lives.

Starting point is 00:07:24 He wrote, I told them that my purpose was to go to the land of Christians, This opened a surprising new chapter in their journey. During their six years doing largely menial work for the natives, they set out on their own to the south. This opened a surprising new chapter in their journey. During their six years doing largely menial work for the natives, they'd sometimes been asked to cure ailing patients. The castaways would protest that they didn't know how to do this, but the natives insisted, so they would blow their breath onto the afflicted men, as the natives did, and would sometimes add the sign of the cross, or say a paternoster or an Ave Maria, and beg God to restore the patient's health. Some of the patients recovered, and now, as they headed south, the four found that they had gained a reputation as faith healers. As they made their way along the coast, the people they met would present their sick to be healed. All four of the castaways received patients,

Starting point is 00:08:20 and all four cured them. This wasn't done cynically, that is, they weren't just pretending to practice healing because they knew it would earn respect. As devout Catholics themselves, they had come to believe that their long ordeal had been a test, and that God was now revealing the true purpose of their existence. Their single greatest healing feat happened when Cabeza de Vaca was asked to cure a man with an arrowhead lodged near his heart. By the time he reached the man's camp, he appeared to be dead. His eyes were turned up and blank, and he had no pulse. He was surrounded by weeping people, and they were dismantling his house, a sign that the owner was dead. But Cabeza de Vaca decided to go through at least the motions of a healing. He ordered that the man's body be uncovered,

Starting point is 00:08:59 and he prayed fervently to God, made the sign of the cross, and blew on the corpse several times. Then the castaway spent the rest of the day tending to other natives. Cabeza de Vaca wrote, At nighttime they returned to their houses and said that the man who had been dead and whom I had cured in their presence had arisen in good health and had strolled around and eaten and spoke with them, and that all of those I had cured had become well and were without fever and very happy. And we have to take this with some

Starting point is 00:09:25 skepticism. First of all, it happened 500 years ago, and the only account we really have of it is those of the Spaniards themselves. But it does seem that they must have consistently been able to help people because they carried this reputation with them for quite a long time. Or at least they helped some people. I mean, I'm a little skeptical if the man truly had no pulse, and then he's up and walking around and eating. I mean, that seems a little extreme. Yeah. They said they never cured anyone who did not say that he was better, which I guess is not impossible. But as these things tend to do, it grew in the telling so that these things were later reputed to be literal miracles, and by 1723, they were said to be literally infinite in number. But one of the castaways was the son of a

Starting point is 00:10:11 physician, so it does make sense that they may have had enough knowledge to be of some use. Yeah, or it's just people thought they felt better afterwards. I mean, I'm still, you know, the no pulse and getting up thing, but I mean, you can imagine that for certain things, headaches or whatever, you could decide you felt better because somebody had done something magic over you. I don't know. I guess there's no way to know for sure. In the spring or early summer of 1535, the four were making their way through South Texas, greeted as healers and even followed by crowds. At length, they crossed the Rio Grande and began to see mountains in the distance, probably the Sierra de Pomeranes of northern Tamaulipas. They didn't know it, but they were quite close to their goal. They'd come 1,200 miles around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico,

Starting point is 00:10:54 and the Rio de las Palmas, which they'd been seeking since Tampa Bay, was now only about 75 to 90 miles to the south. But now they turned aside and headed instead west and north. It's not clear why they did this, but it shows the confidence they developed making their way through this land and among its people. Their decision would be historic. They were following an east-west trading route that connected Tamaulipas to the cultural centers in the interior deserts of North America, and the people they met showed them intriguing hints of advanced societies in that direction. Two women were carrying maize flour, and a trading party gave them a copper bell.

Starting point is 00:11:33 The castaways hadn't seen either of these things in their travels to date. They suggested agriculture and smelting. They pressed forward, and as they went, they practiced their healing and were fed, protected, and handed on from one group to the next. They became the first outsiders to see what would become northern Mexico and the American Southwest, and the first non-natives to describe it. They found themselves among crowds of 3,000 to 4,000 people and greeted as friends. At La Junta de los Rios, they passed through a sizable settlement with permanent dwellings, a community that had stood there for 300 years, its people farming corn, beans, and squash. Guided by these new friends, they continued upriver, probably along the Rio Grande, veered west through high

Starting point is 00:12:10 plains and tablelands, and somehow crossed the continental divide and began to descend toward the Pacific. They passed through what they called the Land of Maze, a series of villages that extended for 300 miles with permanent houses and large stores of grain, probably in the fertile valleys of northern Sonora. Here, too, the people flocked to them, asking to be touched and to have the sign of the cross made over them, the ill and the healthy alike. Women brought newborn babies to be blessed. The castaways began to dream of forging a Christian kingdom here, ruled by Spain but established peacefully rather than through violence. They were still discussing this around Christmas 1535 when they met a man who wore a Spanish buckle and a horseshoe nail as an ornament around his neck. He told them these had belonged to, quote,

Starting point is 00:12:54 some men who wore beards like us, who had come from the sky and arrived at that river, and who had brought horses and lances and swords. These men had been seen by the coast. The castaways had mixed feelings about this. They were glad to learn they were so close to deliverance, but dismayed to hear of the harm that these Christians had been doing to the people, destroying towns and torturing, enslaving, and executing men, women, and children. The castaways promised their friends that they would try to intercede. Two of them set out the following morning with a small party. They pursued a group of Spaniards over 30 miles, passing through three abandoned encampments. Finally, the following

Starting point is 00:13:29 morning, they overtook them. The four Spanish horsemen were astonished at Cabeza de Vaca's appearance. His hair hung to his waist, his beard reached to his chest, and his skin was leathery and peeling. But he spoke perfect and delusioned Spanish. Cabeza de Vaca wrote later, They remained looking at me for a long time, so astonished that they neither talked to me nor managed to ask me anything. He asked them for the Christian date and to see their leader. That was a man named Diego de Alcaraz, who was angry that he'd been unable to find any Indians in this area. He grew interested when the castaways told him of the friends who had followed them, and presently more than a thousand natives joined them. Cabeza de Vaca laid out his vision of a prosperous society in this fertile area, Spaniards and native peoples living side by side.

Starting point is 00:14:14 The natives, he said, were well disposed and of very good inclinations. By making war on the indigenous peoples, the Spaniards had driven them to abandon their lands and flee into the mountains, but they had promised to come back if they could live in peace. He waited hopefully for an answer. But the Spaniards had not lived among these people. What they saw was a fortune in human slaves. Cabeza de Vaca wrote, We suffered greatly and had great disputes with them because they wanted to enslave the Indians we had brought with us. Cabeza de Vaca told his followers to disperse, but they wouldn't go. They thought it was their duty to remain with the castaways, and they couldn't believe that their friends belonged to the same race as the cruel Spaniards.

Starting point is 00:14:51 They told him that, quote, We came from where the sun rose, and they from where it set. That we cured the sick, and they killed those who were well. That we came naked and barefoot, and they went about dressed and on horses and with lances. And that we did not covet anything, but rather everything they gave us we later returned and remained with nothing, and that the others had no other objective but to steal everything they found and did not give anything to anyone. As he reintegrated among the Spaniards, Cabeza de Vaca's hopes were continually

Starting point is 00:15:20 dashed. At Culiacan, the northernmost Spanish town, he encouraged the local Indians to move to the coast to build the kingdom of cooperation that he'd envisioned. He learned later that those who did so were only enslaved by the Spanish. At Compostela, the capital of Nueva Galicia, the castaways voiced their dismay at the slavery and suffering they saw around them, but they were only sent on to Mexico City. When they described and mapped the lands they had passed through, these only formed the basis for more Spanish conquests. Cabeza de Vaca eventually returned to Spain to advance his vision of a more humane colonial occupation, but when he finally reached it in August 1537, the crown had already given away the commission for the conquest of

Starting point is 00:16:00 Florida. His dream was dead. Later he went to Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay to try to realize his vision there, but his methods were idealistic and ineffective. The people resented his proselytizing, and his men accused him of mismanagement, and by 1544 he was sent back to Spain. He spent his last years in the Spanish ancestral village of Jerez de la Frontera, no doubt wondering what his long journey had taught him. If he reached any answer, he never voiced it. The main story in episode 298 was about the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. Greg mentioned that there is a widely reported story that this theft had been commissioned by an Argentine criminal who had supposedly created six forgeries of the painting that he then sold to different collectors after

Starting point is 00:16:57 the theft was reported. But this story was actually invented and then presented as factual in a 1932 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. Orion Sauter wrote, Hello, Closeteers. I just listened to episode 298 and the bit about the mythical six copies of the Mona Lisas caught my attention. I'm a fan of the show Doctor Who and the author Douglas Adams. Besides his novels, Adams contributed to writing for some episodes of Doctor Who, including City of Death, which involves an alien planning to sell six copies of the Mona Lisa he commissioned from Da Vinci in the past and hid away. Adams later incorporated many of the plot elements into his book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Tom Baker's run as the Doctor has a special place

Starting point is 00:17:40 in my heart since my big brother looks just like him, and when we were growing up, our mother knit him the iconic scarf. Thanks as always for the work you put into the podcast and blog. And Charles Hargrove similarly wrote, I enjoyed the most recent episode, but you made one small, easily understandable mistake. The six fakes did exist, but they were in fact painted by Leonardo himself at the request of a Captain Tancredi as part of a complex, century-spanning plot to recreate an ancient spaceship and destroy all life on Earth. Thankfully, it was averted by two aliens and a rather pugnacious private eye in the late 70s. The whole story was fictionalized in the second story of the 17th season of Doctor Who. The earlier 1930s story was obviously influenced

Starting point is 00:18:26 across the space-time continuum by the real story. The story is easily proved as the words this is a fake will be found under the painting in the museum. Of course, it was painted by Leonardo, so how can it really be said to be a fake? Keep up the good work. And Charles helpfully included a link to a Wikipedia page on this four-part serial of Doctor Who, featuring Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor, that first aired in 1979. For anyone who wants to read a summary of the rather convoluted-sounding plot that seems to end with the original Mona Lisa and five of the six copies being destroyed by fire, so that the one that we have today is not the original painting,

Starting point is 00:19:06 and as Charles noted, supposedly has, this is a fake written in felt-tip pen under the paint. Though, as Charles also noted, since it was painted by Leonardo just later than the original, should we really consider that a fake? I'm glad that story got some mileage, you know? Somebody used it somehow. It's a great story. It's just not true. And Mark Donner wrote, I'm glad that story got some mileage, you know? Somebody used it somehow. It's a great story.

Starting point is 00:19:27 It's just not true. And Mark Donner wrote, Dear Sharon and Greg, I thoroughly enjoyed your report on the theft of the Mona Lisa in episode 298. You may be amused to hear that this particular theft is at the root of a family story. At the time of the theft, my great-grandfather, ethnically Polish but technically a citizen of Germany, was living in Ofather, ethnically Polish but technically a citizen of Germany, was living in Ostend, Belgium with his family. They had moved there in order to keep their eldest son from the German draft. My great-grandfather owned and operated an antique store in Ostend.

Starting point is 00:19:55 His passion was painting, however. On one occasion, he bought some cloth at a building demolition site and stretched canvases from it. On one of these canvases, he painted a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. After completing it, he displayed it in the window of his shop in Ostend. Come the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, a local gendarme saw his reproduction in the shop window and immediately arrested my great-grandfather and confiscated the painting. My great-grandfather kept his head and, when questioned by the police, explained that this was a reproduction that was his own work. He pointed out that his painting could not possibly be the Mona Lisa because his painting was a canvas and the actual Mona Lisa was painted on a board.

Starting point is 00:20:33 After a telegraphic exchange with Paris, my great grandfather was exonerated and the story became part of my family history. Sadly, no one in the family seems to have any documentation of this incident. In my daydreams, I sometimes find the reproduction and joyfully share it with my cousins. And I wonder how much that might have happened after the theft of the Mona Lisa. A painting that famous would have to have many copies, and it would be difficult for local police to be able to easily make such a distinction. And everyone would be sort of attuned to it and on the lookout, you know? Right. So I wonder if people were getting arrested all over the place for having copies of it. I hadn't thought about that. The main story in episode 63 was about how in 1915, San Diego hired rainmaker Charles Hatfield

Starting point is 00:21:15 to relieve a four-year drought. After a period of several days in which he released his special chemical mixture from atop a 20-foot tower, torrential rains caused some of the most extreme flooding in the city's history. Zane Custer from Boise, Idaho wrote, Dear Sharon and Greg, I have been making my way through the backlog of episodes for the past month or so and was very intrigued by episode 63, The Rainmaker. In the episode, Charles Hatfield supposedly caused massive amounts of rain to fall in the San Diego region by evaporating a secret mixture of 23 chemicals into the atmosphere, but his methods were met with much skepticism. I can't help but to believe that Hatfield wasn't given the credit he deserved and that he created the first process of what we now call cloud seeding. Modern day cloud seeding is frequently

Starting point is 00:22:00 used in my home state of Idaho during the winter months by the main electrical utility. Just like Hatfield, towers are built with evaporators on top of them that then release chemicals into the clouds. The process in Idaho involves using a flame to evaporate silver iodide into the atmosphere to cause more snow to fall. The silver iodide particle is hexagonal in form and creates a seed for moisture in the cloud to freeze upon, thus creating a snowflake. Just as Hatfield said, precipitation cannot be made from a cloudless sky, but may convert a light rain into a heavy one. Cloud seeding is only used when favorable clouds are in the area, in order to turn a light snowfall into a heavy one.

Starting point is 00:22:37 The additional snow then falls in the mountains and creates a snowpack, which melts in the spring and provides water to the streams and rivers. This water then flows to reservoirs, where the additional water provides hydroelectricity through the dams and irrigation to farmers. The process of cloud seeding is especially important in Idaho during prolonged periods of drought. I know that other places in the world besides just the western U.S. currently use this method. I believe that Charles Hatfield would have been declared a genius if the technology was available to prove his theory. Although we don't have to worry about this modern-day rainmaking causing a massive flood, there are still concerns with the process.

Starting point is 00:23:11 The effects of silver iodide entering the environment and the possible loss of precipitation on downwind locations are both possible issues in the future. Here is a link from my local newspaper with more information. Thank you for making my workday more enjoyable and keep up the great work. Cloud seeding is the deliberate introduction of substances into clouds in an effort to produce or increase precipitation. A number of substances have been used for seeding over the years, and silver iodide seems to be one of the most effective and commonly used ones. Cloud seeding may make use of aircraft, rockets, cannons, or, as Hatfield used, towers. It does seem to be widely believed that the first real experiments with cloud seeding date back to 1946, but perhaps Hatfield did somehow anticipate the rest of the field by 30-some years and managed to keep his methods completely secret.

Starting point is 00:24:01 While I was reading a bit about cloud seeding, I was trying to keep in mind the question of whether that was what Hatfield was actually doing back then. One difficulty in making that decision is that there isn't complete scientific consensus even today about how effective cloud seeding is. Researchers have found it difficult to demonstrate clearly that cloud seeding actually has a very large effect. Estimates of the degree to which seeding increases precipitation seem to often be in the range of about 5 to 15 percent, though in some cases it's been even lower and in others it appears to have not been effective at all. Although cloud seeding has many advocates and is used in a number of places, there are still some meteorologists and other scientists

Starting point is 00:24:40 who question its overall effectiveness. On top of the disagreement about the degree of its effectiveness in general, it's even more difficult to attribute any particular event to seeding, as you can't say what would have happened in a given instance in the absence of the seeding. Further, airborne seeding seems to be generally more effective than tower-based seeding, as you can't specifically target the most promising clouds when using a tower, especially when using only one tower, so it seems that there would need to be an even higher element of luck in Hatfield's case, even if he were using an effective seeding substance, which conceivably he could have been. And lastly, even cloud seeding can't produce precipitation in a total drought, as there are

Starting point is 00:25:19 no clouds to work with, and seeding works solely by increasing the precipitation efficiency of clouds. A cloud seeding expert said by increasing the precipitation efficiency of clouds. A cloud seeding expert said in an interview in Scientific American that actually the best time to do cloud seeding is when you're having normal or higher than normal levels of precipitation. And as Zane mentioned, Hatfield himself had acknowledged that he couldn't produce rain from nothing. So did Hatfield manage to what he called convert a light rainfall into a heavy one? I'm certainly nowhere close to an expert in this field, but in my untrained opinion, I think I'd have to say that it's not quite as implausible as it originally sounded when

Starting point is 00:25:52 I first heard Greg's story. But still pretty unlikely that Hatfield could be credited with creating such torrential rains, and that even if he did have some effect, he was also really relying on a fair amount of luck. Maybe he came up with a really effective compound, you know, many times more powerful than silver iodide. Yeah. And I also, you said in the story that he was working for like 17 hours a day, day after

Starting point is 00:26:16 day. And I didn't see anything about whether there's a cumulative effect. I don't know if anybody's tried cloud seeding for just hours at a time, day after day. You could come up with a romantic story that he really did figure it all out. Yeah. And the whole technique's been lost now. He was just 30 years ahead of his time. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:33 Right. And a quick piece of trivia that I came across while looking into this topic, one of the lead scientists in the area of cloud seeding who discovered the use of silver iodide for seeding back in 1946 was Bernard Vonnegut, the older brother of noted author Kurt Vonnegut. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't either until I was reading about this. Wow.

Starting point is 00:26:52 Of course, I didn't know anything at all about cloud seeding until I was reading about this. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We always appreciate hearing what you have to say. So if you have any comments or follow-ups for us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him an odd-sounding situation, and he has to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Eric Waldo with some minor rewording by me. The office where I work has an old 1970s pinball machine. It's a company of engineers, so we have as much fun fixing it as playing it. The score is displayed on reels like

Starting point is 00:27:42 the odometer of an old car. There are five digits, so when the score reaches 100,000, it rolls over to zero. One day, I noticed that the middle digit wasn't turning. When I took the cover off the back of the machine, I found that although there are five digits in the score, there were actually only four reels. Why? Okay. Okay. Five digits in the score. Yeah. I'm just catching up here.

Starting point is 00:28:09 Right. So you go up to 99,999. Yes. And then you run out of reels, so it rolls over to zero. Yeah. And you're saying that when he opened it up, he found that there were only four reels? Yes, even though you see five digits in the score. Okay. That sounds straightforward.

Starting point is 00:28:26 Well, one, two, three. I'm doing this in my head. All right, it's not that. My first thought is that there's one of them that's just painted on or something because it only ever displays a one or something. But that's not the case here, right? Right. You never get, for example, to 100,000.

Starting point is 00:28:46 If you did, that would roll all the way up to a million. So that ain't it. So you start it presumably at zero. Is that true? Do you start a game at zero? Yes. Okay, and start accumulating points. Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:58 And that goes steadily upward. Yes. Do I need to know the increments in which the points are awarded? Are they all multiples of 10? Yes. So the lowermost is always going to be a zero. Yes. Yes, that's it.

Starting point is 00:29:12 And Eric says, the scoring targets on this pinball machine are worth 10, 50, 100, 250, et cetera, but always a multiple of 10. Because of that, the score will always end in zero. From the front, it looks like five reels, but the one on the right is a fake. There was no point in putting in a reel that would never turn, so there's just a portion of one with a zero on it. So really, they could have just reduced everything

Starting point is 00:29:31 by a factor of 10, and it would mean just as much. It's true. So thanks so much to Eric for a completely non-fatal puzzle. We didn't even kill the pinball machine. If anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try,

Starting point is 00:29:43 please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our amazing listeners. If you'd like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the supporters section of the website at futilitycloset.com. at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll not only help support our show, but also get more discussions on some of the stories, extra lateral 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 link. At our website, you can graze through Greg's collection of over 11,000 delightful distractions. 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

Starting point is 00:30:33 for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the always talented Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 305-Cast Away in the New World

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