Futility Closet - 321-The Calculating Boy

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 a 10-year-old soldier to a domestic lion. This is episode 321. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. George Parker Bitter was born with a surprising gift. He could do complex arithmetic in his head. His feats of calculation would earn for him a university education, a distinguished career in engineering,

Starting point is 00:00:38 and fame throughout 19th century England. In today's show, we'll describe his remarkable ability and the stunning displays he made with it. We'll also try to dodge some foul balls and puzzle over a leaky ship. George Parker Bitter found his own way into the world of mathematics. Born in 1806 into a family of Devon stonemasons, he was sent to the village school at age four to learn to read. He found he didn't like it and played truant whenever he could. He learned numbers almost by chance at age six from his brother, who taught him to count first to ten and then to one hundred. That was his only instruction in figures, but it was all he would need. Exploring on his own, he discovered it was much quicker to count to 10 ten times than to count to 100,

Starting point is 00:01:29 and that put him onto the notion of multiplication. He wrote later, This may appear to you a simple process, but I attach the utmost importance to it because it made me perfectly familiar with numbers up to 100. They became, as it were, my friends, and I knew all their relations and acquaintances. Though he still had no knowledge of written numbers and did not even know the word multiply, he taught himself the facts of multiplication by arranging marbles, peas, and other items into rectangles of various sizes and then counting them. By laying out lead pellets in eight rows

Starting point is 00:02:00 of eight pellets each, he wrote, I began to multiply even large numbers in his head. People began to notice. One evening when he was seven years old, he overheard his mother and brothers arguing about the weight and price of a pig, and he called down from his bed with the correct answer. At the blacksmith's shop across the road, he began to amuse visitors, multiplying two-digit numbers in his head, while the blacksmith's nephew confirmed the answers with a piece of chalk. Bitter wrote later, as a natural consequence, this increased my fame still more, and what was better, it eventually caused halfpence to flow into my pocket, which, I need not say, had the effect of attaching me still more to the science of arithmetic. This was an auspicious time to be a prodigy. The Industrial Revolution had produced a demand for bookkeepers and accountants, so

Starting point is 00:02:58 schools were emphasizing computation, and Charles Babbage was beginning to consider using machines to calculate and print mathematical tables. As the boy's fame spread, his father began to exhibit him at local fairs, where he faced a blizzard of fanciful and challenging questions and worked out the answers in his head. The questions have come down to us in pamphlets and handbills. Here's a sampling. If a coach wheel is five feet ten inches in circumference, how many times will it revolve in running 800 million miles? If nine old ladies were to drink seven cups of tea every night, each cup to contain three drams, how many ounces would they drink in 50,000 years? Suppose a city to be illuminated by 9,999 lamps and each lamp to consume one pint of oil in every four hours.

Starting point is 00:03:44 How many gallons will they consume in 40 years? Suppose the national debt to be 1,000 millions of money in one-pound notes, how long would it take a man to reckon the same at the rate of 100 per minute without intermission? Suppose an acre of ground to contain 256 trees, each tree with 53 limbs, each limb 196 twigs, each twig 45 leaves, how many leaves are there in all? And if the moon's orbit be 1,440,000 miles round, how many hairsbreadths are there in it, 48 to an inch? In those pre-metric days, many measures were compound. Weights, for example, might be reckoned in pounds, ounces, pennyweights, and grains. But Bitter found that once he knew the multiples, he could do the

Starting point is 00:04:29 calculations, and over time he memorized how many barley corns there were in a league, and so on, and could recall those figures when he needed them. That would have helped him with a question put by Sir William Herschel, the king's private astronomer, who asked, Light travels from the sun to the earth in eight minutes, and the sun being 98 million miles off. If light were to take six years and four months, traveling at the same rate from the nearest fixed star, how far is that star from the earth, reckoning 365 days and six hours to each year and 28 days to each month? Bitter was able to answer that in one minute. In April 1815, he was presented to

Starting point is 00:05:06 Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. She asked him, from the land's end, Cornwall, to Ferret's Head in Scotland, is found by measurement to be 838 miles. How long would a snail be creeping that distance at the rate of eight feet per day? He answered, 553,080 days. His accuracy throughout was unimpeachable. When one questioner challenged an answer, Bitter asked him to check his work, saying that he himself had now solved the problem in a second way and got the same result. Before the questioner had found his mistake, Bitter had confirmed the answer by a third method. His exhibitions and tours seem to have been well-managed, and he seems to have enjoyed his life and not been overworked. As he grew older and gained experience, his feats grew more impressive.

Starting point is 00:05:49 In the spring of 1819 at the Bank of England, he multiplied 257,689,435 by 356,875,649 in 13 minutes. In time, he learned of square and cube roots and compound interest. He had no one to explain the rules for these things, but worked out his own methods from the bare definitions. At age 10, he successfully gave the cube root of 673,373,097,125. He said that extracting roots seemed to impress people, but he discovered that his questioners, in order to save themselves trouble, had usually devised their questions by simply squaring or cubing some number, which meant there was a simple answer. Still, some of his achievements strained belief. In 1819, at age 13, he calculated the cube root of 897 quadrillion, 339 trillion, 273 billion, 974 million, 2,153 in two and a half minutes. The answer is six digits long. Astronomer Richard Proctor wrote, I do not believe one arithmetician in a thousand

Starting point is 00:06:55 would get out this answer correctly at a first trial in less than a quarter of an hour, but I confess I have not tried the experiment, feeling indeed perfectly satisfied that I should not get the answer correctly in half a dozen trials. Some more questions from this period. Find a number whose cube less 19 multiplied by its cube shall be equal to the cube of 6. He answered instantly 3. There are seven numbers in geometrical progression. The first is 6 and the seventh 705,894. What are the intermediate terms? He gave those in a minute. In 1816, at age 10, he was asked, What is the interest of 4,444 pounds for 4,444 days at 4.5% per annum? He answered,

Starting point is 00:07:36 And at age 12, he was asked, If the pendulum of a clock vibrates the distance of nine and three quarters inches in a second of time, how many inches will it vibrate in seven years, 14 days, two hours, one minute, 56 seconds, each year being 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, 55 seconds? He answered, in less than a minute, 2,165,625,744 and three-quarter inches. These trials must have been taxing, but Bitter seems to have borne them patiently, modestly, and with unfailing good humor. When a gentleman in London asked him how many bull's tails it would take to reach the moon, he said one if it was long enough. Children who are born with a gift for calculation

Starting point is 00:08:24 are often poorly understood, even by themselves, and can find themselves unhappy and unable to put their talents to good use. The American prodigy Zira Colburn asked what purpose the creator had had in giving him this gift, which he had found led only to misery. But Bitter was an exception in both his education and his career. William Herschel persuaded his parents to send him to a grammar school at Camberwell and arranged to pay the cost. Bitter's father, needing money, took him out again after a year to resume the exhibitions. But then a group of gentlemen in Edinburgh arranged for his education at the university there,

Starting point is 00:08:56 and this time they compensated the family for the lost income. At the university, Bitter throve. He found he was interested more in practical applications than in abstract analysis and so chose to pursue engineering rather than pure mathematics. He went on to become one of the finest civil engineers of the day in one of the greatest periods in the history of engineering and gained a reputation for completing even large projects successfully and within budget. His talent served him well. His friend Robert Stevenson said he could grasp the details of a complex situation, assess and order them, evaluate their relative importance, and combine them to produce a valid answer. Among many other projects, he designed the Royal Victoria docks, served as

Starting point is 00:09:35 engineer-in-chief of the Royal Danish Railway, advised the Metropolitan Board of London in draining and purifying the Thames, and consulted in the completion of the railway system of India. His calculating prowess also earned him a fearsome reputation as an expert witness in parliamentary debates, where he could think on his feet and answer even challenging questions accurately. Hostile counsel found it impossible to discompose him. One tried to have him removed because, he said, nature had endowed him with particular qualities that did not place his opponents on a fair footing. To give one example, a group of landowners opposed the Northampton and Peterborough Railway Bill, claiming that the proposed line would hold floodwaters on the land long enough

Starting point is 00:10:14 to damage vegetation. The opposing council challenged Bitter to declare how long a particular bridge would hold up the water. Bitter looked over an ordinance map, considered the volume of the flood, the width of the waterway, and the water's pressureitter looked over an ordinance map, considered the volume of the flood, the width of the waterway, and the water's pressure and velocity, and answered that it would pass in three hours. One onlooker remarked that the opponent might as well have asked how many fish would go through in the same time. At the height of his career, at age 50, Bitter agreed to give a presentation to the Institution of Civil Engineers to describe his experience of doing mental arithmetic. He said he found this hard to do. He had never had to articulate, even to himself, quite how he went about it. He said there are

Starting point is 00:10:49 essentially two tasks, which he called computing and registering. Computing is just recalling a fact, such as that two and two are four. Registering means storing that result temporarily in your head while you work on the rest of the problem. Computing is easy and registering is hard, so the main rule is to arrange the work to keep registering to a minimum. For instance, most of us are taught to approach multiplication problems from right to left, building up a list of partial products and then adding these together to get the result. This is hard to do in your head because you have to remember all those intermediate values. For that reason, Bitter learned to attack a multiplication problem from left to right and keep a running total in his head. He did the same with addition and subtraction. He found that in

Starting point is 00:11:29 doing these calculations over time, he built up a store of numerical facts that would come to his mind as they were needed. When a calculation involved relatively few facts, it could be done fairly quickly, but as the problems grew in complexity, it got harder to register all the numbers involved until a point was reached where the work could be done more quickly on paper. For example, if he were asked to multiply 89 by 73, he could instantly give the answer 6,497. This required four intermediate calculations, 80 times 70, 80 times 3, 9 times 70, and 9 times 3, and adding the results. But this work is simple enough that he had no feeling of effort. For comparison, he'd once multiplied two 12-digit numbers in his head and said he found this a great and distressing task. In practice, he said, multiplying anything more than three digits by

Starting point is 00:12:14 three digits was probably best done on paper in the ordinary way. It was less total work. His methods were generally his own. He said he considered it a fortunate accident that he'd had so little instruction in mathematics as a boy as he'd had to work out the principles for himself, and this had given him a thorough understanding of what he was doing. Because he'd learned the numbers gradually, and by actually counting rather than writing them, he'd gained a clear, immediate sense of their size and properties. To him, the number 753 was not just a succession of three digits, but a distinct entity with its own character. He said this was like recognizing a hippopotamus. He knew it as a particular creature with its own

Starting point is 00:12:50 essential nature rather than a collection of abstract traits. Remarkably, that conception is borne out in the draft text he wrote for the presentation. Through 36 foolscap pages, every number is written out in words. He said he did this to bring the process more vividly and tangibly upon the reader's imagination and to show the actual train of thinking that takes place in the mind of the mental calculator. He said it might be confusing to read, but when confined to your own thoughts, the confusion vanishes and the numbers succeed each other with surprising rapidity. This way of apprehending numbers may have arisen because he learned to calculate before he could write figures. As a result, he seems to have heard numbers rather than seen them. If a series of numbers were read to him, he could register them immediately, but if they were printed in Arabic

Starting point is 00:13:33 numerals, he had to read them to himself three or four times before he grasped them. He didn't recommend that his own peculiar experience of learning should be adopted widely, but he did say he thought it was hopeless to teach students mechanically, without giving them any understanding of the meaning of what they were doing. He wrote, with the usual forms of teaching arithmetic, not one boy in a hundred can give any reason for what he does. And he recommended that teachers of arithmetic start early, begin with counting rather than writing the numbers, and make sure that students appreciate the size of the numbers they're working with. He did feel that mental arithmetic could help develop powers of reasoning and could be taught to anyone of reasonable capacity,

Starting point is 00:14:10 though carrying it as far as he had done would require many years of labor and perseverance. He felt it required no special turn of mind, exceptional memory, or aptitude in mathematics. He couldn't see that his own memory was at all remarkable, he said, and in studying mathematics at university, he hadn't distinguished himself in any way. His own brilliance may have blinded him here somewhat. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that someone might have trouble understanding a problem or deciding what calculations were necessary, perhaps because he himself never had. He retained his calculating abilities to the end of his life. In the autumn of 1878, when he was 72 years old, a friend wondered

Starting point is 00:14:45 how many light waves must strike the eye in one second to produce the impression of red, using the value 36,918 waves to the inch. The friend took out a pencil, but Bitter said, you need not work it. The number of vibrations will be 444,433,651,200,000. That was his last recorded calculation. He died two days later. In episode 312, I discussed how Harold Russell, a World War II veteran who had lost both of his hands, had been the only person to ever win two Oscars for the same role, one for Best Supporting Actor, plus a special honorary Oscar created for him by the Board of Governors for his role in The Best Years of Our Lives. Tucker Drake wrote,

Starting point is 00:15:43 As for Harold Russell, I was a touch disappointed that you didn't mention the one other thing that he was famous for, and it is also how I came to hear of him. He is the only person to sell his Oscar at auction. He did it to pay for his wife's medical expenses, and the Academy of Motion Pictures, the folks responsible for awarding Oscars, were less than happy about it. As always, love the podcast. I had debated trying to work this into my discussion in episode 312, but it was a bit complicated and in the end there just wasn't room to add it in. So I was glad for Tucker's email as a chance to revisit the topic. In 1992, the then 78-year-old Russell auctioned off the Oscar that he'd won for Best Supporting

Starting point is 00:16:24 Actor, despite pleas from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to not do so. He is the only known winner of an Oscar to sell their award, particularly as since 1950, winners of the awards have had to sign an agreement that forbids them or their heirs from selling the statuettes, unless they first offer it to the Academy to be bought for a nominal amount. The policy was adopted after the heirs of Sid Grauman, the owner of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, tried to sell an honorary Oscar that he'd been awarded in 1949, and the Academy bought it instead. As Russell had received his Oscars in 1947, he wasn't bound by this agreement. Actor Carl Malden, the president of the Academy at the

Starting point is 00:17:06 time, wrote to Russell urging him to not allow the Oscar to become the object of mere commerce, and offering to give Russell an interest-free loan in exchange for possession of the award until he could repay it. Russell said he declined this offer because he didn't want to have to worry about repaying such a loan, and he went through with the sale. The Oscar sold for $60,500 to an anonymous buyer with Russell netting $55,000 or about $100,000 in today's money after paying the commission. Part of what is complicated about this story is that there are different versions of what motivated Russell to sell the award. A contemporaneous New York Times article reported that Russell had said that he needed the money to pay for a cataract operation for his wife,

Starting point is 00:17:50 as well as for emergency expenses and their retirement. The Times reported that Russell said, I love the Oscar, but I love my wife more, and that if I ever get lonely for it, I can watch the picture. The couple explained that they had had to use most of their savings for a family emergency and to replace their home septic system. They also said they planned to travel and to help out their five children, 11 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. The Chicago Tribune reported at the time that Russell's wife Betty had said, it's sad for both of us, but we agreed that we could use the money for our future.

Starting point is 00:18:23 It's a cushion in case we need it. And the Los Angeles Times reported that Russell had said in an interview to them, my wife has to have an eye operation and we had a problem with the house and I need some money. I don't know why anybody would be critical. My wife's health is much more important than sentimental reasons. And went on to say, I'm not asking for sympathy. I feel bad about it. Inside me, I look on my mantelpiece and see one Oscar and the other should be there and it's not. It's interesting that the 1992 New York Times article mentioned that the Russells planned to travel because there are later sources that claim that Russell actually sold the Oscar because his wife wanted to go on a cruise.

Starting point is 00:19:00 A 2006 New York Times article, for example, quotes Bruce Davis, the Academy's executive director, as saying, So it's hard to know what to make of that. According to Wikipedia, Russell married Betty, his second wife, in 1981, so she wouldn't have been a very new wife in 1992. The second complication about this story is the controversy around selling Oscars in general. The selling of the awards, especially for famous actors, directors, or films, can be a big business. For example, in 1999, Michael Jackson paid over $1.5 million for the 1939 Best Picture Oscar for Gone with the Wind. The Academy is adamantly against the selling of the awards, and in recent years has been rather aggressive in attempting to stop all such sales, taking the owners of Oscars to court when necessary

Starting point is 00:19:59 to do so. The Academy feels that commercializing the awards dilutes their artistic value, that Oscars are supposed to be won, not bought. The 2006 New York Times article quotes Bruce Davis defending the organization's aggressive campaign by saying, The more that Oscars are sold, the more it enables the idea of them as collectible items. This is an award for artistic excellence. So while no particular one is a disaster for us, every time one goes, it's another ax stroke. There are members of the Academy who strongly support the Academy's position. For example, the New York Times reported in 2006 that Steven Spielberg had spent almost $1.5 million to buy sold Oscars just to donate them back to the Academy. However, in 2016,

Starting point is 00:20:44 the Los Angeles Times said of the Academy's campaign, the approach has resulted in critics accusing the Academy of using strong-arm tactics to legally bully people into submission. When the Academy started making Oscar recipients sign the agreement about not selling their awards, they also wrote the agreement into the Academy's bylaws so that every winner who was an Academy member was subject to the rule, even if they received their Oscar prior to 1950, and this argument has often stood up in court. For example, in 2007, three heirs of the silent movie star Mary Pickford attempted to auction her 1930 Best Actress Award, but were successfully sued by the Academy to block the sale. Best Actress Award, but were successfully sued by the Academy to block the sale. The attorney for the heirs stated that Pickford's will had directed them to sell the award and donate the proceeds to charity and accused the Academy of using threats and heavy-handed

Starting point is 00:21:34 litigation to bully the heirs of Academy members. Orson Welles' daughter Beatrice wanted to sell Welles' 1941 award for Best Original Screenplay for Citizen Kane to finance animal rights causes. Her lawyer fought with the Academy for eight years over the proposed sale and is quoted in the New York Times as saying, this isn't the nice people you see on TV who present the awards. This is a business, a very ugly business. They are completely uninterested in anybody else's life or needs. I call them thugs in suits. Beatrice Wells did eventually win her case for the right to sell her father's Oscar, and it sold at auction in 2011 for $861,542. I'm trying to decide how to think about this. If I bought Harold Russell's Oscar,

Starting point is 00:22:20 I mean, I'm buying the physical artifact, the trophy, but the honor doesn't convey with it. No one would imagine that I had won the award. Right. So in that sense, it seems like you're not really selling anything controversial. On the other hand, I can see their point. I wonder if this happens in other industries. I mean, people award trophies for all kinds of things. Yeah, I have no idea.

Starting point is 00:22:39 If this is an issue for the Oscars, it would be an issue for... I didn't, until I started looking into this, I didn't even know you weren't supposed to sell your Oscars. Like I had no idea about any of it. In episode 312, I also discussed some of the surprising dangers of baseball, including to the spectators at Major League Baseball or MLB games. Natalie Zadan wrote, Hi, Greg and Sharon, just listened to episode 312 and the segment about all the baseball fatalities, wow, reminded me of something I learned a while back. Japan Major League Baseball has recognized just how dangerous foul balls can be. In this Forbes report that includes a 2.5-minute real sports segment, we learn that the main stadium in Tokyo has all kinds of precautions,

Starting point is 00:23:21 netting all around the stands, not just behind home base, all kinds of warning signage, and staff who blow whistles to alert fans to foul balls and check on fans anytime a foul ball is hit. Don't want to sit behind the net? Excite seats in front of the nets are considered a thrill, and helmets are there for each ticket holder. It seems fairly common knowledge that foul balls are dangerous, even fatal at times. It makes me wonder why the MLB doesn't implement some of these precautions. Just did further research and it does seem MLB may be taking action. This report from 2016 says the Minnesota Twins extended its netting and includes

Starting point is 00:23:56 videos from Korea and Japan showing some of these foul ball precautions in practice. Since that was from 2016, thought I'd check on other stadiums, and sure enough, as of December 2019, the MLB plans to extend netting in all its stadiums. Huzzah! Now they just need more signage and whistles like in Japan. Thanks for all the great shows. NBC News reported in 2019 that foul balls can travel at more than 100 miles an hour and can hit a spectator in about a second after being batted. They also report that the number of foul balls per baseball game has increased by 10% since 2000, and that they found more than 800 reports of injuries to spectators from baseballs between 2012 and 2019, with most of those coming from foul balls. These injuries included

Starting point is 00:24:42 concussions and permanent vision loss for some fans, and in one case, the death of a grandmother celebrating her 79th birthday at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles after she was hit in the head by a foul ball in 2018. The 2017 Forbes article that Natalie sent says that the MLB only requires protective netting in front of the seats immediately behind the catcher, although some teams have chosen to add more netting to their stadiums. The article contrasts this to how very seriously foul balls are taken in Japan. Both the article and the video clip from HBO's Real Sports discuss the extensive netting in Japanese stadiums and the extensive warnings that the spectators are given. Signs are posted throughout the stands and displayed on the scoreboards,

Starting point is 00:25:24 graphically warning about the dangers of foul balls. Animated films play before the game with a blaring warning signal and show cartoon people being smacked by balls and then driven away in an ambulance. Any foul balls that do make it past the nets are treated as serious threats. There are trained ushers and guards in every aisle who use loud whistles to direct fans' attention to every foul ball that is hit. However, as Natalie said, the stadiums do have sections that deliberately don't have netting, situated down the foul line and close to the playing field. The ones in the Tokyo Dome are called excite seats, and fans pay extra to sit there. All these seats come equipped with helmets and baseball gloves for catching balls,

Starting point is 00:26:04 and instructions urging people to use both. As Natalie noted, in December 2019, it was reported that every MLB team had agreed to have expanded netting in the next season. I didn't find any reports that this actually happened in 2020, but it's been a bit of an odd year. In December 2019, Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred explained that this wasn't going to be a new rule, so the teams wouldn't be required to do this, but that every team had indicated their intention to have protective netting that extended substantially beyond the end of the dugout, although the designs of different stadiums would make it more difficult for some of them to have netting that runs the entire length down to the foul poles. Historically, baseball has been

Starting point is 00:26:45 largely immune from litigation from injured spectators because of the assumption of risk language printed on the tickets, which is commonly called the baseball rule. A Los Angeles Times article from February explains that this century-old doctrine only requires that teams protect the most at-risk spectators, which is usually those directly behind home plate. A 1929 court ruling held that fans accept at their own risk the chance of contact with the ball. However, a spectator who lost the vision in one of her eyes from a foul ball when she was 12 filed a lawsuit in 2014, alleging negligence for lack of clearer warnings of the possible dangers of foul balls and more protection from them.

Starting point is 00:27:26 A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge threw out the case in 2017, partly based on a 1997 state appellate court ruling that said that foul balls represent an inherent risk to spectators attending baseball games. However, an appellate court recently ruled that the plaintiff should be allowed to make her case and that the suit can proceed, citing what the judges called the modern practical view of the importance of protective netting. So it may end up being the case that U.S. baseball will need to take more of a cue from Japanese baseball. I don't know if this will mean, though, that U.S. stadiums will have to show cartoons of people being smacked by balls. I don't know anything about baseball, but that always looked more dangerous to me than people seem to treat it, you know? Yeah, I mean, you think of baseball as like this lovely family pastime, right?

Starting point is 00:28:12 Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate hearing your comments and updates. So if you have any that you'd like to send to us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him a strange sounding situation, and he has to try to guess what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from John Jerome. Three men embark on a long and difficult journey. Partway to their destination, their ship springs a leak, which they can't fix. Rather than turning back home, they proceed to their destination.

Starting point is 00:28:54 But when they reach their destination, they turn around without stopping and make a dangerous return journey all the way home. Why? Is this true? Yeah. all the way home. Why? Is this true? Yeah. Okay. Do they make the return journey in the boat, the ship? Yes. But you said they couldn't repair the leak. Isn't that right? The spring's a leak that they can't fix. But they were still able to return all the way home? Yes. Okay. Have I heard of this?

Starting point is 00:29:26 Have I heard of the men? Yeah, you probably have heard of this event. Okay. Your question at the end was why? Yeah. Not how. Not how, but why. Why do they do what they do?

Starting point is 00:29:48 So they get partway across and realize that it's leaking, they can't fix it, and they don't turn around right there. Right. They actually proceed to their destination, reach the destination, and then turn around without stopping and make the return journey home. Are they carrying some cargo that it would help them to get off the ship, to make the ship lighter, I guess, maybe? I don't think so, no.

Starting point is 00:30:06 That's not it? No. Or passengers or something like that? No. So when they touch it, whatever their destination is, might they have turned right around without doing anything else? Is that possible? Would that have accomplished their goal?

Starting point is 00:30:18 I don't know if I can answer the question exactly the way you've worded it. Okay. So they get halfway across, I'm not going to try to guess, is this across like an ocean, like a big? No. Is that worth pursuing? Like how far,

Starting point is 00:30:32 how long a distance they're trying to cover? That's not quite the right question. You called this a ship or a boat? A ship. Is this traveling on water? No. In the air?

Starting point is 00:30:44 Yes. Like a air? Yes. Like a rocket? Yes. A leak. Is this Apollo 13? It is Apollo 13. Good for you. John says, this story describes the Apollo 13 mission.

Starting point is 00:30:59 On April 13, 1970, the Apollo 13 spacecraft experienced an explosive failure that caused the command module's oxygen supplies to leak away into space. If you're on a trajectory to the moon, you can't just stop and turn around, so the Apollo 13 astronauts were obliged to continue to the moon and swing around it before heading back to Earth. That's good. That's a good puzzle. Thanks so much to John for that puzzle, which was about a harrowing but ultimately non-fatal event. And if anyone else has a puzzle they'd like to have us try, please 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 section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll not only support our show, but also get more information on some of the stories,

Starting point is 00:31:54 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 link. At our website, you link at our website you can graze through greg's collection of over 11 000 bite-sized 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 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 - 321-The Calculating Boy

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