Futility Closet - 337-Lost in a Daydream

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 Evelyn Waugh's faults to a corset struck by lightning. This is episode 337. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1901, two English academics met a succession of strange characters during a visit to Versailles. They came to believe that they had strayed somehow into the mind of Marie Antoinette in the year before her execution. In today's show, we'll describe the Moberly-Jordan Affair, a historical puzzle wrapped in a dream.

Starting point is 00:00:47 We'll also revisit Christmas birthdays and puzzle over a presidential term. In August 1901, a 54-year-old English academic named Charlotte Ann Moberly arrived in Paris. 54-year-old English academic named Charlotte Ann Moberly arrived in Paris. She was principal of St. Hugh's, a small Oxford women's college, and was considering whether to hire a younger woman, Eleanor Jourdain, as her assistant. Jourdain had an apartment in Paris and Moberly had come to stay with her so that they might get to know one another better. They spent several days sightseeing and then decided to visit Versailles. Versailles was a popular day trip for visitors to Paris. The palace had been home to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in the final days before the French Revolution. Neither woman had seen it before.

Starting point is 00:01:34 They reached it by train on August 10th and, at length, decided to venture into the grounds looking for the small chateau known as the Petit Trianon. Chateau known as the Petit Trianon. At the time, neither woman was familiar with French history, and they didn't know much about the Trianon itself beyond the fact that it had been a favorite retreat of the queen. But it was a nice day, and they were in the mood for a walk. The Petit Trianon lies half a mile to the north of the main palace. It stands amid an informal landscape of paths, streams, glades, and small, distinctive buildings, including a neoclassical rotunda known as the Temple of Love and an octagonal pavilion called the Belvedere. On their visit, Moberly and Jourdain passed an imposing building, the Grand Trianon, and then got lost and wandered at random for a time. They passed a deserted farmhouse where Jourdain noticed an odd-looking old plow,

Starting point is 00:02:21 and, she wrote later, she began to feel as if something were wrong. When they encountered a woman who was shaking a cloth out the window of one of the outbuildings, Moberly was surprised that Jourdain didn't ask the way, but she concluded that Jourdain knew where she was going. They turned down a lane and saw two men dressed in long, grayish-green coats and small, three-cornered hats. Moberly assumed they were either gardeners, as there was a wheelbarrow nearby, or perhaps officials of some kind. Jourdain asked them the way, and they were told to go down a path in front of them. As they did so, Jourdain saw a cottage to their right with a woman and a girl standing before it. Both of them were dressed unusually, with white kerchiefs tucked into their

Starting point is 00:02:59 bodices. The woman handed a jug to the girl, and for a moment both of them seemed to pause dramatically. Moberly and Jourdain continued down the path and came upon something like a garden kiosk shaded by trees. A man was sitting nearby, and Moberly found herself overcome by an extraordinary feeling of depression. She wrote later, Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant. Even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.

Starting point is 00:03:31 Jourdain had a similar feeling. She described a sensation of heavy dreaminess, as if she were walking in her sleep. Neither described her feeling to the other, but the atmosphere of distress intensified when the man looked up at them. Moberly says he was repulsive, with a dark and rough complexion. Despite the heat, he was wearing a heavy black cloak and a slouch hat. Chardin recalled that he had an evil and yet unseeing expression and that his face was marked by smallpox. Both women felt relief when a red-faced man ran up behind them and warned them in oddly accented French that they were going the wrong way. He then ran off in another direction. The two women set off after him, crossed a small bridge over a stream,

Starting point is 00:04:09 and came in sight of what they presumed was the Petit Trianon. Here, Moberly saw a fair-haired woman sitting on a stool with her back to the house. She wore a large white summer hat and an oddly old-fashioned dress covered with a pale green shawl. She seemed to be sketching. Moberly and Jourdain went up the steps of the terrace to the house, and Moberly looked back at the sketching woman and again had an inexplicable feeling of gloom. Suddenly, a young man dressed as a footman emerged

Starting point is 00:04:34 from a second building that opened onto the terrace. He slammed a door behind him, hurried toward them with a peculiar smile, and told them that the main entrance was on the other side of the house. They went to that entrance, discovered a French wedding party who were waiting to tour the rooms, and, feeling better, attached themselves to that group. The rest of the day unfolded unremarkably, and the two women returned to Paris that evening. For a week, neither spoke about the experience, but one day, as Moberly began to write to her sister about the visit, she found herself overcome by the same sensation of dreamy, unnatural oppression. She stopped writing and said to Jourdain, Do you think that the Petit Trianon is haunted? And Jourdain said immediately, Yes, I do.

Starting point is 00:05:14 She had felt it in the garden where they'd met the two men, but not only there. Her sensation of depression and anxiety had begun at the same point as Moberly's, but she had tried to hide it from her. There the matter rested until both women returned to England. Jourdain accepted Moberly's offer to become vice-principal of St. Hugh's, and in November, three months after their visit, she came to stay with her. When, at length, they began to discuss their experiences at Versailles, Moberly brought up the sketching lady and was surprised to find that Jourdain hadn't seen her. Moberly wrote, I exclaimed that it was impossible that she should not have seen the individual, for we were walking side by side and went straight up to her, past her, and looked down upon her from the terrace. On discovering this new element of

Starting point is 00:05:54 mystery, they decided to write separate detailed accounts of their visit. When they compared these two narratives, they noticed stranger discrepancies. Besides the sketching lady, Moberly had seen the woman shaking the cloth out the window, but it turned out that Jourdain had seen neither of these, and Jourdain had seen the woman and the girl with the jug walk right past them, but Moberly had seen neither of these. In looking over a set of school lessons on the French Revolution, Jourdain realized that the day they'd visited the Trianon, August 10th, was the anniversary of the sacking of the Tuileries Palace. August 10th, was the anniversary of the sacking of the Tuileries Palace. On that date in 1792, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had seen their Swiss guards massacred and been forced to flee for their lives and take refuge in the Hall of the National Assembly. The royal family had been

Starting point is 00:06:35 executed the following year. Shocked at this coincidence, Moberly and Jourdain developed the theory that they had somehow glimpsed an earlier era, perhaps by entering into a daydream that Marie Antoinette had entertained at that grim moment of happier summers at the Petit Trianon. They thought they'd entered into somebody else's daydream? Basically, yes. It's not that they went back to an earlier era themselves, and it's not clairvoyance. It's not reading the mind of someone who's alive,

Starting point is 00:07:03 but it's sort of both of those things. It's imagining that they had entered into the subjective impression of someone who is now dead, which is a strange idea even to have come up with. Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to understand how that would work, but okay. Faced with strange evidence like this, it wouldn't occur to me even to consider that that might be what the explanation is, but that's what they came up with. They began reading about the life of Marie Antoinette, and Moberly discovered a 1785

Starting point is 00:07:27 portrait of the queen that bore the face of the lady she'd seen sketching on the grounds. Jourdain returned to Versailles in January 1902 and found that she couldn't retrace their steps. All the grounds around the Trianon seemed to have been changed mysteriously. She couldn't find the kiosk now or the bridge and the stream. And she learned that, on her last day at the Trianon in October 1789, Marie Antoinette had been sitting in her garden when a page ran to her with a message that a mob from Paris would arrive at the gates in an hour's time. Moberly and Jourdain decided that this must be the memory they'd stepped into. Imprisoned in the National Assembly in 1792, the Queen had recalled the day three years earlier,

Starting point is 00:08:06 when she'd first heard the news that her crown was in danger. That would explain the terrible sense of depression that both women had felt on the grounds. They felt that this solved the mystery. Every person they'd seen in 1901 corresponded to someone who'd been present at the Trianon in 1789. The two men in green were members of Marie Antoinette's private Swiss guards who had worn liveries of that color while on duty at the chateau. The man with the pockmarked face was the Comte de Vaudreuil, who had once been a close friend of the queen and had later betrayed her to the revolution. The red-faced man who'd run past them near the kiosk was the messenger carrying his alarming news to the queen. He'd worn buckled shoes of a kind that was fashionable after 1786,

Starting point is 00:08:46 and so on. The sketching lady, they decided, had been the queen herself. The pale green shawl she'd worn was identical to one described in the notebooks of Madame Elouf, the queen's dressmaker, in July 1789. The two women wrote to the Society for Psychical Research, presenting their story and including their separate written accounts from 1901 as evidence. But the Society returned their accounts with a message saying that it found them unworthy of investigation. The women realized they would have to find a more compelling way to put their case and decided that they must show that everything they'd seen at the Trianon, from the point where they'd got lost to the point where they'd joined the wedding party, had existed only in the year 1789.

Starting point is 00:09:22 For the next nine years, they pursued a search for evidence in libraries and archives and at the Trianon itself, and in 1911, they published their story in a book they called An Adventure, using the pseudonyms Elizabeth Morrison and Francis Lamont. This laid out their whole case and found 18th century analogs for everything they claimed to have seen, people, structures, clothing, and implements. The plow, they had learned, bore a distinctive design not seen since the Revolution. The cottage, kiosk, and bridge corresponded to features mentioned in old maps and memoirs. The woman and the girl with the jug were the wife and daughter of one of the Queen's undergardeners. The running man with the unusual accent was a particular page who had hailed from Brittany. The servant who'd directed the women to

Starting point is 00:10:03 the front entrance was a footman who'd had rooms near the terrace in 1789, and the sketching lady herself was Marie Antoinette, evidenced by her likeness and by records of the queen's wardrobe. 11,000 people bought the book in its first two years of publication, and most of them found it preposterous. The first and most wounding attack was a review in late 1911 by Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. She contended that Moberly and Jourdain had simply got lost in the grounds and misinterpreted what they'd seen, later drawing selectively on their memories and their research to justify the notion of a glimpse backward in time. She cited the experience of a Monsieur Sage, a French associate of the Society who'd gone over the Trianon grounds with the book

Starting point is 00:10:44 in hand. He contended that the so-called Swiss guards over the Trianon grounds with the book in hand. He contended that the so-called Swiss guards were ordinary Trianon gardeners, and that all the buildings and objects that the women had seen corresponded to existing features on the grounds. Other attacks followed. W.F. Barrett, a physicist and fellow of the Royal Society, said that Moberly and Jourdain's visions had resulted from lively imagination stimulated by expectancy, and lacked any real evidential value. And he mentioned the recent cases of one young woman who'd claimed

Starting point is 00:11:10 to communicate with the spirit of Marie Antoinette and another who believed she was a reincarnation of the queen. In 1913, Moberly and Jourdain issued a revised edition of their book that addressed their critics. They felt sure that they'd seen people from the 1700s and not mistaken modern gardeners, tourists, or people in masquerade costume. They'd confirmed that no historical fates had been held at the Trianon on the day of their visit, nor had any cinematographs been filmed in which actors in costume might have appeared. They denied any interest in spiritualism or the occult, and in order to dispel charges that the whole thing was a hoax, they reproduced the original accounts that each had written in November 1901, as well as two fuller accounts for readers who were unfamiliar

Starting point is 00:11:49 with the grounds of the Trianon. The skeptics were hardly convinced, but the matter was never conclusively decided. Eleanor Jourdain and Anne Moberly stood by their story for the rest of their lives, and public interest in the case continued well beyond their deaths in 1924 and 1937. The book went through five editions, and a lively literature continued to appear disputing its claims. The critics varied in their criticisms. Most agreed that Moberly and Jourdain had mistaken ordinary people and objects for those of the 18th century, but they differed as to the correct explanation. Was the kiosk really the Temple of Love or the Belvedere, and were the men in greenish coats really gardeners or officials? Some thought the two women had been honest and earnest,

Starting point is 00:12:30 others that they'd tampered with the evidence to enhance their case. In particular, W.H. Salter, writing in 1950, focused on the supposedly independent accounts that Moberly and Jourdain had written. How reliable could those be, each having been written three months after the event? What assurance was there that the two writers hadn't colluded? And Salter presented evidence that the Fuller accounts, which the pair claimed to have written only a week or two after the first set, may have been written as late as 1906 and included some crucial details that appeared nowhere else, which raised worries that the women might have embellished their accounts to heighten their drama. Salter didn't attack the writers directly, but Lucille Eiermanger did.

Starting point is 00:13:07 She'd been a student at St. Hugh's and was a descendant of the assertedly repulsive-looking kiosk man Comte de Vaudreuil. Eiermanger found that, contrary to their denials, both Moberly and Jourdain had claimed paranormal experiences both before and after their visit to the Trianon, and that Moberly had been prone to hallucinations. On the day her father died in 1885, she'd seen two strange birds with immense wings and dazzling white feathers fly over the cathedral into the west. At Cambridge in 1913, she'd seen a procession of medieval monks, and at the Louvre the following year, she'd seen a man six or seven feet high,

Starting point is 00:13:41 whom she at first took to be Charlemagne, but later recognized as an apparition of the Roman Emperor Constantine. In a 1965 biography, the French writer Philippe Julien noted that the decadent French esthete Robert de Montesquieu had once lived in a house at Versailles and held fancy dress parties there. Some suggest that Moberly and Jourdain had wandered inadvertently into a garden fete that he was holding. The men in greenish coats might have been Montesquieu and his Argentinian secretary, Gabriel Ituri, and the sketching woman, they say, may even have been a man in woman's dress. But it's not clear in what year Montesquieu's parties took place or whether he ever held one near the Trianon, and in any case, this doesn't explain the altered landscape and structures

Starting point is 00:14:20 that the women reported seeing. It should be said that, alongside the skeptical responses, there were many people who believed the two women, and they didn't lose social or professional standing as a result of the affair. To rebut the charges that they'd embellished their story, they drew up a list of statements from people to whom they'd told it in 1901 and who affirmed that it matched their subsequent statements. And that, I'm afraid, is that, while most people seem to agree that Moberly and Jourdain were simply mistaken, their case is essentially impossible to disprove. They claimed not to have traveled back in time,

Starting point is 00:14:51 but to have entered the daydream of another person, which is necessarily subjective and impossible to gainsay. Tweedledee says of the Red King, he's dreaming now, and what do you think he's dreaming about? Alice says, nobody can guess that. In episode 320, I read an email from Adam Orford, who had written to let us know that UC Berkeley was considering renaming Kroeber Hall, the building named for Alfred Kroeber, one of the anthropologists who had befriended Ishi, the last of the Yahi people, whose story Greg had told in episode 312. Although Kroeber was a pivotal figure in the field

Starting point is 00:15:37 of anthropology, there are significant concerns about some of his research practices, especially regarding Native American burial sites that are now seen as reprehensible. Adam recently let us know that the issue of renaming the hall had been decided. Following up on our prior correspondence, Berkeley's Kroeber Hall unnaming decision was finalized today. I think the review committee did a fair job of summarizing the pro-slash-con arguments, job of summarizing the pro-slash-con arguments, and in particular it seems that the decision was influenced by the unresolved history of expropriation of Native American grave artifacts. On the other hand, the announcement does reference Ishii, and leaves the impression that he was mistreated to a degree that, based on your podcast research, is probably unfair. Personally, I agree

Starting point is 00:16:21 with the comment quoted by the review committee. We should rename the building without exaggerating our critique of A.L. Kroeber. I appreciated the follow-up discussion on this you both hosted a few weeks ago and its respectful treatment of a controversial topic. Keep up the fantastic podcast work. It's always a joy to listen. And Adam included an email that had been sent to the members of the UC Berkeley community by Chancellor Carol Christ, who did try to fairly summarize what made this such a debatable issue. This seems to be one of the many examples in life of things that are not really black or white, but instead are rather gray. Christ noted that Kroeber is acknowledged to be one of the leading anthropologists of his time, and that a lot of his work was important in helping to preserve some of the culture and history of

Starting point is 00:17:08 native Californian tribes. Unfortunately, some of his other activities are now seen as unethical and understandably offensive to the same groups. Christ said, I agree with those who see this move as being less about condemning Kroeber and much more about creating a truly inclusive campus that And at the time that Adam wrote to us, a new name had not yet been chosen for the building, and it was to be called simply the Anthropology and Art Practice Building. It seems kind of hard to go wrong with that. Yeah, it seems like a good solution. In episode 328, I reviewed some studies of the patterns of birthday frequencies in the U.S., using some different data sets from between the years of 1969 to 2012. Those analyses showed that there tend to be considerably fewer births on most

Starting point is 00:18:06 holidays, with the strongest drops in frequencies occurring on New Year's Day, July 4th or Independence Day, and Christmas Day, which had the lowest frequency of any day of the year. These effects seemed to get more pronounced over time, which was likely due to the generally increasing rates of scheduled C-sections and induced births. On this topic, Phil Chavone wrote, Hello Sharon and Greg. As a follow-up to the follow-up to the puzzle in episode 318 about fewer birthdays landing on major holidays and the corresponding confirmation in episode 328, apparently the same cannot be said about famous people.

Starting point is 00:18:41 I just finished the book Quirkology, How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things by Dr. Richard Wiseman, and in it he cites a 1988 study by Albert A. Harrison, Nancy J. Struthers, and Michael Moore, in which they demonstrate that a disproportionate number of famous people have birthdays on holidays. Specifically, they showed that there is a higher incidence of eminent clergy reporting their birthdays on December 25th than would occur by chance. This apparently extends to a disproportionate number of politicians claiming to have been born on July 4th. Since their data included births that occurred prior to modern hospital record-keeping, they concluded that

Starting point is 00:19:21 these people likely fudged their actual dates of birth later on in what the authors call the BIRG effect, basking in reflected glory. It seems that unlike us regular folk who don't want to share our birthdays with Jesus or the United States, famous or influential people, or I suppose those who aspire to be famous or influential, see it as a badge of honor. So at least in this respect, we can't say, celebrities, they're just like us. I'm including a screenshot from Quirkology as well as a link to the original study, which I can't access beyond the abstract. Keep the podcasts coming, they're keeping me sane until I'm vaccinated. So I was able to get a hold of the 1988 article that Phil mentioned that was published in Social Psychology Quarterly.

Starting point is 00:20:05 The authors of that paper examined the relationship between three major holidays in the U.S., Christmas, New Year's Day, and July 4th, and the reported birthdays of notable people, using a methodology of comparing the number of birthdays reported for each week centered around each of the holidays, looking at whether the birthdays were on the holiday itself or on any of the three days before or after it. First, they examined the reported birthdays of all members of the U.S. Congress up to 1972, and they found that there were more birthdays on the holidays than any other single day in the weeks examined, but the effect was only statistically significant for July 4th and New Year's Day and not for Christmas. The authors noted that of the 610 people in this sample, only 62 of them were born after 1900, so these data are

Starting point is 00:20:52 fairly older. In their second study, they used a set of who's who and who was who books, which contained short biographies of people deemed to be important by the book's compilers. Harrison and colleagues divided these eminent people into three groups, those born before 1880, born between 1880 and 1914, and born in 1915 or later. Looking for those with reported birthdays in the three weeks that they were studying, the authors found almost 9,400 cases and determined that in the pre-1880 group, a statistically significant greater number of birthdays fell on all three of the holidays being studied, that for the 1880 to 1914 group, those numbers were significant only for Christmas and New Year's, and that post-1915, the numbers

Starting point is 00:21:38 were significant only for Christmas. This is rather in contrast with the members of Congress for whom Christmas was not statistically significant, but July 4th was. Lastly, the authors compared the relative frequencies of birthdays for members of the military and the Christian clergy, thinking that members of the military might have more of an association with July 4th, while Christmas birthdays might be more associated with the clergy. They didn't find any significant differences for either occupation and any of the chosen holidays until they grouped the clergy members into eminent, with a rank of bishop or above, and non-eminent. They weren't able to do similar subgroupings for the military as the

Starting point is 00:22:15 biographical information often wasn't specific enough. The authors did find that a statistically significant greater number of eminent clergy were born on Christmas than any other day in that week, but that was not the case for the non-eminent clergy. And they say that this possibly suggests that having Christmas for your birthday might be associated with more upward mobility in the Christian clergy, though they note the rather small sample size involved and thus the need to be cautious with interpretations. And for another caution about the whole article, the authors note that their data sources included very few females, so the holiday-birthday relationships that they found were really only demonstrated for males. As for why they found

Starting point is 00:22:57 any such relationships at all, they say that that may have been due to parents believing that a culturally significant birthday would give their children a little extra advantage, or this advantage may have been sought by the individuals themselves. And in both of those cases, birthdays may have been fudged a bit to a more desirable-seeming day. Another explanation may be that there could be a self-fulfilling prophecy that affects people who happen to have notable birthdays, as either those individuals or others around them expect such people to be more special. The authors weren't quite sure why the holiday birthday effect seems to have faded over the time periods they examined, with the effect only pertaining to Christmas in their most recent

Starting point is 00:23:34 group of eminent individuals. As Phil mentioned, this study was discussed in Quirkology, a 2007 book by Richard J. Wiseman, a professor of public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. Wiseman writes that statistically speaking, you'd expect to see roughly similar percentages of people born on any of the holidays and the three days on either side of them. And he notes that as we've seen in more recent studies, that you'd actually expect to see fewer people born on the holidays, if anything. Wiseman discusses Harrison and colleagues' interpretations of their analyses, suggesting that people are basking in reflected glory, and compares this to how people may boast that they

Starting point is 00:24:14 went to the same school as a celebrity, or even just happened to have a chance encounter with one. And he seems to lean towards the idea that the findings suggest that some prominent people were deliberately misrepresenting their birthdays. Wiseman cites as an example of this phenomenon that the jazz musician Louis Armstrong claimed that his birthday was July 4th, but it was later discovered that he had actually been born on August 4th. Wiseman also acknowledges that it is possible that at least in some of the cases, it was the parents' decisions to alter their children's birth dates. And he cites the example of the Belgian writer Georges Simonon, whose mother reported his birth as having occurred one day before it actually did, on February 13, 1903, as she considered a

Starting point is 00:24:56 birthday of the 13th to be too hard of a fate for her son. Wiseman notes that it's harder to fudge the dates of a child's birth these days, especially for hospital births, but that historically, parents would report their children's births verbally to local officials, making manipulation of the dates much easier. In his discussion of this topic, Wiseman doesn't mention the possibility that perhaps people with famous birthdays are just more likely to go on to become famous, either because of their own or others' expectations. And one thing that was missing from the Harrison et al. paper was a comparison of the birthday frequencies of non-famous people during the same time frames. We know that in recent decades, fewer people in general have birthdays on most holidays, but as the article used data that was

Starting point is 00:25:40 quite older, it would have been helpful to have a comparison of the birthdays of people in general versus notable people. I think that you might possibly draw some different interpretations of Harrison et al.'s findings if more people in general reported birthdays on holidays in past generations, as opposed to only finding that pattern in more notable individuals. I suppose that we do have a bit of a sample of that in the eminent versus non-eminent clergy, but as that was such a small and specific sample, it's difficult to draw general conclusions from. And Phil's email included a rather amusing PS. The last time I wrote in regarding the SS Eastland disaster, I included a pronunciation for my last name, but I was remiss since Sharon ended up pronouncing my first name as Paul, which I hadn't anticipated.

Starting point is 00:26:25 So I will clarify both as Phil Chavone. So, wow, that's the second time that I know of that I have renamed a listener. Now I'm wondering if there are other times that I've done that and the person didn't nicely let me know. So I am so sorry to anyone that that has happened to. Sometimes what actually comes out of my mouth is not what I intended. So yes, it is Phil, which is apparently not pronounced Paul. And this is a good reason to be sure to tell me how to pronounce your name, even if it seems obvious. Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. If you have any comments or follow-ups for us,

Starting point is 00:27:05 please send those to podcast at futilitycloset.com, and I will do my best to say your actual name. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an interesting sounding situation, and I have to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Mike Berman. William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. However, even if he had remained alive, he would have served a shorter term than almost all other U.S. presidents. Why? Does this have to do with some quirk of the calendar? Does this have to do with some quirk of the calendar? Yes. Okay, let's see.

Starting point is 00:27:50 Leap years are longer than normal. Was there some year that was a little shorter than normal around 1900? Yes. I'm asking. Yes. Well. Yeah. I need you to rephrase that question, I think. You need me to rephrase that question.

Starting point is 00:28:04 Did they make a change to the calendar that I don't remember hearing about? But, like, sometimes the calendar's been changed, and it's like you lose two weeks or something as they move the dates. Oh, like between the— No. Yeah. You mean, did that happen in 1900? Yeah, around then. No.

Starting point is 00:28:19 Around his term. No. Did—they changed when the president got inaugurated. Did it have something to do with that? No. So was he inaugurated on the same date that previous presidents had been inaugurated on? Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:39 To start his term. I mean, as far as I know, I'd say yes. To start his term. Yeah. But his term would have been shorter because the next president was going to be inaugurated on a sooner date. I can't remember when they changed the dates of the inauguration. No, that's not it.

Starting point is 00:28:53 That's not it. Okay. So it's more a quirk of the calendar. Yes. The number of days would have been fewer days if you counted the days. Yes. Because there wasn't a leap year in 1900. Wow. Right. We did this whole funny thing about leap years, like way, way, way, like in episode two or something. And I had to like pull that out of my memory there.

Starting point is 00:29:20 Yeah. Basically, that's it. Since leap years come every four years, a four-year presidential term will always contain one leap year. However, leap years do not occur in years that are divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400. This means that the years 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, and the presidents who served during them, William McKinley and John Adams, would have terms one day shorter than the rest. Mike adds, I suppose this is yet another

Starting point is 00:29:45 fatal puzzle, but hopefully the intervening 120 years have allowed us all to come to terms with McKinley's death. And McKinley didn't have to die for the making of the puzzle. But yes. Thanks, Mike. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to have us try, please send that to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. If you would 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,

Starting point is 00:30:24 where you'll not only help support the show but also get more information 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.

Starting point is 00:30:40 At our website, you can graze through Greg's collection of over 11,000 enchanting esoterica, 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. Our music was written and performed by Greg's incomparable brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 337-Lost in a Daydream

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