Futility Closet - 341-An Overlooked Bacteriologist

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 restless buoy to a portable dresser. This is episode 341. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In the 1890s, Voldemort Hofkeen worked valiantly to develop vaccines against both cholera and bubonic plague. Then an unjust accusation derailed his career. In today's show, we'll describe Hofkeen's momentous

Starting point is 00:00:40 work in India, which has been largely overlooked by history. We'll also consider some museum cats and puzzle over an endlessly energetic vehicle. Valdemar Hofkeen was the fourth of five children born to a Jewish schoolmaster in what is now Ukraine. He graduated in zoology from the University of Odessa in 1884, but was barred from a professorship there because the government had begun cracking down on members of the intelligentsia following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Instead, he emigrated, first to Switzerland and the University of Geneva, then in 1889 to the newly established Pasteur Institute in Paris,

Starting point is 00:01:26 which was becoming the world's leading center of research in bacteriology. Practical bacteriology was then in its infancy. We just saw in episode 336 that tuberculosis was traced to a bacterium in this period. The same researcher who'd made that discovery, the German microbiologist Robert Koch, had found that another bacterium caused cholera, and the Pasteur Institute was making a special study of vaccines to treat it. Before this, cholera had been thought to travel in bad air, and it was assigned only broad treatments, such as steam baths and the spraying of carbolic acid. Hofkein and his colleagues focused on something much more specific, a microbe in the body that they could target precisely. Hofkein made great strides here. After early successes with guinea pigs, rabbits, and pigeons,

Starting point is 00:02:11 he felt he was ready for a human subject, and on July 18, 1892, he injected himself with attenuated cholera, risking his own life to prove that the treatment could do no harm. He developed a fever for a few days, but recovered completely, and when he inoculated three Russian friends and several other volunteers, none had any worse reaction. This is dramatic, but it wasn't reckless. Some researchers felt that the only ethical way to test their hypotheses was to be the one to go first. We've actually talked about this on the show a few times, of doctors who are testing out their theories or their treatments on themselves. I mean, it always sounds kind of weird and a little scary,

Starting point is 00:02:51 but I guess if you need to test it on somebody... Yeah, it would be terrible if you tested it on someone else and found out you had been wrong. But still, it seems very dramatic to test it on yourself, because if you're wrong, then you're putting yourself out of commission in trying to amend any trouble, you know? But I guess there's like ethical implications of testing something potentially dangerous on somebody else.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Yeah. And he did this more than once. At a meeting of the Biological Society of London on July 30th, 1892, Hofkeen reported the results of his experiments. His vaccine, he said, does not present the slightest danger to health and can be practiced on man with perfect security. At the same time, I express the hope that six days following the vaccination, the human organism will acquire immunity against cholera. The next step was to look for a chance to test the vaccine in the field. Sadly, that was not hard to find. The 19th century saw five great pandemics of cholera,

Starting point is 00:03:44 and the last and worst of these was now ravaging Europe and Asia. The disease regularly killed thousands of people in India, and Tofkin traveled there next. His work started inauspiciously. He'd hoped to conduct field trials amid epidemic conditions, but perversely there was no epidemic that year, and he encountered opposition from doctors who doubted the viability of a vaccine, and from Indians who had grown suspicious after enduring years of medical programs mandated by the British. His luck changed in March 1894, when a medical officer invited him to Calcutta to help identify cholera in the busties, poor villages of mud huts clustered around ponds and water tanks on the city's outskirts.

Starting point is 00:04:24 poor villages of mud huts clustered around ponds and water tanks on the city's outskirts. Hofkein felt these would be ideal testing sites. In each household were a group of people living in the same conditions and exposed equally to the disease. If he could inoculate some of each family and leave others untreated, he might eventually get a clear indication of the effectiveness of the vaccine. At the end of March, he got word that two people in the Qatal Bagan Bastille had died of cholera, signaling a new outbreak. Of the 200 people who lived there, Hofkeen inoculated 116. Afterward, 10 further cases were reported, of which seven were fatal, but all of the 10 occurred in the group that had not been inoculated. That promising result led the city health officer to fund a wider trial, but it was hard to convince people to get vaccinated, and Hofkeen was doubly an outsider. He was not a

Starting point is 00:05:10 doctor, but a zoologist, and in an era of factionalism in international bacteriology, he was a Russian Jew who trained in Odessa and developed his skills in Paris. But he undertook to work with Indian doctors and assistants rather than British, and he injected himself publicly to show his confidence in the preparation. In time, people began lining up in the streets of Calcutta for the new vaccine, some people waiting all day. Hofkeen would begin in the morning before people had gone to work and continue in the evening when they came back, and he extended his operations to the tea plantations of Assam, where he conducted large-scale trials on thousands of workers. By the time a bout of malaria forced him to return to England in the autumn of 1895, he'd inoculated almost 42,000 people. All this progress was encouraging, but problems remained.

Starting point is 00:06:00 Hofke noted that his vaccine appeared to reduce cases, but it didn't seem to reduce mortality in people who were infected. He planned to address that with a new strategy, but before he could do so, he was drawn away from cholera, for good, by a crisis in Bombay. That was bubonic plague, which had not visited a pandemic on the world since the Black Death. This one had started in the Himalayan borderlands between China and India and reached Bombay in 1896. The first case was discovered in September in the quarters of a grain merchant at the city's docks. In time, it would account for 15 million deaths, the vast majority in India, China, and Indonesia. Even at the turn of the 20th century, confusion reigned over the cause, control, and therapy of plague. The British wanted to keep the port open, so at first they

Starting point is 00:06:45 underplayed the severity of the outbreak, but its mortality rate was nearly twice that of cholera, and the death count soared in the city's crowded quarters. The governor appealed to Hofkeen, who suspended his work on cholera, and traveled to Bombay, where he was given two small rooms, a clerk, and three untrained assistants, and asked to come up with the world's first plague vaccine from scratch. It's difficult to know how Hofkein felt about this. He was a quiet man who focused on his work. In an unpublished novel, he wrote, I don't like persons demonstrating their feelings to everybody. I prefer individuals with quiet, equal, or even cold face, while a huge internal work of intellect and heart is raging within him. He toiled through the

Starting point is 00:07:26 winter, applying the same approach he'd used for the cholera vaccine, combining microbes with the toxic products they created to produce a vaccine that could be administered with a single injection. By December, he'd successfully inoculated rabbits against plague, and with the new year, he was ready again to test a new vaccine on a human. On January 10th, he injected himself with 10 cc's of the preparation, more than three times the dose he planned to use in wider testing. He came down with a severe fever but recovered in a few days. As it happened, at the end of December, plague had struck the Baikala House of Correction in Bombay, a jail with hundreds of inmates. Hofkeen inoculated 147 prisoners there and left 172 untreated. The untreated group

Starting point is 00:08:07 produced 12 cases and 6 deaths, and those who were treated produced two cases, both of whom recovered. That success drove a quick expansion in production and testing, and Hofkeen was moved from his two-room lab to a government-owned bungalow. Within a year, hundreds of thousands of people had been inoculated with the new vaccine, saving untold lives. Hofkeen was knighted by Queen Victoria, and in December 1901, he was appointed director-in-chief of the Plague Research Laboratory in Parel, Bombay, with new facilities and a staff of 53. Hofkeen was finally reaping the rewards of his hard work when disaster struck. In March 1902, 19 people died of tetanus in the village of Mulkowal in Punjab after being inoculated with Hafkeen's vaccine. The Indian government appointed a commission to

Starting point is 00:08:51 investigate. It found that Hafkeen had changed the procedure used to sterilize the plague vaccine using heat instead of carbolic acid in order to speed up production. The heat method had been used safely at the Pasteur Institute in Paris for two years, but it was unfamiliar in Britain. Hofkeen was fired as the lab's director and placed on leave from the Indian Civil Service. He left India in disgrace and went to London. He developed a plague vaccine with minimal resources and stunning speed, but he was still regarded as an outsider, and the fact that he was Jewish probably counted against him with the Edwardian bureaucracy. Worse, he had been forced away at the crucial moment. In his absence, the plague reached its peak in India, killing more than a million people in a single year.

Starting point is 00:09:33 His vaccine was the main line of defense, but he was now in London fighting for his name. In 1906, the government published the results of its inquiry, finding Hofkeene guilty. But this brought a passionate response from W.J. Simpson, a professor at King's College London. Writing in the British Medical Journal, Simpson argued that the evidence suggested that the error had been made at the site where the injection had been given, not in the lab where the preparation had been made. When the bottle had been opened, it gave off no smell, where a developed culture of tetanus would have produced a distinct odor. When the bottle was examined 15 days later, only a poor culture of tetanus was evident, and on the day of the 19 fatal cases,

Starting point is 00:10:10 88 other villagers had been inoculated and all of them were fine. A close look at the evidence pointed to the contamination of a single bottle, bottle 53N. The assistant who opened that bottle admitted that he dropped his forceps on the ground and then failed to sterilize them properly before using them to open the bottle's cork stopper. He had swished them briefly in carbolic acid instead of sterilizing them in the flame of a spirit lamp, as Hofkeen had instructed. Simpson said that Hofkeen had been the victim of a grave injustice, and others shortly took up the cause. Nobel laureate Ronald Ross wrote four scathing letters to the Times

Starting point is 00:10:44 in which he accused the British of disregard for science and warned that if the conclusion were allowed to stand that the bottle had been contaminated in the lab, it would undermine public trust in vaccines at a time when at least 50,000 people a week were dying of plague. Ross and nine other internationally renowned microbiologists signed a letter saying that the accusation against Hofkein was not only not proven, but distinctly disproven. Ross was apparently beside himself. In a speech at Mansion House London, he said that Britain threw genius on the scrap heap. The matter reached the British Parliament in November 1907. Hofkein was exonerated, but not really restored. He went back to work as director-in-chief of the Calcutta Biological Laboratory, but he was still barred from carrying out trials, which meant he could do only theoretical research.

Starting point is 00:11:29 He wrote to Ross, As a result, his next seven years were largely empty. Of the 30 papers he wrote in his lifetime, only one appeared between 1907 and 1914. He returned to working on cholera, but the Indian government consistently refused his applications to conduct trials, and in 1914, at age 55, he retired from the Indian Civil Service, left the country, and largely left history. Between 1897 and 1925, 26 million doses of his anti-plague vaccine were sent out from Bombay. Tests showed that it reduced mortality by 50 to

Starting point is 00:12:13 85 percent. Back in France, he devoted his last years to his faith and establishing a foundation to promote Jewish education in Eastern Europe. He never married and lived out his final years alone in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he died in 1930 at age 70. Hofkeyn's work stands with that of Edward Jenner and Jonas Salk, who pioneered an essential shift in the understanding and treatment of disease. His name is not nearly so well known among the general public, but his accomplishments inspired many scientists to take up vaccine research in the early 20th century. Joseph Lister, the British bacteriologist and pioneer of antiseptic surgery, said that when he'd first

Starting point is 00:12:50 seen Hofkeen in 1893 and learned his views on the prevention of cholera, he'd had grave doubts as to the efficacy of his theories. Six years later, he called him the savior of mankind. At Hofkeen's death, W.J. Simpson wrote, I knew him intimately. He was very likable and always the same, a courteous and amiable gentleman, even towards those who opposed him and attacked his views and work. Very determined, remarkable for his powers of work, full of enthusiasm and with a dauntless courage which was not to be damped by disappointments. Whether he was bitter at his treatment in the crisis is not clear. As always, he devoted himself to his work. In his notebook, he quotes Theodor Herzl,

Starting point is 00:13:28 Religion keeps us together. Science makes us free. Futility Closet just wouldn't still be here if it weren't for the generous support of our listeners. Thank you. donation to the show, you can join our Patreon campaign, where you'll also get bonus material, like more discussions on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and peeks into what goes on behind the scenes of the show. You can learn more at our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of our website for the link. And thanks again to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. We really couldn't do this without you. We have previously talked about cats with jobs in various places,

Starting point is 00:14:38 such as libraries and train stations. John Hancock passed along to us a tweet from Quite Interesting saying, this seems highly relevant to your interests. And the tweet from early March read, Last week, the Union of Museum Cats was established in St. Petersburg, Russia. According to the organizers of the union, this will help the cats with official employment and job security. I found others online saying basically the same thing, but I had a hard time learning much more than that, although I finally found a Russian newspaper article from February 26 and was able to read an awkward Google translation of it. The article, in MK, reported that the first trade union of museum cats in Russia was created in St. Petersburg, which of course makes me wonder if there are unions for museum cats in other countries. It's hard to say how serious this actually is. On the one hand, the article says

Starting point is 00:15:31 that the organizers want to prove that cats aren't just only pets, but can be real employees of enterprises. On the other hand, apparently somehow to this end, they were planning to hold a contest on March 1st for the best meowing employee, where cats can vote for the candidates by telling their two-legged colleagues who to vote for. As the article says, the cats themselves, of course, will not be able to do this. They have paws. So hard to know what to make of this. And if anyone who reads Russian can find out more, you can let us know.

Starting point is 00:16:02 Or if you find out who won the contest. I wonder if that's a particularly Russian thing. Museum cats or trade unions for them? Or both or either. Yeah. Trade unions for animals. What really interested me about this topic was learning about what are called the Hermitage cats who live and work at the Hermitage Museum, the second largest art museum in the world in St. Petersburg. It's hard to say just how many cats there are at the Hermitage. A 2010 article from ABC News quotes Maria Kaltunin, the museum director's assistant and head of the cat program

Starting point is 00:16:38 there, as saying that the joke is that the director allows 50 cats, so they technically have 50 cats, but that the actual number is around 60. A 2013 article in the Telegraph quotes the number of cats as a very specific 74, while articles from 2020 give the number as around 50 or at least 50. However many cats there are, everything I read agreed that there have been cats at the hermitage, which was originally a palace, since the 18th century, when Empress Elizabeth Petrona issued an order, the Telegraph reports, to find the best and biggest cats capable of catching mice and send them to the court of her imperial majesty, along with someone to look after and feed them and send them by cart and with sufficient food immediately. There have been cats at the hermitage ever since, except during the siege of Leningrad during World War II when there wasn't food to spare for cats. According to an article in the Moscow Times, after the war,

Starting point is 00:17:37 two carriages full of cats arrived in St. Petersburg from elsewhere in the USSR, and a number of them were brought to live at the museum. Apparently, the rodent population had really taken off in the three cat-free years, and the cats were rather needed. The Moscow Times called the cats essential staff and said that they serve as the museum's official rat hunters. Although the Telegraph quotes Kaltunin as saying that the cats don't need to actually chase mice, as simply their presence there acts as a deterrent. In any case, there are staff to care for the cats and kitchens for preparing their meals, in deference to the various feline food preferences. Apparently, the kitties are supported mainly through donations, and so luckily for the cats, back in December,

Starting point is 00:18:19 Christophe Bota, a French citizen, left them some money in his will, which pleased the museum, both for the financial help and pleased the museum, both for the financial help and for the hopefully positive publicity for the cats and the need for donations for them. While the Hermitage's cats can be very popular with the visitors there, at least in the articles that I read, it seemed that no one was quite sure why Bota had done this, as it wasn't clear that he'd even ever been to the Hermmitage. Still, as the Moscow Times said, anyone is welcome to follow Botas' example in supporting the cats by contacting the museum development office.

Starting point is 00:18:51 And when I first heard about a union of museum cats, I wondered how many museum cats do they even have in St. Petersburg. But it turns out it's quite a good number, so maybe they need a union. That's a lot of cats. It's apparently a lot of cats, and I think it's really amusing that most of the time they don't even know how many cats it is. As for some other working cats that we have been semi-following on the show, we've gotten some recent updates on Larry, the number 10 Downing Street chief mouser in the UK. Mark let us know back in early March that it was reported that Larry had gotten a mostly clean bill of health from the vets recently,

Starting point is 00:19:27 where the 14-year-old Moggy was said to be doing well for an old boy. However, it was noted that his weight had been creeping up and the No. 10 staff were asked to please cut back on his treats. The Mirror reported, the chief mouser is said to have been noisy in the car but remained dignified once in the vets, even whilst having his temperature taken in a place he wasn't expecting. It's hard to keep your dignity in that situation. Yeah, who judges how dignified a cat is being? And Andy sent us a tweet by Justin Ang, an Australian photographer living in London who recently managed to snap some photos of Larry, 14 years old and a bit overweight or not, chasing off a fox.

Starting point is 00:20:10 Eng posted, Just seen at number 10 cat see off a fox in Downing Street by the side garden. He's all right. Speeded in after giving a fellow a few paw punches and fox ran amusingly towards the direction of the media press room. and Fox ran amusingly towards the direction of the media press room. The Daily Mail got several nice photos of the tense encounter, which show Larry with a clear upper hand as he is up on a wooden bench glaring at the fox below. We had mentioned urban foxes in London in episode 195, after one of our UK listeners had let us know of their increasing presence there,

Starting point is 00:20:49 and the Daily Mail article states that this fox is believed to be a regular visitor in the area. So good to see that Larry is still vigilant at his post against all potential intruders. I don't know anything about foxes, but I would have bet on the fox in a stand-up with a cat. I'm always amazed at what cats will stand up to and when. Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't actually know who I would have put money on between a cat and a fox, but... I mean, I guess I don't know how big a fox is, but surely they're bigger than cats. I don't know. Maybe not. The puzzle in episode 317, spoiler ahead, was about a bar in Quebec that uses a refrigerator to keep beverages from freezing.

Starting point is 00:21:19 Clay Roper wrote, Hey, Futilizans, just dropping a note to let you know how y'all were with me in a particular way a couple of weeks ago. I live in Austin, Texas, and during a recent notable weather event, I lost power for several days. In order to keep my food from spoiling, I placed the items from my freezer outside on an apartment balcony that probably hasn't seen sustained sub-freezing temps in years. I wanted to do the same with my refrigerated vittles, but I feared them freezing straight through, what with the forecasted multiple days under 30 degrees.

Starting point is 00:21:51 Luckily, my memory of a Ross family lateral thinking puzzle came to my rescue, and I successfully stored my food at the right temperature for days using coolers for inverse insulation. I didn't lose a single bit of food, and I was able to eat from my balcony fridge as though it were from a more reputable and well-known appliance manufacturer. I had read an email from one of our listeners

Starting point is 00:22:13 in episode 326 about how in Wisconsin, coolers are used to keep beer from freezing when you go ice fishing. So I guess this is pretty similar. I'm glad to hear that works. I wonder who was the first person to figure that out. About the reverse insulation. It makes sense if someone explains it to you, but it wouldn't have I'm glad to hear that works. I wonder who was the first person to figure that out. About the reverse insulation. It makes sense if someone explains it to you, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to try that.

Starting point is 00:22:29 And Sierra Crow wrote to us about a practice that we used to do on the show quite some time ago and that we'd pretty much forgotten about until we heard from her. Hi, Greg and Sharon. One of my favorite parts of the podcast is when Sharon uses little-known adjectives to describe the book and website. And actually, anytime you guys use rarely used words, because then I get to look it up and learn new words. It's the part where she says, if you're looking for more quirky entertainment, look for our books on Amazon or visit our website where you can sample more than 9000 adjective noun. And Sierra asked about a particular word that we'd used that she couldn't figure out,

Starting point is 00:23:05 and we attempted to help her out with that. We really had sort of forgotten that we used to do this in the outro of the show. To the best of our memory, after we'd been doing the show for a while, Greg had thought that it would be fun to get a bit creative and started using some more obscure words to describe his website, similar to how he likes to put uncommon words and their definitions on his site. But I generally write the outros, and at some point, Greg stopped supplying me with the unusual phrases, and I just wasn't being nearly as creative in my word choices. Although after getting Sierra's email a few weeks ago, I did start trying to get a little more interesting in describing the website in the outro. I've always found it hard to describe the site. I mean, if you spend a minute on it, it's clear enough what it is. But it's oddly hard to describe it

Starting point is 00:23:50 in the abstract to someone who hasn't seen it. It's such a mix of things. Yeah. So that's, I think, how I've, and that also we sometimes run just obscure words in general on there. So I think that's why in the books, for example, used phrases like ostrobogulus ephemera. Right. And we started using those in the outro, just phrases just like that. I think just to be fun and just to sort of more reflect some of the spirit of the site. And then somehow we drifted away from it again. But even on the podcast, we use the phrase quirky curiosities, which isn't wrong, but it doesn't entirely convey the spirit of it. I don't know what the answer is. We've never been able to figure out how in a very short phrase to describe really what the answer is. We've never been able to figure out how, in a very short phrase, to describe really what the site is.

Starting point is 00:24:26 Yeah. I mean, it's not, I don't mind the word trivia, but like for some of the mathematics and philosophy and stuff, it might not be important, but that's not really quite the right phrase. Yeah. Sierra also said in her email, Also the other day, I finally got to the episode where you talk about the meaning behind the name Futility Closet. where you talk about the meaning behind the name Futility Closet. Before I got to the episode, I assumed that it meant that once you entered the closet, e.g. the website or podcast, it was futile to try to leave.

Starting point is 00:24:53 Have you ever thought of it like that? P.S. I finally got my mom into your podcast. Success! So, hi, Sierra's mom, who is hopefully still listening. An interesting interpretation of our name, although I suppose that could sound almost a bit ominous if you take it a certain way. You cannot leave. That's another thing I'm self-conscious about is like, futility closet, I guess it's a catchy name, but it sounds like it might be about futility. Yeah. Or if nothing else, it's just sort of opaque. It's a very dark closet. Or it just sounds unserious or something. It's hard to, I imagine it might be hard to get your

Starting point is 00:25:23 Uncle Fred to listen to the podcast, for instance, if he doesn't know anything about it but the name. Yeah. Thanks so much to our regardable listeners who send us such sapid observations and updates. If you have any commentary or celebrations for us, please convey those to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd sounding situation and I'm going to try to work out what's going on by asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Sam Tilly. The world's largest electric vehicle never needs to be recharged. Why? The world's largest electric vehicle. Is there only one of this thing, would you say? There could well just be one. Let's say there is, just for simplicity. Just one.

Starting point is 00:26:15 The world's largest electric vehicle. By electric, do you mean it runs on what I think of as electricity? Yes. Okay. By vehicle, do you mean something that is intended to convey people or other objects from place to place? Yes. Never needs to be recharged. Is this in outer space? It's an old standby question.

Starting point is 00:26:41 No, it's not. Is this on the surface of the earth? Yes. So it's not like a submarine or something. The world's largest electric vehicle never needs to be recharged. Meaning like a battery. It doesn't have a battery that needs recharging. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:04 Does this vehicle have a battery that needs recharging. Okay, does this vehicle have a battery? Yes. Are you saying that the battery never needs to be recharged? Yes. Is that because the battery never runs down, never runs out? Yes, I don't want to mislead you. Yes. Is it because it has multiple batteries and you swap them out?

Starting point is 00:27:24 No, no, no. By recharge, I mean it doesn't have to go to a conventional charging station the way another electric vehicle might. Okay. So does it recharge on something else? It recharges from like sunlight or its own motion recharges the battery or it feeds off of humans and somehow charges from their energy. Yes. Something like that. Yes. Something like that. Yes.

Starting point is 00:27:45 So it's just basically, so you would say in some ways it's capturing electricity other than we just plug the battery in directly. That's right. Okay. So I have to figure out. How could it do that? How could it do that? I mean, I'm going to assume it doesn't have a combustion engine in it also, like some

Starting point is 00:28:02 kind of hybrid. Okay. Does it run on sunlight? No. Wind? No. The power that's generated by its own motion? Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:14 Okay. And do you want me to figure out what kind of vehicle this is, like whether it's a ship versus a car or something? I'm trying to decide. I'll just tell you it's a dump truck. The world's largest electric vehicle is a dump truck. It's an enormous dump truck. An enormous dump truck. But obviously it's doing a lot of work and how can it do that without ever needing to. Does it matter where this is? I'll say yes. Okay and does it matter what its specific purpose is other than being a dump truck, like something more specific than that? Where it is, I guess I'll just tell you.

Starting point is 00:28:51 Where it is is more important. It works. I don't want to give away too much. Well, let me work on the where it is. So by where it is, do you mean like what country it's in versus like where it is, it's near a lake versus on a hill? I mean more the latter, but I'll just tell you, maybe this is a hint, it's in versus like where it is. It's near a lake versus on a hill. I mean more of the latter, but I'll just tell you, maybe this is a hint. It's in Switzerland. It's in Switzerland.

Starting point is 00:29:10 So does it have something to do with mountains? Yes. Okay. And is that the important part of the where it is, that it's got something to do with mountains? Yes. Rather than that it's Swiss. Right.

Starting point is 00:29:19 It's not doing its work on just a flat surface. Okay. So is it going up and down mountains? Yes. Does it recharge on the way down the mountain? Yes. That's basically it. It's a mining truck that hauls lime and marl off the side of a mountain in Switzerland.

Starting point is 00:29:32 The truck itself weighs 45 tons. It climbs a 13% grade and takes on 65 tons of ore. Since the truck weighs more than twice as much coming down as going up, its regenerative braking system can recapture more than enough energy to refill its charge. Yay! Thanks, Sam. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to have us try, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported entirely by our extonious listeners.

Starting point is 00:30:09 If you'd like to help support the show, please check out the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can find a donate button and a link to our Patreon page. At our website, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 11,000 self-couthed bedenda. Browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any comments or questions for us, please email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the non-Perel Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 341-An Overlooked Bacteriologist

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