Futility Closet - 347-The Cottingley Fairies

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 abbreviated poetry to a transcontinental fiddler. This is episode 347. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1917, two young cousins carried a camera into an English dell and returned with a photo of fairies. When Arthur Conan Doyle took up the story, it became a worldwide sensation. In today's show, we'll tell the story of the Cottingley Fairies, a curiosity that would remain unexplained for most

Starting point is 00:00:46 of the 20th century. We'll also remember a ferocious fire and puzzle over a troublesome gnome. In July 1917, Frances Griffiths came home with wet shoes. She was nine years old and fond of playing at a stream known as Cottingley Beck that ran among the willow trees at the bottom of the garden, and occasionally she would slip and fall into the water. Today, her mother lost her temper and asked why she was always going down there. She said, I go to see the fairies. The two of them were staying at the home of Frances' cousin, Elsie, in the English town of Cottingley. Frances had grown up in South Africa, where her father had been stationed as an officer in the British Army. The family had returned to England when he was sent to war in Europe, and now Frances found herself living in a rural town in a country

Starting point is 00:01:40 she barely knew. Fortunately, she and Elsie had become best friends. Elsie was seven years older, but neither had siblings, and they shared a small attic room together. It was Elsie who had introduced Frances to the retreat by the stream and to fairy make-believe. Elsie was a talented artist. She drew fairies in her school notebooks, and as her skills improved, these evolved into watercolor paintings. When Frances' mother doubted that the girls had seen fairies at the Beck, Elsie jumped to her defense. She insisted that she'd seen them, too. Their parents refused to accept the story, and the girls cast about for a way to prove it. Elsie had an idea. Just a month earlier, her father had bought the

Starting point is 00:02:21 family's first camera. She asked to borrow it, and he agreed to let them have it for an afternoon. He loaded a single photographic plate into it and showed the girls how to use it. Neither had taken a photograph before. They hurried to the beck and returned in less than an hour with a photograph to be developed. After dinner, Elsie's father took the plate into a dark room that he'd made up under the stairs. As the image came into view, he saw Frances posing at the beck, but surrounding her were strange shapes that at first he took for swans. When he printed the photo the following morning, they resolved into four fairies dancing on the grass in front of Frances. Elsie had hoped that this would impress their parents, but they only teased her. Her father said, what are these bits of paper doing in Frances' picture?

Starting point is 00:03:04 In the weeks that followed, when they caught her daydreaming, they asked if she was watching the fairies. So two months later, Elsie asked to borrow the camera again and disappeared to the Beck with Frances. When her father developed this image, he saw Elsie sitting on the grass wearing a hat and a bridesmaid's dress, extending her hand to a gnome a foot tall. This photo didn't persuade the grown-ups any more than the first one had, but Elsie's father could find no evidence of trickery in the beck or in the girls' room, so he let the matter lie. The family gave a few prints to friends and family and turned to other things. Three years later, Elsie's mother attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford. Interest in psychic phenomena was relatively high in England at the time,

Starting point is 00:03:48 particularly as so many families had lost loved ones in the war, and several hundred people attended. During the meeting, the lecturer mentioned the existence of fairies, and Elsie's mother described the photographs that her daughter and niece had taken. Word reached Edward Gardner, head of the Society's London headquarters. Theosophists believe that, with awakening psychic powers, humans would eventually be able to see nature spirits. The fairies might be the first of these,

Starting point is 00:04:15 with higher spirits and angels perhaps to follow. Gardner was impressed with the photos, and he wrote to ask for details and for the original negatives so that he might add this evidence to his lectures. He took the negatives to Harold Snelling, an expert in photography, who said he found no evidence of trickery. Four experts at Kodak said the photos showed no signs of being faked, but refused to certify that they were authentic. I should add here, too, to people who know this story, that the most famous of the fairy photos,

Starting point is 00:04:43 the first one taken of Francis and the Four Fairies, is strikingly good for 1917. And the reason for that, the actual original that Elsie had taken was, as I understand it, underexposed. But one of the things that Edward Gardner asked Harold Snelling to do was to improve the image a bit because he wanted to use it for his lectures. So they weren't cynically retouching them, but they were improving the image, and that's why it's so, I think, strikingly good, especially for that time. At length, the photos came to the notice of Arthur Conan Doyle,

Starting point is 00:05:13 who was then one of the most famous men in Britain. Doyle was a strong believer in spiritualism, the notion that a spirit world overlaps the material one. But he'd also become convinced of the power of observation and deductive reasoning, partly under the influence of Joseph Bell, as we described in episode 28. So Doyle was seeking a way to reconcile science and the supernatural. By coincidence, he had just been commissioned by The Strand to write an article about fairies. On hearing about the photos, he

Starting point is 00:05:41 arranged a meeting with Gardner, and they agreed that they'd follow up the story together. Gardner would meet the families, and Doyle would write up the results and publish them. Gardner traveled north, talked to the girls and their parents, and visited the sites where the photographs had been taken. He came away believing the photos were genuine. Doyle wasn't so sure. Some of his friends in spiritualism, including the physicist Oliver Lodge, had raised doubts. The fairies' haircuts seemed too modern, the appearance of their hands and legs seemed wrong, and the scenes in the photographs looked staged. They decided they needed additional photos to be sure. Gardner sent a new camera to each girl, along with six dozen photographic plates,

Starting point is 00:06:21 and by the end of the summer he had three new fairy photographs. Gardner declared them the most amazing that any modern eye has ever seen. A fairy leapt before Francis' face, another offered a posy of hair bells to Elsie, and more wandered in the sunlit grass. Now Doyle agreed. In seances, spirits had been hinting that humanity's attitude toward the paranormal was about to change, and this might be the sign they'd been indicating. Doyle's article appeared in The Strand in December 1920, and he followed it up with another the following March. Together, they presented four of the five fairy photos. He wrote,

Starting point is 00:06:56 The recognition of their existence will jolt the material 20th century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life. Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been so convincingly put before it. Word of the photos spread around the world, propelled by Doyle's fame, and newspapers as far away as Australia took up the story. Reaction varied from scorn to applause, but most readers seemed bemused by the claim. The photos were striking, but the conclusion seemed absurd. Doyle wrote several letters to the British press defending them.

Starting point is 00:07:35 To the Yorkshire Weekly Post, he wrote that the photographs had been, quote, inspected by several of the first authorities in England, who have found no flaw in them. When one considers that these are the first photographs which England, who have found no flaw in them. When one considers that these are the first photographs which these children ever took in their lives, it is impossible to conceive that they are capable of technical manipulation which would deceive experts. In 1922, Doyle published a book called The Coming of the Fairies that presented all five photos. He wrote, sent one of the photos to a friend in Cape Town before she had made it public. She had described it as, me with some fairies up the back, and written,

Starting point is 00:08:28 it is funny, I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there. Doyle now wrote, for what possible reason would she, a child of ten, write thus if she knew it was a deception? He continued to believe in the Cottingley fairies until his death in 1930. For the next 50 years, the cousins tried to lead normal lives. Both married. Elsie moved to India, and Francis worked as a medical

Starting point is 00:08:51 secretary and later as a matron at a boys' college. Both tried to ignore the fairy story, which appeared intermittently in articles, television documentaries, and a TV movie. When Edward Gardner died in 1970, he too believed the story was true. But in 1983, the cousins broke their long silence and admitted that the episode had been, as Elsie put it, a practical joke that fell flat on its face. Elsie had copied the fairies from a book of Francis, added wings, and painted them. Then she'd cut them out using her aunt's fabric scissors. When she had first borrowed her father's camera, she'd had the paper fairies in her pockets, as well as a number of long, sharp hat pins.

Starting point is 00:09:30 At the beck, she had fastened the hat pins to the backs of the cutouts and stuck them in the ground beside a toadstool and some wildflowers. Then she'd called Francis over and taken the first picture. The cousins had hoped that the photo would fool their parents, and then they would reveal the trick and everyone would laugh. Instead, they'd been teased and doubted. The second photo had only made things worse, and now, having committed to the story, they had to stick to it. When Gardner and Doyle became involved and the photos became famous,

Starting point is 00:09:56 they had to maintain the fiction to avoid embarrassing these important men and their own family. Elsie had never meant her drawings to stand up to scrutiny. Doyle himself was a dedicated amateur photographer, and he'd noticed some of the flaws in the photos, but he was so caught up in his own interpretation that he believed these only reflected the mysterious nature of fairies. In fact, there's one case where in one of the fairies' stomachs you can actually see the tip of a hat pin poking through. And Doyle decided to believe that that was a navel in evidence that fairies reproduce as humans do. The power of the human mind.

Starting point is 00:10:32 Yeah, that's amazing. Really determined to believe what you want to believe. Exactly. In a letter to the British Journal of Photography, Elsie wrote, My dad said, Really, you must tell right now how you got these photos. So I took Frances aside for a serious talk as the joke had been my own invention. But she begged me not to tell, as the Strand magazine had brought her so much teasing at school, and I was also feeling sad for Conan Doyle. We had read in the newspapers of his getting some jarring comments,

Starting point is 00:10:58 first about his interest in spiritualism and now laughter about his belief in our fairies. There was also a critical cartoon of him in a newspaper, chained to a chair with his head in a cloud, and Sherlock Holmes stood beside him. He had recently lost his son in the war, and the poor man was probably trying to comfort himself with unworldly things. So I said to Francis, all right, we won't tell, as Conan Doyle and Mr. Gardner are the only two we have known of who have believed in our fairy photos, and they both must be at least 35 years older than we are. So we will wait till they have both died of old age, then we will tell. Doyle passed away in 1930, but as it happened, Gardner survived for another 40 years, dying at age 100. By that time, France's children had learned about the story and were delighted at the thought that their mother had seen fairies, so at her request, Elsie agreed to keep quiet a bit longer. But in August 1981,

Starting point is 00:11:50 Elsie's son confronted her with an image from a 1914 fairy book that he suspected she'd used as a model, and the two cousins began to reveal the truth to journalists. In 1983, they admitted the facts in the Times of London. Elsie said, I'm old now and I don't want to die and leave my grandchildren thinking that they had a loony grandmother. Altogether, they had kept the secret for more than 65 years. The Cottingley Fairies can't really be described as a deliberate hoax. Rather, one writer called the affair an accidental conspiracy. When the cousins took the first two photos, they expected that only their parents would see them. They created the last three in the glare of an unexpected media spotlight when

Starting point is 00:12:30 they felt an obligation to protect the men who had endorsed the story. Elsie said, after Conan Doyle was taken in, we didn't dare to confess it because he was so well known and he would have been made to look a fool. Neither woman profited by the deception, and in fact, Frances' daughter, Christine Lynch, said that the publicity had ruined her mother's life. Quote, she just didn't want to be associated with the story at all, and that's purely because the pictures were faked and so many people believed in them. They didn't want to let anyone down or make anyone feel bad, and Frances hated being associated with something that was fake. Elsie said in 1986, the joke was to last two hours and it has lasted

Starting point is 00:13:06 70 years. Whether what they did was right is a matter for debate, but it's ironic that two children felt they had to withhold the truth from grown-ups in order to preserve their faith in fairies. Francis said in 1983, I never even thought of it being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. I can't understand to this day why people were taken in. They wanted to be taken in. People often say to me, don't you feel ashamed that you have made all these poor people look like fools? They believed in you. But I do not, because they wanted to believe. so if you caught the blooper that we accidentally left in last week's episode for a few days before matt thankfully tweeted us about it and we fixed it and you were thinking that you'd like to hear more instances of greg and me messing up the best you were thinking that you'd like to hear more instances of Greg and

Starting point is 00:14:05 me messing up. The best way to do that would be to join our Patreon campaign, where you'll not only help support the show, but you'll also get bonus material like more discussions on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, and outtakes that didn't end up on 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 support Futility Closet. We really couldn't do this without you. In episode 340, I mentioned that escalators can be more of a fire hazard than either stairs or elevators.

Starting point is 00:14:54 Tova Gorman-Bear and partners C.L. Rossmiller and Gus the Cat from Minneapolis wrote, Hi Greg and Sharon. Hello from a longtime listener. I'm listening to your most recent episode, A Vanished Physicist, and the discussion on the flammability of escalators reminded me of an interesting and tragic story, the King's Cross fire of 1987. This was a sudden, terrible fire, responsible for 31 deaths and 100 injuries, that started on an escalator in the King's Cross station of the London Underground. The shape of the escalator essentially funneled flames from one story to the next in a phenomenon known as the trench effect. I first learned about the story from the excellent Forensic Files episode, Flashover, which you can watch here.

Starting point is 00:15:32 So this was a very dramatic case of an escalator being a fire hazard. The King's Cross fire on the evening of November 18, 1987, is called by the London Fire Brigade, the worst fire in the history of the London Underground. Investigations determined that the fire started when a lit match was dropped on the 50-year-old wooden escalator and fell through a gap to set fire to an accumulation of lubricant grease and debris beneath it. The initially small fire was spotted by passengers, and the episode of forensic files that Tova sent a link to said that at first,

Starting point is 00:16:08 firefighters thought that it was just a routine call for a fire on an escalator, and a station officer with the London Fire Brigade who was there that night says that they received probably 20 or 30 such calls a month, which I found a bit flabbergasting. A fire officer initially described the fire at King's Cross as being about the size of a large cardboard box, and they were planning how to best extinguish it when it very suddenly erupted into an enormous blaze in a flashover, an almost instantaneous spread of fire where everything flammable in an area ignites at the same time. A blast of flames shot up the escalator, filling

Starting point is 00:16:46 the ticket hall at the top with intense heat and thick smoke, killing or injuring most of the people in the area. The fire seemed to have defied the laws of physics, and its behavior confounded investigators. Computer modeling was followed by tests on physical scale models of the King's Cross escalator to confirm the difficult-to-understand predictions of the computer simulations, and these led to the discovery of the trench effect in fires. Instead of the fire burning vertically, as would usually be expected, the heated air and the flame stayed low along the length of the escalator until the blaze suddenly dramatically increased in intensity and shot up the rest of the stairway.

Starting point is 00:17:26 Tests on physical models showed that a flat escalator-type trench doesn't show this type of behavior, but that one inclined to 30 degrees, the angle of a typical escalator, does. In the case with the incline, fresh air comes into the fire from the bottom of the trench, behind the fire, which ends up creating a draft, driving the heated gases ahead of the fire in the bottom of the trench behind the fire, which ends up creating a draft driving the heated gases ahead of the fire in the trench. These hot gases preheat the materials ahead of the flames, priming it to all burn suddenly. One of the things that was so dramatic about this event was how quickly it transformed from a rather small fire to a major fatal blaze. The fire is believed to have started at about 7 25 p.m. partway up the

Starting point is 00:18:07 escalator and was first reported by passengers around 7.30 p.m. The timing of the fire reaching the top of the escalator is actually fairly precisely known, as a clock located there was found to be stopped at 7.45 p.m., showing when the flames reached it and burned through its wiring. p.m., showing when the flames reached it and burned through its wiring. So a rather short time frame, and apparently, overall, escalators can be quite a fire hazard. And all this happened because one person dropped a match. Yeah, they think it was likely a smoker that probably even just flicked a lit match down onto the escalator, just not even thinking of the possible consequences. And it just found its way down.

Starting point is 00:18:43 Yeah, and then when they were doing the investigation, they actually found that there was evidence that several other fires had probably started under this escalator in the past, but just had extinguished themselves without spreading. And that this one just happened to hit, you know, the right thing. Wow. In episode eight, Greg introduced us to Gail Howail Halverson, nicknamed the Candy Bomber, a U.S. Air Force pilot who dropped candy bars on parachutes to German children during the Soviet blockade of Berlin. And I covered some updates on Halverson in episode 326. Tova also sent a newer update saying, Gail Halverson, the Candy Bomber, contracted COVID-19 but has recovered. At the

Starting point is 00:19:25 age of 100, I'd say that's pretty impressive. So we can add one more impressive fact to the long list of them for Halverson. Tova sent a link to an article by KSL News Radio in Salt Lake City, Utah from January 24th that said that Halverson had tested positive for COVID-19 back in December, but that at the time of the article, he had fully recovered. So that was a nice update. Good for him. That's impressive. Also in episode 340, we discussed how sometimes we wrestle with how to pronounce names on the show, whether to use a more American version or what the locals would say. And I gave as an example, the American Mel Byrne versus the more Australian Melbourne.

Starting point is 00:20:05 Nick Madrid had some interesting thoughts on the issue. Dear feudalistas, it's been a while since I wrote to you, but I had something to add on the subject of foreign pronunciations and how to handle them. In general, I think it's a good idea to try to pronounce a place name the way the locals do, and it's a good idea to pronounce a personal name the way its bearer does. But I think there's one big exception, and that's roticity. American and Canadian English are rhodic, meaning that we pronounce the R in all positions, whereas British and Australian English are non-rhotic, meaning that they drop the R in a final position. So an American pronounces the R's in George Burns, whereas a British person would pronounce the name something like George Burns. That doesn't mean that the British person is mispronouncing George Burns's

Starting point is 00:20:51 name, just as he would not be mispronouncing California if he called it California. The locals would pronounce it rotically, but the British, being non-rotic, do not pronounce the R. Both pronunciations are valid. And Nick says that British people don't try to pronounce American names rhotic-ly because rhoticity is an intrinsic part of a person's dialect. You don't switch between rhoticity and non-rhoticity from one word to the next. Nick goes on to say that an American saying Melbourne is distracting and even potentially confusing because the ear is calibrated for the speaker's ordinary roticity and is tripped up by a single isolated non-rotic word. For an example of this, in several

Starting point is 00:21:30 episodes Sharon has referred to a listener whose name I believe is Carter, but because he is British and once included a phonetic rendering of how he himself pronounces his name, Sharon has taken to calling him Kata. This confuses me every time I hear it. Sharon's speech is ordinarily rhotic, so hearing her use this pronunciation makes me think that the name must be spelled K-A-T-A or C-O-T-T-A. Why not just say Carter? I can't believe that your British correspondent seriously intended for Sharon to adopt his pronunciation. Anyway, that's my view. Other listeners may feel differently. I'd be curious to hear how our British and Aussie slash Kiwi friends feel about it. I suspect that

Starting point is 00:22:10 they don't actually expect Americans to pronounce their names non-rhotically and are just pulling our legs when they suggest that we do. Love the podcast. It has always been my favorite. Keep up the great work. So that's a more informed view of the issue than I had. I wasn't familiar with the concept of roticity or pronouncing an R before consonants or at the end of a word. Though once I read about it, I thought, oh, yeah, that does describe an important difference in English dialects. And the Wikipedia page on roticity says, the presence or absence of roticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. of roticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. I do share Nick's concern that if I say Melbourne, then it might take people a minute to figure out what city I mean, since that isn't a typical American pronunciation.

Starting point is 00:22:54 So that is something that I try to take into consideration. On the other hand, if someone prefers for their name to be pronounced Kata, then I'm happy to say it the way that they prefer. I guess it would take me back to hear a British person say Carter as an American would. So maybe it sounds confusing for an American to say Kata. Yeah, I could see it that way. I don't know. Other people can weigh in and say what they think. And Dominic Foytu from Prague wrote, Hello, Greg and Sharon. Imagine it is not just pronunciation you have to worry about. What if there are multiple names for a place? It is common enough. Take the Austrian capital as an

Starting point is 00:23:30 example. Wien, Vienna, Wieden, Wieden. Or imagine there are multiple historical names for the same place, each appropriate for a given period. Norman Davies, a prominent historian, faced this problem in his book Microcosm, a history of Wrocław, Poland. He was quite clever about that, using a time-relevant name for each chapter. And Dominic sent a link to a page on Wrocław on the In Your Pocket website that says, As a city under constantly shifting rule, Wrocław has been known by many names throughout its history. In fact, the national status of Wrocław has changed more often than any other city in Europe. And the site includes quite a number of

Starting point is 00:24:11 different names and several variations on the spellings of the different names that the city has been known by. So yes, another wrinkle there. But I guess I'd say that we generally use the English version of a place name in most cases, and the name that would be appropriate for the time period of what we're discussing, which in my case is often the current one. I just ran into something like this in the last episode. I mentioned that Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the top of Mount McKinley, and that mountain is now called Denali, and I had to decide which name to give it. Yeah, that is kind of confusing.

Starting point is 00:24:43 Because people today will know it by the latter name, but when he climbed it, or claimed to, it was called Mount McKinley, which is what I think I went with. Yeah, and I guess that makes sense, but it is hard sometimes to know. What to do. What to do, yeah. Dominic also said, which makes me think there could be another catch.

Starting point is 00:25:00 If you are making an IOU, a promissory note, you are, under the law of many European countries, required to make it in one language only. Otherwise, it may not be valid. However, as given by case law, there appears to be some slack when it comes to place names which you can, luckily, use in both original and adopted form. Sly debtors beware, your knowledge of topography will not save you. So possibly a good tip there.

Starting point is 00:25:26 Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We're always sorry that we can't read all the email that we get on the show, but we really do appreciate your comments and follow-ups. So if you have anything that you'd like to add, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And I always appreciate your telling me how you like your name pronounced. thecloset.com. And I always appreciate your telling me how you like your name pronounced. 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 try to work out what is going on by asking yes or no questions. This is from listener Rowan Bassett, based on an item in Stephen Levy's book, In the Plex. Around 2002, Google was working on a service called Frugal that searched for products on online shopping websites.

Starting point is 00:26:11 As they neared the release date, a problem arose. When the team searched for running shoes, the top result was a garden gnome that happened to be wearing sneakers. Google discouraged tweaking the search algorithm to fix such a specific problem. So what did they do? Okay. They resisted tweaking the algorithm to fix such a specific problem. So what did they do? They didn't want to tweak the search algorithm.

Starting point is 00:26:43 So what are your other options? So is what they did, was it designed specifically to not have this garden gnome come up when people searched for running shoes? Yes. So they did manage to fix just this specific problem without tweaking the search algorithm. Well, have lots and lots of people run the search and then click on the other results to train the algorithm that they want the other results?

Starting point is 00:27:15 No. No. That's not a bad guess. Well, I'm trying to think. They didn't want to tweak the algorithm, but I'm thinking that they did want to train it differently. Get the seller to rename the description or rename the garden gnome or change the description? No. No? Do I need to understand why this garden gnome was coming up?

Starting point is 00:27:38 Something specific about why this result was coming up towards the top? No, you don't need to know that. I don't need to know that. Do I need to know anything specific about how the algorithm works? No. Or is trained? No. Did they just put some kind of a positive spin on it

Starting point is 00:27:54 so that they'd make customers think they wanted to see this? No. No, that would work if you pulled it off. So they want to somehow... Okay, I can think of two ways to go about this, two very broad ways. One is to either make the garden gnome somehow demote it down into the search results, and the other is to somehow pump everything else up so that it goes over the garden gnome. So is it the, you somehow want to get the garden gnome to go further down in the search

Starting point is 00:28:31 results? It's actually neither of those. It's actually neither of those. They managed to get rid of the garden gnome entirely in the search results. Oh. Hmm. Well, I mean, I know Google eventually added in a way that you could like search for results and then like say and don't include any results that have garden gnomes in them or something like that, you know, so you could. No, it's not that.

Starting point is 00:28:57 I'll say this garden gnome was one of a kind. It wasn't a whole series of products. It was one item. They bought them all. a whole series of products. It was one item. They bought them all. The garden gnome was one of a kind,

Starting point is 00:29:09 so one of the engineers just bought it and the product disappeared from the listings. A Google engineer said, the algorithm was now returning the right results. We didn't cheat, we didn't change anything, and we launched. Thanks, Rowan. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle

Starting point is 00:29:22 they'd like to send in for us to try, please send that to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our magnificent listeners. If you'd like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, 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 enchaining sneeds. 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

Starting point is 00:30:05 at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the regardable Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 347-The Cottingley Fairies

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