Futility Closet - 349-The National Hotel Disease

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 narrow words to quantified beauty. This is episode 349. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1857, guests at Washington, D.C.'s National Hotel began to come down with a mysterious illness. One of them was James Buchanan, who was preparing to assume the presidency of the United States.

Starting point is 00:00:39 In today's show, we'll describe the deadly outbreak and the many theories that were offered to explain it. We'll also contemplate timpani and puzzle over an Old West astronaut. In January 1857, James Buchanan left his estate in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and traveled to Washington, D.C. He had just won the presidency but would not be inaugurated until March. He was making this visit to attend to cabinet appointments and other matters as he prepared to take office. He and his party of nine arrived in the city on January 27th and took rooms at the National Hotel, where they dined that evening and went to bed around 10.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Two hours later, naval surgeon Jonathan Foltz woke up thinking, why, I have been poisoned. He took in a medic to induce vomiting, and shortly afterward, a hotel servant knocked on the door to tell him that Buchanan was sick as well. Soon all but two of the party needed Foltz's attention for severe gastrointestinal symptoms. He spent the rest of the night running from room to room to attend to the stricken guests. The next day, the party were too ill to leave their beds. Foltz's first thought was that they had had bad soup the night before. The two men in the party who were not ill had not had soup, and Foltz himself, who was the least ill of those stricken, had had relatively little.

Starting point is 00:02:08 By the second day, they'd recovered enough to gather for toast and weak tea, and Buchanan eventually was able to make the rounds politically and socially. He left for home on February 3rd and was feeling well enough to walk the last 10 miles through bad weather. He worked at home for three weeks and then suffered a recurrence of the illness. Foltz still suspected the food and warned him not to return to the hotel for the inauguration, but Buchanan announced he'd be staying there until he moved into the executive mansion. On the way to Washington, the president-elect was so ill that he had to bow out of a banquet hosted by the mayor of Baltimore. When he reached the city, he found the hotel filled with people in town for the inauguration.

Starting point is 00:02:45 Many of them remarked on a disgusting smell reminiscent of sewage, especially those who had rooms above the first floor. And now dozens of guests began to fall ill with the same sickness. Newspapers began to take notice, and word got out that Buchanan had been struck ill earlier. Many assumed that his return to the hotel had given him a second bout, but in fact this was probably a relapse of an existing illness. At the inauguration on March 4th, Buchanan was suffering so badly that, according to his nephew, we were somewhat fearful that Mr.

Starting point is 00:03:16 Buchanan might be seriously embarrassed. Buchanan felt that the only thing that got him through his speech were the small doses of brandy that Foltz gave him to settle his stomach. In 1857, Washington was barely half a century old. Pennsylvania Avenue was its only paved street, and the Treasury Department hadn't yet received its columns. While Pierre L'Enfant's plan for the city looked good on paper, it was being imposed on a landscape of farms and villages, and this left huge open areas among the grand buildings and private homes. Pigs, cows, goats, and sheep wandered the streets, eating garbage and leaving excrement, and mosquitoes swarmed from marshes and bogs. Worse, the city had no public sewage network, no centralized garbage collection, and only the beginnings of

Starting point is 00:04:03 a running water system. Homes, hotels, and government buildings discharged their sewage into open fields and stagnant ponds, often adjacent to the structures themselves. Slaughterhouses dumped offal in the open, and residents dropped slops and garbage in the roadways. In the summer, the city stank of raw sewage, garbage, manure, and animal intestines. In a rainy spring, the above-ground sewage ditches that normally ran into the Potomac would back up, polluting the springs that supplied drinking water and spreading dysentery, typhoid, and cholera. The National on Pennsylvania Avenue was the largest hotel in Washington and considered one of the best. Its guests included Charles

Starting point is 00:04:42 Dickens, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Abraham Lincoln. But the whole notion of hotels was relatively new in America and still a bit suspect. The first hotel with running water and water closets had appeared only in 1829, and as late as 1889, people viewed hotels as unsanitary. They threw together strangers without regard to the normal distinctions of class, gender, and race, and their rooms were often dirty and unventilated. And now, it seems, one of them was plagued with illness. Within a week of Buchanan's inauguration, the city was abuzz with news of the outbreak. By mid-March, newspapers were giving regular reports, and by

Starting point is 00:05:21 the end of the month, readers were writing in to describe their own ordeals with the so-called National Hotel Disease. These accounts tended to be exaggerated, so it's hard to estimate the true number of people affected. On March 21st, the New York Daily Herald reported that 100 people had come down with the illness. A week later, the Pennsylvanian estimated seven times as many. Folt, looking back afterward, estimated that more than 400 people had been infected and that 10 percent of these had died. For the first few weeks, the illness raised alarms across the country. It had appeared suddenly and from an unknown origin, and its symptoms were long-lasting. On May 5th, the Columbus Enquirer quoted a very distinguished Democrat predicting

Starting point is 00:06:02 that Buchanan would die soon. Time would show that these alarms were overblown, but arguably the president's illness did have historic effects. The recent election had been fought largely over the issue of slavery. Buchanan's Democrats, who favored the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, were opposed by the newly formed Republicans, led by John C. Fremont. Buchanan, who was normally careful and politic, had become irritable and impatient, possibly under the strain of his illness, and he made two disastrous decisions early in his tenure, giving an antagonistic pro-slavery inauguration speech and intervening in the Supreme Court to press for a pro-slavery decision in the Dred Scott case.

Starting point is 00:06:43 Historian Kerry Walters says that in a nation already riven by partisan strife, Buchanan's weakened judgment, irritability, and malaise may have pressed it closer to war. That's interesting to think about, that this illness may have had that broad of an impact if it caused him to act in a more inflammatory or aggressive manner than he otherwise might have. Especially if it happens at just the wrong point in history, which this is a very sensitive point. So it's impossible to know for sure, but you're right.

Starting point is 00:07:15 And the same thing, I'm sure, has happened at certain hinge points in history where something went wrong at exactly the wrong time. Something almost arbitrary and unconnected, like somebody being ill and therefore making different decisions. Yeah. In that contentious climate, it was easy to imagine that Buchanan's illness was not an innocent misfortune.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Perhaps he had been poisoned deliberately by a political enemy. The Baltimore Sun reported on April 1st that a man who had died in Pennsylvania of the National Hotel disease was found to have arsenic in his stomach, and that another patient showed marked symptoms of being poisoned. It's hard to substantiate that story, but the New York Daily Times and several other papers picked it up. The rumors accelerated with the death of John G. Montgomery, a Democratic congressional representative who had stayed at the hotel during Buchanan's inauguration. The notion that a deliberate poisoning lay behind the National Hotel disease was never well supported, but conspiracy theorists still found plenty of suspects who might have done it. First were the abolitionists. They did condemn Buchanan's stance

Starting point is 00:08:20 on slavery, but they had little reason to kill him. Buchanan's vice president, John C. Breckinridge, promoted the expansion of slavery more ardently than Buchanan himself did. In fact, Breckinridge would eventually serve as Secretary of War for the Confederacy. Killing Buchanan would only have installed Breckinridge in his place. Another rumor held that Southern secessionists were behind the poisoning, not to install Breckckenridge as president, but to hasten a split between North and South. But Buchanan and Breckenridge both supported slaveholders, so killing one of them doesn't make much sense. Some suggested that black servants at the National Hotel had poisoned Buchanan for his stance on slavery, but that's impossible. The hotel had no black servants. The staff were all white, mainly Irish immigrants.

Starting point is 00:09:05 In fact, it was hard to see how any poisoning theory could make sense, particularly as only some of the hotel's guests got sick. Here again, there was no shortage of ideas. Some noted that Buchanan and his friends drank their tea with sugar. Perhaps arsenic had been added to the sugar bowls, and this had led to some inadvertent deaths among the other guests. Another rumor held that rats poisoned with arsenic had been thrown into the hotel's water tank, but that ought to have affected all the guests, and it wasn't clear whether the quantity of arsenic that would kill a rat would be enough to poison a hotel full of people. Well, said the theorists, maybe the poisonings had been accidental. Maybe arsenic had been set out to poison rats in the hotel, and the rats, mad with thirst, had entered the water tank on their own and drowned there.

Starting point is 00:09:50 Here again, it wasn't clear why only some guests were affected, or whether arsenic diluted to that extent could harm anyone. And anyway, it wasn't clear whether a poisoned rat would be able to make its way to the cistern. An inventive Scottish chemist named David Boswell-Reed suggested that the saucepans and pots in the hotel's kitchen might have lost their protective coating of tin, exposing the copper beneath, which contained arsenic. But inspectors found no evidence that this was the case, and anyway, some of the people who'd fallen ill had slept at the hotel but neither eaten nor drunk there. Finally, the imputation of poisoning was belied by the victim's own symptoms. Physicians pointed out that arsenic would have shown immediate

Starting point is 00:10:30 effects, with different symptoms from those seen in the guests who'd fallen ill. They concluded that arsenic couldn't have been the cause. The press liked the theory that Buchanan had been poisoned, and in some quarters this persisted for years. But by July, medical authorities and scientists were favoring the view that dangerous vapors had been arising from backed-up sewers. In the first half of the 19th century, before germ theory emerged, two competing ideas were offered to explain the origin of disease. One, the contagion hypothesis, held that illnesses that infected large communities of people were spread through physical contact. Sick people infected healthy people by touching them directly.

Starting point is 00:11:10 The other, known as the miasma hypothesis, held that illnesses were spread by gases or vapors that arose from putrid matter. They believed that damp earth, stagnant water, and decaying organic matter released toxic fumes that spread through the atmosphere and themselves produced disease. In early March, Washington's mayor had ordered the city's Board of Health to examine the National Hotel mystery, and they produced their report later that month. It rejected the possibility of poison and supported the miasma theory, pointing out that several guests had fallen ill who had lodged but not eaten in the hotel,

Starting point is 00:11:49 and that some who had eaten there but kept their room windows open had not gotten sick. That suggested that the source of the illness was in the air, not in the food or drink. What was the source of the foul air? Several guests had noticed a noxious aroma in the hotel around the time of the outbreak. A couple who had stayed in mid-December in the room that Buchanan later took had noticed a foul odor, and the physician Charles T. Jackson reported that he was treating a patient who'd fallen ill after being affected by a disagreeable odor there. So the focus shifted to the hotel's sewage system. The winter of 1856 and 7 had been cold, and two particular cold snaps had coincided with the worst outbreaks of the illness. The first of these had afflicted Buchanan. The theory held that these cold snaps had frozen

Starting point is 00:12:30 the above-ground drains that normally carried sewage from establishments and homes, causing them to back up and forcing toxic fumes indoors. The cold would have led lodgers to keep their windows closed, and Buchanan's room had been situated directly above the drains. Alternatively, each of these cold snaps had been followed by a warm spell in which snow melt had raised the level of the Potomac, conceivably driving vapor back up the sewer, which normally emptied into the river. The subcommittee returned the conclusion that an airborne infection had afflicted the National Hotel, and the mayor upbraided the hotel's owners for failing to provide better ventilation. The owners protested but closed the hotel for a time and even sold off some of the furniture, apparently for fear that it had absorbed toxins from the bad air. The miasma theory of

Starting point is 00:13:16 illness was false, and in fact within a generation it would be supplanted by germ theory, but the imputation of foul air wasn't far from the mark. The victim's symptoms didn't match the profile of mineral poisoning, and the backup of sewage probably was involved, though they were wrong that the stench itself was somehow toxic. The true source of the illness was probably a germ or bacterium, as would become clear with the research of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch later in the century. This is the third time since March that I find myself mentioning the German microbiologist Robert Koch, who with Pasteur founded Modern Bacteriology. His discovery made sense of the New England vampire panic of the late 19th century and helped Waldemar Hofke develop vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. He also turned up in my research on

Starting point is 00:14:00 Martin Cooney, who promoted the use of incubators for premature infants. It's amazing that one discovery can shed light on such unrelated problems. I guess this is a pretty pivotal theory for medicine, germ theory, that it's like just a total sea change from what came before and what comes after. But it kind of shows you how exciting that must have been at the time, because this is just, I'm not kidding, that's in the last, I think, 10 or 12 episodes of this podcast. He's come up, and we cover all of history. Because it's such important work.

Starting point is 00:14:36 But it must have been exciting at the time because it just suddenly made sense of so many seemingly disparate cases all at once. Yeah. It's interesting. Officially, the cause of the National Hotel disease was never identified, but Walters, the historian, says that it was almost certainly cholera. One possibility is that raw sewage had leaked into the hotel's kitchen, due either to cold or to warm weather. There it may have got into the drinking and cooking water, or a worker cleaning up the spill may have transmitted it accidentally to utensils or cutlery given to guests. But it was communicated by food and drink, not by noxious vapors. The stench that the guests noticed may have served as a warning, but it wasn't the illness itself. It's not clear

Starting point is 00:15:10 why some guests who ate at the National Hotel weren't infected. Possibly they had hearty constitutions or were just lucky. And it's not clear how some people merely lodged there and yet still fell ill. Either those reports were incorrect or perhaps the outbreak wasn't confined to the hotel. These lingering doubts still leave room for the poisoning hypothesis. At this historical remove, it's impossible to prove that the disease was caused by backed-up sewage and not by a plot to kill the president. It is a striking coincidence that the illness struck during both of Buchanan's visits to the hotel. But we know that the sewage ditches backed up and then thawed twice that year, that guests noticed a foul odor in the hotel, that

Starting point is 00:15:51 most of the hotel staff and especially the kitchen workers also grew ill, and that inspectors found no indications of poisoning. So the most probable explanation is a cholera outbreak caused by sewage contamination. One reason the conspiracy theories spread as widely as they did is that, like the city itself, the government had not yet fully taken shape. The committee that investigated the outbreak was created ad hoc by the Washington Board of Health and liked the imprimatur of a dedicated agency. A federal mechanism to handle outbreaks of disease had yet to be formed. For its part, the National Hotel will experience no further outbreaks. It was sold to the city in 1929 and demolished in 1942. After our last batch of sports-related follow-ups in episode 343, we received some more.

Starting point is 00:16:49 Peter Rezou from Heemstede, the Netherlands, wrote, Dear Sharon and Greg, As the discussion about members of the audience being hit by misdirected baseballs is now extended to the animal kingdom, I can tell you that soccer has its dangers too. Let me take you back to Sunday, November 15, 1970, in the city of Rotterdam. In the 63rd minute of a match between the two leading local soccer teams, Sparta and Feyenoord, Feyenoord goalie Eddie Traidle kicked the ball high in the air towards forward Ove Schindval. The ball did not arrive since it hit a passing seagull.

Starting point is 00:17:24 The poor animal fell dead on the pitch. No video evidence is kept of this cause, Celebra, in Dutch soccer history, but Tredel is still remembered for it. In a recent interview, he joked that more people have told him they witnessed the accident than the 15,000 spectators who would fit in the stadium. Today, both clubs display a stuffed seagull in their club museum, both claiming to have the original bird. Probably neither of them is right. For the record, the game ended in a draw, 1-1. Always enjoying your podcast, keep up the excellent work. And I found an article on this story in English on Dadaq Van Toon, which describes the event as

Starting point is 00:18:03 seeming fairly insignificant when it happened. One of the Sparta players picked up the dead bird and threw it onto the sidelines, and the game continued. Tredel himself said afterwards that he hadn't thought of it as anything that special. But apparently it made quite a news splash at the time, with all the newspapers in the Netherlands featuring the story the next morning. And despite Tredel's other accomplishments in his sport, he is most associated with the incident with the unfortunate gull. I'm surprised a soccer ball could travel fast enough to kill a bird.

Starting point is 00:18:32 I mean, a pitched baseball is one thing. I don't think of soccer balls as maybe being that hard. It's not like a baseball, but I guess maybe you don't have to hit a bird that hard. I don't know. I guess I don't know much about birds either. Carl Lundstrom wrote, Listening to episode 321 reminded me of another wild coincidence with foul balls. In 2010, Minnesota Twins player Denard Spann was leadoff batter in a game against the Tampa Rays.

Starting point is 00:18:59 He hit a hard foul that went into the stands and struck his own mother in her chest. Spann went to check on her as she was treated and she was thankfully fine. He eventually left the game and said it was because his head wasn't in it, but that left his mom angrier than getting hit because she came to watch him play. So yeah, an article that I found on this by the Associated Press from the time said that when Spann saw what happened, he ran into the stands to be with his mother as she was being treated by the paramedics at the first aid station, and she was able to return to finish watching the game minutes later. Spann resumed playing, but it seems that he'd been

Starting point is 00:19:34 so rattled by the incident that he was playing rather poorly, so he left the game. He was quoted as saying, I told her I came out of the game and she got mad at me because everyone came to see me play. She was more mad at me for coming out of the game than me hitting her. The article noted that this was a spring training game and that the ballparks for these are smaller than the stadiums for the regular season games, which means that the fans are often sitting closer to the field. The article also said that when Hall of Famer Bob Feller heard about this incident, he recalled that in 1939, he threw a pitch that was fouled off and hit his mother on Mother's Day, saying, She was sitting right next to the dugout at Comiskey Park in Chicago. It hit her right above the eye, broke her glasses, and she needed seven stitches. Some Mother's Day for her,

Starting point is 00:20:20 wasn't it? I was pretty upset, but had to keep on pitching. That seems gigantically unlikely. I mean, I'm sure it happened, but just the odds against that are just stupendous. Well, I guess many people bring their parents or their parents come to see them play. So and we've talked about this before. We don't we don't remark the thousands of times when it doesn't happen. All the people that don't hit their mothers, but still, that's amazing. And Dylan Scott wrote, Hello, Greg and Sharon. The sports anecdotes from the listener mail of this week's episode reminded me of a court case which I think you might find amusing.

Starting point is 00:20:54 On October 7, 2001, Barry Bonds hit his 73rd home run in a single season, setting a record which stands to this day, though perhaps with an asterisk next to it due to his alleged steroid use. This record-breaking ball was worth a considerable amount of money and resulted in a lawsuit over who it should belong to, Popoff v. Hayashi. The ball initially appeared to land in the glove of one Alex Popoff when, to quote the court's ruling, his efforts to establish possession were interrupted by the collective assault of a band of wrongdoers. In the midst of this melee, the ball rolled out unnoticed by the mob and was picked up by another man, Patrick Hayashi. The court was left to decide which of

Starting point is 00:21:36 the two men should own the ball. The legal analysis cites a number of situations where the definition of possession can be contextual, including hunting and whaling, where injuring an animal may be enough to claim possession without exerting complete control over it. Ultimately, the court ruled that both claims of possession were compromised and that both the plaintiff and defendant had an equal and undivided interest in the ball and ordered a remedy of equitable division, where the ball must be sold and the proceeds split evenly. I was told by the lawyer relating this case to me that this was a highly unusual ruling in a property dispute like this. Usually property claims are resolved to one or the other party, and equitable divisions are typically seen in cases of divorce.

Starting point is 00:22:19 As always, thank you for the wonderful podcast. thank you for the wonderful podcast. So this incident actually could be considered a surprising follow-up on the topic of how people can end up getting hurt at sporting events. According to an article on this case written by Judge Morton Crace, after Popoff caught the ball, he was overrun by the crowd and thrown to the ground. While Popoff attempted to secure the ball, several people grabbed and kicked him in an effort to take it from him. When the ball fell out While Popoff attempted to secure the ball, several people grabbed and kicked him in an effort to take it from him. When the ball fell out of Popoff's glove and onto the ground, Hayashi picked it up and considered it his. As Dillon indicated, this case turned on what the definition of possession is. The judge in the case had to decide what specific definition of

Starting point is 00:23:02 possession to use in order to determine if Popoff could have been said to have been legally in possession of the ball in the first place, and thus even had standing to bring this suit against Hayashi. Kray said, The definition of possession has never been consistently defined. Rather, it has been changed and tweaked to fit the unique facts of individual cases. facts of individual cases. The case judge ended up choosing a definition of possession written by a law professor at the University of California that states that in this kind of situation, a person is in possession of a ball if the person has achieved complete control of the ball at the point in time that the momentum of the ball and the momentum of the fan attempting to catch the

Starting point is 00:23:41 ball ceases. A baseball which is dislodged by incidental contact with an inanimate object or another person before momentum had ceased is not possessed. Unfortunately, because Popov was immediately attacked, it wasn't possible to determine whether he would have retained control of the ball for long enough to be considered to be in possession of it under this definition. If Popov had caught the ball but then immediately dropped it without being attacked, then it would legally have been Hayashi's after he picked it up, and thus the judge's ruling in the case. And I guess if they couldn't determine who owned the ball, then it makes sense that they would decide that the ball should be sold and the

Starting point is 00:24:18 proceeds split, but that perhaps misses the point that if the two parties were huge baseball fans, then they might just have really wanted to own this particular ball. And the interest might not have really been financial. And it felt kind of bad for Popoff, who was attacked trying to get and keep the ball and then lost it in the end. You're right. They may not have wanted it for its financial value at all. So the ruling, while attempting to be equitable, might not have gotten anybody what they really

Starting point is 00:24:42 wanted. And you're right. The whole thing raises the question of what constitutes possession. I mean, even beyond the realm of sports, it sounds like a simple idea, but it's apparently not very hard to put your hands on. On an older topic, in episode 203, Greg did a notes and queries feature and said that the Oxford mathematician Nick Trefton noted that, according to his dictionary, the singular of the word timpani is

Starting point is 00:25:05 kettledrum. Greg said that he wasn't able to confirm that, but that he liked the idea. And David King, who started listening to the podcast last year and has been catching up, sent us a follow-up on that. Hi, Sharon and Greg. First off, a clarification on timpani from episode 203. In that episode, Greg states that a pair of this type of drum is timpani and that a singular drum is a kettle drum. Too bad you didn't attend Mr. McKinney's percussion pedagogy class with me back in the 1980s. You would have learned that timpani is plural and the singular is timpano. This is confirmed by Wikipedia. Mr. McKinney would be proud of my memory. In America and England, we sometimes call these drums the kettle drums.

Starting point is 00:25:43 It makes sense. They look like enormous kettles. However, there is almost no reason for there to be a singular of timpani. I am unaware of any music that requires only one. In olden times, they always were played in pairs with specific rules for the tuning, and if there were trumpets in the music, there were always timpani and vice versa. Mozart and Haydn only wrote music that needed two. It was as music progressed and evolved that there became a need for more and more timpani and vice versa. Mozart and Haydn only wrote music that needed two. It was as music progressed and evolved that there became a need for more and more timpani, with the most audacious

Starting point is 00:26:10 use being eight pairs of drums in Berlioz's Requiem. I used Norman Del Mar's interesting and enjoyable Anatomy of the Orchestra to check my memory on this subject. He is an expert and very amusing. Second, the Notes and Queries episodes are fun. I am entertained by what Greg has researched and interested in what stumps him. Apparently, things about enormous drums. I also believe that Greg and I read many of the same books. Is a research doppelganger a bad thing? So Greg hasn't done a Notes and Queries episode in a while, and maybe we need to revive that. Merriam-Webster's definition of timpani is a set of two or more kettle drums played by one performer in an orchestra or band,

Starting point is 00:26:50 which does sort of imply that one would be a kettle drum. And they note that the etymology of timpani is from Italian for the plural of timpano kettle drum. The Wikipedia entry is for timpani or kettle drums, which also implies that if you can have just one, it might be a kettle drum. Though they do note that the technically correct singular for the Italian-based word is timpano. I like the idea that there's just no singular form of that word because there's no occasion for it. It's like you don't have a scissor. You have to have scissors.

Starting point is 00:27:21 No one will ever need to say that. David also said, great podcast. It has been enjoyable to hear the transformation from one episode to now. And yeah, we have evolved some over the years, I think. It's always a bit weird to go back and listen to parts of earlier episodes. And hopefully most of the evolution has been for the better. I wonder what it sounds like if you binge backward. It sounds like we're just getting worse and worse.

Starting point is 00:27:43 Occasionally people say that they do that, that they're doing it in reverse order. And I always cringe for that reason because it's like at some point it's like, okay, the audio quality is going to go on them and we're just going to sound like we're getting worse and worse. Yeah. Thanks as always to everyone who writes to us. We really appreciate people taking the time to do so. So if you have any comments or follow-ups that you'd like to send, please send those to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle.

Starting point is 00:28:19 Greg is going to give me a strange 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 Peter Lippard. A man walks through a town in the old west. As he makes his way through a crowd, he spots an astronaut. Irritated by this, he vows to build a new town with tunnels beneath it. Why? Okay, first of all, is this fiction? No. Or people are filming something or some kind of costume party or... None of those. Okay. Did astronaut used to have a different meaning? No. Than what I think of it is now?

Starting point is 00:28:57 No, it's what you think of it. So you say a man is walking through a town in the old West? Yes. Okay. See, to me, that means the American West back in like the 1800s. Do you mean something other than that by Old West? Yes. Ah, in the Old West. Are we in the U.S.?

Starting point is 00:29:16 Yes. Is there a town called the Old West? No, not that I know of. And it's not like a reenactment. It's not like a place where they do historical reenactments? I'll say that it is. Oh, it is. So, well, because you'd be annoyed if everybody in the town is supposed to be reenacting the

Starting point is 00:29:34 old West and somebody's dressed like an astronaut. That's right. That would be a problem. You're on the right track there. Oh, so he wants to build tunnels so that people who aren't dressed appropriately for the historical reenactment, they won't be seen. That's right. But there's more. There's more.

Starting point is 00:29:52 Does this have something to do with like Disneyland, which I think does have tunnels? Where did that come from? Yes, that's the answer to the puzzle. Peter writes, the man in the puzzle is Walt Disney. Peter writes, for his next project, Walt Disney World in Florida. The entire Magic Kingdom park would actually be built on the first story, second in American terms, allowing a series of tunnels known as utilidors to be built under the entire park, allowing cast members to move freely and not spoil the guests' immersion.

Starting point is 00:30:38 I had vaguely heard about this thing about tunnels, so like you're not supposed to see maintenance workers either. They scurry along through the tunnels, so you don't kind of... Yeah, that's my understanding. So if you're a guest, you only see what you're supposed to see. I didn't realize it was Walt Disney. That's really cool that that was supposed to be, that that was Walt Disney, that that actually happened too. That's apparently a legend in Disney circles. I don't know if that's exactly what happened, but that's what they said. Thanks, Peter. Thank you, Peter. And if anybody

Starting point is 00:30:58 else has a puzzle for us to try, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our phenomenal listeners. If you'd like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious, you can find a donate button in the support a section of the website at futilitycloset.com. Or you can join our Patreon campaign. We'll not only help support the show, but also get more information on some of the stories, extralateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and peeks behind the scenes.

Starting point is 00:31:35 You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see our website for the link. At our website, you can graze through Greg's oleo of over 11,000 diverting bagatelles, browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the episode 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 all written and performed

Starting point is 00:31:59 by my awesome brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 349-The National Hotel Disease

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