No Such Thing As A Fish - 149: No Such Thing As The Train King Of Europe

Episode Date: January 28, 2017

Anna, James, Andy and Anne discuss boot camp for trains, celebrity camels, and why Shell send sea shells back to the sea shore.

Hello and welcome to Know Such Things as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the queue. I office is in Covent Garden. My name is Anna and I am here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Ann Miller. Once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts that we found in the last seven days and in no particular order. Here we go, starting with you, James. My fact this week is that Anna wants to be like Madonna and known by just one name. What was that all about? I couldn't work out if normally we do two names or one so I mixed it up. I thought it was casual and friendly, like done enough podcasts now. I thought it was power mad. I thought it was maybe that

you couldn't work out how to pronounce your own name. It might have been that dance confused me over the years. I'd like to be known as Lightning from now on on this podcast, please. You've already got three names. So I'll introduce you all again. My name is Anna and I'm joined by Lightning, James and Ann. Solid. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1758 there were two camels on display in London, one with a single hump and one with two humps. They were advertised as the surprising camel and the wonderful camel. Which was which? I think the one with a single hump was surprising and the one with two humps was wonderful. I think they're all surprising to start off with and then a difference in humps is also surprising.

So I think they're both surprising. Are they? They're both wonderful. Let's not do camels down. I agree with Lightning. I read this in the London Review of Books and it was a review of a book called Menagerie by Caroline Griggson. I haven't read that book yet but I am going to read it because it looks amazing. There's some really good facts in that review. I read a really good book about the history of London Zoo a couple of years ago. My favourite thing in the whole book was that London Zoo used to be at the Tower of London and when it was there you could get in for free if you brought a dog or a cat to feed to the lions. Was it entry for one or was it for a family or did you have to bring kittens if you wanted

your children to go and see the lions? I think if you were bringing a family you had to bring a surprising camel. So one other thing that I saw because that book does look incredible doesn't it and one other thing that I really liked that she spotted is that this was in the age where it was very fashionable if you're a wealthy person to bring back lots of exotic animals from various places or to send agents off to get them and apparently one London merchant asked his agent to send him two or three apes but he forgot the R on Or and so he was delivered 203 apes. Where did he put them? I don't know. Apparently a first cargo of 80 apes arrived with a letter promising them more to put.

Wow. There was one other thing in there that George IV had a giraffe at Windsor and the giraffe didn't flourish very well because it was in Windsor and not where it's supposed to live. Which is a Sandringham. And when it got sick they put it down to sympathy for the king's gout. What a load of PR nonsense. Sympathy for the gout. That is outrageous. You can say that or in an alternative fact universe you can say that maybe it was feeling sad because the king was sad. Maybe it was sad. Do you know they have camel wrestling festivals in Turkey? Is that camel's wrestling against each other? It is camel's wrestling against each other, yeah. How does a camel run? Yeah, they're on all fours. Well, with

great difficulty. I don't know if it is with camels but often they do it by showing the two competence a sexy lady insert animal here. So they might bring on a sexy lady camel and then remove it and then the two blokes remain and say well I want it, well I want it, little do they know they're not going to get it. Do you know what constitutes a beautiful camel since you mentioned a sexy lady camel? Long eyelashes. They do have lots of eyelashes. Although maybe in the camel world because that's so common then short eyelashes. Lovely lady humps. I've been reading about Oman lately because we're researching for the O-series and they have camel beauty contests in Oman and they're put on by the government and it's

a milking and beauty contest and a beautiful camel apparently should have a well proportioned body and face, a long gar rib which is the area between the hump and the neck, a clear and huge hump. This was written by men wasn't it? Firm ears and pouty lips, big whiskers and a fur shimmer. Right. Yeah and he's good posture and it needs to be huge. That kind of makes sense all that stuff I think. That one sounds quite attractive doesn't it? Is it of both sexes? As in the male camels compete against female camels there just has to be a beautiful camel. Yes. Really? Yeah. I don't think you can tell a male female camel apart by looking. I bet you can. Depends where you're looking. In the 18th century there was a collection

of camels on display on the strand just around the corner from us so it was at the Talbot Inn in the strand and it belonged to a man called Richard Hepburnstall and so that's exactly where Aldrich Tube Station used to be which I think is just Aldrich's in it. He tried to lure women in to view his herd of camels because at the time women were afraid they would be a bit dirty and a bit spitty and a bit smelly so he advertised them as having breath as sweet as a sows which is weird because I didn't think of sows as having particularly sweet breath but apparently soon afterwards there was a journal article or a newspaper article that reported that the ladies are especially charmed by the camels

and express great satisfaction at the sweetness of their breath. See that's quite high risk because I read that when a camel spits at you it's also kind of bombing at you because the content of their stomach comes up as well. Yeah it's not a spit is it? Oh it's just spitting no. Maybe that's what generates such sweet breath though. Do you know what you could get from a camel if it's bad at you? A cold because one of the four common cold viruses originated in camels. No. Really? And spread to humans. This is according to the German Centre for Infection Research yeah and there are four global human they're called coronaviruses and they're also things called rhinoviruses rhino meaning nose. Do they come from rhinos?

Yep and so one of these one of these main ones apparently has made its way over from camels a long time ago I don't know if you could still get the same virus inhabiting both or whether it's come over and now it's only humans not sure. Oh wow. Yeah still I didn't know that. A thirsty camel can drink as many as 30 gallons of water in 13 minutes okay which sounds impressive but I worked that out and that's 3.25 seconds per pint and I can drink a pint in less than three seconds so I can drink faster than a camel. It's short and long furlongs though isn't it? Well I would be ahead after the first pint but then by probably half way through pint too it might overtake me and then by pint 240 I'd be struggling

a little bit. So you just have to pick your race when you're challenging the camel to the drinking contest. Yeah so when you say to the camel I want a drinking contest and he says okay let's do 240 pint, well let's start a one and see how he can and don't do double or quits on the next 239. I didn't realise that there are three kinds of camel I thought dramedurain and bacterium were the only kinds but the wild bacterium probably would have different chromosomes. It's got three humps. They thought they did a DNA sequencing on it and it's different species. So we've mentioned before that Saudi Arabia imports camels from Australia because for meat but actually now have you heard that they're

trying to rescue camels from Australia? So Australia's got too many camels apparently they're becoming a bit of a pest and they were threatening to cull I think 6,000 camels a few years ago and there was a big campaign set up in Saudi Arabia an internet campaign saying send the camels to us instead and we'll look after them. Yeah but Australia has a million feral camels so 6,000 is pretty small beer actually. I think we've said before they shoot them from helicopters. Yeah they do apparently want, I think this was in the Australian apparently camels in Australia smash water tanks destroy fences come up to houses and antagonise people. I don't know how a camel antagonises. They're just kind of blended.

Okay on to fact number two and that is Andy's fact. It's lightning's fact I think you'll find. Okay my fact is that before they are launched London sends all its trains to Austria to be beaten up. So there's this wind tunnel which is called the rail tech arsenal. There's a huge article on Wired about them recently and the article describes them as train torture chambers so you can put a whole 330 foot long train in this tunnel and then they basically simulate extreme weather conditions and see how the carriages stand up to it so you can see what it'll be like for passengers if the train gets stuck in boiling sun or snow or huge wind conditions. That must be very confusing for the train because normally when he goes

in the tunnel there's no weather. It's like a Thomas getting fucked up. Are we in danger of anthropomorphising trains a little bit? They shouldn't draw those faces on the front shouldn't they? They do simulate conditions that they wouldn't necessarily come across in this country don't they? Don't they go down to ridiculously low and high temperatures? Well the London ones they only test to minus 13 Celsius which would be very low for London but they can set it to minus 50 Fahrenheit. What would that be? That's cold. That's really cold. So trains from Kazakhstan get sent there as well and they'll have lower temperatures probably. Is everyone's trains go to this tunnel? Loads of them like Germany, America,

Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia. The article describes it as the Eaton College of the train testing world. Where you get beaten up horrendously. Shut the train in the toilet for a bit. You think if all the trains had to go through this tunnel wouldn't it make sense for all the train factories to be in Vienna? Yeah. I guess it would but I guess once you've built a train factory in Derby. And how do you reckon they go, are they allowed to go on the train tracks to get to the tunnel? Or do they have to go on a lorry because they're not past safety? Yeah I think they get boated over. They do. They get trains on boats. Yeah. You get trains which you can put cars on don't you? I think we have one or two of those in

Britain but you get them especially abroad. Are you suggesting? You put cars on the Eurostar. I would just love to have a car on a train on a boat. And I'd probably put like a bike rack on there as well. I think it was in the news this week or last week. We've finally got a direct train service from Britain to China. I don't know why I say it finally like we've all been desperately wasting it. We've all been stood on the platform going, I'll be here any minute. Southern! But yeah I think that's amazing. It takes 18 days. It's a freight train so you have to be a piece of freight. You're a piece of freight mate. But it goes to Yiwu which is in East China and that's the place that provides 60% of the world's

Christmas decorations and so I think it's like the new Santa's sleigh and it goes direct from China to London but that has to actually be lifted from one track to the other sometimes because different countries have different gauges. Just on train testing do you know what the new measurement train is? No. This is this train that's constantly in operation around the country and it's to test all the tracks and it runs 125 miles an hour and it has various means of testing the tracks so there are no passengers on it. It was made in response to Hatfield so that was the year 2000 wasn't it? But it's got this amazing technology so it can test tracks as people would have to at walking pace but at 125 miles

an hour by for instance firing lasers at them and it measures contact with the rails and it measures the electrical supply and you know in some places you need to have a tilt on trains it checks that the tilt isn't too much so it won't crash into a cliff next to it or something and these are running around the country at all times. So there are 100 mile an hour trains going around the country firing lasers at things. Correct. It's so cool. They're really cool yeah. Have you heard about Operation Smash Hit? Is it about 1970s pop stars? No it's not. It's a very well named. God. No it was an experiment that started in 1984 in July by the British Central Electricity Generating Board and what they

did was they got a train and they set it to smash at 100 miles an hour into a flask of nuclear waste. What? A flask. And they televised this. Flask of nuclear waste. Yeah so they had these new ways of storing nuclear material hazardous material in these flasks right and very strongly built flasks and they set one of these up on a track and they sort of wedged it into concrete and this is an old bit of testing track they didn't need to use anymore and they got an old train they didn't need and they set it going at 100 miles an hour and then they put it on TV. Millions of people watched it all around the world and it was to show how safe these nuclear flasks were because it didn't break. Oh wow. They barely

lost any of its pressure at all. And this was the final of a series of experiments they did where they like engulfed them in flames these flasks and they dropped them from a big height. Amazing. And they did like all these loony tunes experiments just to show you cannot break into these. It was to reassure the public. That's high risk though because one of those got drowned. Sorry we just wiped out the country. So France has had problems with trains lately and I think it's important that we smash the myth that France is the train king of Europe because in 2014. The train king of Europe. Yeah come on then. So who is the king of trains? The train king of Europe. Well I think we should enter ourselves into

the contest because France is out right in 2014 I think we've mentioned before they made those trains that are too wide for their stations. Do you remember? So they spent billions. That's pretty embarrassing for the train king of Europe. So this was they'd spent 15 billion euros on these trains. They were too wide so they had to amend thousands of platforms across France so they fitted them and then the following year they made trains that are too tall to get through tunnels to take them into Italy. Wow so who's going to be your new train king of Europe Anna? Well like I say I think we're in with a shock guys. I would have thought Switzerland but I was on a train in Switzerland last week and it got cancelled and I had to walk across with another

platform. You would have picked that in Switzerland would you? No. For me they were always the train prince of Europe. I have a nomination. I nominate Sweden because I went to Stockholm a few years ago and the train there was so amazing. It was really lovely. It felt like first class but standard class and I had to sign up saying if you're more than two minutes late we'll refund you in two minutes. Wow that's good. It was the airport express train but that was a pretty good deal so I nominate Sweden for train king. Okay look these nominations have all been accepted and will be duly considered. I'm a train republican. I think we should put all the trains in a shed. We should move on quite soon. Has anyone got anything else? So in Vienna also in Austria

they had an escalator reopening in 2015 and 14,000 people signed up to turn up to this reopening of an escalator. In the end a good few hundred people turned up and the party just got out of hand and police had to be called to calm the crowd down. Did someone afterwards say well that escalated quickly. Okay moving on to fact number three and that is Anne's fact. My fact is that the oil company Shell used to sell shells. And is that a coincidence the name and the selling of the shells or the two things related? They were different generations so Marcus Samuel in 1833 started had an antiques business and started selling seashells and then they got very popular as they started having these trading rates for import export all over the world and then his son

Marcus Samuel Jr expanded the business different goods and then ended up doing oil. Oil is more lucrative than shell selling isn't it? I guess they plopped onto that. Risker though. Yes for the world? Yeah I think so. But also you can't power a massive industrial economy just grinding up seashells. I'm glad. Actually seashells used to be used as currency many many years ago. Not in Britain? No before Britain existed like I'm talking about thousands of years ago. I think they were cavalry shells and went off memory a bit here and they were used around Africa I think as currency but then they found a new bay which had tons and tons and tons of cavalry shells in and then people just went and collected loads and loads of them and ended up completely collapsing

the very early economy. Did you know that Shell is revisiting its shell-based routes? Are they? In that they are helping to return shells to their natural environments so they're sponsoring this nonprofit organization which collects shells from restaurants and then puts them back on beaches and in areas where oysters can cling on to them because apparently oysters like to cling on to other oyster shells. So there you go they're collecting shells again. So I was really impressed with this fact and I thought it was brilliant. My husband already knew it because there is a vile song from the 30s about Shell. Did you know this? Anna is married to a 101 year old man. The whole song is about in Wargate there was a promenade and a man was selling shells and his

son comes along and turns the business around and then petroleum and ends up being this big thing about how conflicts come out of oil in the League of Nations from the 1930s. They used to write songs about very different things in the 30s. The first ever oil company was founded to harvest just oil that was floating on water because that was the first people knew about it. Obviously you don't know oil in the ground. Yeah so they sort of saw it there in Pennsylvania in 1859 and they said oh maybe there's more oil underneath here and they started drilling down and they struck oil but I think that was the first time that oil was actually struck. You know that just speaking of oil floating on water so bitumen is it's like it's more solid oil it's made of the same stuff but

it's slightly more compressed and so I think the first ever oil kingdom that made its money from oil was the Nabateans who I love I remember researching them for the end series so in the four others. You're always trying to shoo on the Nabateans. In fact Anna is actually sure for Ann Nabateans. I'm even older than Ann's husband. No this is incredible they made their money because they were near the Dead Sea so they base their kingdom around the Dead Sea and they noticed these lumps of bitumen floating in the Dead Sea and they were islands of tar and the Egyptians like to buy tar because they were used in the mummifying process for embalming and they also used for waterproofing boats and so the Nabateans went and swam out to these islands on the Dead Sea

easy to swim in it because you float and they collected this bitumen sold it to the Egyptians and that's how they got so rich and that's how they had the biggest kingdom of that time. That is great. Isn't that cool? That's really good. Love the Nabateans. Do you know someone who wrote about seashells was Edgar Allan Poe did he? He wrote a book called The Conschologist's First Book and it was his best-selling book. No. Yes and also he didn't write it really so he the original author said can you rewrite this and sort of remix it in a cheaper way but like don't tell the publishers that you're doing this because the publishers didn't want the author to do this but the author wanted to make extra money. Like a sparknotes version of the original book.

So Poe needed the money so he re-ordered the picture. He wrote a preface. One of his biographers Jeffrey Mayers said Poe's boring pedantic and hair-splitting preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy. Do you know when the best time to buy petrol is? When your car is like 20% empty. It's the winter actually because petrol gets more dense when it's colder and so that means you get more for your money. So if you make sure you go and buy your petrol on a cold day then more of it's going to come out the same amount because it's measured by volume. Like how metal expands when it's hot so bridges change in length you get a different volume of petrol. Bridges don't expand

that much in length though. We've been on this bridge for ages. Well it's a very warm day. The earliest oil drilling platform. Do you guys know when it was? Was it the Nabateans again? That was collecting that drill. It was Chinese obviously as all great inventions seem to be. This was in the third century BC and they drilled down 800 feet for oil and they siphoned it up through bamboo poles and the reason they did it was because salt was very valuable and they used oil to create fuel to create heat to evaporate brine so that it left salt and they had oil pipelines underground made of bamboo that led from one like salt well to another. Come off it. Isn't that incredible? Bamboo pipelines. Apparently. It does not confuse. It was in a real book and I'll

look it up again later to check that it wasn't crazy facts about oil by Mr Muppet and Shriver. So if you defecated at 650 degrees Fahrenheit with a pressure of 3000 pounds per square inch it would burn. It would and your poo would turn into oil. So oil is made through organic material which is pressurized and that would give you the same effect by doing that. We've all had curries like that haven't we? It doesn't mean we could take everyone's poo because it would be horrible but if someone collected everyone's poo and put them in a hot pressurized room. Yes. So why don't we do that? Well the reason being that the energy that you would need to create these conditions is a lot more than the energy you would get from the oil. No laws of thermodynamics.

It's called hydrothermal liquefaction and it's a report by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where they... Did they say the defecation thing? Was that the harken spin? Yeah that is a harken spin but they said if you put feces under these conditions that would happen through a pipeline and what is pooing apart from feces going through a pipeline? We should move on to him but has anyone got anything else? Oh I was looking at other businesses that originally sold different things but my favorite which kind of makes sense when you think about the name it's American Express. Do you know what they might have done first? Travel or transport? So post. They work because in those days so they were

founded in 1850 and the post US postal servers was sort of not as slick as it is today and you could only post things as big as a regular letter size envelope and so anything bigger you'd go through an express company so sort of horse guys on horseback and some other form of transport that was around them. Like the pony express? Yeah and they would just take things and American Express found out that they did a lot of business for banks and carrying things like stocks, certificates and currency was a lot more lucrative than carrying big bulky things and so they specialized and made their own products which I thought was really cool because American Express and it makes sense. Yeah and my other favorite one is that it's still the same product but the guys who invented YouTube

thought it was going to be a dating site. People would upload videos like for what they were looking for and you see what they were like. And then it turned out no one is very camera friendly and we all like cats but not in that way. Yeah okay we should move on to our final fact and that is my fact which is that when Mozart first performed in Naples he had to stop to take his ring off halfway through because the audience complained it was a magic ring. A magic ring through which he was producing oil at 650 pressures. Oh dear. That's disgusting but it wasn't that kind of ring they were referring to. But Mozart would have liked that wouldn't he because he was he had a dirty mind. Yeah he had quite a sense of humor. He also wrote about his farts and things. He was um

obsessively scatological actually wasn't it and I think people have really tried to analyze this and work out why but he so he wrote to his cousin uh quite rude letters very often and one of them for instance was well I wish you good night this is a swear warning for any listeners he said well I wish you good night but first shit in your bed and make it burst sleep soundly my love into your mouth your ass your shove what and then he wrote another one saying I poo on your nose so it runs down your chin. He also wrote a lot of really good stuff guys. That's some of the good stuff. He wrote enough music that it would take you 202 hours to listen to all of it. Wow. It's pretty cool. I think they might I this rings above and classic fm I

think they might have just released the complete Mozart 200 hours. 202. 200 maybe they skipped off the last two that was all the poo stuff. Yeah it was the best-selling cd of last year wasn't it or more cd more Mozart cds were sold than any other artist last year. Mozart loved poo. Yeah. It's possible that poo loves Mozart. There is a sewage treatment plant in Switzerland and in 2010 they started playing Mozart to the waist. No. Yes. No. I started dancing. I don't know if you've seen Flava. They claimed that the music's vibrations would help the organisms the microbes in it to break down the waist and the cadences and all of these things so they developed a process to play it and the man who ran the place is a guy called Anton Stuckey

and he said he wasn't actually a fan of Mozart. They had to convince him quite strongly that it would work to do it. I don't know if they're still doing it but they did start. Interestingly if you take human eggs in IVF they grow better if you play techno music to them. I read that last week some study earlier. Wow. So is this vibration we're thinking? Yeah. That's vibration. Yeah. I've just realized I haven't actually explained my fact because you'll derail me with your scatological. Sorry. Magic ring. Yeah. Magic ring. So he was doing this concert in Naples. He was 14 years old and it was in 1770 and rumour has been spreading anywhere that he was using magic powers to play that the audience refused to be entertained and they refused to applaud and they just didn't

see it as impressive because they assumed that his power was coming from this magic ring so halfway through his performance he had to stop and take off his ring and at that point apparently the audience gasped in astonishment and fear while crossing themselves. I went on to the Wikipedia for magic rings there is one and it starts off a magic ring is a ring usually a finger ring. I wouldn't know what these magic cock rings are. Oh my god. It's a toe ring James. They're talking about toe rings. Toe ring or ear ring it could be I guess. Yeah magic ring is a ring usually a finger ring that has magical properties. Great. Makes a lot of sense. I should say I found this fact in a book called Timekeepers by Simon Garfield and it's amazing and you should buy it. I'm

loving it. I'm about quarter of the way through. He's brilliant. So I didn't know I knew Mozart was a child prodigy. I didn't know quite how much of one he was so he could play the harp and the violin at the age of about three or he started playing then. When he was five he was quite good and then his father took him on tour age six for three and a half years playing across Europe and with his sister as well who doesn't get as much cred. Was his sister better? I read somewhere that his sister was a better musician. I don't think so. To start off with because she was older. Well she had I think didn't she like trans cause he would play I think she would transcribe and there's some thought that she had more influence than perhaps has given credit for. Interesting yeah

and he could I've read this I can't I don't know if I believe it he could write music before he could write words. You can sort of believe that. It's easier to write blobs on a manuscript than it is to write actual letters. It is very interesting psychologically because he is the original child prodigy and you've got to wonder what effects it had. So when I was listening to I used this podcast as an excuse to listen to my genuinely favourite podcast which is the Radio 3 composer of the week podcast. Second favourite podcast. Second favourite radio louds my favourite. And yeah he was and people were amazed at him and it must have affected him hugely and apparently when he got older he was very angry that people didn't treat him

with the same kind of amazement and deference because once he was a grown-up he was just an incredibly talented musician and composer but as a child he was like this magic genius. So he used to get very annoyed. That is really rough. Because he will be a better player than he wasn't he was a kid but rather than be admired for being like better more skilled everyone's gone oh you're not cute. Yeah it's like someone who's absolute best year was the first year of university and they can never quite get back that magic again. That is the story of my life. So Mozart's first name was John. Johannes Chrysostom Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart and he was named after Saint John Chrysostom and I was reading about the story of Saint John

Chrysostom and it's quite good. He was living in the desert and then a princess came to his cave because she was being attacked by animals and he didn't really want her to move into his cave because he was worried that he might have sex with her and so what he did was like some kind of 1960 sitcom he drew a line in the middle of his cave and said I'll stay on my side of the line and you stay on your side of the line and then despite this the sin of fornication was committed and in attempt to hide it he threw her off a cliff. Just tell him to keep it quiet with her friends. They threw her off a cliff. It was a different time. It was the 17th. 17th AD. Then he went to Rome to beg for absolution which was refused.

For the murderer for the sex. For the murder really. I like to be absolved from murder please but with a sex chaser. At the beginning when he said a princess comes into his cave I was thinking it sounds a bit like the beginning of Nothing Hill because that's where the celebrity comes into Hugh Grant's bookshop in Nothing Hill. A very famous wealthy person comes into the life of an ordinary man. I've not seen Nothing Hill does he then throw her off a cliff. Anyway so then he lived like a beast crawling on all fours and feeding on wild grasses and roots and then the princess reappeared alive with the saint's baby and the baby miraculously pronounced his sins to be forgiven and that was the miracle that made him into a saint. It's very forgiving of

the baby. Was she brought back to life by god or was she did she just survive being thrown off a cliff? We don't see that. We don't see that. They haven't lost it off screen. Yeah you have to infer it from yourself. Like it's one of those stories where it could be one or it could be the other. Like the end of Inception. I thought you could only become a saint by doing three amazing things. I didn't realize you could just get a baby to forgive you. He's done three amazing things. He's had sex with a princess. He's lived like a beast. And he's been to Rome. He's been to Rome. And he's got a talking baby. It's basically Notting Hill mixed with Inception. Mixed with Look Who's Talking. And that's that's the story of Mozart. Most often a lot of bad reviews

interestingly even during life probably used a magic ring one star. Fake. And so these were phrases that were used about him. Too strongly spiced, impenetrable labyrinths, bizarre flights of the soul and overloaded and overstuffed. Really? Yeah. So it wasn't all completely positive. I'm not saying he was bad at music. One of the haters. He may have died. This is interesting. He may have died because he got too little sunlight. Really? Yeah. Because he died so young. He was 35 when he died. And he was very nocturnal towards the end of his life. And where he was living, he died about three months into the winter. And there's a theory that a contributory factor was

lack of vitamin D. Because you can't make vitamin D if you don't get sunlight. So and there are so many other theories there. There are about 20 theories at least of what killed him. He was also rejected in other ways. So he was rejected in love. By the first woman he fell in love with actually, Aloysia Weber. And he ended up marrying her sister. But he fell in love with her at first. And when asked after his death why she turned him down, she just said, I did not know. I only thought he was such a little man to reject because he was too small. And then another person, the Prince Elect of Bavaria once heard him play and then afterwards said, who would believe that such great things could be hidden in so small ahead?

So he obviously had a smallness problem that perhaps he was trying to compensate for with some music. It must have been hard for him to play music with such small hands. He ran up and down the keys. Like big. Maybe there's anything about him not getting, if he was indoors, not getting love with him in D because you need that to grow, right? Yes. This is a cracking theory. This is the kind of thing that bullshit science studies get written about. Was Mozart too small because he didn't have enough vitamin D? Okay, we should round up pretty soon. Has anyone got anything else? Oh, I just have one thing, which I'm not sure is true, but I like it so much. I wanted to say Mozart apparently had a fear of trumpets. And I read somewhere

that to cure him of this, his father hired someone to follow him around with a trumpet and blast the noise to surprise him. I don't care if it's not true. Sorry, I like that. Yeah. I can kind of knowing what I know about Mozart's father. I can totally imagine that. What a horrible man. Is he a slave driver? A little bit, I think. He put his six-year-old on tour for three years. Yeah. No sunlight. Stunted his grip. Okay, yeah. Deliberately shrunk his own son. Like honey, I shrunk the kids. Okay, we should finish on that excellent reference. That's all of our facts for this week. We'll be back again next week with another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. And in the meantime, you can get in touch

with us at our group Twitter account, which is at QI podcast or individually. You can get in touch with Andy at... At Andrew Hunter M. James. At Egg Shaped. And... At Miller underscore Ann. And you can email me at podcast.qi.com to hear any of our previous episodes. You can go to nosuchthingasafish.com. Thanks for listening. See you again next week. Bye-bye.