No Such Thing As A Fish - 372: No Such Thing As A Dinosaur For Goldilocks

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Anna, James, Andrew and Dan discuss boxes in Eastbourne and boxes of newborns.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four mysterious locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Andy. My fact is that from 1925 until 1936, the town of Eastbourne had two phone booths with thatched roofs.

Wow, that sounds very Eastbourne to me. It does, it feels like phones and thatched roofs belong to quite different eras. So why were they getting the thatched roof in what I would call the post-thatch era? Well they weren't, see Eastbourne adapted a bit later than the rest of the world to the post-thatch and to everything. But to the end of thatch, basically it was the beginning of the 20th century, very exciting. You know, we've got phones now and we've got phone boxes and early days local authorities didn't like getting standard designs for what was going on in their parish council, their

town council, whatever. And so they had these two kiosks on the seafront and they thought, no, this doesn't look very Eastbourne to us. So they insisted that they got a local thatcher to come on and build them a thatched roof and it looks so stupid, it obviously looks like a sort of magic toadstool that you'd see a pixie living in. Is this on the classic red phone box, the K6 as it's known, or is this earlier? These weren't K6 models, these were very early models.

They were the K-1s. Yeah. It's still red, right? In fact, I love the full K1 to 6 range and aside from a couple of exceptions, they all look the same to me. I can't believe there's so much fuss about the progress. Maybe you've got phone box blindness like James has face blindness. Sorry, so it's on the K1 that is red but very different to the K6.

These are the K1s and in fact, they were not universally disliked because in 1936 there was a letter to the Eastbourne Chronicles saying, I can't believe you've taken the fat roof off the phone boxes. What are standards coming to in Eastbourne? Well, they did say that but in that letter, they said that the original one looked like a cross between a Chinese pagoda and a mushroom. So they didn't like the new ones but I'm not sure they like the old ones that much either. No one likes anything in Eastbourne.

That's the message. It's not a bad thing. I know you hate mushrooms so you're very biased but I don't know if I automatically assume a Chinese pagoda cross with a mushroom is a negative thing. It sounds kind of beautiful. Yeah, okay. Well, I'm sure that Boris Johnson will be bringing you in to do his interior design sometime soon.

Don't you think it's so sad that they stopped at the K6 because if they got to the K9, we would have had dog-shaped phone boxes. There was a K7 and a K8, definitely. Oh, god damn it. They stopped. Maybe it was a trademark issue, right? Maybe K9 came out and they just didn't have access. Yeah, because it's like Doctor Who had a dog called K9, didn't he?

Yes. He had a, not a telephone box, but he had a, what did he have? A police box. It was a police box. There would have been all sorts of confusion there, wouldn't there? Yeah. There was a KX model. So that was kind of a K10 or a Latin 10, so it feels like there's something going on here

that we're not being told. The KX100 is the one you're talking about maybe, which is the glass modern-ish one that everyone will kind of remember from the 90s. That is the one I'm talking about. Maybe the KX is the rude one when we started putting up all those sex worker call numbers inside. KXXX, known as the K30. I found out about those in the course of researching this.

And only in the course of researching this, I'd like to say. But do you know where the world's largest collection is of what get called Tarts cards in phone boxes? Did they still get called that? Wow. They do in academics. Right. Is it in the British Library?

So close. It's the welcome library, the amazing institute of, you know, they've got all sorts of collections and they have 17 boxes of them collected by one employee called Stephen. He still collects new ones, doesn't he? He goes around London because he's updating the collection all the time. Wow. And what a coincidence that he works for the welcome library, which is also a place that collects things.

Is it advertised as part of the collection or is it like once you've been around a relatively dry selection of old manuscripts, you might want a fun time at the end? Actually, at the welcome collection, they do have a lovely little cafe that has a selection of various Tarts. So they do. Thanks. Yeah. It's really interesting.

Just on those, it sort of started the idea of these Tart cards in phone boxes, started supposedly in Soho area. And when they first went up, they were done purely with words. And in order to go past obscenity laws and so on, they had to do coded advertisement. So for example, you might see one that said, large chest for sale. And you would know that that was some, I mean, there was reports that the worker in question did have to field lots of calls from furniture buyers as a result of that, but it would be all these kind of innuendo.

Wow. Early phone boxes were so cool. Some of them had carpets inside, just one tiny square of carpet on the ground indoors. They all had cigarette rests so you could rest your fag while you were smoking, which I love. Nice. Yeah. Oak finishes.

They were quite gorgeous things in the early days. You know, now almost all phone boxes have been adapted into other things like many libraries or what internet cafes or whatever, because people aren't using them to phone anymore. Even in 1938, I read a letter, Furious Letter, into the Belfast Telegraph by a man who said, I had to make a phone call. So I went to a phone box and I was held up for 10 minutes by two ladies inside. And of course, the two ladies were not using the phone. There was a mirror in the phone box as a lot of them had and they were penciling their

eyebrows and powdering their noses. And as he said, surely we see enough of these empty-headed, useless, modern girls applying makeup on trams and buses without having to wait for them outside home boxes. I'm trying to buy a chest. She signed off Bachelor Bill and, like, it remains so, I imagined. Wow. Yeah. Well, they do.

They are being repurposed at the moment just to jump to current times. There's basically a graveyard, isn't there, of where they've been collected by restorers who field calls from around the world of people wanting to own a precious historical K6 phone box. And they get all sorts of... Is that what you would say a graveyard is? It's a graveyard where you send your dad and they get refurbished and sent back to you, right?

You're right. What is it? It's like a... Hospital. It's a log. It's a plastic surgery. That's what it is. That's it.

Yeah. And they... Yeah, so they're restoring them. And the people who buy them sort of have a request that there was a guy in Saudi Arabia who really wanted his turned into a shower. So they've sort of had to look into doing that. Wow. It's a huge waiting list and they can only restore so many per year because it's a big

job. You have to match the color, which is post office red, which is quite an easy thing to do because it is available. But so that's not... Oh, it sounds like a nightmare, Dad. No, no. You've got to put the new glass in, which they use just classic glass. So you've got to source that.

Very accessible wood involved and just your basic steel. So it's a nightmare over there. Yeah. Gosh. Dan, is that Mirstom you're talking about? Yeah. I mean, how many graveyards are there? I know the village of Mirstom and it's lovely.

That's worthy of you. I think I've been to the place where the graveyard is. And Surrey. Yeah. Surrey, bit beyond Croydon. Yeah. I have a feeling that I deliberately drove my wife about 50 miles out of our direction just to see that graveyard once.

It doesn't sound like you, James. No. Did they let you in, James, to browse the dead? I can't remember. They were too busy frantically trying to find some glass. Oh, dear. The guy who invented, designed many of the models of Phonebox. He did the two, the three, and the K6 as well.

Giles Gilbert Scott. He was an unbelievable guy. In fact, we've mentioned him once or twice before because, Dan, you said, ages ago, that he did Battersea Power Station and did Phoneboxes and other stuff. Yeah. And he did Waterloo Bridge and he did the Tate Modern Building. I mean, his imprint. House of Commons.

House of Commons. I guess. The, yes. The future at that point. No. He did the Phonebox outside the front of the House of Commons. No. No.

I'm not letting that go. It was bombed in the war. And he, I mean, he basically, he did the redesign of the recreation of the chamber after the war, but he did do it the same as Pugin's design. But his family. So he was Giles Gilbert Scott, right? His father was George Gilbert Scott, also an architect. His father was also called George Gilbert Scott and was also an architect, right?

Wow. His son, Richard, was another architect. Richard Gilbert Scott, also an architect, died in 2017. There was an Elizabeth Gilbert Scott or Elizabeth Scott, who was the cousin of Giles and did the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. His whole family of Scots and Gilbert Scots. They've just done so much. Yeah.

George Gilbert Scott Jr., the son of the first George Gilbert Scott, died in the Midland Hotel at St Pancras, which his own father had designed. Wow. I really thought you were going to say he died in the Phonebox, which would have been so tragic. That St Pancras Hotel, which he designed, is where they filmed the wannabe video for the Skies Girls. Is it?

Which I think of all these things that they did is probably the absolute pinnacle. Wow. Wow. And the takeaway fact of this whole episode, that is awesome. If you go there, and I don't think we should encourage everyone to go there, you can just go and stand on that staircase where they kind of come down at the start and do their little sip of cigars. Oh, I remember that scene.

Okay. That's part of the contest. I really hope when you check in at Concierge, they say, what do you want? I'll tell you what I want. There was originally going to be a George Gilbert Scotty spice, but they had to reject the idea. Did he design George Gilbert Scotty the K-4? I guess he did, because again, it looked like all the rest.

I think he was all Ks. I thought he was all the Ks. I believe not, actually. Oh, wow. Really? Thank you so much. Then he was plagiarized in the K-4, which was the best, so it's my favorite of the Ks. Okay.

Because it was also a self-service post office, so it had a stamp dispenser and a letter box added to the back of it. There are only 50 made. It was actually a bit of a disaster. I think it was quite expensive, but yeah, it had a post machine where you could put your money in. You get some stamps out, you post your letter, and there are five remaining, so if you live in the village with any of those five, then go and visit and pay it a respect.

If you want to make a landline call or send a letter, which we all do every single day these days. I'm out of phone box stuff. A couple of things on thatch. Sure. Yeah. Thatch is no longer a major thing in the UK, but there are still some outputs. I think about 60,000, 50,000 or 60,000 homes in the UK are thatched, which is quite a lot

to me. Loads of Norfolk. Loads in Suffolk. There's one thatched brewery, which is in Bridport in Dorset, and Dorset actually, it's got two model thatched villages, and in the village of Shitterton, a thatched wall. Really? What? Okay.

Am I allowed to pick you up on the town today? So that's a real place? Shitterton is a real place, and it's not the point of the fact. No, I'm sorry. Yeah. You must have been so frustrated when you found that fact, and you thought, well, I want them to talk about it as the thatched wall, but you know what they're going to focus on. It's bloody Shitterton.

Why do they need to thatch the wall? Is it to protect it from, you know? I think there might be a summer house somewhere halfway along it, but it is basically a wall that's just covered in a thatched roof all the way along. That's pretty sweet. That's pretty good. Good reason to go to Shitterton. Do you know what in thatching, do you know what are butters?

No. It's if you have a bundle of reeds or straw, it's the thicker end of that. It's called the but. Do you know what a cheek is? Is it the opposite of the but? No. It's the thinner end. It's just a word for the side of a window, but that means if you put your thick ends

of your straw up against your window, you have a but cheek. Ah, lovely but cheeks in Shitterton. Is that official? I'd be so confused if I went into the pay phones and saw the tarot cards there. Would you like your but cheeks plumped? I don't know, plumping but cheeks is actually a service offered by most cool girls. Could be wrong. There's this amazing website called thatchinginfo.com, which I don't know how this man, who is

a thatcher, has also had time to put together this vast resource, but it's everything you ever needed to know about thatching. And one of the things he reports on is the difference in thatches around the country. So the UK is split into five thatching regions, and they more broadly fall into two categories. So you've got the rounded, soft, kind of squishy looking thatch, which I would say is your classic thatch. And then you've got your much more angular thatch. And you know which thatch you're going to see because it exactly depends on if you're

north or south of the A5. Oh, wow. It's so weird and so cool. And this is something that he discovered photographing them. And that's because the A5 goes along the old road that was called Watling Street. And that was a really ancient road. It's been around since ancient Rome. And that was where Watling Street was used as the dividing line between Dane Law, so

when the Danes came over and took over sort of the north of England, and the dividing line between Dane Law and then the Anglo-Saxons on the south. So the thatch to the north of the A6 all looks a bit like Danish or German style thatch, angular. And the south all looks like Anglo-Saxon thatch. Isn't that cool? That is amazing. But what everyone wants to know is what kind of thatch is shitterton.

Right. Where's shitterton again? That'll be rounded. It's in Dorset. Yeah. I read that on thatchinginfo.com, which I have to say is, I agree with Anna, is an amazing website. And they said that the thatcher was like one of the most important people in the village

and he was full of infinite gossip. Because obviously he's kind of in the eaves of the buildings, literally eaves dropping because that's where he's hiding and he could hear everything that was happening. They have lots of examples of the people who were doing the work and a lot of them were women as well. They have an example from Rippon from 1399 of some female helpers who were, they weren't doing like the main work, but they would tend to do like the collecting of the straw and stuff like that.

For instance, Tess from Tess of the Derbavills, she was in that novel, she kind of works alongside the threshing machine, which is getting the cereal off the stalk so that you can wrap them together and turn them into thatch. So yeah. Right. Cool. I thought you were about to ruin the ending of Tess of the Derbavills as well. I haven't read it so I can't, I would.

She leans too far over into the thatching machine and her head comes right off. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that dinosaurs migrated. That's it. We left a pause for where the rest of the sentence should be, but it's such brevity, we couldn't fill it. It is merely a two word fact, which I didn't know. So where are they going from and to?

What are they looking for? Sonia Climes? I think more food, definitely, which obviously Sonia Climes can often give you that. And this was in North America specifically. And it was a new study by a guy called Josh Malone, who was at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas in Austin. And it's really cool. What happened was he was visiting his dad and he was in one part of America and he said,

one of these weird stones on the floor and his dad said, oh, they're gastroliths. And gastrolith is something that if you're a bird, you will swallow bits of stone and it helps you to digest things because it crushes up the food. And dinosaurs had these as well. And so he went back to school and started studying and then decided to do a paper on these stones. And what he found is that the stones that they found in Wisconsin actually originated in Wyoming and he looked for all the different ways that they could have gotten from Wyoming

to Wisconsin. And he couldn't find a single other way. There were no rivers that went there. There was no other way they could have gone. So they've worked out that they must have come in the stomachs of dinosaurs. And this is the best evidence that we have so far. There's quite a bit of other evidence, but this is the best evidence that we have that dinosaurs moved from one place to another on regular occurrences to get more food.

That was one of the things he considered the possibility of extremely explosive diarrhea. I mean, how far is it from Wyoming to Wisconsin? How if you if you're really propelling it, it's about 600 miles. It's bad, you know, it's possible. I'm just saying looks like it could fire it that far. The earth was closer back then wasn't it because of Gondwana land. So maybe it was six meters and it's just expanded. Yeah.

He's falling apart, James. I'm so sorry. But these were these were the really big dinosaurs, the big, long necked sauropods that you'll that you'll know from your models as a child. And we know that they had to eat all the time. And we know that if they'd have stayed where they were, they wouldn't be enough food. So they would have to move. But this is just the first evidence of it.

That's interesting. Sauropods are also responsible for what we know is the longest obvious journey that one single sauropod has made. There's a trackway, which is in France, which has been found, which covers 150 meters of one sauropod walking. There's this 500 feet worth of foot impressions from this dinosaur. And it's the longest one singular walk that's been sort of held in the ground that we have, and that's just, you know, there's there's little two records

there for migration and for longest obvious walk. Well, we can definitely take from that that they did walk, which is more evidence that they migrated. I'm just trying to help you out because I know we ruined your theory earlier and I'm just going to help build it back up. Just on dinosaurs. Yeah. I really like the fact that there were dinosaurs living at the poles, which I

had never considered before study research this fact. Yeah, the poles were much friendlier places during the time of the dinosaurs. They were still cold. They had snow and ice in the winter months, but it looks like they were dinosaurs. And again, this is a recent discovery, living there all year round. And they even, we think, slowed their growth down during the colder seasons so that they could cope with being a bit, you know, colder, having a bit less resources, which is what shrews do today.

I think we've mentioned that before. So, yeah, the wear of dinosaurs in what is now the UK of the British Isles. We know that there are guanodons lived here because we found their bones. But actually, if you think about it, they weren't exactly where we are today. They were about 50,000 light years away. And that is because the solar system moves around the centre of the galaxy. Right. And it's always moving. And like we move around the sun, the entire solar system moves around the universe.

And so the entire solar system is 50,000 light years away from where it was when the dinosaurs were alive. So even though they lived on the same bit of land where we are, if you think about it, space wise, they were nowhere near us. Yeah, I saw there's online. It's really worth checking out on Twitter. There's a video by Dr. Jesse Christensen. And it's an animation that shows exactly what you're talking about, James.

And during the guanodon and the gigantosaurus era, they're literally on the other side of the galaxy to where we are in space time. And if you picture our position right now, if it was, say, a compass, we're sort of southwest on the compass, just very close to the south, but southwest. And as you go up, sort of on the west angle of the compass is when Stegosaurus comes in, in terms of the spacing of our entire galaxy. Then you get to the top and that's when you suddenly get the guanodon and the gigantosaurus.

And then if you were east on the compass, that's when things like the T-Rex and the Velociraptor are coming in. Then finally, in space time, you have the big moment where the extinction moment happened and that is roughly southeast, sort of in between east and south on the compass. But the dinosaur period did start in the period of the galaxy that we are now in. That was the initial bit. Oh, so we've gone round once.

Yeah. Oh, I see. So we've done one circumnavigation of the clock face already. Exactly. Yeah. And the spot we're in is basically in a similar area to where dinosaurs became in existence. One galactic year ago, there were dinosaurs on Earth, is kind of what I'm saying. Exactly. So we might, once we get all the way round, we might bump into them again. It's possible one of them may have got left behind. They're still hanging there in space, a Brontosaurus.

The aliens we met on our way round the last time have been busy sewing us cool new costumes, but they think we're still dinosaurs. That's why dinosaur onesies became so popular a few years ago. Hang on, you think if we meet aliens, they're going to deliver us gifts of outfits they think we might like? Yeah, because we already know that the dinosaurs lived in the North Pole and the South Pole. They must be cold. They needed something knitting for them. It's like when you get people knitting little jumpers for penguins. Got it. This is a very benevolent alien theory.

Like a charity case, basically. In the course of this, I was reading a bit about the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs. Oh, yeah. And, you know, exactly what it was like physically. And there was so much that I hadn't really considered it. Firstly, it was about 15 kilometers across, right? And I hadn't really considered it because you think of it just being a crater now. But basically, when it hit, just before it vaporized, it would have been twice the height of Mount Everest.

As in, if it had just bumped into the Earth slightly, it would now be two times as high as Mount Everest. Oh, as in if it had just very softly landed on the Earth. Yeah. Still wouldn't that. I see. Exactly. Isn't that incredible? Twice the height of Mount Everest. Have you seen that simulation that the BBC put on their site about how basically when it hit, it effectively, the heat was so great that it kind of liquefied the rock

that it rammed into. So it kind of created a wave and the highest point went as high, if not higher, than Mount Everest. So in the 10 minutes after we were hit, we had a mountain on this planet that was taller than Mount Everest and it collapsed on itself into lots of different, less high mountains and then eventually became part of the landscape. But just in that moment, yeah, we had a mountain taller than Mount Everest. Was it like a liquid rock mountain, though? You won't be able to climb it.

You might be able to surf that, I suppose. Yeah. And you only had, you'd have to be really prepared with your crampods and so on. You'd have to have inside knowledge that was coming. Yeah. Do you know that dinosaurs to impress each other had hold digging competitions? Wow. We think. They must have been so impressed when that meteorite came down. The sexiest dinosaur ever.

You can imagine a particularly good hold digging dinosaur coming back up and having missed the whole event. Where is everyone? All for nothing. Anna, what do you mean? We think they did this. So this is a recent discovery. Researchers in Colorado have found these kind of borrows, these long trenches, ancient trenches from the Cretaceous period, and they have a few footprints inside them

that match a theropods, which are things like velociraptors. And so these big trenches and there aren't any fossils inside them that would imply they use them for things like storage or they lived in them or they were for protection or anything. And they've deduced basically that it must have been showing up because basically dinosaurs are digging these big trenches for absolutely no reason whatsoever. So they believe now it's a way to attract a mate. Let's dig a big hole and still work.

You see that on the phone booth cards, don't you? But phone me for a big hole. That's not even trying on the euphemism stakes. Do you know that there were no medium sized dinosaurs? I find this amazing. Goldilocks would have had a terrible time, wouldn't you? Dinosaur era. Goldilocks and the three dinosaurs.

No, the two dinosaurs, because there was no medium sized ones. And this was a study by Catlin Schroeder at the University of New Mexico. And they've looked at all the different dinosaur species, looking at different communities. And they found that generally speaking, they all had a weight of under 100 kilograms or over 1000 kilograms, but there was nothing in between. I just find that absolutely amazing. And the reason what they think is that the big dinosaurs, their children or teenage children would have been eating all of the food

that would have been normally eaten by carnivores of that size. And so basically their children filled in the niche and the ecosystem that normally a medium sized animal would take. So clever. Isn't that cool? Such a good theory. I really like that. Yeah. Yeah. And there was the other thing recently, which I also can't believe that, you know, the maximum T-Rex population, I'm sure you guys all saw that.

The study that found that the total T-Rex population over the years was something like two and a half billion, meaning that if they all came back, every three people on Earth would be able to share one T-Rex. Wow. Well, hey, speaking of living with dinosaurs, I have a survey question for you guys. If Jurassic Park happened as in if we managed to clone dinosaurs and create a big park where they hung out, would you visit? Yes. Yeah, of course.

Well, I've got I've got a thatched wall to see and shitted. But after that, I'm trying to close a deal on a chest when I've got that sorted. OK, I get it. You've all got lives to lead. You're all a yes. Right. There was this poll that was done and it was in the headlines because it was YouGov research in 2015 and the headline was that 25 percent of Americans think that dinosaurs and humans definitely didn't co-exist.

So only a quarter of Americans think that they definitely didn't coexist, which obviously they didn't. Dinosaur and humans, by the way. And overall, we know what side you fall on it. Showing your cards. It's not my opinion. So 14 percent thought they definitely did co-exist. 27 percent thought they probably did coexist.

So 41 percent of Americans think that probably humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time. Very surprising. In the same poll, though, downloaded this poll. And the next question after that was, if Jurassic Park existed, would you go? Only 40 percent of people said yes. Half of people said absolutely not. Well, if your species has already coexisted, but what's the point?

So, you know, this poll, Anna, does it distinguish between the people who actually think that cavemen were living with dinosaurs and people who go, well, actually, I think you'll find that birds are really modern dinosaurs. That's a good point. It doesn't ask. And maybe all of that 41 percent were terrible pedants like that, which might be just worse than people who genuinely think we live with dinosaurs. OK, it is time for fact number three.

And that is my fact. My fact this week is that in the first half of the 20th century, thousands of premature babies were treated in amusement parks and fairgrounds in Europe and the United States. How are they treated like in the teacups or in the loop the loop or what? My clown. Yeah, this is an extraordinary story. This is the story of a man called Dr.

Martin Cooney, who was known as the incubator doctor. And basically within the amusement parks, he set up what you would now see in hospitals as where premature babies would be resting. That started not in hospitals, but at the fairgrounds of the world because doctors didn't believe that incubators could work. They didn't think there was a purpose to them really at the time. Premature babies were seen as weaklings.

And this was one guy who very weirdly was a sort of Petey Barnum as kind of character. He was he was a real showman who decided he wanted to try and save children's lives. And he created what were known as the infantoriums, where you would pay twenty five cents to walk into a building and basically look at children that were sitting in incubators and watch them growing. The nurses used to dress the babies in overgrown clothes really to sort of show how tiny these little babies were. Wow. You.

Yeah, you could watch the children being fed milk in various different ways. Either they were fed it via bottle or they were fed it by the breast or they were fed it through the nose. The feeding through the nose thing is weird because obviously doesn't work unless you actually put a feeding tube through someone's nose and into someone's, you know, esophagus, then you're just inhaling stuff. But yeah, they had a special nosefeeding spoon. I think I saw this in another earlier one even.

This was something called the lion incubator. Because he didn't actually invent the incubator. We should say that came out a while before him. But the lion incubator came and displays were put on of the lion incubator. And there's a nosefeeding spoon and it's basically like a teaspoon. And then at the very end, it had a little pointy fold. And apparently you put milk in it and you held it about in the baby's nose, kind of shoving the little pointy fold up the baby's nose.

And the baby would breathe the milk in drop by drop, like inhaling the fumes. I don't believe that that would work. So I'm surprised that these babies made it. Yeah. So lion, these were the original ones. And it's not only that Cooney didn't invent the incubators. He didn't invent the idea of showing them off because lion did that as well. And he would rent out shop fronts, wouldn't he? Where you could walk down boulevards and you could see these babies in the shop fronts.

And the reason was that his incubators were so expensive, the only way they could get the money for them was to charge people a couple of a couple of some teams here and there to see the babies. Yeah. But what's what's extraordinary about it? I mean, there's a lot to unpack in the story about this guy, Cooney, because in theory, a lot of ethical practices were breached by a guy who wasn't actually a doctor, as far as we can tell. But in his time, he's said to have saved over 6,500 babies.

He had a success rate of 85 percent. And not only that, it was basically a version of health care. Because the parents didn't have to pay for the babies to be looked after. That was the whole point of him going to fairgrounds. And certain babies would be a bit famous. They would come and root for a baby that was growing particularly well. It became the place where parents were able to go. I have no other option because hospitals don't do this.

I can take it to Dr. Cooney and he can save my child. And he did. I think we're OK with him faking the doctor thing. We rarely are. Usually we don't like that. He was a quack who happened upon a cure that actually worked. Premature baby survival rates were 15 percent before the incubator was invented and marketed and they went up to 75 percent in his time.

It's really amazing. But the really nice thing is that some of these babies will still be alive today. We're talking about this as though it's a historical thing. But in 2015, NPR in the USA, they interviewed a lady who was about 94 years old at the time called Lucille Horn. And she had been one of the Coney Island babies born in 1920. Like you say, Dan, her father had had no other option. The hospital wasn't providing the right care.

So he wrapped her in a towel, took her to Martin Cooney, who put her in one of the incubators and she was being interviewed age 94 after that. She went back later in life and introduced herself to him, said, I used to be one of your babies, which I think is so nice. The most wonderful thing for me about this story, particularly, is that Lucille Conan Horn, she was a twin and her twin died and she was prematurely born. And they were told this is not going to happen.

So he rushed the child to Dr. Cooney and had them put him in the incubator. And as you say, she died 96 years old. And when she died, she was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn next to her twin sister, who she was told she was going to be. The parents were told she was going to be buried next to immediately after. They, in fact, told the parents to hold off on the funeral because they would be bearing two children. Another thing about the kids who were in these incubators

is that they were extremely high achieving because they all graduated incredibly early because they graduated from the incubators. They had a proper graduation ceremony. So this was part of the show. Proper. When you say proper, how proper we talking? An aunt's class reading from the St. Louis World Fair in I think that was 1904, wasn't it? And it was talking about these twins, Jack and Catherine, who had been in the incubators.

Their lives have been saved and they all get dressed up in special, specially bought new gowns, slash clothes and dresses. The cradles are decorated in flags and bunting and everything. And big crowds are invited and then they are given little paper diplomas. OK, all right. That passes my benchmark. That's probably, I mean, to be honest, that's probably how Dr. Cooney got his degree.

Yeah, yeah. But the, like I say, the original of all this stuff was in Europe, wasn't it? And it was this guy, Alexander Leon or Lion. And then it was Cooney who kind of took it on and then took it to the States. But he was so popular with his things that he called child hatcheries and that they wrote drinking songs about him, about how he was saving children. Yeah. And the reason his incubator was so much better than any of the other ones that they had is because you didn't really need to give it any attention at all.

You could put the baby in there and it would be fine because all you'd have to do is feed it and wash it. There was like water pipes that went underneath it that would keep it warm. And then there was like air pipes that would pump the air through there to keep them kind of plenty of air there as well. Yeah, because maybe we should say why it is that premature babies need to be incubated anyway. And it's just that they've left the room earlier than planned.

And so you're trying to simulate the womb, essentially, aren't you? And it is that very stable environment around you, a huge amount of warmth, which you wouldn't normally get. That's why I think sometimes when you have to improvise an incubator, if you can't get to the hospital on time or so, I think there was a story of a nurse who had to transport premature baby to hospital and she improvised an incubator by fitting one box inside of another and then filling the gap with hot water. And so you just got to warm them up and keep the environment stable.

Was that recently, Anna? Yeah, quite recently. Yeah. That's amazing because that's how a lot of the early ones operated in essence. When was this Leon guy? And he painted his 1889. He got his first patent. So there was a guy, there were a few before even these. So there were some from the 1830s onwards.

And then one of the really successful ones was a French obstetrician called Stephane Tarnier. And his inspiration was going to the zoo because incubators were used for eggs. And he then worked with the zoo's instrument maker, who was a guy called Odile Martin. That was based on hot water as well. And you know, double walls filled with sawdust to provide the temperature and the stability. But yeah, nothing like as effective was it really? Negligible impact compared to when you had natural incubator. Yes.

It was a Leon. And they did weird stuff though. When so in the Alexandra Lyon incubator, which as you say about 50,000 people came and looked and paid their duty to look at these babies in its first year. When people came and looked, there was a reporter journalist wrote about it. First of all, it's so funny how journalists write in a different way in 100 years ago. So this was 1896. And he said it was very annoying because Lyon's explaining the science of his incubator.

And suddenly we're interrupted by this wailing child. And it was described as an insignificant lump that was disturbing the neighborhood. And he said it was it was hustled into a glass window department called a baby's dining room by one of the nurses. And then a nurse put powder on its face with a powder puff, which I found so confusing. And he said she put powder on his face to bring him to a state of immaculate perfection, even though the baby was screaming and crying, and then gave it some milk.

And I think this was just once a day, they made them up. Just to stop being so red from all the screaming and stuff. It's just yeah, especially premature babies. They're very red based, aren't they? Yeah, cosmetically. Well, you want to see that they're looking like they're having a good time, even though they're premature, right? If it turned into a horror show, you would have it shut down.

Like what's going on with these babies? So yeah, you just want to make sure they're fine. Do you know what? Cooney, when he accepted children, and again, this is a guy who, as far as we know, was not an actual doctor. He would bathe them in lukewarm water. And then if they were capable, the article I read said, they were given a small dose of brandy and then they went in.

But that's I mean, for a premature baby, I don't know. Like maybe when they're teething. If you haven't even supposed to be born yet, that is early to be starting on the album. I normally don't have anything before 6pm. But I think not having anything before you're born is quite a good rule, isn't it? You've got a bill of intolerance.

Yeah, I mean, that is just the absolute definition of it was a different time and that babies just were given alcohol. That was just the way it was. In terms of what we're saying about it being a different time, la la la, which it definitely was, this is I'm going to quote directly from the Atlantic Magazine now, who wrote a brilliant article about the Cooney Island babies. Here we go.

I'm just quoting now. The visitors at Cooney Island approached Cooney's incubators with a combination of excitement and confusion. The doctor was frequently asked where he obtained the eggs, gestated in the incubators, and he got the occasional request to have sexual intercourse with the incubator device in an attempt to conceive. So people thought that like a chicken incubator,

you put an egg in there and it would turn into a child. But they also knew that children came from sperm and eggs and so they decided to say, well, you can have some of my sperm if you need it. Is that what we're saying? I'm just quoting. I'm not getting into it beyond that. People apparently sometimes wanted to have sex with the incubators.

I don't know if they were good-looking incubators. Well, it's just an act of generosity, isn't it? They think they're doing him a favour. That I will inseminate this incubator for you. People, men. We're talking about men, we're talking about gross men. Well, obviously, it's not going to work if women do it. That is where the word incubator comes from.

It's the beta comes from masturbator, doesn't it? Because that's the same route. So Coney Island, which is where obviously this, you know, one of these big exhibitions was, I just was looking up a few other things that they had at Coney Island. One of the things they had there was a recreation of the Boer War by a thousand soldiers, including veterans from both sides. And it happened two or three years

after the actual pivotal battle of the Boer War had happened. They were doing recreations. And the soldiers loved it because they were being paid, but they weren't being shot at. There was zero risk of them dying. And they just were doing a show now. And they had to pause it once a day because there was a horse race happening nearby

and the horses at the horse race got freaked out by the gunfire. So they had to just temporarily pause the Boer War recreation. They did the horse race and we got on with that. Premonsure babies next door, not get freaked out by other gunfire. I'm sure they did. Yeah. It just sounds crazy. Sigmund Freud, big fan of Coney Island. The only thing about America that interests me

is Coney Island is a quote from Sigmund Freud. He was obsessed by the idea of the debauchery that was going on behind the scenes there. He said it was almost like an epicenter of hedonism and sexuality. I mean, there were people trying to have sex with incubators, so he was a bar of. Yeah. He was back on, yeah.

Does that incubator remind you of your father? Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that giving someone the finger has been an insult for 2,300 years. Old, and I just love that. I love that you go back 2,300 years to Athens and stick your middle finger up and someone will be offended.

It's a good tip, isn't it, if you're ever going back in time? It really is, yeah. I think the first reference we have to it is from 4th century BC in Athens, and it's from Diogenes, who we've mentioned before, who was a big old character and philosopher, and it was recorded that someone said to him, someone in the crowd said to him,

hey, where's Demosthenes? I love Demosthenes, as in famous orator Demosthenes, and Diogenes thought Demosthenes was shit, and so he said, oh, there goes that great demagogue sarcastically while gesturing with his middle finger at him, and it was given to understand in this report that was a very rude way to gesture. So it was sort of like a pointing thing.

There's another theory behind it is that he was saying, here is Demosthenes, and he's saying that he is my middle finger because my middle finger looks like a penis, and Demosthenes is a big old penis. Nice, nice. Could have had a double meaning. And it just ran from there. So by the time you got to ancient Rome, it was Digitus impudicus, or Digitus impudicus,

as they probably would have said, and as in literally indecent or unchaste finger, to mean such a rude finger. That's another thing you can ask for in a phone box, can't you? I'd like an unchaste finger. I just love the time travel element that it's sort of like, I'm so pissed off in the year 2021 about this play, that I'm just going to go back and just give them the finger

just to say, fuck you and your play, this is bullshit, and they'll get it. There's no translation issues. Yeah, it's perfect. It was mentioned in some plays in Aristophanes. He wrote in his play, Peace. He wrote about giving someone the finger. But he used the word eskin-malison to mean sticking a finger up.

And that comes from a word, which means to shove a finger into a bird's anus. And that was the word that he used to mean to show the finger. To give a finger. Wouldn't have thought you needed to have a specific word to that. Why have you got a word? Yeah. Well, why would you think, for instance,

you might need to put your finger up a bird's anus? Cavity search. Nice, God smugglers. Oh, no, not that. No, not that. Customs. No. Anything to declare?

Mr. Pigeon. You wanted a boiled egg for breakfast and you're getting really impatient and it hasn't laid yet, so you just go in there yourself. That's pretty much it, Anna. It is. Apparently, this was a thing that people would do to check

if a chicken was about to lay an egg. You would stick your finger into its cloaca to see if it was ready. And there was a word for it in Greek, and then that word became a word for an insult of giving someone the finger. So you know how we were saying that it's a penis gesture that when Diogenes was using the gesture

he was saying this is a penis. There is a theory, I'm not sure how firm it is, that just as we use our fingers to represent a penis, squirrel monkeys in South America use their penises as a finger. So they have these gestures with their erect penises to show dominance. This is Desmond Morris's theory, isn't it?

Yeah. He's done a lot of work on this who claimed the comparison, but it makes kind of sense. They do it as sort of go away to rivals, I think. So they don't point directions with their penises, or if they're playing cricket, they don't say someone's out by sticking their penis in the air.

Yeah. I don't even think they can play cricket. This is a sad truth. It's weird, isn't it? Did you guys read this? And I don't know if I've been had, but the idea of a thumbs up in Afghanistan is virtually the middle finger

that we would present to each other. I'd never heard that before, and I know different countries have their variations, but... No, it's in lots of places. Because it's like a thumb up the bum, basically, isn't it? But it's genuinely offensive. It's caused controversy in the past. I think in the 90s,

there was a minister in Bangladesh where it was also very offensive, so it's quite a lot of Middle Eastern countries and in West Africa. But in Bangladesh as well, a minister gave a thumbs up at the end of a parliamentary session. And I couldn't work it out

if it was quite a Westernised minister who'd picked up the thumbs up in a friendly way. It seemed like it was, and he was like, hey, good job, guys. Well done. And there was this huge scandal afterwards where I think the Prime Minister was like,

this guy's got to apologise. That is outrageous. He's done that. It is interesting when you consider that the top sort of, let's say the President of the United States, Prime Minister of UK, that is the preferred hand signal in a photo,

but they know that that is effectively sending a message to countries we're in trouble with, let's say. There's a thing that's always mentioned which is that Richard Nixon once made a similar mistake when he stepped off a plane in South America. This is when he was Vice President in the 50s and he did the sign for like AOK

where you put your thumb and your forefinger together in a circle. It's like, that's okay. So he stepped off a plane and he did that. And in South America, that is very bad. It's got scatological implications and is insulting. And so the story goes, he was very badly booed

and it started the tour of very badly. A, I can't find any instance. I mean, literally every book, every article, every history says that. I can't find a photo. And B, this was when America was doing some seriously dodgy stuff in South America and they weren't super popular anyway.

It was famous this tour for him being sort of spat out and sworn out and having stuff thrown at him. So I think the implication that, oh, they were just upset because he did the, you know, that circle with the fingers gesture. It's probably concealing a lot of other stuff they were upset about as well. But yeah, if anyone's got a photo, I'd love to see it

because it's repeated all the time. There was a study done in 2019 about middle fingers, which I really like. And it was trying to work out whether the penis connection of diogenes actually holds water. And it was an experiment testing whether the middle finger primes people think about either penises or the word penis. Okay.

And it was basically, if they showed people, participants, either an A-O-K sign or a middle finger, and then they showed them a word with a couple of letters missing. I showed them P-E-N and then dot, dot. So the idea is that if they had seen the middle finger and then when they were shown P-E-N, they completed it more often with penis instead of, you know, penny or penne or other words that began P-E-N,

then that was an example of priming. Okay. And the study showed that people did not, as a result, think more about the word penis. They didn't automatically leap to it even after seeing a middle finger. They did if they had been shown the finger bang gesture, which is where you put one finger into a hole,

you've made with your other hand. That did prime people to complete with the word penis. So that makes people think of penis. The other thing does not. That's really interesting. Because I would have thought that if you give people the letters P-E-N blank blank, 100% of people would just write penis every single time,

no matter what else is happening in the room. Don't know what you're talking about. First thing I thought was penultimate. Okay. And then penarius. These are not five letter words. Oh, does that have to be five letters? Yes.

I would say that not only would I write the word penis, the eye would look quite a lot like a penis. Yeah. And then how can you write the word more penis once you see the middle finger? That's the thing. How can you really emphasize you've underlined it lots of times?

Like I'm really thinking about this now. Another gesture which I hadn't heard of, and this is I think maybe it's a Middle Eastern thing, is the Five Fathers gesture. I don't think we've discussed this before. Basically you bunch together five fingers on one hand and then you touch them with one finger of the other hand. Okay.

And what the implication there, it's incredibly obscene. The implication there is that your mother had so many suitors that it's hard to know who your father is. That's what is happening when you do that. That's a Middle Eastern thing. And that really is not one to do as you're getting off the plane. That's very clever. And so if you wanted to be really insulting,

you take both your shoes off, go barefoot, and then get 15 digits up against one index finger. And then you're saying someone's fun. This has really been around the block. Wow. It's like a goose's head, isn't it? What you were doing a little bit. Oh, if you were doing something like this.

Oh, yeah, yeah, on one of your hands. Yeah, like a shadow. Like a shadow. Yeah, exactly. Eating a bread stick, basically. Goose eating a bread stick, exactly. But do you know that the word goose means to prod someone in the bum?

Do you know where that comes from? Oh, interesting. No. Well, there are two possible reasons. One is that the finger might look a bit like a goose's beak or the thumb might look a bit like a goose's beak that you're prodding with. And the other one is that you might cause

enough nervous excitement that the person you prod makes a noise a bit like a goose that flaps around and stuff like that. And that's your two versions. Okay, good to know. Pick your poison. Pick your favorite. Do you know the, this is not a rude gesture,

but it's a gesture that I didn't ever think about, the hang loose gesture for surfing. So if you were about to pull this as a listener right now, it is keep your pinky up, keep your thumb up, and put the other three fingers down. The surf's up, the kind of, and supposedly that is from Hawaii. And this is the story. It's from a guy called Hamana Kalali,

who was someone who lost three fingers. He lost those three fingers. And so, and he was working at a sugar mill, and that's where he lost them. And so he used to do that all the time. That was just his, his natural state of holding his hand, but he would shake it around. And it was called the shaka in Hawaii.

That's what you know it as. Oh, yeah. Is that, is it true? When was he around? There's, there's a few theories about where it came from. He's recent. I don't have his dates, but he's, he's not, you know, ancient Rome. He's, all right, I get it.

Some people have more up to date facts than I do. And it made me think that, because we had that fact a long time ago about the high five was supposedly originated or popularized by a man with four fingers. And I just like that that is, is by one finger and one thumb. It's kind of lucky that he lost those fingers and not all of the fingers apart from his middle finger,

because then all the surfers would just be flipping everyone the bird all the time, wouldn't they? Yeah, exactly. Speaking of flipping the bird, which is obviously, at least in America, that's the term for doing, giving someone the middle finger. I found the most epic flipping of the bird that could possibly ever have happened.

And that was a bunch of the twitchers were watching starlings flying in the sky and caught in this beautiful moment in a photo is a giant group of starlings sort of shaping the biggest screw you middle finger that has ever been caught on camera. Wow. And that's stunning.

But just looking back going, stop staring at us, you perverts. Maybe they were giving a sign that they wanted someone to check if they had an egg in them. But it is awesome. Check it out online. It's a group of birds flipping the bird at humans.

It's awesome. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account.

I'm on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email podcast.qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or our website.

No such thing as a fish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there. We also have links to any upcoming live shows and also a link to any YouTube stuff that we have where you can see what our faces actually look like. Okay, we will be back again next week with another episode

and we'll see you then, guys. Goodbye.