No Such Thing As A Fish - 398: No Such Thing As An Upside-Down Upside-Down Bat

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Live from Peterborough, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss murderous midwives, Mexican mouths and motorcycling mothers-in-law. 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 this week I'm coming to you live from Peterborough, my name is Dan Shriver, 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 favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that's my fact, my fact this week is that the man known as the father of British midwifery was called Willie Smelly, so childish Willie Smelly, so Willie Smelly he lived between 1697 and 1763 he was a Scottish obstetrician obstetrician

obstetrician sure I'm sure James will make one of those work in the edit he lived in London and he was basically you know obviously midwifery was going on for thousands and thousands of years but he was the first male who was allowed sort of into the game and he did quite a lot of things to sort of turn it into somewhere that was a bit more safer for having babies he sort of helped to advance the use of forceps with some designs and he was a very important figure in that world. He designed a mannequin didn't he that would let you learn how to deliver a baby it was known as the Mock woman or sometimes this most curious machine it had legs and feet

that would have shoes and stockings on it so that made it quite realistic there was an anatomist called Robert Campbell who said he could scarcely tell the difference between the machine and a real live woman this machine didn't have a head it sounds terrifying it really does it was it had a stomach that was full of leather right which I think represented the baby well there's a little wax doll in there as well also a baby and it had a bladder which you could fill up which was helpful with a little cork stopper like the real female bladder so you could break the water was that the idea was that for breaking the water we sometimes use real bones and like real skeletons I think he made at least four of these weird

robot women and for one of them yeah he used actual like he made ligaments and muscles and they moved like real people and use an actual skeleton of a mother and baby I think and he used to use real people as well as in pregnant women and he used to have a thing because he was very good at his job as well so a lot of people wanted him to be the midwife for the job and so he would say I'll do it for free I'll wave my feet if I can do it in front of all my students and they can observe and I can do a sort of lecture as I'm doing it. I wonder if you want your midwife to be focused mostly on delivering the child not on delivering

a good lecture if they want to deliver one thing well you want it to be the child yeah today's lecture is what not to do during birth what stop the birth stop the birth hi everybody just wanted to let you know today's birth is sponsored by hello fresh this model we don't have any of them anymore they've all disappeared and we don't know where they are we have a few others from around the same time there's one in France called the Boudin Pinard model and that was kind of similar it was made of rubber it had a vaginal opening with a thumb screw so you could make it bigger and smaller some of them work like that actually yeah the non cork with the cheaper vaginas this one also had a rubber rectum and the

rubber rectum was there because there was something called the ritgen manoeuvre and one version of doing that is you the midwife would put her fingers up the bum of the mother and then they would kind of manoeuvre the head a little bit if it was in the wrong place and it would stop the perineum from getting in trouble this this rick and manoeuvre evolved from a technique from the ancient Greeks it was first proposed by a Greek physician called soraenus soraenus of Ephesus can you have an alternative determinism when the words have won't mean that for another 2,000 years wow he was controversial William Smelly because men weren't allowed into the midwifery game and male midwives were seen as controversial

when they started practicing and they had to work by touch because there was a risk they might see something indecent so some of them had to kind of work with a sheet in between them and the delivery so they yeah yeah I think even even up until the 19th century any men working on the female body and by the 19th century it was all men women had sort of been edged out of the practice were encouraged not to look directly at a woman's private part so obstetricians were told well they were obstetricians had specific instructions that to reassure a female patient they're not looking at her private parts they should gaze into the distance or maintain constant eye contact with her giving birth already

very very very stressful imagine seeing your medical team walk in they're all in blindfolds some of them are looking at the mountain over there one of them just staring you straight in the face put the fingers at the bum like I put the tail on the donkey and it was really controversial for the men to come in wasn't it because before that all of the midwifery was done by women there was someone called Elizabeth Nihel who was writing in the 18th century who really thought that this was a terrible idea she thought that basically all the men had come in and they were finding problems that weren't there and the best way to do it was to be a natural birth and you know you're getting all these four steps in

but if you just leave it will probably be fine in most cases and she said that a lot of the surgeons were coming in and they were being fast-tracked to become a midwife and people like William Smelly were trying to like teach them really really quickly and like barbers tailors and pork butchers were coming in to become midwives in a short period of time gosh you would ask wouldn't you what was your previous career the men were called when they started becoming midwives they were called either man midwife or he midwife and the masters of the universe but it kind of doesn't work because midwife the the actual term itself it literally means with wife so you are the mid to the wife so yeah so that

was just an extra bit of word you didn't need it was yeah everyone is a midwife if you're helping give birth yeah yeah yeah you know you said that William Smelly he developed the forceps which was sort of his one of his main contributions so he didn't invent it he made it better I guess you can all picture what a forceps is right in birth it's sort of like a pair of scissors but instead of the scissor bits you have like a clamp it's more like a pair of asparagus tongs it's it's like that man of the people Andrew Hunter Murray or like two eyelash curlers together more like that but gigantic ones yeah yeah to clamp onto a child's head anyway he developed forceps which we're only using two percent of childbirth even then so it's weird

that it was thought was so revolutionary but forceps before that the design was a complete secret from all the hundred years so there was this one family that invented them the Chamberlain family and from the mid 16th to the mid 17th century over five generations they had to keep it completely secret so they had this elaborate ceremony when they arrived at the house of a woman in labor they'd arrive in this big carriage they'd have this massive wooden box that had all like carvings all over it it would take two people to carry the forceps in no one was allowed to see inside it looked like it was some gigantic instrument no one else is allowed in the room when the woman's giving birth and then you know they'd make weird noises like ringing bells and

making weird sounds so the people outside the door thought what is this amazing instrument wow no one knew I read that I read that sometimes they blindfolded the woman giving birth was anyone not could anyone see in the room no blind man's muff was what they called it wow wow yeah they were two brothers weren't they the Chamberlains both called Peter yes so weird we should say there's another controversial thing about willy smelly um which is that it turns out he might have been a serial killer um and the four of us discovered this very late in our research it really feels like his name has buried the headline throughout history um I don't think it's even worth mentioning you know you do one dodgy thing yeah but no it turns out apparently quite a few dodgy a serial number

of dodgy things here you do a series of dodgy things yeah and the idea was that he and another guy called John Hunter I think wanted to be the best midwives and wanted to kind of become famous for their new techniques and so they needed people to test it out on and in the kind of birken hair kind of style they knocked people off so that they could get the cadavers called Birking in fact I don't know which seems like where's hair gone in that verb all the papers talk about it as you know he was part of a bit of Birking I think hair's like it's cool yeah I'm very happy with it is it definitive it seems like there's a lot I guess I mean he wasn't tried so it's never been no it's hard to kind of know for certain certain but it does seem like there's lots of circumstantial

evidence of people not asking you know like even not asking questions about where the bodies are coming from that kind of thing I think it's quite there was someone at the time who raised it during his lifetime and he almost stopped practicing for a while just because he thought you know okay either the rumor is becoming too prevalent amongst people or it was true and I better stop we don't know which but it's come up more recently that someone has gone through all of the the lists of women that he had access to and how did he get that many women and it kind of seems like all the academics who love him because he was so influential there were hospitals named after him that have since closed but up until 1992 wouldn't you go to the Willy Smelly Hospital

but so it seems that there's someone has written this paper and a lot of academics have looked at it and gone yeah it's very compelling um damn it because they love him so much and they almost don't want to look at it but it looks like it could be true um so on midwives who aren't serial killers yes there were some um the job of a midwife sometimes entailed giving women orgasms this was so there was this belief from basically from ancient Greece until the early 19th century that you know in the 19th century everything got very buttoned up and no one was supposed to enjoy anything anymore but before that everyone thought that it was damaging for women if they didn't have orgasms frequently enough and Galen you know the ancient physician said that uh women

would suffer from limb aches and things like that due to the build up of female generative fluids within and so in the 16th century a doctor called Forestus a Dutch doctor said that women should employ midwives to manually stimulate them on a regular basis if they weren't getting enough sex fair enough fair absolutely fair enough yeah the idea the midwife's coming around again darling are you sure I didn't even know you're expecting a baby I will be soon the um yeah the idea with Galen was that um he thought that the a woman would have exactly the same genitals as a man but just inside out and so that was why the man needed to orgasm in order to create the seeds so the women would have to do the same that was the idea he thought also if a

woman got too hot that her genitals would fall outside of her body and she'd turn into a man so ah it's not true that's not just busting another myth um did you know that some midwives are hamsters was this is a person called a hamster no it's not it's not this is what the NHS has resulted to then it does mean more funding there's a specific kind of hamster called a Jungarian hamster the paternal hamster the dad will mechanically assist the delivery actually will help the mother give birth to the the litter of baby hamsters and it does it does a proper job like um we'll consume the amniotic fluid tick proper good service here yeah um eat the placenta to finger up the bum they'll even open the baby's airways by licking

its nostrils okay so that is they're not the only animals that do it so we know that some monkeys do it as well um they they like to perform that and in some cases bats have been observed doing it as well so there's a biologist called Thomas Kuntz and he lives in florida and hey listen come on just because we've had soaring as willy smelly Kuntz doesn't need to be lumped in there um and he saw so basically he was in the lab must be so hard for a bat to give birth because you're upside down no you're like push push exactly you're meant to flip the other way so he was he was in his lab and suddenly there was all this drama because a bat was in distress and another bat kind of flew over and was like hey come on gotta help the bat out and and so she flies

back and they go and observe it and this other bat who's not related by blood gets next to this bat so bats actually do flip upside down to give birth so they're on their feet but this bat was upside down still hanging so this other bat flipped upside down and started going to show this other bat you know you've used upside down to mean both the right way up and upside down on multiple occasions and no one has any idea okay so so the non-pregnant bat has flipped onto its legs the wrong way around and is going and straining and showing the upside down bat how it should be done and then the upside bat goes oh okay flips over and then the bat not pregnant starts um licking the genitals of the bat to sort of help lubricate it it's so awkward there's a kid in the front row

i'm really it's trying to work out how to say what i needed to say here i think what happened there was about five minutes ago you worked out what you were going to have to say you're like i'm just going to keep saying upside down until it stops uh look we need to move on to our next fact it is time for fact number two and that is andy my fact is that there is a town in mexico where one person in ten is a dentist i know what you're thinking that sounds about normal you know sounds like a roughly normal ratio it's not it's not at all it's called los algodones and it is the dentistry capital maybe of the world certainly of mexico um it's got 350 dentists in it but that is one person in ten there so so who are they well surely if there's not many people who are they

actually dentists stringing each other each other they've got no teeth left no no no it's not that um so it's a it's a huge place for health tourism so people who don't have dental insurance in the usa will travel because it's very it's very near the border with the united states but just to give you an idea of how weird this proportion is one person in ten so uh they have to look after 320 teeth each right because you know one person is i know i'm i'm sort of assuming there's no health tourism now but that would be 320 teeth each in the uk each dentist has to look after about 53 000 teeth wow that's quality it's less than one tooth a day isn't it that's you know absolutely they can spend a day in a bit on every single tooth yeah yeah they've got 200 times as many

dentists per head of population in the town los algodones is um only four square blocks in size and the population is about 40 times smaller than just to take a random city peter brah wow you kiss arse it's also extremely sunny sunniest place on earth so great dental care on earth on earth well the sunniest place on earth is yuma which is just on the other side of the border i mean literally a 20 minute drive away less so i think it can also be called the sunniest place on earth that's amazing yeah it gets 305 sunny blue sky days a year wow interestingly the best way to get there from the sunniest place is through a place called the gap so for a few you've got teeth problems i love it but the gap is just what they call a huge hole in donald trump's wall oh really

you'd have thought if anyone can fill in a gap it's the town of dentists next to it um i was really a bit about dental tourism generally and dental holiday package deals are just a bound if anyone's interested i didn't realize this but you like you go online to dentalholiday.co.uk and for £3,200 you can get a trip to slavakia which includes a pamper day at hot spring spa island a return boat trip down the danube and eight crowns or veneers wow that sounds great and it was actually it was a weird thing in covid earlier on this year in ireland i said ireland had specific travel bans which allowed for health tourism but you couldn't go just on holiday and suddenly people going to tenareef rocketed and it turns out they also have quite a lot of dentists in tenareef

and a study found that 40 of people traveling from dublin airport on flights had a letter from a dentist in tenareef yeah yeah this person definitely deserves dental treatment they need to come here that's amazing right have you guys heard of uh the the big thomas the big thomas yeah that sounds like a euphemism for something it does doesn't it um well he was a french man and his name actually was his name was jean thomas which is a euphemism for something but that's not what that joke wasn't known at the time so he would have been fine he was an neither was sorenus but it's still funny he was a dentist in paris in the 18th century and he was for 50 years a massive fixture on the pont nerf bridge and he was the most famous dentist in paris he was this huge guy and he if

you couldn't get your tooth out he would lift the patient in the air by the tooth to try and get it out like he was incredible um his motto was dentem synon maxillam the tooth i if not the tooth the jaw i i'm getting something incredible incredible guy um he was in an opera as a comic character he um he was called the honor of the universe and the terror of the human jaw um he was quite quite the man he was once pranked by a group of medical students who attached four rockets to the underside of his cart because he had a sort of travel you know wheeled surgery basically and then when he was in the middle of extracting a tooth they let off the rockets and the cart blew up and he fell over on the patient and that was and what about the patient and it doesn't say what happened

to the patient that was that was the equivalent of you know Beatles about or whatever in 18th century paris i reckon there were a lot of people with only half a jaw in that town who were very much behind the medical students during that prank yeah yeah but wasn't it 1700s you say because that was when becoming a tooth puller became such a lucrative industry suddenly because sugar consumption quadrupled i think in that century and so suddenly people's tooth teeth are rotten all over the place and they use a thing called a pelican which was like shaped like a pelican beak and it clamped onto your tooth and gum and then you leave it it out you kind of twisted a tooth out and it came out i i saw a pelican in the park the other day great story andy no but they are surprisingly huge

yeah you've seen a pelican in the in the flesh i have seen them yeah massive these were smaller than they were not um size about i don't understand yeah yeah as you were yeah nonetheless guys check it out if you google pelican length you're gonna you're gonna be surprised thank god you didn't let james cut you off from the rest of that story sorry do you know that your dentist can tell if you're scared of them because you tell you say you're shaking with fear even if you're kind of fronting up they can tell oh really and it's bad news as well because it make can make them fuck up oh so there was this study um and what they did was they gave students some t-shirts and they kind of either gave them a really stressful exam or they gave them a really calm

lecture i don't know what a calm lecture is but they gave them one anyway and then they put the t-shirts on mannequins and they got the dentist to do some dental work on them and they found that the dentists who were doing work on the ones with sweaty scared t-shirts did a much worse job they sometimes would like damage the neighboring teeth when they were trying to get one out they put another one out really they can they can smell fear they can smell fear that makes me more scared of them and that's going to make them even worse which makes you even more scared well this is what i haven't been for 10 years james um gosh you don't need to go as often as they say oh wow okay i mean i too am more of a once a decade wants to recover the decades kind of gal and that's probably not

often enough but like how often do most dentists recommend you go once every six months every six months that's 75 percent of dentists in america say every six months that has no basis in scientific fact that's been around since the 18th century and actually the nhs recommends that for children it should be kind of once a year and for adults you should be okay going every two years oh okay there you go nice that's pretty encouraging um the first the first woman who was a member of the british dental association was this really cool girl called lillian lindsay uh i was reading about her it was uh i think it was sort of towards the end of the 19th century and she did it because she sort of made a throwaway rebellious mark to her headmistress and she became one of the leading

dentists in the country she was head of the british dental journal president of the british dental association she was like brin's leading dentist by the 1930s 1940s the reason she became a dentist was because she was at school and i had mistress called her into her office and said look lillian i think you're destined to be a teacher of deaf and dumb people and lillian said i absolutely refused to be a teacher and the headmistress said then i will prevent you from doing anything else very interesting teaching style back in the victorian age and so lillian replied straight away in her words she said like a flash i replied you cannot prevent me from being a dentist and then she immediately realized knowing nothing of dentistry having stated that boldly she

would have to become a dentist and she did and she kept on not being allowed like when she applied to the um national dental hospital she had to do her interview outside on the pavement because the dean who was interviewing her said that she would distract all the men in there too much if she came inside oh my god yeah tough yeah it was a bit easier to become a dentist in mexico back in the day the first female dentist in mexico was margarita charney e salazar and she's actually the first woman in latin america to get a university diploma in anything it was in dentistry but to get her a degree in dentistry she needed a letter from her dentist saying that she knew how to be a dentist okay that's so good well the truth is that she had been practicing i think someone

else in her family had been a dentist and when they couldn't do it she would do the work and then she was like well i should get a degree for this because i do know how to do it and they said well where's your evidence here's a letter right it's weird because you know i don't think that my dentist would be a good judge of how good a dentist i would be i i'd show mild curiosity about the procedures but you know it's not enough yeah you know um when you're training to be a dentist yeah you have to work on something called a phantom head and it's just it's literally it's just the name they provide for the yeah like that um that birthing mannequin device mannequin was also a phantom wasn't it i think phantom just meant something that was not real but didn't we say

the mannequin was missing a head yeah i think this sounds like it was the head in willy smelly's body i think that's it yeah yeah but you you used to have to provide your own teeth not your own teeth you have to had to provide teeth right for the the phantom head where did you get those from i don't know imagine if your first day at dental school you went into the room and said okay we're gonna extract all of your teeth of course because put them in this mannequin what yeah but i spoke to a dentist about this and she confirmed that since the passing of the tissues act you no longer have to bring your own teeth which is good but she said the phantom the phantom heads sometimes leak on you in the room so that's a bit stressful leak on you lovely leak on they leak on

you yeah okay what do they leak i don't ask follow-up questions that's what i've learned how much you reckon is the most expensive electric toothbrush on the market today uh so there's something available to all of us in like boots well to all of us who have enough money for it okay might not be any of us uh a thousand pounds really nice one thousand pounds five thousand three thousand wow you've all gone this is really unusual for these guessing games not only dan goes for ten billion and he goes for 25p and it goes for i don't care but in this case you've all gone round about the right amount it's four thousand two hundred dollars so not far off three thousand pounds really that's incredible bargain it's i'll take it the design durability it's got an

antibacterial coating i mean it is that much but the bristle heads they give you a free one every six months um so you're saving money really yeah yeah yeah actually that only works for the first three years after that it's 400 pounds wow but if you use the offercode fish we do need to move on to our next fact it is time for fact number three and that is Anna my fact this week is that in the Yazidi religion Adam left paradise when a peacock pecked an anus in him so he could defecate and you're not allowed to poo in the garden of Eden so he left to have a poo is basically he had to he had to go outside to take a poo and then there was the doors didn't let him back in not allowed back in once you left the garden of Eden you can't just pop out and in

willy nilly so really smelly so was he so sorry he he didn't need to go to the loo until this peacock pecked him a bottom well first of all the peacock tricked him so basically the peacock is a guy called Tawusi melek so in Yazidi religion there's god and then god has a bunch of sort of messengers angel on earth the most important one is this peacock messenger angel Tawusi melek and a melek had to lure Adam out of paradise and he did so by feeding him a grain of wheat and then as soon as Adam had eaten this grain of wheat because he hasn't eaten for eternity so that immediately goes straight through him and he's desperate for the loo and at that point Tawusi melek says okay I'll peck you an anus but now I've done that you are gonna have to go outside to poo and then he's out and he can't

get back in and in this in this creation story you're thinking where is Eve and she's not really a part of this right no she's she's not instrumental to the birthday she's there but she isn't she doesn't create the the human race yeah in fact it sounds like he um oh Jesus the little boy in the front row so he's upside down so he he spends a bit of time with himself and what he harvests in in the process gets put into a jar have you ever considered setting cryptic crosswords there but from the jar that's contained that is where the birth of of humanity came from right yeah or Yazidi people anyway yeah the Yazidi people rather the Yazidi people are descended from Adam's divine essence I think was what you were trying to say um but then Eve's divine essence

was put in another jar and that became all the worms and scorpions on earth according to the story wow nice where's her PR um wow this sounds like a much more fun and strange uh Garden of Eden myth doesn't it yeah maybe we're just so used to we're so used to it's all nuts isn't it like yeah yeah it's just a new version like yeah it's just got detail of pecking an anus is the only thing that I mean that's more fun and it's a peacock peacock so they're fun they're more fun than a snake there is yeah I would say there are some versions where a dove pecks his anus and some where a raven pecks his anus but everyone can agree that some kind of bird pecked his anus we can all agree

it's people's front of duty here isn't it yeah there are so many of these Garden of Eden stories and there was a big rash in the 19th century of people going looking for it or claiming that they found it so one uh Victorian Victorian historian the first president of boston university claimed it was at the north pole because he said it's got it's definitely there it's got to be there that he had lots and lots of evidence published a book which is about 500 pages long saying it's definitely at the north pole um evidence is a strong word right for really a very strong word William Fairfield Warren yeah that was his name yeah yeah what was his evidence well I think his evidence was that um we've never found the Garden of Eden and no one's ever been to the north pole

it was circumstantial it feels like that makes sense it must be that wasn't there a bishop who said it was on Mars as well to really yeah yeah ages ago we've never been to Mars and we've never been to Mars and still haven't very good point James so that was more sensible because you know longer term thinking the whole north pole thing we were going to get there in the very near future at which point we were going to discover it's not the Garden of Eden unless they've all lied to us there was another another person who had a theory about where the Garden of Eden was and that was the first female presidential candidate for the United States so Victoria Woodhull who we must have mentioned before ran for president in 1872 and she also wrote a big speech called the Garden of Eden

in the 1870s about what she thought it was and she basically was ridiculing all of these people who thought the Garden of Eden was at the north pole or on Mars or whatever and she said that any schoolboy of 12 years of age who should read the description of this Garden and not discover it has no geographical significance ought to be reprimanded for stupidity and then she went on to argue that it's all a metaphor for the female body and the female reproductive system so you know in the Garden of Eden there are four rivers that meet and she said they are the four fluids of the body so one river is the blood one is the bowels one is the urinary and one is the reproductive system so the euphrates is the reproductive system up which the sperm flows

in the biblical metaphor and that was what the bible intended us to think in order to inseminate the Garden of Eden okay we've got more than four though right well they didn't know about bile ducts and things at the time I guess but we had like tears that's a that's one that's not been mentioned that's true yeah maybe she should have done tears instead of bow maybe bowels and urine could have gone together yes snot if you have your various very snotty yeah these are more streams I think streams and tributaries goal I haven't seen me goal is another one goal yeah take it up then maybe this is why she didn't become president it's certainly a pretty weird stump speech yeah I was looking at some other myths about

birds and anus and all that kind of stuff oh my goodness the taolipang people of North America of South America sorry they have a story where all animals used to have no anus and they would always defecate through their mouths but the anus was actually a separate animal called puitu and puitu the anus would wander around slowly but he would always annoy people by farting in their faces what and they're running away what is this story yeah give us a bit more what does this mean what happened next well it's a great story isn't it when you need to know what happens next sorry I'll keep going so the two parrots decided that they'd had enough of him farting in their faces so they went to try and

capture the the anus and eventually they did and they tied him up and then they decided to cut up the anus and spread it out to all of the animals in the world the tapir was really eager to get a piece and they cut out a huge piece and that's why the tapir has a larger anus than other animals who's who's sorry whose creation story is this this is the taolipang right right yeah I don't know it's a good animal story I think I prefer Andy's pelican story it just had so much to it okay there is an Inuit folktale the the title character of it was him whose penis stretches down to his knees and in the middle of the story he's attacked by a raven while he's sleeping and by the end of the story he's known as him whose whole penis barely peeps from its cave

okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James okay my fact this week is that the first woman to motorcycle from coast to coast in the United States did so with her mother in the sidecar knowingly oh no okay oh wow um no this is the mother and daughter team of Effie and Avis Hotchkiss and in 1915 they decided to go from New York to the world's fair at San Francisco but just to show it could be done really we're not exactly show why they did it Effie told one reporter that it was to demonstrate that motorcycling is perfectly good as a girl's sport and other people thought that she was just sick as she was working in Wall Street and she was sick of her clerical job and she wanted to see the world other people thought she just wanted to

go to San Francisco wasn't trying to break any records she was just trying to do it wow what about mum what do you think about why her mum went well we're not sure why her mum went according to some of the interviews at the time one of the reasons might have been that she wanted to inflate the weight of the motorcycle because she's quite a big lady and because then that would stop Effie from going too fast yeah she was really concerned with her speed wasn't she yeah Effie was it had been sort of booked a few times for she was quite famous for kind of zipping around the town yeah she was getting booked yeah so there's an idea that she did that it could be just again that she wanted to see the world because she kind of taught her into going to the Grand Canyon and to I don't

know you know Niagara Falls and places like that yeah it sounds it sounds amazing as a trip because there weren't many I mean roads were really pretty bad at the time and they had to do a lot of mending the motorbike as they went they they had to they had to have a gun they had to shoot at rattlesnakes and coyotes at various times I really like this detail of the journey they took with them a jar of water from the Atlantic Ocean so that they could pour it into the Pacific Ocean when they got to California imagine if that had ruined everything suddenly the ocean just exploded all the animals die float to the surface fuck this is why we don't let women on motorbikes at one stage they had a puncture and they they ran out of inner tube spares and so what they

did was they just got blankets and stuffed it into the wheels so they would keep going so and that was kind of how it was in those days once you got to the Midwest it was let you say no roads it was pretty hard to get anywhere yeah I like that it does sound like the mother like she was there just to slow them down um and keep you know on top of speed but also it sounds like whenever they stopped and you know had to do stuff she just remained in the side car she just wasn't interested in getting out and at one point she was taught tatting which is it's kind of like you know lace it's like weaving lace together um and so she just tatted the whole way across America just making these beautiful little pieces of yeah of fabric yeah I mean maybe

she couldn't get out she was she was a larger lady and an older lady presumably and a sidecar is quite low and maybe she was just too embarrassed to say all the way across I really can't can't stand up well they really they really struggled to find a sidecar that fit not just because of her but also they had all of the gear as well right they had absolutely tons of stuff and eventually what they called it was the bathtub which explains the size and shape of it it was a real big big because it had a jar of water in it she brought a gun with her as well which that was yeah it was standard wasn't it it's completely standard equipment for just being like traveling across America at the time I think it's part of the course now um to be honest guys yeah I'd say

that like it's a weird thing yeah of course um the following year there were sisters of Van Buren sisters who did the same thing uh but did it together a bike to cross together I don't I think with no one in the sidecar um and they did it to prove that women could be dispatch riders so that they could free up men to fight in World War one um so you know trying to help and not only were they arrested multiple times on the way for wearing men's clothes they were then not accepted into the army for wearing the arrested not not for doing anything else in America you weren't allowed to wear trousers if you're a woman yeah yeah that's what they did them for yeah but you can't wear a skirt because it blows up on a bike if one sees your pants so it's a rock

in a hard place yeah um and they did not get accepted into the army at the end so a complete waste of time and there was Alice Hula Ramsey who drove from who drove a car this was not a motorbike she was the first woman to drive a car from coast to coast she did so with two of her sisters in law and a friend they went from one to the other and the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle the next day was pretty women motorists arrive after trip across the continent and one of them was called Margaret Atwood no really not not thee but you know still cool she had a good trip Alice Ramsey she had various obstacles along the way but she wasn't really allowed to say so because the reason she was doing it was because she was driving in a Maxwell briscoe company car a Maxwell

car and the companies it was the company's idea for them to do it to say look our car can drive even a woman across America so even though it broke down various times along the way and she had to fix it herself had to wait for mechanics to come out in fact she said there was an awkward moment where um they uh had to replace a coil and they had to wait for a while for um of course when you say coil you mean part of the car the coil in the car yeah they've reproductive technology wasn't that advanced back then um but yeah the crowd the crowd surrounded her and chanted get a horse which is embarrassing get a horse love um and the horse lobby was a big one back then so another problem they found was they used guidebooks which would just be lists of landmarks to follow

so they'd say things like you know take the big oak tree get to the oak tree turn right along the white fence etc and the problem was the landmarks used to change and specifically there was a yellow house and barn in their instructions but the owner of it was a horse loyalist hated this new motor thing and so he repainted his barn red deliberately to send them off the trail that's so funny amazingly they made it when they got lost what they would do is there were telephone lines there weren't there and they would just follow whatever the telephone wires had the most wires on them they felt well that must be going towards a big town and they kind of navigated through the towns that way that's clever motorcyclists as well used to go on the railroad

tracks didn't they when they were just like well this will definitely just lead me to where yeah and it's you know i'll just move when there's a train but otherwise yeah did so are you reading about george wyman yeah i think so yeah he was the first he was the first person to take a motorbike across america 1903 this was and it was basically a bike as well it wasn't really a motorbike it was a bike which had a motor on it kind of like an e-bike basically yeah yeah um and he had a camera he had a change of clothes and a gun obviously um and it was so broken down by the end of the journey his motor worked so badly that he had to cycle the last 150 miles just pedaling his motorbike um but he cycled on railroad tracks but across the west so you know the sleepers that he was just cycling

over the sleepers bump bump bump bump but he miles and miles and miles and it's created a thing to you can do today which i really like which is called the iron butt association and it's if you cycle uh sorry if you motorcycle a thousand miles in 24 hours of riding yeah not if you saw you can't no one has ever cycled a thousand miles in 24 hours if you motorbike that you get you join the iron butt association yeah do you guys hear of the first person to walk across america no no it's great it's in fact it's someone we've mentioned on this podcast friend of the podcast i would say um he's called edward payson weston known as the wily wobbler i don't remember him he was the founder of pedestrianism and he he did all these walking challenges he would walk you

know 500 miles in five days or whatever it was 500 more and then he would walk yeah and he was the man who walked a thousand miles to turn up in california it turns out walking across so he when you sorry when you say he was a founder of pedestrianism it must be like everyone else was driving a car until he came it was it must the same way that william smelly was the father of midwifery people had walked before right but he perfected it i see perfected the form so he yeah he walked across america for the first time aged 70 and then he did it again aged 71 and 500 000 people supposedly turned up to see him arrive in new york big deal he was he was world famous just for walking but he walked across america when he was 70 which presumably would take

about a year and then he walked it at 71 took him 100 days 100 days only yeah to walk america i know he was the wily wobbler he was the wily wobbler he and then he came to britain and he walked all around britain and people went nuts he must have found that piss easy he absolutely did piece of cake he walked 5000 miles around britain in 1884 get this i love this line the royal society very eminent body announced that his feet is the greatest recorded labor that any human being has ever undertaken without injury right imagine getting that accolade the feet were his feet his feet i'm surprised you can even get 5000 miles around he must have gone right around the coast you got a webball yeah yeah you walk you walk you do them i remember when i used to live by the coast i used

to go for a run in the morning yeah and i would run for 30 minutes along the coast but because of fractal geometry that meant that i'd gone an infinite distance all right sure just watch the mathematicians there um guys we need to wrap up very soon oh really um the cannonball run do you know this the cannonball run is the speed record across america for driving um the current record is um 25 hours and 55 minutes to drive from one side to the other what um the record was beaten only four times between 2006 and 2019 and then it was beaten five times in 2020 pretty quiet yeah for everybody basically no police on the roads no cars on the roads they could just go as fast as they wanted yeah it's very illegal isn't it the average speed for

that guy fred ashmore i think it's called it's 108 miles an hour average speed yeah it's insane the amount of sort of logistics it takes to organize it because they all have kind of spot cars going ahead to say if they see any police don't they and you know exactly and he had to um he removed all the seats in the car and he got an extra special kind of gasoline tank so he could get more in and this was a rental car so afterwards he had to put it all back together i love to be the guy at the rental place who's just recording the the mileage on the car oh that's funny you rented this yesterday and it's got 3 000 miles more um the first all-female motorcycling stunts group in the uk was called the moto birds they were formed in lester in the 70s and every year they

were trying to jump over a river in lester and they always failed they could never quite get it working and then one time in the final time they tried it they really souped up their motorbike they jumped over landed on the other side of the river in the net bounced out of the net back into the river look guys we need to wrap up okay that is 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've said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin and anna you can email podcast at 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

all of our previous episodes are up there links to the rest of our nerd immunity tour is up there as well and some merchandise uh but that's it for now peter burrow thank you so much that was so much fun really appreciate you coming out and for the rest of you listening at home we'll be back again next week with another podcast we'll see you then goodbye you