No Such Thing As A Fish - 403: No Such Thing As The Buckingham Palace All-Day Breakfast

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

Live from Oxford, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss the longest baseball match, the highest wedding ceremonies, the largest carpets, and the holiest trees. 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 coming to you live from Oxford. 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 favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with fact number one and that is my fact, my fact this week is that the longest professional baseball match on record only lasted so long because the umpire's rule book was missing the bit that explained when a match should be stopped. That's amazing. I kind of think that an umpire should already know the rules by the time he's

starting to umpire the game. Yeah you would think. Halfway through he shouldn't be going I'm just going to check. Well this was unprecedented times in the baseball world so this was a match that was in April 18th 1981 it was the poor Tuckett Red Sox and they were playing the Rochester Red Wings and so these are smaller teams and a different league professional baseball players though and poor Tuckett it was played there which is in Rhode Island. Big deal for poor Tuckett because the newspaper the next day said not since the time that they had to shoot the drunken camel at the city zoo has there been this much excitement in poor Tuckett. Yeah but it was 1981 1981 so it sounds like a weird match from ages ago but quite recently really at the start of the match there

were 1700 fans watching by the time the game eventually ended which was 407 in the morning there were 20 people left watching still watching the match 20 which I feel is quite a lot. I read that some of them wear a sleep oh okay they all got given a season ticket so it paid off I think some of them got lifetime passes yeah they did that's true so it was this is the longest baseball match on the world which is eight hours and 25 minutes it really isn't that long I think what makes it long it's quite long it's it's not from a nation of cricket that's exactly because all the writing up like there was a player called Wade Bogues who was 22 years old when the match started and by the time it ended he was 23. Wade Bogues is quite famous he became quite a famous

player later but this didn't happen to like land on the you know when it went past midnight he turned 23 the thing about this match was it was eventually stopped and they then resumed the match a few months later oh you're kidding oh that's I thought it was just a midnight thing the birthday no okay but when they've carried on afterwards it took like about 18 minutes or something for them to just didn't they just have to score once basically and they did and then that's over and there's sort of thousands of people flocked because by then it was almost as big news as the drunken camel thing so the entirety of the nation practically was there for 18 minutes but Dan what's the deal with the missing page who's ripped out the crucial page yeah we don't know if it was missing we don't know if

they couldn't find it and just no one knew what to do and so there was actually someone that they were trying to call on a landline who was higher up who just wasn't near their phone also it was you know 12am heading into 4am eventually yeah so they eventually got through to him and they were like what do we do when he was like stop the fucking match what are you doing why did they why was it lasting so long do we do so what happens in baseball is you have an innings and an innings you keep going with innings is until someone scores more in that innings than the other team you get you know you do a certain number that you're supposed to do and then if it's a tie you just keep going until one team gets it's like sudden death and they just kept going nil nil nil nil

nil nil and then there was a one right and then the other team got a one and that was um it was Ray Boggs um he kind of got a home run to tie that game and he said I didn't know if the guys on my team wanted to hug me or slug me that's a great thing but Ray Boggs by the way I just want to say because he is famous but the most thing I know about him is he once consumed 107 beers in one day whoa for like charity or he was sometimes people sometimes people don't need an incentive then he was famous as big drinker but then this is the record that his friend said and he's confirmed wow but so um the match itself again it I wish we hadn't told you it was just eight hours because

when you hear the details of the match it does sound like it just went on for like a week so the accounts of the baseball players a very cold night the baseball players getting so cold that they were ripping up furniture from the dugout and burning it snapping used baseball bats in half and putting it in this bin of fire to to stay warm to keep them going if you can snap a baseball bat in half I don't think you'd need a fire I think you're fine but jump around these people are pathetic it was cold it was really cold and what that was one of the problems it was a really windy day as well and so the problem was it kept being nil nil nil because no one could get any home runs and the reason was they kept whacking it for miles and miles and the wind would just blow it

back into the stadium yeah they're playing with a boomerang it turned out yeah extraordinary game it is quite pathetic if you look at sports matches of your where they basically before all these rules were codified for all the sports and sort of mid to late 19th century they just went on for days and days and days didn't they you get football matches and rugby matches with hundreds of participants you'd have one village playing another village and they play from dawn until dusk for like four days straight it was great I think the first recorded football match ever in Sheffield in 1794 that was three days long and the match report said three days long a very good match and it felt necessary to note that although there were quite a lot of injuries no one was killed

but that's amazing because that team before that game they were called Sheffield Monday weren't they very strong but on the flip side you do get short baseball games as well and there is a record for shortest baseball game ever which was in 1916 and the match lasted for 31 minutes and yeah and that's really quick for baseball and the reason is both teams beforehand spoke to each other and realized they both had them trained to catch which was going quite no way so but the problem was for the fans who came to the match is that the game started 30 minutes early so the game ended before it was meant to start so fans rocked up and they're like this is going to be great and then they saw like the final batter or whatever and then they all went off and that's

bullshit I'm outraged for these people 105 years ago do you know the first ever baseball rule that was written down was that all players must be punctual really this is the oldest set of rules we have they're called the knickerbocker rules they were written in New York and but the thing was the teams were from New York but there wasn't much room to play in New York so they always played in New Jersey and so if you have to schlep all the way over the river to New Jersey obviously you don't want people turning up half an hour later an hour later whatever so that's why that was the first rule it was good interesting a new jersey is what these poor cold guys in the match we previously referred to need it and also the in those set of rules hitting the ball out of the stadium was a foul

so you know in baseball now really what you're trying to do is whack it all the way out in those days if you did that you would be out and that's because the stadium was right next to the Hudson River and they couldn't afford to lose all the balls so did the phrase you knocked it out of the park have a negative connotation idiot you knocked it out of the park now we've got to go and get it in the boat um there was one controversial rulebook incident which i read about and this was a guy called Earl Weaver who was manager of the Baltimore Orioles and he had a real issue with umpires so i think he was managing like 70s he hated umpires he thought none of them knew the rules and they didn't know what they were doing and he got told off loads of times for once he pulled up third base

and just walked off the pitch with it um he he wants the description was he he was told off for pecking at an umpire's chin with the beak of his baseball cap so they had a tense relationship anyway in 1979 he got in such a big fight with one of the umpires who basically hadn't called out what this guy thought was an illegal move of the oppositions that he went to the dugout he got the rulebook he marched back onto the field and he opened the rulebook and started reading from it saying look you obviously don't know the rules you idiot and the umpire got annoyed understandably and so then he started tearing the rulebook to shreds and throwing it all over the field in front of them one of the other things um early baseball they never so baseball players all have

that cool glove that we we get as kids when we're playing baseball glove yeah that's what it's called you don't mean the giant gladiator phone thing no i don't mean the audience yeah um no so those gloves but in the in the early days of baseball that was seen as a very wimpy thing to have any kind of handwear so you would just have to use your hands but that was really damaging all the players because those balls as we know very hard and they're being walloped so that was a real risk when you were a baseball player and so it was a player as far as one historian was looking and found this player called charles c weight who was the first person who wore a glove but because he was so scared of being made fun for it he wore his skin tone color as the glove so he thought at

that distance they might just think in the crowd he's got slightly big hands but just one big hand yeah yeah um just on the gloves and the catching and throwing yeah so the world record for throwing and catching eggs was set by a couple of baseball players from new zealand i guess they're very practiced at it called nick hornstein and ricky pieway in 20 is that like i throw an egg to you and you have to catch and you have to be as far away from me as possible exactly does it matter how the egg is cooked it does come on that would be very frisbee a fried egg come on that's a challenge it's 93.6 meters sounds boiled which is pretty it was not it was a raw egg and it was very impressive and this is at the the world egg throwing federation which is based in swat swat in england

we know where it's based sorry anyway it sounds like an incredible party the world egg throwing championship so i was reading an account of it and what i'm just going to read you what happened on the day former champ norm fowler of peterborough won the russian egg roulette no explanation in this article of what that is well then the target accuracy contest throwing at male model joel hicks was won by tina from cambridge with two shots to the groin listen we need to move on to our next fact it is time for fact number two and that is anna my fact this week is that when acorn woodpeckers fight each other the rumor spreads through the community and other acorn woodpeckers turn up to watch this is so cool so they're really social

they're the most social woodpeckers because a lot of woodpeckers is a solid tree i'm sure you know and they love this spectator sport and they have these amazing battles over their territory their trees their granary trees which are where they stockpile all their acorns and basically the trees are guarded by a group of males who are all brothers and then a group of females who are all sisters and they're all chagging each other as well as guarding the tree but they're not brothers and sisters with each other so there's no incest going on anyway when one gender dies out when one sex dies out then there's a vacancy and so you know a bunch of female acorn woodpeckers will want to swoop in to claim that tree and these massive fights break out between the

different claimants to the tree and yeah people come from miles around not when i say people i mean woodpeckers i think you've identified too closely with your research area this week anna yeah that's amazing and they'll spend they'll travel for a couple of miles and they'll spend like an hour a day just watching this big fight and they'll go back home and i think it's useful they think because you can pick up social information yeah yeah yeah spy out potential mates but they leave their bit of tree that they're protecting in order to see this fight and it feels like that's the next little trick of evolution that you need a fake a fight and then send in your troops all just like one acorn woodpecker who kind of goes around when everyone

else is at the fight just stealing their acorns exactly or claiming the trees you know oh yeah yeah the fight in the system the fights they last for a long time they last for about a day sometimes i know the woodpeck the audience has come pretty much has last for five days so well it's true pathetic um yeah this family strategy they have is pretty uh interesting the sort of incest avoidance thing they have because you get a breeding pair and then you get a load of babysitter let's say a load of babysitter males okay who are the offspring of the breeding pair got it then the breeding female will die okay but that means that there has to be a new female however the previous the helper males the babysitter males previously couldn't breed

because the breeding female was their mother okay so but now there are unequal terms with their dad because there's going to be a new breeding female yeah so now there is just a parity so they're all going to breed with the new female so finally and this is good for obviously for the babysitter males who now can breed but it's also very interesting because it means these birds have an awareness of the relations of other birds to each other yeah it's called triadic awareness and it's it's not a woody woodpecker though is it does it make do we know if it makes it an awkward father-son dynamic it's like if your parents divorce and then your dad marries a step mum then you also shag the step mum it's it and that often creates tension i think it does

it's just why i wonder if it's the same yeah but it's so yeah like that family dynamic is so weird it's also the case that a few mums will also live in the same nest right and when that happens and they're having eggs they try and synchronize eggs so that they don't have one child arriving before the other and what they'll do is if one of the mothers has an egg they'll knock the egg out just to make sure that that's no longer i think they might eat it and yeah yeah and they'll yeah and they'll get the the young instance if there are two breeding females exactly and they haven't synchronized when they're having their eggs yeah the other one will push out or eat the egg of the first one yeah until they get it right until they get around or statistically feed it to the mother

often you know you've laid an egg and then your rival female pushes it out and then comes and feeds it back to you but it's all because this bizarre setup where they have up to seven males and up to three females in every crew isn't it so you've got these three rival females at all times constantly laying and killing each other's kids and laying killing each other's kids and it can be weeks it cannibalism for weeks and then you time it right and then happy families again yeah it's like when your periods are synchronizing when women live together it takes a few months to get in sync yes and you kill each other's periods until they all arrive at the same time yeah apart from of course that's a myth yeah it's a myth women's periods don't synchronize is it oh yeah you keep claiming it's

a myth but i what am i let's move on no don't come on then please see well my research has shown in the houses that i live in that there's something to it hundreds of thousands of houses i'm sure i have to move a lot of times to different houses particularly when they found out of my period experiment i was conducting the um the fights are pretty violent though because um i read one place that said this the birds basically have spears for mouths and you'll see after the fights that the birds will have eyes gouged out blood all over them they'll fall to the floor holding each other's legs so they can't fly and they'll kind of crash to the ground so they're pretty violent wow you can see why people go to watch yes by people again they make a sound that goes like waka waka oh like

fozzy bear fozzy bear or Shakira were the only two i could pick up when will they duet um what did woody woodpecker his was like yeah exactly yeah is that in anyway that's pretty that's joe was quite good actually not bad so the the voice of woody woodpecker was a woman called grace lance she's also known by her stage name grace stafford and what happened was they had another person who did the voice i think it might be melblanc but it was someone famous yeah he was the original i think yeah and then he decided he didn't want to do it anymore and she said well i'll do it i do a really good impression not as good as dan schreiber but it's quite good uh and her husband who was producing it said nah i don't think so i think we're gonna we're gonna tender for it

and so she then did an anonymous audition tape and sent it in with all the other audition tapes and he still chose her woody woodpecker cool um and for the first something like 10 years or so eight years in fact that she did it she didn't have her name on the credits and that was because she thought people would be disillusioned if they knew woody was voiced by a woman right wow as opposed to a woodpecker because i would be devastated as a child um the trees are incredible aren't they you've got to look up the granary trees of acorn woodpeckers which they mostly keep in california oregon area basically look like a tree that surface is covered in crumpets they look incredible they look like you know people who are scared of like little holes yeah they're called trypophobia or

something like that and they would hate these because it's just loads of loads of little holes and each one is shoved an acorn into it yeah and they test them they'll shove an acorn in and then they'll practice trying to get it out and if it's too easy to extract the acorn from the little hole they've made they abandon the hole that's going to be too too easy to steal but they it keeps changing because the holes always change size because trees change size trees are always growing and shifting a bit and acorns dry out so they will change size when they do so it's a nightmare yeah so they spend all of their bloody time moving they're they're it's not funny they're up to 50 000 holes in a tree guys guys come on please take it seriously 50 000 acorns in a tree it's just you and your brothers

and your three weird wives and you you have to it takes 20 minutes to make one hole there are 50 000 holes in the tree and you're constantly moving the acorn to a better fitting hole it's awful i would want to die in a fight um okay look we need to move on to our next fact it is time for fact number three and that is james okay my fact this week is that the world's largest carpet museum is shaped like a giant roll of carpet for people at home we've just put a picture of it on the screen and i think that undeniably looks like a giant roll of carpet yeah it's awesome it's really amazing yeah where is it this is in Baku in Azerbaijan and this is something that i noticed when i was reading about a carpet war between Azerbaijan and Armenia um on top of the actual

war they're having but the carpet war they're not the most lethal weapons are they no but you can carpet bomb somewhere i suppose yeah i think you've got confused um so these are carpets that come from an area called Nagano Karabakh which is a disputed territory between the two places Armenian weavers are claiming that the Azerbaijan government is appropriating their culture because basically most people most historians not all of them but most historians think that these are Armenian-based carpets um but Azerbaijan has built a massive museum and most of it says no they're ours oh i didn't know that this was so political uh museum it's quite political museum yeah um apparently there's some Azerbaijani officials who say there is no such thing as Armenian carpets

no such thing that's pretty that's pretty ballsy to say Armenia doesn't even make carpets i know well they they claim that the Armenians stole the Azeri like tactics and you know stuff like that and um the UNESCO has said that Azerbaijani carpets are a masterpiece of intangible heritage but a lot of people pointed to the large donation that the government made to UNESCO just before they made that so this is very controversial and i know from me saying that it sounds like i'm on the Armenian side you know you can make your own decision but don't decide wrong James you just absolutely torched our Azerbaijan tour next year so thanks a lot for that um wow and this museum yeah it's quite new if you look in Baku i think a few of you will

know this because like they've had football tournaments and stuff there but they built a whole load of new stuff in Baku quite recently um but one thing about i noticed when looking in the interior of this is that all the floors are paved with marble that doesn't seem to doesn't seem to be a single carpet that's not behind the perspex so you don't want to ruin them that's a sign that you're treasuring your carpets yeah i guess because they're really i mean there is much wall hangings as for floors until pretty recently aren't they yeah i've always thought we should bring back the wall carpet yes i like it yeah it's gone out went out of fashion a long time ago pretty like probably turn of the 20th century maybe before i've got a carpet on a wall so went out of

fashion maybe 200 years ago actually have you really only yeah why it's actually sound sound proofing yeah maybe that's what they were doing recording all their podcasts back in the day maybe i like i was reading um there's Turkish carpets rather than having a new Turkish carpet that feels like it's just really bold in its colors and really bright getting a more antiquey feel to one is is something that people chase more and in the way to make that happen that they do in Turkey is that they actually take the carpets out for months at a time and just lay them out in fields so if you go on google earth and you zoom in on turkey there is whole fields yeah of thousands of carpets that are just laid out in the open because it's very dry um and they just sit there and it's

these these carpet layers who understand fading so well that someone can say i want it faded to like this kind of degree and they're like leave it to me and they go and get the carpet when they know the time is right when it's when it's faded yeah and it looks really antiquey and they dust it off and that's when you get your carpet oh interesting yeah that's really cool is it no i know i i do believe you it's just that when you say weird shit like that it's off about i know the way you looked at me it was like is that true james is it true prove me wrong um so did you hear that in 2012 scientists at the university of Manchester made a magic carpet which is very exciting yeah not a classic mage mage carp they made one which it basically it can tell you when you're gonna fall

over which is very useful oh so it doesn't fly either it's not flying it doesn't fly no no no they're working on that but this is very useful they're working on that they're not working on that obviously they're not working on that it's the next obvious step isn't it yeah no but it's how does it do that does it just have those horrible rolls in it that trip you up and then a sign on the other side that goes ha ha told you'd fall over quite the reverse no quite the reverse it's stuffed with clever fiber optic cable and that kind of thing and basically it builds up a profile of your movement as you're walking around so it's not like can you get amazing internet it basically monitors you and if you if your movement deteriorates even slightly it's for

people who are elderly and can yeah can tell you're gay and if you're gay so it can't tell you you're about to fall over now but it can say you're about to fall over soon so look out for that you can imagine an alarm that went off when you're about to fall over would actually make you more likely to fall over 100 yeah and you know that there's people at the Harvard University that are working on a magic carpet same question flying one this is an actual flying one and they have made it but it's the size of a banknote and it's only not 0.1 millimeters thick okay so who's flying on it like a cool yeah that would be so exciting that would be awesome right and they think that they could possibly make it bigger in the future but you'd need so much energy and you'd need to

make it ripple so what it is it it's like a really tiny bit of almost like paper it ripples and ripples and ripples and then the force that these ripples cause can make it kind of just go up off the ground but they can also make it go forward so it kind of is quite cool but it's I suppose we're a few years away from that yeah yeah yeah that's a long way to go that's very cool can we go back to the countries that lead the world in carpet making because I don't think we've covered them all there are a lot okay so Turkmenistan is a big one has the Guinness World Record for the biggest carpet in the world which by the way is really beatable if anyone wants to it's 14 meters wide and 21.5 meters long what which feels shit and it wasn't even made by that many people daily

Sabah which is a Turkish news site said it was made by a total of 40 people including one man it is like historically it's like a women's role to make these carpets isn't it yeah pretty much everywhere that seems to be the unifying thing across all of these carpet countries he's always the women who do it he's smashed through the carpet floor it's great well done him but Turkmenistan's national flag has carpet on it does it which I don't think any of the others do so I think that's winning but yeah in 1992 when I think they became independent from soviets they started designing their national flag and if you look at it it's really nice flag it's green with a red stripe and it has five carpet like motifs on it they're called gulls and they're just little carpet patterns

oh it's passive the flags not made of carpet material does it have tassels because if not I'm interested yeah it doesn't have tassels and if it was made of carpet it would need a fucking strong wind to fly it oh yeah good point um can we talk about weather spoons carpets please briefly please okay sure okay every weather spoon so about 900 in the uk has its own special carpet and this wasn't known about until about 2015 known about in public I must have been known about Tim Martin the boss he probably knew he probably was laughing up his sleeve at all about everyone's always so pissed when they leave they never remember the carpets that's the trick there was a guy called Kit Kales who started a blog about the floor coverings of every single weather spoon in the country

and he assumed they'd be identical when he started so I'm not sure why he was blogging about it but all right he found out and then he started the blog it doesn't matter that each one has their owner they're often themed to the local area it's really exciting so there's a britannia pub in Plymouth which is slightly cruise chip based you know he wrote Kit Kales he wrote an entire book about weather spoons pub carpets and the sun covered it with the headline the rug prat is this britain's saddest hobby is that is that a pun on the rug rats it's a pun on the rug rat yeah yeah yeah yeah I know well he was the person the original people that made those carpets were the people that x minster yes yeah yeah I've gone a bit deep on

this one yeah yeah yeah so they they're the ones who have the royal decree warrants warrants in order to make carpets for the royal family so yeah weather spoons and then and then they stopped making it because people started coughing but Buckingham Palace if you have been inside it's all weather spoons yeah that's what's taking up all the space the ground floor is just a really big weather spoon I tell you what the Buckingham Palace all day breakfast is off do you know one very famous red carpet that we all are aware of is the Hollywood red carpet that we see at the Oscars every single year and I didn't realize that there's so much mystery around the red carpet at Hollywood so when they when they make it they make it in a mill in Dalton in America and they

don't tell you which mill it's being made in that's all we know we don't know it's got its own special color academy red okay they bring it there in a truck it's very mysterious they lay it down they have people in tuxedos with little portable vacuums just a vacuum at every spot and make sure that the carpet's doing fine and then when the when the ceremony's done they pick it up and they burn it and it's only ever used once it's just a big mystery and they make a whole new carpet the next time why do they burn it because they don't want the material they don't want so a few people have stolen bits of material from it and they've gone on ebay and they're really worried that it's kind of like the coca-cola recipe they're going to discover the recipe for the for the

it's a red carpet no it's not red it's a magic carpet it's kind of slightly off red it's more like burgundy yeah it's burgundy they let people film the ceremony you can see what color it is you can see the color but you can't see what it's made of it's made of carpet it doesn't matter i think although i like the conspiracy theory reasoning i think it's more likely that you can't reuse it because the next hollywood year it's gonna look like crap and it's 152 meters long so there's very little other use you can put it to there's hardly anyone who's got used for 152 meters long carpet i think it might be maybe it's just made of something really awesome like bill murray's back hair or something yeah exactly yes you know people used to cover their carpets with

other carpets to protect them called druggets oh yeah i've got one on my wall yeah your wall is seven carpets thick um yeah until the 19th century druggets which are just cheaper carpets you put on top of your carpet for everyday use and then if a guest came you whipped the carpet off and then you had the proper one underneath that's the sad thing andy has a drugget dealer don't you okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is that the world's first ever hot air balloon wedding was meant to happen in 1865 but the officiating priest refused to go up so the couple had the first ever hot air balloon honeymoon instead oh yeah it's uh it's just a nice story about a couple called mary west jenkin and john f buoynton they wanted to marry in a balloon

they thought it'd be fun and the reverend said no uh he said it was too unholy not not appropriate enough so uh they they just went up after the wedding instead but it was a very exciting ceremony this wedding so there were 6 000 people there which they were mostly there for the balloon they were there for the balloon yeah they were in central park so they did get married in the end but they got married on the ground and how much do you suspect that the reverend was just too much of a pussy to go up in the balloon it's possible isn't it there was uh the boltomar daily commercial of the 10th of november 1865 this was a couple of days later they said that the official story was that the priest had to get the last trained philadelphia okay but then they did say

the actual reason probably was that the reverend gentleman accustomed to operate souling in mundane matrimony had backed out at the 11th hour right i wonder how much a history like speaking of the shortest baseball match before has been influenced by people needing to get trains yeah quite a lot what time is it now and the reverend by the way was a guy called thomas dewitt talmadge and one reason why i'm not sure whether he was scared of going up is he was a massive publicity stunt guy and they said that he was the most famous clergyman in the world including hopefully over 30 he was really really famous he thought that no one should be able to read novels uh and you're also when was this this was in the 1860s people frowned on novels back then didn't they you're supposed to read in

greek he said that anyone who read novels shouldn't be allowed to work in an office a store a home a shop or a factory where are you going to work in a field in a field yeah did you get one of dan's magic jobs drying carpets out for a living it's not it's not it's real yes yes but this guy who there are two people who got married it was late you say mary west jenkins and dr john f boynton and his doctorate was in geology and he decided that as well as doing his wedding up in the hot air balloon he also was going to make several electrical experiments while he was up there cool so he was like mixing business with pleasure yeah she must have been slightly annoyed as he set up the cathode the balloon was an interesting one uh well the owner of the balloon was an

interesting man he was called thaddeus low and he had been a spy in the civil war but a balloon spy right yeah it's so hard to spy on a balloon you'd think it's quite very hard yeah but yeah you're right he he had proposed balloons for use in the civil war which they actually were in the americans of a war and um so what would what would he do as a spy though with the you would you know look around oh he'd be up there he'd be up there he'd come back and be like they've got carpets everywhere yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah he demonstrated it for george uh george for george washington who had died about 40 years earlier sorry for the white house he'd gone up in washington with a telegraph key which linked him to the white house so he was able to radio down to the white

house um you mentioned george washington by mistake for no reason yeah no reason oh thank you thank you for picking me up on that um the first actual marriage that did happen eventually in a balloon was in 1874 it was mary elizabeth walsh and charles m colton and it was on top of the pt barnum manhattan hypnodrome that they had there was always a balloon on the top of there and it used to go up all the time and so they got married on there and one of the people who was on there who was basically barnum's balloon guy was called washington harrison donaldson and he was named washington after george washington hence the connection um and he was a daredevil and he was amazing so he used to do high wire racks and so on and then when balloons became a thing

he did a thing whereby he would go up in a balloon but he got rid of the basket and he would have a bar just a bar where he would put his legs over and go up and he would start doing basically trapeze style acts where he was flipping around and so on and when he got very high he would let the uh the gas go down of the fire and he would come back down and as he was coming back down he would drop a human dummy from it which everyone would see suddenly a plummeting human and it would land on the ground and inside were business cards and flyers for his act that's amazing and so yeah so he used to go around doing this act and eventually pt barnum saw him and employed him and what he used to do in the middle of manhattan would go up in this balloon before shows and when

he was up there he would just throw barnum business cards and so on so new york constantly littered i think the balloon was called pt barnum as well yeah it was yeah um well i thought these guys are pretty brave actually because the wedding was postponed by one day because the balloon burst the day before it's a good way to get your wedding paid for because that was it was the idea of the couple the first wedding and it was basically a way to get pt barnum to fund their whole wedding and pay their dowry because it was such good publicity and also because these became really popular if you look through new searches of like the late 19th century balloon weddings were the thing and it was such a good way to get guests to your wedding if you didn't have mates because

thousands of people would come and sure they're there for the balloon but the photos just say i'm a seriously popular dude um and there was one actually i read about one in 1884 this was in pennsylvania where the couple failed to arrive they freaked out and realized they were too scared to do it and all the promoters were going to have to refund the crowd because you'd be a paying customer as well as a guest and they decided they weren't going to do this so instead the balloon's owner and his assistant like staged a marriage they posed as the couple they got married to each other in this balloon went up in the air under assumed names but they only found out four years later it was actually legally binding did they stay did they fall in love i don't really want to tell you the

answer to that and because i think it'll ruin your night okay don't tell me don't say anything okay we'll leave it there there was one in 1888 this was a wedding between margaret buckley and edward t davis 40 000 people came to that wedding to see them go up on the hot air balloon unfortunately the balloon then landed in a swamp but it kept kind of moving along the swamp so they were dragged for two miles clinging to the ropes of the balloon and they finished the rest of the trip by train so good um i have a favorite hot air balloon love story this is an account from someone online my husband proposed to me on a private hot air balloon ride that's not the story the pilot told us that one time he had five couples on a larger ride and one of the guys decided to propose to

his girlfriend by having a big sign on the ground where the landing saying will you marry me but he didn't put a name on the sign all five couples were dating and all five of the women thought this is the best proposal i've ever received in my life four of them were disappointed no would you i mean i think you'd roll with it wouldn't you if it's a third date it's too you know you can't roll with it it's got to be someone's you can't say oh yeah that's mine and have the other bloke next you go no it's not it's mine anyway there is actually there was a service that offers uh it's called dnd ballooning i think sadly the company's shut down now but it exists under the dragon's ballooning uh you look too excited about that but no um i think dnd is

just people who run the company it's in california and it offers mile high balloon trips and basically what it promises is comfort and discretion for a couple it says you've got in your basket the privacy of an enclosed dome tent with your own private view as our discreet pilot ascends to one mile we provide a cd player you provide the music blankets pillows and imagination and it lasts an hour and an hour an hour five minutes in seconds like that oh come on please sir we haven't actually taken off yet oh my god um we're gonna have to wrap up very shortly can i tell you about one balloon hero yeah yeah will he coppins heard of him will he or won't he go on he will he will he will and he did he was a fighter pilot in the first world war belgian man very brilliant at shooting down

observation balloons right which were major feature recently large target look they were very well defended all right he was so good at it they were called balloon busters the pilots who did it he shot down nearly 40 balloons during the war which is really big potatoes okay the german the german army was so angry about willy coppins they specifically tried to kill him with a booby trapped balloon they put up a balloon with explosives but get this once he was being shot at from a german balloon in his plane and he coolly just flew up and around and parked on top of the balloon what till it landed and then just gently slid his plane off and flew away listen if you're going to give me shit about carpets being laid out in target yeah no way buster i'm i'm a bit

skeptical i have to say never thought i'd say this but i'm down here that's an abrupt break that's an emergency break for a plane to land on a balloon no it's a very soft landing surely no it's the softest landing you could possibly have if we think about you'd need a vertical takeoff and landing plane right like most planes kind of come into a runway so it might have been a very long balloon that he was like they had those long balloons that he was landing on that's the wrong way a zeppelin a zeppelin yeah any further questions please no look i hate to cut this off but we got a train to catch so that's it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you'd 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 you can go to our website no such thing as a fish dot com all of our previous episodes are up there we've also got the link to all the rest of the tour dates of this nerd immunity tour oxford thank you so much that was so much fun thank you for coming out being with us here tonight really appreciate it and we will be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye