No Such Thing As A Fish - 441: No Such Thing As Spying With Ritz Crackers

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

James, Anna, Andrew and Dan discuss emu eggs, exciting eclipses, musical machines and medical mishaps. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshinski and Andrew Hunt and Murray and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our 4 favourite facts from the last 7 days and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number 1 and that is James. Ok my fact this week is that in the 1930 World Cup semi-final between the USA and Argentina, the American medic accidentally chlorophened himself and had to be carried off.

It's very funny and it raises for me a lot of other questions like who was he trying to chlorophen? Is that legitimate tactic? Was it like a classic like movie where the bank robber or whoever is trying to steal someone puts the rag over them, was he like holding his face? There is so much wrong with this fact I think and we might go into all of it but it's basically it's on the FIFA website so I think it counts as a fact for us but I can't see it mentioned in any contemporary part and chloroform doesn't really work like that.

It's an incredible self drive by on your own face. So he was called Jack Cole, is that right? And there are a few versions of events on there so one is that he ran on the pitch trying to help another player and then his thing broke in his bag and he had chloroform in his bag and then that broke and then the fumes raised and knocked him out. That's one version, another version is that he went on to the pitch to argue with the referee about something and threw a bottle of chloroform onto the ground in anger and then it came up and a fume stopped him out.

That's a red card, that's a red card from the head. The earliest I've managed to trace the story back is to a journalist called Brian Glanville and a lot of people think he's the greatest football writer of all time, he's really really famous but he was born in 1931 so he couldn't have been at this match. But it is on the FIFA website but the other thing is if you look at contemporary reports from the newspapers at the time it's not mentioned and I found an interview with Jack Cole which was done about 15 years later and he doesn't mention it in that interview. You might not though, to be fair, you could remember.

It's amazing, the self-knockout is just phenomenal right, like it's one of those things where you don't know what to do when you see someone do it and Ash who wrote the theme tune for our song, he once was in a bar fight, it's very weird, exactly, you can't quite imagine it. He's so zen, so this was I guess just pre-zen, just pre-zen Ash and he went for the first punch against these other people, he took the swing and as he took the swing he took a step forward, slipped, fell on the ground, knocked himself out and that was end of fight. Is that his only ever fight?

Yeah, he KO'd himself on the first go. So he actually has a 100% record of knocking someone out. One win, one loss in his only match. The last I found this is a book called Angels with Dirty Faces by Jonathan Wilson, which is the best book that I've ever read on South American football and he mentions it in that. It's like such a big qualifier, like this is the best book I've ever read, is what they'll use on the camera. This generally, so we haven't really properly said, but 1930 World Cup was the very first

ever World Cup and it was set up because the Olympics weren't taking football seriously and they weren't having it as recognized as an official sport. So this was set up in South America, but as a result of that distance, it meant that a lot of countries around the world didn't come and play because the journey there and the journey back as well as the subsequent tournament would mean they were out of play for like three months, which didn't work with their local tournaments and so on. Also expensive for a lot of countries. And also the home countries, so England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, they thought that

actually really they were more important than FIFA and so they had their own kind of home nations tournament and they didn't really see this as a proper World Cup, so they weren't in it. So I read that the American team who were playing in this semi-final was mostly made up of English and Scottish professional football. Mostly Scottish, yeah. I did account. I made it to be five Scottish players and one English player.

It's a lot. It is a lot. It's more than you're normally allowed. I don't know what you're talking about. I think. Well, and Cole was Irish, I think, wasn't he? Yeah. In fact, he was Irish, brought up in Scotland and he'd just gone to America to track down

his father who'd run out on him and he found himself in America and they were like, God, are you from the British Isles? Yeah, would you mind playing for us? Wow. But it's weird because America were quite good then, so I don't know why they had to poach. This was like a heyday for American football and it sort of plummeted after this because of the football wars or the soccer wars, I think, where they, it's so unexciting.

It's the most boring war ever. It's like there were two bodies trying to manage football who were competing with each other. It was like the USFA and the ASL and they fought so much that everyone was like, well, this is tedious. You're all arguing so much. And the depression came, which didn't help. So and the American team, they were known by the French as the shot potters because

they were so big. They were like really big, strong players, but they got battered in this game. They lost 6-1 to Argentina. And one of the reasons might have been because one of the players got a broken leg. Yeah. The first half. I so don't believe this. Look, I've seen people with broken legs and it's really painful.

It was guy called Ralph Tracy and apparently afterwards he was diagnosed with that, but I reckon it was a tiny chipped bone. You saying he played on? Yeah. He played on the whole game. He got broken leg. Yeah. Really early on.

It was really weird because there was another player, Andy Old, who ripped his lip open. And the problem was is that there were no sort of proper rules about how you could treat the wound. And so he played the rest of a match with a rag in his mouth to sort of stem the bleeding. Officially, that rag had got chlorophyll on it. Yeah. And so basically they were a good team, but they basically got beaten from pillar to post. And in the end, by the second half, they really were just hobbling around and the Argentinians

absolutely battered them. Yeah. Although quite nice that they, because it was 6-1 and America scored their goal in the last 89th minute, I think. Did they? Yeah. Well, you think kind of what's the point? Why are you still trying at that point?

That's great. It's a bit of honor. Yeah. In the final, which was Argentina versus Uruguay, Uruguay won that final and in Argentina, they kicked off. The Uruguayan embassy was attacked. They did a morning parade through Buenos Aires and two people were reportedly shot for not saluting because the parade went past.

Oh my God. Amazing. And the one newspaper said that since they'd lost Argentina, probably it meant that international football tournaments were a bit useless, so they should just never do them ever again. And eight players from that Argentinian team never played for the country ever again. Wow. This feels like it's about, you know, in a marriage where you have a massive fight about where you keep the spoons.

It's not about the spoons, really. I don't think it's about the spoons. With me, it actually always is about where you get spoons, because I think it's a very clear place where they should be. Andy's like to his wife, you've had an affair, she's like, this is about the spoons, isn't it? Yes, it's about the spoons. Yeah, there was a ref called John Langanus and he's pronounced Longanus.

Longanus. Sorry. I imagine that's what the fans sung to him. Yeah, John Longanus. Longanus. He was a Belgian, right? Yes. And he was the head ref of the, I'd say he was the one who officiated the final.

And he was really worried about the tensions running really high, as James says, like even post the match. So one of the Argentinian players, Luis Monti, he got a death threat sent and the referee demanded a quick escape route to get back to his ship. He wanted, not a secret tunnel, but as near as damn it, a safe passage. Exactly, because he thought whatever call he makes and this if he gets it. So Longanus asked for a safe passage to get back. Yeah, so I mean, it did sound like it was a bit of an intense atmosphere.

And there was a controversial goal in that final as well. So yeah. Well, Luis Monti, for instance, he was like the hard man of the Argentinian defense, but he did get this death threat. And afterwards there was a suggestion in the Argentinian media that it was one of the Uruguayan players who drank him up with a silly voice and said he was going to kill him. And but in the end he still played. He didn't think he was going to play, but all the way through he would kind of in great

training, grace, he ate himself with a crowd. So whenever a Uruguayan player went down, he would sort of go and help them up and stuff like that. In the hope of the guy who was going to kill him, holding the revolver somewhere in the crowd thought, oh, he is a nice guy actually. After all. Yeah. I'll put it away.

One of the other things about the crowd that was there, so it was 90,000 plus. But that was only five days into the tournament because their main stadium, the Estadio Centenario, was not ready in time and because of the weather as well would rain. So there were two other smaller stadiums where they ended up going to as well. Yeah, it was the grass hadn't grown properly, right? And so they thought that the studs would kind of dig it up. The cleats for American listeners would kind of dig up the ground and was this because of the weather?

Because one thing I read was that it had rained for 92 consecutive days before the first game of this world cup. Wow. 92 days. Which is... Oh, imagine the state of their reservoirs. Lovely. Yeah, gorgeous.

Lovely. Very green lawns. Yeah. We could do with 92 days of rain right now. Right, it's like that. Do you remember that summer when Rihanna's umbrella was in the charts and it rained for like three months non-stop? Yes.

Yeah, yeah. So why the song did so well? There was a suggestion of that. Yeah, I remember it was like they had real problems at Wimbledon because they couldn't play any of the matches because it just rained non-stop. And is there a suggestion that Rihanna did some Cloudseed? I think the label did. Yeah.

She probably didn't know about it. She flew the Cessna herself, dropping the chloroform. Yeah. No, thank you. I've got a sample here and let's try it. Enough of your chat up line, something. So yeah, chloroform is really, really interesting stuff in that. I just love the story of how it was first used.

It was first sort of properly introduced to surgery in the UK by a doctor called James Simpson. And before that, they were using ether, but the dose is very hard to get right. And it doesn't, you know, it smells horrible and all of this. So, you know, chloroform was an improvement. And in 1847, Simpson had two other doctors who were called Keith and Duncan, their surnames, I think, round to dinner. And they decided, he said, look, I've got this stuff, do you want to try it?

And they tried it, got lightheaded, laughed a lot, and then all just fell unconscious. And then someone came into the room and they were just out. I imagine one of them went, your surname's also a first name. Yeah, exactly. They actually had witnesses for the whole thing. It sounds like they had really fun parties, these guys. And they'd spent an entire summer trying to find a better replacement for ether. So they spent an entire summer inhaling various concoctions of gases around their dining room

tables, collapsing and having fits and stuff. And then they remembered, I've got this thing called chloroform that a friend told me about. I think it's under some waste paper, picked it out, they tried it. And, yeah, apparently, unwanted hilarity seized the party for a while. And their conversation was of unusual intelligence for a few minutes. The first woman who took it was actually at the party that night, because there were family and friends there who were finding them also charming and entertaining. And so once they'd sampled it a few times, the guests, I had to say, well, can we ever go?

And she apparently gallantly took her turn and then fell asleep while crying, I'm an angel. I'm an angel. Oh, OK. Actually, I think she wasn't the first woman to take chloroform. No, sorry, maybe wasn't. So this is that so it had been discovered. It was discovered about three times by three different people in the same month or so. OK.

And a little I should say, a lot of my facts, there's come from a book called chloroform by Linda Stratman, which is great and rollicking. Absolute knockout. Again, it's for the cover. So Samuel Guthrie was a doctor in Massachusetts, and he thought what he had was this thing called Dutch liquid, which there was an existing recipe for, which involved chlorine and, you know, chlorate ether. So he had made it, but he kind of accidentally distilled it one extra time, or there was

an extra ingredient in the mix when he made it. So he had chloroform without knowing it. But because he thought it was a known substance, which was already being used for medicine, he just kept some in his lab and would distribute bottles to friends and family. And his daughter, who was eight year old Cynthia, would often run into the lab, dip her fingers in the liquid, taste it, and that was just a little treat for her. On one occasion, she took too much of it and she fell over completely asleep. And so she was probably the first person to be knocked out by chloroform.

Wow, what a claim. Yeah. And Stratman writes, it is probable that he simply assumed she was drunk. It's all right, everyone. It's all right. My eight year old's drunk. She's not not to self out with chloroform. Don't worry. And what do we use it for today? Is it used still to put patients under?

No, we use it for manufacturing. I think it's used to make Teflon and some other stuff. It's sort of a primer ingredient for Teflon, yeah. Right. But no, it sort of fell out of use. It started falling out of use in the 19th century because people started to question. It kills people. Yeah.

Also, I think it gets a bad press. Like it kills. They did a massive study and found that it killed one in 2,500 of the patients that it had been used on in the 19th century, which is not great, but it's not terrible for 19th century medicine for 19th century. And then there was another study which found it could like four in a thousand. But I think the four in a thousand one was done in the Civil War when everyone was quite injured anyway, so you're not at your best.

Yeah. What a journey it's had, you know, in terms of its repurposed uses. Like if it was on, who do you think you are? And you were like, your ancestor used to like kidnap people, you know? And then you're... Is that something to be proud of? Well, in movies, that's the classic thing. It's used to fumigate grain.

That's it. Yeah, yeah, it's a fun use of it. It actually feels like you've fallen from grace, from the great glory days of kidnapping and curing people in the Civil War. Settle down and get a proper job. You're like a farmer, now you're in like the cooking industry with Teflon. We don't know that anyone was really kind of kidnapped using it, right? Because it's really hard to use.

Yeah. We might have said this before, but basically you'd need the exact correct dosage. Otherwise, they would just feel a bit woozy or they would die. You'd have to get the exact thing in between. And also it would take around five minutes. It'd take minutes. Did it even happen in movies or is that one of those missing memories? No, it does. It happens in a Sherlock Holmes story.

It happens in Dickens, I think. Or Wilkie Collins, I think, maybe? That's weird, because Dickens' wife used chloroform to give birth. So Dickens was well into chloroform, right? And it's in one of his books, and I can't remember which one it is, unfortunately. But it was in one of his books, but he doesn't call it chloroform because whenever the book was set, it was before chloroform had been invented. So he talks about this kind of special thing, which knocks someone out really quickly,

but he doesn't specifically say it's chloroform because he was so into chloroform. We're pretty sure that's what he meant. That's great. Like you say, it is quite hard to administer. And it does have this really dark Goldilocks phase where it works. And then on either side, it's a bit useless. But even so, there was this massive spate of crimes reported in the 40s. As soon as it became popular.

1840s. In the 1840s. Yeah, the 40s. Sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're ashamed. When I say the 90s, I'm usually referring to the 1790s. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Your 90s club night. How's it going, then? There's a lot of baroque music or something. A lot of ether, a lot of fun, actually. But yeah, there were things, there were all these stories about, you know, a handkerchief would be waved in the face of someone and they would collapse or a lot of stories of women coming up behind men and putting a handkerchief to their face. Women chloroforming men.

Yes. Blow for equality. I know, score, right? But there was one doctor, actually, who got so annoyed by all these stories by, I think, the 1850s or 60s. Because he said, this doesn't make any sense. It takes minutes and minutes for it to work. That he eventually soaked a handkerchief in chloroform and waved it in front of his aunt's face

until he was absolutely exhausted of shaking to prove that it couldn't do anything. Oh, that's great. Was he proving that to his aunt? Maybe, though, I don't know the argument that came before that, when she said... Some consumer spoons. Yeah. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact is that there's a group of astronomers called Solar Wind Sherpas

who drag their equipment around the world to watch every single solar eclipse. Wow. Cool. I think these guys are so cool. They've been going since 1995, so they visited every single eclipse since then. Eclipses happen. Total eclipses we're talking about once every 18 months. It was set up by this woman called Shadia Refai Habal, who's a scientist,

and, yeah, they take all their equipment and they go and watch eclipses, and they want to see the corona, which is the bit when you see a totality in an eclipse. You've got that little bit of ring of light around it, and that's basically the stuff that the sun is emitting, and it's always too bright. The rest of the sunlight is too bright for us usually to see it. It must be hard for them to Google corona these days. It was always a struggle with the beer,

but I think the last few years has made it a lot worse. And so how long they've been doing this? How long they've been trekking? Since 1995. Since 1995. That's 1795. Yeah. Wow. They're called umbra files as well, aren't they?

There's shadow. They've got called coronafiles, eclipsaholics. Yeah, you don't want the coronafiles nickname catching up. You really want to shed that. I got these from the website BeingInTheShadow.com, which is an eclipse chaser. Let's see it set that up. Who's seen 12 now?

Cool. Who's seen 12? That's so cool. It's a lot. People get really into it. Yeah. You know, they see their first one. You think if you've seen one eclipse, you've seen them all?

I know. I know the eclipsah files are going to come up from now. I'm going to throw some shade. But yeah, I would have thought they were all the same. You'd think so, but I guess it's such a unique event even for our soldiers. Well, obviously not if they've seen 20 others. No, I guess I mean like...

It's a bit like saying your first cocaine high. Once you've done that, you've had a whole, you know... Some people do, I guess, keep going back. They do chase them. They get addicted. They really get addicted. They do say it's a kind of transformative experience and they just, whoa, they need it again.

Yeah. Well, Matt Parker, a buddy of ours who's a friend of the podcast, Steve Mould, who was on last week. They were in a group together. He goes chasing eclipses. Does he? Yeah, sometimes on cruises with his wife, because Lucy, his wife, is an actual solar physicist.

She looks at coronal mass ejection for her livelihood. And actually, just speaking of them as a couple, there's a thing that gets done with eclipses now. So it's called Bailey's beads, right? And that is an actual phenomena of eclipses. It's like a corona, but they're just really beads rather than a full circle. Exactly.

So it looks like diamonds. So when the moon is over the sun, you make it beautiful. When the moon is over the sun. And it's to do with the fact that, I believe, because the moon obviously has bumps and lumps all over it, it's sort of like when the final bit of the eclipse is covered, a little bit will come through, a bit that's a bit lower. And so they look like little diamonds and people propose to their...

But you won't be able to see you being proposed to. Oh, yeah, good point. Because it's a totality of an eclipse. It's totality of an eclipse. I'm just not so distracting. I'd definitely say no, regardless. You've only got six minutes to watch it. But wait a minute.

You can see people in the dark when there's a new moon or something. You can still see people. But I thought the whole point of a totality in eclipse was that you can't see anything. You can't see a cos you can. It doesn't go pitch black, Andy. There's still stars, for instance. When there's a solar eclipse.

Yeah, it just goes quite dark. Like a light night. Do you... 1999, we were all alive. Oh, yeah, but I wasn't in Cornwall wherever it was. I actually was in Cornwall and it wasn't that dark. It was quite dark, but you could make out someone proposing to you. If someone said, when you're marrying that,

I wouldn't be groping around in front of the camera. Who says that? There are so many possibilities. Wow. Oh, okay. I thought it wasn't really dark. Well, when there's no moon at night time, you can still make things out.

You can still make out, like, shadows. I've got my phone torch on. What's that other thing? Was it the last time a full eclipse was in the UK? It was 1999? Yeah. Anywhere in the UK? I remember seeing footage of it,

and wasn't it lots of people were taking photos with flashes on their cameras at the time? It was just incredibly annoying, because, you know, obviously you're trying to see the wonder of the place. Yeah, you would have been the pain in the ass with a massive torch. I've lost my diamond ring.

There was a big solar eclipse in North America in 2017, but at that time they had a load of monitoring stations, and they were checking the bees in North America. And at the moment of complete pitch black, all of the bees went silent, apart from one bee. There was one bee who buzzed. And they don't know why.

This is a Disney film. That's really funny. It was not so funny. Just one bee didn't get the memo. Yeah. And Candace Galen at the University of Missouri says that maybe he was slow getting back to the hive, or he was a bee with particularly good eyesight,

who wasn't affected by the eclipse. That's so funny. There was a story about a squirrel going nuts as well during the eclipse. Really, really, really spitty. Sorry, I missed my own thing. And afterwards they were like, do squirrels go crazy in the eclipse?

Or was it just the fact that we only saw one squirrel, chasing all the knowledge now on that? So, on this point, there has been a study from 2020 titled Total Eclipse of the Zoo, which is all about how all the different animals in the zoo react. Why does that work as a pun? It doesn't rhyme with heart. It's not a pun.

It's a reference to eclipses. But it's a reference to the song. Yeah, it's a reference to the song, Total Eclipse. Then it's a bad reference. If you're going to make a reference, make it a good reference. Total eclipse of the heart, make out the e and then you just study deer.

That's good. That is good. Well, they wanted, I think, a slightly broader remit for their study. Total eclipse of the heart, or the deer and other animals. All sorts of animals, actually. Warthog's anecdotally showed no reaction to Total Eclipse's.

Komodo dragons move around a bit more than usual. Giraffes huddle together. Spiders dismantle their webs. Where's that? The one specific species of spider rights. Yeah, the orb weavers. Just takes it down. Total eclipse of taking your web apart.

There we go. It's closer. It's lovely. There you go. Much closer. Oh, dear. There was it from in August 2017. I think this is the eclipse that you were talking about.

There was a story went round, which it turns out wasn't true, but it got picked up by everyone. We think it's not true. It's not confirmed entirely, where a bunch of people were hospitalized because their eyeballs were really hurting, because they weren't able to get their hands

on the proper glasses that you would wear to use to look at the eclipse. So instead, they thought they'd put suntan lotion on their eyeballs, and that would help. No, that's not true. That's the story, and it was reported by Forbes, and Snopes tried to get to the bottom of it, and they called up all the places.

They never heard back from the one lady who was quoted, who was called Trish Patterson, who gave a quote saying that this had happened, so it's inconclusive. Because people have sunglasses. I mean, that's the thing. But these people didn't have sunglasses at the point. But I mean, normal sunglasses, not special sunglasses,

because I know you can't get special. Are they lined with a particular... Yeah, yeah, they are. But that's what Andy says. You would have thought before you go to the suntan lotion on the eyeball, you would go prepare sunglasses. Like an ordinary pair of sunglasses. Yeah, but you might just be out in the beach that day

or whatever. You've got your suntan lotion, you haven't got access to glasses, you've forgotten as a solar eclipse happening, you're gonna... Someone said you could use a Ritz Cracker, because there's little holes in the Ritz Cracker, so if you hold two Ritz Crackers to your eyes,

I don't think that works either, does it? No, no. Is it ultraviolet? It will still let the sunlight onto your retina to burn it. I think you might be able to hold a Ritz Cracker and then put a sheet of paper behind it. Yes. And then I reckon you'd see the...

Because then the image of the sun appears on the paper, but don't put the Cracker over your eyes. Well, look, lots to test out when the next solar eclipse happens. I never thought of using a Ritz Cracker for stuff like that, though. You could spy on people with a Ritz Cracker, or like, you know, when they have newspapers on a bench in a park, a spy. So I'm just holding up a Ritz Cracker.

Yeah, hold on. I think the idea is that you think someone's reading the newspaper, which is a completely normal thing that someone might do, whereas putting two Ritz Crackers over your eyes is going to automatically arouse suspicion. You'd have to spend years normalising that activity, and there could be a really fun viral leg campaign Ritz Crackers did.

Like the Ice Bucket Challenge. Yeah, yes. You've got wits putting Ritz Crackers over your eyes. Yes. Everyone does it. Get ritzy. Yeah. And then it's all part of the long game for that bench moment.

If anyone from Ritz Crackers is listening. Or MI6. Please do get in touch. It's almost like a brand partnership in history with Ritz Crackers and MI6. So another famous eclipse chaser is Cecilia Paine Gaposchkin. In 1919, when she was 19 years old, she went on a solar eclipse expedition to Africa.

She later became the first woman to chair a Harvard department, so she's a very famous academic. And she is a person who proved what stars are made of by spectroscopy of the light emitted. So she worked out that it's made of helium and hydrogen, mostly all the stars, the sun and all stars. Oh, so we only found that out. When did you say?

In the early 20th century. Oh, early 20th century. Yeah, so before that they thought it must be made of metal. Some kind of maybe some meteorites are flying into the sun and that metal kind of burns and burns and burns. That's what they thought. Anyway, she worked out that it was made of mostly hydrogen. And she wrote this paper about it.

But everyone thought it was obviously bullshit. How on earth could that possibly be true, that the stars are made of hydrogen and helium? And so when she wrote her thesis, at the very end she wrote, this result is almost certainly not real. What? Oh, no!

Because she wants to protect her career. She thought that if she did this, yeah, she didn't back herself. And it would be another 10, 20 years before people realized that that was true. That's terrible. Well, all you're hedging your bets and cheating, guys. You can't say, oh, here's what I definitely think,

except I may be just joking. Have you guys heard of Donald Liebenberg? Donald Liebenberg. No. From Clemson University in South Carolina, a very well-established umbra file. Eclipseaholic. Okay.

Call him what you will. Nerd. So he's not seen more eclipses than anyone else. There is a group of people who, as of 2017, had seen 33 each and they were the front runners. Which is a lot. Do you reckon there's going to be like a murder mystery where they all knock each other off

so that one person has the most? Or there's another eclipse but it's in a difficult place and they all stop each other from getting there and like, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is great. Anyway, Liebenberg, he's...

Okay, riddle me this. Yeah. He's not seen the most eclipses in the world. He's only seen 26. Yeah. But he's spent more time in the totality of eclipses than anyone else. Even though other people have seen several more than him.

Yes. How can it be? Is he a pilot? No. But you're so close to the right. Was he on a plane? He's an ass. Yes.

No, for the 1973 eclipse, which is on June 30th of that year, there was a group of eclipse experts who got on Concorde. Yes, that's right. And they followed the path of it and they experienced 74 minutes of total eclipse at 1,000 miles an hour. Crazy.

How cool is that? It is cool. Also as a sign you've got too much money. How did they see where they were going, Andy? Surely. Obviously, the plane had a torch on its front. Planes have headlights, you know. But to me, right, the whole point of an eclipse

is it's over in like six minutes, right? It's like it's bright and then the six minutes of weirdness and then it's bright again. If you're going for 74 minutes, you might as well just fly at night time. Exactly. But I think things might stay weird and get really weird. 79.

You don't have to replenish the suntan on your eyeballs. I actually, I was wondering about the glasses for people who can get hold of them. The special ones. The special ones. And I found out that there's a company called American Paper Optics who are the main producers of them in America and their revenue doubles in years of solar eclipses.

Wait a minute. What are people buying? You think it would more than double, actually. You think it would be an enormous spike in those years and quite leaving the other years. They make other types of glasses as well, right? They make 3D glasses. So most of their customers, like, you know,

you get a 3D cinema or you sell them in cereal packets or they're mostly freebies that they hand out so they get branding deals with companies. But in like in 2017, for instance, their revenue went from $7 million to $14 million. That's doubling. That's doubling. That's what doubling is.

And they've prepared for two and a half years for the 2017 eclipses. They doubled their staff and the guy who runs... They could afford to, couldn't they, with all that double revenue they were counting on? It works out perfectly. That's good projection. And the guy who runs the company is a guy called John Jarrett who seems to be really obsessed with eclipses.

He actually got his big glasses break in the cardboard glasses world in 1991 when this astronomer got in touch and said, there's going to be an eclipse. Can you make some glasses for me? I hear that you make cardboard glasses. And it ended up being a massive deal. And he sold a million glasses to Corona Beer in 1991

when the eclipse was in Mexico. Clever. And I think it must be that Corona, because of the Corona and the Corona, perfect partnership. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Genius. Brilliant.

That's very good. There was, you know, we spoke about solar eclipses not on a podcast, but on a book. 2017, our book of the year. We had literally our scripted conversation in there. And there's a great fact in there, which is that NASA has two accounts, which is NASA Moon and NASA Sun.

And on the day of the eclipse, NASA Moon blocked NASA Sun on Twitter. Yeah, brilliant. Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1906, there was a music streaming service which involved just two people playing keyboards

down the telephone. Yeah. So would I ring up and I'd immediately get piano music played at me? Yeah, so this was... Was there someone waiting for a call, basically? And whenever the phone rang, they'd have to answer it and start playing piano at me.

No, this is phenomenal when you think about the sort of the scale of what this person had built. So this was a lawyer called Thaddeus Cahill. And he's 1867 to 1934. And at the end of the 1800s, he decides he wants to invent a machine whereby if you called up this one phone number, you would get music just streaming to you.

And it was a subscription model. So he was going to sell it to hotels and restaurants and so on. What you would do is you would hold a paper funnel to the phone receiver. So that would act as your amplifier to the room that you were playing it out to. And I think in answer to your question, they would be just playing Bach or whatever.

And whenever you phone them up, you would get whatever they're playing at the time. So if they're playing chopsticks, you get chopsticks. So he basically invented the concept of music, sort of background music that can just be playing. But he, to do this, he invented a machine which was called the Telharmonium, which was as big as the office space that we're in right now.

A ginormous room in Manhattan. Can I just say, Dan, sorry to interrupt, but people at home don't know what the QI office is like. So I think at the moment they're imagining like an aircraft hangar or something. We now have clips on YouTube. You can watch it to see the size of our... It weighed 200 tons.

It weighed 200 tons. And it was 60 feet long. So it's actually significantly longer than the bit of the office that you can currently see now if you are watching it on YouTube. Yes, yeah. A picture, more feet the other way from the video. They had all these phone lines that would be hanging in front of basically a ginormous gramophone horn,

which was the music as what was being pumped through. I mean, it's very complicated to get your head around what this machine was, but effectively, what Cahill had invented was the first synthesizer. It was electronic music. I love the way of explaining how complicated all the wires were and stuff. The Republican and Herald newspaper in Pennsylvania in 1907

started off explaining how it works and then said, it would be useless to describe the more complex principles of the telharmonium because it would require diagrams and mathematics. I'm with him. He tells everyone to dance. Yeah. What's the surname of that joint?

Yeah. So this was in Manhattan, as I say. It was located on Broadway in 39th Street. It took up an entire floor of the building. He called it the telharmonic hall. He also called it the music plant. And he advertised it as the music of AD 2000, which is really cool, really sci-fi.

He knew he was onto something that was kind of looking into the future. Now, there's no radio at this point. This guy is decades ahead of any other kind of broadcasting of just playing music out. And there was a rumor that this was all generated, this music, by two people who would supposedly play for 24 hours. That was said in passing in an article, so there's no confirmation on that.

It might be a peer. Yeah, but the music was being played by people. And supposedly, this is where I get confused, could emulate sounds like the flute or... Yeah. Well, it was electronic. That was why it was so amazing. Yeah, but how?

Did they record the... So, I thought this was really interesting, because I've never known how, like, when you get an electric keyboard and you press a button that plays a symbol or whatever, how do they do it? And it's basically just you add lots of harmonics to one tone. So, another amazing thing about this is it wasn't a normal musical instrument. It was an electronic instrument.

So, I think if you stood next to it, I'm not quite sure how the gramophone horn bit works. If you stood next to it, you couldn't hear it play, I don't think. You could only hear it play when the electrical signals were transmitted through cables and they were interpreted into sound at the other side. And the electrical signals, through this very complex system, you could overlay lots of different notes on top of each other. So, you'd have, like, the main note,

but then they worked out that the reason a trumpet sounds different to, like, a violin is because there are kind of, like, harmonic sounds overlaying that main note. That's insane. It is unbelievable. I'd love to know how realistic it was. Wow. Well, the other thing is that on top of what Anna's saying,

there's quite a lot more, but it would be kind of difficult to explain without mathematics in the program. So, we probably won't go into all that stuff now. And we don't have any recordings. This is the other thing. And it doesn't exist anymore. And it doesn't exist anymore. It's dismantled.

You have to solve a scrap. It's incredibly tragic. And there were complaints as well. So, it interrupted other transmissions at various points. Yes, so many complaints. The US Navy complained that they had secret wireless transmissions, which they'd like to hear, but they were getting Rossini overtures instead.

Thanks to the telemonium. Yeah. It interrupted phone calls a lot. I mean, that was one of the reasons that it didn't succeed in the end, was that there were just so many problems with it. People would be on the phone and music would bleed in. And in fact, I read one newspaper article from the time saying it had almost broken up a marriage

because a husband had called his wife to say he was working late in the office. But she heard the William Tell Overture playing in the background. So, of course, said, Bullshit, are you in the office? May you're out at a concert. Yeah, having sex to the William Tell Overture. Da-dlin, da-dlin, da-dlin, da-dlin, da-dlin, da-dlin, da-dlin.

The U.S. Navy won, I think, by the way. Later on, I think in 1911, he worked with a guy called De Forest, and they came up with a new system that was basically the teleharmonium, but instead of going through telephone lines, they would use radio technology. And it was when the U.S. Navy was using radio technology as well, they would get that kind of thing.

So it was a later bit of his career where he was working on something else, where he was still... He was still getting it. Yeah, that's so good. And it must have been good because it did get good reviews. So we don't have any samples of it anymore, but Mark Twain basically said he would postpone his death

just to hear it again. Wow, I mean, how comfortable was he that he could do that? Exactly. That sounds like you're in a situation where someone's about to kill you, and you're like, no, no, just one second. I just want to listen to the William Tell Overture one more time. Like a last meal, a last song. So he was quoted.

He went to a recital, basically. He was invited to go to one, and he said, every time I see or hear a new wonder like this, I have to postpone my death right off. I couldn't possibly leave the world until I've heard this again and again. And so in 1907, at this point, the plan of Cahill was that he wanted to put it into places like, as I said, hotels and restaurants,

but he couldn't get it into people's homes. And Twain managed to work out that he could get it into his home because of his celebrity status and so on. And so the Times reported that he was going to glory in the fact that he would be able to rejoice over other dead people when he died in having been the first man to have tellharmonium music tuned in his house like gas. Twain seemed really, really, really like it.

He said he wanted street lights to be connected to it, which would play the funeral march during his funeral as his funeral procession went on. He seems quite obsessed with death, doesn't he? Yeah, yeah. He was getting elbowed at this point, wasn't he? Yeah. Got it annoying meeting him in the afterlife immediately going,

yeah, in your face. I heard the tellharmonium. Well, you do know that got dismantled after two years, don't you? And no one ever heard of it ever again. What? There was an earlier thing called the theatrical phone in 1881. And that played, it was in Paris and it was the theater phone and it transmitted music but also some theatrical productions

over the phone. Cool. No, hang on a second. Did phones exist in 1881? Yeah. Yeah. There were quite a few. There was only one.

Now there were some in 1880s. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. When was it in 1870? Yeah. Patented. It's early, isn't it? Yeah.

Well, because people thought with the phone, weirdly, they thought the phone was going to be used for mass entertainment. Amazing. And they sampled this loads of time. So, yeah, there was the 1881 thing. There was, I think the longest running most successful version of mass entertainment via phone was the telephone newspaper. And this was in Hungary and it was invented in 1893

and it ran until 1944. Wow. And it was a subscriber service and you just called it whenever and it started off just being a news service. So, you called it and they tell you the news. But then it was music performances. There were, you know, like fun, new pop songs, whatever you played.

When was this? Comedy shows, 1893. So, was it a live program? Yeah. So, you didn't request? It wasn't a request. You had to tune in at, let's say, noon for the headlines. Exactly.

And if you missed the headlines, you might get the column later on or the crossword. Yeah, there was no record option. You can go to it later on. That's brilliant. That's incredible. Even in the 1920s, 10,000 people were signed up to the system in Hungary where you called up to get your news.

That's amazing. But do you remember when the internet first started and it was through telephone lines? And then whenever anyone was making a call, you couldn't use the internet? Yes. Well, it would be the same here. If someone was listening to the news,

you wouldn't be able to make a call. That would be really annoying, wouldn't it? Yes. Yeah. In 1896, telephone wires were laid between Buckingham Palace and a bunch of concert halls in London so that the royal family, whenever they wanted to, could listen to a concert.

No. Without having to. Because it was a bit lowering to go into a music hall, for instance, if you're the Queen Victoria. A music hall? I mean, you definitely wouldn't go into a music hall. Even having a phone line laid to a music hall is, I think, a bit undignified.

Wow. You are one of the snobs of the 1890s. If there's a raucous, naughty performance, maybe you can't see her getting naked as well. She's probably just enjoying the... It's a great tune. But I guess it depends on the venues, I suppose. Some venues, I'm sure, were very reputable.

Oh, there must have been some reputable music hall. She wasn't doing a phone call to some sort of other pub in Soho. It's going to be a guinea minute for this phone call, Mum. Are you sure? It wasn't a sex line, OK, but it was so that... She also said Queen Victoria didn't have a sex line installed in Buckingham Palace. Not that we know of, but we can't be sure.

But it was for the slightly more improper performances that it wouldn't do to be seen at. Who knows? That's so cool. On music platforms these days. Obviously, huge music platforms, like Spotify and things like that, one growing and rapidly growing music platform

is Peloton Bikes. Yeah. They've all got licensing deals, and they've got their own in-house music department, specifically to license... Oh, do you mean Exercise Bikes, the brand Peloton? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not anyone in the TARDA France.

Anyone who's not in the lead, but in the main group. They have to carry a big boot. Yeah, there's the yellow headphones, and whoever's in the lead on the TARDA France gets to listen to the music. No, but the Prince, as in the Musician Prince, dead now, but the Grateful Dead, confusingly, I think a lot of him is still alive,

and Beyonce, they've all licensed their music, specifically to Peloton, for massive amounts of money, because it gets used in the exercise classes. So this is the forefront of streaming, is Exercise Bikes, basically. But it's not exclusive tracks, is it? You could still get them on Spotify. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can, but you cut...

So in the early days, I think Peloton was just using a lot of music in their exercise classes, and obviously they're making money out of these exercise classes, and I think it was a big old fuss about it. Well, that's a big... I mean, I think we've said that Guitar Hero, with certain bands like Aerosmith, were making more money from the licensing deal that they did

for that than they would make on their records. Yeah, that's a big industry now. I don't know much Grateful Dead, and a bit of Prince, and it's weird, Beyonce can totally see the cycling... I think, yeah, she's really the queen of Peloton. You can get Beyonce-themed classes, specifically to do on your bike.

And riding your bike, of course, gives you an amazing arse, which is what she already has, so that's something to strive for while you're riding. I just see that from somebody who cycles a lot, by the way. And you basically cycle every day, and you're like, you know what, people who cycle? Amazing arse. My God, that is rock hard.

I'm sitting on two boulders right now. OK, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that Australian aboriginal people sometimes built objects specifically to arouse the curiosity of emus. OK. That's nice of them.

Well, it wasn't nice of them. It was naughty. It wasn't naughty either. It was just a spicy. Well, as they say in Australia, curiosity killed the emu. Yeah, exactly. And it did kill the emu, in this case, but the unborn emus in the egg.

That feels worse. Well, this is maybe the worst way I've ever introduced the fact of the show. There are these things. They're called emu callers, and aboriginal people were built them. They're cylinders of carved wood. And when you bang the end with the flat of your hand, it produces a sound which, apparently,

is reasonably like the noise of a female emu. And this has to be a female emu as well, because with emus the male is the one who sits on the eggs and nurses them towards... incubates them. That's the thing. And so one hunter will hide in the bush playing this thing, making the noise of a female,

banging away, and the male will say, ah, a female emu, and go and explore. And then his colleague, the man on the bush's colleague, will go and peck to death. And that is absolutely the name of the game

when you're hunting. And so then you've got a lovely emu omelet, Feed four people. Feed four people. The other way it was used sometimes is to distract a mob of females, and you can move them to one place where you want them to go so you can shoot them. So it was used by hunters sometimes as well.

But I will say the father, in Andy's case, had it coming because he was going to cheat on the mother of his children, right? Yeah, but you know what's happening at the same time. Like, when a male emu is incubating the eggs, the woman's off shagging other emus. And not only that, she shags the other emu,

gets a baby in an egg, and then slips in under the other father. Yeah, look, it's all complicated. There's no villain in this piece. Oh, no, there's no villain. I thought the male was the villain a moment ago, Anna. She can store sperm as well, right? Like, multiple different sperm that she can then revert like this.

You've got to sort of lard her. That's what I read. I think there's a kind of cupboard inside the female emu. That's kind of how it works. Could she select? I think he'll have a little bit of Tony today, and then fertilize from him. I don't think so. I don't think there's a sort of, like, spice shelf for the difference.

But the male doesn't eat or drink or defecate during the incubation of the eggs, which is 56 days. I'm not going to judge him for hearing a female and thinking, oh, I wonder... So he doesn't have time to poo, but he does have the chance to shag another female.

Yeah, it's all about priorities. How appealing is he going to be for that female? Has it showered in 50 days? Bowls unleash immediately. There's a slight advantage for the males, I think, when the females can bring other eggs back and make him incubate them,

even though they don't belong to him. Because if he's sitting on his own eggs, but also some other dad's eggs, if the eggs get attacked, at least it raises the chances that someone else's kids will be lost. That's pretty dark. The first eggs to hatch will be his eggs, right?

Because he was the first one there. And that means that when all of the kids have hatched, his will be the oldest and perhaps the strongest. So that might help as well. Because the male looks after the chicks for, I think, about seven months. It's a long, old time that the male

is doing the carrier after. And sometimes we'll take on other chicks which got lost from other broods. Yeah, right. This object that they make, if you can imagine a didgeridoo, it's like a small didgeridoo. And it's sometimes known as a woman's didgeridoo.

Because it's a small version of it. And they're made in the same way. So they're not necessarily made by the humans. They're kind of naturally made by ants eating out the middle of a trunk. And then decorated. And they do sound, if you listen to a didgeridoo,

so I haven't heard what the emu cooler sounds like, but I imagine it's a slightly higher-pitched version of a didgeridoo. They do sound a bit like emus. The emu noise is very kind of like something grunting underwater, I thought. Which is a little bit like a didgeridoo. But it's not the only way to attract an emu

if you're in the business. Really? Yeah, I was reading... There must be myriad ways. Oh god, there are a lot of ways. Des Fallon called himself the world champion emu cooler in the 90s. I think it might have just been self-styled.

But he said, and this does work, and lots of people do it now, you lie on your back and you wave your legs in the air, kind of like a turtle that's been turned over. And you sort of make a noise like a strangled cat sort of grunting noise. And halfway between it being in pain

and being in love, I think one researcher said. I heard a slightly different version or take on that, which is that you lay on your back and you put one leg in the air with your foot in that position that it looks like it's an emu's head and it confuses the emu into thinking it's another emu and it comes over to investigate you.

Because they're so stupid. Apparently they're so stupid according to a big research study that was done. I can tell you that emus do really like they're like shiny objects a lot. So if you put a disco ball in a tree emus will stare at it for hours on end. Really?

Do they dance? A bit of Macarena? Well I think this has been a similar thing has been used in hunting them. So again traditional Aboriginal hunters will lure emus by hanging a ball of emu feathers and rags from a tree which I guess must catch the light

or I mean it certainly looks weird and it's an unusual object for them and they just gather around it and are captivated at which point you can throw a spear at them and kill them. Is that not because they're all going hang on, we're flightless. How did that emu get up the tree? She's cracked it. Hey Barry!

What was the trick? Yeah that's so good. They can't fly. They do when they run they still sort of wave their tiny little wings that they have. They think they're not fully sure why they do this from the article I read. The suggestion is it's a balance thing

to help them with the speed because they can go very very fast. But I did read that when they have because they have predators like dingos and eagles and so on in Australia and one way that they fight against a dingo is they leap into the air just stomping them

just jumping on their head and shoving them into the ground. They've got claws but that's just such a wonderful fighting style touch. The tantrum. Just on emu penises which are rare but sorry they're not rare for emus

every emu... But no one else has an emu penis. Half of emus have an emu penis. Nobody else has an emu penis. But birds with penises are rare 10% of bird species don't have them and emus are in the rare but they don't have blood in their penises

or when they have an erection it doesn't fill up with blood. It fills with lymphatic fluid which is very unusual and it's also low pressure. So they can't keep an erection for very long. One interesting thing about that is that

the other birds that have penises also are lymph based and so that means that the earliest ancestor of these two lineages of penis birds must have also had a limp lymph penis. And what that means is that it was

some time, a long time ago, and what came before the birds, the dinosaurs and so if we ever find out that a dinosaur had a penis and at the moment we haven't found it in the fossil record but if we ever do there's a good chance that it would also be a lymph based.

I saw a picture of an incredible penis the other day and it was sent to me by John Blasch's Snell, the explorer. You really should probably block him. His only fan's account is really, really cool. This is a great explorer.

He's a friend of the podcast and he took, he showed me a picture of a bat that he'd caught out. I think it was in the Amazon somewhere, ginormous. It looked like it was as tall as us basically. Did he catch it by the penis? He might as well have because this bat was hung unlike anything I've seen.

It was like a human penis on a bat. It was insane. I'll show you the photo later. It's truly extraordinary. I'll give it to you. I wonder because they hang up so I down a lot. I'm just trying to think. It would just keep bashing them in the face

whenever it was windy. Wind chimes. Did you guys read the emu story from earlier this year? It was only a month ago, I think. It was Malmsbury in Wiltshire. I used to live. Really? Yeah. Very exciting. I wish I'd still lived there for this story.

There was a man who crashed his car into a shop front and he was with an accomplice and he ran away from the scene of the crash because he was incredibly drunk and incredibly high I think and basically crashed it into a building, legged it and the chef of the local hotel

was a guy called Dean Wade, saw him do this and said, I'm not letting someone get away with that. That's terrible. Chased after him, they ran away. They ran for quite some distance and they ended up at the edge of the local wildlife enclosure which has a field full of emus. And Dean Wade shouted, don't go in there. There are emus and the guy said, I'm going in there.

I'll take on the emus and he was absolutely they pecked him a new one. They really went for him. He shouldn't have flayed on his back and flailed around his legs in the air. He was trying to do kung fu kicks and karate chops on this emu and the emu was impecking, impecking, impecking him.

And he was apprehended this man. I think we're crediting the emu with the apprehension right because the fact that this guy, the chef is still in full chef's guard. He knew that the emus could take care of it so he was then free to go get the police. Was he sort of shepherding them towards the emus? I'm not sure if it was a deliberate conscious thought

but I think when it happened he thought that's a stroke of luck. Is he okay this guy or? Yeah, he's been right. He lived. I wonder if the chef was torn to get the police or to then go and steal the eggs from the next. Yeah, you're right. Have we ever done the emu war? Yeah, we have.

Have we on the show? It was an international fact ball which I think isn't canon. Well, the interesting thing about it is when we mentioned it, did we mention that it's basically a myth? Is it? No way. So the idea is that, you know, Australia went to war against emus and lost.

Yeah, that's the story. Far be it from me to back up the Australians but it turns out that basically it was one Western Australian governor did declare war on the emus but didn't send all of his guys out there. He sent three people out to attack all these emus.

Three men, a pickup truck and two machine guns and that was against 20,000 emus. And basically what had happened was there had been the war, the Second World War and the Australian government had given land to a lot of veterans

but the land was really dry, it was really barren. They couldn't really grow anything apart from wheat and the emus loved wheat so the emus would go in after the wheat and the governor of Western Australia decided, well, we're going to declare war on them and we're going to shoot them. Because they've got all these veterans living there.

Well, that's what they thought. They thought we'll send three of our actual army guys and we'll get all of the veterans to come in as well but actually really, I mean, there was no chance that they were ever going to do anything. I think it was Major Meredith who was the guy in charge of them and maybe the birds could keep running even after they'd been shot.

And so there was very little chance of them winning this engagement. Well, the other thing is like, if you had a big mob of emus let's say there's 100 in a mob as soon as you shot them, they split up into 250s and it was like the Gremlins when they get water on them again. It's like being attacked by a worm

and you chop it up and you just keep making it worse. And Meredith said after he said if we had a military division with the bullet carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world. Wow. Yeah. And really the reason that it became a big deal

is because it was the time of the Great Depression and the Great Emu War was kind of a funny story that they could have in the newspapers all the time. Right. It is funny. It is funny. Well, that's good. I feel like Aussies get so much crap for the Emu War. So now there you go.

You can come back up people with. We only sent three old blokes in there. And I have to say on Twitter this is probably the most requested story that people sent to me saying, have you guys ever spoken about the Emu War? It's just constantly... So there you go. You're welcome, Australia. Considering you cheat so much at cricket

you should be very glad that I said this. Unbelievable. OK. 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 have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

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