No Such Thing As A Fish - 56: No Such Thing As A Killer Tomato

Episode Date: April 10, 2015

Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss mad NASA projects, WW1 spy tactics, and an old, new enemy to all mankind.

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 Anna Chazinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray, and once again we have gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chazinski. Yeah, my fact is that for 200 years after tomatoes made it to England, they were grown almost entirely for ornamental reasons.

Because they didn't want to eat them? Because they were just waiting for them to be ripe. It's not ready. It's still red, wait for it to be green. I think the first tomatoes it brought over were yellow, and that's why they're called Pomodore in Italian, I think, it's like yellow apples or something. Anyway, yeah, people thought they were poisonous, and this was for, well, there are a number of explanations for why people thought that.

I think the most likely one is that they were botanically identified as belonging to the nightshade family, and people knew that other members of the nightshade family, deadly nightshade, were poisonous. So they were botanically advanced enough to work out what family tomatoes belong to, but not botanically advanced enough to say, these things are obviously harmless, you can eat them. So there's another theory that they were actually poisoning people, isn't there? And the idea behind that is that they had puta plates which contains lead, and the tomatoes

have acid in them, and the acid would release the lead out of the puta plates and would give people lead poisoning. So that was one theory. Yes. Although I think puta plates mainly belong to wealthy people, but yeah, I reckon if they thought they were part of the nightshade family, there may be a few rich people got ill from that. That would have meant.

Can I say my favorite theory? Go on. No, no, this was a big one during the day. They thought, someone noticed, I believe it was Ralph Walder Emerson, in fact, noticed that there was a worm that was going into his tomato, and he thought that it was the worm that was poisonous, that it was poisoning the actual tomato. And so. It was a green tomato worm, wasn't it?

Yes, yeah, exactly. And it's just great because a bit of hysteria was created out of people thinking that it was this thing. There's someone who described it as a poisonous as a rattlesnake. They were saying, you know, stay away from this thing. And there's a wonderful quote. Dr. Fuller said that there is a new enemy to human existence, and then he said that if you were bitten that you would die, and then someone else pointed out that wouldn't hurt

a flea. So it wasn't actually as dangerous, but for a while they thought it was this worm, which is pretty cool. I think tomatoes were just starting to get over their bad reputation, and suddenly these worms rocked up. And there was such hysteria, there's this story that's told that's so brilliant, and there's no firsthand record of it, but it was reported in newspapers in the 19th century and it's that it was in Salem, it was the old county courthouse in Salem, it was 1820,

and this guy called Colonel Johnson had decided it was getting ridiculous that everyone thought tomatoes were poisonous, and he was going to prove to people that they weren't. And so he stood on the steps of Salem courthouse, and he ate this whole bowl of tomatoes in front of this huge crowd. And the witness reports, apparently according to newspapers that reported it later, said that women were screaming and fainting as they watched him do what they thought was suicide in public. Do you know what the Latin name for tomatoes is?

It's Lycopersicon, which means wolf peach. How cool is that? Yeah. Why? Do we know why? No. Well, I don't. Maybe it's because when they go mouldy, they get a grey fur.

Yes, and they also start hunting in packs, and a few of them can bring down a fully grown moose. It's actually no wonder people were so afraid of them for so long. Yeah. Well, there was the attack of the killer tomatoes movie, wasn't there? There was that factual documentary, yes. And the return of the killer tomatoes was George Clooney's first movie, or first movie. He'd been in a few things before, but that was his first main break.

Wow. Well done, George. And the first attack of the killer tomatoes, there was a helicopter crash, which is in there at the start, and it was a real crash, and it was a rented helicopter, and it went down. Fortunately, no one was killed, but the crash cost them $60,000, which used up more of the budget than all other aspects of the film combined. Wow.

Whoa. At least they got the footage. Did you guys know that George Clooney, ten years, exactly ten years before he started being the star of ER, was the star of a hospital drama called ER, with dots after the E in the R. Really? Yeah. What?

Yeah. It does kind of feel like there was some kind of admin mix-up, doesn't it? It really does. And they've just got the cast list, and got the wrong cast list, the old one, it's like, ah. Yeah. The story was meant to get the part in the ER. I have a news story, which I also wanted to share with you.

Yeah. This is from 2013, from the BBC. A man caught with a prostitute in his car, told police she was there to show him where to buy tomatoes. Is that a euphemism? This is in the West Midlands, and... I could have told him where to get tomatoes in the West Midlands. Where?

There's a nice big morrisons in Wolverhampton. Yeah. Well, he could have saved $20 and a £400 fine from Walsall Magistrates Court. Ah, Walsall. Yeah, I don't know that as well. Police reaction was amazing. PC, one of the police from Walsall Police said, I've heard some excuses before, but in the 10 years I've been a police officer, I've never heard a curb crawler covering

up his crimes by claiming to be buying tomatoes. Our officer in the court saw through his lies. Well done, Scooby. That's another crime solved. I've, over the last few years, developed a new taste for tomato juice on planes. It is supposed to taste better. Yeah. Then, like, other things that you would try on the airplanes would taste worse, but actually

tomato juice like Bloody Marys and stuff are supposed to be still okay. Yeah, why is that? Well, your taste buds obviously go down. So tomato juice, because of the thickness, kind of, and for other reasons I'm sure, retains the full taste. Okay. But they did a massive test of it in a simulation where they had passengers come on to a simulated flight to see if they...

That wouldn't work, really, because surely it's the altitude that makes a difference. Yes, exactly. Well, actually, the whole study brought no conclusive results. But the reasonings, they asked all the passengers, why did you go for it? And one of the main results, which is exactly what I did, is that you see the person ahead of you, or two people ahead of you, going, tomato juice, and you go, oh, I might have a tomato juice. And that was genuinely one of the main results that they got from the thing.

Hang on. So they think that it just happens that the people in the front row tend to order tomato juice. Someone orders it, and it spills down. And surely we have to work out why that first person always ordered it. Because they were at the back of a previous flight where someone offered them tomato juice. So one person once happened to order tomato juice, and since then it's been a constant

domino. But hang on, sometimes the trolley comes from behind you on a plane. Yeah. Oh, you're talking about an economy. Right. I didn't know they had trolleys back then. Another theory about the tomato juice thing is that, I can't believe this, but is that the noise of the plane affects how you perceive flavour.

Wow. But you've genuinely experienced the tomato juice thing. On planes, it's my main topic of conversation. If there's someone I don't know next to me, I'm like... Oh, God. Yeah, some of the tomato juice ordering. And they're going, excuse me, are there any spare seats? An old man going back to a caravan.

Tomatoes. Are they a fruit or a vegetable? They are a fruit. They are, so botanically they are a fruit, but legally they are a vegetable. And that was a precedent set in 1887, because some guy called John Nix was trying to import a bunch of tomatoes, and he was saying, these are botanically a fruit, and so I shouldn't have to pay the vegetable tariff on them, because there wasn't the same tariff for fruits. And the courts decided that they wanted him to pay that tariff, so they declared that

tomatoes were a vegetable, and he had to pay up. And that's it. The judge said, in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetable which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cold or raw, are like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery and lettuce, usually served at dinner, in, with or after the soup, fish or meats, which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not like fruits generally as a dessert.

And I must admit, I didn't realise how long that was going to be here. I can't help thinking that guy got turned down in his job as a chef, and went on. So other things that were not used for eating originally, the Romans didn't really eat butter. They did have it, but they didn't really eat it. What did they do with it? They would rub it on themselves, if they had a burn, for instance. They would use it for medical reasons. The Germans had it, and they did kind of eat it more, but they didn't eat it all the time.

They used it for her dressing, and Herodotus says that the Thracians ate it, but the Greeks thought that they were weird for eating it. So like back in the olden days, hardly anyone ate butter. Did it happen with the first Roman who got a burn on his lips, put it on there? This is delicious! Wait a second. Oh, when they burnt their toast, presumably. Okay, time for fact number two, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that NASA is planning on giving the moon a moon, which is very exciting. Explain yourself. Okay, so basically NASA is going to... It's quite an ambitious idea, and in theory, but they are going for it. So it's not... You know, it is NASA. It's not like some college kids. They've got it planned.

Is it going to be a smaller moon than the current size moon? Yes, yes. So the idea is that in 2020, they're going to launch a probe that's going to go to a passing asteroid, they're going to land on the asteroid and lasso around it, or using a kind of knapsack bag of a sort of gigantic scale, take a boulder off it, then head back to our moon, and then leave that boulder at a point where it can orbit the moon, and then they can mine the asteroid for everything, learn more about what asteroids are made up of and so on.

It's hugely ambitious, but it's in the slot. So I don't think moons can really have moons. Well, our moon can't really. It could have one for a short amount of time, but eventually the orbit would decay. And that's because the movement of the Earth and the movement of the Sun would kind of give tidal forces that would kind of decay the orbit. How long do you think they could have it for? I think they could have it for a fair amount of time.

A few years, but it wouldn't last forever. That's quite cool, though. We're going to live in a period where the moon has an orbiting moon. But it is weird. Like, if you look at NASA's schedule for, you know, it's upcoming seasons, it does have a few planned projects that you just go, have I read an April pools page and I checked the date this time and I haven't, because they're doing the planning of going to Venus with these balloons that are going to sit and kind of create a little balloon city that they

can do observations from. It's really weird. They're working on a city made out of huge balloons in the clouds of Venus, which will allow astronauts to explore the planet without venturing onto the hostile surface. That's from a science website. It's amazing. Yeah. I read another one from 2020.

This is a mission called the asteroid impact mission and they're going to send a probe up to an asteroid called Didymus and the asteroid Didymus has a moon called Didymoon. Just like those days. The naming conventions are great and they officially encourage you not to name them after your pets. But I don't know how strictly the rules are enforced, basically. Can we talk about asteroids? Yes.

Asteroids and actually lots of planetary bodies, but they instituted the rule relatively recently but the first one that came to their attention, which they didn't like, was a guy who named an asteroid Spock or he named it Mr. Spock, but it wasn't after Mr. Spock. It was after his cat, who was called Mr. Spock. Presumably the cat was called Mr. Spock after Mr. Spock. Yes, but the asteroid was technically being named after a cat. That's so good. And in the 19th century, people would name them after their mistresses and racy things

like that and they'd say, yeah, we don't want that either. Well, my mistress is called Mr. Spock. That's why I called her anyway. Just like with the idea of names being on this, check out the name for this Venus one. It's called the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept and it's not a very good name, but it actually breaks down into Havoc. Is that what you want to be naming a serious NASA mission? Exactly.

Is that the balloon one? Yeah, yeah. This is a proposal stage at the moment, but it is being proposed by NASA to NASA. They know. Well, surely NASA's going to accept it. Guys, I think this is a brilliant idea. Well, thank you NASA. No problem NASA.

The idea of naming something Havoc though, yes, we're doing a central high altitude operational system, the Project Chaos or Mayhem. Well, certain death. I found something really nice about just speaking of asteroids and things orbiting each other. So you all know that Pluto was downgraded from being a planet in 2006 to being a dwarf planet. A dwarf planet. The decision could have gone another way because the International Astronomical Union met up

and according to a draft definition of planets, its moon, Charon, or Charon, could have been upgraded to being a planet. So then you would have... Charon is just a pretentious Charon, isn't it? Let's be honest. Sorry. It's moon Charon. It's moon Charon.

Charon is someone's named after their mistress, haven't they? Yes. And Pluto presumably after their pet. That must have been a good day's work. Guys will never work it out. But yeah, there would have been a binary pair of planets because they orbit a central gravity which is outside both of them. It's a point of space between the two of them.

So they're both constantly orbiting that point. There's a great moon that I saw called Mimaz and it looks exactly like the Death Star from Star Wars. It looks exactly like it. It's so cool. Or it looks like a 3D squeezable boob. That's the other thing it looks like. Sorry, aren't boobs just 3D squeezable boobs?

Normally you have to specify if a boob is 2D or not squeezable. NASA is looking, so it's looking to employ people, I suppose. It's looking for people who are willing to stay in bed for 70 days. And it'll pay them $18,000. But yeah, this is to see what effects long periods of having to stay still like you often would have to in a spaceship or something has on the body and has on a loss of muscle and bone and cardiovascular function. Like hypersleep?

It's like hypersleep except you'd be awake and bored but earning good money. Well that's, it's a new thing called Pteranauts where you can have a whole career at NASA as an Earth astronaut, a Pteranaut. So you just hang here and you do all the things that they're prepping astronauts to do including laying in bed. I can just see the husband at a party going, I'm an astronaut and the wife next to me going, you're an Earth astronaut. Pteranaut.

I looked up a list of things that are on the moon. Yeah. Okay. That we have left there. Okay. Because lots of things have crashed into there over the years. It's a huge amount. It's about the weight of a blue whale or something.

So golf balls is famously up there? Golf balls. There's also a javelin. Is there? Yeah. Ah. When Alan Shepard made his golf shot, his colleague through a, it was an improvised javelin. It was apparently a star from a solar wind experiment.

But he threw it as a javelin. And I have a theory that it might be the longest javelin throw ever was made on the moon. How far did it go? Well there isn't data but. The world record of javelins probably just over 100 meters, probably about 106 meters or something like that. Yeah. But you do need data Andy.

I don't like with world records the way it works. I mean you have to provide an actual number. What? I reckon. It's just my pet theory. I can't prove it but I do believe it. Also on the moon, there are, they call them defecation collection devices. And there are five of those.

That is a jazz that word for a toilet attendant, isn't it? Yeah. A toilet attendant. Buzz Aldrin on the way back he's like, oh god, has anyone got two quid? I can leave this to you. That's the terrible thing. They live on tips and there's very little to come by on the moon. And there are 10 urine bags which are divided into urine collection assembly small and urine

collection assembly large. And there are also six bags which are just called emesis which actually means vomit. But they were too polite to say vomit bags. Wow. Yeah. The other day that Buzz Aldrin actually brought a book to the moon. Kids got bored? Exactly.

He's going to be sat on the toilet. He's going to do stuff. Yeah. He brought a book to the moon. What was the book? It was a biography of a pioneer of rockets. So someone who was building rockets and I can't remember his name but yeah. Speaking of emesis in space, NASA has been developing ways of getting alcohol into space.

Or tentatively. At the moment you're not allowed. Yeah well at the moment you're not allowed alcohol in space. I think the Russians take it up didn't they? Yes. Do they? Secretly they were bringing up vodka. The weird thing is they only actually took vodka up because it went so well with the

tomato juice. Which just tastes so much better in space. It was a John Glenn said. I've not seen tomato juice and everyone's copied him ever since. Yeah sorry go on. Yeah so sorry they've developed like a powdered sherry NASA tried out and they decided to test this out by recreating zero gravity tests and putting people in the test flight and as soon as the astronauts who were in this test flight smelt the sherry they all vomited.

So they haven't perfected it yet. I actually think that the Australians have developed a beer to take to space and so far as I know it's the only contribution of space that the Aussies have made. The Italians are taking a espresso machine up aren't they? And the South Koreans came up with space kimchi. Oh yeah. So like a lot of different countries like do their specialism and I guess Australia's is beer.

Yeah. America has SpaceX. Australia has Forex. Could I just stop you there for a second. I wanted to tell you that today's instalment of No Such Thing as a Fish was produced with the help of Squarespace which is the award winning website builder that makes it easy to tell your story to the world. It's got beautiful templates.

It's got 24 seven support and e-commerce. Give your story a voice at squarespace.com and use the offer code FISH to save 10% off your order. Back to the podcast. Okay time for fact number three Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is the man who played Sherlock Holmes spent the first world war dressed as a tree. Which man? What?

Exactly. Benedict Cumberbatch. Benedict Cumberbatch was not as far as I know intimately involved in the first world war. You're saying he's a coward. Yes. I have told you. And I can say that all I like because I know that he won't fight me over it.

This was Basil Rathbone who was one of the first people to become extremely famous playing Sherlock Holmes. He played him in a lot of films. Yeah he's one of those guys who I know about and I remember his face but until his name is said out loud if you just said name the Sherlock Holmes guy I wouldn't be able to name him. He did like 16 movies, 200 radio plays. And he was also in the first world war playing a tree.

He was fought on the western front and his brother was killed in 1918 and he did these incredibly dangerous patrols where during daylight he and other men would basically camouflage themselves as trees and walk very very slowly or crawl towards the German trenches. If you're crawling are you going as a tree that's fallen down I guess. Yeah I suppose so. It's such an interesting concept the idea of the tree being a spying mechanism for war. Because this did happen. The Germans built a 25 foot tall tree out of metal.

They cut down a real tree, put up a fake tree, put a man in it and later on the British overtook the same area and they didn't notice for seven months that the tree was not real. Well you wouldn't unless you went up inside it. I mean they were designed, they were photographed and sketched by botanical experts weren't they so that then they'd go and photograph the correct tree and then they'd bring the sketches and photographs back to base and they'd be designed to look exactly like the tree that they'd replaced. In the autumn did you have to kind of drop your fake leaves do you think?

Yeah you would have to wouldn't you? You would have to. Well you'd have to have someone climb up and paint them painstakingly brown over a period of weeks and then remove them one by one to seem natural. But these are two different types of tree disguise we're talking about right? So these trees we're talking about were more common I think which were trees that you'd put snipers or like observational posts up inside where's Basil Rathbone I think was a moving tree.

Dressed as a tree. So really was he? He was just a tiny tree like there's a famous Charlie Chaplin movie where he's dressed as a tree and he hits soldiers as they come by. I think he was Charlie Chaplin's mentor so maybe that's where Charlie Chaplin got the idea so you're saying Charlie Chaplin dressed as a tree in one of his films. Yeah he did it's a very famous one. Wow he was very laconic about it he just said we brought back an awful lot of information

and a few prisoners too that was it he did a few of these patrols he didn't spend the whole war dressed as a tree. Imagine being captured by a tree. So he as I think Dan said he sort of volunteered to do this because his brother had died and I think it seems like maybe he lost respect for his own life it was devastated his brother's death but he had or thought he had a premonition of his brother's death because he wrote in his journal one night that he'd woken up at one o'clock in the morning it was June the 4th 1918 and suddenly he woke up in bed and thought of his brother and started crying

and he didn't know why and then he later found out that exactly that time was when his brother had been killed. He wrote a fantastic letter to his family if I read it I'll read a little bit of it to you. Dear all bees letter arrived this morning along with some other things and a parcel from Aunt Alfreda which looked very promising but proved to contain nothing but will and underwear of such gigantic proportions I am at a loss for words. We have managed to fit three men inside a single pair I wonder if this is the intention

you must inquire and discover if auntie made them herself I think they will make excellent tents do not tell her that. Just a bit of nice so these these huge giant tree structures they actually had almost I guess like foxholes that you would enter them through you'd go underneath them and yeah and go into them they're really tall they're very very tall trees I really like just on a bit of nominative determinism that one of the guys who sketched one of the trees that's held in the Imperial War Museum his name was Leon Underwood Underwood and Basil Rathbone second wife was called Branch that was her that was her surname really and so you get

fake trees around these days which are mobile phone masts don't you have you seen these no right so in probably in the 90s or something they built a load of mobile phone masts around the UK and to make them look better they decided to disguise them as trees but what they had to do at the same time was build other trees around them so it made it look more like a little car or whatever now the problem is what they didn't realize is that the mobile masts that look like trees of course didn't grow but the trees did grow and so now you have loads and loads of masts with just trees all around them and you can't get a signal out of them and apparently there's about 10,000 masts in the UK around with trees completely

around them that you can hardly get any signal in 2007 a man tried to rob a bank in New Hampshire as a tree the article about this said that it was despite the lack of other trees with which to blend in he was in a branch and it was on Elm Street as well the branch of the bank perfect the police later found someone who recognized him from CCTV do you think that there might be CCTV footage of say half an hour before the actual robbery of him in a fancy dress shop going do you have any balaclavas sorry we're all out mate we do have a tree costume oh damn it all right yeah if you're going to rob a bank dress up with something that you'd find in a bank like a person it seems like the smartest thing or a

biro on the little stand because then you can get really close to the counter without anyone notice it but then you're chained to the counter forever yeah that's true yeah don't go too method on it so Rathbone he was the archetypal Sherlock Holmes yes and he was also often a villain in other movies that he did and he apparently is a really really great swordsman he might be the best ever swordsman that Hollywood ever like brought out right but he would always lose because he was always the villain yeah and there was only one time he won a duel on screen in his whole career and it was when he played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and he got an Oscar nomination for it oh really was that just kind of a sort of pity thing because he'd had to lose so many jewels

yeah maybe the first Sherlock Holmes film was in 1900 and it was called Sherlock Holmes baffled basically this guy who supposedly Sherlock Holmes walks into his drawing room to find that he's been burgled and then he sees the villain and he's about to shoot him and then the villain just disappears and it was like just a way of showing trick photography at the time oh cool in the um wikipedia thing of what happens in the movie it says at the very end at this point the movie ends abruptly with Holmes looking baffled do you think it was only at that point that the audience went oh the title that makes sense good reveal yeah um just one more thing that we used for camouflage in the first world war yeah the french used a horse carcass disguise okay so there

was a real horse which was dead on the battlefield and they replaced it with I think a papier-mache one but possibly something a bit more robust than that but they made a fake horse carcass left it on the battlefield and a man crawled inside under cover of darkness and was able to observe any german troop movements and he had a telephone wire in there so he could report back they also used a camel dung as camouflage this was jasper masculine who was a magician and according to his memoirs which were not 100 shall we believe but according to his memoirs they had to mask a load of tanks which had been painted green because they were going to be used in europe but actually they were being used in egypt so they needed to be sand colored and um in order to make them

sand colored they painted them in putrid wuster sauce flour and camel dung wow wait his name was masculine yeah and he had to mask a line of tanks wow not one of the determinism gets everywhere gets everywhere we also used to use papier-mache heads didn't we during trench warfare so uh they'd make a whole bunch of papier-mache heads this sounds like possibly the most fun part of what wasn't a very fun thing to do which was fight in the trenches and then you just like stick the papier-mache heads up above the parapet and hope that they all got shot and then you would see where the snipers were firing from is that the idea or where their guns were yeah or you just it would just be like misdirection it would just be like they'll think now that they've defeated us because

they've just shot all our heads off um i i was reading during world war two uh as part of ways of disguising um one of the big problems obviously german u-boats they didn't know when they were going to come up and if a u-boats a u-boat saw a battleship they'd be inclined not to come up because they know the battleship had the capability to just mow them down yeah so uh what they used to do was they used to disguise their battleships as cruisers as public member of cruisers and they would all dress up all the soldiers the sailors would dress up as just people who were just on a holiday and guys would dress as girls and they'd be hugging on the on the so the u-boat would see them come up come towards them and suddenly all the guns would come out and then they would take

down the u-boat so once they had seen a u-boat as in they were trying to lure it a bit closer they had a whole rigmarole of what to do so they would start running around the deck as like panicked civilians basically and some of them would fall over and some of them would jump into a lifeboat and then leave someone behind by mistake and he would be screaming at the road saying come back come back all the sailors who wanted to be an amdram but had never had didn't have the chance because they were at sea would have applied for this particular mission yeah um and what's my motivation for this sinking i just want to know it apparently worked apparently 14 u-boats uh were sunk as a result of this uh it's amazing this ploy do you know that some u-boats uh came

fitted with planes so there were genuinely u-boats which um had little aircraft hangars on top of them which could be sealed obviously but when they surfaced um they had they would open the hangar and send up a little plane like thunderbirds yeah and it would observe the sea all around because obviously it's really good for observation and then um it would land ideally near the submarine because they'd have to sort of tug it back in and then put it in the hangar so it lands on skis or something yeah exactly yeah it can land on water and then yeah how cool is that yeah that's very cool yeah yeah i love those things um i got one last thing before we move on basal athpone didn't actually like playing Sherlock Holmes um it became the bane of his life because everyone

just it was total typecasting everyone wanted him to be Sherlock Holmes a bit like cone and Doyle how he wanted to exactly like Conan Doyle and he even talked about it saying cone and Doyle killed him off but i can't you know and um at the end of his career though he said to his wife why don't you write a Sherlock Holmes play and she did and it closed after three nights uh apparently it wasn't that good but if you look at his imdb among his last movies ever made uh are two that i really like called hillbillies in a haunted house and the ghost in the invisible bikini okay time for our final fact of the show and that is james harkin my fact this week is that abraham lincoln used his stealth pipe hat to keep important documents hidden was this before the

imagine of the briefcase i imagine it was you don't know when was the briefcase invented i don't know but why was he using his hat that feels like they would fall out do you know how it works um yeah i think those it was in the lining i think he had a little pocket in there that you be able to keep things in so these were his top hats yeah the top hat thing that he was really famous for wearing yeah it seemed like he used the top hat as a bit of a gimmick because he was six foot four anyway and this top hat would give him an extra like seven eight inches so he would be by far and away the tallest person in any room yeah um and also it was always slightly shabby which apparently was supposed to like suit his frontier image uh and there was a story that

um he was shot um by someone and it hit his hat and it knocked his hat off but he survived and everyone thought oh well the hat saved his life but actually what it meant was that he was always much easier to spot because he had a big hat and it was easier for people to see him if they wanted to shoot him they'll just aim for the hat right yeah and he because this was the year before he was actually assassinated he was riding on his horse um his hat just gets knocked off the horse goes insane rides off one of his people go back to find the hat and they find this big you know gun hole through it and he's he didn't believe that it was someone trying to kill him he just thought it was a mistake yeah he thought it was a mistake he thought someone had led off

a gun in a distance shooting attempting to shoot some wild animals a wild hat a wild hat yeah the day that he was assassinated he there was found on his desk the documents which uh proposed to put the secret service into being which proposed to make the secret service be a thing and the secret service obviously now the purpose of the secret service is to protect the president and to try and save his life and stop him from being assassinated he started it or he started the secret service yeah actually weirdly at the time the secret service was to solve a fraud and you know money laundering cases and stuff like that because you can imagine the day after they go okay bad first day um the man who shot Lincoln was John Wilkes Booth but the man

who shot him was a guy called Boston Corbett have you heard of him yeah he was the most strange and interesting person he was a hatter and he was genuinely a mad hatter um did he was the reason that he shot him because he had shot at the wearer of one of his precious hats it feels like it's some kind of hat related vengeance it does doesn't it i don't think it was um he had previously castrated himself with a pair of scissors were they samurai scissors history i hope so for his sake but um yeah and he then went for a walk before going to hospital to think about what he just done um so just let's go to the assassination scene for a second John Wilkes Booth you're mentioning yeah um so an interesting connection is that Tony Blair's wife Shari Blair was originally

Shari Booth yeah she is directly related to John Wilkes Booth really yeah she's a she's a fourth removed cousin i believe um and so she has a connection there more interestingly i think for the purpose of this podcast on the night that Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth another person was injured in the commotion that followed and it was a guy called Major Henry Rathbone who is related directly to Basil Rathbone wow really yeah and he later died of the wounds that he suffered from that night from a stabbing uh god and that was Basil Rathbone's distant relative oh wow yeah yeah the other thing is you know the um assassination of JFK the grassy knoll yeah that was Basil Rathbone dressed as a grassy knoll

and on the night he was assassinated Lincoln had been drinking tomato juice because he was very high up in the theater and at that altitude tomato juice tastes better well he was six foot far so he probably did taste better at that there were some hats in the georgian period i think this is according to Lucy Warsley who's just um written a book about that period um that were never intended to be worn on the head uh they look like i think that kind of disqualifies it to be in a hat they were referred to as hats they were by those bichorn hats which are like the they've got a lot too long pointy sides their hats at sailors where they were made to be held under the arm on formal occasions they were impossible to wear on the head um there were other

types of bichorn hat that were designed to be collapsible in the 19th century which i quite like and there was one hat designed which is called the opera hat which was collapsible so that when you went to the opera you wouldn't be obscuring people's vision so that was when there were there were big top hats and they were spring-loaded so that you could just collapse them and then you'd sit on them you'd sit on this flat collapsed hat on your opera chair spring-loaded they're very dangerous yeah what if the spring went off while you're sitting on it everyone's bouncing around the theater jack in a box my date's just been lobbed over the balcony president mabuto of zaire uh banned all leopard print hats from his country except for his own as it wasn't animal rights grounds

no he was the only one allowed to wear it and he also made a law saying that television in zaire could not mention anybody but him by name what that must have made a lot of dramas very difficult or the weakest link so who do you think is the weakest link i think it was that guy which guy that guy or university challenge um second along on the top deck that is unbelievable how long was that uh he when did he die he must have died about 10 years ago how would he be introduced to people mabuto this is um this is a guy on television only on tv only on tv the law in the whole country we better call our next child mabuto as well what should we call this asteroid leave it after my mistress mabuto

just other famous hats i really like john wain's hat oh yeah he had a stetson yeah war all the time everyone thought it was to cultivate this constant image of of a wild western kind of cowboy um loved his hat so much not wanting to take it off that he actually had his car which was a Pontiac station wagon he had the roof raised so that he could fit his stetson in when he's sitting and they still have that car i saw an image of it it looks really cool i went to the hat museum in stockpot and they reckon that one of the reasons that hats went out of fashion is because of the motor car because you couldn't wear it inside the car because the roof was too low but when they went out of fashion uh no one could really believe it newspaper reports of 1948

like bemoaned the fact that there was a new fashion of their headedness and the um hats industry did some research and they found that 84 percent of women preferred men in hats so they couldn't believe that people had stopped wearing them because they were so attractive yeah i think they still i'd like to see a poll of women now what they think of men wearing hats i reckon still most women would say they prefer men wearing hats we kind of fetishize that mr. Darcy top hat look didn't we uh yeah but i'm not like a backwards cap i mean context of being in 1814 or whenever it would be do you think if someone actually walked into the bar wearing a mr. Darcy hat you think i think yeah i'm not so into this as i thought it's very hard to wear any hat other than a beanie

hat or a baseball cap uh non ironically without seeming like you're trying to dress up like you're in the 40s i'm not sure you could get away with a baseball cap no you're absolutely right you're absolutely right um babe ruth always kept a cabbage leaf in his hat underneath his cap to keep him cool uh and there was a south korean baseballer called park myung kwan uh who also kept frozen cabbage leaves under his cap to keep him cold um but he wasn't really supposed to there wasn't really a rule but it was kind of seen as not very good because it was performance enhancing cabbage yes exactly that exactly that after leaves fell out twice live on television they came up with a new rule and now players may only wear cabbage leaves by presenting a doctor's

note in advance which doctor are you gonna which serious doctor is gonna sign something to that effect only doctors are in the pocket of big cabbage will do that okay that's it that's all of our facts thanks so much for listening if you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast we're all on twitter i can be gotten on at shriverland james i can be gotten on at eggshade andy you can got me on at andrew hunter m adder you can email podcast at qi.com yep and uh if you go to know such thing as a fish dot com we've got all of our previous 55 episodes up there for you to listen to also you can go to qi.com slash fish mail you can sign up to our newsletter

we're gonna be back again next week with another episode thanks for listening goodbye