No Such Thing As A Fish - 66: No Such Thing As A Robotic Margaret Atwood

Episode Date: June 19, 2015

Dan, James, Andy and Anne discuss the fate of London's bendy buses, lifts with toilets, and century-long book deals.

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 Andy Murray, James Harkin and Ann Miller, 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, Harkin. My fact this week is that in the 1840s, London buses had straps attached to the driver's arms that you would yank if you wanted to stop. This just seems like the worst idea in the world.

In 1839 they invented the bell on buses, and then they decided to go to the strap version afterwards. So these are horse buses of course, and in those days you didn't have to go on the left hand side or the right hand side of the road and there were no bus stops or anything like that. So when you wanted to stop you needed to tell the driver which direction you wanted to go to the right hand side of the road or the left hand side. So if you wanted to stop on the right hand side you would yank his right strap and that would move his right arm which would move the horse to the side of the road and then he would stop.

I read that they didn't have to even pull over to stop for 40 years after the horse drawn bus was invented. So 1829 I think was the first one and there was a new law passed in 1867 which said really you should probably pull over to the side of the street before you just stop the bus. Yeah until then they would just stop dead. I think the first buses in London they just did the route and they would let you on wherever it was 70 people could get on and you just would hail it. They weren't stops and things. I guess they just thought well if we let you on anywhere you can get off.

Yeah exactly. That sounds really good actually. How did you used to park when you had a horse attached to your car? The parallel parking? Yeah parallel parking, three point turns, how did that all work? You would pull your horses off and they would feed or drink water. Big apart. If you were a caring horse owner.

You would pull him off to the right if you wanted to. The horse had two straps attached to it actually. Okay that reminds me of another thing about people with straps attached to them, the Huichol Indians of central Mexico. During childbirth the father would sit above his wife who's giving birth and have a strap attached to his testicles and whenever she had labour pains she would yank on the strap and yank his testicles so that he would have the same pain as her. Good job.

That was a great idea. My god that is so, when did that stop? It's a traditional thing. I don't think it's happened for hundreds of years. I don't know why that died out. So another thing about buses is that driving buses wasn't actually legal until 1832 for the first three years. It hadn't been properly regulated or anything and drivers would chain themselves to their

seats but they were still arrested anyway. They were training themselves to stop being, you know, stopped from driving by the authorities. Yeah. That's amazing. Isn't that insane? So after World War I there weren't that many buses in London clipping repurposed during the war. So Mr A Portridge realised that he could make some money by running his own buses on the

same route so he'd go alongside the official buses but he would sort of take shortcuts to avoid traffic and make his buses better and then you'd often see races between the official bus and then the pirate bus. That's great. When he thought of that idea he must have gone, ah ha, back of the net. They do that in some of the countries, I think in Moscow they have like unofficial buses that you can kind of get on and they're a little bit cheaper than the official ones. It's like hustling for minicabs.

Yeah. It's like driving fast. I mean like. St Lucia has those as well I think. So they sort of, well they have a range of buses of different levels of officialness essentially. That's cool. Do you guys remember the Bendy buses?

Yeah. Do you know where they are now? Australia. I mean we have a lot of them in Australia. I hadn't noticed that they weren't there anymore. They've gone. Yeah. So they, Ken Livingston brought them in.

Then Boris got rid of them saying they were a monstrosity and we didn't want them. So they went to Malta. Malta has very narrow, tight roads and they are very difficult to go through traffic so they were a complete disaster. Not least because on the day all the drivers went on strike so they shipped in drivers from the UK who didn't know the route or the language. Oh my God. They caused complete chaos and they are called Arriva which is arriving in Italian and they

got nicknamed Bespetta which means waiting because they were just rubbish. So Malta have now passed them on and they're now in Sudan. Really? Wow. Bendy buses. That's unbelievable. I know. That is really interesting.

Do they drive the buses to these places or do they fly them? I think it's a plane with two straps on and then they steer it from the ground. So there's one person who was in Malta and wants to go to Sudan and finally the buses turned up. You wait ages for a bus to Sudan and then all of London's Bendy buses come at once. Just back in the day where everything was horse drawn, something that hadn't occurred to me and I read in a book the other day is that if you had an emergency and you needed a doctor, doctors just used to leap on a horse and ride to the scene.

I don't know why that's such an amazing image of just like a doctor speeding down the road on a horse. He had to shout the word ambulance backwards as he wrote. I really like this. The double decker bus was introduced maybe I think about 20 years after the original horse drawn bus and supposedly it was introduced for the Great Exhibition before they had a proper staircase. They just had kind of an iron ladder, which was quite, you know, three or four quite high

iron steps, but there were also seats available on either side of the driver. And there's one book. It's called Transport in Britain from Canal Lock to Gridlock and it says that the seats were hard to get, but they were highly prized by younger passengers because of the driver's great reputation for jokes and witty repartee. So nothing changes, does it? It was the original banter bus. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Here's the thing. Here's the best thing I found this week. Oh, yeah. Who invented the bus? A jack bus. The earliest known public bus line, it was called The Carriage, was launched by Blaise Pascal, the mathematician and philosopher, the guy.

We were at a bus company in his spare time. Oh, it's unbelievable, isn't it? How can that even be true? It was on Wikipedia and I checked it out and there's some books, some philosophy books about him and apparently it is true. I know. That is incredible. I wish I knew more about Blaise Pascal, so I could put that in context.

Yeah. Give us a bit more then. Okay. So he, in mathematics, he did Pascal's Triangle, which is a famous load of numbers in a triangle where the two above add to the one below. He has the SI unit of pressure named after him. He wrote a famous book called The Ponce, which was a philosophy book and he was a great French kind of...

A transport enthusiast? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, he was one of the great 17th century French thinkers and he also invented the bus. That is incredible. How did the bus fall off from his list of achievements? Like, well, it's the one that no one ever talks about these days, really. Yeah, I read a theory and I'm still trying to get to the bottom of this because it sounds

like there is some truth to it, but not as much as most articles would suggest. Do you know why the railroads in this country are the width that they are? Yes, it's the stride of a yeti, isn't it? No. It's the idea that obviously when trains were horse drawn, you had two horses pulling the train and the width of the railroads now are the widths of what two horses standing next to each other would be. Now, that's a theory that apparently in America as well, with all the railroads, that's how

it became. But then different countries have different gauges. Exactly. Yeah. And in fact, Britain had two different gauges. Yeah. America had 20. This is where the theory falls down slightly.

Maybe the horses got, like, fatter in certain states. Yeah, that's true. That's possible. Different diets. There was a way it could have gone. Oh, God, there was an amazing program about this ages and ages ago on the beef. And it was basically saying that there were two gauges, a narrow gauge and a broad gauge for trains.

And the whole of the country eventually went with the narrow gauge simply because it had spread further and faster, like basically VHS over Betamax, if you like. And so now these days we could have these incredible lavish, huge trains, but we don't. And you have to kind of squeeze through the aisles with our coffees. Exactly. I have a thing about, there was a guide to Bus Etiquette printed in the Times in 1834. I just love this so much. So they're quite similar, like number one, keep your feet off the seats, two, do not

get into a snug corner yourself and then open the windows to admit a North Wester upon the neck of your neighbor, like a wind or rain or, you know, isn't it weird when you get on a tube and someone just immediately gets on the tube and opens a window without checking the temperature, just goes on, opens the window and sits down. Yes, that is true. That is weird. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you get on and it's like walking into another window.

So I guess. Yeah, no, I can understand it. If it's summer, it's okay. It's winter. I get really pissed off by people who open windows. You know how you keep learning a few things about yourself as the years go on? It's a new thing I've learned very recently. If people are opening windows whenever you walk into a room and you might be the problem.

Someone else is saying, you know what, I've recently found out I hate people who smell bad. What can you do? What can you do? This Bus Etiquette guide then starts to go slightly off the rails of where we know. So number six is do not spit upon the straw. You are not in a hogsty. Number seven, behave respectfully to females and put not on an unprotected, last the

blush because she cannot escape from your brutality, which is very good advice. And number eight, if you bring a dog, let him be small and confined by a string. Let him be small. It's like, oh, big dogs are going, please let me be small. Yeah. On the underground, isn't there's like a rule that you can have a thing. It's something like you can have a dog on the escalator if you can hold it. Yes.

Absolutely mega dog. So there is a bus that goes from Bristol to Bath, which is powered by poo. Oh, yeah. The bio bus and it's powered by bio methane gas, actually, which comes from. Okay. From excrement and it can travel up to 186 miles on one tank of gas. I thought you were going to say one poo. Just the driver gets out of the 166 miles.

Got to top it up. Opens up the cap. Oh, I've hurt your eyes. No, it can go 186 miles on one tank of gas, which takes the annual waste of around five people to produce. So five people have to poo for one year to get one tank of gas. Yeah. That's not so bad.

Yeah. Cause I, I mean, I just, I do that every day, not a year's worth, but like, it's not like I'd have to be like, better, better poo, like all you'd have to do is just bag what you're doing. Right. I see what you mean. I don't. I'm just saying it's not bag what you're doing and posted off to Bristol.

The council buildings will be fine. Okay. Time for fact number two. And that is Miller. My fact is that standing like Superman can make you more successful. I love that. Which is why I'm doing it right now. So explain how can that work?

Do we know? Okay. So it's a thing called power opposing, which is basically about body language and giving off the right impression. And it's the work of Amy Cuddy, who's a social psychologist at Harvard, who reckons we should all spend two minutes a day power posing. So there's lots of various postures you can do, but the best one is superhero. So hands on hips, chest out, head up in sort of classic superhero.

And people who do this will have increased levels of testosterone, a decrease in cortisol, which is the stress hormone, and feel both more powerful and more open to risk. People who take low posture poses have the opposite. What are low posture poses? Things like slumping in on yourself. It's basically making yourself small. So it's the thing, if you go to a meeting and you sort of, you know, bend your knees, you tuck your arms and your head's down, you look.

Being naked and crying in the corner. That also sends off bad, bad impressions in job interviews. They found that people, if they're with someone who's doing a powerful pose in a powerful position, rather than copying them, you're more likely, even if you are relatively powerful, to then adopt a weaker stance. By presenting as more confident, you become more confident. So by being Superman, you will become not quite Superman, but with Superman-like powers. Well, here's the thing.

It also works if you wear Superman outfits. Which is the less effort. So they put students in various different items of clothing and got them to do mental ability tests, and they found that generally people were getting about 64%, but people in Superman t-shirts were getting 72%, and also people wearing white coats did better as well. This one's interesting, because wearing a lab coat makes you better, but they're taking lab coats away for doctors, so they'll have to do something in Superman poses to counterbalance

this. The doctors will perform poorly because they're wearing the wrong outfit. The costume thing also actually works for Christopher Reeve. There's a story in Roger Moore's autobiography where while they were filming the movie, Christopher Reeve, during breaks where he couldn't get out of his clothes, if it was lunchtime, would go to the Pinewood Studios canteen, which is where they were filming. And if he went out in his Superman costume, he was just swarmed, girls coming around, swarming around him, just totally in love with him.

If he came out during the Clark Kent scenes, just no one came near him, he was just left alone at the canteen. They probably didn't recognize him. Yeah, I know. I think this is really good. I really like this. I'm going to start doing this power-posing. We used to do it all the time.

Well, you don't have to do it in front of people. You can do it for two minutes when you got up in the morning, and you got home today, and you'll carry those benefits with you. There is one bad thing about wearing Superman costumes, and that is if you're a child, because apparently superhero costumes cause children to hurt themselves because they start doing playing, which is a bit like they try and fly and stuff like that. Oh, no. Do you guys know that Superman was originally evil?

No. No, he wasn't. Yeah, he was. No, I don't know that. Well, you can take it up with Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, who came up with Superman. In 1932, they did a story called The Rain of the Superman, about a homeless man called Bill Dunne, who was transformed by a mad scientist who used a secret chemical to help him be able to read and control minds.

The Superman, with these new powers, kills his creator and starts playing the stock market and winning races to get rich enough to take over the world and then loses it all. Wow. Is that because he likes risk? Because he's been doing these power poses that he's playing the stock market with? Yeah, I think that's what happened. And then, obviously, they rewrote him, and he was nicer the second time around. And an alien and...

Not an insane word or a gambler. Wow. I always thought, by the way, that any time I saw a portrait of Henry VIII, that he was adopting a Superman pose. Yeah. Yeah, he does make himself look big, doesn't he? That's true. I wonder how many people from history wear that pose because it's inspired by...

I want to make that a tumbler. Yeah. Superhero history. Yeah, Superman poses in history. Oh, that's a really good idea. Okay. There's a guy, there was a newspaper article I read about Superman, and it said something like this.

When Clark Kent wanted to transform into Superman, it was a fairly simple task. He would step into a phone box, spin around, and the switch would be complete. For Herbert Chavez, his change into the comic book world has taken a bit longer, through 16 years of plastic surgery. Oh, my gosh. And yeah, he's had plastic surgery to make him look like Superman. Oh, Herbert, you're beautiful as you are. Just do the posture, that's enough.

He doesn't really look that much like Superman, to be honest. Yeah. Do you mean before or after he doesn't look like? In neither case, did he ever look like Superman? Oh, Herbert. It's the heels, but with Superman, it is largely the outfit that marks him out. Yeah, yes. That's why Christopher Reeve, when, you know, not in costume, was not mobbed because...

Yeah, it fits the costume. Yeah, you look over and you see a block just in a shirt and trousers, and you don't think, oh, my God, I must mob him. You look over and you see Superman, you know, that's very exciting. Herbert Chavez just keeps walking into the Pinewood canteen, waiting for people to mob him and go, another operation then. Oh, dear. Oh, that's so sad.

I've got one more fact, which is that Superman was trained to get bit by Darth Vader. Right, okay. What do you mean? Christopher Reeve, when he was getting fit for the movie, was trained by David Prowse, who was Darth Vader. Oh, my goodness. Oh, Steve Prowse is the West Country one, isn't he? Yes, he is.

And there's a clip of him doing Darth Lines in the West Country accent, which is the best thing possible on the internet. Yes, yeah, because we all know it's a famous Star Wars thing is that James Earl Jones became the voice. But there is your right footage where you can actually hear the West Country accent coming out of Vader's costume. Throw the ribbles out the airlock. It's so good.

It's just not as sinister, really. Okay, time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact is that this year, Margaret Atwood submitted her latest novel, and it's going to hit the bookshops in the year two thousand one hundred and fourteen. Go bloody publishers, eh? I bet she really rushed for that deadline as well. So Margaret Atwood, she's the first author who's part of a very new project called the Future Library Project, and the idea is that a bunch of novelists for the next hundred

years are going to submit a novel, and in a hundred years time, starting from 2014, the first novel hit the shops. It was started by a Scottish artist called Katie, Katie Patterson. She had this idea that it would be nice to do a long term project, and also the way they're going to publish it is they're growing a forest out in Oslo in a hundred years time. They'll chop the trees down, and they will be turned into the books. It's so cool. Yeah, it's the big project going on.

I read that they're putting a printing press in the library as well, so make sure that if in a hundred years we don't have the printing technology we have today, they can still turn the tree into paper and make sure those books definitely get read in a hundred years. That's a good idea. Can you imagine if a hundred years from now we really mess up this planet and we're really low on trees, and suddenly they're like, well, we're just going to take this forest down. Then the Margaret Atwood robot with her brain inside it, a massive robot comes along and stops people and crushes them and says, no, these are my trees.

That's a very cool idea. The Margaret Atwood robot, I love that. I think she would like it. Yeah, she would. She's a sci-fi writer. It's such a good and strange idea, but you're right, because it's like people 150 years ago saying, well, we're going to have this extraordinary telegram competition in a hundred years time, and telegrams will be sent all over the world.

We have no idea what's going to happen in the next hundred years. So I like it's optimum. The printing press is a really good idea. Books have lasted quite a long time, though, haven't they? So there's a reasonable chance they will again. Because when you say it, it sounds very futuristic, but I think actually a hundred years ago, we still read novels from a hundred years ago, like older than that, obviously. But it could be reading could be the same or it could be completely different.

But then they also said that if the world changes, like language could be different. Or there's a thing that people think the handwriting might start dying out. So just what will people in a hundred years be doing and reading and writing? None of us will know. But it's a hundred years. You're right, it's not that long. Like this year has gone really quick from a personal perspective. Yeah, you know, just need a few more of those and then you're there.

So they said that in this project, you can submit anything. It can be like one word. It can be appointment, can be a novel. That's a very dangerous idea for authors, because they will submit one word. You'd stand about three weeks on that one word. When you at the end of it, you've got nine percent of the forest left. The picture is fine. I think it's nice that in a hundred years time,

some people somewhere will definitely be reading books as we know them. Well, I read that in twenty one, fifteen, which is a hundred years in the future, people have predicted that there'll only be six hundred languages left on earth as opposed to today's six thousand. Oh, God. So whatever language Margaret Atwood's written, and you better hope that's one of them. Yeah, if that was presumably English, presumably English, that's awful. Yeah.

There must have come a tipping point where the world stopped gaining languages and started losing them. I don't know. We've got the Avatar language now. We've got Klingon. We've got we I mean, as dumb as that sounds, that is a language. That's not how that's not how Papua New Guinea got its eight hundred languages by authors of fantasy novels and making up novels

which people could quote to each other at sci-fi conventions. Papua New Guinea is just one massive sci-fi convention. That's all that's made it through. Yeah. Like Klingon, they teach Klingon. They're a Klingon schools now. Like it's it's a language, though, but it's a language. I know it's a language, but it's not a language that has developed over thousands of years.

Klingon is not a replacement for the hundreds of well, no strange language because we're not going to go over to Papua New Guinea and go, sorry to hear that you're losing your languages. We've got a new one for you. We've got Dothraki for you. Not suggesting we replace them. Right. I'm just saying there are new languages. Yeah. So you know how Papua New Guinea is famously the place with the most languages?

I think one in ten of the Earth's languages have spoken there or something. Yeah, they've got at least 800. And if you say there are 6,000, then yeah. But apparently there are a few more in New York City, or at least it's very close. The number in Papua New Guinea compared to the number in New York City. But the Papua New Guinea ones are native, presumably, and New York is immigrant. It's sort of everywhere. Yeah, yeah. That's cool.

Oh, that's very cool. I had to look for things that haven't been read at the time. And I found out that so the World Bank released a lot of their release, all the reports as PDFs. And they found out they nearly a third of them are never read, never downloaded, never read. But the reason I love this story is the report that said no one reads them was released as a PDF. And because the story sort of did quite well and got a lot of coverage,

their most read PDF could be the PDF saying they read their PDFs. That's very good. That's brilliant. That's great. So the second author who's going to be contributing to this project is David Mitchell, the novelist. And I there's something about this idea of submitting something that no one's going to be able to give you feedback on if you're an author. And incredibly tempting. No reviews, no difficult sales for the paperback edition.

I'd still like the advance, obviously. The audience are going to love it. Well, that's what kind of what happened with Mark Twain's autobiography, wasn't it? Yeah. Did he kind of say that no one was allowed to read it for 100 years or something? Yeah, he did. I mean, he put he put it into that was the deal. It could be published 100 years after his death, and that is what happened. It's the first two volumes have come out.

They're ginormous and they are was only about two years ago, three years ago. They finally got published. There's currently one Spike Milligan book that yet remains to be published. Spike Milligan can't find a publisher, right? It's basically Spike Milligan did a bunch of books called According to a court. So Black Beauty, according to Spike Milligan, Treasure Island, Hand of the Bascals, he rewrote the classics.

Yeah, Mark Twain's autobiography, according to. But this one book isn't out of copyright yet. And the copyright holders have refused to let him to do that. So his agent, Norma Farnes, is just holding on to it. And the copyright is going to come up in about 10 years or so. Right. Then we'll get one more Spike Milligan book. Yeah. That's the other thing about Margaret Atwood's thing. Doesn't copyright run out 70 years after you die?

So she's not going to see any royalties. Well, she hasn't exactly. Like her her estate won't see anything unless she lives for another 30 years. Right. And she's what? Seventy five at the moment. Is she? Yeah, she's in her seventies. I guess she's invented a thing called the long pen. Have you read about this?

Yeah, it's just a really long pen. It's ginormous. No, a long pen, very different. This is this is kind of like a futuristic invention. It's the idea that you can sign on a tablet, but it can appear. It was basically designed for book tours and so on. If she couldn't physically be in a place, so they'll have like a robot arm and you'll go and sit next to the robot arm.

And then she'll do a Skype chat with you and you'll say my name's Herbert Chavez or whatever. I've had dozens of operations to look like you, Margaret. But no one's mobbing me. And then she'll say, OK, Herbert, I'll sign your book for you. And then she'll sign it on a tablet. And then the robot arm will come down onto your book and sign exactly as she signed it. Wow.

So rather than just being like they have the auto ones where they do a present signature, but it's actually hard doing it in real time. Yeah. So so she can't be in the room in Australia for a book signing, she could do a live Skype chat and then you can go to a desk where there's a robot arm and you can watch her signing it on Skype and the robot's doing it. I think we've got to be very careful with that kind of thing. And I think the voice of the author, whoever it is,

should immediately be converted into a metallic robot voice. Thank you for coming to my signing. It works especially well for like dystopian novel signings. So you're like, welcome to the future. Here is your book. Yeah, I would. Well, robotic Margot Atwood, as you were saying earlier, there is a good story in that. I had a look for authors whose books haven't been

have had delays or have been lost. Dr. Zoice, when they cleared out his attic. I approve of that pronunciation. Just so we're clear, is that Dr. Seuss to the rest of us? Dr. SEUSS. Yeah, Dr. Seuss. But Dr. Zoice is probably the perfect pronunciation. They when he died, his basic box of sort of things got put to one side

and then they found it in 2013 in three books, one of which is What Pet Should I Get? I think it's like a fabulous book. No, is it a dog? Is it a frog? I mean, it's a shame that Dr. Seuss has already written this book, because otherwise we could Christmas 2015 by the Elves.

Watch out for it. OK, time for our final fact, and that is Murray. My fact is that Japan is considering installing toilets in its lifts. Sounds like a plan to me. Yeah, does it have very long lift journeys or what? Well, it doesn't, but it does have earthquakes, lots of Japan. And when earthquakes happen and lifts get stuck, there are already some little seats in lifts

so that elderly or infirm people can sit down, because the last time it happened, people were stuck for, you know, hours in the lifts. And there has been a recent proposal and they haven't completed it yet, but they might do, which is to fit the seats with little toilets just inside, sort of discreetly, so that if they have an enormous earthquake soon in Japan, they've calculated that up to 17,000 people could be trapped in lifts

for some time while they just get everyone out and clear the buildings and so on. So that is that would be quite good to have. And then they could collect it all and power a bus. Power the lifts, that's true. But so I was reading the story that talks about this and they kept referring to the earthquakes as going, we're expecting the big one. Yeah, they really think it's imminently coming.

This big, ginormous earthquake. But it's definitely better to be thinking that than thinking it'll be fine. There'll be no earthquakes around here any time. Yeah, that's true. There are lifts that you already have sensors in them that can detect the beginnings of earthquakes. So if the lifts detect earthquakes coming, they sort of try and stop at a floor and get people out.

They won't carry on going. That is amazing. Safety mechanisms. Imagine if there's like just about to start an earthquake and then it stops on the floor to let you out, but you're halfway through having to poo. You're not meant to use it in less than an earthquake. Oh, right.

It's not just for your day, it's the office. People will start using it for that reason, though, right? Surely. You should poo responsibly. Imagine if you're about to get into a lift and someone walks out and goes, I'll give it a few minutes. No. Oh, my God.

Um, so the really cool thing about lifts is they go back really fast. So the Coliseum had lifts as I'm not sure if we've mentioned that before, actually, but they were hand-powered. Yeah, and they were to get the animals up into the arena, right? Yeah. But the invention of the lift or the lift becoming popular completely changed what people think of as the best room in a building. So the best rooms in a building used to be on the first floor,

right, because if you were wealthy, you didn't want to have to climb loads of stairs. And then suddenly the lift is invented and people think, oh, it's high up here. And there's the sort of extra privilege of traveling in a lift. You've got a view. You've got a view and it's sort of it's more naturally exclusive. But in ancient Roman apartment blocks, the top floor was the port for the poorest.

If you go to the big buildings in America, like the richest people would always be on the top floor. But then after 9-11, they all moved down to the bottom floors. Really? Yeah. Wow. I believe that's true. Will that change again over time? I was only told by people at the time that that was happening. I don't know if it's changed.

The first generation of skyscrapers were known as elevator buildings. Were they? Really? They could only really exist because of the elevators, I guess. They could only go so high. And the first lift in London was at the Groverner Hotel and it was called the Ascending Room. That's good. Oh, I heard of that.

It sounds amazing. Yeah, it sounds really cool. Ancient lifter often sort of, you know, ropes and simple mechanisms. And I read that in the Greek Meteora Mountains, they would put people in baskets and hook them up on ropes. And the story that a visitor asked them how often they changed the rope and the reply was, each time that it breaks. Very nice.

Bill, you were confident of this. That's funny. Have you heard of Paternoster Lifts? Yeah, they have one in the Arts Tower in Sheffield University. Really? No way. It's basically two lift shafts open to you without a door. And then there's a chain of compartments, which one is always going up and one is always going down, right?

And they move on a continuous belt and you just step in as a compartment passes you by and it carries you out. Wow. I know. And there are still apparently loads of them in Prague because they didn't have quite the same safety standards, basically, during communist times, as they said, now we don't need your safety standards. Same in Sheffield.

Yeah, and there are some in Germany. And they're called Paternosters after our father, which is the Lord's Prayer, right? Because of the way you move rosary beads. Oh, yeah. How cool is that? They sort of click through up and down. Yeah, I didn't know that. That's very cool.

My favorite thing, actually, but this fact is that it does kind of fit into that thing of Japan just consistently when you hear stories of Japan and technology. Just feels like they're really cool and they've got just great innovations. Yeah, and bathroom stuff seems to be like there's an invention which is toilet slippers. The idea that you would change your house slippers into toilet slippers and you could go in and then you'd leave them at the toilet.

So that's just a quite nice idea. But just a little inside fact for our show, if you listen to our theme tune right at the beginning of our show, there's a Japanese voice at the top of our theme tune. That is the voice of a bathtub in Japan telling the person in the flat that their bathtub is ready, that their bath is run and it's ready. So Ash Gardner, who's been on the show and does M.P.S., he took that recording sitting in his kitchen of his bath telling him

it's ready for him to come. It's so cool. Yeah. That's very cool. I also read that in Japanese public toilets, like in train stations and stuff, have these really cool things like they'll have like a seat so you've got a baby, you can put your baby in a seat so you can sort of balance your child and go to the toilet. They have like a sort of flip down board.

You can stand on it, you want to change your socks or your shoes. You don't have to stand on the floor where everyone stands with their feet. That's a good idea. So you just have to have a really smart idea. Japan is so clever in so many ways. It's so good. They must be horrified when they come over here and like go to like Waterloo station. I know. Yeah.

And the thing about removing your shoes is enormous, isn't it? In your own home, you would just never wear shoes. There's a tiny bit in the entrance hallway where you come in, take your shoes off and you put on your slippers and then you're in your home. Makes sense. Yeah, it does. It absolutely does. Do you know that Foodie Tech, such a Japanese company, claimed to make the world's smoothest lift and they have a thing called the nickel test

where they put a nickel or a coin, place it so it's facing up on the lift and then they ride it from the top to the bottom. If the coin is still there, it passes the test. Wait, do you mean on its edge? On its edge. Oh, wow. Yeah, flat would be a lot. That reminds me, just going back to buses from all that time ago. In China, they had this drive safely campaign of bus drivers

and the way that they did it is they'd put like hang from the ceiling next to the driver like a wok full of water. And the idea was you couldn't jerk the bus because then you'd spill the water and that really happened. That's very good. Quite recently, I think that happened. That's quite smart. Yeah, that's very clever. The first department store in New York City to have a lift, it promised customers it would take them to the second floor in 26 seconds.

OK, today, the lift in the Burj Al Khalifa goes 2038 feet in 35 seconds. That's how far we've come in that time. Do you know in 1989, the guy called Nicholas White got trapped in his office for 41 hours after there's a power cut and he got stuck between two floors and no one noticed him. Oh, no. He ended up having to pee down the lift shaft which he hoped would attract attention, but it didn't. I don't know where he was looking for attention from

because no one lives at the bottom of the lift shaft and would be inconvenienced by urine. His story is really sad, though, because it ruined his life. What? He wrote an article about it saying because this happened in 1999 and he sought compensation, basically. Lots of lawyers came waggling, you know, million figure Psalms in front of him. He spent about five years trying to get compensation and at the end he got sort of, you know, some compensation, but nothing like the millions that he'd been led to.

It's only 41 hours of overtime. Yeah, well, and then his relationship broke down and he said, this has basically ruined my life and I did this to myself. I shouldn't have gone looking for that and I sort of gave in to the temptation. Yeah, really, really sad. Do you know the person who's got the world record for the longest time stuck in a lift? Was it Nicholas White?

No, it was a Cypriot lady called Kivilly Papa John. Papa John of the Papa John family. Was she delivering? No, she was going to get her groceries. Was she going to get tomatoes, mozzarella? Sweet corn, pepperoni. Maybe some pineapple and tam if she was feeling fun. It's such a good name, isn't it?

Well, it's a full name in and of itself, which is why it's not really a surname as far as I know. But yeah, she went out to get her groceries in December, 1987. She's still there. But people keep laughing at her about her surname. It's not fair. I think it's a hoax call. So what happened?

She was stuck in her lift in her apartment block for six days. Wow. But luckily, she'd just been shopping, so she had loads of food. Yeah, perfect. But when you say she holds the world record, was that like she was five days in and they were going, listen, Mrs. Papa John, we've got Guinness coming. Hold on for a bit longer.

We reckon we could get a really good record out of this. Is she holding the door shut when they're trying to come on? I need one more hour in here and I get the record. OK, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the stuff we've said over the course of this podcast, we're all on Twitter.

You can get me on at Shriverland James at X shaped and at Miller underscore and Andy at Andrew Hunter. You can also get us all on at QI podcast. You can email us on podcast at qi.com. And you can also go to know such thing as a fish dot com, where we've got all of our previous episodes. We'll see you again next week back with another episode. Goodbye.