No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Half-Past Purple

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Live from the Royal Institution, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss warmed fog, weird fines and wind farms.Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreonEdited by James HarkinProduced by Leying LeeTeam includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Hello and O'Hoodo Wackash? Hello and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast, this week coming to you live from the Royal Institution in London. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tysinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones

with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is, the first ever megawatt-scale wind turbine was erected at a Vermont mountain called Grandpas Nob. Okay. So this is wind turbine. And so megawatt scale, you know,

it could generate a megawatt of electricity at any one time. That was the capacity. We're in 1941, October 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, coincidence. So America had nothing to do at that time, I guess. I know, it was easy, breezy times, but no, that's just setting the scene for you. And there was a guy called Palmer Putnam, who was both a sailor and an engineer. He lived very near, Grandpa's Knob, Cape Cod, and he had two problems. One was constantly windy, just constantly, the wind blowing in off the Atlantic, just constant.

Secondly, his electricity bills were too high. And he thought, I wonder if I could combine these problems into one solution. And he had a bit of expertise in the field. And he built this wind turbine. It lasted about, not very long, sadly, about two years. But it was groundbreaking because there had been turbines before. They could generate electricity. But this was the biggest that had ever been built.

You know, a megawatt is sort of a symbolic threshold, I guess, to get over. Yeah, it only lasted two years because it got blown over. Yes. Did it? Which I think is sometimes a problem with wind turbine. binds, isn't it? Occasionally, yeah. You do need to build them to withstand that. I know in Denmark, if it gets too windy, they turn off. That's true. Yeah, yeah, if it's sort of very stormy conditions. But this guy was like, he was really famous in his time, wasn't he? I read that he went to,

he did a lecture at NASA about wind power, and then he signed autographs for 45 minutes afterwards. Really? And that's because they all thought he was going to be like the Edison of wind power. And they thought wind power is going to be the next big thing, so we're going to get his autograph last. I should say how important this was because a megawatt, it was 10 times bigger than the biggest windmill that had ever been produced in terms of the electricity it could generate. Right.

And in fact, most people had windmills at the time. They were about 1,000th of this scale in generation. Like those little ones that you stick in your garden on a little pole. Yeah, farmers had them. Farmer had them for grinding corn and for other boring. If you go even now to like the Midwest of America, and like in old movies and stuff, you see them.

They're like bits of... metal with tiny windmills on. Yeah, they're sort of like ugly versions of European windmills, aren't they? They're like disreport with a tiny head and a massive body. Yeah, I guess, but the thing is like because they were pioneers going out west, they had to make do with what they had. They couldn't just get loads and loads of planks and make an enormous beautiful windmill. They had to just make it as minimalistic as possible. But I think it's quite ironic that, um, kind of America was built on those windmills, but now the right wing in America just hates wind farms. That's true.

That's true. And after Putnam built this, it took, so this was 41, it took until really the 1970s for Wynn to take off in a big way, which was partly thanks to the oil crisis, two oil crises in the 70s, when there was a cut off of fuel from the Middle East. But those problems were, those days are gone. Those days were resolved, so we don't need to worry about that. I just wanted to ask the question on everyone's lips, the most important question about this. Who's grandpa? Well. And can we be introduced? No. I don't think I found why it was called Grandpa's Knob. I did look. No, I don't think we, I don't think anyone knows unless someone around here has found it. No.

But there is next to it another place called Biddy Knob. And it seems like maybe Grandpa, because Biddy, it's short for Bridget, but it was also used in America in those days to mean like an old lady. So it might have been that Grandpa Knob and Biddy Knob together made a couple. and they might have been named after two people from the area. Hey, Andy, is there, I think, the other main question that listeners of our show want to know, is there a society to do with wind turbines and windmills and have you joined? I haven't found one yet, but I don't think there's a grandpa's novel preservation society because it got taken, as you said, James, it got blown over and it damaged in a storm.

And then a few years ago, someone proposed putting up a modern turbine, kind of the same size as a tribute to this amazing engineering first. And someone else said, oh, what if it vibrates? And so they cancelled the plan. Okay. But they have got a phone mask there now. So, you know, that's something, isn't it? Progressive sorts, isn't it?

One more thing on Palmer Putnam. He also designed amphibious landing craft used during the Normandy landings. Wow. Oh, my God. Yeah, he's a big deal. And later in life, he got into gardening, and he always planted vegetables next to each other that he knew would grow to the exact same height. What?

One of those inventions. is more useful than the other. I'd say. So they're really big now, aren't they? They're even bigger than the grandpa's knob. Yeah, yeah. Way bigger. Wind turbines.

Wind turbines, yes. And in fact, the biggest wind turbine in the world is currently being built in Germany. It's going to be 360 meters high, which is 100 stories high, which is quite cool. And difficult because cranes can only get up to about half that height. So you build half of it. They are currently building half of it with cranes. And then the other half of it. is just telescoped on the inside.

So you get to halfway up and then you pull the rest out like a telescope. Yeah, I don't know if it's as simple as that, construction-wise, but it's essentially it. The other half is inside. So cool. I've been reading about windmills, old school. Oh, yeah.

Fascinating. Fascinating history. I didn't realize there was a code of the windmills. So you would do social announcements via your windmill. No. Yeah, so I've printed out this thing. So you can probably have a go at guessing, but okay. So you never used to leave your windmill with the, so if you had four sails, you would never leave it with the vertical right up. Can I say why? Yes. Because the vertical one going down would stop you getting out the door.

No, I mean, probably correct. But what it really was was back in the day, it was lightning bolts. You would have the highest thing and so we would attract lightning bolts. You can leave it there like that now because they have right. rods that attract the lightning in its place. But that used to be a way that people, if they saw that the windmill sail was up like that, it meant, okay, they're not at home, but they'll be back because no fool would leave their sail fully vertical. Oh, wow. So you knew they were still in five minutes. Exactly. Back in five minutes, exactly. And they still use that today in, for morning. So if someone dies, like when the queen died, then all Dutch windmills were in that position, right? It's like I was having flanks on half-mast. Yeah, all windmills go to morning windmill position, which is like the crucifix position, as opposed to the X marks the spot

position. That is amazing. Yeah, it's cool. And incorrect. So what you would do is, it was more of a diagonal direction that you would have it. That would be the morning to suggest that there was a death. Yeah, I can just show you a little photo here. He's absolutely right. I was just testing you, Dan, and you do, you have learned the windmill language correctly. Well done. Thank you. And then if you were 12 o'clock and you went to say like you're on your way to one o'clock, it's like half 12, the small hands on its way. That is celebration. We've had a baby.

And so you would know, you would see the windmill and go, oh my God, they've had another baby. But when it's actually working, do you think, baby morning, baby morning, baby morning. Picking your moment when to go into the house through the door and not be decapitated. But yeah, so isn't that cool? It had its own language as well.

Very cool. And they go backwards. Do they? Dutch windmills go round the wrong way, or as they would see, the right way, counterclockwise, whereas all windmills that are built in the modern day go round clockwise. We know why? Well, it's kind of arbitrary and not a good thing. So it's basically because in the 70s, when everyone was getting the big windmill contracts,

there was an engineer called Leif Nielsen, a Danish engineer, and he had a brother working at a rival windmill company, and his brother was going for the standard counterclockwise direction, and he didn't like his brother much, so said, okay, I'm going to make my turbines go around clockwise. And then he got all the contracts, and that's why all windmills go around clockwise today. You're joking.

This is like Aldi Little... It's all over again. Yeah, yeah. And it's actually the worst way for them to go around in the northern hemisphere. How can it be worse? There was a study done which showed it actually can generate 30% more energy if they go backwards slash anticlockwise

because of the Coriola's effect in the Northern Hemisphere, which sends the little whirlwinds of air that the turbines generate in the opposite direction, it generates more energy. Why didn't they just put them the other way around? Why don't they spin them the other way around? No, no, no, just put them facing other way. Then I'll go backwards, right?

I'll put you in touch. Why do I have to do all the work? I read also that a windmill can never give you more than 1627th of the energy of the wind. Okay. This is something called Betz's Limit, and I'd love to tell you more about it, but literally someone senses that fact two minutes before we came on stage, so I didn't really have chance to read up on it.

But I think it's because basically the energy of the wind has to go through the sails. So if it got 100% of the energy onto it, it would just stop there, but they wouldn't spin round, so the air has to go through them, I think, from a one-minute reading of a Wikipedia page. But thank you to whoever sent that in. Here's a cool thing. First, Wimel that generated electricity. First turbine.

Created by James Blythe, who was a professor at Glasgow College. It was 10 metres high. It was tiny. I mean, he used it to charge some batteries, and at the time, batteries were incredibly primitive as well. But two nice things about that. Villagers nearby thought, this is the work of the devil,

and they refused to sign off on it. That's not one of the nice things. It could light up 10 light bulbs. That's not one of the nice things either. That's just an example of, what size this was. I'm struggling to find the nice things about this now. No, the nice things are, A, he's got the National Wind Turbine Testing Facility named after

him now. He's a big deal in the wind world. And that's where they test them to the absolute maximum. They sort of put them through unbelievable stress until they snap. And when they snap, you can feel an earthquake 500 metres away because these blades are so huge. The tips are going around at 200 miles an hour. Whoa.

It's incredible. It's so good. And then they snap. and you have to build a whole new one. Send that to the testing facility. Snaps, build a new one. How do they ever get made? I know, I know.

But that's science for you, isn't it? But no, the other thing is, the first ever wind-powered home was in 1887. 1887. And that means that, you know, Jack the Ripper could have seen a wind turbine. That's nice.

That's the nice thing. Or pick your person who was alive in 1887. Just anyone else. Queen Victoria Oscar Wild All good examples Did someone say Gandy Gandhi? Gandhi would have been very young

Very young But he would have been alive Good point Tushay Tushay No but hang on I'm sorry to quibble But you need someone who

Because Gandhi could have seen A wind turbine later on You know for the rest of his Like I mean in the 30s or 40s He could have seen the one At Grandpa's Knob What we're looking for ideally Is the most famous person

who died in late 1887. And ideally one who didn't murder lots of people. And ideally not Jack the Ripper. No, Gandy is a great point. Thank you. So are we all clear on who could and couldn't see a wind turbine? Oh, good. That's what this room was all about.

Scientific debate. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Bubble. That's right. Babble. The most important language.

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So get 60% off babble.com forward slash fish. That's B-A-W-B-E-L.com forward slash fish. Rules and restrictions may apply. Flatabladian fracotuga, which is on with the podcast in Atlantean. On with the podcast in English. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that when he was a child, notable royal institution lecturer, Humphrey Davy's favorite hobby was to lock himself in his room and give hour-long talks to a bunch of empty chairs.

This is Humphrey Davy, who is one of the most spectacular names ever to have walked into this building, an absolute juggernaut of science. we're going to talk about him in a second, but one of the things he was notable for outside of his discoveries was he was an astonishing lecturer. He delivered the most amazing lectures, and it turns out not only did he have an amazing love of science from childhood, but he also just loved having a crowd of people listen to him, and he didn't even need the crowd. He just needed the idea of a crowd. So when he was a child, he used to go out and he used to gather kids at the local market, and he would just rant at them based on anything that he found interesting, giving them those.

Yeah. And then back at home, he would just, yeah, he would set up those chairs. Yeah. forcing children to gather at the market while you scream about, you know, electricity to them. Well, it sounds like he's a child too. He's a child too. Oh, okay. No, that is better. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. But he was a really, he was a science-minded child and he was always in chemicals. He was obsessed with them and he used to do tricks on his family. So for his sisters, he used to take, chemicals that would be fluorescent and at night, when they turned the, well, when it got dark, suddenly these monsters were on their bedroom wall

that he painted on. Yeah, so he played lots of tricks with the chemicals even as a child. That's cool. And then he kind of went into poetry, didn't he? He really loved poetry when he was a young man. Yeah. And he even had some poems published by Robert Southie.

Sothea. But then what seems to have happened, because he's from Cornwall, there was a big shipwreck. and on that shipwreck there was loads of instruments from French surgeons and stuff and then he managed to get all of these instruments and then started doing loads of experiments

and then got into science afterwards but he was into science but this is where he started to do all of this gosh, that's very romantic because he was from, was it Pennzance I think he's a very proud son of Cornwall and all this so he went to Bristol first of all to start his career and this was the really

first really exciting thing at the age of 20 he was in Bristol working for someone called Thomas Beddow Beddows and he was working on laughing gas. And he was just the sort of young man in the room who was to a certain extent a guinea pig. He was really interested in science. But...

That is the best job ever though, isn't it? When all your friends are interning at their dad's printing company, you're the guinea pig for laughing gas. Yeah. And he really got into it. I mean, he took a lot of laughing gas for a long time. And it was that was the time when he knew all these poets. So he knew

Sothe. He knew Samuel Taylor-Colarish. This is all in Bristol. He was friends with Roger of Tesaurus fame? Yeah. Wow. I know. Do you know what?

I read Rogey's account of taking laughing gas because what Humphrey David did was, he said, you can come to all these laughing gas parties I'm throwing, but you have to write down notes of exactly how you found it. And so he compiled this book of all their notes. And Roger... It sounds dreadful. It sounds like a load of people's anecdotes about getting stoned.

Oh, it's brilliant. I've read it. Yeah. Well, maybe it's more at my street than yours because it is just what you described. Yeah, okay. But I suppose it's not like your mates telling you. It's like the greatest poets of the 19th century. I still think drug experiences and dreams are the two things

that are terrific in your own head and then kind of... No, it's the original... Davies the original Aldous Huxley doors of perception. That's what he was doing. He was trying to show that your brain went into a different state of consciousness when you were on these things and what you were opening yourself up to. That's the bit I can see, Anna, you didn't like... To be honest, that is the most tedious thing about people who've taken drugs

when they talk about the older states of consciousness, I just want to hear that they sort of shapped themselves in a corner at their grandma's house. If it's that, they're fine, yeah. Which is, and Roger of Thesaurus fame, his account, well, here's what it is. He said, I was incapable of speaking, lost all consciousness of where I was,

my whole frame was violently agitated, I panted violently, and my heart seemed to palpitate in every artery to throb with violence. Of Thesaurus fame. he uses the word violin about 19 times in his account. He hated it. Most of them loved it.

He said, I cannot remember that I experienced the least pleasure from these sensations. Really? Yeah. Because Coleridge loved it. Davey really loved it. They got to a point where the party died down

and no one wanted to do it anymore, but he just kept doing it. And he went around with a sort of green silk bag that he would just fill up with the stuff and he would go for long walks. and he would do it to the point where he'd pass out and wake up two hours later, not realizing how much he had done,

and then get back on the horse and do it some more. Everyone's got that friend from uni, haven't they? Sort of 10 years later, oh, you're still? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. He did move on. He moved to London,

and he came to the Royal Institution and invented the minor's safety lamp and the rest is history. Yeah. But yeah, he did loads of lectures in this very room, didn't he? and they were so popular that the traffic around here got really, really busy and they made a one-way street so that people could get in and out, and it was the first one-way street in the whole of England. Yeah, the Royal Institution is on Albemarle Street, which is just outside us, and so many people were coming horse and carriage and walking and crowding to see Davy speak that they had to change the whole system so that they could just stop London coming to a standstill. Which is actually a huge faff when you're cycling here on the way to a show and you're late.

So good to know I have him to blame for my near-death experience today. He also, he discovered five elements, which he showed at the Royal Institution for the first time. So calcium. Biggie. Biggie. Strontium. Yeah, it's like B-side, yeah. Barium.

Barium. Okay. Unless it was named after a guy called Barry. Boron. Yeah. Magnesium. Biggie. Biggie!

These are huge. But he said his greatest discovery of all was not a chemical. It was not any of the experiments. It was a little student called Michael Faraday. And Michael Faraday is also one of the great... Oh, good noise. Not many rooms you'd get that noise in when you'd drop Faraday's name. Faraday had come to a bunch of lectures that he'd seen Davy do when he was younger,

and he scribbled down this big booklet of ideas and so on. it to Davy and Davy saw so much potential that he brought him in. But Faraday is also one of the great giants of this room. Didn't Davy have a big accident or something? He was working with nitrogen trichloride, which is a huge explosive and it exploded in his face and he went partially blind for quite a long time and he needed a helper and that's when he brought Faraday in to help him. So this one big accident was what brought them together to work together. What really gave us Faraday. He was reckless, I would say. He used to shut himself in a box with the gases he was inhaling to make sure he got the most intense high possible. And there was one

time when he sent all of his servants away because he really just wanted to, you know, if you're having a big high, you want to enjoy it by yourself alone. And one of his servants didn't get, I'm told, one of his servants didn't get the memo, didn't realize that they'd all been dismissed. And so he came to see if Humphrey wanted, you know, a cigar or something, came and found him in this you know, shut box that Humphrey built for himself specifically, completely unconscious, asphyxating, and dragged him out. And he would have died had this servant not

rescued him. So he did take self-experimentation to, someone's saying, quite stupid limits. But can we say the thing about the safety lamp where he saved a lot of lives? Yeah. This is incredible. So miners were dying by the dozen, and in fact, many more than that, due to something called fire damp, which we would call methane.

We have these pockets of methane underground that catch fire. and the only way of lighting your mine underground is with candles. So this is a huge problem. And he spent, I think it was about two weeks on the problem, before designing a lamp. And there was a bit of debate about whether there was a different kind of lamp. Stevenson of Rocket Fame came up with another version of one.

But this, I mean, from what it looks like, this definitely was Davy's invention. And it's basically just a fine sort of cylinder of gauze around the light that you're using. It kind of encloses the light, doesn't it? Yeah, you still get the light, but you don't get the methane exploding. even if you're in a dangerous area. And he refused to patent it, which is very exciting.

And I think for over a century, coal miners carried these things and did not die, at least due to me, they died to plenty of other things. And what this did was it made deeper and bigger seams of coal accessible. And a lot of the industrial revolution was powered by miners being able to access lots more coal. So, you know, that huge change in the world was at least partly thanks to Davies. lamp. But did any of you think that it's quite basic? It's literally all he does is put, it's like you put a sieve over a candle. That's all it is. Mine is going into mines. Candles are causing explosions. And Dave says, you know what, if you put a sieve over this, a metal gauze,

because it's metal, it absorbs all the heat. So you don't have the heat for that big explosion. And that's it. Put a sieve over it. So the best ideas do seem simple once they've been discovered, right? I just reckon I would have come up with that in my kitchen at some point. I'm not Are you sure? I can't be 100%, but... I just think, yeah, combining it with any utensil in your house, I wouldn't think of the sieves, first of all. Had we invented the sieve at this point?

Yeah, the sieve was invented... Ooh. Oh, oh my God. No, he didn't invent the sieve because then the headline would have been Sivman. Sivman helps with coal mine stuff. When was the Siv around? When was the Siv? Who came first?

Gandhi or the Siv? That's what I want to know that. No one knows. No one knows. Okay. Can we talk about his wife as well? Yeah, of course. So he married a very wealthy heiress,

which is done thing at the time, Jane Aprice, and she is responsible for a very interesting bit of his story because he went on a very dangerous journey in 1813. So what's going on in 1813? Probably fighting the French. Fighting the French. Fighting the French.

You said that a little bit too enthusiastic. I'm up for it. I will serve, if called. And only if it was the French. Just delimited, yeah. So there was a thing called the Pre du Galvanism created in 1801 by Napoleon Bonaparte, which was a prize for scientific advances.

He had won it, and in 1813, so really, you know, Napoleon's march on Moscow has just ended catastrophically, we're gearing up for Waterloo. It's a great time. Davy and his wife, Jane, and Faraday went to Brittany to present themselves to Napoleon

to pick up the medal and the Czech. They were arrested mistakenly when they got there. This was quite a perilous trip they made, but they did make it, got the gong and the money and all of that. But there was a really big appeal a few years ago

by the Royal Society of Chemistry saying, where is this medal? And it turned out that Jane, his widow, had been so embarrassed to have this French medal and the French money in the house that she had hurled it into the sea off the Cornish coast

after he died. They knew roughly where they had done it and they spent four days diving in, I think it was 2013 they did this. Really? Or 2014. Yeah, they didn't find it obviously because, you know, it's very hard to find. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's still might be out there. There still might be... It's still definitely out there.

Wow, the Davy treasure. That's cool. Find it. Go and find it. He actually was very much against the French, though, wasn't he Davy, I think. Good lad. He went to them. Sorry. Sorry. I'll tell you what. You know what? Over the The last two or three weeks, we've been talking about football every single day. And Andy has not been interested until we said that we beat France.

But no, he went to the Louvre and then he wrote back to his friend saying, yeah, it's all right. It's just full of stuff that Napoleon stole, isn't it? Right. He went to, there was an anti-British play on at the time, and he went and sort of sat in the back and watched to see what they were saying about us. And the main thing was, there was another chemist called Lavoisier. and Lavoisier had done all this stuff about the science of heat and Davy disagreed with Lavoisier's theories and in the end he managed to prove it

and when he proved it in his paper he was just all about how the French were so dogmatic about their ideas and how we've finally proven them wrong and so yeah he was just like a real he was like the Andrew Hunter Murray of his day Wow okay it is time for fact number three and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that it's not as foggy as it used to be. There's a fact or a conversation opener. It's such a boomer opinion to have. I'm not saying you're a boomer, I'm just saying, Oh yeah, that's got Daily Express article written all over it. Like, what's wrong with a bit of good old British fog? And it's the immigrants fault.

Yes, right. And you know what, the young people couldn't handle it anyway? I don't think it would be in the Express because it's probably due to climate change. Oh, okay. So, yeah, this is quite a few studies that have been done over the last few years, and every single one shows a big decrease in fog. 2009 studies showed that in Europe there is a 50% drop in low visibility events,

which just is fog mist, haze, all of that stuff, since the 1970s. And in 2010, the Barclay University looked at America, and they found that fog has declined 33% since 1951. And what it seems is that basically climate change means that as the ocean's warm, the conditions you need for sea fog especially, you need like a cold water surface in order for the fog to form because it's when the warm air from the water kind of hits the land. You just don't really get those conditions anymore. So we just get less fog than we used to. And it's important. Fog is the new moss.

I mean. Fog is really important. So there's lots of crops which use fog in places where it doesn't rain. much. For instance, in California, where they make lots of lettuce or they make lots of strawberries, it's the fog which nourishes them and keeps them hydrated. And in cities, the fog can sort of move away pollutants from the air. So it's really useful there as well. We need our fog and it's all going. Bring back the fog. It's really important as well for London tourism. As early as the 1970s, the tourist board would urge Americans to come to England and to London in particular.

when it was winter so that it would be at its foggiest, because Americans love foggy London. Americans, writing, if you agree with this. It might have changed recently, but it certainly was, and there were mass... So don't ask anyone, don't ask anyone. Just believe it. I can see that, like, if you want,

if you're American, you come to London and you want to see the London of Sherlock Holmes, or the London of Humphrey Davy is going to be like that kind of... You know who else loved a bit of London fog? Jack the Ripper. Keen, very keen. But like there was a company, in America that did codes, still do codes. I think they were called Londontown initially.

They changed their name to London fog. But I think that's because it was famous back in the date. I mean, by the 70s, it was gone. We'd nailed it. This was the big smog, wasn't it, that was, yeah, Victorian era, start of the 20th century, a bit of a disaster in London. No one could see anything. Americans flocked because, you know, Thomas Cook organized fog holidays apparently, but aside from that, it was quite bad. And then we had the Clean Air Act in 1956, which is kind of an amazing success story, which, basically. basically sorted it out, but it was a massive issue before that, and it was particularly an issue for Hollywood, in fact, and for filmmakers. So it wasn't just bad for filming outdoors.

It would get inside film studios in London, because it was so much of it. And they didn't know how to get rid of it. So some films in the 1920s that were shot in London had to shoot at night, because, you know, you can penetrate darkness with a light, but you can't penetrate. As anyone who's ever tried to turn on fog lights knows, when they do fuck all, anyone knows that you can't penetrate fog with any light. So if you wanted to film something, then you had to film it at night. So film schedules would be from 9pm until 6 a.m.

My God. It was mad. Alfred Hitchcock's first ever full-length film was called The Lodger, a story of the London fog. It was a big bit of brand Britain. Certainly London, actually. And, you know, any other big industrial cities, because I think we might have mentioned before

the London particular was a term for the fog. But there was also the Manchester entire you know where you just couldn't see anything in Manchester. Oh, Andy Burnham. Stop trying to make it happen. It is incredible reading about it now, just how thick the air was. So in 1901, not far from here in Piccadilly Circus, they needed to turn the lights on in Piccadilly, even though the sun was shining and it was daytime.

It was so foggy. You couldn't see where you were going. You couldn't see to drive around. Sometimes you would be standing by the window during the day, and you couldn't read a book. I mean, it was so foggy. It was coal, basically. Every home was heated by coal.

There were big coal power plants in the center of town. It was coal, coal, coal, coal. But the cool thing was, fog changed color. You could tell what time of day it was by the color of the fog. Really? Yeah. So yellow in the morning, because people are burning coal to heat their homes and all of this, and the tar in particular made it yellow.

Later in the day, when the industries got going trains and ships, it would turn dark brown. None of these are nice colors. No, they're not. Okay, well, there were green fogs, purple fogs, black fogs, but it was just such a mega thing. And how precise was this? Because you say to someone, I'll meet you at yellow o'clock.

Definitely. And half past purple. Sadly, you can't see where the fuck you're going. But is this more smog than fog? I thought fog was just water, pure fog. I think so, yeah. This was smug for sure. It was combined, wasn't it?

It's like foggy fog. Foggy and then it's a lot of pollution. You do get super fog, which is even foggier than normal fog. And even fogg even fog. Really. It happens if there's like forest fires and stuff because water vapor condenses onto the smoke particles. And so the reason that Anna's fog lights don't work is because the light goes in, but then it's dissipated by all the tiny little water particles.

But in the super fog, it dissipates it even more. And so you literally can't see anything. It just, you're driving along. There's a little bit of fog. And then suddenly it just goes dark, completely black. You can't see a single thing. And loads of accidents because of that. Gosh.

Oh, wow. So black fog. So you were pro fog before, but now we're... I think fog is, it's got many facets. It's like there's lots of advantages to it. So I said before that it can clean the cities. It turns out the fog is alive. And it is. So it is. So it's bacteria in the fog. And if you take a thimble full of fog water, it has about 10 million bacteria, which is the same as if you took the average bit of seawater. So it's all really dissipated.

Yes, it's all really dissipated, but the actual amount of bacteria in there is the same. And this bacteria, they eat the chemicals. Things like formaldehyde, which is in the air, which is very bad for you. The bacteria can eat that and turn it into things that aren't bad for you. So that's why they kind of get rid of all of these chemicals from our air. Right.

Okay. You get things like fog catchers now, humans, like the crocodile hunter. You get fog hunter. So there's a guy called Abel Cruz, and in Peru, Bolivia, and so on, where they don't have necessarily access to clean water. He's worked a system of nets that are up at night and they collect the fog water as it's coming through. That's how a lot of places are now getting their drinking water.

Although they seem to have had trouble scaling it up. I couldn't find anywhere that's really done it on a big scale. And so the only useful version I found of fog catchers was in San Francisco. where in 2016 they worked out to turn fog into vodka which you can buy and this is a project of a non-profit actually

which claims to be trying to provide water to developing countries but took some time out to collect fog in San Francisco with yeah it looks like to gold post with a net in between catches the fog and then collects them and then turns it into water and the fog catcher on that project was called Chris Fogliarty

Oh come on Why would Would there be an international agreement on what fog is? There's an international definition of fog. Okay. Why do we have that? Something else has to be standardised which fog is important for. So it's the strength of your fog lights and your car.

So they're the same in every car in the world. To do with transport. Is it to do with shipping? It's not to do with shipping. It's due with airplanes. Okay. Oh, so when you're allowed to fly versus not? When you're allowed to fly.

Ah, goddam. So that's just for aviation. You just got to wait at the bottom. back, James, and let everyone do the work. But there is this tool. So basically, yeah, that's it. Just if it's foggy, you know, you can't land safely on a runway. And they've got, they've got some tools to do with it now. But there was a great tool invented way back when, I think this might have been before the Second World War, called the fog investigation and dispersal operation, Fido for short. And it was designed to just

clear fog off airfields so that planes could land safely. And it's basically two pipelines going along the runway and you just produce a wall of flame. Like, oh cool. It is quite rock and roll. And it's just the standard fighter system apparently used 100,000 gallons of fuel every hour. So it's a bit of a luxury. It's a bit of a treat, more if it's a long runway.

But the amount of money it's saved by having a plane not crashing into the ground was probably, you know, made it useful for a while. So that's what's reassuring as a pilot. If you're flying towards the runway and there's a huge wall of fire in front of you. You know you're good to go. It did decide a crucial thing in the 15th century.

And I think you might have had an opinion about this, James, because it was in the Wars of the Roses, and it cemented a Yorkist victory. It was one of the most important victories. It was the Battle of Barnet. I've gone off, fog a little bit. I thought you might. Yeah, this was Battle of Barnet,

and it was King Edward, 4th of York versus... Earl of Borick, who was Lancastrian, and there was a very thick fog, and this screwed things up in various ways. One of the ways was the armies didn't line up right against each other, which I find kind of amazing anyway that you'd like organise at the start of battle and be like, okay, your furthest left man has to be exactly opposite our furthest right guy, and they weren't lined up. This meant when they charged towards each other, one side of the army totally surrounded the other, and we're like, oh my God, we're winning this. But the other side of that army totally surrounded them and thought, oh my God, we're winning this. And because it's foggy, they can't

see the other side of their line. So they don't know they're losing on the other side. This is like a dotsy dough. It was very much the country dancing of the 1400s, yes. So what happened? What is Warburne Caley? It's so eventually this, it was all chaos for a long time. And then eventually at one point, one of the sides, I think it was Warwick's side, sort of went off the battlefield and tried to regroup. The problem was they had in their heraldry a picture of stars and streamers, and King Edward had a sun in sort of splendor,

and they look in very thick fog, very similar, and so Warwick's men all started firing on themselves and killed each other without Edward really having to do anything. And then there we go, and that led to the Yorkers being in charge for a decade or two. So there you go, fog. Is your enemy, James. We should move on, guys, to our final fact.

I got one more thing about climate change and things that are changing. So snowshoe hairs, they have a little trick. So in the winter, they're white. And in the spring, they turn brown. Brilliant. It's for camouflage, obviously, so they can camouflage in the snow. Unfortunately, due to climate change, the snow is not around as long as it used to be. And so for a certain amount of the year, they're bright white, but there's no snow to camouflage.

And the guy who has read an article about a guy called Alex Skye. Kumar says that they act like you can't see them. They're stood there and they're thinking, nah, no, you can't see me. But actually everyone can see exactly what's happening. Wow, they are not long for this world. If you want to see them, get there fast. That's like my three-year-old playing hide-and-seek

when you walk in the room and they're hiding behind a lamp that's just literally holding it. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show. and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 2024, Google was fined more than the world's total GDP. A lot more. Good. Yeah.

Do it again. You want them to double it? Yes. Okay, right. They are doubling it. Oh, they? They are indeed. Yes.

Yes. So this is a Russian court, which had fined Google two undecillion rubles, which is a two followed by 36 zeros, as I'm sure you know. It's 20 decillion US dollars if you're interested and it's for restricting Russian state media channels on Google services Still think it's good, Andy? I've changed my opinion a bit I did read an article about it saying it's 20 decillion dollars Brackets 15.4 decillion pounds Yeah

Oh great Imagine being sued for amounts you've never heard of before Yeah it doesn't feel good I didn't know Dessilion existed There was a guy from the Kremlin Dmitri Peskov who said I cannot even pronounce this number, which is weird because the Russian for undecillion is undeclion. Oh, okay. So I believe it's more dollars than there are grains of sand on earth.

Yes. Really? And the article, the Anna sent round, said that it was whatever undercylion it was, but it was doubling every single day. Yeah, so it's way more now. It's way more now. According to my calculation, this was when I did it a few days ago, so it's doubled a few times since then.

The current fine is two times 10 to the 200. 125 rubles. Oh, no. So if you were to take every atom in the universe, and every single atom had another universe in it, and every single atom in that universe had another universe attached to it, that the total number of atoms that you have will be nowhere near this number.

And that's why you've got to pay in the first 14 days. Wow. So are they going to do? do like a payment plan? What's the... It's hard to know. I think they have to earn over a certain amount in their salary before they start. I think they just wait until the ruble collapses by so much

and it's actually just about 20 quid. It did start off much more reasonable, as you say. It started off as 91.5 quintillion rubles. What was it... Was it for something? Sorry? According to Russia, they were deliberately not allowing people to see Russian news

on Google searches. Yeah, so it's barring a lot of Russian sites. because, and it was coinciding with the war in Ukraine, and Google saying that there's a lot of misinformation out there, that it was blocking, because Google doesn't like misinformation to spread. And Google's subsidiary has gone bankrupt in Russia as a result of all these massive debts

that they're being asked to pay. And they've got quite basic functionality there, but I don't think the Kremlin really minds. So we're at a bit of a stalemate. So does it do fines work, is the question? It feels like at that level you're starting to not work, doesn't it? But they certainly have worked with the EU, and tech companies.

In fact, do you know who has been the only sort of barrier between tech companies and going completely insane and doing whatever the hell they want? I'm going to say it's a single person. This is my claim. It's not Nick Clegg.

It's Cleggie. No, he's got nothing to do with it. It's Borgen. Do you guys know the TV show Borgen? Danish detective? Danish Prime Minister. Danish Prime Minister. But yeah,

Morgan has been holding back Google. In what way? Well, because the character in it, who's Birgit Nyborg, who is the Prime Minister, is based on this woman called Marguerite Vestaya, and she was EU's anti-trust chief from 2014 to 2024. And she was the person who basically led the charge preventing tech monopolies. So as soon as there was any kind of like online rigging that Google was doing to rig things in its favour, as soon as there's any anti-competitive stuff, she brought lawsuits against them,

against Google, Apple, Amazon, X, Starbucks. IKEA, Gazprom. I feel like IKEA's kind of the good guy in there, actually. But it's made a huge difference to them. Just this woman and a large team of people also in the EU. But leading the charge. Wow. There you go.

And Prime Minister of a fictional country at the same time. That's very cool. You asked whether fines work, Andy. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't, I think is the answer. If you fine people for being late, let's say, for instance, you are late picking your child up from the nursery. and it means that the teachers have to stay a little bit longer,

everyone's a little bit annoyed, so you get told off. Or they change it, so you don't get told off anymore, but you get a fine. It turns out people are way more likely to accept the fine and then just be late anyway. And the reason is they kind of see it as an exchange of money for time.

And people think, well, you know what, I'm paying a little bit of a fine, so it's actually no problem if I'm late, because at least I'm paying. I'm buying the right to be a bit late. Exactly. And then you're not allowed to be cross of me

because you're finding me. That's the idea. And people are more unhappy about someone very cross from the nursery. Definitely. Yeah. Especially because I've told you

you can just tie her to the railing outside and leave her there. As long as she has a little bowl of water that she can lick from. I've got a show to do in London. So this is the really interesting thing. Yes, there have been lots of studies of whether fines have any power.

And it's because, you know, you need to calculate the cross-section between the chance of being court and how severe the punishment is if you are caught and lots of firms, especially the huge firms, treat it as the cost of doing business. You know, well, we may as well, we know that they won't find us much more than this, even if we are caught. Therefore, there's no real incentive to change. So I think unpredictable fines are maybe the way to go. Oh, yeah. So, okay, so I'm caught speeding. Yeah. And I get the letter through the post. Two million quid find. Oh.

I was hoping it was going to be 10p. Yeah. Well, Noel Ebbens picked it out of the box. I think there would be a case to be made for chaos fines where it could go really badly. What's the country where the fine is? There's a couple. There's Switzerland and Finland, I think, are two of the ones that do it. You mean proportional to your income, yeah. Proportional to your income. And also they increase it based on various other fun factors.

So you get to kind of spin the wheel. Have you been fine before recently? Bigger fine. Do you earn a lot of money? Bigger fine. So I think the biggest fine ever was a Swiss drive. this was a couple of years ago and he was caught

going at 290 kilometers an hour so actually not that much in miles an hour but... Was he going directly off one of the mountains? I think he got done for just over one million euros. Yeah, that's right. Exactly.

Did he do it again? Don't know, but it doesn't matter, we've got a million euros now if we're the Swiss government. Yeah? I think yeah, I think that is a good case to be made for that. Yeah? In fact, there was a guy in Finland. The other place that does it, a guy in 2023 called Anders Wickcloth, who was only driving at 51 miles an hour. So it does feel like this guy driving at 180 miles an hour it was, has done a big one. What's the limit, though?

This guy, oh, yeah. This guy who was going at 290 kilometres now. He was actually at 280 zone. So he was only... Yeah, you're right. No, this was obviously in like a 31 mile an hour speed limit, converted to kilometres an hour. He was fined $121,000 euros. He'd been fined

before in 2018, he'd been fined $63,000 and he'd been fined $95,000 in 2013. And he was asked in 2023, you know how he felt about this $121,000 he'd lost again, and he said, look, I've heard the government wants to save some money on healthcare, so I hope my money can help fill

a gap. Okay. There you go. Isn't that nice? It's good. I mean, you do read about some fines that I do think, like James is saying, oh, yeah, it's worth it to pay it. I was reading a story about a guy in Portsmouth who went around Portsmouth Cemetery with his arms in the air pretending to be a ghost going, woo-woo, and he got fined 75 pounds. Why?

He was doing it while people were mourning. Yeah. Okay. There's my context. I'm not a monster. That's, yeah. But a fine feels a bit. Yeah.

Well, what would you do? Well, I'd say a letter of apology. Okay. I think that's a good. Letter of apology is another good one, you know. Okay. For grownups. Yeah, for grownups.

Everyone's busy. You know who's got time to write a bloody letter. It's a huge pain in the ass. I suppose whether there's bank transfer is just click of a button and you're there. Exactly. Having to write two sides. You're not allowed to do double spacing either. Suddenly, people are thinking before they get the sheet on and run around Portsmouth Cemetery.

But you could use up a lot of the space on the page by saying, I'm sorry, I said, woo. That's a good point. So how much was this guy fined? 75 pounds. Okay, more or less for this fine. Roy Marsh was sitting by a boating lake in Lincolnshire when a gust of wind blew a bit of grass into his mouth

and he spat it out. And two enforcement officers immediately approached him and told him they'd seen him spitting on the ground. More or less than 75 quid. I think a spot five for spit it. Oh, this is, oh, wow. This is your brucey moment. I think we've got something here, haven't we?

This is a format. Yeah, yeah. So the room is saying more. I think more. Yeah, more. We all think more. Okay, the answer is more. Oh!

300 pounds. 300? Yeah. Wow, they didn't think it was that much. Sorry, did someone say more after? Okay, more or less than 300 pounds. A Florida priest was fined for feeding the homeless. They're just paying for blood here.

It sounds punitive. The way you guys are. screaming it. Yeah. So they're saying more in the time. Less. I'll go less. I'll say more.

This one. More. Okay. So you said more. You said more. It is more. But I'll just to make it sort of still a bit of a competition, how much more? Two million pounds.

Ah, good. Like 50 quid more. Dan is just closer. Oh. Because he was fined more than $500,000. Wow. Because a bit like this Russian fine, it kind of just went up and up. and up and he was doing it every single day for quite a few years.

Why was it not allowed? It was in an area that was not where his church was. And the annoying thing was, it's the area where his church used to be. And then it got rezoned and he carried on feeding the people in that zone. And they said, you're not allowed to do it. And he got fined for every single day that he did it. And it racked up to half a million dollars. Where's this?

Where do you get fine for feeding homeless people? This is in Florida. Wow. Everyone's going, yeah, that checks out. That's amazing. Do you know, Freddie Flintov, when he was an England cricketer, he once got fined £2,000 because he was scared by a ghost. Was he in Portsmouth Cemetery at the time? Yeah.

Because Portsmouth Council, they're cleaning up here. They really are. Both ends of the transaction. No, he was in Zimbabwe at the time. They were playing a game overseas. And Mal Loi, is that his name? Do you know him, James? He starts telling ghost stories.

and Freddy gets freaked out because he doesn't like ghosts. And so he runs off to his friend's room, who's called Vikram. Vikram's very religious, and the logic was that maybe ghosts won't go near him because he's very religious. So then he couldn't go to sleep. Both of them were freaked out. They then sleep in, and they're late for practice. And so they get fined £2,000 because they were late for practice, all because this ghost was freaking them out.

But according to Freddie, Mal got in trouble as well, find for telling a ghost story that scared Freddy. Yeah, that's unfair. So you don't tell ghost stories to our key player who's terrified of them, you dick? I can, knowing Freddie Flintor, I can imagine the worst spirits involved somewhere. We gotta wrap up very soon. Can I briefly talk about the greatest finding nation in Europe? Sure.

I hate to give it to him. It's the French. They are so good at finding you for minor social infractions. It's unbelievable. So there's all sorts of people, especially on the French trains. They have very strict rules and they have lots of enforcement people. So there have been French pilgrims who were fined by police for doing some chanting in Latin at a station, having been to a cathedral. There was a middle-aged man who was fined 200 euros quite recently for just having a call on loudspeaker in a train station, not even on a train. More!

Okay, okay. This is how the revolution started, guys, all right? He's not petty. And five officers approached him, and they said they'd... Okay. People just want social norms observed and quite right. Okay, we'll see what you think of this one, guys. Oh, my God.

A French woman was fined 110... Ten... But you have to wait. There's a French woman who was fined 110 euros because her cat meowed too loudly on a high-speed trade despite the fact the cat had a ticket. That's it.

That is all of our facts. you for being here, everyone, in this amazing room. And we're going to be back again next week with more. No Such Thing as a Fish from the Royal Institution. So we'll see you again. Goodbye, everyone.