No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Oceans Eleven with Puffins

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and Greg Jenner discuss why weekdays are confused, why electric cars were not all there, and why children were in Seine.  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/patreon

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of No Singers of Fish. This is another live show which was recorded at the Soho Theatre in London. And who is our special guest today? Well, if you are a podcast fan, if you were a fan of amazing books, if you were a fan of the TV show, Horrible Histories, then you'll know who I'm talking about. Our guest was the historian Greg Jenner. So like I say, Greg first came to,

prominence, I suppose, as the historical consultants on horrible histories, but he has since become a nerdy superstar in his own right, thanks to his podcast, You're Dead to Me, which you definitely, if you haven't, I'm sure you've heard it, but if you haven't heard it, you definitely should check that out. But he also has written lots of books, the latest of which are called Ask a Historian and Dead Famous and Unexpected History of Celebrity. And the very exciting thing about those if you are super quick off the blocks is that at the moment they are both 99P on ebook for the rest of September. He also has an illustrated kids book called U.R. History and that is out in hardback and audiobook as well. Look, just go to the place where you buy your books,

ebooks and audiobooks and search for Greg Jenner and you will not be disappointed. And I hope you will also not be disappointed with this week's podcast. So let's just get on with it. On with a podcast. Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Soho Theater in London. My name is Jan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Greg Jenner. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact this week. My fact is, when Virginia's Barter Theatre first opened in 1933, it paid playwrights their royalties exclusively in ham,

except for George Bernard Shaw, who was a vegetarian, and managed to negotiate his payment to be in spinach. Super. Yeah. So, this is an amazing thing that happened during the Great Depression in America. And this guy who was an actor, he was a very young actor at the time, called Robert Porterfield, he found that all these actors were out of work.

The theaters weren't running because no one could afford to go to the theaters. But then he also noticed that there were a lot of farmers who had a lot of produce that they weren't able to shift. So he thought, what if I set up a bartering theater whereby you could trade ham for hamlet? That would be the sister, right? So you could come in and you could then give, you know,

any kind of produce that you wanted, and that would get you a ticket. And the bartering system worked very much like how bartering does, you negotiate as you're doing it. More like bartering. Oh. Very good, very good. It was good, yeah.

Yeah, so it would be... It was good, Andy. Don't let everyone tell you differently. Yeah, so the system, yeah, God, yeah. Well, it's just... The stories are great, because people have written about how this... You know, a lot of these playwrights,

so when George Bernard Shaw was first asked, He said, I'm not really into it. And then pigmalion came out. And he said, oh, yes. Pigmalion. Pigmalion. Should have been spinach malian. Should have been, yeah.

So all the stories that he collected over the years, people got interviews out of him. And it's really fun. So there would be examples of, say, a farmer who would bring his cow to the theater and he'd say, how much milk to get in to see the play. And they would tell him, and then he'd go to the side and milk the cow

to the amount that they said, hand over the bucket, and then he would start to go in. And in the anecdote, his wife was with him, and they said, you're not going to get your wife to come in as well? And he said, she can milk her own ticket. I was wondering how they did change at the theatre, because I thought you were saying...

Oh, you're handing your hum, and you get a little bit of bacon back. Well, yeah, kind of. I mean, you could have a pig which was worth ten tickets. Wow. So I think if you traded it a whole pig, maybe you got like a season pass, that kind of thing. But they accepted all sorts.

It wasn't just farm produce. they accepted toothpaste, snakes and underwear as well. Which is good if you don't have a pig, so you can... It's a toothpaste for the snakes. Do they have teeth? They have teeth, right? They've got fangs. Can you brush a snake's teeth?

Sorry, I'd derail the podcast. You can milk a snake's teeth. Hello. One ticket. There was all sorts of weird. Like there was a boy who said that he had some jam or some kind of substance in a jar turned out to be mud. So people were trying to counterfeit their way in there as well.

There was someone who did brig a pig saying, I'll pay with my pig, but then the pig got loose and all the actors had to chase their money down the street. And weirdly, there was a jail that was directly underneath the barter theater. So while they were doing the plays, there was always this slight concern that one of the jailmates would break free and sort of come onto stage and murder everyone. So there was added conflict, you know.

Yeah, it sounds like it was an amazing place. One of the things was a guy came in, he was a mountaineer, and he said, I don't have any food, but I make coffins. Do you all want a coffin? And they said, no, we're fine. He said, well, I make canes as well. And he made so many canes that apparently every major actor in Broadway

was seen walking around with one of these canes because he just kept making them and kept going to more and more shows. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, to me, I know I am an ex-accountant, but it does sound like a massive tax dodge. Oh, yeah. Like, bartering is all well and good

as long as you pay the tax on the actual amounts of the thing that you're battering with. So how much tax? One slice of bacon? Well, you know, 20% of your pig or whatever. That's the thing. Like, there's that old story of Picasso. Do you remember he was in a cafe? I mean, I don't think this is true, but he was in... It is true. Is it true? Yeah, my mum's got one. Wow.

So Picasso, if I think I know where you're going with it. Picasso used to buy his meals by doing a tiny little doodle because it would be worth more than the meal. you did thousands. They're now valetious. Really? Is that what Gary Linneker has been doing in all restaurants? In the restaurants?

All Indian restaurants in the UK have a signed photo of Gary Lennox. Yeah, yeah. Like everyone, and you can see like, I was young Gary was here. Oh, Gary was here quite recently. That's what he's doing. I imagine that is what he's doing.

That probably is what he's doing. It's probably getting free food. Well, I don't want to do smudge Gary Linneker. Oh, I don't mind. We don't know. The thing is, though, with Picasso, right? So the story goes, one of the story, he goes, that he did this doodle,

and they said, well, Mr. Picasso, will you sign it? And he said, well, I want to pay for lunch. I don't want to pay for the entire establishment. That's a story. But the thing is... What a wanker. I don't think anyone's saying that Picasso wasn't a wanker. Of all the artists, I think Picasso is very high in the wanker index.

Okay. But the thing is, like, if you're an artist and you draw something and you're in a cafe and they give you some food, there are tax implications of that. And really, it is against the law to do that. The only way they could get around it is if Picasso, instead of just having lunch, if it was a business lunch, and if the people in the cafe were going to put the picture up on the wall

so that everyone in the cafe can enjoy it, so technically it's decoration, then they're both business expenses, they're both tax deductible, that's fine. Why do you think accountants have such a reputation for this? Thank God, James. isn't at all these historical moments where Picasso lands an absolute zingo

and he's going, well, actually the tax implications of that. Could he do a smaller drawing to be the tax? No. Yeah, he could. In fact, I believe in some places, in America sometimes they have accepted artwork as tax payment from artists who couldn't afford to pay their tax

and have done that. So that is possible in theory, yeah. I can't believe we're accepting this fact given how much shit I took many episodes ago when I said that if Mozart, was on the street and he was passing someone who asked him for some money, a beggar, a homeless person was asking for some money

that he would say, I have no money, but here, let me write you some music and he would be like, Ras, give it a do godudu, and give it to them. And then they would take that and they would... And do what? What would you do with your Picasso? You can sell it for a lot of money.

No, you can't. No, you can't. Because my mum has one and you can't do anything with it. Has your mum been trying to sell it? It's not worth anything. I'll buy it. All right. I'll buy the unsight Picasso that we know is definitely him, yeah. Also, how do you verify that the music is by Mozart when it's just one bar of music?

Because it sounds like Abba. Right, yeah. Barter, barter is a weird thing, isn't it? Because there's a lot of debate about barter. I definitely thought it's a thing before money. So the baker makes some bread, and he goes to the butcher and the butcher, and the butcher has some.

meat and between them they have a sandwich. They have two sandwiches. Exactly, you end up with two sandwiches and everyone's happy. But of course, what if the butcher doesn't want any bread, the baker starves to death, nightmare? So, you need money. That's like, that's the basic, and I say very basic premise. But this is the weird thing about barter. There's no, I don't think there's any, actually, it seems like money produces barter systems.

Like after the fall of the Roman Empire, people resorted to barter because there wasn't a stable currency anymore. There doesn't seem to be any good evidence of a barter society, like a proper barter society where someone says, I'll give you these grapes if you give me that cloth. It just, it doesn't seem to be any evidence for that. Greg?

Oh shit. Not evidence that I found in a short look. I mean, money's fascinating, right? So coins are really new. In terms of the history of the world, coins are like, they're like 2,700 years old, give or take. They're really, really new.

So you've got these sort of enormous societies in the Bronze Age. The Egyptians don't have money. No, really? The Samarians, the Babylonians, the Arcadians, don't have money. Really? And the first coin has got a little lion face. It's very cute, and it's ancient Greek. And I think the city, I think it was maybe Liddy, I can't remember,

but it's like 2,700 BCE. So prior to that, you have economic structures, and you've got kings, and you've got people with power, and you have got distribution of wealth of a sort, but it's not cash. And even in the sort of eighth, ninth, tenth, tenth, centuries, you get these coin hordes, you know, Viking coin hordes buried in the ground. And you're never entirely sure to what extent they are, someone going, I'm going to put that

in the ground and come back for it later. Or it's someone's nicked it, or someone has been killed in battle. We're never quite sure because the money's not in circulation. So the history of money is really interesting because there's a lot of stuff we don't know. But obviously, barter must have been part of that equation. Certainly in the Stone Age, no? You're going to tell me there's no bartering in the Stone Age? You're going to do that? Go on, do it. Don't.

Yeah, sort of, why not? Straight from nothing to Bitcoin. That's what I'm saying. We're dead. But you are right that definitely when society breaks down or when there's problems in society, we do resort to barter. That's definitely true, right?

So in Russia, in the 90s, there's a lot of it going on. So there was not much, certainly in the late 90s, not much demand for rubles. If you've got any rubles, you just want to swap them for US dollars. That's pretty much all you'd ever do. with them. And so when companies run out of cash to pay their workers, the workers would often just accept, you know, whatever you're making, you would take some of them home and then you'd be

able to swap that for dollars. There's no point having the roubles in between. And so there was like Siberian workers who were paid in coffins, as we were saying before. There was a Volgagrad factory where all the workers were paid in bras. And then there was another factory in Volkerrad called Ahtuba, and they made navigation equipment. But then they'd recently, diversified into making dildos. And the workers decided, well, we're not going to get paid otherwise, so we'll just accept the dildos

as payment. This is in the economist, guys. This is happening. And so they got all these dildos and then went to the local sex shops to try to sell them and get some US dollars. But it turned out that just around the same time, the world

had moved on to electronic vibrators and their dildos were virtually worthless. Oh, no. So, navigation to dildos. Yeah, how did they diversify from that? Yeah. So it's what, from compass to cum pass? Wow.

Sextant. You had sexton. Sexstant. Sorry. Sorry. Wow, is there a heartwarming end to the story where they all use the dildos to build a new... There's no heartwarming ending

to any story that begins in Russia in 19... Do you remember the story of that guy who bought up a huge bulk amount of copies of Lance Armstrong's book? It's all about the bike. It's not about the bike. Did he do two books? Did he? No.

It's not about the bike. It's not about the bike. Which turned out to be... It's about the drugs, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this guy suddenly had a warehouse full of these books and no one was buying them because this guy was an untouched celebrity. Did you buy them before? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was like just before. He's like, did the deal and suddenly like news headline, Lance Armstrong. That's bad luck, isn't it? That's so bad. So was he sort of bulk ordering them in the hope of then selling them and making the profit? I think like they were remandered and he thought, I'll buy them and I can do a trade of them somehow. Yeah. Here's a place that does have barter.

This is good. Zoos operate a barter system with each other, even today. Because you need a permit to buy and sell endangered animals. But in America, zoos are allowed to barter their creatures. So in 2014, there was. an aquarium in Boston that needed some fish and North Carolina's aquarium had some of those fish. And North Carolina

wanted jellyfish and snipefish in exchange for the fish that they were going to give to Boston. But the Boston people didn't have snipefish. So Boston had to... Is this a riddle? Hang on, Greg, hang on. So they had to get some Japanese snipefish, swap them for some blunt fish that they did have in Boston, then they

sent North Carolina those. But they can't be on the craft at the same time as a fox. Yeah. And the fox isn't a submarine. And... Everyone's in the... The zookeeper was the mother. That's it.

That's really cool. And it's because in the olden days, if you had a zoo, you just send someone off and say, I'd like two pandas, please. Yeah. I'd be an explorer, and they just go and get you two pandas,

but you can't really do that anymore. No. And there was one... Because of Brexit. There was one aquarium that swapped 800 mackerel for a dozen puffins. Does that feel like a good deal for you?

I'd love a dozen puffins. Yeah. I feel like a dozen puffins is exactly the right number of puffins. I feel like that's a bank job. It's like Ocean's 11, but puffins. I genuinely think if your mother put up that Picasso, you could trade that for 11 puffins. The Picasso is a dove, dove of peace.

So we could swap a dove of peace for 12 puffins. And then I could hit a bank and take on a casino. Sorry, are you also the 13th puffin in the costume? I'm George Clooney puffin. Yeah, nice. And then we'll have Brad Pitt Puffin, Matt Damon Puffin, and other puffins. I've forgotten who else is in the film.

Jet Lee, is he in the film? I don't know. So, how did your mum come by this picture, the Picasso? Did you buy it? No, she was gifted it, I think. Because it's not value, it's just got, it's not enough value to be worth anything. So it's a gift you give someone in return for like,

oh, thanks, that was really nice. Here's a, here's a Picasso. James, are there any tax implications to Greg's mom receiving this, priceless work of, yeah. They've got them as part of her job, yes, it would be. All right, she's a French teacher. Where do we stand on that?

I don't know. I don't know. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Greg. My fact is complex, so I'm apologising in advance for it. But my fact is this. At different times in history, Mondays have been considered the first day of the week, the second, the third, and the seventh. Wow.

And what is it now? Right. So... We've got six hours, yeah? Yeah, we've got it. Now, it's officially, internationally, it's the first day of the week. The International Standards Committee, or whatever they're called, because I was always taught at school that it's Sunday is the first day of the week.

Yeah, so in the religious Christian calendar, Monday's the second day of the week now, it used to be the third day of the week because in the Jewish calendar it was the third day, Sabbath, Saturday, Sunday, and then Monday became the third. But then when you get Christianity becoming dominant in Rome in the sort of second and third, centuries, they move Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. And so Monday becomes the second day. But the really tricky thing about it is that the Industrial Revolution gives us Mondays, as we know them, the Garfield one, the Monday. The Garfield Monday that he hates. There's a lot of great philosophers who do Mondays, Plutarch, Diocassius, Bob Geldof, Garfield.

So our Mondays is an economic Monday. Our Monday is the post-industrial revolution where you get the invention of a brand new temporal structure called the weekend, right? The weekend is a new thing, it's about 100 years old. And some Mondays get redefined. But in ancient astronomy, Mondays are wrong. So the days of the week should be, according to astronomy, it should be Saturday, Thursday, Tuesday, Sunday, Friday, Wednesday, Monday. Poor Craig David. He'd be so confused. Took it to a barque on Monday. Meta for the first time Tuesday. What's happening?

So that's the order that astronomically the planet should be in. And we've got this really lovely ancient book we don't have what we've got the title of by Plutarch. And the title is literally, why is the days of the week ordered wrongly? It's the kind of thing you Google at 3am.

They're like, what's on Tuesdays? So Diacassius wrote a thing saying, what's happened here? Is it because there's 168 hours in a week? There are 24 hours in a day, which the Romans are very keen on. Each hour gets assigned to a god. The first hour goes to the god, and that God gets that day named after them. The second hour next God, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, and then you're back to the first God again.

By the time you get to the 25th hour, you're on to the second God. So the day gets named after him. Oh, yeah, okay. And so you end up with the days being in the wrong order. So our Mondays are wrong, and the Romans are like, oh, no. We'll just have to live with it. And we have. We've lived with it ever since.

That's amazing. That is incredible. I've got a fact about Tuesday. Is it Thursday Tuesday or Saturday Tuesday? I'm going to go for my Tuesday, which is tomorrow, yeah. So we're doing this on a Monday, we should say, for the audience listening at home. So this is cool. This happened last year.

The 22nd of February, 2022, was a Tuesday. Yeah, which means it was Tuesday. It was Tuesday. It was Tuesday. It was Tuesday. Two, two, two, two, two, two, Tuesday. It was Tuesday. That's nice.

That's the end of the fact. Mondays caused lightning. Okay. This is a good thing. Well, it's not a good thing, actually. It's just a thing. So it's because of car exhaust. So more people commute

on Mondays. So scientists counted lightning strikes in the USA for a decade and worked out where they fall, where the distribution is. And this is particularly in southeastern states in the USA. And lightning strikes rocket

because there's a bit more pollution in the air. the air is moisture, there are low-lying clouds, that creates the perfect conditions for lightning. So, yeah, for hundreds of miles, you get more lightning on a Monday. That's really interesting. I've got Wednesday, fact.

No. Go on. Is this your Wednesday or... It's my Wednesday, yeah. So day after tomorrow, we're recording this on the Monday. It's worth knowing people at home. According to one study, the best time to tweet, or X, is to...

Oh, no. Oh, my God. Look at you staying in with Elon. You creep. Apparently, if you want to get maximum impact, it's 5pm on a Wednesday is when you should send that tweet. Really?

Yeah, they've just scanned through where most have engagement and so on, and apparently that is the one. Hump Day, is that... I mean, that doesn't feel... What's happening to 5pm on the Wednesday? They just found engagement was higher. That's wrong.

I don't like that stat. I reckon it's because people aren't really trying as hard because it's not Monday anymore. Right. But you also haven't left early because it's not Friday. It's just like the perfect time. So you're stuck in the office.

You're looking at your phone. It's 5pm and you're out at that door. I reckon. Have you got any Thursday facts, Dan? I do. There's a theory that the universe was created last Thursday. It's called Last Thursdayism. And the idea is that,

and it's very hard to just prove this. Was this fact three weeks old, in which case the universe hasn't been created yet until this week? Or is it always last Thursday? It's always last Thursday. The idea is that every memory that you have, everything that's on our planet, everything has been set to seem like it's been here for millions and billions of years in the case of the age of the universe. So last Thursdayism says it's impossible to deny the theory. It's infallible as a fact because it's impossible to find a glitch in.

Right. Well, what if I put something in a box last Thursday and then I open the box today? Your theory falls over. No, it doesn't because your memory is you put it last Thursday. Yeah, but I know I did. I wrote a label. I labeled it Thursday. No, I labeled it Wednesday.

I left it Wednesday. I can't believe, Andy, that you found the hole in the bearing. Wow. How come Andy's underpants that say Thursday on them are still in the wash? Yeah. I got a fact about Fridays. Oh, yeah.

You want to hear that? Do you know Dressed down Friday? Dressed down Friday, yeah. Do you know who invented that or why it was invented? Military thing. military thing. Yeah? Yeah.

Like, every Friday, you don't have to wear a uniform. Yeah, you start in the city, but you're wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Yeah, exactly. It's fun. It's good for morale. It's bad for camouflage,

but it's like, what do you think it'll be fun? Yeah. Well, I gave you a clue there. It was invented by people who made Hawaiian shirts to sell more Hawaiian shirts. Oh, really?

Oh, really. This was in the 60s. Yeah, it was a company called, it was the Hawaiian Fashion Guild, actually. and they came up with the idea of Aloha Fridays where everyone will wear a Hawaiian shirt into work and then it just took off

and now we have people just wearing jeans. Wow. But do the people who work at the Hawaiian Fashion Guild have to go in in a three-piece suit on a Friday? Just while we were talking about military on Fridays as well, there's a thing on Japanese Navy ships and submarines that they have curry every night on Friday nights because on a ship you might lose the track of the days

and that's a way of them going, oh, it's Friday, we're having curry. It's a thing on the menu that allows for them to remember. Yeah, because you do lose track. And on a Saturday you feel like, you know? Yeah. No, that's, no, that's, I do have a Saturday fact if that's what you're edging towards. But it's absolutely not that. Okay, go on, let's hear your Saturday fact.

My Saturday fact is that on US ships and submarines, they will have burgers for dinner just so they remember what day it is so that they know. and that's because you can lose track when you're on a ship or a submarine they will have burgers and they're like, oh, Saturday. Yeah, I feel like I'm losing track now. This is a study from 2006,

but Mondays, most of us apparently are tired and depressed on a Monday and work that it requires emotional involvement or flare should be avoided. Or flare? I'm afraid so. Oh, wow. It's best to be alone. Our lines of communication mentally

are largely closed and communication with each other is also poorer on a Monday. So that's why we did this kick on a Monday, is it? I think maybe we're proving it. Very quickly, because I just thought suddenly remembered, Fridays are obviously Freya, so these are the Germanic gods, right? So Saturday Saturn is the only one of the days of the week

that's named after a Roman god, all the others are Moon Day, Sunday, and then Germanic god. Who's Freya? She's Anglo-Sexam and a Norse goddess. Very powerful, very cool. Thursday's Thor, Funor, when it stays Woden. But the Romans called Venus, the planet,

not Venus. They called it Lucifer. Just suddenly, it occurs me. And the Greeks called it phosphorus, like Giver. So it suddenly reminded me that Friday is named after Venus, Aphrodite. But they didn't call the planet Venus. They called it Lucifer. So they would see Lucifer in the sky and go, there he is.

Oh, that's great. It's quite a scary name. Although they didn't call it Lucifer. They'd call it Lucifer. Latin. Look care. Look at it. That's awesome.

Go on, Dan, tell us your Sunday fact. So, on Sundays, in order for U.S. Navy ships and submarines, to know what day it is, they have steak. Because you can lose track of time when you're on ships. So they will have steak on a Sunday. And they're like, oh, it's a Sunday. We're recording this on a Monday, by the way. We're going to have to move on to our next fact in one sec.

Should we go for it? I can give you a quick Sunday fact. Yeah. Obviously, Sunday, trade. was a thing. There were certain things you're allowed to sell on some day, certain things you weren't. And so if you're a shopkeeper, you're allowed to sell food for horses because they were working animal, but you weren't allowed to sell food for dogs because it was a pet often.

This is in Hansard in 1968. They were discussing this. And apparently, the reason that they wanted to change the rules is because it was such nonsense that a man could go into a shop and say, I have a pony who only eats dog biscuits. Can I have some dog biscuits for my pony? And they had to give in the biscuits. And that's when they thought maybe we need to change our rules a little bit. That's so good.

That's amazing. Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is Andy. My fact is that the first electric cars were taken away each night and delivered back to your door fully charged in the morning. So they were like shoes outside hotel rooms, basically. We put them out, so it takes them away, polishes them. Is that what happens?

Hang on, what? I'll tell you what, we stay at travel lodges. Yeah, where are you staying? Yeah. What are you talking about? That's a thing, and I feel like I'm immediately distracted from the main point of the... But that does happen in hotels.

You put your shoes outside the room and then they... Like, if you want them polished, you don't have to... What? Do you leave a note on them, say, please? Oh, okay. It's read, it's understood. Is it? You don't need to leave a note.

I feel like the hotels where I stay and they would just get stolen. Yeah. Well... Just by... By a round of cheers. Has anyone heard of that in here? Okay, a few people. Who here hasn't heard of it? Not enough for government.

Okay. Can I retake my fact? Yeah. The fact is fine. It was the follow-up. The first electric cars were taken away each night and delivered to your door, fully charged for the morning. A unique occurrence. When are we talking?

First electric cars? So early, early days. Not the... So like late 19th, early 20th century. This is from... an interview with the head of Ford. I was listening to a podcast the other day which was interviewing him.

He's called Jim Farley. And he was talking about the firm Detroit Electric, who they made early cars. Like loads of the early cars when Cabastrians were just starting were electric. And the electric ones, they were kind of marketed at, they were marketed at women, basically.

Yeah. The idea was they're a bit daintier. You don't have to hand crank them to start because that's quite a, like a physical. It's the smell of petrol for you. The smell was particularly a big part of branding. Yeah, petrol stinks and it's all like it's very, yeah. And also Wikipedia claims they were sold to women drivers and physicians.

No idea why. Well, I think the idea was if you needed to go and save someone's life really quickly because they were sick, you wouldn't have to do all the cranking. You just go straight away. That's good. Okay, okay. That tracks then. Yeah.

And they had the system with the doors where they didn't have the charging capacity in your home, obviously, because most houses weren't even on the electric at that point. And they sound like mad cars. they were operated, this is incredible, from the back seat. So amazing. From the back seat. They had a rear-facing front seat so you could face your passengers. Oh, great.

You put your passengers in the front seat facing backwards to you. You can chat to them as you drive. But you can't see the road. And they also, and they had, instead of a steering wheel, boring, they had a tiller. Yeah. Because that was nice and, it was nice and calm. It was like having a lovely sailboat or something.

What's a tiller? Like a rudder, basically. On the back of the boat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's left to go right, right to. Wow. I know. Didn't see it backwards

from the backseat of the car, unable to see the road ahead of you. So weird that didn't catch on. The Tiller thing is amazing. So Ben's invented the steering wheel in the 1890s.

Ben's and Jerry's, yeah. Ben's and Jerry's, yeah. But Americans just stuck with this Tiller the whole time. And there was a journalist writing around the time who said, few have adopted that foreign freak

the steering wheel. A car with a wheel. would be a nerve wracker of the worst kind. Imagine that, a steering wheel. It's amazing. So it came back to your house fully charged. And we're talking, not lithium iron batteries, we're talking, what, lead acid?

I don't know exactly what the batteries were in these. How do you charge it? For sure, they were acid batteries, I'm pretty sure. But I think what would happen most of the time is they would replace the battery. Yeah. And then the battery would go back somewhere else to be charged, which might take time, I don't know.

Oh, okay. It was a lot of these places, which I think would be really, cool now as someone with electric car. I'd love to just, instead of plug in, they just take the battery out and put another one back in and you just go straight away. That's a cool idea. It's like changing horses. Well, that's actually the reason they did it because

people were used to changing horses and this was kind of the obvious way of doing it. You get up in the morning, you look outside your door, you get your nice polished shoes, go down, you take a fresh horse. Someone has recharged your shoes. Because I mean, rechargeable batteries were invented at 1859. So it's quite

Right. So that's Gaston Plante who invents them. And that's quite exciting. But that's already 20 odd years after the first electric car. It's really amazing how early they're... Because we now look at electric cars and we kind of go like, Elon Musk. But the electric car is like so much more established

than fuel than petrol. Yeah. For 20 years, they couldn't reach out of the batteries. That's the thing. You got the battery, finished it? Yeah. Throw the car away. Yeah, I mean, you just chuck it and you get a new one.

The guy I like is... Have you heard of... Sbrandus Stratting? No. No? He's a Dutch guy. He's not, he sort of deserves more renown.

He's quite cool. And he possibly invented the first electric car that's like decent and we know about. There's a Scotsman called Robert Anderson who may be invented one

in the 1830s but we don't know much about it. But Sopranda strating lived in Groningen he was a Dutch chemistry professor and in 1835 he makes an electric car weighs about three kilos. It's a tricycle.

He can carry about 1.5 kilos which is a guinea pig? I don't know. It's not great, is it? It can go for 20 minutes. And it's 1835, nearly 200 years ago, and this thing is already electrified. But he's very cool because he also,

he spoke 13 languages. He built early electric light bulbs 50 years before Edison. He fought a pandemic. There was a malaria outbreak in Groningen, and he built a small chlorine factory to create disinfectant for the people. And he built an electric boat.

So this one sort of chemistry professor in the mid-8-30s was just sort of going, yeah, I'll do a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of this. But yeah, electric car. And so... Why don't we know his name? I think he's sort of been slightly forgotten. And I discovered a PhD thesis by a Dutch historian

who's been trying to, like, just get back to the basics because it's really fascinating. And I've got a picture of the car here. Like, you can't... Perfect for a podcast. Sorry, yeah. But, like, it's... God, that is an unbelievable picture.

I... Wow. And the genitals are so impressive. They're so... And the polishing finish on those shoes. But yeah, I just like him. He's doing electric cars in the 1830s, way before Edison, way before Ford.

What's his name again? I've forgotten it. He said it twice. Sibrandus strating. Dutch listeners will now yell at me for getting that horribly wrong. But yeah, 1830s. Very cool.

And it's very cool. In 1908, there was a race, Philadelphia, between Mrs. Laura Duval, who owned an electric car with the top speed of 17 miles an hour, and a guy who owned a petrol car that could go 60 miles an hour whose name appears to have been

Driver Middleton. So his first name was Driver. I don't understand that really, but it was in the papers, this is true. And they decided to have a race through the city to see who would be the fastest see if electric cars were better than petrol cars. And the slight twist in kind of a top gear style

is they had to stop at a few shops and do a few things on the way through the city. And the woman who had the electric car, she won by 10 minutes, and the reason being that she didn't have to crank it. And the thing is, like, you couldn't really go much faster than 20 miles an hour in the cities in the time

because there was so much other traffic in the roads and people in the roads and stuff. And so really that was the fastest you could go, even if you had a 60 mile an hour car. And so the lack of cranking, then it was a much better. Lack of cranking. That feels like that's a life lesson then.

Yeah, yeah. And that's the reason that electric cars didn't win the race against petrol cars is because people stopped having to crank their cars into life. So they invented a thing called the electric starter, which meant you not only had to crank the car. So it was electricity meant that the electric car failed. Oh, no.

Dramatic irony. Yes. I mean, dramatic irony up the wazoo. That's insane. Yeah. And there was another thing, the muffler. The muffler was invented, which made petrol cars quieter. Yeah.

Oh, because, yeah, that was a big issue, right? And they got cheaper and cheaper. It's also the discovery of oil, right? Yeah. The discovery of all was a minor third element, hugely revolutionised. I mean, Edison is talking to Ford, I think. They're having conversations about whether to go big

and produce electric cars en masse. Because at this point, you know, so London got electric tube trains 1890. It got electric trams 1901, and he got electric buses called electro buses in 1907. And they were powered by batteries. So if you go on YouTube, there's footage of like, Lester Square or Piccadilly Circus in like 1908 or something.

There are electric buses. pootling around. Crazy. We were saying we did a show about suffragettes recently, but you do see these images where suffragettes are on electric scooters. And, I mean, it's basically London today. Popping a wheelie.

Yeah, exactly. How they were getting to, you know, throw bricks at Parliament and stuff via electric scooter, which is mad. And one of the big things, I guess, is that there was so much resistance not only from members of the public who might not have thought

that this was a useful thing, but by the railworkers as well. Because trains were, you know, everyone would be out of a job if suddenly these electric cars worked. So early cars were being hit by a whole group and whole industry because they just thought, no way, we don't want to. My favorite electric car from this era is called the Electrobat.

Oh, yeah. 1894. I feel like Batman in an electric car, but like a really cute pootling 15-mile-an-hour one. That's a Chris Nolan movie I want to see. In order to defeat fear, you must become fear, but only at 15 miles an hour. In America, this is in the 50s now,

they used to do mass car blessings. If you got a car, you used to go to the church and have your car blessed just for, you know, good karma, basically. I'm mixing my religions out, but yeah. Oh, I did... Oh, show! Oh, wow! You're cool.

You stealth punned yourself. Wow, that was cool. That's great. Care to come back into the room, Mr. Schreiber? I'm just doing my victory lap, Andy. I'm sorry. So, yeah, so you would take it to church, and you would have it blessed by a priest.

Is it like a drive-through? No, but they did have, um, on mass. So you would... On mass. Oh, fuck! I feel like if I put my shoes on you, they're going to recharge. What pun's coming next?

No one knows. I'm too nervous. What if I, I'm going to start trying to throw. think I wanted. I should just say it. Stay in that state. I'll stay in the zone, yeah. Okay, so yeah, so they would do mass blessings and so on, and it would be thousands.

Yeah, pretty cool, hey. We do need to move on in the second. In 2010, Renault was sued. Renno in France were sued for trying to call their new electric car the Zoe. Can you guess why? The Zoe. Okay, so was it by another person called Zoe who didn't want to be Zoe Wanamaker?

It was, well, it was by two married couples. who both had daughters named Zoe Reno. And their surname was Renault, it's just a name, you know. And so they said, our children's, our daughter's lives will be irreversibly damaged if you call your new car the Renault Zoe. And they basically brought a case saying first names are for humans. Not for cars. So French.

But listen to this. This is from the reporting of the time, right? The lawyer also argued that all of France's thousands of Zoe's could be affected with playground teasing and, as they grow older, comments in bars such as, can I see your airbags? Or, can I

shine your bumper? Case was rejected flat out of hand. I do need to move us on to our final fact. It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1908, the New York Times, reported on a dog in France

that was deliberately knocking children into the Sen before rescuing them and claiming a reward. So, yeah, this is a thing that happened. It was in the New York Times that the headline was, dog, a fake hero. And they said that he was doing it to win beefsteaks. And, yeah, basically a child had fallen into the river, and he'd gone and saved the child

and they'd given him a big old steak and he thought, well, I could do with a bit more of that. And sure enough, over the next few days, more and more children started falling in the same and the same dog kept saving them. That's amazing. It's so good. Isn't it?

That's incredible, isn't it? How long did the scam go before people went hang on us? It was only a few times. The newspaper article said it wasn't too long before the jig was up. So, yeah. But actually, this isn't the first dog who's done this. I found an article in The Spectator from 1885

about a dog in Lake Ontario who had pulled a boy out of Lake Ontario and they'd taken him and they said he went to a confectioner's and given him a variety of cakes and other sweets. I'm not sure if dogs are allowed to eat cakes and other sweets, but they did anyway. But yeah, sure enough, he started pushing kids into the lake.

It's such a good example of unintended consequences. It's brilliant, isn't it? I was looking into life-saving dogs. Oh, yeah. And I've had a report, this is from 2009, right, that Italy had 300 life-saving dogs that were stationed at beaches. Okay, I'm just going to tell you what it's said, right?

And then we can get into it because the vice president of the training school was a woman called Donatella Pascuali. And she said that the, I'm quoting here, the dogs learned to tow their instructors out to sea so they had the medical strength to give attention to drowning swimmers. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

Does it? Well, if you don't have a boat. If you don't have a boat. Okay, that's the if. That's the big if. Yeah. Because why can't you just have a boat? But, okay.

They've spent on the money on dogs. Exactly. She says... Okay, okay, okay, Dad. That's... Okay, so maybe you don't have a boat on any of the 300 beaches where you station the dogs.

Fine. Here's what Ms. Pasquale said. The dogs are incredibly strong. Our record is one dog towing 40 people at the same time. What? Are they Newfoundland dogs? Are they Newfoundland?

Dogs? Who fucking cares, Dan? It's 40 people. Yeah. One dog can't tow 40 people. That's impossible. Are they not on a lilo? Are they not on like a sort of...

Are they like floating on the surface? Still. Exactly. They're not swimming. Why are the dogs towing 40 doctors? At that point, I feel, get a boat. Sometimes, Andy, and I only know this because I do watch a lot of Baywatch, you can't make it out past the surf on a boat, right?

So when you're swimming, if you're on a speedboat and the waves are coming in thick and high, you're going to get flipped over. You're not going to make it out. So that's why David Hasselhoff always runs with that little red thing that looks like a mini, like micro surfboard and does that.

Now, let me ask you this. Okay, go on. How much better would Baywatch be if he had a dog under his arm? And he was able to conserve his energy. There you go. Not surf it, but like get out there in that sort of way, right?

Amazing. It makes total sense. Well, you've put me back in my box, and I thought that was an insane thing. by dog towing 40 people, but you've made me see it some very reasonable... The reason I mentioned

Newfoundland dogs is because a lot of rescue boats take Newfoundland dogs with them on it in order to... They're amazing at saving people. They're these big, fluffy life rafts, basically. They get into the water.

You can lay on them like your Kate Winslet on the door, and you can be saved right, and there's a story. Greg, I wanted to ask you about this. Actually, full disclosure, it's the only time

I've ever asked a guest whether or not this is true. And you said, but I'm going to ask you anyway. Apparently, Napoleon fell off a boat and a Newfoundland dog jumped in after him and saved him. No. So your answer is still the same as before the show, is what you're saying.

I mean, there's a billion stories about Napoleon. Yeah. You can never, ever rely on any of them. Okay, right. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe. Oh, upgraded to a maybe. I'm still taken by your vision of Titanic's closing scenes down. Get off the dock!

I've got some other hero dogs who might be villains but not really but they're not villains but they might have stolen a bit of thunder from other dogs so the most famous one is Bolto have you heard of Balto?

Bolto, no. Bolto. It was a hero dog, really famous because he was part of a team of sled dogs that's sort of 120 odd dogs and 20 mushes, 150 dogs who saved a town in Alaska in 1925 called Nome

and they had a terrifying outbreak of a really horrible disease, I think it was diphtheria. They couldn't get the medicine to them because it was just frozen. The planes wouldn't get there. The ships wouldn't get there. And a team of sled dog mushes, I guess, volunteered. And they had to take this medicine 670 miles in terrifying, you know, the worst possible of the Alaskan weather you can think of.

And it's called the Great Mercy Race for Gnome. And Bolto was the lead dog in the final leg and became like a Hollywood celebrity. They put a statue up in Central Park and became a really famous. he was stuffed to put in a museum. And everyone was like, Baltho was a crap dog. Really? Baltho, the hero dog. He was never a good dog. There were other dogs, really, that dog, that dog.

And it sort of turns out maybe that the musher, at the end, the guy called Gunnar Kassan, he had been doing the second to last leg. And he got to the kind of way station and found the other guy who's meant to finish the run was asleep. And he says, oh, well, I didn't want to wake him up and delay. I thought we just had to get to know. And so I did the final leg on my own as well.

So he did two legs with Bolto as a lead dog. But there's a sort of controversy as to whether he stole this guy's thunder, stole the other dog's thunder. And the Botto, the kind of mediocre dog and Carson, you know, but basically nabbed the headlines and ended up as the hero of this enormous sort of relay race to save a town. Yeah. But there's a bit of kind of controversy as to whether he maybe nicked that from someone else.

And I guess they kind of don't care that much because it gets a story out there still, right? Yeah. And it's like the face of the story. So that's kind of the important part. I've got another villain that I found out as well, worth mentioning. Have you heard of the DC superhero called Dog Welder? No? No, I'm sorry, dog welder.

He was a villain, and what he used to do was weld people's dogs to their faces. That was his thing. And you can read a sort of bio on him, so powers and abilities. Abilities, dog welding. Obsession has a strong compulsion to weld dogs. people's faces. Equipment. Welding equipment.

Weapons. Dogs. Which he welds onto people's faces. And so this was a DC comic. Yeah. Yeah. Wasn't he part of a... I think I remember, to vaguely, he was in a team.

And one of the others in the team was just the de-fenestrator who carried around a window to throw people through. So that was... I think you're thinking, because he gets rid of now, I think you're thinking of dog welder 2, who was... Basically, there was a husband. who one day goes to an antique shop. He's possessed by original dog welders' welding equipment, which happens to be in the shop.

And then he immediately gets very obsessed with welding dogs and welds the family dog to his children's faces. His wife is furious. She divorces him. And so he's, like, struggling with it because he wants to get back with these kids. He's like, why am I welding dogs to people's faces? I don't understand what's going on.

And then it turns out, and this is he turns into a good guy because he learns that actually there's a moment. moment where the star, Sirius A, and B, are expanding, and if they touch, they'll explode and destroy Earth. And so, wait a minute. The dog star. The dog stars. And he realizes he's meant to weld them together.

So he punches some NASA astronauts in the face, steals their outfits, their astronaut suits, outfits, spacesuits. And flies beyond the moon to the serious stars where he welds the planets, the stars back together, and he dies in the process. but so he turns good in the end, dog welder. It's a brilliant thing. When you weld a dog to a face, is it face to, do you go dog face to human face?

Do you do dog bum to human face? Do you do dog sides? Like a human centipede? Human centipede. Is it schnauz or is it, is it, you know, where are you? I would have thought the side of the dog to the side of the face, that's why I was thinking. I would think so.

But don't you have to have metal to weld things together? Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Hang on, Mr. One Dog can tow 40 people. No, you're right, Andy. Let me write to Fantasyland, care of James and Andy.

If we welded in Newfoundland to David Hasselhoff. We must wrap up soon, but... Can I tell you one last thing? Yeah. In 2015, the Telegraph reported on a stray dog called Archie who had been rescued. It was a really nice story and coached back to strength by a volunteer.

Jack Russell, little dog. and it was a lovely French nursery school teacher who'd been volunteering at this sentence spending all of her weekends with him. She sang him lots of songs in French and she called him Mont Petitieu and all of this. And as a result, Archie now only reacts to commands given in a French accent. And if you want Archie to do anything, you have to say,

Zit? Anyone do anything else. Wackies! Yeah, exactly. I got a very, very quick stories. No, go for, we have a few more minutes. Okay, so about clever dogs. Yep.

So the spectator, which is where I told you about the second evil dog, they actually got a bit of a reputation in the 19th century for sort of clever dog stories. To such an extent that whenever any other newspaper would write about them, they'd say, oh, this is yet another spectator dog. But they would always get people writing in with these stories, and they all said they were definitely true. So there was one person who said that they were in church and there was a new priest. and the priest was saying a sermon and it was going on forever and ever and ever

and there was a dog in there and it got restless and the dog knew that an altar boy would always go around with the plates to collect money just before the end of the church service and so what he did was while this pastor was sort of droning on he went over to the boy

who always took it and sort of looked at him just stared at him and said when are you going to do your bloody thing and then when the boy didn't do anything he started to bake for him to do the passing the plate round and when he didn't do anything about that he started nuzzling him and trying to push

him around the church to try and get him to do this part of the mass and then knocked out the boy took his cassock dressed up as the boy conducted the search so not the search that was it called what's the free money thing

at the end of church called free money you're doing it wrong if it's free money not the collection The collection, I don't say the tipping, which is not... Can I just ask, what is the tax implication of the... free money? All right, I need to wrap us up, guys. That is it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. James... At James Harkin.

Andy. At Andrew Hunter. And Greg. Greg underscore Jenna. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at No Such. thing. Go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there.

You can also join Clubfish. Any Clubfish members in here? Oh, wow, quite a few. Okay, cool. Join them. They sound fun. And we will be back again next week with another episode. Thank you so much Soho Theater. That was awesome. Thank you, Greg. We will be back again, as I say, next week. Goodbye.