Radiolab - Helicopter Boy

Episode Date: November 3, 2009

In this podcast, a story about a mom, a boy, and a home-made helicopter.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From.

W-N-Y-C. C? C? Yes. And NPR. Okay, ready? Yeah. Hey, I'm Jada Boomrod.

And I'm Robert Coleridge. This is Radio Lab, our fun drive edition. We're trying to prevail upon you. Give you all the reasons we can think of to support public radio and radio lab in particular. You know what? Robert, why should we even say anything when I think it's more powerful when somebody who uses Radio Lab, who uses public radio, can say it for us. Well, do you have someone in mind? I do.

I have a story here that came into our inbox. This is a true story where public radio, are you ready for this? Okay. Literally saved a boy's life. What? All right, so I'm exaggerating a little. But it helped out in a pretty dire situation. And if saving lives, healing wounds, doesn't make you want to support this service,

then, well, frankly, I don't know what will. So anyhow, the woman who wrote this, we're just going to call it right now, her name is Jennifer Babb. And how would we be spelling Babs? Babs with a S or Jennifer Babb as in B A BABB. B A B B B B B. B. Yep, and it involves her and her son, Blake. Blake. Hello. Hi, is this Jennifer? Yes.

Hey, this is Jad. And this is Robert. here on the other microphone. Hi, guys. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you telephonically. Now, Jennifer, I understand you have a son, right? Yes, I have two children.

Two children. My son is my oldest. He's seven and a half. Blake. Blake. And so can you set the scene for the story you're going to tell? Well, let's see. So Blake, he says when he grows up, he's going to be an inventor.

And what he likes to build most of all is airplanes, airplanes and helicopters. Okay. So the first ones he built were just, you know, he'd take a couple of pieces of Tupperware and lay them out on the floor in the shape of a plane. But lately, he's been trying to build planes that actually fly. And so he made this airplane. He's sitting next to me now, and he's telling me it's more like a helicopter. He took a big cardboard box, cut out two long propeller blades that he ductate together in

shape of an X. And the propeller, I have to say, the propeller is really cool. The propeller actually flies. So we have kind of a balcony on our house and he stood up on the balcony and like flung it off and then hovered in there. Really? Oh, wow. For a moment before falling to the ground. Okay, so you've done a bunch of tests with this propeller. You see that it can fly. And then I'm assuming at a certain point, he takes it to the next step. Yeah. So he's been learning about electricity and about motors and things,

and he's got a couple of toys that have motors on them. So he's been trying to build an airplane that'll hook up to the motor, and he tried to attach his propeller, and it just fell over. So the motor wasn't powerful enough. Right. And so there's only one thing that we've got that's strong enough to power, a propeller of this size, and that's a human being. Yeah, so what he did was, since the owner didn't work,

he made out of duct tape a harness system so that he could kind of climb inside the harness and hold on to the propeller. And is he going to twist the propellers himself while he's flying? Exactly. Grab onto it with his hands and just kind of like spin to make it fly. And so, you know, we have this rock wall that's about I don't know, three feet high.

And so he climbed up on the rock wall and spun it and jumped. And he said, he hovered for a second. Really? He felt it. He was saying he felt it. It's all kind of weird. Hi. Hi, Blake. Hi.

So you felt like, so where did you jump from? You jumped from the wall? Hello? Hello? Blake, are you there? Blake is not a really big talker. Did you mom know any of this was happening at this point? Yeah, I made a movie of it. Oh, you did?

So you were aware of his experiments in flight? Yeah, well, it's fascinating to watch, you know, to see how his mind works. He's learning, like I said, you know, every time, reiteration he learned something from the way the one before failed. So that was in the evening. evening. That was like 8 o'clock at night. And the next day, he was this Saturday or Sunday, and he's fussing around in the garage. And my husband and I were in the kitchen talking about whatever, and Blake comes walking past with his harness system on, and he walks through the doors to go into the backyard. Just walks right through. Right. There's something slightly Calvin

and Hobbsy about this. So for whatever reason, this did not arouse our suspicion, as it should have, You know, I don't know what we were talking about. And then, you know, two, three minutes later, we hear the cry. You know, the kind of cry that's not I'm scared or wham, hungry. It's the cry that means I'm hurt. Oh. Now, just to jump in here, Jennifer runs outside to the backyard where there's this maple tree, and she looks up.

And she sees her son. Completely intense. in the tree. Looked to her like he'd climbed up to the top branch. With the harness system on. And then jumped. And got twisted up. And he was really, really bloody.

He had scraped the whole back of his leg. This big, like, footlong gash. And they were just like, oh, my God, oh, my God. Just bleeding all down his leg. And now my husband had to, like, push him up so that I could untangle the, like, ropy bits of the duct tape harness system to get him off and pull him down. So I, you know, carried him through the kitchen and put him on the couch in the living room. And she says she tried to turn him over so she could get a look at the cut, but he kept squirming and wouldn't let her see it.

And that was the moment it occurred to me to put on radio lab. For something for him to listen to, that would kind of capture his imagination, so he'd lie still. Forget that his leg hurt him, and then I could look at it while he was distracted. What gave you that idea? I don't know. The iPod was kind of sitting there, and I was like, okay, I'll put on radio lab, and he can listen to the bit about parasites. Parasites?

Yeah. So when you press go or begin on your iPod, what happened? Oh, he was instantly fascinated. He listened to the whole entire podcast, the whole 45 minutes or whatever it is. And, yeah, and I was able, I got his wound clean. off. To get a child like that to stop moving, to stop twitching in some degree like you should see him right now, he's sitting here like tapping his feet and playing with this spork. And you had his attention from the first moment. But it goes beyond that. According to Jennifer, after she'd been playing him the show for a few minutes, she paused it just shortly after a segment we made about a parasitic wasp. What it does is it flies around and it looks for a cockroach. That's the one. And she asked him,

Did you understand any of that? And he repeated it back to me. Really? Yeah. Almost word for word. Maybe we should put Blake on. Yeah. Okay, let me go get him.

They are ready to talk to you, man. Hi. Hi. So we want to hear, like, what can you remember about the radio show? The one about parasitic wasp? Yeah. The parasitic wasp is flying around, and then it finds a cockroach. Once it finds that cockroach.

They fight. They tumble back and forth around, around until the parasitic was mentioned to stab it in the stomach. Right in the belly. The cockroach twitches for a second. And then it just falls over. Boom. And it stings it. The stinger actually sort of threads its way.

Somewhere in the brain. To a particular spot in the brain. In a way they can control the cockroach. So when it recovers, it just stands up. And so now the wasp... It pulls it by the antenna. The cockroach's antenna and start pulling on it. Over to it is dead.

Down, down, down. And it lays eggs inside the cockroach. And then the eggs hatch. You remember the entire story? Yeah. Jennifer too was flabbergasted. She says she turned to him and was like, wow, Blake, what excellent listening conversation.

comprehension you have. You do understand what you hear. And he said, yes, but I don't understand when people are talking to me. You mean like he doesn't understand it when people talk at him or lecture him? Yeah. And he's like, right. Like when I'm in trouble. I never understand what you're talking about. So I did have the thought that if only I had the means I could record some of my lectures so that I could play them back, you know, with the right sound effects so that he would have that same, like, intensity of listening to what I was trying to say.

Oh, God, we could sell ourselves to mothers everywhere when they want to have children. Mothers across America will be paying millions of dollars for these lectures. Which brings me to a really quick pitch. Public radio is all about making stories stick. That's what we try and do at Radio Lab and all the shows try and do. Do you have lectures off the top of your head? because if you give them to us, we could give them back to you in a radiolapified version. Well, let's see.

I guess there's, there's one thing, and this is, you know, this kind of gets at the whole climbing up into a tree with propellers. Like, you have to think things all the way through to the end. Jennifer says she said that to Blake millions of times. She's not sure if it ever gets through. Think things through to the end. So we thought we would try and give her a new spin on. I don't know if this is going to work, but hey, let's give it a shot. Here is our attempt to make a sticky lecture for Blake.

You have to think things all the way through. You have to think things, think things, think things, think things to think thing all the way. Think things, think things, all the way to think thing through. Think thing. Think thing all the way. Think thing. Think. Think.

Blake, what your mom is saying is that when you want to have an adventure or invent something, don't just think about the beginning of it. Or what you think might happen in the middle. In your mind, take it all the way through. To the end. To the end. You know, it's okay to test your theories. You know, I encourage experimentation.

The only way you're going to learn is if you fail. And she's not just saying that. I mean, take Thomas Edison, the king inventor. He tried to invent a battery, and he failed 10,000 times. But you need to think about the degree of failure. So you have to kind of consider what's kind of the best outcome and what's the worst outcome. And imagine that both of those things have happened. Like, imagine the scenario in your mind and what you would do.

Okay, let's do that. Scenario 1, you're in the tree. This is the good one. And you spin the blade. Round, round, round, and round and round and round and round, and round, and round, and round, and round. It works. You're flying. All through the neighborhood.

So here's the question you've got to answer. What happens next? What he hasn't thought is, for example, how's he going to land? Ooh. So you've got to take it all the way through to the landing. Now, let's play out the other scenario, the one where things don't go well. Let's say you jump out of the tree and you crash and you really hurt yourself. Well, think of how sad your mom would be and your dad and your sister.

In both cases, what you do is you make up a little movie in your head and you play it all the way through. And hopefully the good one will happen, the best outcome, but just in case, you'll now be prepared. mitigate the effects of the worst outcome. And I probably wouldn't say mitigate to my child. So we're going to do something with this lecture and send it to you. No, seriously. Well, thanks, you guys. It was wonderful to talk to you.

Yes, and we have absolutely no connection to any kind of further experimentation of this kind. You can resolve yourself of responsibility. Blake is on his own. All right. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Now, I don't exactly know what to say here,

but there is something about this story that just kind of like gets to the whole point of why we do this. Yeah. But here you've got this kid who's obviously in a lot of pain, and he just sits still and listens to a story about parasites? You know, what we're trying to do here is tell stories that move you, or keep you still in this case, but stories that draw you in and make you think differently about the world,

even just a little bit. Help us to do that. Here's how. Go to our website, radialab.org, click on the support button. And whatever you give, it goes right into the making of this show

and we really, really appreciate it. The Radio Lab is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Thanks for listening.