Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Popcorn Ceilings

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why popcorn ceilings are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Get tickets to see us LIVE at the London Podcast Festival this September: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/comedy/secretly-incredibly-fascinating/

Folks, as you know, we're doing a live episode of this podcast in London, and I can announce our special guest. Me and Katie are joined by legendary comedian and writer and passive guest, Robin Ince. Please see me and Katie and Robin Ince at the London Podcast Festival. Tickets are linked in the description. See you there. Popcorn sealings. Known for being in apartments, maybe.

Famous for being old, maybe. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why popcorn ceilings are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie!

Yes! What is your relationship to or opinion of popcorn ceilings? Popcorn ceilings. Love to chew on them. No, I like them because they make me think of my childhood as a youth. Oh. I would look at the ceiling and it was usually a popcorn ceiling in the school. And I think in our house, maybe before we, like my house got remodeled as a kid, but I do remember, I think there were popcorn ceilings as a kid.

And I have these distinct memories of kind of lying in bed, especially like if I'd woken up in a crepuscular fashion at dawn and then tried to get back to sleep. Like I'd be looking at the ceiling and just like be watching, looking at this popcorn ceiling and drifting off. I have a fond memory of it. I don't love the look of it just from a purely aesthetic kind of thing, right? Like sometimes like when I would go to a

cheap apartment and there'd be a popcorn ceiling and be like, ugh, one of these things. Impossible to get scuff marks off of it. But in terms of, I don't know, I do have some positive associations with it because of just nostalgia. And this might be a topic name that not everyone knows the name of, but if you just Google this, I could link people to it, but just Google it and you'll see the thing that you have definitely seen in your life, listener. It's a specific stippled kind of pattern on a ceiling that I think is truly sift, partly because I realized I have never paid attention to ceilings in my whole life, basically up until me and my wife Brenda are in our starter home. And through researching, learned that because our home

is so old, perhaps too old, it doesn't have popcorn ceilings. This was from a somewhat specific era and the house predates it. So we don't have that right now. Yeah. There is a popcorn ceiling era. I also remember as a kid, I think there was some rumor that spread that all popcorn ceilings are made out of asbestos and are really dangerous. And I don't know if that's true. I'm sure we're going to talk about it today though. Yeah, we'll talk about two different reasons they might have asbestos, but they don't all have it. Ooh, mystery.

I love it. I love an asbestos mystery. Like I said, fun asbestos surprise. We don't know if there's asbestos in there until we try it. Yeah. And I don't want to be like local news at 11 with the actual news about the danger. The only way to know for sure is to scrape a bit of it and test it. Because they can definitely be made without it and that's the only way to know.

So no secrecy until later there. You just have to test. We don't know. Yeah. Don't run screaming from your home. I also think with asbestos, it's only dangerous once it is disturbed, right? So like if it is in your ceiling, I don't think it necessarily just like falls onto you and causes mesothelioma. It only causes problems when you like, if

you say, want to remove your ceiling. And then that's when it would actually be important to know. Yeah. And there's a long ago, SIF episode, just all about asbestos that we'll link. It's truly a fun episode, even though asbestos is scary. Asbestos. And officially, technically, it is dangerous if it's just in your ceiling. But like you said, Katie, far and away, the biggest danger is when it's being disturbed and can be boosted into the air and end up in your lungs. So yeah, if you do any kind of removing a popcorn ceiling, wear all of the PPE or do very specific testing and make sure you don't have asbestos.

Yeah. Like, I know you're looking at your ceiling and you're screaming right now, but it's okay. It'll be all right. Yeah. And yeah, we'll talk all about why. Cause I also came out of this more excited about popcorn ceilings after researching, which is nice. I was not like stoked about them before, but I am like feeling more positive about them now.

Do some of them have popcorn in them? Like, is this going to be a fun sort of like mystery? Either you find asbestos or you find delicious popcorn? I think on the maze episode we established that we're both way into maze and corn and so on. And yeah, so I really love popcorn, but no, it's just sort of a visual reason it's named that. Right.

Yeah, it's just called popcorn ceiling because it looks like someone glued a bunch of popcorn on it. And also thank you to Arcblade on the Discord. They suggested this and also relayed the suggestion from a friend of theirs. But that suggestion won the polls with support from Xcairax and Chris and others on the Discord. Truly SIF, I'm really glad we're going to do an episode about it. Yeah. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating

numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called... Viva statistics, viva statistics, viva, viva statistics. I did some gyrations. You can't see it, but I did do gyration. You can't see it, but I did do some gyrations. She went back to my Elvis. It was great. I did.

I went to Elvis and started courting my young cousin. Oh no. And then being abducted by aliens, which is cool. That part's cool. He lives with aliens. No, you give me those brains back. I need those for my music and for courting my cousin. That name was from Hugh Agent on the Discord.

Thank you, Hugh Agent. We have a new name for this every week. Please make a Messilian Wacking Bazz possible. Submit through Discord or to civpod at gmail.com. And the first number for popcorn ceilings is the 1950s. 1950s, the time of poodle skirts and racism. Pretty much. And it's also the beginning of this topic. We'll get into how and why the 1950s are the start, but that's when it became a big trend, especially in the US, but also in lots of other countries. This is a relatively global practice to make popcorn ceilings.

And they continue to get put up to this day. Builders can either paint that on or spray it on. And the basic mixture of materials is regular ceiling paint plus some kind of lumpy aggregate. Lumpy aggregate. That kind of thing has come up on our concrete episode and asphalt episode. It's basically any small particles of solid stuff is an aggregate. And so when it's not made of asbestos, it can be made with vermiculite or stuff like styrofoam or really anything solid that will lump together with paints and generate this pattern. You know, lumpy aggregate is my stage name. Right. Your birth name is Elvis Presley. And then you said, I can't perform under that

name. It doesn't work. No one will come to my shows under that boring name. Yeah. And some people also call these stipple ceilings or name them after the solid stuff, like a vermiculite ceiling. But that's what it is. It's where you both- What is vermiculite ceiling, but that's what it is. It's where you both- What is vermiculite? It is a mineral that can be mined and then heated and dried into a bunch of just little particles.

Okay. And it's also common in potting soil. Oh, right. I used to eat those as a kid, the little white things in potting soil. And it's like relatively safe for us, except for a way we'll talk about later. Hopefully, because I ate them when I was a kid. I knew I wasn't supposed to, but I did eat, I would pick them out of potting soil and

eat them when I was, you know, like four or five. I think that Stats song really turned you into Elvis in my head. I'm imagining a behind the music where we talk about your crippling vermiculite issues behind the scenes of your world tours. I did have something of a pompadour as a child. I guess more of a fro. I'm not really sure. I had very curly hair and it was like a little poofy.

Yeah, your hair color is somewhat like Conan O'Brien's hair color. So if you had a pompadour, I think it would just be very Conan. I have thought about making a Conan conversion, trying to veer towards Conan for my career, just for career purposes though. Getting the Conan hair, getting on a stretching rack to be taller. Right, for torment or colonization. Those are the two uses of a stretching rack.

Right, colonization. Behold the colonizer. All your truths will be ours. And yeah, and so a popcorn ceiling, it's doing two things at once. It's painting a ceiling and it is adding a texture to a ceiling. And that's all it is. Is it purely for aesthetics? Is there any kind of like insulation?

Like you said, like it would be a lumpy aggregate. Like is that just aesthetics or could it also be for like insulation? And we'll get into details later. It's basically just aesthetics and there are some like claims about it doing other things that are hard to verify like sound absorption and insulation and stuff. But it's such a thin layer. It's basically paint plus another thing. So that doesn't really like change the situation of your room. Right. I got into sort of sound absorption things when I was trying to make my studio.

And there is some truth to like a lumpy texture can help a bit with say like echo because the sound instead of like they're just bouncing off of a flat surface and back to you, it like kind of gets some of the sound waves get dispersed at different angles, so it can help sort of soften some of the echoes. I'm not sure if a popcorn ceiling, how good that would be at it, but it might help. I don't know. Yeah, it seems to be very minimal and also not like a drawback or anything either. Right. So yeah, for as much as people talk about this as like a design feature, before researching,

I almost would have thought it's some kind of entire material like drywall or plaster or something, but it's really just more of a special style of painting on top of whatever wall type material your ceiling is. And you can apply it and remove it and it's relatively straightforward. It's almost like repainting a room. It's just a texture. And this really got going in the 1950s. And one of the reasons gets into the next numbers here because the next number is 13%.

13%. 13%. And that is how many Americans lived in a suburb as of 1945. Oh, this is like part of the suburbanization of the America. Yeah, yeah. The US of A. Yeah, boy. In the US, we're always just like claiming that and everyone in Central America is like, I don't know, man, we're also... Yeah.

Central, like there's Canada, there's Central America, there's South America. Yeah. And in the US of A, there's just almost a coincidence where popcorn ceilings become popular right when we build more housing than we've ever built before and in a ton of places. Is it just like a really fast kind of method of creating? Because like if you're trying to paint a ceiling and you're trying to do it on like a flat ceiling, all the imperfections would be much more noticeable. Whereas if you can just kind of have a spray on ceiling, you can do it real fast. Yeah. It, in a subjective way, hides imperfections or dips or other things in the ceiling. And

because it's relatively fast and, you know, it's just paint plus another thing. So lots and lots of builders did it. Yeah. Right. And continue to do it. It's still useful that way. And then life was perfect in America once we all fled to the suburbs. And yeah. Yeah, because this trend, obviously it has some difficult things bound up in it, especially

because some suburbs specifically got built in a racially or economically unequal way or expanded our car culture. But there were some surprisingly positive things to me too. 1945, it's the final year of World War II. At that point, 13% of Americans lived in what's considered a suburb. And according to nonfiction writer Bill Bryson, that didn't just start with cars. Apparently the first suburbs of the UK and the US were reliant on train lines. As soon as locomotives got going, we kind of started to suburbanize in a way I didn't realize. I saw, yeah, I actually went to the Museum of Transportation in London the last time

I was there. And yeah, they had all these advertisements for living out in the suburbs because of the train lines. Because the advertisement was basically, hey, you can go live outside of the hustle and bustle of the city and you can still get into the city for work and stuff because we have these train lines. Right on. Yeah, that fits. Because yeah, and I think in the US we just think about interstates, but this started especially around New York and Chicago. And then coming off of World War II, between population growth and veterans returning home, the US had a shortfall of about 4 million homes. According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, as many as a third of US adults in 1947 were living with relatives or friends or strangers

despite wanting to have their own house. And like right now there is a US housing shortage. NPR says as of April, 2024, it's about 4 million homes, maybe more. But World War II America faced and resolved that kind of housing shortage with about a third of the population. That was a much more glaring housing shortage, given there were a lot less Americans. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like this is the pivotal

moment for a lot of countries, right? After World War II, when you have the influx of people returning from the war, you had these huge economic changes and it seems like it more or less determined sort of the trajectory of the design, city designs for, I don't know, until now. Big time, yeah. Yeah, there hasn't really been a shock like that, especially in the US until now when mostly for for local reasons and property value reasons, we realized we're out of houses. But before that it was World

War II. And from 1945 to 1975, the US built approximately 40 million new homes. Wow. That's a lot. They said, we're down 4 million. Great. We'll build 40 million. That'll cover it. Jesus. And also population growth. And because popcorn ceilings were coming into fashion around that time, they just got built a lot. Yeah.

Everywhere. It was a timing thing, was a lot of it. People were crazy about lumpy amalgamations. That's why it's my stage name. So it's a big hit with the boomers actually. They really like it. I've also realized they could do Elvis's name in lights real big, because it's just five letters, but lumpy amalgamations,

that's a lot of bulbs, that's a lot of power. It's a lot of- It's somewhat blinding. It is blinding, and that is what draws people in like moths to a flame, Alex. Like moths to a flame. Huge with moths too.

Just real moths. Yes, big with moths. They love the camouflage they get with lumpy amalgamations. Yeah. And the other number here about this is more than one million people. That's a lot of people. That's a lot. I can't even fit that many people in my house. That's too many. I can. I'm so powerful. Wow. Whoa. It's amazing.

Big house. Schmidt over there. Yeah. It's a 500,000 bedroom. That's pretty good. Only one bathroom though. Yeah. Big one. So more than 1 million people is the attendance figures for just one model home in Los Angeles. More than 1 million people came to see it. Oh, so there was like a singular model home that was put on display for what? Potential buyers? People who wanted a home? It was for like design principles and then partly to promote a developer and some architects. And they simply named this the post-war home.

They built it in 1946 and wanted to define what we ended up calling the post-war era. Like it was very influential partly because of this house. Okay, I'm seeing various designs of potential post-war homes. Oh, one's like a dome. That's cool. Why didn't we go with that?

Oh, we'll talk about that. Yeah. One's just a right angle, which I like. Man, we could have gone in a lot of cool directions, America. The Los Angeles Conservancy has a page with pictures. And also I double-checked Google Street View. It's still in LA. Apparently the interior has been totally redone a few times, but the exterior is still there. And to me it looks like what I'd call a ranch style of house. It's a big, long, single story house. Yeah, it is a long house and it kind of looks like, you know, it's very Bakersfield too.

If you've ever been to Bakersfield, it's kind of like a time capsule because a lot of buildings have not been redone. And yeah, it's just this very like, it's this very squat sort of like long house with a lot of windows. I'm still team dome though. I wish we had gone in a more yurt direction. We're going to get way into the domes in a little bit. But this house here, it is part of the popcorn ceiling story because it did not have popcorn ceilings. What?

Alex, you built this all up. Here's this model home. Like a million people went to it, but there's no popcorn ceiling. Then what's the point? Yeah, the point for our topic is that this helped relegate popcorn ceilings to be in what's considered not as nice houses. Oh. Because, like, after World War II, the U.S. was building so many houses so fast that a few models and designs could influence all of that.

From 1946 to 1950, over a million people visited the post-war house and paid a dollar admission fee just to see it. It was in tourism ads with the Miracle Mile Mile Shopping District and the La Brea Tar Pits. Like it was an LA tourist destination in addition to an architecture thing. Man, people must have been so bored. Because I'm looking at this and I don't know. It's all right. Maybe because like for the time this was like a new style, but guys, couldn't you go to a drive-in

movie and kiss each other or something? What's going on here? Right. They skipped the beach. It's kind of stupid. But yeah, this kind of made itself boring because it was so influential, but the biggest features were every technological luxury of the mid-century.

It had an electric garbage disposal, large screen TV, really nice closets, two-way intercoms, radios, stereo, and climate controls, including an electronic air cleaning system. And then also a backyard with a big pergola. The idea was this is the future and the nicest way we're going to do the future. So this would be like if nowadays there was a model home that was an entirely smart home and you had like smart bed that made itself or smart television that turned on itself, or I don't know, smart kitchen where it cooks food for you, and so on and so forth. Exactly.

Yeah. That was why people wanted to walk through it and be amazed. They wanted to see all the gadgets work together and be gadget jets and stuff. Okay. gadgets work together and be gadget jets and stuff. Okay, this is making more sense why this is popular as opposed to like what whatever else people in the 50s did went to Smooch Hill or watched grass. I don't really know what people did back in the day. Every town had a main street, an ice cream parlor, a smooch hill. And the old grass patch where folks would gather to take a look at that lawn.

Boy, somehow the old grass patch made me think of the grassy knoll and Kennedy. So, it's where my head's at. Every town had a grassy knoll for you to recreate that famous moment that would happen later. Yeah, Alex. It's ahead of the time. A little suspicious, Alex, that you're bringing up this anachronism. Interesting. Yeah, and so this indirectly promoted popcorn ceilings because this kind of house and the general concept of it, it helped create what we kind of have today where people either buying or renting a place to live say, okay, this is the checklist of what I want. I'm

going to do a balance of as many of the things I want and then trade-offs where I can't get it. And so, you know, sometimes you say, let's make sure to spend the money on having a dishwasher. We can accept a less awesome ceiling and a popcorn pattern and so on. Because, again, this model post-war house had a lot of like wood finishes and stuff. It did not have a popcorn ceiling. That was not included in the like dream list of the post-war era. And we have one last number before just takeaways for the rest of the episode. And this last number is 1911, the year 1911.

That's earlier. Alex, you're all out of order with these dates, man. I really wanted to know the trajectory of this stuff. And 1911 is when the inventor Carl Akeley got a US patent for a spray gun for construction materials. Whoa, spray gun for construction materials. What does that mean? So like a spray gun that sprays what? His could spray stuff like plaster and concrete.

Whoa. Building material. You know, that's interesting because we do have now sort of like 3D printed homes, I'm using air quotes. It's like these giant machines that spit out concrete and then move like a nozzle that moves and then can like build a wall out of concrete with this like moving nozzle. And that sounds kind of like what he was interested in making. Yeah, that has kind of a lineage because Akeley invented this one year later, he sold the

patent to a cement company. They manufactured and marketed a gun and a sprayable concrete to load it with. And they marketed it under the name Gunite. Okay. As a futuristic like gun of concrete. Alright. Okay. I mean, could have called it Guncrete, but... The other popular name is Shotcrete. They didn't go it Guncrete, but... The other popular name is Shotcrete. They didn't go with Guncrete. Shotcrete is fine.

Gunite. I think it just sounded technological, especially 1911. People were like, whoa, you know? Whoa. Whoa. It's my perfect 1910s person impression, just saying whoa. Oh, this is't smooth chill. Whoa!

And that invention of Ghanite shotcrete brings us into takeaway number one. Popcorn ceilings come from a broad 1900s movement towards sprayable construction materials, partly sparked by a taxidermist. Huh. Okay. I want to know about this because taxidermists are my favorite weirdos. They're very odd people, but they man artists, really. Yeah. Carl Akeley is an all-time leader and innovator in taxidermy and then came up with this on the side. After becoming the most famous taxidermist in America, also invented gunite. You can kind of see how there's overlapping skills, but yeah, he was a really wide ranging person.

I don't actually... Just like fixing things in place, I guess. It's not very overlapping. Yeah. Okay. Make... The Venn diagram barely touches, but I don't know. I see it. Popcorn ceilings are one of the winning ideas that came out of, you know, kind of the same era that gave us sprayable insulation and spray paints. Those are all things that are still here from this broader movement. Very end of the 1800s, but really the 1900s, we got way into spray devices and nozzles and stuff and people built with it. All about them nozzles. Rename Smooch Hill nozzle hill. Yeah. I mean, you know,

after a few dates maybe. Yeah. Key sources here include the Los Angeles Conservancy, the New York Times, the Chicago Field Museum, their natural history museum, and the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. We mentioned popcorn ceilings can be sprayed on. I couldn't find one single inventor of them. The loose conflicting bloggy sources I could find suggested that it might be from the 1930s, especially a UK product called Artex in Britain. So the invention of this is like a lumpy amalgamation of different inventors. Yeah, it's a popcorn invention. And that happened in line with a few other inventions.

In 1949, an Illinois paint store owner named Ed Seymour came up with spray paint. He put paint in an aerosol can. And in the 1930s, a German scientist named Otto Bayer came up with sprayable insulation. Like let's put insulation in a device that sprays and will spray properly. All those texts are like common and not used for everything all the time. You know, like we use spray paint, but a lot of people paint houses with rollers or big brushes. It's just useful to us. I like the big brushes. Just a big oversized brush with the paint dripping from it. You've got a pair of overalls where you've got paint stains on your butt and one of the overall sleeve thingies is like hanging down.

Yeah, we've all done this picturesque thing. Yeah. This is a very like Norman Rockwell episode, but also weird stuff, you know? Right, and then I convince another neighborhood, you know, a young lad from the neighborhood how fun it is to paint. The Adventures of Lumpy Aggregate and her friend Huckleberry Finn.

And yeah, so all those technologies like popcorn ceilings, we use them today. And again, you can use a roller to apply a popcorn ceiling. You can also spray it. People do it both ways. And we were also saying that popcorn ceilings do save time. The big feature of that is instead of several rounds of sanding and priming and painting a ceiling, you can apply or even spray a popcorn ceiling. And if there's divots, dips, et cetera, that hides it, it also gives it a texture.

I'm sure everyone's had some experience in a craft department where you go and you see divots, dips, et cetera, that hides it. It also gives it a texture. I'm sure everyone's had some experience in a craft department where you go and you see like they've painted over various things. Like I had an apartment where they painted over a lot of human hair. They painted over like a cockroach. The fun one is when they have many coats of paint over the, what's it called?

The fuse box to the point where it is inoperable. fun one is when they have many coats of paint over the, what's it called? The, the fuse box to the point where it is inoperable. Our last apartment, they did multiple coats of that white paint over both doorknobs and window latches. And it was like, we had to kind of break them open, you know? You got to get an X-Acto knife and like kind of carve away until the hinge is like operable. Yeah, it's wild. But they're like, I don't know, it's painted. And I'm like, you're right.

And yeah. It's like, what is this lump? Oh, it's the previous tenant. They just painted over them. Right, like Frozen Han Solo just stuck. Yeah, yeah. Stuck to the... stuck. Yeah. Yeah. My, my favorite thing about sprayable paint and insulation and ceilings is that they all came after a very industrial idea of can we spray entire buildings into

existence? You mean just like shake up a little can and a building? Yes, like it's a bigger hose and tank, but yeah. And it was this gunite stuff. People were like, if I can just spray concrete, can I just spray a building into being? Right. Yeah. Which we kind of can now. And they could then, people just weren't that excited about the results. Is this the domes? This is the domes. Yay, we're going to talk about the domes. And this all comes from, again, a taxidermist. My goodness.

And cannot understate that he was the main US taxidermist for a while. It's not just that he also had a hobby. It's like if someone who is the leader in taxidermy invented a new kind of house today. It's the Carvagio of taxidermy. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I like that. He's the Elvis of taxidermy.

Is that better, Alex? Thank you. Boo, paintings and culture, boo. So Carl Akeley, he first made his name in 1885 when he taxidermied the circus elephant Jumbo. Oh, wow. Like it's taxidermying a celebrity, right? Like wow.

It's a big gig. And then he founds taxidermy collections in Milwaukee and Chicago and at the Smithsonian. Those museums had to outbid the British Museum for his services. He helped invent putting taxidermied animals in displays that imitate their natural environment. He helped invent a hollow skeletal structure for taxidermied specimens. In 1909, he was the right-hand man of President Theodore Roosevelt for an African safari to bag interesting animals and game. He was world right-hand man of President Theodore Roosevelt for an African safari to bag interesting animals and game.

He was world famous before he invented gun concrete. I mean, I can kind of get it though, because if you're inventing different kinds of taxidermy forms, because taxidermy forms are often sort of a foam, not like a soft foam, but a hard kind of like foam thing. I once, there was this some taxidermy parts, maybe mountain lion form or something that was just like hanging out in the basement and I got to check it out. And it's just, it is made out of some kind of like weird sort of hard foam like thing, I think, because otherwise it would just get to be too heavy. They are, my friend used to have a deer head like that. And yeah, it was like very weighty

because it's really rigid. And so yeah, that's the Vandigram overlap. And that's also part of why he just sold his patent because he didn't want to switch industries or jobs or whatever. He was like, I'm busy being the most famous taxidermist. I don't need to run this. I've taxidermied the most famous elephant in the world. Now I want to figure out how we can live inside of it. And yeah, and Ickley was also just big into technology. He also helped develop better motion picture cameras. He also helped other people promote zoological parks.

He was interested in every way we can document animals besides mounting them. He's a really wide ranging guy. Something in that formaldehyde, right? Because I don't know. That seems like a lot of stuff to do and work on because for me, it's like, man, if I text the most famous elephant, I'd just retire after that and take lots of naps. So it sounds like though. Inside the elephant, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And he, right, he invents this in the 1910s, gunite, a sprayable concrete that will just set. And as soon as the 1920s, architects are saying, can we just make instant sprayed homes now? Can we just spray a house into existence? And you basically can, but consumers didn't want it. That's the only limit is the housing market and people not wanting to buy it and live in it. It otherwise works. So when you say spraying a house, what would that actually entail? Because clearly you can't just like shake a little bottle and spray it a house magically

appears. I wish that would be awesome. It's a few steps and one of them is really weird and complicated, but the leader in this was an architect named Wallace Neff, who had already made his name building regular mansions in Los Angeles for celebrities. He built mansions for Groucho Marx, Judy Garland, Douglas Fairbanks, all the big stars. And then one day in the mid 1930s, Neff was shaving his face. His description of his moment of inspiration is, quote, a soap bubble appeared and it held firm against my finger and it came to me, billed with air, end quote. And he developed a process that he called the Airform House, which got nicknamed

bubble houses or dome houses. Cool. That's awesome. This guy's just like shaving and then he's like, ooh, look at the bubbles. I have an idea for creating houses out of bubbles. Yeah. And the whole process, first you lay down a circular concrete foundation in the normal foundation way. And then the other tricky piece of tech is they developed a dome-shaped balloon. All right. And so you inflate a giant dome-shaped balloon and then you just spray gunite all over the

surface of it to get a solid dome. And then deflate the balloon, take it out, build the next house. It's like paper mache. We've all done this as kids, right? Like doing paper mache bowls or spheres or something or planets, right? Like I think I made a solar system once and I did like paper mache planets, but you inflate a balloon and then you put the paper mache over it. Then you pop the balloon and pull it out of a little hole and then you paint Jupiter or whatever and then you get a B plus.

Yeah. And it's almost that easy in a home construction sense. Apparently, that's braying plus adding plumbing, heating, electrical, the basic systems. A crew could build an entire house in less than 48 hours. Like house immediately. I'm looking at this dome house. It looks like something from a Star Wars. It's very Tatooine. Yeah. The thing is about the suburbs is the way that we built houses is very inefficient,

right? Like very space inefficient. Everyone's got a house and like a yard, a front yard, a backyard. It's not very space efficient. And yet the houses still follow like the square designs of houses that typically were more efficient, like townhouses, apartment buildings, right? Like tenement buildings where it's like, yeah, the square design makes sense if you wanna like build up or make it more space efficient. Like if we don't care about space and suburbs, which we probably should, why not a wacky shape, right?

Cause it's not like you have to like build on top of it. This is not something where we're trying to cram more, like do more space efficiency. Like just have a bunch of domes, right? Cause like, why not? Exactly. Screw it. And it like works.

They were completely functional houses. And then these got built all over the world, Virginia, Arizona. They got built as dorms at Loyola Marymount University in California. Whoa, cool. And the Caribbean, Brazil, Senegal, a lot of the rest of the world, somewhere they built an air-formed house and people simply didn't like it. I see. Too hard to hang posters. Truly like furniture meant to stand against the wall didn't like it. I see. Too hard to hang posters.

Truly like furniture meant to stand against the wall didn't fit because it was for a flat vertical wall. And some people complained it had less natural light than what they're used to. And a lot of Americans just nicknamed them igloos or perceived them as weird and made fun of them. And so purely for subjective reasons, people went away from it. But this sprayable construction movement led to stuff like popcorn ceilings that we still use today. It's like from the family tree of can we use spray gun technology for every part of building an infrastructure? Yeah. It's the classic Batman move of just having a spray for everything, like an anti-gravity

spray and anti-joker spray, anti-bullet spray. Wow. Yeah. Shark repellent and popcorn ceilings. Same family. Yeah. Yeah? If you sprayed popcorn ceiling at a shark, I'm sure that would also repel them.

Would not like that. Right, because they love popcorn, but it's not delicious. So they'll be so mad. They'll go away. Man, imagine being a shark and getting all those like little popcorn kernels stuck between your teeth. Just pop out a tooth and put a new one in because it's so annoying.

Now I'm just thinking about sharks eating, but folks, that's a huge takeaway and tons of numbers and trends. We'll take a quick break, then return with takeaways about the popcorn ceiling you might be under right now. Ooh, ominous. And it's fine, mostly. It's mostly fine.

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We've got a mega takeaway and too many takeaways inside it. That's the rest of the show. Wow, it's like a Russian nesting doll, like a matryoshki. Let's frame all this with mega takeaway number two. ["Jingle Bells"] There are no objective downsides to popcorn ceilings except possibly asbestos. Except possibly asbestos is like the best, that's the best like disclaimer, right? Like totally safe to eat except possibly contains asbestos, right?

Yeah, and I feel like the complaints I've heard tangentially about this are all like style stuff. And that's all completely fine if not advantageous. Like there's good things about it. But you do need to test it for asbestos. And if it doesn't have it, you're good. We talked earlier about how like, obviously if you're planning on doing construction, you have to test it because if you disturb it, then you kick up all these, what are they, micro silica

in the air and then that can get in your lungs and that can irritate your lungs or at the very worst cause cancer. Exactly. Yeah. It's asbestos is a mineral, it turns out, and the little fibers of that can interrupt the regular cell growth of your lungs if you breathe them in. Yes. And also it's easy to make them without asbestos in them.

Right. We can still keep doing this. And key sources here are The Washington Post, a piece by John Kelly, National Geographic, a piece by Kate Etherton, and then a lot of blogs from apartmenttherapy.com, especially by Shagun Karr and Jessica Isaac. Because again, asbestos is carcinogenic, as people say, and in the US, the Clean Air Act of 1978 banned asbestos in buildings in general, and other countries vary on how much or little they regulate it. Stupid nanny state telling me how much asbestos I can put in my lungs and everyone else's lungs. Yeah.

And the unfortunate timing thing with popcorn ceilings is we got excited about them and built 40 million homes in between developing popcorn ceilings and banning asbestos from them. So a lot of structures got built with a popcorn ceiling with asbestos. The good news is 1978 is approaching 50 years ago, a lot of structures have had their asbestos removed,

including any asbestos ceiling. There's been a lot of effort since then. Right. So that's good. Right. So if you have a building built after, what year did you mention? 1978.

It's probably OK? It is. And then the wrinkle there is mini takeaway number three. One mine in Montana accidentally contaminated a lot of the world's vermiculite with asbestos. Whoa! Why? So? Why? Just a mistake.

Asbestos, you've done it again. You've snuck your way in there. That's wild. So they weren't even trying, because asbestos was used for insulation, for construction materials on purpose before we knew it shreds your lungs DNA, your cellular DNA in your lungs. But then they just accidentally like, oh right, we mixed up the bag called harmless vermic... What is it? Vermiculite?

Vermiculite, yeah. And then very dangerous asbestos. Because especially before we were sure about asbestos being carcinogenic, and we talk about the timeline of that in the CIF episode about it, but a lot of people said, hey, if you do an asbestos popcorn ceiling, it's all the popcorn ceiling benefits and more fireproof and more insulated and all the other asbestos benefits, right? Like you can't beat it. Yeah, that's why it's called the asbestos. And since then, we've found we can do all the popcorn ceiling benefits just as easily with other

stuff, especially this mineral called vermiculite, which is easy to find in deposits and cheap. And you just dig it up, bake it, and then you can put it in stuff. Right. And as far as we know, it does not cause lung cancer. Yeah. As far as we know, vermiculite is harmless. And it's also-

That's good, because I ate a lot of it when I was a kid. I love that stuff. So crunchy. And then it's a famous additive in potting soil because it helps potting soil retain water. And then there's another material called perlite that helps aerate it. So usually those two things are the little pebbly looking things you see in potting soils, vermiculite and perlite. And so it turns out, and this reminds me of the baking soda episode where we found out

most of its mined in Wyoming in one spot, the main mine for the world's vermiculite was in the town of Libby, Montana, in Western Montana, near Idaho and Alberta, the traditional land of the Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Tenoxa peoples. National Geographic says that in the 1980s, about 80% of the world supply of vermiculite came from the one mine in Libby. But then around 1990, we found out that the Libby deposit of vermiculite was just contaminated with some asbestos from an asbestos deposit. Totally honest mistake, it seems like. It's just a bummer. Right. So asbestos in its natural form is also dangerous, right? It's not that... Because once it was sort of a powder that it becomes dangerous because that's when it's

small enough to be inhaled. Yeah. The thing is, it's just a mineral in the ground in several different types. And then by digging it up and breaking it into a bunch of tiny pieces, then we start causing risk to ourselves. And we dig up and break up vermiculite when we use it. And so just... Okay. So the same process, right, will also... Yeah.

I see. And so somebody ran a test that I guess hadn't been run before and found, hey, this vermiculite has a little asbestos in it. Whoops. There's also been occasional other times when other vermiculite mines, they found this and they say it's in relatively trace levels. So especially gardeners, it won't really matter. But the larger amount of vermiculite in a popcorn ceiling, you know, if it's a ceiling

from after 1980, it's probably not got asbestos. But this contamination issue is the one reason it still might. I wonder if I ever ate any asbestos as a kid. Yeah, we're still here. So I'm still here and I'm healthy, I think, maybe, possibly. Starting to be less confident about that actually. And yeah, and like we said, in a ceiling, the main risk is when you disturb it.

Legally, officially, it's a risk, even if it's just in the ceiling. And the way to find out is testing. You test, you find out, and it doesn't take particularly special skills to remove it. You just need protective gear and a relatively normal set of tools that you could DIY. There's contractors who'd probably do it better. That'd probably be something. I would not DIY it myself, but to each their own, I guess.

So that's really where the bad news about popcorn ceilings ends. It's just that one substance that we all know is carcinogenic. Just that little asbestos detail. The rest of the news is neutral or good. I feel like the biggest thing is that I really don't feel like these are objectively ugly. Yeah, it's fine. It's also worth remembering that basically every trend in home design and decor comes and goes.

That's right. And the biggest example of that is carpeting. You know, I now have hardwood floors after having carpet for a long time, and I now understand like those both the pros and the cons of carpet, right? Like carpet does provide a lot of sound insulation. So that's nice, right? It, it quiets footsteps. Comfy. Yeah, it's comfy. Like in the winter, when you wake up and you put your feet on a cold floor, it's much less comfortable than like carpet. And you can vacuum it a lot easier. Vacuuming hardwood is difficult. It doesn't vacuum very well.

Sometimes you just push stuff around when you use a vacuum. The downside of carpet is like, yeah, it stains more easily. You can't sweep it, right? And it's harder to like, say, get pet hair out of it. Stuff can get stuck and tangled in the fibers. And some people don't like the look of it, right? Especially the, like, I think also that there's a huge difference between nice carpet and like the default cheapo apartment carpet that everyone, like that brown sort of shag carpeting

that like everyone has had to deal with in apartments where it's like super cheap. Like you will just, you will gently walk on it. And then there's like suddenly like black footprints on it because somehow it absorbs every single piece of dirt. So yeah, I mean, you know, it's, I think it's all cool though. Yeah. And I'm, I think I'm less picky about home decor than most people, at least from what the internet

has told me. And so some people are very strict about popcorn ceilings or carpet or some other trend thing, and other people are good with it. And if you are good with your elements of your home, that's great. Nobody can tell you it's bad. That's right. If they try, just spray them with your gunite nozzle. You just try the shark repellent. Like, I don't know, maybe it's not just for sharks. I'm Batman, I'm busy. Anti-nosey neighbor spray.

Right, it is a picture of them on the tube. They're like, oh yeah, wow, okay. Right, with a big red X over them. Oh yeah, wow, okay. Right. With a big red X over them. Well, and other good news is these ceilings are very removable because again, it's only like a paint layer deep. It's basically like repainting.

They also do hide other imperfections in the ceiling, also help disguise like a dip in the shape of it or distract the eye from other parts of a room. There's also a only somewhat true claim about popcorn ceilings that they're relatively prone to mold. But it turns out they're not that risky for it. It's basically as risky as any surface that's not flat. The one way they could mold more is that there's just little crevices that water could be in. It's just moisture. That's the thing that will cause mold. It's not great. Exactly. And so popcorn ceilings are not on the list really. It's just a criticism of

them that's very minor. And also there's a somewhat positive myth about them, which is that they're hugely soundproofing. It's really just a very, very minor change to your wall in terms of sound. Seems like it would be less soundproofing and more just like helping to disperse echo a little bit or disperse sound a little bit. Yeah. So that's like a modestly good thing that you can still be glad about. But also it's yet another element of this that's just relatively neutral. Like it's really not objectively that good or bad. It's just a way we do ceilings sometimes.

With all this, that leads us to a very last mini takeaway number four. If people never built another popcorn ceiling, they would probably use similar moves to improve the look and feel of ceilings. It turns out builders are often moving beyond popcorn ceilings because of the negative reputation, but then they're just doing a variation on the exact same thing. Yeah, I've seen sort of stippled ceilings where they do like the paint or the stucco like in a sort of scalloped pattern or something. Have you seen that? You know what I'm talking about? Kind of like a cake frosting almost. I personally don't love it, but...

I've seen it. Yeah, it might be similar or the same as the big variation I found. They call it knockdown texture. I'm linking the website of Bob Bela, but also you can just google the phrase knockdown texture. I'm linking the website of Bob Vila, but also you can just Google the phrase and act on texture. It is a little bit more of a rugged look, sort of like the stucco of traditional Spanish materials. It's the same goal. The goal is let's use paint plus some solid stuff to make this surface more textured and make issues less noticeable and do it quickly and without spending much money. People have replaced super specifically popcorn ceiling with another way to do the same thing. And we'll probably just keep doing that because there will always be utility and a relatively

nice looking ceiling for not a lot of money or time. I see like a, there's like a chart here. There's from Home Guide. It says there's popcorn, there's orange peel, there's sand, knockdown, lace, and Venetian plaster. Yeah. So if the internet told you popcorn ceilings are some kind of mess, that's just sort of a specific dig at one way of doing this and it'll keep happening all these ways for a

long time. And did big popcorn pay you to say that, Alex? I'm very in the pocket of big popcorn and for no money. I pay for popcorn. It's great. They throw it on the ground like you're a chicken. The last time I guessed it on the Daily Zeit zeitgeist They were doing like the funny holidays of the day and it was national popcorn day And I like interrupted miles with how excited I was I was like yes Like I was I was a very rude guest because I was that excited about popcorn did they provide you with any popcorn? No, I made it myself immediately after taping in my really pop to stovetop popper. It's great

No, I made it myself immediately after taping in my Whirly Pop. It's a stovetop popper. It's great. Aw, that's cute. The Whirly Pop, like, is that like, that's the one where it's like the metal thing and then you like... You turn it, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's so cute.

That's cool. They're fantastic. I'm an air popper, not a stove popper. I like that we've both beaten big microwave. Take that. Big microwave. Make your own popcorn. Take that. Big microwave. Take that. Yeah.

Sometimes I just like use a hairdryer on a single kernel if I just want a little snack. And then point the dryer up, pompadour immediately. One whoosh. Just. Right. Popcorn, pompadour, popcorn, pompadour. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, popcorn ceilings come from a broad 1900s movement towards sprayable construction materials, partly sparked by a taxidermist. Mega takeaway number two, there are no objective downsides to popcorn ceilings, except possibly asbestos. Mini takeaway number three, one mine in Montana accidentally contaminated the world's popcorn ceilings and potting soil with asbestos. And mini takeaway number four, if we never build another popcorn ceiling, we'll probably use similar tricks to improve the look and feel of ceilings in general. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support

this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Cave Popcorn. That's right, Cave Popcorn. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 17 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fund bonus shows. It's special audio.

It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfund.org. Key sources this week include resources on architectural history from the Los Angeles Conservancy, UC Berkeley, and Indiana Landmarks. Also museum resources from the Field Museum and Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. And tons of journalism from the New York Times, National Geographic, NPR, and more.

That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord,

where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 143 that's about the topic of crows. Fun fact, crows might have invented the hook as a basic tool before humans did. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin's weekly podcast Creature Feature about

animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshaven by the BUDOS Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating

So how about that? Talk to you then Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.