Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Telephone Poles

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why telephone poles 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/

Real quick before we start, we're doing a live episode in London at the London Podcast Festival. There is a link in this episode's description to get tickets. Please join me and Katie in London. We're going to be there. We're meeting in the middle of our places. It's great. Telephone poles, known for being tall, famous for being wood pole. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why telephone polls 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's Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie! What is your relationship to or opinion of telephone poles?

Love to climb them. Love to nibble on them. Okay. When you said climbing, I was like, I'm very impressed by your strength. When you said nibble, I was like, hold on. No, no, no. I don't climb nor nibble on them. And I suggest nobody do that neither.

Wait, did I double negative that our way into a lawsuit? Anyways. I'll say it's not safe. We're safe. Great. It's not safe. Don't climb or nibble on them. As a bird expert, because I know a great deal about birds. One time I did a, I was promoting my other podcast, Creature Feature. Wow. Look what I just did. I just name dropped it, but I was promoting it on the radio. And for some reason, people kept asking me like when I was doing this sort of radio, like quick radio interviews, Oh, why do, why do birds always sit on telephone poles? And I was like, why are, why is everyone asking this? Did they all get some copy to ask me about telephone poles and birds? And the answer is just like, because they can,

because they can sit there. There's not really any like special answer. It's not like, oh, they can hear our voices through the wires and they are intercepting our messages as spies for Soviet Russia. No, it's just that they sit on them because they're there and they offer some visibility. And that's really all there is to it.

I also like, I don't know, telephone poles are both very interesting to me as someone who has driven up and down Southern California. You see all these telephone poles and especially the ones that have the big. Now, actually, I'm trying to think whether these are telephone poles or energy poles. That's not it. Electricity wire. That's not it either. Power lines.

That's it. That's the one. Or power lines where they have the big, like, colorful balls. Always been fascinated by those when I would go on road trips as a kid. That's a very good distinction to bring up because we're mainly talking about the wooden pole that most people would use the name telephone pole for, at least in the U.S. But also those can carry electricity and we'll later use the term utility pole. OK. For the poles doing phones, power, Internet and more.

So that's kind of a topic, too. But not not really like the huge metal power ones, like mostly the little wooden ones is what we're talking about. The little wooden ones. Right. Now, that makes sense. I'm trying to remember those. You know what I'm talking about, right? Those big colorful balls that they put.

And I wanted to play with them when I was a kid. So I would climb up one of those and give it a nibble. Before we started taping, I sent Katie pictures of bears climbing and nibbling telephone poles. So I think that's on the minds. It's very striking to see. I'm in bear mode right now. I'm bear coded, bear pilled, bear moded. I'm excited to talk about all that because this was suggested by Aloysius Jr. on the Discord and previously other funding systems do. They've done a very

long and fun push for this perfect topic for the show. These polls are just around and we don't really think about them. And it turns out there's a lot there. Yeah, it is really interesting because they are just so ubiquitous that you're like, yeah, it's kind of becomes trees in terms of settling into the background of our visual landscape. Yeah, especially because they used to be trees. The irony. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics.

And this week, that's in a segment called, I gonna sing you the stat song cause you stats for it cause you numbered Sifpod. That it was submitted by Sigmund Fraud on the discord. We have a new name every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through discord or to Sifpod at gmail.com. See, we've got some Jungian fans on the Discord. Yeah, if you want to do a name like Jung in the trunk or something, I don't know what it would be. You can have a better one. Yeah.

Well, Jung. Oh, yeah, that's a better one. Great. A little bit blue, but I'm into it. Hey, you know what? So was most of those psychologists, so it's fine. Yeah. The first number this week is an earlier year than folks might expect.

It's the year 1794. And 1794 is the first year anyone used towers to send a telegraph message. Oh, right. And so telegraphs were those clicky things. So you would have a little clicky thing on one end and you'd click it in Morse code, right? And then on the other end, they would receive the little clickies and there was a code called Morse code. And then they'd translate it into words. Yeah, and we'll talk about that, but it turns out that was the second version of a telegraph. What? It was a whole first version of the telegraph that was not electrical or on wires.

It was a series of what we would today call like semaphore towers. Oh, okay. Or visual telegraph towers. So like with flags? Yeah. With like a wooden set of arms, basically on top of a like lighthouse looking tower. Wooden arms. What am I trying to visualize here? Like actual human arms or like two sticks? Like, yeah, like sort of a T and then two little arms on the ends of the T. And you can semaphore style signal letters. I see.

And then someone in a next tower sees that with their eyeballs with a telescope and then does the arms to the next tower. Imagine if that's what they did in that scene in Lord of the Rings, where they're like lighting the fires. Yeah, the beacons. But it's just like some cute little semaphore. When I told a few friends that I was moving to Beacon, New York, they sent me the light the beacons thing from Lord of the Rings. Oh, yeah, light the beacons.

Yeah. Now all of China knows that you're here. Okay, that was a different one. That's the other good one. Yeah, Bulan. And it's kind of that principle, but it was really revolutionary to the point that it coined the word telegraph. And this was French people. There was an engineer named Claude Schopp. And Claude Schopp thought of this series of towers that do semaphore shapes on the top. on the top. And he used the word telegraph, which means far writing in French and pretty much in Latin, to name this thing. And people only came up with an electric telegraph later.

And so did he sell this idea and open Claude Schaap's Rod Shop? If only he was very patriotic, I guess, because he demonstrated this to the new French Republican government in 1793, like kind of as the French Revolution is happening. And he demonstrated it as military technology. I see. Which side was he on? The Republican side. OK. And those were like the pro-democracy ones. Yeah, this was an idea for, hey, let's use this for military technology, especially because all of Europe's monarchies basically invaded the new French Republic immediately. And so the government loved the idea. They set up the towers and it was first used in 1794 to say that the Austrians captured a messenger on a horse and hope he doesn't get blown up yeah those were the two ways and the birds or people would get like captured or shot all the time you know or or like a spy is the

person and then they give it to the wrong side so this was much better. Hard to capture a pole. Hard to accuse a pole of spying. Yeah. And then it was just a much more complex message than a fire on a tower, like a beacon. Right. You could send actual letters, actual words. They could specifically say the Austrians took this fort and this is what you should do. This was the dominant form of a telegraph in Europe for about 50 years. Oh, wow.

That has some longevity for something that I've actually never heard of or seen depicted. Yeah, and not everybody did it. The French were really the main ones. That's why. Because the Republican government, which almost immediately became a Napoleon dictatorship, was constantly at war, they built a bunch of military semaphore towers. I see. I see. I guess the weakness of that is that if anyone has binoculars, they can just read your messages. Yeah, that's true. Right. Yeah. If they

learn the semaphore version of Morse code and look at it, yeah, they can take it too. Right. the semaphore version of Morse code and look at it, yeah, they can take it too. Right. And so, yeah, this was useful and also hackable. And either way, it goes away because of the electric telegraph. And the key number there is 1844. Because 1844 is when Samuel Morse sends a telegraph message from DC to Baltimore. Samuel Morse's rod shop. So I would assume, does he invent the actual telegram technology or just the code for which one uses it?

Kind of both, because he is the creator of Morse code. And then several other people have an earlier claim on some very small electric telegraph, especially in the UK. They built a lot of that along rail lines. The UK was a big trains leader. But Morse was an innovator in that tech and also the first person to set up a system for a long telegraph message, which he sent between DC and Baltimore. You know, it's funny. I did like a little project in middle school where my dad helped me build like a little tiny telegraph thing. And then I did a map of like the different telegraph lines that happened. And yeah, it was interesting. Like it seemed to catch on really quickly.

And yeah, it was interesting. It seemed to catch on really quickly. Extremely quickly, yeah. And the key thing with that is takeaway number one. One telegraph construction problem steered us toward filling the world with telephone poles. Because Morse essentially invented the wooden telephone pole that we think of. But he did that by accident because of a problem with this DC to Baltimore telegraph line. Right. Because like what they try to bury it first and then it just could they could not get through rock or something. Yeah, they tried to bury it first. Look at you being a Samuel Morse. Hey, this was his process. Right. First the dots, then the dashes, then you get out your shovels. He came up with the code years before trying to build this line. And for that and other reasons,

Congress gave Morse a giant budget to build this telegraph line. They were like, this is economic and military and everything, infrastructure. Let's try it. Let's fund it. But he tried to do it underground first and it didn't work. There were problems with the wires and some even kind of hard to determine issue. It was either the digging or the wires or something. It just kept breaking. I see. So the messages would not get through and it was also just like physically difficult to make these trenches or whatever they were using.

Yeah, because the 1840s, you have a lot less machinery and worse tools. And so it really is like guys with shovels for the 38 miles between D.C. and Baltimore. Yeah. Which is not that easy. Like you can do it. Yeah. I would imagine like the first time they hit a rock, they were like, well, okay, back it in boys.

We forgot about rocks. We forgot about rocks, fellas. I've been above ground for too long. I forgot. There's worms. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

Also, I guess I just don't know enough about the wire technology to know like, so even Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Right. Like there's like and you can have like fiber optic cables that can like run under the dang ocean. So like you are it is burying stuff is not a bad idea. It can work, but it sounds like they just encountered some like resistance. No, no pun intended. Pun kind of intended. Oh, my God. I can't believe you did a pun about electricity resistance. Yeah. Mine was worse. Yeah.

Yeah. It's awkward. It hangs in the air like a stink cloud. One key source this week is an amazing write-up of the history and present of all this by April Mulqueen, who's an official with the Policy and Planning Division of the California Public Utilities Commission. And she says that Morse's projects felt like they were under a lot of pressure because they had congressional national money and they needed to do it in the budget and the time that was allotted. And quote, one of Morse's partners suggested that

the quickest way to complete the project would be to string telegraph wires overhead on trees and wooden poles. The wooden utility pole was born, albeit as a mistake, end quote. Like this was an emergency chuck it together,back idea. Right. To put it on big wooden poles above stuff. Yeah, I can see that. Because they're not the most like aesthetically compelling thing, right? Like if you bury stuff, you don't have to see it. Whereas with the poles, it's just like, well, it's kind of like when you've got your, when you look at like weird wiring and sort of a crappy apartment and you just have wires going along the walls. You're like, where is this one going?

And you follow it and it literally leads to nowhere. That's how it feels. Yeah. And some poles are that way. They're like kind of abandoned and nobody followed through on taking it down or something like that's the thing for sure. Yeah. But before then, we didn't have anywhere to put our cat missing posters on. So it did really help find some cats. That's the story of every feral cat. They're descended from a pre-telephone poll cat.

They got lost. And linking that California Public Utilities Commission piece, they have an illustration of one of Morse's poles. It just looks like a little wooden telephone pole. That was basically the entire idea. They have not made it nicer looking since then. And it's also very functional. It's a big vertical piece of wood and then a little horizontal piece of wood with the wires on it. a little horizontal piece of wood with the wires on it. I mean, it's kind of interesting because it looks visually looks kind of similar to the semaphore pole that was used earlier, which now that I'm actually looking at the diagram

of the semaphore pole, it's really funny because it looks like a little guy dancing. Yes, it does. Like the different the different arm positions because it's like there's a joint. So it looks kind of like a little wacky inflatable arm guy made out of wood uh and then yeah the other one is just kind of that yeah it really hasn't changed much it's just that t-shape yeah which somebody working with samuel morse thought of as a emergency chuck it together just get the gig done idea yeah like look Like, look, we know this, we know this looks like, but, and no one will want to use it. So like, we just do this as a temporary measure and then they'll figure out something

better later. But this is America. Like that's the first telegraph message. We know this looks like, but, but this is America. Yeah. And yeah, like you said, this spread incredibly rapidly. The next number is 12,000 miles, which is over 19,000 kilometers. That's how many miles of telegraph lines on poles that the United States built in seven years after Morse's first message. That is. We just immediately kept doing that system all over. That is industrious. I mean, to be fair to the telephone pole, they probably would only, they would have only been able to do that with that pole. Trying to dig all that stuff

seems a lot harder. Right. And yeah, it's partly a timeline thing, but as we'll talk about later, it functionally makes sense to this day. Right. For costs and for the kind of renewable resource of trees. And it makes some sense to this day to build it that way. Samuel Morse is famous to this day, and not just for the code. It was global news that this telegraph message happened. The whole country and world copied how he did it, even though it was the backup that this telegraph message happens. The whole country and world copied how he did it, even though it was the backup plan. Right.

Like he did that first message in 1844. Wait, what was his first message? Like, what was the content of it? He said, what hath God wrought? Oh, what? Which I think it was a very planned, like what would be the coolest thing I could say. That's like, I am become death after, like, what's with all these guys who like invent a thing and they're like, oh God, oh God, what have I done? And that's like their famous quote about the thing they invent. Like, why don't you invent like a puppy petter or something where then you're like, like, I think God would be proud of me for this one.

Yeah. I almost want to link our past episode about the novel Frankenstein because like everybody, all these dudes read it and said it would be kind of cool to be Victor Frankenstein. That would be sick. Yeah. I want to make a Frankenstein's monster. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then say, behold, the might of my, it's not a quote from the book, but you know, something, some cool line to say when the Frankenstein wakes up instead of just screaming and running, you know. I have done something terrible. The scientific equivalent of a fart in the elevator. The monster's like, what's farting? I'm new. Right. I don't know. It's just a little baby.

And then one second later, oh, yeah, there we go. Nurture, not nature. Where were we? So his first message was, what hath God wrought? Because he's a little emo. And he starts a live journal immediately after creating the telegraph. And then it spreads like wildfire all over the world. Yeah, like I'll also link the old episode about undersea cables because cable technology developed kind of separate.

Like this episode is more about poles than cables. Weirdly, you could do whole separate things. And if you're looking for cables, get out, leave. The US and the British Empire had an undersea telegraph cable between them as early as 1858. Whoa, how'd they get down there? Like in one of those old timey scuba suits and some shovels? Just like dropping it from boats, basically. Like they didn't go, you

know? Okay. Thought maybe they sent a little guy down there. That would be cool, yeah. But they did that first. And then a couple of years later, 1861, was a transcontinental telegraph system. There's a telegraph line on so many poles between the east and west coasts of the contiguous, so many polls between the east and west coasts of the contiguous, eventually 48 U.S. states. The biggest sign of that change is before that line in 1860, Abraham Lincoln is elected president, partly with votes from the states of California and Oregon. And those states don't learn about it for eight days. Pony Express riders and parts of a telegraph system, it takes eight days to tell them. Right. Like they got to get actual physical guys running over with the news.

And then they finally reach the post office or whatever, the communication hub. And they're kind of like, eh, it's got to take five. Right. Yeah. It's almost the origin story of the marathon from ancient Greece. Like somebody running all that distance to tell about a battle. It's like Paul Revere. Like imagine if Paul Revere didn't have to like ride on his horse and wake everyone up in the middle of the night and could just like text the British or come in.

Sad emoji. and sad emoji. So 1860, it takes eight days to tell California that their electoral votes elected Lincoln president. Five years later, Lincoln is assassinated and they get the news immediately by telegraph. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's it is we take it so much for granted now that news can be pretty immediate. Everyone around the world can learn about news relatively simultaneously. And that's just completely new and weird in terms of human history. Truly. And like reach different parts of the world at different times. The U.S. and the British Empire were kind of the first places and then other places built it after. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. I mean, I wonder if it changed the cultural impact of Lincoln's death.

If everyone's learning about it pretty much at the same time, like it makes it much more of a thing that everyone is experiencing simultaneously, like the JFK assassination or 9-11 or something where it's like everyone's like, yeah, like it happened at this same moment for all of us. Wow. Yeah, that I wouldn't say I wish it, but it does make me wonder if a president had been assassinated before mass communication. Yeah. How it would feel, how it would have been told. There probably would have been weird rumors because of the message getting garbled on the way, you know? Yeah. Like some people just not really believing it and taking a while to even confirm it. Right.

And if like one guy mentions it to you at the general store because somebody gave somebody a letter, you're like, okay, sure, pal. I'm just going to take the sacks of stuff I bought and go home. Right, exactly. This seems wrong. There's a lot of misinterpretations, the game of telephone that can happen, ironically, which is a game played without telephones. Yeah, and we've talked a lot about telegraphs because that is the origin of specifically telephone poles. like to enter Graham Bell, 1876, developed in smaller scales by a few people prior to that, including an Italian inventor in 1849 named Antonio Meucci. He's maybe the first maker of any kind of telephone. But when people want to set up telephone systems, they just copy

the existing telegraph poles and build new ones, or they string it onto the same poles. Yeah. And that's a lot of the first telephone pole systems. Yeah. You know, what's weird is there aren't really that many telephone poles where I live right now, like in the city center, at least. Like outside of the city center, there might be, there are for sure some, but like inside the dense city center, no, I don't. I don't see any telephone poles.

Yeah. And that's that's actually a good transition into our next takeaway. Number two. Telephone poles carry much more than phone calls, and they do it in a dangerous way with a lot of advantages. Huh. That's exciting. Because a lot of older and dense city centers specifically steered away from these, mainly because a lot of early telegraph and telephone poles also got way overloaded with electricity poles, and then people died.

Yeah. But in a lot of other places to this day, there's above ground poles and for good reasons. Despite some of the dangers and issues, it still makes a lot of sense. So I'm in Turin in Italy and it is a relatively old city. We do have wiring for the trams, actually, like overhead wiring for the trams. And those are usually strung from building to building. I don't see so many telephone poles in the city. That's more of a thing where you get outside of the city center and then you start seeing telephone poles. Yeah. And that's a great example. Since especially the early 1900s in the US and other areas and other places,

those wires often kind of got centralized on these existing poles and then set up separately after that. Like the tram poles are their own thing and phone poles aren't even needed maybe because the phone wires are relatively light and relatively low voltage. A lot of downtown places just string them along the sides of buildings or underground. Right. Yeah, I suspect that's how it is here. A lot of experts call these poles utility poles because they've carried everything from telegraph signals to electricity to internet. The telephone poles is a name that comes from just the telephone

being a big deal. But also to this day, they carry telephone wires often. Like even if you're using a cell phone, a lot of the towers are linked by physical lines because that's just a good way to transmit stuff. So the squirrels are getting huge doses of 5Gs. Look out squirrels, look out. It's bad for some reason I don't really understand from the theorists. Yeah, I think my understanding is there's both like, at least specifically in terms of like, because there's like some kind of electrical offshooting about that in terms of like bird migration and stuff and how it affects that. So there are like actual seeing possibly bad effects of these things, but I don't think it's

because of the 5Gs putting messages in your head. Yeah. And that fits in with the wide range of reasons that it could make sense to move all of this stuff underground and just stop having the polls. But for another whole set of reasons, we're not going that way. And they're not all bad. Some of them make actual sense and are good. One of the biggest reasons we have a lot of telephone poles is we just started doing it that way from Morse, and it kept being the cheap, simple next step of maintaining this stuff. One source here is Professor Ken Baker of Heidelberg University, who says that a modern pole lasts about 70 years, mainly because of the chemical treatment done to it. mainly because of the chemical treatment done to it. And so, you know, in some places you're even seeing the second or third generation of pole after they replaced it after many years because they last a long time and then it keeps making sense. Yeah, I mean, that's good.

Like, you don't want to have to having infrastructure that you don't have to replace constantly is a objectively good thing. constantly is a objectively good thing. Yeah. And it's led to the United States having estimates vary between 130 and 150 million poles for utilities, phone, everything. So that's more than one per three American people. Does it, like when you put wires underground, do they undergo degradation faster than say wires on poles? Because like say you have a pole that lasts a really long time. At the end of its lifespan, is it better to transfer it to like a new thing like underground or is that less sustainable than like doing a new pole? That's the central question of all of these systems. And the way cities and places answer is usually it's cheaper right now to do a pole

and underground is not necessarily more reliable. And it is also more challenging in many cases to repair an underground line. It might be more protected from stuff, but you have to do a lot of digging just to visually see it. And they can diagnose some problems looking at the system on their end, but just to see it, let alone fix it, is really challenging. And on a pole, it's just sort of up there for you to look at. You just get in a crane. Right. You see the fried squirrel there and you're like, well, that's your problem. Your delicious problem. Mmm.

Yum, yum. Yeah. Telephone maintenance line workers comes with free lunch. And yeah, and burying lines can be more expensive to build, and it's especially more expensive in rural places. According to Theodore Curry, who's director of energy studies at the University of Florida, it costs about $1 million per mile to bury a power line in the U.S. Geography and population density can triple the cost if it's very rural or cut that in half if there's a lot of people. I see. So that doesn't seem the most cost-effective thing. So you'd have to have some pretty compelling reasons to justify the cost of burying telephone wires, I would assume.

Yeah. And the reason is usually high population density, like in the middle of a city, especially because there's more buildings trying to be up in the air. Right. Are there safety benefits to burying telephone lines or power lines? Because I thought that one of the things in like, say, Southern California is that like having buried power lines or buried telephone lines could decrease the chance of, say, like sparking a fire. That's all dead on. Yeah, the biggest problem with putting them in the air is that they can fall down and cause a fire. The biggest example is the 2007 Malibu Canyon fire in California burned more than 4,000 acres because three wooden utility poles fell down.

burned more than 4,000 acres because three wooden utility poles fell down. But also, according to investigators, those poles were not built to code and to regulations. And so theoretically, we can mitigate this. And that's one of the biggest reasons we keep building poles is we think we can regulate the quality and safety and strength of them to mitigate this, even though you can't end it. the quality and safety and strength of them to mitigate this, even though you can't end it. It does seem though that like you could have a system where you select particularly tinderbox zones where you choose to bury the line for a while and then go back to the poles once you are sort of out of that danger zone. Is that possible to do? Can you like, cause surely you can have kind of a, a transition from underground line to pole without too much difficulty,

right? Yeah. It's just expensive and you have to make space for both things, I guess, which is it's like all completely doable. And we're just trying to cover so much of the earth with cords that we we end up deciding to cut costs and trouble with some poles yeah like we want the whole earth to have cords on it as people today yeah i mean cable management is hard on your desk alone let alone uh the whole

world uh yeah but it is interesting because like there like there is so like in a lot of developing countries where you'll have slums, sometimes there will be like an effort to like, hey, we're going to improve a lot of wires and cables and stuff. But then there's just no, because it's also like, well, it's slum, so we don't really have any good existing infrastructure and we don't want to spend that much money. It's just, you'll see these bundles of cables just hanging everywhere like vines and it's incredibly dangerous. Yeah, especially for the electricity lines. And that's happened all over the world and history. And there was a peak in the U.S. in the early 1900s, late 1800s, when we had built poles initially maybe just for telegraphs and then for telephone lines. And then started heaping much, much heavier electricity lines on them. Especially that California Public Utilities Commission piece

has pictures of extremely dense one pole with dozens and dozens of crisscrossing wires. Yeah, I'm looking at this. You could fit a lot of birds on here. I'm not sure that's a good thing, though. Like a bird city. It'd be amazing. Yeah, this is like a bird skyscraper that can kill you. Yeah, and they also have a picture of like a roadside utility lines where snow fell.

And then the whole thing is just heaving to the ground because it was not built to do this. And people said that one pole can do all of our wires forever. No. And so there was a transition period where we had to kind of get it together. It's kind of pretty, actually, if you ignore, you know, the danger. Like this snow, it's like all these snow covered lines. It's like, ooh, pretty. And then, you know, disaster. Yeah. And apparently certain places in the U.S., in particular Manhattan,

moved to completely underground systems because rather than waiting for regulation and good poll management to catch up, they just stopped because it was killing so many people. The New York Times, they interviewed Joseph J. Cunningham, who is a historian of New York electrical power and electrification. And he says in 1888, there was such a bad blizzard in Manhattan that Thomas Edison, the person, not the company, he personally encouraged New York City's government to ban above ground lines for everything because these electrical lines with as much as 2000 volts of electricity would fall onto wet puddles or snow drifts. And then that would conduct through it and kill everyone around it when it fell. Yeah, that's that's pretty terrifying, actually.

I mean, like especially for like imagine like you have this relatively new mass technology, right? And then it can also just fall down and create deadly lightning water. Yes, yeah. On the flip side, there's a weird thing where above ground lines are kind of better for managing the heat of stuff like power lines. Because if it's up in the air, those lines are hot for electricity and it just dissipates. But if it's under the ground, you have to set up a lot of shielding or some way of releasing the heat that's very expensive and complicated and can break easily. So a lot of below ground lines are less protected from the elements and danger and can break easily. So a lot of below ground lines are less

protected from the elements and danger and breaking than you would think. It's actually about as safe to put it above the ground where it could fall on us. I see. I see. Yeah. We've solved it by just regulating the size and strength and spacing of poles and sometimes putting stuff up below ground. And apparently as of 2012, about 25% of new U.S. utility lines get buried, which is a lot, but the rest are going up on poles. This is not going away. And we've loved using telephone poles for other stuff until somebody tells us not to.

And it's been a consistent hub to put stuff on as we cable manage all of modern life. Yeah. No, it's interesting because it is kind of a visual representation of this new kind of connectivity, right? It is very, it makes it very, rather than like with satellites, you can kind of imagine it this like we have this sort of shell of all these satellites going around and and relaying messages. But with telephone wires and power cables, it does actually make that intuitive sense of like, oh, yeah, look like we are, you know, creating almost like this we are creating almost like a spider web of communication. Yeah. I'm going to link that Undersea Cables episode because on that one, we talk about

how much easier it is to just send information through wires. We can send it through the air, but we can send so much more through physical stuff. And so these polls remain extraordinarily important for all communication, for you hearing this podcast. It's very useful. I wonder if that would ever change, right? If you would ever get to a point where it is more efficient to send information just through the air, or if it's always going to be that like a physical cable. Because as the through the air technology improves, so would cable technology presumably so i wonder if there's like a plateau i'm gonna i'm gonna go on joe rogan and pretend i

know about it and like you just know what's gonna happen yeah that's his show yeah and then talk about how and this is why you gotta eat my supplements because it'll protect you from the 6Gs, which they're coming out with soon. Anyway, Joe is doing what he does. He is. That's a true fact. Never was there a more truer fact. He's doing what he is. Folks, that's a ton of numbers and two takeaways. We're going to take a quick break, then return with lots more numbers and takeaway about the biology and artistry of telephone poles. Folks, support for today's show comes from Solar Slice. Isn't that nice, Katie? Solar Slice.

Is that some kind of like pizza that comes from the sun? I want that product now. And also Solar Slice is related to solar energy. Because a lot of folks feel helpless about climate change and 75% of harmful emissions come from energy sources. So Solar Slice is a way that you can put your money into something better for the world. It's not an investment. You don't own a piece of a solar farm. You are purchasing what they call a slice of a solar farm. And so with a very reasonable amount of money, you can contribute to that kind of energy

and that kind of power. That is really cool. It is like a pizza, but each slice represents you creating a better future with renewables. Yeah. Yeah. Like, cause, cause I can't buy an entire solar power plant, but I can chip in. And I think this is a cool way to do that. Yeah. I, if I had solar plant money, I would be flaunting that I'd be, I'd be flaunting my solar plants. I'd be like, look, this is my summer solar plant. This is my solar plant that I winter at. Right. A black one for night driving, a white one for day driving. I'm thinking of car stuff.

Yeah. It'd be too heavy, I think, to drive. But yeah, this is really amazing because I like our planet. I like animals and I like my fellow humans. So I think that I have a lot of climate anxiety and I love projects like this because it is a thing where it's like, yeah, I could actually, you know, help out. Yeah. And you get to see it working because they have an app that shows you how much energy your slice is producing and you get points to plant trees or buy more slices or support other green initiatives. So if you're ready to take action, visit solarslice.com and buy a slice on Kickstarter today. Together, we can build a cleaner, greener world one slice at a time. That's solarslice.com. Don't just offset your carbon footprint.

Build a brighter future. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers Ghostbusters and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife I think I'm going to roam

in a few places, yes I'm going to manifest and roam All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage

years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Folks, we are back and with takeaway number three. Telephone pole design is a combination of biology and some very rare choices toward artistry. Huh.

More numbers to start. The next one is the year 1928. The year he sailed the ocean, Blate. Great. The great ocean. Great. The year he sailed the ocean, great. I hate mnemonic devices.

They're useless. Yeah, it's very unhelpful. It's 1928, just short of 100 years ago. That's when AT&T, and their name stands for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. What? It turns out. I have been a customer for a long time, never checked. But anyway, they...

Did not care. But they set up a testing facility in 1928 that became colloquially known as a telephone pole farm. Huh. But it was not a farm for generating a maximum amount of telephone poles. It was for experimenting on what kind of trees make the best ones. Oh, OK. Oh, that's interesting. So like, yeah, I guess I was going to ask, like, how you how you make a telephone pole?

You just get like a tall tree, shave off all the branches and hey, presto, telephone pole. Yeah, there's like two more steps, but that's it. Oh, yeah. And then you got to give it a little kiss and say, go get them, champ. Yeah, that's correct. Good. You're a dead tree now, but you still are doing stuff. Okay, mister. They all sound like that when they talk. And yeah, this

farm is in Chester Township, New Jersey. AT&T's goal was to figure out what trees make the best telephone poles by beating them up for decades and seeing what happens. Because it's just out in the elements all the time. Right. So they would hire some goons to beat up the telephone poles and see which ones like lasted better? Yeah, in the sense of like woodpeckers and gophers and stuff. Oh, okay. Like they actively brought animals to them to see what happened. Those do make pretty good goons. I don't know if you've ever hired a woodpecker goon,

but they are pretty intimidating. Yeah, that's how I run my crime syndicate on the streets of Beacon, New York. Woodpeckers. Muscular-headed woodpeckers. Yeah, they've all got like, they're really like broad-shouldered and they have the little, they walk in that cartoon way where they're sort of strutting and they've got the like little sweater on and that little newsboy cap tilted over one eye. and that little newsboy cap tilted over one eye. Yeah, and they try to do goon speak, like, listen, see,

but their mouth is banging into my victims, so it's hard to speak. In Morse code, they're doing goon speak in Morse code. Listen, stop, see, stop, meh, stop. Yeah, so AT&T 1928 plants hundreds of different trees in very neat rows. And then once they've grown enough, they chop them down to short kind of half-sized poles at the width of a standard telephone pole. And then they let the weather and a bunch of active damage that they did to them happen to them to see what trees survived at the best to become telephone poles. Right. Just like signs that says woodpecker buffet. Yeah. And they started it in 1928. By the 1980s, they abandoned it because they figured they had their answers. They figured out what they wanted to know. Which is the best tree? It turns out the main one is the yellow pine, specifically species from the southeast of what's now the U.S. Okay. And we also use a lot of Douglas firs.

We use a lot of Western red cedar. I see. Interesting. So all of those are quite resistant to weather and woodpecker attacks. Yeah. And they're also not necessarily the most invincible tree in the world, but they grow tall, fast in a relatively cheap, easy way. And that's what we use. Yeah. Okay. All right. And so then you mentioned there's a couple of extra steps after you sort of tear off all the

branches and make it into that nice long cylinder. What else do you do to treat it? Exactly. Yeah. They call it debarking and then they shape it into poles. Then they drill holes to match the specs for the lines that will go on it. And then second to last step is seasoning it with either air or heat drying in giant cylinder shaped chambers that they like pile a pole into. That sounds delicious. Yeah. It sounds like a barbecue sm a pole into. That sounds delicious. Yeah, it sounds like a barbecue smoker or something. It sounds great. Yeah.

That must really bring in the woodpeckers. No, woodpeckers don't eat the wood, but the beavers. We talk about seasoning big pieces of timber. And kind of because of that, then the last step is infusing it with chemical preservatives to increase its lifespan. According to Ken Baker, that changes the lifespan from around five years to 70. Oh, wow. It's a very significant change. And it's because the stuff is either a little or a lot poisonous, usually. It's not good for you. are a lot poisonous usually. It's not good for you. So like when a beetle gets in there, thinks like, I've got free cambium lunch, and it tries to eat some of this tree, it just dies.

Yeah. And I'm linking to, it's a publication called Chemical and Engineering News. They talk about how for many decades, we've basically used the chemical, decided it's carcinogenic, stopped using it for telephone pole making. And the good news is most people aren't licking these things. Right. I'm not worried at all. Why aren't you, I was going to say, showing me your tongue? I don't know what the hiding would be in this circumstance. There's just a bunch of splinters in it. But key chemicals with that are something called creosote. Also, one we've recently

discontinued is pentachlorophenol. We're starting to turn to one called copper naphthenate. But there's basically an endless process of finding a balance of dangerousness and preservative ability for the chemicals that we put into the wood. Right. Because I imagine even though you're not licking it, it rains and there might be some like leaching of that into like the groundwater or something. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, there's a lot of reasons we want it to be less dangerous. But, you know, for all the renewable and easy reasons of using trees to make these, we also want to turn the tree into a completely invincible substance, even though so much of nature wants to eat a tree. I mean, like that's kind of the point, like that in nature, like a tree is going to get broken down and that's generally a good thing. So you don't have a bunch of trees just lying around. Yeah. And apparently the two animals that at least in California attack these the most are woodpeckers and bears. Yeah. And woodpeckers, you really can't blame them, in my opinion. It's exactly what they want. Woodpeckers are not eating the wood.

They are not after the wood itself. They are generally trying to find bugs inside of the tree. Yeah. Or to use it as a nesting area. And it's just set up perfectly for them to do that. And so the California Public Utility Commission says that it's very difficult to deter woodpeckers. They suggest you can cover the pole with wire mesh, but then that's a whole other cost and process that not everybody wants to do. And so woodpeckers really go in on these.

And so woodpeckers really go in on these. And then this California commission also has amazing pictures of bears, like climbing the poles, rubbing against them. One of their photos is an adult bear on the top of a telephone pole, which they claim it's foraging for nuts like a tree. They claim it's hard for bears to tell these apart from trees in some cases. I mean, because they are trees. So come on, like the bear is not wrong. This is a tree. It used to be a tree. Oh, they're so cute. I was in the sequoias recently for my brother's wedding and I saw my first, yeah, they're big trees. And I saw my first baby bear and it was a black bear and its mom. We all kept a respectful distance. So there was no danger there. They were going at these trees and like, it was so cute to see because the mother bear would be ripping up the bark. So it'd be, it was a fallen tree, a dead tree.

up the bark and then licking all the bugs. Like there's like ants and termites and all sorts of like yummy goodies. And the little baby bear would like look at its mom and then like copy her and like really making a good effort at it. It was so cute. I think I saw a video once of a bear on a telephone pole and they like tranquilized it and then held a like, what is it like a trampoline under it? And then like they tranquilize the bear and then the bear fell down and then they like caught it in that not like a trampoline but you know what i mean like a fire what are those called where it's like the fire trampolines where they hold it under you the one from cartoons but real life the one from cartoons yeah to catch it and they like catch it uh and i think that was i mean a lot of that is for the bear's safety right because it's up there

near this high voltage to and so they like it with a tranquilizer and it was like, whoa, whoa. And then they catch it. It's really funny. But I think the bear was okay. I think they put it back in, you know, in bear town. bear town. Yeah, there is a secret process of utility and phone companies helping bears that decide telephone poles are trees. And the wildest California picture of that is a photo of a baby bear cub that is all the way up a pole and about to bite an electric power line, like a nibble on it like a little kid. I know. It looks like candy. It's not. Don't do it. It's so cute.

Baby bears are so cute. And I know you can't cuddle them. I get it. Also, tell me that this one is okay, right? I'm very grateful they captioned it. They said that a crew turned off the electricity in time and then like a game commissioner helped the baby get down and go back with its mother. Like it was all okay. Oh, good. Oh, good. But that's just like going on in the world. There are people whose job is,

there's another bear I need to help. To save bears from these delicious telephone poles. Yeah. You cannot blame the bears for this, especially when we put very handy, like, I love how he's like, you know how they have the little, it's not quite a ladder, but it's those little metal protrusions that helps the line workers get up there. The bear's just like using those because we put them there and he's like sitting on one of them to like chew at this clearly very dangerous high voltage wire. chew at this clearly very dangerous high voltage wire. Exactly. Yeah. Like to explain to a bear why it shouldn't climb it, you have to teach it the concept of electricity.

Right. Like beyond lightning bolts, you know, and that's challenging. Like I don't really blame them for getting up there. It looks awesome. And it's like looking at the whiteboard, looking at its pot of honey, sticking its face in the pot of honey. Right. Yeah. I. Yeah.

I don't. It would be like an alien race creating something that looked exactly like a hamburger. And then you go to try to eat it and the aliens are like, no, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. That's like, that's super dangerous. That will like rearrange your organs. Right. Well, which is kind of like a normal hamburger,

but you get the point. Yeah, and biology and regional geography and stuff plays a ton into these poles. Like part of Morse running with wooden poles is that the Eastern US had a lot of forests. And like other than the plains, most of the 48 states has forests and we just kind of brought trees to those areas to fill in the system.

But there are other places in the world where they didn't run with wood because they lack timber and have different pests. And the most famous example is South Australia, the state of South Australia. It's a specific place. They have special telephone poles called Stobie poles. Oh. According to Australia's ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, colonizers in that region

struggled to build American-style telephone poles because they had very little timber and they had an insect species called the white ant that devours wood. And an electrical engineer named James Cyril Stobie solved that. He invented a utility pole made of joined steel I-beams that has become a regional icon of the state of South Australia, Stobie poles. There's even ones with his portrait painted on them in his honor. Oh, good for him.

Yeah. But like, do they have like koalas trying to climb them and chew on stuff? Man, I really hope so. That's such a tree bear. Oh man. Like I saw one walking on the ground once and it was freaky. Like they belong in trees. They really do.

They're very like their bodies are Their bodies are made for spooning a tree. But yeah, the Stobie poles are weirdly specific to just South Australia. People in the nearby state of New South Wales opted not to build them because they thought the metal would rust, which is not really a big issue with them. There's just weird decision-making about what's the most basic and straightforward way to do this all over the world. Interesting. It's actually relatively rare that anybody has the artistic impulse to do something different. That's the other big reason telephone poles all look like that, is people said,

yeah, it's a telephone pole. That's what it looks like. Right. But there's two examples here of somebody wanting to do something different. And one example is a particle accelerator station and research facility called Fermilab in Illinois. All right. And it comes up on the podcast may series I made about the bison emoji. My dad worked there at one point. The founding director of it got in a fight with Commonwealth Edison and forced them to let him build and design his own utility poles because he just wanted to. He was like, I'm doing all this stuff at this facility.

His name's Robert R. Wilson. So he designed metal utility poles in the shape of pi, the Greek letter pi. Oh, that is such a nerd thing to do. Yeah. For nerd stuff. And he said he did it because they'd outlast standard poles and because he finds standard poles ugly and wanted to do something different. Okay, I just looked it up. So it's like an arc at the top.

Yeah, it's not quite exactly a pie shape, but it's two metal vertical poles and then a like kind of pretty arc between them. And then all the lines run on it. So it's like this. It's sort of similar to the symbol for pie. And then in his point, like it looks interesting. Yeah, it's cool. And then it's like his claim is that it's more it is more sturdy than like a typical telephone pole. Yeah.

And they have lasted, but also so do the regular ones. And they basically got built that way because one guy building an entire complex and compound said, I'm also going to be custom about the poles. Right. And the vast majority of the earth does not do that. They just set up telephone poles. Yeah. That's interesting. I kind of like telephone poles. Yeah. That's interesting. I kind of like bespoke telephone poles.

That's fun. And the other fun example is a very similar thing, Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. It has a lot of regular utility poles and telephone poles, but it has one Mickey Mouse-shaped pylon. I see. In Celebration, Florida. It's what you think. It's the Mickey Mouse shape, the ears I see. In Celebration, Florida. And it's what you think. It's the Mickey Mouse shape, the ears and the head. Yeah.

It's like three circles, you know, that form the Mickey Mouse shape where it's the big one and then the two little ones is the ears. But they're like, they're just metal circles. So they're hoops. So then the wires kind of attached at certain points. Yeah. And they've also added fiber optic lights on it. So it lights up at night.

You see a glowing Mickey head in the sky. Just as a reminder, who's in charge here? Right. And it pretty much has to be a Robert R. Wilson or a Walt Disney setting up their own special compound for the world to have any different style of telephone pole. Otherwise, we do the wooden thing that Samuel Morse threw together. And that's kind of amazing on its own. You'd think there'd be a lot more design variation than just Stobie poles and a few other ideas. Yeah, that seems like something that Musk would do, like put some Musk poles up.

Oh. Yeah, I know, right? that musk would do like put some musk poles up which yeah i know right like but they're gonna be really over designed and actually have and actually have a musk like a smell yeah that would actually be cool if you put up stink poles that have odors that you can scratch and sniff that would be what would happen if dogs was in charge. Instead of telephone poles, they'd have stink poles. That's why I'm voting for Cookie for mayor and president and United Nations general secretary, everything.

I think she'd do a good job. Four more years. Scratch her ears. Four more years. Scratch her ears. Four more years scratch her ears four more years scratch her ears four more years hey 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, a telegraph line construction problem steered us toward filling the world with telephone poles. Takeaway number two, telephone poles carry much more than phone calls, and they do it in a dangerous way with a lot of advantages. Takeaway number two, telephone poles carry much more than phone calls, and they do it in a dangerous way with a lot of advantages. Takeaway number three, telephone pole design is a combination of biology, regional geography, and artistry. And then so many numbers and stats this week about everything from how long telephone poles last, to how many telephone poles there are all over the U.S. and world, to the surprisingly non-electrical origins of the telegraph. Those are the takeaways, and I said that's the main episode because there's 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 show is the multifaceted cultural role of telephone poles in Tokyo, Japan. Tokyo. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost 17 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max that bonus show. For a library of almost 17 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun 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 MaximumFun.org. Key sources

this week include a piece for TheConversation.com by Professor Theodore Curry, Director of Energy Studies at the University of Florida. Further expertise from Professor Ken Baker of Heidelberg University. Digital resources about telecom history from Elon University in Elon, North Carolina. Also amazing pieces for Popular Science, the New York Times, and other trusted journalistic publications. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hokang, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the

Mohican people, Skadagoke 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 SIF Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the 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 16.

That's about the topic of The Great Gatsby, the novel The Great Gatsby. Fun fact, that novel owes a lot of its popularity and significance to soldiers in World War II getting handed copies of it because nobody really cared about that text. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals and 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.