Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Smoke Signals

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

Were smoke signals real or a Hollywood invention? Turns out, they were indeed a thing and invented by the Chinese, even.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to the short stuff. Everybody pipe down, we've got to get started. There's Chuck, I'm Josh Cherry, et cetera.

Let's go, let's go. Stop laughing. Boy, that's never gonna get old, is it? No, not to me. Probably to other people, but not me. We're gonna start getting emails where people are like, I like short stuff, but I always feel so anxious. Right, yeah.

Well, join the club, pal. So I wrote this article on smoke signals many, many, many years ago. I know, it's a good one. You think? Sure, all right. It's a, I mean, it's a fairly short topic. Like even when you go research elsewhere

outside of your brilliant article, there's not that much more to it, you know? It's like pretty straightforward stuff. But I think the thing, the first thing to kind of cover with smoke signals is that they actually were real. It's not something that like Hollywood invented from like cowboy and Indian movies or something like that. Yeah, which that seems like it could have been the case.

The one thing that got me in reviewing this again, and then originally when I was doing it years ago as an article was just like how brilliant this is. It really is. It is. I also check that one thing that struck me when researching it is just how stressful it would be. Because if you screw it up,

it's not like there's a signal for wait, let me start over. Well, maybe there was. I hope there was for people like me, for neurotic Native Americans. Yeah, I guess so. All right, so we're talking about smoke signals, which like you said, they were real, and they are still real.

It's not like, you know, they're still smoke, and they're still wet blankets. Right, exactly. But Native Americans, and not just Native Americans as we learn here in a second, but Chinese soldiers along the Great Wall of China, you know, they couldn't communicate long distances. But if you have a big fire with white smoke,

you can see that for, you know, a thousand miles. Maybe, let's just say a million miles, Chuck. Yeah, a million miles, and they were so smart, they figured out, hey, this is a great way to send a kind of rudimentary message over a long distance. Yeah, and that's a really important point too, is you're not sending like, hey, how's it going?

What's up with Alexander? How's his foot doing right now? I'll wait for your reply. Alexander the Apache? Yeah, exactly. Or the Chinese soldier, one of the two. Sure, yeah. This is just strictly like, everything's okay,

or I am here, or please, please God, send help, something really horrible is going down. Like really broad stroke communications that you would need to send over long distances. Yeah, but it could be, I mean, depending on the tribe, and what they arranged, because kind of the beauty of smoke signal says, it's just puffs of smoke, so you can have it mean whatever you want to mean,

as long as you all talk about it beforehand. Get everyone on the same page, although they didn't have pages. They had smoke. So that you couldn't use that term back then. No, get on the same puff. Yeah, get everyone on the same puff. I'm gonna start using that.

As long as you had everyone together, you could send more complex messages. It's not just like, hey, someone's invading, it could be like, hey, we're really sick over here, and could use some help. Right, right. We're hungry or whatever. Yeah, and because everyone could see it,

you had to kind of have like a previously agreed upon meaning to each of the messages between you and who you're sending it to, so that you, it was encoded in a way, I guess you could say. Yeah, and as far as China on the Great Wall of China, that's kind of a perfect scenario, best case scenario for sending a smoke signal, because it's sort of wide open,

and you can see it for many, many miles, and they had watchtowers, so you could convey from, you could string along from one watchtower to the next, and all of a sudden you're sending messages over a few hours, three, 400 miles. Yeah, I saw that the earliest accounts of smoke signals being used is with the Chinese along the Great Wall of China.

What I think is interesting about the whole idea of smoke signals is that it's just such a great idea that it evolved independently in different parts of the world. I could see that, yeah. Like with Native Americans, as far as we know, they never had any contact with the Chinese, the book 1421, not withstanding,

but the Native Americans in the Southwest and in the Plains were using smoke signals at the same time that the Chinese were half a world away, just because it's just such a basically good idea, but they were using virtually the same... Technology? Yeah, and technique too, you know?

Yeah, depending on, we're gonna talk about the best stuff to burn, but in China they burned apparently Salt Peter, Sulphur, and Wolf Dung to create really dense smoke, and I can't imagine what that must have smelled like. I'll bet it smelled a lot like poop and salt Peter. And sulfur. And wood, yeah.

Sulphur, dude, that's the icing on the cake. Is that the kicker? Yeah. Just throwing a little eggy smell on top. Exactly. It's like, did you? No, it's the fire. That guy's always saying it's the fire. It's totally not the fire.

He's always blaming it on his dog or the fire. Oh, Alexander. Well, should we take a break and then talk about how to do this? I guess so. All right, let's do it. [♪ Music playing Oh, Alexander. Well, should we take a break and then talk about how to do this?

I guess so. All right. Let's do it. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

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Okay, Chuck, we're back. And before we, we really get to the nuts and bolts of all this, I want to say I also saw a lot of, um, mention of how tribes in North America used mirrors to signal. Oh, and I was like, did they have mirrors? Yeah. That was my thought. It was Micah. Sure.

But they, they used those over long distances as well. And body positions too. Like you could see how somebody was like standing or sitting or crouching. And that, um, indicated something to other, other people in their tribe who were say like also going through the woods with them, that they had seen something or who they had seen or that there was a bear or whatever, um, which is pretty ingenious. Yeah. I wonder if they got the respect from, uh, and by the way, I'm going to stop using the

word settlers. Did you see that email? Mm-hmm. Did, I don't recall us using the word settlers. Did we? Well, I mean, I've said the word settlers a lot over the years, I'm sure. Um, yeah. But I mean, have we said it recently?

I don't know. But it was just a very nice email. One of those that was like, oh, you know, I never really thought about it. It was already settled. They weren't settlers. Right. They were, you know, conquerors, invaders, invaders, interlopers. Yeah.

So I just wondered if the invaders from Europe, uh, if they saw these things, I know that they were always like, you know, these rudimentary savages. I wonder if they ever saw the genius in some of these things. Hopefully. You know? I mean, surely. Yeah. I'm sure that there were people who adopted smoke signals after they learned how to do

it, like white Europeans who figured it out from, from watching or maybe even from being taught. They're like smoke signals. We use pigeons. Right. Far more advanced. Get with the times. All right.

So this is still relevant today. The Boy Scouts of America still teach us smoke signaling and it sounds silly to think about, but if you are ever in the woods and you are, uh, hurt or injured or lost and alone or, you know, can't get help. Loanly. Yeah. Just lonely. Need a friend.

This is still a way that you can send a message, uh, and wilderness people understand if they see three like clear wilderness people. If they see three distinct puffs of smoke, then that's a signal that says, hey, somebody needs help. Get me out of here. Pretty much. Yeah. That's, that's the, that's a universal one.

You can also do that with your, um, gun. If you're lost in the woods, you can shoot three times in the air. It's the same thing. Car horn. Car horn. Yep. The one thing you don't want to use like that old joke is, um, you don't want to shoot your bow and arrow three times in the air.

It doesn't really do anything. When I'm sitting at a traffic light behind someone on their cell phone and it turns green, I go honk, honk, honk. And they always go, what do you need? What do you need? All right. Are you lost in the woods? That's how that goes down.

Yeah. So, um, to do this, first you have to start with a fire, obviously, but you have to start with a pretty good fire. You have to let your fire get going to start sending smoke signals because you're going to do your best to smother that fire from time to time repeatedly. So you want to get a really good raging fire going that won't easily go out, right? That's step one. Yeah.

And part of the, uh, being able to see if you want that good, thick, dense, white smoke, uh, if you've ever been camping, you know, if you throw greenery on a fire or something that's even a little bit wet, it's going to turn really, really white and thick. And that is sort of the, after you get your fire going really good, that's when you put on, um, the more green, uh, timber and leaves and stuff like that. Or if you're glamping, you have someone do that for you. So that's another reason you want a really good fire going, because you don't want it to be so weak that the grass or the green, um, sticks or whatever, you know, put the

fire out. So you're creating this nice, white, dense smoke and you get the thing going pretty well. Maybe you've got somebody's attention. They're like, you don't see that kind of smoke every day. What's going on over there? You want it. You want to have a blanket with you. And actually it's vital that you do have some sort of blanket or some sleeping roll or something

like that, um, that you can wet. That's another thing too. Cause I was thinking like in the American Southwest, like that was, you know, kind of an investment of your water to wet a whole blanket enough to send a smoke signal. But you want to take a wet blanket and you throw it over your fire and hold it there until there's no smoke coming out. Right. We mean Alexander who was a total wet blanket.

We mean a real wet blanket. Right. Like the literal wet blanket as the hipsters would say. Yeah. So, I mean, I imagine you could do it with something dry as long as it's, you're sending like one quick signal, um, but obviously something dry, you run the risk of catching it on fire. So if you have no access to any water, you could probably still get by, but you definitely

want a wet something. It's going to make it a stressful form of communication, even more stressful. Right. Um, you hold it on there long enough for smoke to cease, uh, and then you pull the, the blanket off or I guess you kind of flap it off as probably the better way to do it. And while you had that wet blanket over the fire, smoke was still building up. So when you pull the blanket off, a big puff of smoke comes up and there's your first signal. And if you, if you just stop right there, what you've just told the world is, Hey, how's

it going? I'm here. Well, it could, these that I researched were specifically Apache, um, and a single plume basically is yeah, sort of an attention getter, um, maybe something's going on, but like you don't need to send in reinforcements or anything, but maybe just keep an eye on the sky as things play out. It could also mean something like I've arrived, like somebody's watching for your signal and you're saying like I made it across the valley or over the mountain or across the desert,

whatever. So this basically a generic signal, just saying this person is still alive. Right. Um, if you are really good, you can do two in a row. And that's saying what, Chuck, if you're an Apache. Well, uh, if you're an Apache that meant everything's fine, um, you may have seen my one puff signal that meant to, you know, we're not so sure about things, but now my two puff signal means everything's good.

We've established our camp. We're all safe. Um, you just stay where you are unless you hear something else or see something else rather. Uh, and this was important because they would, you know, they would travel around that, you know, they had some more permanent encampments, but they also went where the food was depending on the season and where you could hunt better and get, you know, more resources. Right.

Exactly. And yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. I confused the Boy Scout technique with the Apache technique. What was theirs? The Boy Scouts one puff is just here I am. Whereas with the Apache, it was like, uh, something weird was going on. Stay tuned.

Yeah. Exactly. And then like you said already, three puffs in any language, a Boy Scout or Apache means there's something bad going on. Yeah. Like come and help us. We need, you know, whether or not we have all been, uh, befallen with an illness or there's an invader or we have no food, uh, we definitely need some help.

And I saw also, I mean, almost across the board, it was just puffs basically was, was the way that, um, smoke signals are communicated, but I did see reference to one tribe from Texas called the Karakawa, I believe, and they could get super fancy. They could do spirals and zigzags and stuff like that, which is pretty, pretty impressive. I'd be stressed out with just the puff system, let alone having to make a spiral or a zigzag. It would be kind of cool to know how to do that though. And then of course the Snoop Dogg tribe, uh, use the puff, puff pass. Right.

Exactly. That meant come on over. Exactly. The door's open. Yeah. Well, that's it for this episode of short stuff on smoke signals. Hope you enjoyed it. Until next time, so long.

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