Stuff You Should Know - When inventions kill!

Episode Date: October 11, 2018

Few things are more ironic than an invention killing its creator. The stories behind real life cases of death-by-invention are pretty interesting too. Pull up a chair and hear about a few from Josh and Chuck.  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, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

I don't know what edition this is. It should be pretty interesting and entertaining. How about that? This is the interrupting Chuck from watching the Cavanaugh hearing edition. Yeah, really, man. Talk about historic, huh? Oh, I was glued to it, and then like,

oh, I gotta go do my job. Sorry, for some reason I feel guilty, like I'm responsible for that. No, no, it's not your fault. Thanks for letting me off the hook. We gotta make the donuts. Man, don't get me started. I'm recording it, so I'll just go back right after this.

Oh, okay, cool. Well, we'll talk really fast. I'll go back to Seething Rage right after this. You'll just be like, you'll be like, no one tell me what happens. Oh, goodness. All right, let's do it. Death by Invention.

Yeah, I guess this would be the horribly ironic twist edition of Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, and we are talking of people who died by their own hand, in a way, as in, and it's really sad. I mean, all these people are pursuing their passions for the most part, and to die because you are a creative, inventive, passionate person,

except maybe in the case of Lee C. It's really sad. It is, I think to die in any way at any time for any reason is unnatural. It's just wrong, you know? Yeah, they listed out a couple before the official list of five. Yeah, there's like a whole, very long list of them.

Yeah. I mean, we could do the same show, like, every once a quarter, maybe? Maybe we will, Chuck. Five more people? Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how this one goes, how about that? Did you want to touch on a couple

of those other people, though? Yeah, I mean, Henry Wynne Stanley is definitely a kind of a famous one. He built a very famous lighthouse, Eddystone Lighthouse, back in 1698. Yeah. I think that was the first iteration of it. I think there's been four total,

and we talked about it on the lighthouse episode. Yeah, I think this was the first one on rock. Right, and it's just like out there on some rocks in the ocean, or in the channel, one of the two, or the sea, it's out in the water. Yeah, a candlelight, old school candlelit lighthouse. Very romantic lighthouse. Very romantic, invented by, like you said,

Mr. Henry Wynne Stanley, great name. And speaking of great, five years later, there was a great storm. Yeah. And this lighthouse, actually, that he built, collapsed on him and killed him while he was trying to shore it up. Yeah, he and five other people,

and they were never found. That's just sad. I guess the swee, the swee? The swee swept him, as the swee does. Swee swells, swee swells, by the swee swore. Yeah, it's really, it's such a tragedy. What about Marie Curie, who died at 66, from radiation poisoning,

which technically, she didn't invent radium and polonium. She discovered them. But, I mean, her work, she won Nobel Prizes for it. Yeah, like the dangers of working with, I mean, always dangerous, but especially back then. And then in 1945, again, physicist Harry Daglian. I'm gonna say Dalian. Dalian, I like Daglian.

Okay. Dalian. That's what I'm going with, but hey, man, it's up for grabs. So silent G, silent H. Yeah, kind of. I mean, there's a little bit of a guttural in there. Why do you hate letters?

Those are superfluous letters right there. So Harry Dalian was another scientist, who he was working on the Manhattan Project, on the demon core, the core of the plutonium bomb. And he died by his own hand as well. He was stacking carbide bricks, tungsten carbide, around the core, and dropped one, which I can imagine, like,

what a frightening moment that would be. Yeah, even more so, Chuck, he had a monitor. He was trying to see how many tungsten bricks it took to make the plutonium go critical, which is like, once it goes critical, you got a nuclear explosion on your hands. So he's just sitting there, messing around with this. And he's got a monitor showing him, and the monitor said,

hey man, that last brick will make this go critical. It was a monitor from the 70s, so it said things like, hey man. And so he knew, like, I gotta get that brick away, and he went to go pull it back away from the stack, but in going to pull it away, he accidentally knocked it onto the core. So he had to go into the stack after it,

to get it away from the core, to make sure that the thing didn't blow up. And he did, but he supposedly suffered tremendously from radiation poisoning. Yeah, I mean, he died within a month. So that's pretty tragic. And it sounds like he was a hero, because if that thing would have exploded,

many, many, many lives lost. Yeah, he's definitely honored as a hero. He also was not one to follow the rules, apparently, because he was in there, the lab, by himself, which was against protocol. I think he went back to work after dinner, and was sitting there working on a nuclear pile, by himself, that he was trying to see

where the threshold was for getting it critical. Geez. That's a little crazy. So these examples to serve as a setup, though, to the official five. And we're gonna start with Lee C, L-I-S-I. I got no love for Lee C. No.

No, this is not one of the ones where just a great creative following their passion. I don't know, maybe he was passionate about harming others and taking advantage of people and core intrigue, for sure. Yeah, that's a good point. But we're going back to ancient China here, roughly 221 BCE, is that what we're saying, though? Yeah.

And China, at this time, was making the conversion from just a big mess of warring states into what would be eventually be the end of the war. Probably be the Qing dynasty, is that right? Qin. Qin? We've been corrected by that officially, too, in the emails.

I looked it up, I was like, I'm not falling for this again. Here, I did it. I think it was you last time. It definitely was. So, yeah, the Qin dynasty finally being ruled by one dynasty, so it was a big change for China. It was, but the way that they assembled

all of these kind of like fractious states into a single empire was through this practice called legalism, which is a political doctrine that basically said, it basically assumes the worst about people, that they're selfish and dumb, and that the best way to make a state out of your citizens is by exploiting them and lying to them and passing a law for everything

and then brutally enforcing it. Yeah, and kind of the government just fully ruling with an iron fist, it's citizens. It's like proto-fascism, like the point of your citizenry is not to serve them, it's for your citizenry to kind of give all their power and work and attention to the state, to the emperor. Yeah, so there's this sort of an outlier

as far as where this guy started out. Lisi, he became very, very prominent with the Qin dynasty, but he was not born into it. He was a commoner and he was a clerk at a local government office, and he really worked his way up through the system, pretty impressively. Yeah, all the way up to prime minister.

So local government clerk to prime minister, and I mean, this guy makes like Machiavelli and the Medici's look like cream puffs. Whoa, you calling the Medici's cream puffs? Yeah, I am, compared to Lisi, yes, and not just Lisi. So like the emperor of the Qin dynasty, the founder of basically China was an emperor named Shi Wangdi.

I'm pretty sure that's how you say it. I'm almost equally sure that I've gotten it wrong, but he was the king of Qin, the first emperor of Qin, and he was pretty brutal, but he found good company with Lisi and his brutality in the way that he saw citizens and people, and then also the king's eunuch, who was basically tied for second place with Lisi.

He was the king's official spokesman, his name was Zhao Chao, and the three of them together just ruled quite brutally. It was, you bribe people, and if they didn't take bribes, you killed them. You tricked neighboring states into accepting your rule. Book burning was huge, and this is what Lisi is most commonly remembered for,

is instituting a policy of burning most books, especially history books, in an effort to kind of form a single way of thinking for all Chinese to fall in line with. And the way that you start that is to get rid of everything that's been written that doesn't fall into that line of thinking. So he instituted an empire-wide book burning drive.

Yeah, I think the only thing that he said it was okay, or books on medicine, books on growing things, and agriculture, and then divination, which I think, I can't believe we haven't done a podcast on that at this point. Is that water-witching? Yeah, I think so, right? Yeah, I think that's probably also reading frog guts,

and tea leaves, and stuff to see the future. Oh, well, that part totally makes sense. Right, because you gotta know how it's gonna come. And had Lisi been at all capable of divination, he would've seen that his end was coming horribly ironically, and it was going to be very painful for him. Yeah, so they, like, speaking of Machiavelli, they definitely led the path and do anything necessary

to get what you want. And he said, you know what, I'm pretty into torture as a means of getting what I want, and I've invented a pretty foolproof way to ensure that someone is dead, or gives us what we want, and imagine it up dead anyway. Yeah. And it was called The Five Pains,

and it's basically cutting things off of the body one at a time until you get to five, which is the body. You cut the nose off first, then you cut off a hand, then you cut off a foot, then you cut off the penis. Or the vagina. Sure, castration. Yeah. And finally, you just cut in half.

Your body is cut in half. They come done with you. Yeah, The Five Pains really undersells it. It really does. So. Because The Five Pains for me are traffic. Right. Traffic.

This is The Five Unbearables. Yeah, social media. Yeah, none of them involve cutting off hands and feet. A nose, man. Can you imagine losing your nose? That's first, too. Yeah. So Lisi is credited in some circles with inventing that.

Others say it's not entirely clear. But Shi Wangdi, the emperor, when he died, he died abroad suddenly. And Zhao Chao and Lisi decided to conceal it because the king had said, my eldest son is my heir. I want him to take over after I die. So Lisi and Zhao Chao got rid of that decree and forged a new decree to the oldest son

who had been exiled for opposing that book burning idea. Yeah, that was the reason it was a problem is because he was no friend of Lisi. Right, exactly. So Lisi and Zhao Chao drafted a new decree from the king and it said, son, kill yourself. And they sent it to him and the son killed himself. Yeah.

So they had, now they had consolidated their power and they named an infant son of Shi Wangdi to be the new ruler. They decided that wasn't any good. So they killed the infant and then they turned on each other and Zhao Chao got the upper hand and said, Lisi, I have some terrible news for you. You're about to face the five pains yourself.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is when you've got two psychotic creeps working together, eventually one of them is going to turn on the other. That's how it always goes. Let's hope that never happens to us because we're a pair of psychotic creeps working together. What is a king's eunuch? So the eunuch was a castrated son.

Well, I know what an eunuch is, but like, so the king's eunuch is, why did they castrate them just to render them subjugated or whatever? Or trustworthy, like now I can trust you around my wife or whatever. I'm not sure that's why people were eunuch-sized. But in this case, he was like the spokesperson for the emperor.

He was like the highest, imagine like the press secretary and the chief of staff combined. Right. That's kind of what he was. But no penis. No, right. So he, so Zhao Chao turns on Lisi

and has him executed through the five pains, his invention supposedly. How about that? Which I looked into that five pains thing. It seems to come under the tradition of ling chi, which is called slow slicing, which is as bad as it sounds. And I think it's way worse than the five pains.

It's, there can be 24 cuts or a thousand cuts, they call it. And they actually last used it in 1905. Wow. And there's a horrible picture of the man who was executed in 1905 by this, like being executed through this slow slicing method. Was he just cut all up and bloody? Yeah, it's pretty rough.

It's pretty awful to see. But they did it up until 1905. Remember the days when we would send each other those awful pictures? Yeah. I think we got to a certain point where we're like, yeah. Seen too much.

You find it on your own, more power to you. Yeah. You become a father, you know, and I'm a father in my own way. So I feel like, you know, we have to protect ourselves from that. Oh boy. All right.

Well, let's go take a break. I'm going to go watch it. It's four minutes of the Kavanaugh hearing. Okay. And we'll come right back right after this. 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 nonstop 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?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back.

Now let's talk about parachuting. Franz Reichelt. Yeah, I know a little bit about this one because I did something back when we were doing videos. I can't remember exactly what it was. But one of our half-hearted attempts at a video series. I think it was a blog post. Was it?

Yeah. Those didn't work either. It was like in that same series of the baby cage that hung out over the window. Yeah, that's right. Remember what relief it was when we were finally told, hey, guys, why don't you just podcast? Because that's a job.

That was nice. Wasn't that great? Yeah. You don't have to dance like a monkey on YouTube or blog like it's 1997. People miss that stuff, though. It's crazy. I know.

But we enjoy this. Yeah, oh, I love podcasting, Chuck. All right, so it's the late 1700s. We're in France. And there's a series of men that are intent on jumping off of things and testing out this new thing called a parachute. Yeah, and so in the 1470s, Da Vinci

is credited with designing the first parachute and just on paper. I've seen pictures. And apparently, somebody built it, and they're like, yep, it works. Of course, it's Da Vinci. But something, and I couldn't figure out what it was, but something in the 18th century and 19th century

just caused parachute fever in France. And there was, you can't really attribute it to anybody else but the French, the development or the early development of the parachute. There was just a bunch of French men working on the parachute at about the same time. And maybe it was the advent of hot air balloons, which was another huge thing in France.

Sure. And they were like, well, I'm up here, how am I going to get down there if my balloon starts to crash? So it's possible that was it. But there were a lot of French guys jumping off of buildings in the late 18th and early 19th century trying out parachutes.

Yes, I mean, over a 10 or 15-year period, there was a guy named Joseph Montgolfier. Great name. That means golf mountain. Oh, nice. I don't know if that's true. Louis-Sebastian Le Nomain. OK.

I just dropped the last couple of letters on anything French. Didn't the alley do it? Yep. And then a third guy named Borgé. He just, he's like Cher. Right. All of them were kind of making parachutes. There was another one too, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, who

actually realized that silk is pretty good for getting out of a hot air balloon as a parachute. He had to ditch once back in 1793. So there were a bunch of them. And Lenore Mond is the guy who actually coined the term parachute, which para in the Greek means against and chute in French means fall. So it's against falling the parachute is.

Yeah, in a way. So the parachute was invented by a number of people. But there was one specific parachute, kind of like a wingsuit. But it differed from a wingsuit in that it didn't work at all. Yeah. And it was invented specifically by a guy named Franz Reichelt. And I would love to hear you say his name properly. Franz Reichelt.

That's pretty good. Yeah. That's an interesting case too, because this was a full, like close to 100 years after people were successfully using parachutes. Yeah. So it wasn't like he was like, oh man, these things have not worked yet.

And I really need to figure out a better way. So I think Franz was, I don't think he had a death wish, but I think he was shooting for the stars. He was an eccentric, is what I've gathered. Yeah. He was an eccentric. He was a very talented tailor. But this article points out, I think, quite astutely.

Part of being an inventor is knowing where to draw inspiration from among other inventions and inventors. Right. And this guy apparently just went through to first principles, like Elon Musk does, where it's like, oh, I can buy batteries on the market for this. Let me instead figure out what you need to make a battery. And I'll go buy those parts and make it for way cheaper.

Franz Reichelt seemed to have the same impression about his flying suit. He just kind of made it up. Not based on anything else, he just did it himself. And he was quite proud of it. And he took it to the Aero Club of France and said, check this out. And they said, do not use that ever.

Ever. That thing is not going to do anything. And he said, oh, nuts to you. And he started doing trials from his fifth floor apartment window with a dummy. And it didn't work, but he wasn't dissuaded by any of that. Yeah, the only thing I can figure out

is that, because again, I don't think he had a death wish, I think he must have thought. The only thing I can figure is he must have thought a dummy, like it needs to be a real rigid human that can move their body. And a dummy is just not going to cut it. So I need to try this thing out, because I think it's going to work.

It was a time in 1912 when apparently you could go to the Eiffel Tower and just tell the cops, hey, I'm going to throw a dummy off of the Eiffel Tower because to try out my flying suit, and they said, go ahead. So he went up there, but I don't think he changed his mind. I think by all accounts, he intended fully to do this himself the whole time. And the suit, like you have been hinting at,

it didn't do anything. It didn't. And actually, I should have sent you this one, too. British pate, or pate. I'm not quite sure what the old newsreel service. They were there and filmed it. And there is a haunting video of him close up. Like it's not far away, but close up,

like on the ledge of the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, 190 feet, or almost 58 meters high, just waiting, waiting. And then he jumps. And he just goes straight down like a sack of potatoes and dies immediately. Yeah, 190 feet, very, very tragic. Yeah, and on the film, you see the police measuring the depth of the impression he made in the ground

when he fell, when he hit the ground. It's really sad to see. You're like, don't do it, don't do it. But you know, obviously, that he's going to do it. And he died. Well, it was a time, too, where people were trying to figure all this stuff out. So they're all kind of crazy.

I mean, I know we haven't done one on the Wright brothers yet, but you've seen all the crazy flying machines that people were trying to come up with. It was a time of the spirit of adventure was in the air. And everyone there was probably like, man, check out this guy. He's going to fly off the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, I mean, they thought that or they all had a lot of bloodlust and were coming out

to see this guy die. I don't think he had a death wish either, Chuck. And he actually applied for a permit. That's sweet. So I mean, why would you apply for a permit if you had a pretty good idea you were going to die? I think he thought very much that it was going to work and he was going to live.

And he didn't want to get in trouble, so he applied for a permit first. That's a good point. How about moving on? Yes. Number three, Max Valier. Valier. How would you say it?

Valier. Valier? I don't like extra letters. Man, I need to take French. Sure. Although this guy wasn't even French, was he? No, he was born, get this. He was born in Austria-Hungary in the town of Bozen.

But Austria-Hungary broke up. It was very sad. And that town is now known as Balzano, Italy. But the guy's last name is Valier. But was he Italian or what we would consider Italian? If he had been born after the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, he would have been Italian, but he was Austro-Hungarian.

Well, yeah, but you know what I mean. It's not like they said, all you Austro-Hungarians, get out of here. I don't know. I really don't know. I would guess because it was an empire, there was probably a lot of movement around the empire. So who knows what his ethnicity or pedigree was in his family?

Well, we know one thing for sure is that he was a smart dude. And he did not have a degree in science, but he was very good at figuring stuff out. He was, I guess, an amateur engineer would be the best thing to call him. Yeah, and a bit of a groupie. Sure. But like a groupie who put his actions where his mouth was.

Yeah, so he reads a book by a German engineer named Hermann Oberf. And it was called The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space, which is just wonderful in the early 20th century when books like this would be written. Yeah, this is, I think, credited with helping inspire the idea that we actually could do this. Yeah.

So this guy gets inspired by this book. On an amateur level, he develops a four-stage program and starts to get to work on what would be with a car company, Opel, at his side, like in partnership, on a rocket-powered car. Not a space rocket, but a car. And he built these things, and they actually worked. Yeah, and Opel was involved in this to a Red Bull degree.

They were like, look at this crazy stuff. Check this out, we're making a rocket car. But Valle was like, no, this is the future. Rockets are going to power everything. And he actually, I think some of the first tests were pretty putsy. Like one of them went 125 meters in 35 seconds. That's super fast.

I mean, like a football field in a quarter in 35 seconds is not fast, but later on, he got some of these rocket cars up to 145 miles an hour. Yeah, that's impressive. And then he got a rocket sled up to 250 miles an hour. Yeah, this was in the 1920s. Yeah, so like these rockets are working. He's making them work.

But then there was a phase three and four of his four-point plan. And it went from static engines, just the rocket engine tests themselves, to rocket cars and rocket sleds, and then to rocket-powered aircraft and then space rockets. Yeah, and to his credit, like, it's not like things were going really poorly and he was just pressing on anyway. Like he said, he got one of them up to 250 miles an hour.

So it would make sense to go to a stage three, the rocket-assisted aircraft. And then very tragically, May 17, 1930, he died working on phase three. He's working on a liquid oxygen gasoline-fueled rocket motor. This thing explodes, a piece of shrapnel severs his aorta, and he's dead immediately.

Yeah, everything I saw was that he just dropped it. So it must have been a heck of a severed aorta. I mean, right through his heart, I guess, then, huh? I guess so. Jeez, man. Yeah, an explosion that shoots a piece of shrapnel that severs your aorta, you're not going to last much very long after that.

And he was only 35 years old at the time, too. We had a pretty bright future in all of this, a self-taught rocket guy. It's pretty impressive. It is. But this article is hilarious. It talks about how his legacy continued. So he helped found an organization called,

you want to take that one? Sure, I love that I take German and you take French. And both of us should have taken Spanish. And neither one of us can do Chinese. That's right. I'm going to say, Beren, if you're Ram Shifat. Not bad, Chuck. That's what I would have said, too.

It means a society for space travel. Because, again, at the time, this is like smart people are saying, we can actually do this. Let's figure out how to do it. And some very famous people were members of this space society. And some of the members actually went on to work on the Saturn V project, including one member named

Arthur Rudolph. And the thing that cracks me up about this article is Arthur Rudolph was a Nazi war criminal. Yeah, they didn't mention it at all. Right, who was basically plucked out of Nazi Germany at the end of the war from the V2 rocket program, which just devastated Britain and other parts of Europe, and put to work on the Apollo space mission.

And then after that, they said, OK, you have to go. Now you're being accused of working people to death in your V2 factory. But he carried on Max Vallier's legacy. Yeah, in a way, I guess so. Yeah, yep. Have you seen the trailer for the Neil Armstrong movie? No, I haven't.

All I hear is Oscar buzz. It looks good. Oh, I'm sure, man. Ryan Gosling, man, he's pretty good. He's great. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. OK.

OK. On the podcast, Hey dude, the 90s-called, David L Lancer and Christine Taylor, stars of the cold 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? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen

crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, I think we're down to two. And this is weird because normally we do top tens, but we only do seven or eight of them. This is a top five. And by God, we're doing all five.

That's right. With a couple added on. Yeah, this one, William Bullock. Oh, Bill Bullock, in 1832, there was the printing and the printing press, the history of the printing press. In fact, we should do one on that, too, at some point. Really fascinating. And many, many people contributed to the printing press

gaining traction and gaining in speed and just getting more efficient and being able to pump out more and more what you would call sheets per hour, paper sheets per hour. Right. And by 1832, they're up to about 400 sheets per hour. That's good. Like, yeah, it's not bad at all.

It was a flat press. You had the type set on a flat board that came down and you'd take the paper off or flip it over and then print another one and another one. They could do like 400 sheets per hour like that. And then this guy named Richard Ho came up with, he replaced that flat thing with the type setting with a cylinder with type setting.

So it just spun. And you just moved that paper on and off as fast as you could. And all of a sudden, you could do like 1,000 to 4,000 papers, pages an hour. So that was a huge leap, right? And I think 1832 is when Richard Ho's invention came along. Yeah, so flash forward another 32, 33 years.

And William Bullock comes along. Again, a great period of invention in the world and in the United States. And he created the Bullock Press, which was, I think this is sort of the one we're more used to seeing now, which is a rotary press, which had not sheets of paper, but one big, huge roll of paper. Some of these were up to five miles long,

where you're just continually cranking these things through. And all of a sudden, you could get 12,000 sheets per hour. Yeah, what was amazing about it. So before, it didn't matter how fast that cylinder was moving. You still had a human who had to take a paper off after it was printed and put a piece of blank paper on to do the next one. With this, it was just fully automated.

You had a cylinder on top doing the front. And you had a cylinder on bottom doing the backside of the paper. So you could print two-sided, 12,000 sheets per hour. And today, from what I saw, those rotary presses that Bullock invented, move paper through it 20 miles an hour and can do, I think, 64,128 page booklets in an hour.

Now, they're that fast, which is, I'm impressed. It's come a long way. But Bill Bullock, like you said, kicked the whole thing off with his web rotary printing press. And I mean, think about it. Think about making an improvement to a machine where it was 4,000 pages an hour. Now, it's 12,000.

Thanks to you. You feel pretty good about yourself. Plus, he was a newspaper editor, too. So he was kind of doing this based on his own observations and how to make improvements in his own industry. And he was an orphan raised by his brother, who is self-taught in mechanics just from reading books. Amazing.

So I'm impressed with William Bullock, except for one of the last things he ever did in his life. Yeah, so because he was invented this machine, he would work on it himself. He would adjust it and make repairs himself. And that was at the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1867. One of his Bullock presses needed some work. So he went in there, himself was working on it.

And exactly what you think happened, happened. His leg gets caught in one of these rollers. And there was no pulling out at that point and crushed his leg. That turned gangrenous. And he died a few days after that. Yeah, during an operation to amputate the leg. Yeah, I feel like he was close to making it.

He was. Here's the thing, though. From what I saw, what got him was he was trying to kick a belt back onto a pulley. And if his leg got caught in there and sucked in, that means he was doing that while the machine was operating. Oh yeah, that's exactly what happened. So yeah, not that impressive.

But yeah, that's a terrible way to go. Gangrene, through complications of surgery from gangrene, brought on to leg crushing, brought on by not just stopping to turn the machine off. Brought on by being a brilliant inventor. Great guy. Nothing makes me more relaxed and enthralled than watching a newspaper operation being printed.

I've said it before. Have you? Because it doesn't ring a bell. Yeah, I think I said it when we were talking about the movie that, last year, was called The Paper. No, The Post. The Post. One of the hokeyest shots I've ever seen in my life

was in that movie. Ooh, what is it? Where the lawyers and the editors are all at, I think, they're at Tom Hanks's house. And they're arguing. And the camera is just moving around the room, just ticking in all this frenetic scene. And one of the shots is Bob and David from Mr. Show pointing

into the chests of the lawyers in rhythm. And then the lawyers are backing up in rhythm, almost like it's like a Rogers and Hammerstein musical that suddenly is breaking out. It's crazy. And I was like, who directed this? And then I saw that Steven Spielberg directed this. And then I thought, I think his maybe B or C director maybe

came up with that one. Oh, like his second unit was shooting the day. I'm hoping. I just love that he cast Mr. Show. How great was that? It was pretty great. Did not expect to see that in that movie. Have you seen the paper, the Michael Keaton?

Yeah, that's one I was thinking of. That is a world class one. That was a Ron Howard movie. Yeah, those guys know how to make movies for the most part. Yeah, they do. Unless it's a Star Wars movie. Did they make one? Yeah, Ron Howard made the Han Solo movie.

I didn't know that. Did you see it? No. I didn't care for it. The one I saw that I liked was Rogue One? Rogue One. That was great. Yeah, I love that one.

It had nothing to do with anything, right? It was just its own thing. Sure. I thought it was great. Yeah, I wouldn't say it had nothing to do with anything, but it wasn't part of the, I don't even know what Star Wars fans call that. The canon?

Yeah, we're just going to get slaughtered for this. That's fine. I've been slaughtered for less. So let's move on then. How do you pronounce that guy's name? Daker? Michael Daker. That's what I'm going with.

All right, you're keeping all the letters. I looked it up and I couldn't find any news coverage of it. That's usually how you can find somebody's name. Yeah, and this is surprising because this was very recently. And we're going back to Rockets again with this one. And this is a really interesting idea for an invention if you look at these things. I assume you checked out the pictures of the Jet Pod.

Dude. So this guy's idea, he was born in the UK in 1956, was a pilot in the British Army, but good pilot. And he had this idea for something called the Jet Pod, which is basically an air taxi. So he was like, I think if I can invent something that doesn't need very much runway to take off, can go really, really fast in a quick time

and land in a kind of a truncated area, then I can speed up. I can make like a jet taxi where people can get from like an airport to a city center. In the case of London, he said in four minutes from Heathrow to central London. Yes, dude, which I'm sure you know this from when we did our UK tour. It takes an hour at least to get there by regular car taxi.

Yeah, by black cab. It's horrible. So the idea of getting from central London to Heathrow in four minutes is a dream by itself, right? Yeah, and these things are cool looking. They really are. And from what I can tell, this was not just like some pie in the sky kind of thing.

Like this guy was on track. Oh, yeah. This thing was like the real deal. It was something called very quiet short takeoff and landing aircraft, which is a type of VTOL vertical takeoff and landing, which like you said, it just needed a very short strip of land, which meant you didn't have to have an airport.

You could have like a dedicated, say, airstrip, but it could be, it would just take up a very small amount of land in the middle of the city. And they were going to sell them for $1 million, which meant that trips on these things would have been like $50, $60. That's as much as a cab ride. Yeah, and in four minutes rather than an hour.

And the whole point was this was going to ease congestion. It was going to be a cheap and easy way to kind of hop short distances or medium distances. And he had some ideas for military and ambulance uses for it as well. So it was close. And who knows if we might have these things by now, because in 2009, the guy died.

And it was during a test flight of one of the jet pods. Yeah, there were a few of them. I don't think we said on any feet, about 410 feet to take off, which is about 125 meters. And it would go like 350 miles an hour, which is awesome. But he had three models, the T100. If you look these things up, it looks like a little ultralight plane, but it's a jet.

This would take about 50 trips a day back and forth between the airport and city centers. It looks like a short bus plane is what it looks like, because it's yellow. Yeah, it totally does. And it's like stubby. Yeah, it's stubby with wings and goes super, super fast. Then he had the M300, which was bigger.

This is the one that he thought could take the place of military helicopters or not take the place of, but assist with removing injured soldiers from the battlefield. And then the E-400 was like a flying ambulance. Yeah, so these things, like you said, they were speeding along. Again, not pie in the sky. This was a real thing that was happening. And then on August 16, 2009, not very long ago,

he took one of the eight-seater models, a prototype, in Malaysia for a test flight. I also saw it was in Taiwan. Oh, really? Yeah, I couldn't tell where it actually happened. Interesting. And this is where it gets a little frustrating, because he could not get airborne on three attempts.

And that, to me, is when you're like, all right, let's just ground it for the day and figure this out. But he tried it a fourth time. The aircraft went right straight up into the air vertically, and then right back down and killed him. Yeah, it shot up 500 to 700 feet. And then yawned left and crashed, and that was that. And that was that.

I'm curious, I would imagine that this thing wasn't completely scrapped after that. I'm curious what the status is. I couldn't find anything about it. It's the company that he founded that was developing it as Avsen, A-V-C-E-N. And I couldn't find what the status of that thing is. I hope they continue on with it, because it would just

be wonderful to have these things. Because another thing, I mean, these were jets, but they had some sort of technology that cut the jet noise in half by 50%. So it's not like we would just hear jets in our city skies constantly, it would be much quieter. Relatively inexpensive, but you need to solve that straight up and straight down thing.

Well, R.I.P. Michael Daker and R.I.P., all those inventors, except Lisee, I'm not really interested in wishing him well, who died by their own invention, hats off to you for your spirit of curiosity and ingenuity. Agreed. If you want to know more about inventors who died by their own inventions, go onto the internet. There's all sorts of stuff about that.

And in the meantime, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this, I love it when we get answers to questions that we ask, because this is from Scott Miller. And we asked about how they test for color blindness in animals. And he knows, because he does that. Guys just finished that episode in Chuck's question about how they test.

I was very excited, because this comes from my own area of study in behavior analysis. It's actually a very simple and clever experiment. Experimenters will teach an animal to respond to a color, often by pressing a lever or button, or performing some action that is easy for them. And in doing so, the animal earns a treat. But the animals only get treats if they press the lever

when certain colors are presented to them. So in this way, if an animal does not respond differently between two colors, e.g. green and red for dogs, then that would indicate that they are deficient in detecting those colors. The same is true for birds, rodents, cats, and anything else they have tried this with. Congratulations on being one of the greatest podcast ever.

Love, Scott Miller. Thanks, Scott. Jeez, how sweet is that? Yeah, that was very sweet. And thanks for explaining it. It makes total sense. The poor animals, they're like, I can't tell between red and green,

so they don't give me mouse heads anymore. Can I get another mouse head? If you want to get in touch with us like Scott did, we would love to hear from you. You can hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyshino.com. You can also find links to our social media accounts, where you can sometimes find us lurking around.

Or you can send a plain old-fashioned email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. 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 slipdresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to use it 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, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week

to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.