The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - A Marathon Catastrophe, Dangerously Spooky Tunes, Confused Cannibals

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

This week, we've got the second half of our extra spooky Halloween live show! The weirdest things we learned ranged from eating mummy dust to a man drinking rat poison to boost his marathon time. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  If you want to see us in your town, click here to take our listener survey! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Hey, weirdos. Just a heads up that you're about to hear part two of our latest live show, which was at Caviot in New York City on October 31st.

Yes, it's a super spooky Halloween episode for you to enjoy before fall officially ends because you ate a bunch of turkey and now it's Christmas time. Sound quality may be a little bit different from our usual episode. because, of course, we were in front of a live audience at Caviot in New York City. You'll also hear us reference a drinking game, which you're welcome to play, as long as that's legal and safe wherever you are. You'll also hear us reference visual aids, and some of those you can only see by coming to our next live show, which you should definitely do, but we'll link to a few of them on popsight.com slash weird. If you wish you'd come to our latest live show,

well, you should come to the next one. We'll have one super soon. But you can also help us out by filling out our new listener survey. We'll have a link in our episode notes and at popside.com slash weird. And we're just looking for a little more info about where our listeners are, where they might like to see us perform live, and how we might be able to make that happen. Okay, on to the show. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure the those with you. Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Ryan

Mandelbaum. And I'm Claire Maldorelli. Wow. Great. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, training for important things, what have you. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Claire, What's your fact? Yes. So the 1904 Olympic Marathon included doping with rat poison, hitchhiking to the finish, and several near-death experiences.

Cool. So, great. I assume you're going to have at least one of those on Sunday. Really going to channel all of those things. Ryan, what's your fact? A mistake led to literally centuries of medical cannibalism. We do have medical cannibalism. and mistakes. My fact

is about an instrument that many thought drove its listeners to insanity in an early grave. And we're going to hear a little bit of that music tonight. So that's pretty scary. Wow. Wow.

Ryan, I just feel like you should start. I don't know why. I probably shouldn't have held the clicker, but... I can't wait. Let me have it. How Human started eating mummies by mistake. An etymological mix-up. So this, I found this awesome research paper from the 80s by Carl Dandenfeldt, who was a professor at the Arizona State University at the time. So when you see that, the first thing you probably think is... A mummy.

I want to eat that. Oh, yeah. Or maybe you think eating that will make me feel good. You wouldn't be alone, actually. So just a quick shout out. Medical cannibalism made a big appearance on a weirdest thing episode recently, thanks to Eleanor. And it's got a long history. People thought that humans, if you ate them.

would make them feel better. You know, oh, my head hurts. I'll eat a head. And also, mummies sort of, I've always kind of played a role in medical stuff. People would eat them, rub them on themselves. They were found in drugstores literally until the Victorian era. Also, people had, like, such a weird, nasty fascination with mummies in the Victorian era. They would, like, steal them, and then they would just unwrap them for fun.

Yeah, they would have parties where it was like, you never know what might be inside. Yeah. And it was always a gross, dead body. Yeah. Anyway, so now there's this long history of people using bitumen, which is noun, a black viscous mixture of hydrocarbons obtained naturally or as a residue from petroleum distillation. It is used for road surfacing and roofing, also called asphalt.

So people were using bitumen in medicine for a really long time. In fact, Pliny the Elder, he's famous. He wrote about using it for cataracts, leprosy, and gout, as well as dysentery. Greek physician diascorides in his Materia described using a pitch from Albania it was like a liquid

I don't really know what they were doing with this stuff from what I got either they like grounded it up and rubbed it on their wounds or they just like in some sense it was like a liquor and they could just drink it so that's fun and then there were these Middle Eastern physicians Alcinda and Razis as well as

Avicenna aka Ibn Sina and so they also described using bitumin or asphalt and they called it Mamia Mamma Mia. Mammaia. Yeah, exactly. That's a shout to Claire.

So. Thank you. So people, you know, they saw this word, Mumia written, and the translators tried their best. Gerard de Cremona of the 12th century translated it as the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead mixed with the aloes is transformed. It's similar to miri pitch.

So they're, you know, they kind of, at first they're like, oh, Mamia is just this material that's found where the dead bodies are. Then they found that, oh, maybe it's found with the dead bodies. One of the mistranslators said, it is the mammia of the sepulchres with aloe and mer mixed with the liquid of the human body. So things aren't looking too good. And it kind of makes sense almost because, all right, it's like long been established, you know, in Persian medicine,

in Middle Eastern medicine, in Greek medicine, that bitumen is like totally okay to use as medicine. And actually, if you've ever looked at a mummy, it's got like gross black shit on it. And so what's actually happening is that there was this long history of Egyptians, supposedly according to the Greeks, using asphalt and bitumen to actually preserve the bodies.

So... That's incorrect. They looked at that and they thought, let's eat the gunk. Remember the sarcophic? goo were they open a sarcophagus and there was like it was full of red goo and people were like let us drink it and they were like no I mean there's literally centuries of research that tells you to drink that drink the sarcophagus juice it's got life juice it's got death juice I mean it's got everything the body needs in there yeah delicious but when I tell you that they're mistranslating I mean it like they literally I like this one a lot the mummy found in the hollows of the corpus in Egypt differs but immaterially from the nature of mineral mummy and where any difficulty arises in procuring the ladder

may be substituted instead. So they looked at the black gunk on the mummies. They looked at the black gunk they were using for medicine and went, that's the same thing. So they said, and then that just turned into, let's just eat the whole mummy. This one is especially good. In these sands is found mummia,

which is the flesh of such men as are drowned in these sands. And they're dried by the heat of the sun. So that these bodies are preserved from putrefaction and the dryness of the sand and therefore that dry flesh is esteemed medicine abler It's an excellent accent there Albeit there is another kind of more prestious

That's a misspelling on my part sorry Momiya which is the dried and embald bodies of the kings and princes which of long time has been preserved dry without corruption Your accent is getting more and more yiddish Which makes sense Yeah, and just as a side note, this just eventually became like, okay, well, we could eat the black stuff. We could eat the black stuff on the mummies.

Okay, we could eat the mummies. And then eventually it just became, we could just eat people, bro. Let's do whatever. So at this point, it's the 1500, 1600s, 1,600, 1700s, literally centuries of this went on. And people were going to Egypt and having robbing parties where they would just steal mummies, bring them back to Europe. grind them up into a powder and sell them at a premium and people would mix it with water, rub it on themselves, drink it. But eventually the Renaissance doctors were like,

that's really gross. I found a couple quotes where it's been one of them and a guy just says it's literally cannibalism. And then I tried it and he ended up deciding that it was a wicked kind of drug. Doth nothing help the disease. And he also said that he got quite sick when he tried to have it.

It started to fall out of favor once people were like, this is really gross. The epilogue of this is that up until like the 1970s, it would still appear in important medical journals is like a treatment. And in this one 1972 handbook, they decide that like, oh, you know,

it's this, okay, it's the black stuff on the mummies, but you shouldn't try it because there's arsenic on it. Like that was the conclusion. Like, oh, okay, like, don't eat the dead bodies, but just like you might get a little poisoning, so don't eat them. Anyway, that's how they ended up eating mummies by mistake. Great.

Love it. A gunky Halloween tale. Thank you. It's because of Halloween. It's like spooky. We're going to take a quick break. I almost forgot. All right.

So like Rachel said, I'm running a New York City Marathon on Sunday. Anyone else running it in the crowd? No, I'll be alone. Okay, well, just cheer for me then. So all that's been on my mind lately is the marathon. So a couple nights ago, I even dreamed that the Central Park portion turned into the woods and I got lost and all the other runners seemed to know all the shortcuts and I was like I didn't prepare for this. So I was able to figure out a fact

that has to do with marathoning because that's all that's on my mind. So as you may or may not know, I don't know. I don't know if you obsess over marathon things, but there's been some really exciting things happening in distance running lately this past month on a super fly course in Vienna, Austria, Kenyan distance runner Elliot Kipchogi became the first person in the world to run a marathon in under two hours. He ran in one hour, 59 minutes, and 40 seconds. The achievement was this really big end result of millions of dollars, countless coaches, scientists, world-class athletes, and many volunteers, because prior to this, people thought that I'm running a two-hour marathon was basically impossible, like something that was this human potential

barrier that we couldn't pass, similar to the four-minute mile, which was broken. So now people think that maybe more people will now break it. So to break it, they've pulled out all these scientifically perfect things to get this extreme feat of marathon perfectionism. He had Pacers, which were in this pyramid-like formation that kept him from having any draft and whatnot. And then he even had lasers that the Pacers had to stay on to make sure that they were going

at his four minute 34 second per mile pace. I will not be trying for that, but something to strive for, but close. Instead of a laser, you'll have me throwing sour patch kids. So he had all these great amazing things, and we've really come to basically understand what the human body needs to sort of run at a fast pace for a long time, and we really understand how our muscles work and everything like that. It's just a ton of spaghetti. This is true.

I mean, it's absolutely true. So we've come a long way, though, and I would like to compare this feat of perfectionism to the 1904 Olympic Marathon. It's quite different. I love number three. He just looks like. Oh, we'll get to number three. He doesn't know what he's doing. We'll get to him.

All right. So let me set the stage. It's 1904. We have had, this is our third Olympics ever, third marathon ever, in terms of, like, you know, big marathon event. And the first two, the first one in Greece, second one in Paris, went really well. A plus, super good job, smoothly done. Now, 1904 happens, and it was set to take place in Chicago, which is much cooler temperatures than St. Louis. But also, they were planning the World's Fair in 1903 in St. Louis, and they couldn't get their acts together.

enough and so it turned into a 1904 World's Fair and they were like well we can't have two major events like there's too much competition so St. Louis was like we want the Olympics in Chicago was like fine I guess so this whole marathon route was planned for Chicago now it's in St. Louis much smaller city rural area spread out middle of August okay this brings me to my first comparison I would like to compare Kipchogi now he Elliot Kipchogi, he had his marathon course chosen in Vienna because in October it was prime conditions. It was either between 45 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Fahrenheit such that if it wasn't that temperature, they were just going to postpone it because they were like, we need things to be perfect.

We must run under two hours. And as scientists have noted, if you start a marathon at 70 degrees Fahrenheit, they actually tell race officials to consider not doing it because it's dangerous for the participants to have their body temperatures heat up over those 26.2 miles. In St. Louis, they decided to start the event at 2 p.m. I'll be starting at 9.40 a.m. The elites before me will be starting at 9. It'll be 50 degrees, hopefully. In St. Louis, though, it was 90 degrees out. And 100 degree. Real feel humidity level. So things were is primed to go sour. Now I pulled this from the St. Louis dispatch from August 28, 1904, and it is a hand-drawn map of their route. It starts at Francis Field, which I think still exists today, and they're

going to do five laps around the field, then go out into the streets of St. Louis, and go into rural areas, come back through that, do a little loopy thing, and then come back to Francis Field for the conclusion. That doesn't sound bad, but it gets bad. There were 32. athletes that the Olympic Committee convinced to run this event in 90-degree weather for 26.2 miles in the middle of a world celebration where other people were eating hot dogs and popcorn. Only 14 of those runners actually finished the race, but there's a handful that I would like to pick out specifically. First up is John Lorden. Now he, I could not find a good picture of him on the internet, so you'll just have to imagine. White guy, tank top, split shorts. You get the picture. I don't know if there were split shorts back then, but there should have been for running purposes.

He was the favorite for good reason. He won the Boston Marathon year prior, a very big deal, and he was quoted in a book about the 19-04 Olympics at the time saying, quote-unquote, I am in great condition this year. Never felt better in my life. Okay. Next up we have Fred Lores, and that's him. He was from Boston, and he was a bricklayer who trained at night, and he was a bricklayer who trained at night, and he quote unquote qualified by running a five-mile race.

The marathon is 2016.2 miles, but okay, whatever. So he's ready to go. And then next we have Felix Carvajal. Rachel, you remember him? Yeah, so he was a male man from Cuba. Yeah, no, actually it turns out he's a male man, but he was just incredibly talented and avid runner. And so as, yeah, as the story goes,

he like took a boat to Florida and then made his way all the way to St. Louis and he got to the start line in long pants, a long sleeve shirt, and work boots. But he did rip off his pants to make them shorts before he started. Thanks for the pro tip Felix. Those are his ripped off shorts. The belt should be a requirement. That belt is awesome. Yeah, it's pretty great. So then we have William Garcia, another American not pictured. I didn't know. I couldn't get good pictures back then. He was a carpenter almost six feet tall. Apparently has something to brag about in the 1900s. And the San Francisco Chronicle called him, quote-unquote,

the greatest long-distance runner on the Pacific Coast laughs. Okay. Next, we have Thomas Hicks. He is my favorite. Not much was said about him other than he trained well and was just nervous about the hills because he trained on flat ground. Much more to come from him. The gun goes off as suspected.

John Lorden takes the lead and he's off to a great start. He does his five mile loops. Some would say a little bit too fast. They tell you not to do that in a marathon because it's a marathon, not a sprint. And he gets two city blocks, stops, starts vomiting and was like, screw this heat. I am out. I don't care if I was in the best condition of my life. Maybe he wasn't.

I don't know. He's done. Back to Kipchogi. He had a team of Pacers who every 5K would be on a running bike, hand him a water bottle, he would grab it, drink whatever he wanted, and throw it down. And they did this because scientists figure out that every 5K is like the optimal time to hydrate. So in the 1904 marathon, they had one water station. It was a well, and it was at mile 12.

And it wasn't like, here's the well, but we've already have these cups of water for you and you can just grab one. It was self-service. According to one account, quote-unquote, the visiting athletes were not accustomed to the water. And as a consequence, many suffered from intestinal disorders. But also, like, a lot of marathon runners get diarrhea because the blood flow is going away from your digestive system. So maybe St. Louis was unfairly maligned. that's a great point Rachel we should really consider that William Garcia is trotting along and he thinks he's doing great but he starts coughing blood and he can't drink water and so he just

keeps coughing out blood and as it turns out the path that they chose for these rural areas they were in fact rural the roads weren't really roads for pedestrians they were for cars or for horses. And so all these cars were traveling along with them, trying to, you know, relay the race back to participants back, you know, to like be able to say what happened. And so they kick up so much dirt that it gets into William Garcia's lungs and he's coughing out. And so he's like, I'm out. I'm done. I'm calling it a day. He takes a car for emergency medical help. So that brings us back to Felix Carval. And now I could not confirm this fact, but I just really wanted to mention it anyway,

just because I don't know. I couldn't believe it. It was just crazy. Apparently, he didn't bring any of his, you know, like early 1900s Gatorator gel packs. So he ate some crab apples on the way. His stomach got sick, which now I'm considering Rachel's hypothesis that maybe it was just his, like, runners trots diarrhea. I wouldn't say crab apples are a good marathon food.

Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. So he's out, even though his newly minted shorts were, you know, helping him along the way. He's like, I'm done. I'm out. So that leaves us with Fred Lores and Thomas Hicks. And this just gets to the good part. So Fred Lores, he's at mile nine and he's extremely dehydrated and he's just simply cannot make it to the well. He's like, I can't. I just can't. So he says, screw this. He calls a cab essentially. And the cab comes and picks. him up and he starts taking it back to the finish. Now I want you to remember this. He's in a car. He has quit the race and he is now in a car. Okay. Thomas Hicks, the champion of the race. He's at the 16 mile mark. He has a super strong lead, but his body is breaking down. He has severe dehydration. I wonder why. No fuel also wonder why. And he's this pretty well-known athlete. So he has these coaches and trainer is in this car with him the whole time and he keeps asking for water but instead according to local accounts they simply just sponge water on his body and into his mouth and pour some water over his head and they feed him raw egg whites i don't know why protein maybe anyone's guess and then on

top of that his trainer gives him rat poison also known as sulfate of strick nine so stric nine is really bad. What it does in the body is it basically blocks glycine receptors and glycine is this amino acid that basically stops various functions in your body from happening. So if your muscles are like firing, if you're running a marathon or something like that and you want to stop at the well to drink some water, then glycine helps your muscles stop. But if you're given strict nine, then your muscles just can't stop firing, which a little bit is great because you're just keeping going

and you're running a marathon, so you're just like, I can't stop, won't stop. There's no off switch. But he keeps going and his trainers and coaches are like, this is great. Strychnine is working, so they give him more. And a little bit of strict nine good. A lot of strict nine.

bad. A lot of that causes violent, uncontrollable muscle contractions and basically they just keep giving it to him because they are like, it worked the first time. What happened to this great effect? Now, he's taking egg whites, sponge baths, rat poison. He's got the trots, but he is on his way to the finish. Now, do you remember what happened to Fred Loris? He got a taxi. Now, the taxi breaks down four miles before the finish and not wanting to miss all the action of who actually crosses the finish line first because you know these are all buddies

after all. He and he's recovered. He didn't have any strict nine so he starts trotting along the course to the finish to get to the race's end. But when he gets close everyone starts cheering for him because they think that he is winning the race

and he is like screw it, I'm running I'm going for the finish. He gets to the end and all the race officials are like, Fred Lourz, you have won the marathon. Congratulations, here is all your rewards. And a bit later, rat poison, dehydrated, egg white fed Tom Hicks, staggers to the finish. Oh.

And sees Fred Lors. And he's like, called a cab. And Fred Lors is like, okay, okay, okay, I'm innocent. Thomas Hicks is the winner. Hicks won the event in a time of 32845, which is slower than 98% of all finishers of every single marathon that has ever happened from 1896 until now. Now, this is the face of a rat poisoned, egg-white-eating, sponge baths marathoner. I think that. If Thomas Hicks had all of Kipchogi's help, he could have broke in two hours. Thank you.

We are going to take a micro break. Listen to the world around you. What can you hear right now? A coworker chatting on the phone? A car driving past on the street? The hiss of steam pipes heating a building? Now think about all the sounds that happen on Earth every day. Bat screech overhead, howler monkeys, well, howl, and blue whales bellow below the ocean.

Thunder claps while Sand Dunes sing and rockets launch to planets where our own voices would sound different. Meanwhile, we're detecting mysterious radio bursts around the globe, inventing languages of gibberish, creating sound effects with animal noises, playing 300-year-old instruments, listening to music, trying to calm, crying babies, and looking for that one place of complete silence. The world is a symphony and a cacophony of our life. experiences. Read and hear all about it in the noise issue of popular science. Available on newsstands now and at popsai.com slash listen.

Everybody knows that glass harps were invented by Sandra Bullock in the year 2000. So just kidding, glass harps are documented as, sorry, this is going to be important in a minute, but like I said, this is my rapid fire version of this fact. Glass harps are documented as far back as Persia and China in the 1300s in the form of musical water glasses. but they were popularized in Europe by an Irishman named Richard Pockrich in the 1700s, so he sadly perished in a fire along with his waterglasses. But this isn't a story about Richard, or I'm sad to say, about Sandra Bullock.

This is a story about Benjamin Franklin. This is what came up in Google Image Search. I assume this is him. I'm face-blanked, so it's on a recent episode of Weirdest Thing. Take a listen. In the 1760s, Franklin invented a mechanical version of this glass-water harp called the glassy chord. Then he promptly realized that that was really dumb name

especially for a device that he claimed produced incomparably sweet tones. So he pivoted to calling it an harmonica, which was based on the Italian word for harmony and actually predates the instrument we now call the harmonica by 60 years. Basically, he took the water glasses, turned them into bowls,

flip them on their sides, put them on a kind of spindle, and then you used a foot pedal to turn them. So because of the positioning and because the turning was now mechanized instead of your finger turning around the glass, it meant you could play multiple notes at once. So you could actually play 10 ringing notes simultaneously. And it wasn't just a novelty. Many composers, including Beethoven and Mozart, wrote pieces for the instrument, which we'll get to in a minute. And it also fit really well with the art scene in Germany in that period of time. They were getting off of the

kind of like stern and dr, dr, der, and were like more like soft voice sad songs that could have multiple emotions in like one song. So something with a very ethereal quality was really in vogue, was part of the zeitgeist, if you will. But why did it fall into oblivion by the 1830s? Well, the music wasn't just pretty because many people also believed the notes of the harmonica had a strange power that could be used for good or evil. to heal you or to drive you to insanity in an early grave.

So Franz mesmer which is yes where the word mesmerism comes from which I did not know so he was a German doctor who developed the concept of animal magnetism or mesmerism

which is basically he thought like every living thing had a natural something flowing through it some kind of life force what was it don't ask him he's just the mesmer guy and you could manipulate it with either like magnetic interventions

or a lot of things that fall under what we'd now consider hypnosis and that you could use this to cure various ailments. And he often played the harmonica as part of his treatment because he felt it had a kind of like in tune with your vibrations, hypnotizing you kind of quality. And Franklin himself believed that the instrument could be used as a health treatment.

He also told people to sit around naked for a couple hours every day because he thought baths were too bracing, take everything he says with a grain of salt. But in 1772, he actually worked with a Polish prince's wife who suffered from melancholia, otherwise known as having a husband who's a d'i. But she said she was ill, and he was really kind to her. He was a dog.

So he was like, let me play the harmonica for you, you poor young lady. And she said the music made a strong impression on her, and she started to cry. and then Franklin sat by her side and looked in her eyes and said, Madame, you are cured. And she was like, okay. And then he offered, did you try to play? And she loved it.

She did attempt to poison herself and had a lot of electroshock therapy, which luckily had a better lasting effect than the harmonica music. But at the time, she really thought the harmonica had just done wonders for her and her dick of a husband, which leads us to the darker side of the instrument's supposed powers. So first of all, Mesmer's experiments were all really shoddy, and even at the time when people were doing a lot of weird stuff, like eating mummies, people were skeptical of his work. So his association with the harmonica actually did not help its reputation. And then there's the fact that there started to be all these rumors about people who played it and what happened to them. So it was premiered in 1762 by this British musician named Marian Davies.

And she toured periodically for years, but she started to write of like nervous complaints. And she died in a mental hospital. But she never blamed the instrument. Another famous player also died young, allegedly with like shot nerves because of the instrument. And then there was one guy who quit to focus on religion and believed he was receiving direct communications from Christ. And a lot of people who were starting to be more like rational than that

were like the harmonica made him see God. And that's probably not good. So there were all of these periodicals that were saying, you know, the harmonica. Monica is an apt method for slow self-inihilation, which sounds like Twitter. They said the sharp penetrating tone runs like a spark through the entire nervous system. They were like, it literally shakes your nerves, which we'll get to in a second. They really didn't understand how nerves worked at all.

They were like, it's like a guitar string rumbling through your body. People started to invent things that kept you from actually touching the glass, like gloves or things that basically hit it like a hammer on a piano because they were like, because the really fierce vibrations come up through your arms, and that's unnatural, and it's shaking your nerves. And so the guy who invented the keyboard, who was totally unbiased and had no reason to talk about the dangers of the harmonica, he was like, I have these five examples.

One, it brought a peace between two men who were about to have a duel. Two, it played a vital role in the blood transfusion of a man who was dead and brought back to life. Definitely real. Three, it added to the joy of some religious people in a rustic setting. don't know what that means, but that's what he wrote. Four, it awoke and terrified a young girl, which doesn't sound that bad to me. And in five, it caused a dog to fall into a trans-like sleep state followed by seizures, and then the dog awoke droopy and unusually fearful. So, like,

solid evidence for and against the harmonica, clearly. So why all this nonsense? Because we really didn't know how nerves worked at all. We knew enough that people started to say all this kind of very untrue stuff about forces moving through the body because we didn't know it was electricity going through through nerves and so they were starting to understand there was some association between like stress and mental illness and physical health but not really they understood just enough to be super super wrong all the time also anything that got ladies excited was dangerous and music is like about a lot of feelings generally.

And a lot of women played the harmonica because it was this very ethereal thing that required a delicate touch. It's actually quite possible to break it while you're playing it if you get too intense. So that's one of the reasons it became very, a lot of the virtuosos were young ladies. So anything that young ladies

were getting very passionate about was potentially the cause of a nervous disorder. Because it was so ethereal, it was used in a lot of like horror shows. This is like a phantasmagoria where they had projectors, and nobody knew what those were. So they just absolutely lost their shit. You can see men trying to sword fight with a skull, with bat wings.

I would pay to go to something like this. This rocks. Yeah, that demon has like very saggy teeth, I would say. But so, yeah, it was just smoke with stuff being projection on it, but everyone was like ghosts. And, you know, that man is having a terrible time. so because the music at these shows and seances was often the harmonica people are like oh so it can raise the dead dangerous and there's no evidence that players died unusually young some people will now be like oh you know actually it was that they got lead poisoning but the thing is that there was lead in literally everything and it's not like people were licking their very expensive glass instruments so there's no reason to think that armonica players got any more lead exposure than anyone else who were like throwing lead powder on their faces all the time and eating off of lead plates. The thing is that they were like, they got a bad reputation, the musical taste

changed. They were also really expensive and fragile and impossible to amplify to suit the large halls that were increasingly being used to entertain. You know, we were getting away from chamber music. So that just meant that they weren't in vogue anymore. They did have their return in the 80s. This guy named Dennis James became really fascinated with the harmonica and the only one for sale at the time was $1.5 million. So instead he spent years like having one rebuilt based on all of the specifications you could find and it took a lot of trial and error. It also took him years to teach himself how to play. But now we can hear the spooky tunes. And this is one of the pieces that was actually composed for harmonica and it is very, very beautiful. According to Dennis James, he has identified 12 separate parts of each finger with unique sounds.

And that even the hand position and the angle that he approaches the glass can affect the note. It's basically like playing a string with a bow and water is the rosin. So it is a really intricate and beautiful instrument and has a spooky past, but only in like a fun, silly way. So I love it. That slapped hard. Thanks, Ben Franklin. Yeah, and that's it. All right, very quickly, the weirdest thing we learned this week,

was it hauntie Franklin tunes? All right. Was it? Eaton people. Was it the shit show that was the St. Louis Marathon? Oh, my gosh. Most of that. Oh, my gosh.

Claire is the winner, and she's going to be the winner on Sunday. I don't know how the New York Marathon works, but I'm sure she's going to win it, so. The weirdest thing. I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popside.com. Our show is produced by all

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