The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Biting Cow Lips, Death by Molasses, Shopping for a New Finger

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a 30-foot-tall molasses wave to the man who invented "bulldogging" in rodeos. 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!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- 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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take a look at these hats. Take a look at these hats. 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 share those with you. Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science.

I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Eleanor Cummins and I'm Jess Bodie. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we learned while reporting our stories, doing research, reading book excerpts. We do a lot of fun stuff at popular science. What can I say? And then we decide which one we 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. Jess, welcome to this show. Thank you so much. It's your first time, is it not?

It is. I'm so grateful to be here. Amazing. Jess. Yes. Since it's your first time here in the studio, why don't you tell us your teas first? I would love to. Today I'm going to talk about a 30-foot-tall tsunami of molasses.

Oh, no. Treeing. That's a lot of molasses. It's quite a lot. Too much. Eleanor? I would like to talk about a man who bit bowls by the lip. That's how I take life by the lip.

Not the horns. The original version of that idiom, yes. I'm going to talk about, you know what, I'm just going to read the newspaper headline that starts off this story, which is, three figures for a finger. Who will help pretty widow to an extra digit? Lost one, semicolon. Inartistic, semicolon. Can't play piano, semicolon, sad, period.

Surgeon hunts for one to substitute. Oh, my God. That's a long headline. Yeah, I'm really glad I wasn't a journalist in 1911. So, what should we start with? I mean, the molasses, I got to hear about the molasses. I have to admit. Let's let that washover.

I've heard of this one. I've heard of this one before, and I'm really excited to learn more. This story begins in Boston, Boston's North End, in 1919. So that makes this year the centennial. And there's this, like, absolutely monumental molasses tank. Like, it's super, super huge. And it's kind of like what a water tower would be today, but it's just, like, filled to the brim with molasses. And any, like, photo or artist's interpretation of, you know, the area at the time, you just, like, see the tank.

lurking, like hulking in the background. Yeah, and it was capable of holding 2.5 million gallons of molasses, and it was like 50 feet tall, 90 feet across, just a unit, if you will. It was also like very notoriously poorly constructed. It was like very, very, very leaky, small Bostonian children would go to it in the day with a small bucket and collect molasses strippings to take home. And the company that owned it didn't really care. And they just, kind of like painted it brown so that you couldn't see the leaks. We've all been there. Yeah.

Yeah. So then one day a new shipment of molasses comes in from the Caribbean. And molasses was like a very big deal back then. People used it to make rum, which is like a main use for it, but also for like cans of baked beans and actually also for World War I munitions. So this is all about Boston baked beans? Yes. Okay. I get it now.

Yeah. Anyway, so the shipment comes in. They plunk it down in the big leaky tank. And two days later, around lunchtime, people were out and about. It was like a warm January day in Boston, which was like 40 or 50 degrees. People were like out and about like eating lunch outside playing cards. And then you guessed it. The tank burst.

It released a full 2.5 million gallons into the streets. Some reports at a 50-foot wave. But that was like the next day newspaper. So I would imagine that people saw it and were like it was absolutely massive. But more conservative, probably accurate reports, say 30. foot wave. That's still a big wave of molasses. Quite, quite large. And it moved 50 feet per second or 35 miles an hour. It flattened buildings, including people's homes that they were inside of. And this one man was in bed just

sleeping because he like on the bar. So it was like lunchtime. So he was like sleeping in before his shift. On the third floor of a house. And then he woke up in molasses. His bed was floating. And he had to cling to it. So he didn't drown. And then his wall opened up and he rode the molasses. wave down into the streets on his bed. Oh my God. Yeah. There were these elevated train supports for like a above-gone train. And the molasses wave just knocked them clean off.

Yeah. You know, it might sound cartoonish and kind of funny to think about like a molasses tsunami, but 21 people died. And 150 people were injured. And people died because they literally drowned in molasses. Oh, my God. There were reports of people trying to wipe it away from their mouths and noses, and it just made it worse.

Oh, no. And it was like apparently like quicksand. Like if the more you struggled, the more you sank. Oh man. Is molasses a non-Newonian fluid? I think it might be. Yeah. But that is, yeah, no, that makes sense.

It, because of, it is really hard to get out of bottles. Mm. When you make gingerbread cookies. That's true. But luckily, you know, amidst all of this hullabaloo happening on the North End, the Navy was out in the harbor and they saw what was going on. So they sent people in to help and they would pull people from the same. sticky rubble. So it took days, nay, weeks, nay, months to find people. This wagon driver named

Caesar Nicola wasn't found until months after, like during the cleanup, during which they had to use salt water and big hoses to try to like dissolve things and they used saws to saw through it because it had all solidified in the cold Boston climate and they used brooms to sweep it around. Decades later, people wanted to know why it was so deadly. So these Harvard scientists actually looked at the temperature records and the weather and the viscosity levels or properties rather of molasses. So they found that when they put the new molasses in the tank that day that it was so much warmer, so that when it escaped the tank initially, like it was thinner, like more watery. So that's how I could travel fast and far and knock out all of those buildings and kill people.

But then like in the cold air, it's solidified. And that's when people sank down low. Oh boy. Yeah, it's quite somber. Obviously, the flood was very big news. It was the front page story in every Boston newspaper that day. And it knocked off the prohibition amendment from the first page, which was past the night before. Which is kind of funny because all of that molasses would have been probably used to make rum.

And also the Versailles peace talks that ended World War I were knocked off the front page as well. Who cares? So people tried to sue United States industrial alcohol, which was the company that owned the tank. But the company was like, no, this was not a faulty tank. There was definitely foul play. Ericists tried to blow up the tank. Okay. And then obviously they were wrong.

Anti-malasses activist. Truly, yes. But after a legal proceeding that lasted five years, they reached a settlement with the victims and they paid them collectively $628,000, which is $8 million today. So nothing. Yeah. For wiping out an entire community or whatever. Yeah.

So this was also just like a very important legal milestone in American history. There's this guy, Stephen Puleo, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, who's like cataloging the truth behind the flood and all the legal stuff said that it was the first case in which expert witnesses were called to a great extent, like engineers, architects, those kind of like technical people. And it kind of like set the stage for class action lawsuits in the future. And it totally changed the relationship between business and governments. After this flood, architects and engineers and inspectors like all had to look at blueprints and the construction and sign off. And everything. which was never a thing before this, which is how it all happened. Wow. Wow. Oh, and the last great fact of this is that local Northenders today say that you can smell molasses there on an especially hot day. That's morbid. I don't like that.

Yeah, it's quite morbid. A somber tale. Quite. I know. I was entertained by this at first, but the more I delved into this, it really is quite sad. That describes most of history, really. All right. Let's take a quick break.

and then we'll be back. And we're back. And I'm going to jump right into my fact, the one with that fantastic headline that I read at the top of the show. It's from the LA Times in 1911. And it tells the story, according to the journalist who wrote it, of perhaps the two most anxious persons in Southern California at present, Dr. Fred B. West of Los Angeles and Mrs. Reginald Waldorf, originally in Philadelphia. Mrs. Reginald Waldorf was a quite pretty widow, according to this journalist, doing serious journalistic work. And she had cut her finger on a rusty saw or something, I believe, rusty knife. It being 1911, that led to blood poisoning that almost killed her. So they cut her finger off to save her life. And she was dissatisfied with that outcome. Granted, it is traumatic to lose any appendage of oneself. but she was not super sympathetic in the way she talked about it, at least according to this journalist, too.

She said, and that is not the worst of it. It is so inartistic to be minus a finger when one has been used to five all one's life. I would rather have a finger that I could not use than to have no finger at all. And Dr. West was like, I can take care of that for you, sweetheart. He told her it was totally possible to find some finger and just graft it onto her hand. and she danced with delight, according to this journalist who I hate at the LA Times. And he takes an alabaster cast of the index finger on her left hand and takes a bunch of measurements so that they can put out ads for this finger. He goes on a search for a finger for her to buy so that he can attach it to her right hand.

Again, according to this guy writing for the LA Times, she was spurring him on with appealing missives. Dear doctor, she wrote, I am depending on you to get that finger for. me. You must not fail me. I don't care if it is a little expensive. Try the hospital wards. Try anybody, anywhere, any time. But get the finger. Get a good healthy tint, too. Do you think that this is like Gossip Girls, Blair Waldorf's great-great-grandmother? Yes, absolutely. It has to be. And by the way, all of this is coming from the website of Thomas Morris, who we've talked about on the show before. He wrote this fantastic book called The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth. And it's just a bunch of bizarre case studies from throughout medical history. And I was clicking around on his site and found

this fantastic tale. Long story short, Dr. West starts to advertise for a right index finger. Any will do, but a nice one, he clearly doesn't really know what he's looking for. He implies that it could be sent by post, which really speaks to his lack of knowledge about how transplantations worked at the time, which was not at all. There had been some success. in terms of grafting tissue from one part of your body to another, but no one had ever done any kind of transplant successfully. Because as most of us know today, your immune system will very quickly reject a foreign body that is sewn onto your body, which is like a reasonable thing for your body to do. Most transplantations were unsuccessful until we had immunosuppressants good

enough to convince your body to not attack the new object. Especially when that new object is like molten from its pony express. Right, exactly. So not only is he promising things that were definitely not possible at the time, but he's not even making it easy on himself. It's not like he set out really scientifically to be like, we can do it the first ever finger transplant. It can be done.

He was just like, yeah, mail us a finger, please. And, you know, they were offering money. And what's really sad and not altogether surprising is that people started writing in who really needed money. And they were like, I'm fine with just nine fingers. One person was like, I wrote this without using my index finger just to be sure that it was okay for me to sell you my index finger. That's devastating. Yeah.

There was one woman who wrote talking about how desperate she was to get her young daughter out of New York City because she kept getting sick. So she would happily sell her finger. So sad. She said, haven't I made every other sacrifice a mother is capable of making? Take my finger. It sounds like something she would lord over her daughter for the rest of her life. Yeah, it's like Fantine. And the real kicker of the newspaper story saga is that the price of the finger that they were supposedly offering kept going up.

At first, it was three figures, which, as Thomas Morris says on his website, even at the time that seems like a paltry sum to part with a finger that is desperately desired. You know, market value should be high. So it's getting more and more expensive. There are people talking about getting tens of thousands of dollars for it. It's really like kind of like gone viral as much as something in 1911 can. And then this woman named Viola Larson starts talking to reporters about how she will sell her finger. But a Chicago reporter figured out that she was just really into keeping herself in the papers. So she would just do anything.

She had stolen a horse and carriage and explained that it was because she was writing a novel about a criminal, so she wanted to be arrested for the experience. She also got herself committed to an insane asylum for the same reason. She organized the Sacred Annoying Club, an anarchist group for young women. So you know what? Maybe she was actually, like, not an attention grabber. Maybe she was just a young radical and a hero of our day. She had actually put a classified ad out in 1909 that she was offering herself as a slate. because Chicago was so sorted that you might as well be owned by another person.

And that ad led to a proposal of marriage. She left him shortly thereafter. She said she'd wanted to try it out and married life wasn't for her. So anyway, Viola Larson probably never actually interested in selling her finger. I think she might have been a performance artist. Yeah, she's fascinating. Yeah. So I would love to read or write a book about her.

but that's kind of where the finger story ends. It just kind of gets out of the news cycle. People stopped caring. There definitely was never any finger transplant. And that made me think, like, how off base was this? You know, obviously in 1911, we were not going to transplant anything, let alone a finger. But really, the only comparable thing we have are hand transplants. There have been a couple cases of people claiming they've done finger transplants or doing them.

because the patient really desires them. But I couldn't really find anything in the medical literature that wasn't about just like grafting fingers from one hand to another. Like if you have a traumatic injury and you lose, say, the use of all of the fingers on one hand and you still have most of the fingers on the other, a doctor can graft some of those fingers, which is still a very complicated surgery and doesn't always work. And if you're lucky, then you regain some of the use on the other hand. But the important thing there is that you really don't need all the fingers on one hand to have a fully functional hand.

Five fingers, great if you have them. Fine if you don't. So it's really, it is a bizarre case that this woman got a doctor to say he would do this probably fatal, definitely ill-fated surgery for something that is completely unnecessary. But, you know, she was feeling inartistic. So I guess whatever. Even hand transplants, which are more often necessary, though still considered not super necessary because, you know, you can have prosthetics. For a long time, people were like the benefits will never outweigh the risks. Transplanting a hand is really hard.

You have a ton of nerves, all these little veins. So it's really difficult to get everything connected properly. It's one of those transplants that takes hours and hours and a multi-person team. and even then you have no way of knowing how well it's going to take. Obviously, you have to worry about rejection, but you also have to worry about how well that hand is going to do in physical therapy. It might not ever be functional in any meaningful way. So it's still a really hard surgery even today. In 1964, there was technically the first hand transplant, but it only lasted for two weeks before the hands were rejected.

Bummer. And that was in Ecuador. And then in 1998, in France, there was an arguably successful. surgery, but the recipient didn't feel good about it psychologically and didn't really adhere to his physical therapy and immunosuppressant regimen. I think reading between the lines, he was disappointed that it wasn't like he had his hand back. He was dissatisfied with the utility of it and the feeling of having an alien hand. So he just didn't really take care of it. And it didn't go well.

And in 2001, after a couple instances of rejection, they removed it. So the first truly successful hand transplant didn't happen until 1999 in Kentucky. And that was because they spent a really long time finding the perfect recipient who had a great support system, who was going to work with these mental health professionals, who was going to keep up with the doctors afterwards so that they could make sure everything went successfully. So it was a long time. It was 88 years from when this guy told a pretty little widow that he could totally get her a new finger to when we actually successfully transplanted a hand. It's really wild to think about the idea that the risk often doesn't outweigh the rewards because they feel so important. There was a really great Amanda Hess article in the New York Times that was talking about how like the internet has just become an internet of hands, right? Like we just watch those tasty videos and then all of those tasty spinoff videos.

where it's just these hands doing things. Slime. Yeah. I can totally imagine just getting a hand transplant and being like, these are not my hands. Yeah. Well, we write about penis transplants a lot because that was one of the more recent transplant surgeries mastered for the first time. And that was another one where they were like, well, the benefits will never outweigh the risks. Because, like, you can live a full life without a penis.

But, like, it's certainly a very traumatic event to lose one. Sure. And certainly there are people who will benefit greatly. benefit greatly from having a new one. So people figured out how to do it and now they do it. And that's great. But the first arguably successful iteration of that surgery ended with it being removed because the guy was like, I can't get used to this. This is freaky. It's a real thing with all visible organs. I don't think it's as common a phenomenon if it's a heart because you don't have to look at that heart in the mirror. So interesting. All right. We're going to take a

quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Hey weirdos, looking for awesome popular science merch. We've got you covered at popsye.threadless.com. Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, mugs, and other great swag with iconic vintage covers or modern designs. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite pop-sai shows like the weirdest thing I learned this week. All that and more at popside.threadlist.com. That's p-o-p-sci-i.threadless.com. Okay, we're back and I'll Eleanor is going to talk to us about a bull. Thank you. So, you know how sometimes you do one thing for like an hour and then you talk about it for the rest of your life?

This is how I felt going to the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin over Thanksgiving. They had this exhibit, rodeo, exclamation point, the exhibition. Oh, my gosh. Very similar to the campaign slogan of Texas Native son, Jeb, exclamation point Bush. And the exhibit was just really fabulous. You walk in and it's like all of the glitz and glamour and honestly horror of rodeo. With a few surprises, the surprise I want to talk about today is a man named Bill Pickett. And so he's this legendary bulldogger, which is the name for someone who wrestles steer.

We're going to get into it. But Bill Pickett was born in Texas in 1870. And so that's five years after the Emancipation Proclamation. His parents were of African and Native Heritage. And he went to school for a little bit. It sounds like he probably attended through fifth grade. But after that point, he left to be a cow puncher, which is the historically accurate term for a cowboy on a ranch. How much punching of the cows did they do?

Very little, but they did something weirder, which is what I'm here to talk about. So I don't think a lot of cow punching. But he got the attention of the Miller brothers who ran this 101 ranch in Oklahoma. And it was super famous at the time for staging these Wild West shows. And so this was at a point in Texas history in the 80s. 1890s and Oklahoma as well, right? This middle west or south, no one really knows kind of area was really trying to define itself. After the South lost, these states were like, well, we don't want to be associated with them because everyone thinks they're backwards. So how do we carve out a

new niche? And the Wild West was the answer. So you just turned up the notch on all of the glory of the open range. And you put on these Wild West shows, even though the Wild West was super not existent by this point. It's just a bunch of barbed wire and cattle and dead buffalo. This is where at the 101 ranch in Oklahoma, Bill Pickett literally invents steer wrestling, which is one of the seven main events in rodeo and a huge American pastime. Wow. The way that this is done, well, the way that Bill Pickett did it was he would ride out on his horse Bradley. He would ride alongside a steer, so they'd be sort of parallel. And then when it was time, he would jump off his horse and wrestle the steer to the ground.

And typically in bulldogging today, that's done by grabbing one horn and then trying to bring the steer off balance so that you can bring it to the ground. You know, you win, so to speak, when you've stopped the steer from moving and one side of its bodies laying in the dirt. But what Bill Pickett did was he bit the steer's lower lip and held on. And that was his strategy for bringing this thing to heal. I'm sorry. And that's, I think, where this bulldogger comes from

because like a bulldog, you just bite down and hold on. Yeah. And so this was his strategy. So I'm standing in the Bullock Texas State History Museum and I've been smiling at rhinestone cowboy boots and then there's this fact about him biting big castrated boy cows by the lip. Like that's what a steer is. They're enormous.

And I was just, I was really taken by it. So I wanted to look in a little bit more. to his life after World War I and during the Great Depression, Wild West shows started to fall out of favor. The 101 ranch went on business in 1931 and Pickett continued on for a while with the 101 ranch. He was raising horses on a different ranch for them. And at age 61, he died what I think is sort of an unfortunately emblematic or almost stereotypical rodeo death, which is that he was hit in the head by a Bronco. And so he died at 61 in 19th. But his legacy is obviously lasted.

In 1972, he was inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame. And he is this really important symbol in Rodeo today. I think a lot of people assume, and for good reason, right, if you turn on Rodeo right now, that it's a pretty white-dominated activity. But he's this really central figure. He's a black man who invented this entire one-seventh of the sport. Wow. And he is a great reminder that Rodeo's origins really come from.

the Spanish conquistadors bringing over their bullfighting traditions, and then that mingling with the demands of the West and the indigenous people who they employed to control their cattle. And it's this very vibrant multicultural phenomenon in the Southwest. I don't know. I'm really taken by Bill Pickett. There's a lot wrong with rodeo, but I just think that this is the most wild story. And I'm really glad to know about him. I want to know how he thought to start doing this. I feel like it must have happened by accident.

Yeah, that would make a lot of sense. Like the cow just reacted so submissively to do it. Right. It's really, like, okay. Like, honestly, what would you do if somebody just out of the blue showed up and bit your lower lip? Honestly, even if I was doing like hand-to-hand combat with someone, like, it was established that we were fighting, if they bit my lower lip, I'd be stunned. It also depends who it was. Like, if it was like blonde Zach Ephron that, like, bit my lower lip.

I'd be fine. I would still be stuck. But for different reasons. Totally. Yeah, I actually grew up half an hour from a rodeo in New Jersey, which always surprises people because people don't realize that New Jersey has some country. So I wrote a story about another thing that I found out at the Bullock Museum, which was about how important rodeo dirt is to competition.

And one of the best photos that I found from the 1930s of women in rodeo because their sport, women compete in rodeo in barrel racing, which is where you take three really tight turns in a clover pattern around barrels on your horse. And one of the best photos of vintage barrel racers is from a Springfield, Massachusetts rodeo competition. So it's really, it is a very unique American pastime and it's everywhere. And it's for everyone except for people who are worried about the treatment of animals. Which is everyone. Really legit.

Wow. Great story. The image, I need to look up like photos or videos of the lip biting move because I don't want to see it. But I feel like it's going to be so much worse to spend the rest of my life. Not knowing. Trying to figure out what it would look like. Did he like loose teeth? Like did he accidentally get his teeth knocked out?

Like I feel like that is so precarious. Yeah. I don't think that anyone was intact. Okay, fair. I guess like it's not a safe thing no matter what. Yeah. They definitely, I don't think that they had great health. This is our heritage.

Wow. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week, you guys? I think that one. Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to beat a man biting a cow's lip. It's just patently shocked. Yeah, which is why it worked. Congratulations to Eleanor, but more importantly, congratulations to Bill Pickett. Indeed.

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