The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Glowing Civil War Wounds, Bubble Wrap's Origins, Historic Font Disputes

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from the origins of bubble wrap to Civil War soldiers whose wounds glowed in the dark. 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 on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman Sophie Bushwick: www.twitter.com/sophiebushwick 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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The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. 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. So the episode you're about to listen to is weird in like a different way than usual. For starters, I'm not in it. Thanks for hosting Eleanor. And more importantly, we're moving and this was recorded in a temporary space. We promise that this is not our new normal and the next episode will be especially pleasing to your ears. It is our Halloween spooktacular extravaganza, and we are very excited to share it with you.

So, in the meantime, enjoy the weird facts and maybe some weird hissing noises that you might notice. Just think of it as an Easter egg. Okay, bye. Popular science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other 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 Eleanor Cummins.

I'm Sophie Bushwick. And I'm Jason Letterman. So as you may have noticed, Rachel is not here. Don't worry, she'll be back next week for a very spooky Halloween episode. But I have commandeered this very strange shit for this week. But I think, you know, we'll follow the same rules as always and get started by teasing our facts

and then getting into our really great stories. So Sophie, do you want to start? Sure. My tease is that bubblewraps inventors intended it to be wallpaper. Ooh. Wow. Pop pop. Pop, pop. Jason, do you want to share your teeth? Sure. I want to talk about some Civil War soldiers who had wounds that glowed in the dark. Oh, yikes. Gross. I'm already into it.

Yeah, definitely. I would love to talk about typographical dispute that had a lot of implications. meeting up to World War II. So we're going to talk about fonts. Ooh, I do love fonts. Well, fonts are great, but I kind of think we should start with blowing wounds. Oh, I totally agree. Okay.

Take us away, Jason. All right. So I was looking for some inspiration this week for a fact, and I turned to our Facebook group, which you are all welcome to join. Search for The Weirdest Thing on Facebook, or it's Facebook.com slash groups slash the weirdest thing. And I found this post by Derek Roberts, and then with some help from Valerie Franik.

Let's just dive in from there. All right. On April 6, 1862, the Battle of Shiloh began when Confederate troops launched a surprise attack on Union soldiers led by Major General and Future President Ulysses S. Grant. Yeah, you know I'm all about the name dropping. The Southern troops eventually retreated, but not before 3,000 soldiers had died,

and more than 16,000 soldiers were wounded. It took two full days for medics to get to all of the wounded soldiers because there were so many of them. But as they did, the medics noticed something unusual, which was some of these wounds glowed in the dark. Wait, so the medics are like going out onto the field of battle and retrieving people. Correct. Okay. And it's taking them two days. It's taking it because they're just lying out there.

Yes. In the mud, in the cold. This is in Tennessee in mid-April or early April. So it's still pretty cold there. Yikes. And so these wounds came to be known as angels glow, not just because they were glowing, but also because the wounds that did glow healed faster and healed cleaner that those that didn't. Huh.

This is a mystery that could have gone unsolved forever, but it didn't. Thank God. I know. If you were going to say we still don't know, I would be real magic. And that was the tale. Thank you, Jason. So in 2001, the 17-year-old Bill Martin was visiting Shiloh and heard about the glowing wounds. And he turned to his mom, Phyllis Martin, who is, she works for the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

Okay. She's a microbiologist. And he said, could have bacteria have done that? In an interview with AAAS science net links, I just love this quote. She says, and so being a scientist, of course I said, well, you can do an experiment to find out. Yeah. And if that's not the most mom thing to say, I don't know what it is. So let's come be our moms.

So he did. Bill and his friend John Curtis started studying what the weather conditions were like at the Battle of Shiloh, as well as the soil conditions, and they did some research on the bacteria that Phyllis studied, which is called photorabdis luminescence or pea luminescence for its friends. Right. The bacteria that can glow in the dark and develops in the guts of nematodes. So what you're saying is that Phyllis literally is an expert in like bioluminescence already. So just like perfect storm. Yes. Rang she happened to already be studying P. luminescence. Yes. Like foremost expert, the battle, and a great teenager.

Correct. Ready to rumble. Correct. These bacteria, the P. Luminousinscence, when they are puked up by nematodes, they glow blue. Beautiful. Yeah. So Pee luminescence could have survived in Shiloh based on the soil and weather conditions of the day, which is very exciting. But there's a problem, which is the human body is too warm for P.

Pelluminescence to survive. But if you recall, this is early April in Tennessee. It's very cold. Some of the men were literally on the field for days in hypothermia set in. And so their bodies cooled enough that the bacteria were able to get into the wounds and to help heal them. So how exactly do the bacteria help the wounds heal? Yeah. So Pee luminescence is not particularly infectious to humans.

So there are cases and you can get very sick from it, but more than likely if you were infected. It's neutral. It's pretty neutral. Your body would flush it out. But because it releases like a chemical cocktail, that's the term that mental floss used in this article that I was reading. Again, thank you, Derek, from the Facebook group. They release this chemical cocktail that can kill off its competitors, and that's probably what help to kill off pathogens within the wound and save these people. That's so interesting.

So it was like it was kind of doing more good than harm in this one scenario. and I was able to help the people who survive. And the conditions were perfect to let it do so. Like if it had been a little warmer or the bodies that were left out there had been put under blankets or something. Right. Yeah.

That's amazing. This reminds me of a case where with the Joplin Missouri tornado a few years back, you know, people were brutally injured, right? By like falling debris. Their homes were, you know, completely destroyed. And so when they went to the emergency room, the sort of triage protocol is that you're taking care of people with the sort of, you know, severe physical injury first. So all these people who came in with like small scratches and stuff like that weren't really like tended to directly because it seemed like such a smaller problem.

So it turns out that there was actually this fungus that like lived in soils. And so it didn't ever really interact with humans that often right. Like you're not dying from it all the time. But because the tornado literally ripped up the soil and turned the world inside out. It was just like throughout the environment and really easily got into people's wounds and so it went from you know like a topical scratch to like a deadly infection Like I'm not terrified enough of tornadoes already Yeah every time I get a scratch I'm gonna be like this is it This is the one that kills me I but I think like similar to like the angels glow like it was just such an unusual like a perfect storm right like you know

Yeah, yeah Yeah, like it was like an kind of an unlikely set of events that could like like like like, you know, transpired in both cases. I mean, that seems more likely to me that you'd have a perfect storm of bad as opposed to good. I feel like often the stories, when you hear wounds and bacteria, the first assumption is, oh, this is a bad thing, as opposed to the Civil War case where it was actually helpful. Yeah, yeah, it probably saved a lot of these soldiers' lives. It's amazing.

Yeah. I love that story. I'm shocked that it was heartwarming. It seemed like it was starting off in a bunch of other planes. Right. We start off with a bunch of dead civil war soldiers. but like the bacteria, it glowed in the dark. And with that, we're going to take a quick, great.

We'll be back in a second with another great fact. Me, more, I am a robot. Listen to Last Week in Tech. Thanks for that introduction, Robot. I'm Stan Horacek, one of the hosts of Last Week in Tech, a podcast from the popular science editors, where we take a look back at the week's big technology stories, including everything from new products, social media,

and even future tech, yes, like robots. You can listen on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, wherever you get podcasts, or if you are a robot, just stick your antenna up in the air and tune into our frequency. Listen, or I will destroy all humans. Thanks, robot. But please do it because he's not joking. And I'm going to be sharing my teased typographical dispute. I was working on a story last week about this idea. It's called Sam's Forgetica.

And it's this new font. And the whole premise is that it will help you to remember better because it's, actually harder to read. And it sort of got me thinking about like fonts in general, right? Like they're everywhere. And but like it's not often that you look at one and can like name it. Like unless you're really into fonts, you don't spend a lot of time like thinking about them actively. So I was like looking through the contentious parts of font history, which do exist. Thank you for asking. Oh sorry, do they exist?

Yeah, they do exist. And so the one that I came across that I found really fascinating is called the Antiqua fracture dispute. That makes it sound like the de-finestration of Prague, like a major historical event. It is in my book. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Jason. It should be. So essentially, there are two fonts

that look very similar. Antiqua is one that, like, you would recognize pretty instantaneously. It's a very, you know, kind of like robust and romantic font. You know, it's something that when you look at it, you would immediately think like old book. like very old book.

Okay. So like very flourished? Yes, exactly. Like a very, yeah, very fancy, but readable. And that will be important later. Fracture, on the other hand, was much more difficult to sort of read. It was even more dramatic and had a lot of flare. And that was the one that the Germans preferred and that they believed, like, you know,

like they identified with deeply. And so going back to the. 15th and 16th centuries as fracture and Antiqua both sort of emerged, the German people would, you know, use fracture and the rest of Europe would use Antiqua. And that doesn't seem like that big of a deal until the Germans start to become a very like nationalistic country in the early 1800s. So like, you know, a little bit of background, right? Like the Holy Roman Empire dissolves under Napoleon. And Germany is occupied for a time.

And sort of from this comes this very nationalistic culture. And they are in this period where they're trying to say, like, what it means to be German. Like, this is, you know, a very pressing problem at the time. And naturally, fonts are a part of that. Naturally. And so they say that, you know, well, fracture. Like, that font is a part of what it means to be German. Like, Antiqua is not only said to be un-German, but it's like very rude.

rudely described at the time, shallow, light, not serious. Whereas fracture, let me tell you, being a darker and denser. And by the way, more unreadable script, right? They say that it connotes sobriety and the depth of the German people's culture and intelligence. Because it takes so much more concentration to read it. Yeah, exactly, right? But these are very similar. Like visually, they are similar?

Yeah, let me pull up a photo, like honestly, I will pull up a photo so you guys can see this. Can we post this on our website? Oh, yeah, there will definitely be a photo of these on our website for some comparison. So Antiqua's on top and fractures on bottom, right? Oh, God, fracture is terrible. So fracture almost looks handwritten and it's also spelled, I thought it was- like a font typed. I thought it was spelled like fracture, like a fractured bone.

That's spelled like Fractore. Yeah, Fractore. Yeah. German. Yes. Fractore. Like, it's serious. really almost does come from its like inaccessibility on some level like you really have to be like versed in reading it to get through it because it is just like as you're saying like almost

handwritten yeah yeah very curvy yeah and there are like a bunch of different stories about like the origin of fracture like at this time people were really into like the middle ages and so they wanted to believe that it was some like you know gothic kind of script and there are other stories that like it originates um with the holy roman emperor um commissioning a piece from Albrecht Dorr, the, you know, the wood block carver who's very, like, famous in the German Renaissance, you know, but it was just like such this point of pride. And that continued into the 1930s and 1940s when it became the official fonts of the Nazi party. Of course it did. Oh, that's why I say, like, you know, like Fractor, like Antigua sort of just blends into

the background, but Fractore is like something when you look at it, you're like, oh, like, I've seen that before and that is because like it was the thing that they were using on all of their propaganda. So the Nazis are like what's the most annoying terrible font we can choose? I know. Yeah. And they were just like this is part of like what it means to project Germanness. And so what I think was really fascinating is there was this Vox video that was talking about the font Futura, which I feel like you've seen this. Right. Yes, I have seen that video. Futura was something that in the 1920s and 30s, this German typographer was like working on developing and he was really passionate about it and he thought that you know he could create a very

simple script like futura is actually on my like pops eye water bottle right like we use it a lot because it's been to the moon like you know it's like NASA uses it it's something that persists to this day in a way that fractor does not he developed this and the nazi party just like totally rebuffed like his font and him and and hated him for trying to do something different um which ended up saving the font right because the downfall of the nazi party means the downfall the fall of Fractore. But Futura, because it was rejected by the German state, ended up being used everywhere else. And so now, you know, you see that in like Wes Anderson movies and Stanley Kubrick films and all of this. So I just think it's like so funny to think about these,

you know, like we're still using Futura every day. And not only does it have its own backstory, but its backstory has a backstory in the form of these like very difficult to read fonts. So that was the thing that really excited me. But it doesn't. stop, you know, 70 years ago. Like, fonts continued to be, like, very, like, politically relevant in terms of, you know, like, shaping messages and trying to define, like, who you are to the world. But also, I found this really, like, interesting case that I just have to share with you guys of font, a typographical dispute in a legal situation. So it was called Fontgate. Of course it was. And this is a fontgate hotel. This was literally last year.

A Pakistani politician had been accused of sort of like bringing all of these laws and, you know, like it was a huge scandal. And she put up a bunch of documents in her defense that she says are from 2006 and are like an out, right, to like these claims against her. But it turns out that the font that these like documents are in, this cracks me up, were Microsoft's Calibri font, which only came out in 2007. Yes. Oh my God. I saw it coming and I'm so excited. She was caught because she tried to use a more modern font. Yes. Wow. So, okay, also just like... Use Times New Roman.

I know. Just go, yeah, stick to the basics. She could have used Fractors. Everyone would have been like totally reasonable. But it was just amazing to me like, first of all, like who on the like prosecution's legal team is like their font expert? And like second, like, how do I get that job? Like, that's amazing. Like, to just come through in the final hour and be like, I know how we, like, trap this person. Like, we have the proof here in this font.

I wonder if someone was just as a hobby was a huge font nerd and was just sort of like, hey, I don't believe. Yeah, entirely possible. What a great legal strategy. Like, is it? Bravo. Yeah. I have no words for how great that is. Yeah.

But, yeah, Popside. Like, we've written a lot about different. fonts, like there's like the Sansfergetica one, which is almost like Fractore, I feel like, in the sense that, you know, the Germans probably really were smart and did remember a lot of what they were reading because it was so hard to read anything. And so that's sort of what the Sansfregetica font is doing. You know, but we've also written like about the design of like the Space Force logos and, you know, the fonts there were criticized. Everyone loves to like yell at the water cooler about comics fans. Like, I don't know. I'm just here, I guess, to say that

we should all think a little bit more deeply about our fonts because they have some pretty fun stories waiting for us. Fonds used to be more fun. I feel like when I was younger, I did, we would play around with like turning, putting the words into wingdings. Oh yeah. Like, ha, ha, ha, now you can't read it. Yeah. Speaking of which, I spent a lot of time as a week watching that S&L skit with Ryan Gosling, the papyrus one. Oh my God. I love the sketch so much. Which is literally about the his belief, this character's belief, that James Cameron, when making the movie Avatar just like put Avatar title at the top of a word, document, then pulled down the drop menu, went through all of them, and then clicked on papyrus,

and then that's how we got the avatar movie logo. It's futuristic? Yeah, she goes, he, like, in this skit, he hits a fire hydrant, sets off a, you know, with his car, sets off a, like, a plume of water, and this woman comes running around and and he goes, do you remember the avatar logo? Because it's like 10 years after the movie came out. And she goes, yeah, it's tribal but futuristic. And everyone's asking him, his friend's like, man, you've already told me this theory because

he has like a, you know, like a serial killer board of like all of his proof. Where do you even, where else do you even see this font? And he's like hookabars, Shakira merch, off brand teas. The way he says off brand teas is actually like really funny. Anyway, you should definitely watch the papyrus skit. So with that, we will take a break and come back with some bubble wrap. Can't we? Hey, pals, looking for super cool popular science merch.

We've got you covered at popsai.threadless.com. Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, and mugs with iconic vintage covers and illustrations ripped from the magazine. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite shows like last week in tech and the weirdest thing I learned this week. That's popsci.com. P-O-P-S-C-I-thudlis.com. We are back and Sophie, I'm super excited for your story. So I would like before I give my story to tell you both to look under your chairs. And by under your chairs, I mean on your desk, because I brought you bubble wrap.

Oh my God, it's like an Oprah episode. This is the worst ASMR video. So the story of bubble wrap starts in 1957 and this is just a couple years before season one of Mad Men. So that will help you set the scene because the, the, The trend, this is about like trends in wallpaper. And so 10 years earlier, they'd introduced a vinyl wallpaper, and you don't just have to have paper wallpapers anymore. So people are trying to make wallpapers out of stuff like bamboo.

And these two engineers in New Jersey were like, we should make plastic wallpaper. And not only that, but we should make 3D plastic wallpaper. Okay. So these two guys, Alfred Fielding and Mark Chavon, I, H-A-B-A-N-N-E-S, I have no idea how you say his name. That was not what I expected. Yeah, no.

Chauvnais. Mark Chauvines. It's almost definitely French because his first name is Mark with a C. Oh. Chevonne. Chavon. Chavon. Chavon.

That's it. So they decided to make this material, this sort of three-dimensional plastic by sealing two shower curtains together with air-trap between them. And after a few weeks. iterations of this, they ended up creating a machine to do so. And I'll talk a little bit more about how the machine to make a bubble wrap works later. But for now, they were really trying to sell this wallpaper and it just did not take off. Turns out people don't really want bubble wrap on their walls. I mean, disagree. So when that didn't take off, they turned to the next logical application, which was greenhouses. They thought it could work as greenhouse insulation and

actually did work, but it didn't really take off. So in 1960, the two men founded the Sealed Air Corporation. And then it was after that that they realized they could use this stuff as a packing material. And their very first client was IBM. Oh, good client. Yeah. At the time, IBM had just released one of the first mass-produced business computers called the 1401. And when I say computer, this is not like your desktop PC.

This is like a building. Yeah. This is like the computer in. In hidden figures where you see them learning how to use this giant computer or honestly, even to go back to Mad Men, they have a computer in that show too. But this is a really large thing. And it's got a lot of Steve Jobs computer. It's like punch cards. This is a big old computer.

And so it's got a lot of a lot of prosnickety parts in it. And so when you're shipping all these many parts for this giant machine, you have to have a way to protect them in transit. And so the Sealed Air Corporation pitched bubble wrap as a way of protecting it and IBM accepted and it really took off from there. The Sealed Air Corporation is the most like late capitalist, like business name I've ever heard. I love it. Well, the thing is the sealed air corporation actually has like multiple times through their history considered changing their name to like the bubble wrap company or just, you know, naming themselves after bubble wrap. But the thing is bubble wrap is like 10% of their total revenue these days. Oh. They actually make most of their money from food packaging, so they do stuff like shrink wrap bags and laminated films.

That's really interesting. In 1993, Fielding and Chavon were inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame, and bubble wrap has remained popular ever since everyone really loves popping it. Sealed Air Corporation has done a bunch of stunts to keep, you know, to keep the name alive. So in 2000, they had a pumpkin dropping contest, and they put a bunch of, of layers of bubble wrap on the ground and then they dropped in 815 pound pumpkin nicknamed Gordzilla. Oh no.

They dumped it. I love it. See, the problem is they dropped this from like a 35 foot crane and the bubble wrap protected the ground but then the pumpkin bounced. Oh no. Bubble wrap trampoline. A bubble wrap trampoline would be super fun. Gorsilla, no.

And other kind of cool things about bubble wrap. wrap. If you took the annual production of bulwrap and put it in a line, you could circle the equator 10 times. It's alarming. That's a lot of bubble wrap. And I mean, one of the reasons I got interested in this topic is because we're actually moving at the office. So we've got a big box of bubble wrap. We're wrapping a lot of things. And I found a video of showing how bubble wrap is made by machine, which is, which is just, it's one of those hypnotic videos because I think just watching anything be made on large specialized machines is really fun. But the way you make bubble wrap is you start with these pellets of resin, like the size of gravel, and they go into an extruder,

which is this long cylinder that rotates while it heats, and you get this liquid from the pellets that melt. And then they squeeze it out of the cylinder into two stacks of this clear plastic and then one layer gets wrapped around a it's a sort of um a drum with these holes punched in it and then they use apply suction to the holes to pull the plastic into them to create the bubbles oh and then the other piece gets placed uh seals air into the bubbles so they stick together and then they you know dry it and pack it and the problem is that uh the plastic the bubble wrap is made of would normally just leak air so by the time it arrived you just have two kind of squashy layers of plastic without the air between them that acts as cushioning.

So a lot of companies used to just sort of spray the outside with a saran coating. These days, sealed air has a method of putting air retention into the material into the polyethylene during extrusion, but they won't tell anyone how they do it because trade secrets. There you go. So my final thing is that this video was addictive and so I was watching it like multiple times. I can't wait to watch. And then I was I was reading about it. It turns out that, so the Cielder Corporation releases this video in 2014,

according to them, it wasn't really intended for public consumption. So there's an article in the Huffington Post where they talked to the Cieldera Corporation, and apparently a 12-year-older corporation named Naomi, who has leukemia, wrote to the Cieldera Corporation asking, A, how do you make this material? And B, can you send me a big box of it that's in a cool color? And so they created this video for her and sent it to her on a DVD with this big box of Bblower app. Hmm. Aww.

Yeah. I love that that's what she really wanted to know. Well, honestly, I don't blame her. I mean, bubble wrap is really fun to pop. Yeah, I think that she sounds truly great. Jason. All right, let's do it. Let's go.

I guess it's time to decide who we think had the weirdest fact this week. Glowing wounds. Glowing wounds. I think bubble wrap. Hmm. I also think bubble wrap. Yeah, bubble wrap was amazing. Yay! Triumph and popping!

I'm so sorry to all the listeners. No, it's okay. Triumph and bubble popping is exactly right. Thanks so much for listening to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. Stay tuned because one week from today, we will have our very special spooky Halloween episode, which is basically our show's Christmas, so it's going to be lit. The nightmare before Christmas.

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