The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Lice-Feeding Nazi Fighters, Bisexual Birds, EZ Pass Origins

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

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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 Feltman. I'm Perbita Saha. I'm Aaron Oman Updike. And I'm Aaron Welsh. Welcome Aaron's to the show. So nice to have you. Thanks so much for having us. We're super pumped. Super excited to be here. This week we have not one but two very special guests who are the hosts of a podcast that people recommend to me all the time, which makes sense because it's great and also full of weird and sometimes upsetting stuff.

which is definitely my brand. Arons, would you like to talk about your show for any listeners who have not had the pleasure? Absolutely. So our podcast is called This Podcast Will Kill You. And, yeah, I mean, essentially it's about things that can kill you. Mostly. Most of the time. Most of the time.

Sometimes we do some better things like vaccines, which are wonderful and they prevent you from dying. But yeah, so each episode, we take a particular. topic, typically a disease, and we talk about its biology, how it infects you, how, you know, what treatments are available for it. And then we go into its history. It's evolutionary history sometimes, where did it come from, and then how it has impacted human history over time. And then we follow it up with where do we stand today? How much plague is there in the world, for example? More than you might expect. Yeah, more plague than most of us would care for, I think. But I think our favorite part, or at least what started out is our favorite part of our podcast,

was that we have a custom cocktail for each episode called a quarantini and a non-alcoholic one called a placebo rita. So, yeah. Learning and laughing. I love that. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. I think this is going to be a great fit. But let's get into it. 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 found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and 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. Perbita, when do you start with your tease? Yeah, hello. I'm going to take a little tech spin this. this episode, and I'll be sharing the dramatic origin story of an American classic. It's not baseball. It's not apple pie, but it is the easy pass. I love it. Well, intriguing.

A quintessential aspect of American life, for sure. Certainly my American life, but I grew up in New Jersey, so I spent a lot of time on toll roads. Errins, what's your teas? We are very excited to talk about louse feeding, louse feeder was a job during World War II. And not just that it was a job. It was like a pretty sweet gig. Like it paid pretty well. And it was a lot more than just a job.

Doon, do. I love that. I can't wait to hear more. Okay, well, my tease is that I am going to talk about a goose from New Zealand who turned out to be a bisexual icon. I am so intrigued. I can't wait. I'm already best one. Well, we can start with the goose.

It's a great, great story. We are recording this on the first day of Pride Month. I hadn't really put that together because the episode won't be airing for a while. but I'll pretend that I did that on purpose. The real reason that I'm thinking about bisexual birds is that my first book came out recently. It's called Been There, Done That, A Rousing History of Sex. Many of our listeners have already bought it, which I so appreciate. But if you haven't, you can pick it up anywhere you buy books.

There's also an audiobook that I narrated. And they only let me do that because they believe that because I have a podcast, some of you will want the audiobook. book. So please don't prove them wrong. But anywho, one of the stories, there are a lot of weird historical sex stories in this book. But one of them has just really stayed in my mind as being so delightful. And that is the story of this goose named Thomas. So it's the early 90s. and a black swan flies into New Zealand's Weimano Lagoon. And like all black swans, it is an absolutely beautiful bird. These are Australian natives.

They are strikingly dark. They have these bright red beaks and this flash of white flight feathers that you really only see when they are in flight. Just lovely. So it's no surprise that this. foreign bird, which locals dubbed Henrietta, because a wing injury kept her from leaving with the rest of her flock, so she started hanging around. It's no surprise that she caught the attention of this, you know, plain old white goose named Thomas. And I don't know if he

had a name before then. We only got a name once he became noteworthy as the goose who hangs around with the black swan. But they named him Thomas. And for nearly two decades, they were generally always seen together. Thomas protected Henrietta from dogs and other disturbances, presumably like toddlers throwing bread at them, those kinds of things. And then another Black Swan showed up. And that's where things started to get kind of complicated. So first, Henrietta starts spending more of her time with this new gal pal. And Thomas was like acting pretty aggressive towards them. He was like picking fights.

He just seemed really ticked off that he was losing Henrietta's attention. And then this newly arrived black swan laid eggs. And Henrietta started caring for them the way you might expect a Papa Swan to care for his young. Because plot twist, Henrietta had always been a male black swan. Apparently, they're kind of hard to sex. which makes sense because swans have like very tiny external genitalia when, you know, they have a cloaca, but also like the thing that emerges from the cloaca, very tiny.

So you don't often see a swan penis, not easy to spot. And ergo the groundskeepers had missexed this bird. very confusingly, the tour guides who worked at the lagoon where this all went down, they decided to just name the newly arrived actually female bird, Henrietta. And then the artist formerly known as Henrietta became Henry. So just so it's clear for our listeners, Henry is the bird who has been here since the early 90s, who has had a loving relationship with Thomas. Brand new and a new mom.

The good news is that Thomas didn't hold this grudge for long and actually once the chicks hatched, he took on like a tertiary parental role. He cared for those babies and the babies that would come over the course of the next six years because Henry and Henrietta had 68 in total, which seems like a lot to me. I don't hang out with a lot of black swans. So anyway, they clearly were having a good time. And Thomas became an icon to tourists, mostly because they were just like completely charmed by how devoted he was to this family of swans.

He was always with them. He would look after the swans. And he even taught some of the baby swans to fly, which is. So precious. And what's really cool is that for Henry and Henrietta, neither of those arrangements would have seemed unusual at all because research on the species that they are shows that male black swans frequently pair up together both in captivity and in the wilds. They sometimes briefly associate with a female black swan and then kick her out.

Very poorly negotiated surrogate style, I guess. And they've also been known to simply overtake an existing nestful of eggs to raise as their own. Some of these very burly male-male couples that just like go around bullying their way into fatherhood. which is kind of cute and also upsetting. But they can also set up what are essentially long-term throuples. So all three birds, two males and one female will participate in mating displays together. And then the males will take turns either being the one who is mounting the female or being the one that is like parading around protectively while it's happening.

And in this setup, the female is not kicked out as soon as the laying is done. And the males actually, they will jointly take over caring for the nest so that she can then immediately go lay more eggs. So they like maximize her laying potential by like co-parenting, which is just really cool. I really love that for them. And according to researchers who have observed all of these setups among black swans, It is, you know, from a reproductive success standpoint, it is incredibly successful. It's very stable.

And it happens pretty often. So my question is, like, was Henry spending the better part of the 90s, like, wondering why his beloved Thomas didn't want to go, like, rob a nest with him so they could start a family? What was it going to take to get him to commit and be a family man? But the Snoozyl and Triad stayed solid through those 68 babies until Henry died of old age in 2009. And that prompted Henrietta to go looking for more of her kind elsewhere. geese and swans can reproduce and create these like modeled hybrids known as swoosh, which is a thing I just learned today.

But I guess Thomas just wasn't Henrietta's type. and without their shared affection for Henry, she just decided to go start over. Now, ironically, a few years after that, when Thomas finally met a female goose that he fancied enough to settle down with, another goose stole those resulting chicks for their own. And there's no word on whether that goose was gay,

but I'm pretty sure the BBC, where I got most of this information from, would have mentioned that because that obviously would have been quite a twist. So we have to assume that that bird had less heartwarming motives. Apparently geese sometimes will actually kidnap goslings from like less powerful birds around them to pad their broods, like to literally add a layer of extra babies to the outer nest. so predators will grab those instead of their natural young, which they'll keep better protected, which reminds me of advice I got once when a friend of mine's apartment got broken into, which was like to keep a decoy laptop, like in a really open area.

And they were like, look, this is teenagers doing this. They don't want to dig around your stuff. They want to grab a valuable item and get in and out. So like just put your old laptop on the coffee table and probably they'll be fine and you'll be fine. And everyone can keep on living. And I was like, that's a good idea. Apparently geese do that with children. That's not so great.

But despite that unfortunate turn of events with his little goslings, when Thomas died in 2018, he was beloved by tourists from all over the world. A lot of this information comes from an obituary in the BBC. And he was 40 years old, which is extremely old in goose years. And I think we can all agree that he did get to experience the joys of fatherhood with his 68 Black Swan stepchildren. So I think he lived a rich and full life. And he's a queer icon to this day. But yeah, that's the story of Thomas, the goose. Oh, my goodness. That's so heartwarming.

It is so cute. I also can't get over 68 because I also want to know how many of those 68. Did each of those have 68 offspring? Because a lot of geese. Yeah, I was really, this was like such a lovingly crafted obituary from the BBC. And I felt like the one real hole in the reporting was like, what about his grandchildren? Yeah.

I assume because, you know, blacks ones, they can be found all over the place now, but they're native to Australia. And my understanding is that the ones that passed through this lagoon in New Zealand were headed back to Australia or away from Australia. So I would assume that as those migratory groups came through for a, you know, a juvenile, Black Swan, it would be hard to resist, you know, picking up and leaving with them. So you didn't have to also find a goose to shack up with at this lagoon in New Zealand. So I assume that's why there were no mentions of doting grand baby geese swans in the obituary. But yeah, I was like, that is a high number that there have to be just exponential number. of Thomas's step great great grandchildren out there right now.

Unbelievable. I love it. That's so cute. And yeah, I talk about a lot of like, you know, misconceptions about how sex works in my book. But I really liked the Black Swan one because the idea that there are animals that have these. what in humans would be called like non-traditional co-parenting setups. And it's like, how much more traditional can you get? A swan does it.

So I love that. Yeah. Very, anything that's traditional or non-traditional, very human-centric views there. Exactly. Yeah. I actually had a friend recently who asked me, Rachel already knows this, but Erin's, I, I'm a birder and my friends are constantly asking me random burn questions. But one of my friends has been observing a flock of Canada geese at her hospital.

And she saw two males kind of like hurting some chicks and seemingly like, you know, forming like a family unit. And she asked me something similar on whether, you know, that happens, whether like, same, sex pairs will do that in Canada geese. So now I feel like I just have to send her Rachel's book. That's always my end game. Yeah, I'll have to look up Canada geese specifically. But apparently, I mean, it's pretty common in birds, I think. You see it in penguins.

There's kind of like they have that nesting instinct. And if for whatever reason it doesn't work out that they are in a mating pair and producing chicks on their own, it does seem like a lot of times males will be like, I still want to do it. I want to be a dad. I am guilty of anthropomorphizing, mostly only when talking about gay bird dads. I will admit that. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

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It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Okay, we're back. And let's turn it over to our guests so we can hear about flea bags, flea feeding, flea-bag eras, etc. We'll talk about louse, lice feeding, less about flea. fleas. Oh my gosh. Those are two different things. But it's a common mistake and fleas are also awesome and probably worthy of plenty of fun facts. Oh yeah. But before we get into the louse feeding part of it, I want to start with a little bit of context. That'll make it all make a lot more

sense. Okay. So this whole louse feeding story, it all starts with typhus. So typhus, specifically epidemic typhus, is an infectious disease. It's caused by a bacterium that's known as rickettsia prawezekiae. And the symptoms of epidemic typhus, they're pretty nonspecific. It generally starts with a fever. And then you have anything from headache, abdominal pain, muscle aches. There's a whole variety of rashes that can develop that can really vary in how they look. And very often the disease will progress to delirium, which is like very well.

waxing and waning consciousness. It can progress to seizures or even coma. And unfortunately, without treatment, so without antibiotics, the mortality rate of epidemic typhus was astounding. It was as high as 60%. But it could be even higher if the person who got sick was already, say, malnourished or otherwise had like a weakened immune system to begin with. So typhus was called, epidemic typhus, in part to distinguish it from several other similar diseases that are different typhuses. But one of the things that distinguishes epidemic typhus from other diseases is that it often occurred in very large outbreaks. And as a lot of the diseases that we talk about on our podcast tend to do, typhus is the kind of disease that became really, really prevalent during times of

war, during times of famine or natural disasters, or just basically any other major human catastrophe, the kind of situations that crammed a lot of humans together in a small area and often weakened their resistance to disease. And part of the reason that typhus is a crowd disease like this is because of the way that it's transmitted. So typhus is spread by none other than the human body lous, pediculus, humanis, corpus. And I'm going to slide in another weird fun fact, just because we can. The human body louse is often considered a separate species or at least a separate subspecies than the human head louse that your kids all have, which generally the human head louse doesn't transmit any diseases, unlike the human body louse counterpart. They've subspeciated to exist on

different parts of our body. And it's very cool. That is so wild. I mean, I guess it's, it's not so different from, like, when you look at, like, the bacterial microbiome and, like, the belly button versus the armpit. It's, like, different continents. Yeah. But still, that is, um, really surprising. Lice are very cool. And they do this on, like, so many different species. Like, the lice that we're living on Henrietta were totally different than the lice that we're living on Thomas. Different spaces. Right. Anyways. Okay. Enough about lice. We'll talk more about lice. But typhus specifically, which is spread by body lice, it's then understandably a disease that would very often historically rear its head whenever times were tough,

because those were the times when lice would flourish. Things like famine, displacement, war, these are the types of conditions under which body lice are very easily transmitted from person to person. And if those lice were carrying those rickettsia, they were then spreading typhus as they went. So typhus has likely been a plague of humans for, well, we don't know exactly how long, but certainly hundreds and more probably thousands and thousands of years. But for much of human history, it was really difficult to distinguish between various causes of epidemic illnesses, generally speaking, especially those which for, flourish during these times of stress that we keep talking about, and a lot of those diseases shared the same symptoms and signs, malaise, fever, etc. So how do you distinguish, you know, this fever versus that type of fever? And so you really needed both germ theory and microbiology

development microscopes, culturing, et cetera, to get started in order to understand which bacteria or which viruses caused which diseases. And for typhus, that was around the early 1900s. And that's when people were able to both identify the causative agent of typhus, this bacteria and rickettsia praozykiae, and also when they figured out that it was transmitted by these body lice. But just knowing those two things alone, what causes the disease and how what's transmitted, while that's helpful, that knowledge doesn't by itself stop the spread of disease. Because even if you have effective treatment, let's throw treatment in there as well, you won't be able to get rid of typhus if you can't clean your clothes properly, which takes hot water

and then not wearing them for five days. So if you're on the move during a war, or you're displaced, or you're, you know, escaping from a really dangerous bad conflict or situation, how are you going to be able to find hot water to wash your clothes and then not wear those clothes for five days? It just can't happen. You're not. Yeah. And so to paint a picture of just how widespread both typhus and body lice were, let's check out some typhus numbers from World War I and the Russian Revolution. So between the years 1917 and 1921, so just coming off of World War I, and starting the Russian Revolution, it's estimated that in Russia 25 million people became infected with typhus, and around 2.5 to 3 million people died of the disease. And we already knew a lot about it

at that point in time. And this monumental impact that typhus had, not just on Russia, but also in many places during World War I, this impact made people really, really scared of the disease, and rightfully so. And it also made them realize that treatment alone wasn't going to cut it. Prevention was key. And how do you prevent a disease? Vaccines. Vaccines. Okay, so, louse feeders, we teased it, we haven't talked about it yet, where do they come into it? After the devastation caused by typhus during World War I and the Russian Revolution, many research labs set their sites specifically on typhus and the development of a typhus vaccine. But one of the biggest hurdles in creating a typhus vaccine is that you needed to be able to grow enough of the rickettsia

bacteria in order to get material to make the vaccine. And rickettsias are notoriously difficult to maintain in the lab. They're intracellular, they're super small, they can be very host-specific, and so you can't just have petri dishes or flasks just generating bacteria over and over again. And also because this is a human-specific pathogen, you couldn't use lab animals as reservoirs of this bacteria. You needed a more creative solution. Enter Dr. Rudolph Weigel. So Dr. Weigel, who was born in what is now the Czech Republic, lived most of his life in Lavov. which was then part of Poland, now part of Ukraine.

And Dr. Weigel came up with the brilliant idea to use the lice themselves as the maintenance animal to create a lot of this typhus pathogen for his vaccine research. He would grind up infected lice and then inject that into the butts of uninfected lice to be able to make more vaccine material. But again, there's this problem. Where do you get supplies of uninfected lice? How do you maintain a louse colony with enough food? Well, because lice are so species specific to humans.

Human bodies. Human bodies. Humans had to supply the food in the form of blood. Oh, boy. And that's how the job of louse feeder was created. Yeah. This was an actual job, like an actual, you know, job description, Laos feeder needed.

It was created by Weigel. and essentially what you did is that you would go in, you would strap little boxes containing tons of lice to your arms or legs, and it allowed the lice inside those boxes to feed for a set amount of time. And if you happen to be one of those lucky louse feeders, you would be feeding up to 30,000 lice at a time, which is a lot of lice. It's a lot of lice. But that would provide enough vaccine material for 300 people in one week. Well, that's nice. It's pretty good. It was a decent paying job. It was relatively safe also. If you had never had typhus before, you were only allowed to feed the uninfected lice, and if you had had typhus, then you could earn a little bit more money by feeding the lice that were infected.

By the 1930s, Wigle's lab had become the world leading lab on typhus. People came from all over to study his louse colony and learn. how to feed lice and learn how to make the Weigel vaccine. And what started out as an easy, if not slightly uncomfortable, we may even venture to say gross job, became so much more in the late 1930s as it became evident that war was yet again on the horizon. World War II kicked off when German forces invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939, followed by Soviet troops, and Poland, where Weigel and his lab were located, was partitioned between the two. During first the Soviet occupation and then the Nazi occupation of Lavoff, Weigel was forced to keep working at his institute, producing typhus vaccine. And this was during a time when so many other Polish intellectuals were being deported

or imprisoned or outright killed by both Soviet and Nazi troops. So why were Weigel and his lab still there? Not just allowed to work, but forced to work. It's because Typhus was a terrifying, terrifying threat, and so Weigel's work was viewed as invaluable. The Nazis were absolutely terrified of Typhus, and they used this fear as an excuse to enact horrific policies. Because Typhus wasn't seen as this universal threat that could impact anyone, the Nazis blamed its spread on Jewish people, and Nazis used typhus as part of the justification for things like the construction of Jewish ghettos and public health orders for bathing and de-laussing often had this undertone of anti-Semitism, like when beards were ordered to be shaved.

Under German occupation, Weigel's institute grew rapidly, where it served as the only means of survival for many Polish people who faced death, starvation, or deportation. Weigel went out of his way during World War II to hire hard. hundreds and hundreds of people as louse feeders. These were often Polish intellectuals or Jewish people, people who were under incredible threat from the Nazi occupation. And it's not certain exactly how many Polish people ended up working at the Institute as louse feeders during this time, but it's likely between 1,200 and 3,000, which is a lot of people who were able to be kept safe and alive because they were feeding lice for this typhus vaccine.

But the other cool thing is that while feeding the lice, these people sat around and they chatted, they exchanged ideas about philosophy or mathematics or why salt is used to make ice cream. Like, they talked about everything under the sun. But the conversations during louse feeding weren't always about, you know, casual or trivial things or philosophy. about half of the feeders were actively working in the resistance against German forces. What? Yeah. I know. Are you telling me that Schindler's list could have been about lice-feeding resistance fighters?

I know. There needs to be a movie. Hollywood Y. Right? I know. Yeah. And so this louse feeding was such a great cover for all of these people working in the resistance. It allowed them to get out of the house.

and move freely and have an excuse to be outside, and it also allowed them to connect with one another and plan with other Laos feeders who were also in the resistance. And the Institute, one more just like Cherry on top, it wasn't just a place for resistance talk, but also resistance action. Workers would sabotage the typhus vaccines that were intended for German soldiers,

making them essentially ineffective. while tens of thousands of full-strength doses of vaccine were smuggled out of the lab and into the Jewish ghettos, where lice infestation was incredibly high. So it's just, there's so much more to this amazing story of Dr. Weigel and his lab and these amazing louse feeders. But we hope that you liked this little taste of how the humble louse helped shape modern history and why louse feeder was not just, an itchy job in the 1930s and 40s, but an opportunity for resistance. Oh my gosh. Amazing. On the edge of my seat, I am emotionally invested. I am about to open 20 tabs. Yes. That is the best feeling. Did the lab survive after World War II? It did. I think Dr. Weigel was at various points accused of collaborating either with Soviet forces or during Nazi forces. So he kind of was

like disgraced, but it seems like unfairly so. There is a fantastic book I'll recommend that goes into this story in great detail. It's called Dr. Weigel's Fantastic Laboratory, I believe, or the Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigel. It's by Arthur Allen. And it goes in an incredible detail about this story and also a few other amazing characters. in sort of resistance fighting against Nazi forces during World War II. Like, for instance, there was a Jewish researcher who created also sham vaccines for German forces named Fleck, Ludwig Fleck. So, yeah, it's really amazing. And I think no one realized, like none of the German forces realized while it was going on that they were given sham.

vaccines, that there was this resistance movement. It was all, it all came out afterwards, which I think is just so cool. That is really cool. It's funny because, you know, I, we do still have people who get paid to feed bugs with their bodies, but not really because they're usually grad students in mosquito labs. So it's a way less cushy job, it sounds like. But listeners, we have a great story from one of Popsie's favorite freelancers and friend of the podcast, Lee Coort on Popside.com, which I'll link to in the article about this episode, which is about some of the nastiest jobs that help keep science and innovation running. And one of them is mosquito feeder.

But again, the modern version of this job is way less like hardcore and cool. It's, it's, but, you know, it's necessary. Thank you so much. That was awesome. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless.

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Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Okay, we're back. And actually, I hope Jess just includes everything that just said, because that was really good aside about lice butts. But if not, I guess you'll have to live with the mystery and Google it for yourself. Per Bita, tell us about Easy Pass, which I

used to think just worked magically and meant you never had to pay tolls again. Yes, me too, until I became an adult. Yeah. Then one day you are the arbiter of the easy pass bill. You realize nothing is magic. Now my life depends on it. So as I've said on this podcast many times, I live in New Jersey in a suburb right next to the Garden State Parkway.

So I flashed my easy pass way more. than I pump my own gas. You should put that on a t-shirt. Oh, okay. I will. Very personalized. Yeah, honestly, I can't believe that I used to wait in line at tollboots and pay an exact change. Like, there's still a toll booth that I drive by that makes you put in 65 cents, like, into the little, like, funnel thing.

and I'm just like, who has 65 cents an exact change? Wild. Anyway, so Easy Pass is relatively new technology for the American transportation system. Only dates back, widespread use only dates back to the 90s. But the story of its invention and origins goes way further back, and actually does not start in the U.S. But for the millions of drivers in mostly the eastern U.S. who use these electronic toll systems,

the technology might seem trite, but it's very essential. And there's also nothing trite about the tens of thousands of tons in greenhouse gases that are saved by states switching to electronic. tolls, although of course, counterpoint, we're still driving cars and vehicles that run on fossil fuels. But the story behind the technology is surprisingly juicy. So before I get into it, let me explain how easy pass works for Rachel's childhood itself. Yes, for my inner child. Please explain. Really trying to thrill the errands here as well. So for those of you who own an easy pass or have just seen one. It's, it really looks pretty archaic still. It looks like maybe it was

invented in the 70s or 80s. It's this like just bulky tag that you like Velcro or stick on to your windshield. But inside of that tag, there is a unique radio frequency identification transponder or an RFID transponder that can only be ride by the antennas in EasyPass tollboots. So once that antenna reads the transponder in your vehicle, it basically gleans all this info about your car and your EasyPass account and automatically takes your money. That's how it works. So the origins of EasyPass actually goes back to the invention of RFID transponders. And a lot of the material and backstory that I got here was actually covered in an NPR, All Things Considered, Radio Show back in 2016. And the hosts of the show kind of give

credit to two individuals in history. One is a musician and one is a rocket scientist for NASA, which seems to make a lot more sense. So let's start with the musician. I should say amateur musician heightened to professional musician fame once he came upon this one invention. His name was Leon Thurman, and he was a self-taught cellist and a Bolshevik and a tinker from St. Petersburg, Russia. So in the 1920s, he was experimenting with microwaves and trying to make. measured the density of gases. And basically he was holding two antennas in his hands and moving them around. And he realized he was actually producing sounds at different volumes and pitches.

So he turned this very simple interaction into a new magical instrument. So he was playing this instrument around the Soviet Union and Vladimir Lenin. it caught the eye of Vladimir Lenin, who then made Theraman a representative for Soviet science overseas. So Theraman started touring the U.S. and Europe and showing off this instrument in places like Carnegie Hall. And eventually he got a contract with RCA, the giant music company,

to manufacture it for people to buy and play at home. It was called the Theraman, not very imaginative. It didn't really work for people at home. They didn't understand how to play it, and it really just sounded terrible and like mooney. So it didn't make a splash in the market, and RCA stopped making it after a couple years. But once Theraman returned to the Soviet Union,

Joseph Stalin had taken over, and because he was a scientist of sorts who had gone overseas, he was imprisoned, and he was forced to work for the state. So he took that electromagnetic technology from his instrument and actually designed a wireless bug that didn't require batteries and, again, could transmit information sort of magically through the air. And they installed it in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during World War I. So in a way, Thurman became this engine of espionage during this historic warfare between the Soviet Union and the U.S. So that's the somewhat sad story of Therman.

You know, he had this innate curiosity that he turned into a musical invention that was forced to be used as an instrument for warfare eventually. But let's fast forward to the 1960s. That's when Mario Cardulo, an engineer in the NASA Man Space Flight Network, who lived in Brooklyn, New York, he began fiddling with some primitive versions of RFID tags, which at the time we're being used to prevent shoplifting in department stores. So if you think about those big, like, hulking tags that you sometimes get on clothes, I think those were some of the most basic RFID tags. So Cardulo used this kind of tag, but then paired it with pheromins microwaves to essentially create a different kind of transponder that, again, would transmit information between a tag and an antenna, but also contain a small load of data inside of a memory.

chip. And again, it would be wireless. It wouldn't have a battery. Very, very easy to use and very versatile. And for some reason, when he came up with this technology, the thing he thought about was tollboots. He was like, hello, I can revolutionize the toll booth. Get me on the phone with the Port Authority, which is the big transit authority here in New York and New Jersey. So Cardulo did get on the phone with the Port Authority, and he showed them as prototype, which was very big at the time. It was about the size of two large. NPR described it as cigarette packs. I went with a more modern metaphor of fablets, so extremely large smartphones. And Cardula wanted to test this on the George Washington Bridge in New York City. The Port Authority didn't love the idea of

drivers sticking this giant transponder on their windshields or windows, not very safe, ultimately. So they did reject his patent, which is sad for Cardulo. He put a lot of energy into that partnership. And after that, it took a few more decades before Cardulo landed his RFID tags elsewhere. surprise or no surprise. It ended up being in Scandinavia, and they had the first quote-unquote easy pass toll booth. From there, they took off in Europe and then came back to the U.S. Not in New York first. I think Dallas was possibly the first city with an electronic toll booth. But then finally, New York opened up its doors to it in 1994. And then 1997, that's when the George Washington Bridge first got its first Easy Pass toll booth as well. So Easy Pass, of course, is a company.

It's like a corporate version of Cardulu's technology. But now we have commuters in 17 U.S. states using this Soviet spy era electromagnetic system. And it really hasn't changed much since Cardulo tinkered with it, which is pretty neat. Might as well bring back the theremin while we're at it. Oh, the theremin never went away, Burbita. My dad owns at least two of them. Wait, what? Yeah.

What does he do with them? Oh, I mean, like, I don't know. I remember trying to play them when I was a kid and it didn't really go anywhere. There are only like a handful of actual therapy. Mertuosos in the world because it's both such a difficult instrument and such a new one. So it's like if you, most people are really self-taught. And then it's like if you really want to do incredible stuff, there are so few people in the world who can go like teach you.

So I've randomly seen a couple of those people perform. And it is like a beautiful haunting instrument when someone actually knows how to play it. most people who play theremonds can at best do some like of the like sound effect noises that it's mostly known for with the like woo or like the star trek theme um though that was that i could never have played that that is like an actual good theremin player but yeah no like it has a it has a cult following for sure i used to really want to get good at playing the thereman just because i was precocious and I liked things that were weird. And when my dad said, almost no one can play the theremin, I said, watch me.

Challenge accepted. And then I gave up about two days later. So, you know, what could have been? Who knows? You could have been playing it for us right now on this podcast. That's true. That's true. I could have.

So I do not think that it would transomite well over USB microphone. It's a very, I mean, it's literally. Like, it's very pitchy. Anyway, we'll link to some Theraman music on Popside.com slash weird for listeners who have yet to experience it. You'll have to connect the dots between the Theraman and Easy Pass through your dad. Yeah, I'm surprised this is not a story I have heard at the dinner table before. Awesome.

So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? For me, it is absolutely that lice helped take down the Nazis. I love that story. I really do not understand why no one has made a movie or at least a weird contemporary opera out of it. I actually know a lot of weird contemporary opera people, so I should just text them. I feel very strongly that there are a lot of historical diseases that have not gotten enough cred in like modern media in general.

There's just like it's such a rich field for movies and miniseries. I'm like boom miniseries. I would watch that. Boom, movie. I would watch that. 100%. But yeah, I like the idea of a contemporary opera for sure with Laos feeding. Absolutely.

All right. I know, you know what? I know just the person to call is going to make it happen. Thank you so much for joining us. Listeners, remember you should, can, will listen to. This podcast will kill you wherever you get your podcasts. Erin's, anything else to plug while you're here? I don't think so.

I think that's it. That's all we've got. We have a good website. We have lots of quarantini recipes. Just Google us. You'll find it. Lice, this podcast is a plug for Lice. Yes.

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 read and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at popsye.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering, by Jess Bodey. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird

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