The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Science Meets Magic, High-Tech Murders, Bees?!

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Writer and game designer Jonathan Sims joins the show! The weirdest things we learned this week range from bees telling time to death by apple core. 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!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- 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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Just steps from the water. 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. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Trodosh. And I'm Jonathan Sims. Johnny, welcome to the show. Hello. Very happy to be here. So for listeners who don't know, Jonathan Sims is the writer and one of the stars of one of my absolute favorite podcasts,

The Magnus Archives, which tragically just ended and ended tragically. It's not, well, I mean, okay, it ended tragically, but it didn't tragically end. It was, it was a perfectly complete show, which I very much appreciate as a consumer. But yeah, for our listeners who have yet to let me indoctrinate them into audio drama, would you just say a little bit about who you are and what you do?

So I'm Johnny. I write and perform horror fiction. The Magnus Archives. It was made by a production company Rusty Quill, and it's been five seasons of initially kind of standalone, horror stories that gradually link together and spill out into all sorts of terrifying nonsense. Spill out, literally, figuratively. Yeah, in all the ways.

Well, thanks so much for being on the show. I thought you would be a perfect guest for a weirdest thing because part of what I love about the Magnus Archives is how much you pull interesting things from history and you know, really give stories like a sense of place in time by sort of peppering in things that really happened or at least, you know, beliefs of the day. And so I figured, you know, this is a person who has picked up some genuine weird stuff along the way, I'm sure. Yeah, it's a really interesting one because it leaves you with a very deep knowledge of very specific things. you know, like, I don't know a huge amount about a lot of 17th century European history,

but I know a lot about some very specific rivalries within the astronomy scene. Because, like, you just find these really specific, really interesting facts, and then you just sort of dig down. Like, I know a lot about early automaton's in central Europe, but not much about the wider development of technology of the time. But yeah, I think I've picked up one or two things. Yeah, and I've recently been spending a lot of time on TikTok, as listeners know. I find it much more soothing and low stakes than Twitter.

And I found my way into the legion of weird teens who love the Magnus Archives, possibly even more than I do. and it occurred to me, you know, I knew that lots of other people listened to the show. It's very popular, of course, but it occurred to me, I think we have the potential to have some of the same kinds of weirdos. I think some of these weird teens would love to hear our weird science stuff. All listeners of all generations are valued, and I couldn't possibly speak to the weirdness or otherwise of the Magnus Archives fandom. Fair enough. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each giving a little tease about

some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, scripting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to tease our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, would you start with your tease? Yeah, I'm going to talk about how we. know that bees can perceive time. And it involves TikTok coincidentally. It's a good TikTok. I'm excited to hear more. I hadn't done any follow-up research on that TikTok. So, all right. My tease is

that I want to talk about a murder case that involved cutting-edge technology in 1845. And I'm going to be talking about a father of science and some of the remarkably unscientific. as we understand it, practices that he engaged in. I'm sure I have no idea what you mean. We definitely didn't have an episode all about how doctors used to drink pee to diagnose people and then also sometimes do magic with the pee. Sarah, why don't you start us off with some bees? Yeah, okay.

So I will admit up front that this... Bees? Sorry. Bees! There's going to be a lot of arrested development references in here. But yeah, okay, I will admit that, so Rachel, you've seen the TikTok, I gather. I have. But again, I have gone no further in my pursuit of knowledge on bees at this time.

To be honest, the TikTok had like all the best bee facts, if we're being honest. So it will be a little bit of a repeat of the TikTok video. So I will just give a shout out to TikTok user Tom Lumperson. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but who produced this like, Incredible TikTok. I'm not cool enough to be on TikTok, but I am on Reddit, and this did appear on Reddit, an R.Bkeeping. I'm not sure why I ended up on R beekeeping, but it was there. It was very interesting. Be honest, Sarah, you're out in the suburbs now. You're ready for bees. Oh, God, if I would be a terrible beekeeper. So, yeah, so there's this incredible TikTok video,

and it's about time perception in bees, and I just thought it was absolutely insane. And so I tracked down. I tried to do a little research just to like see if there were more details, most of which were buried in papers that I did not have access to. So I asked my dad who works at a university to download the 1960 paper that details this specific bee experiment. So, okay, so like a hashtag free access. So true. Open access. Give us the papers. It drives the number of times I'm like, you want me to pay $50 to access. this paper for 24 hours. Are you serious? Academic gatekeeping.

Hooray! So, yeah, okay. So time perception. I feel like we have to start by saying, like, I feel like, at least for me, and maybe I'm just a ding-dong here, but I feel like time perception is one of those things where I'm like, because humans perceive time, it was kind of weird for me to realize that, like, if you are an animal cognition researcher, like, you can't assume that other animals, like, perceive anything the way humans perceive things, and that includes time. But, like, because I can't imagine what it would be like to be a thing, a living thing that experiences the world, but doesn't

experience time, like, I don't even have the words to express what that might be like. Like, I just cannot even possibly imagine it. But we can't assume that bees experience time. So at the beginning of the 20th century, a researcher named Ingeborg Belling, which I'm certainly not pronouncing correctly, but she developed a method to test whether bees can perceive time. And it's pretty simple. So you put a bunch of marks on a bunch of bees so that you can tell whether they're the right bees from the colony that you are looking at. And then you put out sugar water at like some location where they wouldn't normally have a reason to be going. like it's not an area where they can forage for pollen every day at the same time so like two hours a day say between like nine and 11 a.m. There's a bowl full of sugar water there every day and the rest of the

time of the day like it's not there. So if you do this for I don't know a week or so the bees learn that if they show up between nine and 11 a.m. They can get sugar water and so they keep showing up and so you train them on that and then one day that there's no sugar water and that's your testing and you see, do they show up anyway? Because presumably the only reason for them to show up would be because they can perceive time, and they know that between... They're going in their little diary. Yeah, they're like, hey, if we show up, we get the sugar water.

It's real easy, real easy taken. So Ingeborg Belling came up with this method, and it is true. It's very easy to train bees to show up for sugar water. You can only do it every 24 hours. You can't do it every 19 hours. You can't do it every 48 hours. It has to be 20. 24 hours, which I think kind of makes sense.

Like, some flowers open at certain times of the day. Like, there's a very, it's a very natural 24-hour circadian rhythm to, like, most of the world. So it kind of makes sense that it would be 24 hours, but they're not very adaptable. So it's only every 24 hours. Although, interestingly, if you cool the bees down, if you just, like, stick them in the fridge, stick them in the freezer at like four to five degrees Celsius, so that's like low 40s Fahrenheit. They are consistently three to six hours late. So that suggested to the researchers, because if you chill them, they're late.

That suggested that maybe there's something else going on. Like maybe they're not perceiving time because when they're chilled down, they can't perceive like external stimuli. So maybe there's some external stimulus that they're sensing and they don't really. know what time it is. So that meant that they needed to devise another experiment to prove more definitively that, yes, bees can actually perceive time. And so the obvious solution is that you fly the bees across the Atlantic Ocean. So that's obviously. Why didn't I think of that? Yeah. So that that is what Max Renner and his colleagues did in 195. So they they trained bees to show up to collect sugar water between 8.15 and 10.15 p.m. in Paris. And they were trained in,

like, closed chambers, so like constant light, constant temperature. And then they were put on an overnight flight to New York. And they were tested when they showed up in New York. And no bees showed up between 8.15 and 10.15 p.m. Eastern time because the bees had jet like humans do. But how cranky were they? I don't think they measured the crankiness level. of the bees, but presumably they were because overnight flights are pretty miserable. And they did the reverse experiment too where they trained the bees in New York and then they flew them overnight to Paris and they got exactly the same results. So that seemed to prove.

Like the bees really do. They have some kind of internal clock and they definitely can perceive time. But sunlight is still a factor. Like they did these experiments in these weird little closed chambers like it's a strange like physics experiment. Like what if you put the bees in a frictionless vacuum? What do they do then? So they figured, like, how does sunlight and air temperature affect the bees? Because that would be how they would normally exist.

They don't exist in little boxes. So they did a similar experiment where they trained the bees on Long Island. They were trained to get sugar water between 1254 and 2.24 p.m. every day. Very precise. I have to- Very specific. I have to assume that they, like, they were like, well, we'll start at like 1230 and then they were a little late. and then the first day it was 12 you just had to stick with it that's how science works yeah the first day

they were like well it's 1254 so now this is the time we have to start every single day um so they did this they trained the bees and then they flew them to davis california which is precisely three hours and 15 minutes behind eastern standard time uh and then they were tested like how early were the bees going to show up and also more importantly which direction would the bees fly in Because, like, how do they know where to go? So, like, in Long Island, they flew in a particular direction. I think it was, like, northeast or maybe it was northwest. But, like, you know, they're flying from their hive to a specific location to get the sugar water.

And, like, how is transporting them across the country to California? How does that affect where they fly? Because how do they know which direction they're going? So they, in Davis, put the bees in the middle of like a ring of dishes, and then they watched all of the dishes to see, like, which one were the bees going to show up at? So there's a whole graph that shows, like, the predicted flight pads of bees if they were navigating by a variety of different mechanisms. Like, what if they could sense the Earth's magnetic field?

Like, here's the flight path they would take under those circumstances. And the winner seemed to be that, like, they're doing it by the angle of the sun. They did try to determine whether this was, like, half the paper was just devoted to, like, the angle of the sun and how bees may or may not be able to detect it. And there's, like, four paragraphs that just talk about the fact that, like, so the sun, the angular velocity of the sun changes during the day, which is, like, a fancy way of saying, like, in the morning. evening, you seem to like, you can watch the sunrise. You can watch the sunset. It seems to happen very quickly. But in the middle of the day, it seems pretty much stationary. So like, that's the angular velocity changing throughout the day. And like, but do bees know that? Do bees know that the angular velocity of the sun is changing throughout the day? We still don't know as far as I could tell.

I couldn't track out any papers after this 1961 to see like, do they know? Did we ever definitively find that out because the flight path is like something in between. There's an option where it's like they're doing it by the angle of the sun, but they think it's a constant velocity. Or it's the angle of the sun, but they know that it's changing. The flight path is somewhere in the middle. So it's still unclear whether bees understand the complicated velocity of the sun. I think the only thing that sounds like a safe bet to me is for us to assume that bees know everything. They do. So far, everything we've tested them on, they seem to know. Yeah. So fear them, respect them. What I want to know is do bees, do bees appreciate a sunrise? Like, you know, does it move them?

That's a much more interesting question, to be honest. Also, my, like, I feel, I'm like, yes, bees are weird, but the thing, the weird thing I know about bees is actually to do with English beekeeping law, which is some of the wildest lore out there because if your bees start swarming, they stop being your bees. And you have the legal right. Yeah, wild bees are swarming.

They are considered wild bees. Even if they were in your hive and they start swarming, you have the legal right to chase them. And as long as you can keep your eyes on the bees, as long as you can see them, when they land, you can close. them up and be like, okay, these are my bees again.

But if they settle on someone else's land, you have to go to the landowner and say, can I get my bees? And that, the landowner has the absolute legal right to say, sorry, don't you mean, my bees? I was just going to say, I think you forfeited the right to have the bees. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. And if two swarms merge together, that is the only instance, I believe, in British law,

where you can be forced into a legal partnership. Because either one party has to just give up their bees and be like, okay, well, they're all part of your swarm now. Or you are now legally partners in ownership of these bees. You must co-parent the bees. I love this. I would watch an enemies to lovers rom-com about this. I would watch a sport devised around like... That's amazing.

You know, the fancy footwork needed to maintain ownership over bees. But yeah, primarily I'm interested in the forced bee merger love story. There's also, like, back in the day, and I don't know exactly what period of history, but for a long time, like, a lot of lands, British lands would, their primary product would be honey. So you'd have an estate, and the bees and the beekeepers would be very important. and there was a tradition that when the squire or the Lord of the Manor would like die, the new one would go down and like present themselves to the bees. And if the bees swarmed, that was generally considered an incredibly bad omen.

And, you know, you might end up actually forfeiting your title if like, like, not legally, but, you know, all the people who worked at land would be like, hmm, should probably. The bees don't accept him. Yeah, like I said, the bees know things. So apparently it was very important if you were due to inherit an estate to be real good friends with the beekeeper so that they might just like, just have a bit of smoke around before your visit so the bees were sleepy. Wow, I had no idea that bees had so much power in UK law. Apparently so. Good God.

Now I'm thinking I should have done a lot more research about like US laws surrounding beekeeping. Yeah, I've no idea. Like, I know that this is like some just weird foibles of the British law around it, but I've no idea how that translates over the Atlantic. I mean, they're very powerful. I don't know. I, my husband's father gets free manuka honey because they are from New Zealand, and they have neighbors who keep bees, and they have manuka trees,

like manuka honey named for, because they pollinate manuka trees. And because the bees forage on the neighbor's land, as a thank you, they get like, so you have to, uh, for it to be legally manuka honey, it must be tested. Like there's a certain chemical composition that you have to meet to be called manuka honey. And so you as a beekeeper have to submit these like samples of honey to the board, whatever the board is to say like, I'm allowed to sell this as manuka honey.

And then the samples, the like beekeepers just give to the neighbors for free, which is like a really valuable gift. It's so wildly expensive. Well, Sarah, if I know anything about your beautiful-being appearances, it won't be long before you have a whole new fact about bees. More bee facts. Yeah. Honestly, for the write-up, I'm going to look up interesting U.S. beekeeping laws or maybe global beekeeping laws. I don't know.

Keep an eye out for that on popsight.com slash weird. If you've never clicked around on popsai.com, you can go to popsai.com slash weird. And every time we post an episode in our podcast feed, we also post an article that has some blurbs and, you know, links to supporting documents and other cool information. So, yeah, check that out. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to jump in with my fact, which is about crime. And I feel like that kind of begs a brief disclaimer that, like, we don't generally do true crime on this show.

I'm generally not into true crime. I have no problem with people who consume it. I don't inherently have a problem with people who make it. But it often strikes me as, like, a little bit exploitative. I just think, you know, recent criminal cases, especially murders, are something that we, like, should be really thoughtful about how we're presenting as entertainment. you know, who is benefiting from that and who may be suffering due to that. I will say, however, that I have a weird blank spot when it comes to learning about cults. But, you know, nobody's perfect.

But also, I have this story and then one that I think I'm going to use in a future episode that are about murder, but they are very old. And I feel like I draw a distinction on murders that are occurred in the 19th and early 20th century as being more interesting than potentially harmful. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where, like, if there aren't still, like, living victims or people alive who were directly affected. Totally, yeah. Yeah, and then, too, just, like, the framing of it, I mean, you know, for this and the other

story I tell, I will be making it clear in my stance that the people who committed these crimes are real bozos. A hard on a condemnation there. Is that the official podcast? Yes. Murderers, real bozos. Murderers, bozos. Yeah.

Because, you know, I think like there's a lot of glorification. Even if it's not like, ooh, you know, Jeffrey Dahmer was hot. Like, there's still this like mythos that I really just also, you know, speaking very bluntly and personally as a survivor of an abusive relationship with a pathological narcissist. It's just very pedestrian to me and like gross to act like there's like something special about these people. If there was something special about them, they wouldn't have gotten caught. So with that disclaimer, the moral of the story is if you're going to be a murderer, be a good murderer, and Rachel's respect.

Yeah, I'm just, I'm not about to listen to some fan-girly true crime about some idiot who couldn't even stay out of jail. But, yeah. Also, like, you know, it's okay to enjoy, like, horror and thrillers. And I suggest that listeners who are into true crime, try maybe channeling that into listening to, like, horrible things happening to fictional people on the Magnus Archives and similar shows. I couldn't possibly comment. So, yeah, I came across this fact while paging through the book A is for Arsenic by Catherine Harko. I've had it on my shelf for years. It's all about how Agatha Christie used poisons in her books

and kind of delving into the history of those poisons. It's a lot of fun. I like to just flip through it sometimes looking for potential factoids for the show. But poisonings are a dime a dozen. And when I found out that this story also had a telecommunications angle, I just had to learn more about it. So we start with a character by the name of John Towell. And he's he's this guy who like dabbles in Quakerism on and off his whole life. And for people not familiar, it's, it's a religion that's all about peace. It's all about introspection. It's all about having a strict sense of morality. But also at the time, it was a religion full of a lot of very successful capitalists. So that is perhaps what drew Taville to it. He was a very successful chemist.

And yet he got caught forging a 10-pound note in 1814, which, which is the equivalent of about 800 pounds or $1,100 today. So not casual, but it was punishable by death at the time, which still seems pretty harsh even for $1,100. But because it was a Quaker bank, he defrauded, and he was kind of an off-and-on Quaker, the aggrieved parties actually petitioned for him to not hang because the Quaker church was so opposed to the death penalty.

that got I'm transported to Australia. For folks who don't know, transported means like you are sent there to work in indentured servitude in lieu of going to jail, basically. And he eventually brought his wife and sons there to join him. And he actually, he got pardoned pretty quickly. He opened the colony's first pharmacy, and he was generally seen as like a philanthropist, a contributor to the foundation of the first Quaker community on Australia. And he was even a governor of his son's school.

which I think is basically like being the head of the PTO, though I'm not totally sure. He helped found a school for girls. And great fact, he famously dumped 600 gallons of his own liquor into Sydney Harbor one day after suddenly deciding it was immoral to sell hard alcohol. So, a rich life. Really unfortunate for all of the wildlife, though, living in the harbor at the time. No, it reminded me of that episode we had a couple years ago where there was like poop Fecal matter, poop in the water on the Jersey shore, and some, like, renegade townspeople

tried to go in and bleach it. Lucky for them, like, the amount of bleach they had truly was not going to have an impact on the Atlantic Ocean. I mean, worse than the poop, though, like, there's poop everywhere. Yep, yeah. I was going to say that, like, is there any possibility that he just discovered the sort of wildlife that lives in the waters around Australia. And thought, we have to get rid of this.

Yeah. Just throw the rum in. Unfortunately, Towell's commitment to clean living seems to have evaporated when he moved back to London in 1838. Not surprising, his two adult sons had actually died within a few years of one another, and his wife, Mary, died of tuberculosis not long after they got back to England.

The timeline around this is kind of hard to sort out. I saw some conflicting secondary circumstances, sources of information, but at or around, when his first wife died, Tawel took up with this woman named Sarah Lawrence. And some sources say she was actually the nursemaid he hired to care for his ailing wife. She was a nurse in the Quaker community, but she was not Quaker. So Tawel and Lawrence would actually have two children together, which is, of course, perfectly fine, except that somewhere along the way, he married someone else. One source I read said that Towell had like run into trouble with the Quaker community previously for a relationship with a non-Quaker woman,

possibly even his first wife that resulted in a child out of wedlock. It seems like his first marriage maybe was a shotgun wedding designed to get him back into the Quaker community. So it's not shocking that Towell chose to marry a Quaker widow who was quite wealthy while keeping his family with Sarah Lawrence out of sight. He kept a public life in London, and he moved Sarah Lawrence, who started going by Sarah Hart, and the two children to a cottage in Salt Hill, which even today is a 45-minute drive from the middle of London. Far enough, I think, to be pretty sure that she would stay out of sight and out of mind. He would visit her, give her a pound a week to pay for the house and the children, which is about

$140 today. She apparently told her neighbors that her husband worked overseas and that John was just his employer coming to deliver his wages to her. And they probably believed that because she was like 30 and he was pushing 60 by now. So everybody just let it slide. I promise that this was a story about a crime. So here's the crime part. Some folks say that Towell was facing financial problems in 1845 that just made the expense of this secret family too much to bear. Others say he was just starting to get nervous that Sarah would make trouble or someone would discover their arrangement. But what we do know is this. Around six or seven in the evening on January 1st, 1845, Sarah's neighbor heard sounds of groaning

and distress and saw towel leave the woman's house. When the neighbor went into check on her, she found her unconscious and foaming at the mouth and she quickly died. She and the other gathered parties, which eventually included a local reverend, thought that it was clear that town had poisoned her. But when they dashed off to try to catch him, they just managed to see him boarding the train back to London. None of them knew the guy's real name, and they could only vaguely describe him. So unless they somehow beat the train to the city to alert the constable there, all hope of catching the culprit was lost. And of course, there was no way they could beat the train back to London, except the station was equipped with the absolute cutting edge of technology, a brand new telegraph machine.

So telegraphs worked by sending electrical signals down a physical wire from a transmitter to a receiver at another station. And the one by Salt Hill was one of the shiny new bleeding edge to needle telegraphs, where needles were moved into particular positions to code for letters. And this was a big improvement over previous models with four or five needles because each needle required its own transmission wire. So it was just really prohibitively expensive to lay and then maintain that many wires from station to station. I'm sorry, Rachel. Are you telling me that this electricity can somehow outrun a train? Yes, it's true.

Sounds a bit far-fetched, to be honest. I mean, I think that's what most people were saying about. the Telegraph at the time, to be fair. Yeah, just to contextualize, like, how truly cutting edge this was at the time. This was less than a year after Samuel Morse sent the message from DC to Baltimore, what hath God wrought? That was the inaugural message on that line. I did not know Morse was such a, it was so dramatic. Wow. Oh.

Yeah. So back to the murder, they send a message to Paddington Station. And this is a moment where the story gets really hilarious because it referred to towel as being in the garb of a Quaker, except Quaker was spelled K-W-A-K-E-R. Quaker. Because the machine didn't produce the letters J, Q, or Z, which was still an improvement over previous machines, which left out even more letters. apparently the Paddington operator kept asking for the word to be repeated because when they sent him the letters KWA, he was like, there's no word that starts with KWA.

There must be an error. And it was after several back and forth that he finally was like, fine, just finish the word. And then once he saw the whole word, he was like, ah. A duck. Quaker. Of course. But they got the gist. And I do just want to pause for a second and say that this quirk gets.

a lot of attention. But I would also like to point out that because the messages were in all caps with zero punctuation and the letter J was also omitted, the telegram read thusly, a murder has gust been committed at Salt Hill. And the suspected murderer was seen to take a first class ticket to London by the train, which left slow at 7.42 p.m. He is in the garb of a quacker with a great coat on which reaches nearly down to his feet, he is in the last compartment of the second class compartment. I guess people are still figuring out how to write succinct messages in there. I know that they probably buy great coat. They probably mean like a big coat or a long coat, but what I love is that they were like, it's a really great coat. It's very stylish.

So yeah, they send this message and manage to figure out that Quacker means Quaker. and a sergeant Williams of the British Transport Police spotted a man in such a gray coat getting off the train and he tailed him. Funnily enough, Towell assumed that this was the conductor at first and paid him sixpence fare, which will be important later. So, yeah, this British transport officer like throws on a coat, goes undercover, maybe not a great coat, but a coat. And he was waiting until Towell seemed to be settled into a lodging house.

house because he wanted to make sure he wasn't going to lose him, but then he ran to get a city policeman to complete the arrest. And when you read about this story on the British Transport Police website, they go out of their way to tell you that now the British Transport Police are perfectly, legally capable of arresting you themselves. So fair warning to any listeners who do crime at a train station, I guess. But Towell claimed upon his arrest that he hadn't been to Salt Hill that day. And Sergeant Williams was able to handily refute this by asking why then he had paid him sixpence. So it also came to, sorry, go ahead. Sorry, it took me a second to process what the sixpence, what the significance of that was.

Because for some reason in my head when you first said, I was like, he was bribing him. He was like, don't tell them about my crime. No, no. He had seen this man and said, oh, you must be the conductor. Here's the money for the fare for the train I have just taken. definitely not to do murder. So it also came to light that earlier that day or thereabouts, towel had purchased a couple bottles of Sheel's prussic acid,

which was a topical treatment for varicose veins, but otherwise known as hydrogen cyanide, a poison perfectly capable of causing heart's demise, and according to the folks who did her autopsy, the thing that had poisoned her. Listeners may recognize Sheel as the chemist who invented Sheal's Green, the paint that killed a bunch of people. So an expert on poisons then?

Yes. A prolific chemist who maybe should have done more toxicity reports. That's Sheel's legacy. But boy did he work with some pretty colors, you know? So the coded of the story is that Towell's defense attorney who had much more experience in commercial law than in criminal cases argued that Sarah Sarah Hart had probably just poisoned herself by eating too many apples. Apparently he actually... Oh, we've all been there. Apparently, he actually opened his defense by just saying apple pips, which really, I can like completely see...

God, everyone was so dramatic back then, huh? Yeah. So this guy Fitzroy Kelly was then known as Apple Pipp Kelly for the rest of his life, which seems really fair. and I will say that while it's true that apple seeds contain amygdalin, which turns into hydrogen cyanide in the digestive tract, this process only occurs if the seeds are thoroughly chewed or crushed. And you also need to eat anywhere from 150 to several thousand seeds to get a lethal dose, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, depending on the type of apple. So since the average apple has like eight seeds at most in its core, you would need to be a little. to be thoroughly crunching, like really chomping on more than a dozen apple cores in their

entirety in a single sitting to die this way. So not likely. And the jury agreed, though I think they knew slightly less about apple core toxicity at the time. The facts all lined up and Tawel was hanged that March. Some 10,000 people purportedly showed up to see it because he was was the man hanged by telegraph wires. This was the first time a murderer had been caught. That sounds quite painful. Comparatively. So yeah, he was the first murderer for sure, possibly even the first criminal full stop caught because of the use of the telegraph. It's also considered to be one of the first murders involving hydrogen cyanide, which makes sense since it had only been discovered in 1782 by Carl Philheim Schill.

It's also sometimes said to be the first known instance of a murderer using a steam train as a getaway vehicle, which could be true because the first intercity passenger railway had only opened in England in 1830, 15 years before. But it is definitely absolutely the first case of a murderer being caught thanks to the telegraph and electronic communications in general. And so, yeah, the media sensation, no doubt, contributed to the technology's adoption around the world. And just so we all know, his wife was able to petition the court to get his assets back, and she financially supported Sarah Hart's children who went to live with a grandmother.

So that's nice. That made me feel a little better. Wow. A surprisingly heartwarming ending. Yeah. Could be much worse. I kind of thought people would have just forgotten about the children entirely. So I was happy to find that information.

Also happy that his Quaker second wife also named Sarah, which raises red flags for me. But that's another story. Yeah, she like lost her assets because they had become his when they got married. And then they like became the property of the state. And she had to go to court saying, give me my money back. And she succeeded. So that's also a happy ending. Good news all round.

It was so good to be a woman for so long. Yes, wasn't it? Precisely. Or when you got married, just your stuff wasn't your stuff anymore? Yeah. I'm sorry, Sarah, weren't you listening? The courts allow her to have her stuff back. Oh, okay.

Oh, I'm so sorry. No, that is very fair. But yeah, I love this story because I love all of the firsts in it. I love the, like, steam rail as getaway, but also the, like, you know, we live in such a, like, monitored police state now that the idea that there was a time when, like, if you just left town fast enough and someone wasn't following you, like, that was it.

The lead was cold. Yeah, like, when you said, like, oh, if he got away, go steam train, like, that was it, they'd never catch him. And I was like, that can't be true. They must, and then I was thinking, I was like, yeah, actually, how, yeah, unless someone just is in London, it's like, hey, aren't you there? I'm that guy. Yeah, like there's always a chance they could catch him later.

But with so little description, just like this guy looks like a Quaker. And he's got a really great coat. Also, how lucky were, though, that he was dressed as a Quaker? And they didn't have to telegraph being like wearing a dark suit and top hat looking just like a Victorian man. Dressed like a man. No, yeah. And what a coup that he was wearing a great guy. coat. Yeah, yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with one more

fact. Okay, we're back. And Johnny, it's time for your fact. Yes, hello. So my fact, in some ways, is more of an excuse to talk about alchemy. Because I really love alchemy. So my fact is that Isaac Newton, so Isaac Newton, generally considered the father of modern physics, was a very keen alchemist. Very invested in his research into Grosopia, the transmutation of other materials into gold. And

yeah, there's a big controversy in the early 20th century when a bunch of his notes were found. And it's something like 10% of his notes, which is hundreds of volumes, are about alchemy, which obviously these days is considered, I mean

nonsense, like magical pseudoscience. but it fascinates me because it's really illustrative to me of a very special place that alchemy sits in science and how science has been perceived and thought of throughout history. So the idea of alchemy is a lot of it shares its basic concepts with chemistry. chemistry did in fact grow out of alchemy and it is rooted in this hermetic tradition which has the idea that god is in all things in a very literal way so you have different states of matter you have different sorts of substances and transmuting substances between from one to the other is as much a spiritual process as it is a physical process as it is a physical thing

physical one. It's not a matter of you pour this acid on this material and it chemically changes into something else. It's you pour this acid onto this material and through the power of prayer, its spirit is purified into being another material. And the idea was like gold, like Crosopia, the pursuit of gold was, gold was considered like the most spiritually pure of the metals. And so it's fascinating because fundamentally we have so much documentary evidence and so many notes of all these different alchemists throughout the age. And we know what basically none of it actually means because there is a strong chance that a lot of these like recipes are actually metaphors for prayer and spirituality. but also they contain legitimate chemical processes. Everything was kind of connected.

So you have the symbols, the alchemical symbols for the seven different metals are linked to the planets. The symbol for gold is the same as the symbol for the sun. The symbol for iron is the same as the symbol for Mars, which is also what we now consider the male or the masculine symbol. So you had the idea of like astronomy and religion and science like they were all the same thing. And trying to figure out how the world worked was not something that could be separated from like religious thought. And it fascinates me because these days we very much see sort of like post-enlightenment science. And the scientific method is often in opposition to religion, like especially in, you know,

your modern culture wars, you've often got like evangelical Christianity on one side saying, like, oh, well, this, this, like, you can't believe this or that about science or evolution or what have you. And on the other side, you have, like, you know, rationalism, atheism saying, well, no, science has disproved religion. and it fascinates me for so much of history, the two were the same thing, that to try and understand science was trying to understand, like, how God made the world work, essentially. And to return to Isaac Newton, you know, he was a very firm Christian. I mean, a little bit heretical in some of his beliefs compared to the predominant doctrine of the day,

you know, a little bit more into area. had some beliefs about the Trinity that probably would have gotten him in a bit of trouble. But fundamentally, he saw alchemy as an expansion of his scientific work. And it's not until Robert Boyle, shortly before the start of the Enlightenment, another alchemist who publishes the skeptical chemist, which is very much a repudiation of a lot of the, shall we say, grander claims of earlier alchemists, that he starts to sort of say,

well, actually, a lot of these experiments still work even without the God bit. And so, like, chemistry is just alchemy once you've pulled out all the God. And it's a really weird progression. And also, like, looking back, a lot of practices, a lot of, like, occult practices, are thought, oh, well, in the past, you know, they would have been considered witchcraft or they would have considered, like, occult in the modern sense, which tends to have a lot of associations with, like,

the dark side, in inverted commas, of spirituality. Whereas in a lot of history, it was a lot more political than that. What was considered, like, in averticom's witchcraft and what was considered legitimate, like, religious experimentation, was very much down. to like... Like who you pissed off maybe? Yeah, exactly.

Like John D is a really good example of that, who was absolute besties with Queen Elizabeth. And like did a lot of experiments that everyone else was like, that seems a bit, that seems a bit like bad occult in like astrology and alchemy and talking to angels as well. Although admittedly that one was in the company of Edward Kelly, who history has judged a charlatan, shall we say. But in his later life, when he falls from political grace and eventually in the reign of James I, his studies are considered crossing lines. They are considered dark occultism, but that is such a political decision.

and like in mainland Europe and around Prague, a lot of the judgment of what is and isn't acceptable alchemy is actually kind of tied into a lot of Renaissance era anti-Semitism because a lot of the most famous alchemists of the day were Jewish. So it is a fascinating thing that like where science starts and ends and how it mixes in with religion and who gets to. to judge what is what is something that really, really intrigues me. And for instance, the magnum opus in inverted commas, which is considered the great work of alchemy, the attempt to create the philosopher's stone, which is, you know, has apparently aspects of the secret to an immortality and is very important in Crosopia, transmuting led to gold. Again, if any alchemist actually did it, and it wasn't all just one big metaphor, a lot of them have like 12 stages, a lot of which were written in code, and a lot of them you don't really know what they mean. Like the 11th stage, the penultimate stage

of George Ripley's creation of the philosopher's stone is called multiplication. and how it is meant to be multiplied, does that mean just make more of it? Does that mean it will multiply itself? Nobody knows. Or Samuel Norton expands it into two categories, multiplication in virtue and multiplication in quantity. No clue what either of those actually mean in practice. So it's fascinating that there's this huge body of work that is almost, completely impenetrable, not just because a lot of it is done idiosyncratically. There's no standardised system of coding or measurements, but also because reading it through modern, the eyes of modern science, it cannot make sense because it is reliant on a worldview

that doesn't separate the physical and the spiritual. So yeah, an Isaac Newton, as the like designated smart man of his era was big into alchemy, loved it. Also, I enjoy Isaac Newton because in a lot of history, there's such a small pool of people with the power to actually do stuff that like occasionally you'll just get one who's really smart and they're like, okay, can you do all the things please? It's like, can you be the master of the mint as well? Can you run our money because you're the smart one of England in this era? When you were talking about, you know, how difficult it is to know if they were speaking in metaphor and to separate the science from the religion because it was all happening in the same breath.

It totally reminded me of Hildegarde von Bighen, who we have talked about on weirdest thing before, who in the 1100s was, you know, writing some crazy stuff, including some very unambiguous, like, descriptions of the features. female orgasm, which was not supposed to exist, and which she certainly shouldn't have known about as a nun and yet. But there was also stuff where she wrote tons of works that now some researchers look at and say, you know, she had access to texts from the Islamic world that had really like just become available to scholars, meaning, you know, people in monasteries in England. And so some of what she wrote, it sounds pretty metaphorical. It sounds very religious about the movement of the stars and the way seasons work and things

like that. But there's now kind of this pushback to say like, well, maybe we're not quite giving her enough credit. Like maybe she was making some really scientific observations. But looking at the text, you can, I was like, unfortunately, I can totally see the argument to be made against this too. this all does sound very woo-woo-y, but, like, that was the only way to write about these things. Yeah, it's like at the time that those are not considered separate, you know?

Yeah. It's like the people who are thinking about how the natural world works are generally also the people in those religious institutions. Because, like, your monastery was, like, I mean, it's why for so much of history, like, the only things that were written down were religious works because the people who knew how to write for the most part were monks. And thank God some of them did weird doodles. Or we would have no idea that they too got bored and true freaky shit. Just monk stuff is one of my favorite genres of historical fact, which is something that's

that just makes you go, oh yeah, they did just like, oh, here's a, here's a, like a cat's paw print in ink. It's like, yeah, cats, cats have always been cats. People have always gotten bored and doodled weird things in the margins. Just monk stuff would be a great blog, just saying. Oh, just monk stuff. If you start it, like just girly things, just monk stuff. Yeah.

Just monk stuff. Like why we call it, like why Anno Domini, why AD became a thing. And it's just this really passive aggressive monk. Because it was back in the day where the years were measured by the Roman emperor. And so it would be like, I don't know, Octavius 7 or something like that. And one of the monks in charge of deciding when the religious holidays were, just decided, just was really angry at this. So started calling everything, well, it's the year of our lord. 207. It's the year of our lord. And eventually it just caught on. Is that true? It's just because of one monk?

Yeah, just this one very passive-aggressive. To be fair, I think to call him just like a monk is probably underselling him. I think he was quite important. I forget the name. I mean, I don't need him to be a random monk, you know, but I love the idea that just one person in history was like, you know what, I'm real sick of this whole Octavian seven things. So we're just going to change it.

And now the whole world does that. Dionysius, member of a communion of Scythian monks in present-day Constanta. I love that. Much lower stakes, but my family history has kind of a similar tale where my whole life, I've been aware that Feltman with a T is much less common than Feldman with a D. And I assumed it had been changed on Ellis Island. Like, that's the narrative you hear so much, that some, you know, racist, white, man was like, eh.

A tea every D. A tea is fine. And then I found out that it was, thanks to a cousin of mine who was doing some genealogical research, I found out that the change happened after we moved to the US, seems to have just been my great-great-grandfather, Mordecai, was like, eh, I like it with a tea. That's wonderful.

And everyone else was like, yeah, it is better with a tea. actually. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? A lot of great facts woven in to all of these stories. Um, honestly, the British beekeeping law thing. I was just going to say the cake. Yeah. Somehow you stole the seed from my fact and your fact about my fact was the weird. No, don't be sorry. It was amazing. There's an amazing, there's an amazing table. I found a line I don't know where, but you could probably find. Googling like British beekeeping law. And the table is basically, are they still your bees?

You know? Just like a whole list of like different circumstances and whether or not you still own these bees. Oh my God. That's like is the ship still stuck, but just a website that's just are they still your bees.com. Johnny, thank you so much for joining. Is there anything in particular you want to plug for our listeners to check out? So my book, my first novel 13 stories, S-T-O-R-E-Y, is out at the moment. I think in the US you can currently only get in an e-book format, but yeah, it's available as on Kindle or in audio format.

And if you're in the UK, you should be able to get a hardback from all good bookshops. Also, if you're interested in my game design work, I do some work. with tabletop RPGs, check out MacGuffin and Company.com. Awesome. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on 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, tote bags, and mugs at popsai. threadless.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Just Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

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