The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The First Underwater Video, Ballooning Over the North Pole, The Call of the Void

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from finding lost footage of the first-ever underwater video to a daring attempt to fly over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Mary Beth Griggs: www.twitter.com/MaryBethGriggs Tom McNamara: www.twitter.com/fieldguidetom Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest.

That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the same. 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 tech stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fulman. I'm Mary Beth Griggs. I'm Tom McNamara. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start out by each pitching a little negative information that we picked up while reporting, reading, editing, clicking around on Twitter, you know, being a journalist. And then we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about right away. And once we've all spun our little science yarns, we reconvene and vote on what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. and you can agree or disagree with us on Twitter at Weirdest underscore thing. So Tom, since it's your first time on the show, welcome. Hello.

Would you like to give you a little pitch first? Yeah, sure thing. So first let me set the scene. There's a dead horse floating upside down in the ocean waters off the Bahamas. Oh, my God. What? A shark approaches. Oh, no.

And there's a diver and cutoffs wielding a knife. and no, this is not a lost scene from the Life Aquatic. The year is actually 1914, and what I've just described, is the first motion picture film ever recorded under the sea. And this footage has more or less been lost for decades until I found it. Mary Beth. My gosh, this is. It really is. It really is.

What's your pitch? I mean, okay. This time the year is 1897. and I'm not going to set the scene quite as much because I want to leave a little bit for later in the show. But it's 1897 and three men just tried to fly over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. What? Yes.

Wow. Okay. That was the year to do it. That was. Well then. All right. So my tease is that a lot of people are afraid of height. but possibly even more people

when they stand at the edge of a great height feel the urge to jump. Do you feel this urge? Well, we'll get to that later, Tom. I think Tom ran away with the pitch session, so why don't you start us off? Well, for an upcoming popular science video I'm making, it's all variations on the theme of Nautilus.

So Nautilus, the animal, Nautilus fractal patterns, and Nautilus, as in Captain Nemo and the Nautilus. I came across the 1916 Silent Film version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And it's really beautiful, strange, and it has these very eerie underwater sequences in it. You see sharks floating by, there's beautiful coral reefs, there are these fishes. And, you know, if you look at the movie posters of the era, I can read you what. it says right now. It says the only production of its kind in the world, the only photo drama actually photographed at the bottom of the ocean with sites that for thousands of centuries have been denied to mankind. And so I thought, well, is this the first underwater

footage ever recorded? I mean, it's hyped that way and it isn't, but it's connected to it. The hype machine was real even back in the turn of the industry. That's amazing. I mean, they had to put butts in the seats. I started on this sort of quest of like, well, what was the first footage record underwater? And I found out this footage is lost, but no one was really like looking for it terribly hard. So I contacted the Library of Congress because they had records of this film being recorded and they didn't have it. And so like through Google searching, I was able to find a copy of this film, but in Dutch at the I Film Museum in the Netherlands. I got in touch with them.

They shared the footage with me, and now it's a part of my research and video that I'm making. To the person who invented this filming technique, his name is J.E. Williamson, and he's a newspaper man out of Norfolk, Virginia in the 1910s and 19-teens. And he was on a quest to find his big story to make himself famous. Aren't we all? Exactly. Is that really the goal of to make this most famous? That's kind of horrifying to me, but okay. And so, you know, like all good fame-seeking people do,

they manufactured and made themselves a part of the story. And so he was like, I'm really struggling trying to find a story, but what if I was able to produce the first ever picture underwater? There were actually like photographs taken underwater, actually even before the 1900s, but not really, like, widely popularized. Anyways, his father was a sea captain and a shipwreck scavenger,

and his father had actually invented what layer became the photosphere. It's like a barge, and then there's an accordion metallic tube that goes probably like 30, 40 feet under the water attached to a sphere, and there's a window looking out, and then J.E. had the idea,

like, what if I put a camera down there? What if I took a picture? So his first step was taking a picture and he developed it successfully. And with sort of like the height behind that photo, he was able to raise funds from financiers across the country to go on an expedition to the Bahamas in 1914 under the promise of I'm going to record the first motion pictures ever under the ocean surface. You know, I've sort of set the stage for what's going on here and I can return to the dead horse upside down in water. Yes, please. I can return to the gentleman wearing cutoffs, wielding a knife, and the shark approaching

from the background. Why this scene happened is because J.E. promised his financiers a fight between man and shark, as one does. Yeah. The original shark tank. Exactly. J.E. had hired some local Bahamian divers

to board the ship as a part of his crew and he was asking them for their counsel on like, well, how do you get a shark? I would like one shark, please. Exactly. And their advice to him was, well, you gotta drop a dead horse down there. Naturally. As one does.

Exactly. So the problem was, I guess, on the islands at the time, it was illegal to kill an animal without cause. So he found a horse that was, I guess, lame or something and was on its last ropes, but he couldn't actually, like, legally kill it. So he had to get, like, this whole, like, dignitary group

to come with, like, a formal decree, and they actually read the horse its death sentence, and then in his memoirs, like, before they, like, before they, like, finished the death sentence reading, they shot the horse in the head and it died. What the hell? So I'm sorry, I just want to make sure I understand. So they had this whole formal procedure planned out,

but they shot the horse before they finished it. Right, right. They were trying to save some time. Maybe daylight was running. Oh, my God. So they finally had the dead horse. And, you know, the footage is so strange. You know, this is black and white, slow-moving footage.

and all of a sudden this horse appears in frame and you're looking down at the ocean waters seems just very like out of some Werner Herzog movie or a David Lynch movie. I can hear Werner Herzog narrating the scene. Oh, the madness of the oceans. You know, man can only destroy. As the horse lowers,

this is the first time on recorded images or moving picture that a shark has ever been captured before. And it's just moving slowly. And so as a part of his deal with his financiers, he had to set up the fight. So he's brought, I guess, the opponent to the match. And now he's got to find someone to fight the shark. One of the local divers on his crew jumps in the water. He swims around.

They start recording. Battles the shark. He's able to, I think, stab it right behind its fin, and the shark dies. but unfortunately all of this happened off camera. Oh my now. And there was no footage recorded of this fight. Oh my gosh. And the diver said, I'm not going to do it again.

So, J.E. in a very, like, he had a lot of confidence. He said that he was fitter than any of the local Bahamians, that he was stronger, smarter, all this stuff. And so he said, I'm going to fight the shark. And so that's when J.E., like, decides to cut off his trouser pants into some pretty slick looking cutoffs. You can see it in the film. He lathers his body up with oil, just, you know. Because the shark could grab onto you and you would want to slip away. Right.

And you also just won't look good for the camera. He dives into the water and all of a sudden, like, as the footage is recording, you can see this panicked person. in the water, sort of swimming in between the legs of a dead horse in the ocean, and he grabs the fin of the shark swimming at him. And after a little bit of a struggle, which didn't really seem like a fair fight, he guts the shark. The shark sinks to the bottom, and J.E. swims to the top. Apparently, he'd never been underwater that long.

He sort of blacked out and came to on top of the boat. but when he came to, he ran down to the photosphere just so that he could watch like the last moments and the last struggle of the shark. And actually the film ends in this really, it's a little bit of a disturbing film to watch. The film ends as they're like dragging the shark up out of the water and there's a close-up as the shark's eye rolls back into its head.

Oh my gosh. And that's how it ends. Exactly. Seriously. Wow. He named this short, as you just described, Shark Snuff film. Originally 30 leagues under the sea with a wink and a nod.

So then I think more appropriately, the film was later retitled the terrors of the deep. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's appropriate. Not for the reasons he thought. Right. So I brought the footage with me so we can all watch the clip together. But since we're in podcast, we can describe the video for you. Oh, I'm so nervous.

Wow. Just to set it up, J.E. is on. top of the jewels Vern and as you can see he's starting to lather his body with oil. Oh my gosh. Oh, well, that does that dude and cutoffs. There he is rubbing, rubbing himself down with oil. Having two other guys rub him down with oil too. Hmm.

What kind of movie is. Oh, God, there's a horse. And the shark. There goes J.E. Down he goes. I'm so glad our reporting trips are not like this. Oh, I see, yep, I see the shark. Yeah, that's a real shark.

That's a shark that'll mess you up. That is a shark under the legs. Oh, God. And there was the death strike. Oh. You see, it happened so quick. Yeah. It didn't really.

Oh, no, dead shark. So, there you go. Wow. Cool. Thanks for letting me share my story. Thanks for sharing it. I think we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. with some more weird facts.

Okay, pals, you love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast. And now you can love it as a Facebook group. Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish findings of other science lovers. We'll also be publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for the weirdest thing on Facebook. Wow, that sounds like a great Facebook group that I would be super active in and that everyone should join. And now we're back, and I think it's my turn now. Oh, yeah.

I was on Reddit today I learned, which is a great resource and also a place where Pop-Sai article show up frequently. And I saw this post about one of those untranslatable words, which I always... Oh, those are so much fun. I love that crap. It's like a list of 20 phrases, many of which are often quite translatable, but we're like, There's no one word in English that means this. And they're always German, too. Always.

That's just because German works by just smashing words together, so you can create a whole sentence that's one word. But anyway, there was this French one. La Pelle du vide. It's the appeal of the void, which I think is pretty translatable. But it's the feeling when you're at the edge of a great height and you find yourself wanting to jump, Not for any suicidal reason, not because you're consciously thinking it'll be a fun thrill-seeking adventure, but just you have this compulsion to jump that seems to come from nowhere and is often quite frightening.

And the reason I was interested is because I've heard of this idea before. I was weirdly once at a Sufion Stevens concert and he opened his song Vesuvius by saying that, this was what that song was about, that it's about when you're standing at the edge of an abyss and you suddenly find yourself wanting to jump into it and you don't know why. And I thought about that a lot since because it made me start noticing that sensation, which I'm not sure if I noticed before. I don't know if I experienced it and just hadn't thought about it or if Sufian Stevens has made me want to jump into a cliff, which is like, yeah, like all the time in my adolescence. But thank you, Sufian Stevens.

But it turns out that it hasn't been researched that much, but there is at least one study on it. So to give a little bit of context, about 6% of people are afraid of heights in some notable way. You know, they experience physical discomfort. And the actual, like, serious phobia of heights is even less common. But 6% of people note that they are fearful of great heights. And it makes sense that humans would have evolved

a fear of heights. You know, we were probably more likely to survive if we didn't hang out on the edges of cliffs. Oh, yeah. At least in most cases. And, you know, sometimes they're great resources at the edges of cliffs. They are.

You can, like, climb down and get sea bird eggs and stuff, but no, I'm in that 6%. So in many groups of early humans, it was most beneficial to avoid cliffs. And since those people were more likely to reproduce, there's this idea that there might be kind of an innate fear of heights. And then a lot of fears are also learned. So that 6% probably comes from a healthy combination of both things.

Humans are probably slightly predispositioned to not want to fall off cliffs. And a lot of children have scary things happen when they fall off of high things and so become afraid of heights. But then there's the urge to jump. And one thing that I found really infuriating is that there is a Wikipedia page for the call of the void. But it redirects to suicidal ideation, which. negates the whole point. The point is that it's an urge that's not related to an actual desire to kill yourself. There's this one study that was just an observational study. It was at the University of Notre Dame back in 2012, and they had 431 subjects, which is not the tiniest study, but not a huge one either. And they were all college students, so again, not exactly a sample size we can use to extrapolate very broadly.

but they found that 50% of people who did not report ever having suicidal thoughts had experienced this urge to jump inexplicably, which the researchers led by Jennifer Hames called the high place phenomenon. Among people who had had suicidal thoughts, 75% had felt the edge to jump. And again, this was a small study, so it's not like we can say, oh, 50% of all people definitely have felt this urge. But like it is enough of a, it is a high enough number to suggest that in the general population, this is a thing that happens. It's not just like a one-off that Sufjohn Stevens had one time and one French guy a long time ago. Those researchers led by Jennifer Hames, they did try to figure out what was going on. And they have an idea.

So they think that it might be kind of an instance of like cognitive dissonance, which is when you're holding two disparate thoughts at once. and your brain often tries to make sense of these two conflicting pieces of information. Your body is protecting itself. Maybe you take a step back. Maybe you just lean back. But you're having this very quick unconscious reaction to protect yourself from the thing you might fall into. But then consciously, all of you're aware of is the fact that you're actually not at all close enough to the edge to fall in. You know that you're safe.

You know that you're not about to plunge off of this mountain. So her idea was that maybe your brain takes those two pieces of information and decides that you must have wanted to jump. Your brain decides that what it was protecting you from was your urge to jump. So you're kind of confusing the urge to overprotect yourself with an impulse to do the thing you're protecting yourself from. Oh, that's so weird. Other researchers think that it might just be as simple as that humans are thrill seekers

and that it might just be like a very quick momentary, like, ooh, you know, that would certainly be a long fall and that it's just as simple as that. I found one other researcher responding to that 2012 study who was saying that he thought it was just that we're doing risk assessment and considering taking a gamble. Because like if our brains are thinking that they must protect us from this great height, then there's the question of why we are risking being so. close to it in the first place. So maybe we kind of get confused and there's some part of our lizard brain that's like, well, whatever it is you're doing to risk being so close might be worth going over the edge for. So, you know, go get some eggs from cliff dwelling birds. Or when I read it, my first thought was that like, you know, if you're getting chased to the edge of a cliff by something. Maybe it's worth it to

jump down as opposed to waiting for the thing to catch you. I don't know. It's all very weird. But yeah, maybe think about the idea of intrusive thoughts, which is what the call of the void is really. It's just an example of an intrusive thought, which is a

phrase that could use a lot in psychology for just kind of any negative and kind of alien thought that pops into a person's head. It's kind of a catch-all term. mean a lot of different things. But for example, if you're standing on a cliff and you suddenly are like, what if I jumped in?

That's an intrusive thought. An example I heard from a friend once that I really love. He's in medical school and they were working with cadavers and they had the brains that day. And a friend of his was like, for some reason I'm terrified that I'm going, she's like, I started out terrified that I was going to accidentally eat the brain. somehow and the more I thought about it, now I'm worried that I'm just going to reach out and grab it and shove it into my mouth. And she was like, I don't know why I can't stop thinking about that. Like, obviously I would not put the brain in my mouth, but now that I've had the thought,

I'm terrified that I'm going to do it. And that's like a really great example of an intrusive thought. They're not always physical actions, but it is something where you're like, why am I thinking that and why can I stop? That's like when I've been on hikes and I come across a berry or a mushroom that I know to be poisonous, it's like all I can do to not eat that mushroom or berry. I don't know why. That's your call of the void. The call of the mushroom.

What is the void trying to say to me? Come to me, Tom. And the thing of... Okay. No. No. Say no to the void. Always say no to the void.

You know, a lot of people. have experienced intrusive thoughts to enough of a degree that they've talked to a therapist about them or at least have, you know, read about them online. You know, people with obsessive and compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, a lot of those disorders come down to having intrusive thoughts that make it impossible for you to live your life and be happy. You know, whether those are thoughts about rituals you have to perform or, you know, there are cases of OCD that are just about intrusive. thoughts of violence that people can't control and that really can make them feel like they must be secretly terrible people if they keep having these thoughts. And in PTSD, you know, you can have intrusive thoughts about a traumatic event over and over again and not be able to stop thinking about them. So one thing, if anyone is listening who feels like they periodically

have thoughts like these and you think that it's a sign that you're secretly a terrible person is that it's really important that you recognize the thought as being part of being a healthy human and something that happens to all of us. We're not really sure why, but our brains are very weird and messed up. There's no such thing as being healthy.

And also that realizing that it's something that happens to everyone and also not something you should act on is the best way to get rid of them, which is not to say that like, oh, just like accept and let them go and you'll be cured. You might very well need therapy and you should talk to a therapist if you keep having intrusive thoughts.

But it's definitely known to make them worse if you just agonize over why you're having these thoughts that seems to contribute to making them kind of like play on repeat. So that's my little mental health PSA for the week. I think there are a lot of intrusive thoughts like the call of the void that are just like our wires getting crossed You know, we were designed to like play out worst possible scenarios.

We're very imaginative. And so sometimes we can have these sudden thoughts and it feels like they are coming from some like deep inner part of ourselves when they're really just like random neurons firing in response to really mundane stimuli. All right. Well, we're going to go talk to the void for a little bit, but we'll be back with some more weird facts in just a minute. It's Pride Month. Celebrate with our limited edition Science Pride T-shirts featuring a rainbow popular science logo. All profits go to Out in STEM, an organization that empowers the LGBTQ community in science, tech, engineering, and math. Get yours now at popsy.com and share on social media with hashtag sciPride.

That's SCI Pride. Wow, the side pride t-shirts are so good that I'm literally wearing one right now. You are. She is. It's not a lie. All right. Mary Beth, it's time for your science adventure. Oh, boy.

And this is such an adventure. It's, okay. And just to remind everyone, my fact was that in 1897, three men tried to fly over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. Smart. It's just like, yeah, this is very odd. And the reason I came across this fact was I was on Twitter. as one does, and there was this picture of a balloon with some people next to it in the Arctic. And I was like, this seems interesting and odd.

And I started going down a rabbit hole. A lot of the information that I found was from a book called the Ice Balloon by Alec Wilkinson, who wrote this really interesting story of this saga that kind of started in the late 1800s and kept going and, you know, ended up kind of concluding in a way in the 1930s. We'll get there, I promise. The person who came up with this idea was Salomon August Andre. He was a Swedish scientist and engineer. He was working in the patent office.

And like many people that were kind of these scientist engineer types at the time, was fascinated by the Arctic. And he also happened to be fascinated by balloons. Who isn't? Who isn't, really? by about the late 1800s, like there had been about a thousand people that attempted the North Pole, like wanted to get there.

But of the thousand people who attempted, 751 died. Wow. Wow. Yeah. This is not exactly a stage. Not great odds. Really bad.

And so, in part, a balloon will make the odds better. Exactly, exactly. He figured, you know, okay, so sailing and walking and, you know, dog sledding there is not really, working out so much. So why don't we fly? Balloons are awesome. He kind of studied the winds in his

work and he'd participated in some Arctic expeditions before. And he figured that he would just fly right on over to Alaska from Europe. And it would be great. Seems reasonable. Yeah. And he actually made this impassioned speech for his case and kind of insulted the people that had, you know, lost a bunch of people on these other missions. Apparently it was effective. He got support of like these big name groups. And so it was, you know, not only the popular press that were super interested in this mission

in the Swedish Academy of Sciences, it was the King of Sweden, Alfred Nobel, like they funded this project. He ended up raising 130,800 croner, which is about a million dollars today. So a lot of money. for the time. A lot of balloons. It's a lot. It's only one balloon. It was one balloon. And it was, I mean, and that was what the largest expense, which kind of makes sense was the balloon that they were going to make.

That is the focal point. Yeah. Yeah. Remember that he's getting all this funding and everything in about his first attempt was 1896. He first rode in a balloon in 1892. And he, at the time that he actually, embarked on this adventure had spent a grand total of 40 hours in the sky. Well, but he's got a can-do attitude. He does. And not only does he have that can-do attitude, he also has invented a way of steering that involves dragging ropes along the ground, because this is a hydrogen balloon. This is not a hot air balloon. And so this is actually, he basically figured, okay, we'll just inflate the balloon, and I will throw these big heavy ropes down onto the ground and drag, let them drag, and that will change the course. Like, that will help me get to where I need to go.

A lot of experienced balloonists were like, no, no, please don't. That's not how this works. But he ignored them. He started setting up the sixth edition, and part of that was getting the balloon going. And so he commissioned one from France. The balloon itself was nearly 100 feet tall. It was made of silk and it was sewn in like this workshop in France.

The problem is that, you know, in sewing, you're creating lots and lots of little holes, all up and down the balloon. About 8 million holes. And just no one thought that would be a problem? Well, I mean, they thought they had like special varnish. This is like the time where they can do all kinds of things. And so they figure that they were like, we live in the future. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Don't forget the rope strategy. Don't forget the rope strategy, which is key. He estimates that at the time he's like, okay, this balloon is going to last in the sky for 30 days. It'll be plenty of time to get across to Alaska. Do you know what was the longest balloon journey at that point? You know, that is such an interesting question. And it was not that long. I think that they were kind of trying to figure that out.

It was much longer than it ever been actually attempted before. They went up to the area where they were going to take off in 1896, the summer. of 1896, and they were like, we are going to do this. This is going to happen. And as they're waiting around and keep waiting around for the winds to change, because again, you're in a hydrogen balloon, you don't really have like ropes aside, not that great of a way to steer. So the wind has to be blowing in the right direction. Toward Alaska. At least generally. At least in a vague way. But it kept blowing to the south. And so they were just like, okay, this isn't happening. In 1897, the three guys that end up going are Andre, a man named Neil Strenberg, who is a physics and chemistry student.

He was charged with kind of taking pictures. He was going to take cartographic pictures from the air that were going to help map out the Arctic. And the other one was Newt Frankel, who was, and I don't know if I'm saying that right, an apology is if I'm not. Sorry to all the Frankl's. I very much apologize. guys. But he was a civil engineer, the meteorologist, for the mission. And there was a huge public interest in these guys and, and, and like their mission going up. And so finally, it gets to the point where, okay, we've got the brave souls that are going to go up on this balloon,

as El Colm has just been like, no, this is, this is not going to go well. But they're still convinced it's going to happen because that can do attitude. And so July 11th, 1897, you have lift off, which is from an island, Spitzbergen in Norway, and it's about 650 miles from the North Pole. Immediately, everything goes wrong. As soon as they send off their telegram, they're like, we're off telegram, things immediately start to go wrong.

They drag ropes, dragged. So they kept dragging along the ground, and the balloon could barely, like, float above the water. Not only are they getting rid of some of the weight of the sand that they had on board to kind of help maybe control their altitude. At the same time, those ropes that are dragging in the water, there's a safety mechanism that they'd installed that made them suddenly, like, release. Freed of all that weight, they went up to 2,300 feet, just like, suddenly, just up. I'm sure they all felt great. Yeah.

As they're going up, they start losing hydrogen. And so they don't make it 17 days. They flew for a little over two days. And they traveled for around 300 miles, which is a pretty impressive distance. But the last little part of their journey was mostly like the balloon kind of like bouncing along the ice. And it wasn't going well. And so it finally came to a stop and they realized, okay, we're not going to get this up again. And that was one of the pictures that I'd come across initially.

And I can show it to you guys and kind of describe it for everyone at home. And you can also see that picture on popsye.com. You can. And so this is one of the pictures that kind of initially attracted my attention. And in it, you can see, like, it looks like a beached whale almost. It does. Like, it's incredible. Yeah, it's really depressing.

And you can see, like, down here, like, these are two of the guys. So were they in like an open basket? Yes. That seems impractical. Yes. Yes. For traveling to the Arctic. Yeah.

And because like they also have it's inflated with hydrogen, which is, I mean, remember the Hindenberg, you don't want to have sparks near it. So they were planning on like cooking on their cook stove like out of the basket. Leaning out of the basket. Like they had to have their cook stove off of the basket and they would light it with like an extendable like arm to keep it as far away as possible. And is this where it came? to settle after the 300-mile trip.

Yeah, so this is like the resting place of the balloon. And when you said dragged, I sort of imagined or like hopping, I imagined it hopping. But looking at this picture, it looks like it was literally dragged. Like the basket is out on its side. The balloon is on its side. Yeah. Everything is on its side. It looks horrifying to be dragged that way across the snow.

Yeah. This probably isn't soft, lovely snow either. Like, this is in the middle of an Arctic summer. And so you've got like just ice up there. It's also just like a very small basket for three men to hang out in 17 days. Where did they poop? That's a question I have. I mean, I think that's an excellent question.

Next to the stove. Just kind of hanging off the edge, probably. But yeah, so they, in this tiny basket, though, I mean, they were at least nominally prepared to, like, you know, survive because they knew that they would need to, given, like, the incredible death toll that Arctic exploration takes. And so they had equipped in this tiny basket. They also had like sledges for each person, supplies. They had guns for, you know, hunting and that sort of thing and food. And they were kind of ready to try to make it back. They don't have any pack animals, clearly, in this tiny basket.

And so they were having to drag the sledges themselves across the kind of broken ice. This is not an easy landscape to get through. And they're really hard to drag. And so they start having injuries. They start getting very sick. There were some reports that they started getting like diarrhea. And they just weren't making that much progress. They moved like 300 miles in just a little over two days.

But now they had to make 300 miles back across some of the harshest landscape in the world. Right. And it gets to be September. And they're still not back. And they're just not back at land. And they're trying to, you know, do the best that they can. And they decide, okay, we've got a winter here. And so they actually build a house on the ice near an island.

And they're just like, okay, we'll set this up. We've got like our living area. We've got our supply area. We've got like a little bedroom area. And they think, okay, we're going to be fine. They're only there for a few days when they wake up in the middle of the night and the ice has started breaking underneath them and underneath their home. And so they're like, oh, crap.

So they have to gather all of their supplies and set out again. They don't ever make it back. you know, to Sweden. It wasn't until there was another scientific mission that landed on an island in Norway that was set to map the glaciers and seas in the area. It was a Norwegian expedition called the Brabog. And they came across a skull.

They were like, well, this is an interesting thing to find. An auspicious start to our field expedition. Okay, this is an interesting field expedition. and they start looking closer and there are two corpses that are visible and they find that they're wearing clothing that has monograms on it and they realize that this is from this expedition.

The reason that we know so much about what happened with these men was that they found the journals and apparently they were pretty, you know, chipper until the end. They were like, okay, with these companions, we can do anything kind of thing it was last like coherent entries

but they didn't quite make it. The leading cause is probably they just died of exposure. It was like they're out there in this bitter cold and that probably did them in. There were a lot of other theories. Some of the bodies have been kind of torn up a little bit and they think that that was a polar bear but it's not clear that they actually died

in like a polar bear attack. And so yeah, it's still kind of unclear as to what got them in the end but you know several months in the Arctic is not going to be good for anybody. But their photographs did survive. And in 1930, like, their bodies, you know, 33 years after they'd left, returned to a hero's welcome in Sweden. And so because people still kind of remembered, like, oh, this was this famous expedition

that just completely disappeared. There were lots of conspiracy theories that started, you know, in those 33 years. It wasn't until 2000, year 2000, that David Hevelman Adams became the first person to pilot a hot air balloon over the North Pole. And so that was 103 years after they'd attempted. It was a hot air balloon, which is a little bit, I mean, still not the most controllable vessel, but definitely easier to control than like a hydrogen balloon. Also, way less risk to do it in 2000 when like, you know, someone can pick you up. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You could hit your emergency beacon. Yeah. Yeah. Nowadays, mostly balloons are used in the Antarctic and Arctic for science

experiments. But not like this. The first flight was not that great. That one bobs me out. I'm sorry. Sorry. But a fascinating story of exploration and can do with little know-how. Yeah. Well, given that this one is really sad, I'm going to vote for Tom's for the weirdest thing I learned this week. Yours was sufficiently weird, Marybeth. Listen, I can't compete with a dead horse. You can beat a dead horse, but you can't compete with you. Nope. So do you also vote for- Oh, I also vote for Tom?

Tom, congrats on winning your inaugural appearance on The Weirdest Thing. Hey. Thank you for having me, and I didn't doubt that I would lose. So. No kidding. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now. And if you like the show, please tell your friends.

And please rate and review us on iTunes. iTunes. You can buy our merch, including limited edition Cy pride t-shirts and the weirdest thing I learned this week, tote bags, at popsci.threadlist.com. Our theme music was produced by Billy Cadden. Our editor is Jason Letterman. 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 back.