The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Most Man-Eating Tiger, Historical Balloon Riots, Baseball’s Curses

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a tiger that ate more than 600 people over seven years to not one, not two, but three historical hot air balloon riots. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Now available on Disney Plus rated PG. Hey, Weirdos. It's Rachel. I'm out of town this week. So we are going to take the opportunity to share the first half of our latest live show with you. You'll notice the recording sounds a little different because we weren't in a studio. We were in front of a live audience of weirdos at caveat in New York City. The show was on February 1st and it was so much fun.

So we're really excited to share. with you. But we'd be even more excited if you joined us next time. We'll definitely be doing another live show sometime in the near future, so keep an ear out for details soon. Before we get to the show, just a couple notes about how it might be different from what you're used to. You may hear people shout, drink. It's because there was a drinking game. We'll put the rules on popside.com, and you're welcome to play along, assuming you're of legal age and not currently driving. You'll also hear us reference visual aids, which may be kind of frustrating because you're not watching, you're listening. But don't worry. Everything we reference is going to be either posted or linked to

on popsight.com slash weird. Okay, that's everything you need to know to enjoy our live show part one. So let's get to the show. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while most of the fun facts we learn end up in our articles, there are a lot of other weird facts that just end up on the cutting room floor. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learn this week, a podcast from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Eleanor Cummins and I'm Jess Bodey. Thanks, Jason. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease of some kind of fact we picked up while reading, writing, reporting, scrolling through

Twitter and being depressed, being a journalist, you know. And then we 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. Let's get on to our teases. Eleanor? I would like to talk about the man-eatingest tiger of all time. The most man-eatingest of all tigers? No competition. Okay, interesting. Jess.

My teaser is sending a bloody goat's head in a box to someone. Cool? Yeah. A normal Friday night. Of course, yeah. So mine is about how I set out to learn about one hot air balloon riot and actually found three of them. Who will start? I think it'll be me.

Naturally. That's what I thought too. I just completely spontaneously think we're going to talk about balloons. Drink. So, balloons. You know, hot air ballooning was always a pretty lofty, a fair drink. Legend has it, the Marie Antoinette was actually present for the first ever hot air balloon test. They can also be called gas balloons. There's a distinction.

I'm not going to get into it. I only have nine minutes. During that test in 1783, there were not humans. There was a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. in that hot air balloon basket. And apparently they all behaved themselves until they landed in the woods. But the same cannot be said for human spectators.

No, I am here to tell you, my friends, of not one, not two, but in fact three historical hot air balloon riots. So the first riotous tale actually comes with a big assist from Dr. Brett Holman. He's a historian from Melbourne. So I tracked down his very lovingly and painstakingly dissected written accounts of the Melbourne Balloon Riot of 1858.

Not to be confused with the more famous balloon riot of 1864, which we will get to eventually. Some of the stories go that the Australian balloon full of dignitaries had just gone for a moonlit sail over the botanical gardens. There were fireworks, it was lovely, and it glided into a working-class district where a violent crowd, driven mad by the heavy-hand

metaphor of a basket full of rich people who had just watched fireworks from the sky, sailing over them, seized the vessel and tugged it down and attacked them, and the crew had to jettison champagne bottles, picnic baskets, their sense of irony to get back in the air, okay? Another account claims that these ground dwellers were actually appalled of the sacrilege of man trying to fly because apparently working class Australia in the Victorian era was the Dark Ages. So Holman did find an account from Charles Henry Brown, who was an aeronaut of the Australasian,

of an ill-fated flight that was around that time and was in fact over a working-class neighborhood. While he was tugged down and beaten about the head and generally attacked and had to run away on foot, no jettisoning required, there's no mention of potential motive. So we have no way of knowing why these working-class citizens wanted to destroy man's balloon. And in fact, there are a couple accounts that suggest that Australian locals had made it into a game to any time they saw a balloon to try to destroy it, which sounds a lot more like the Victorian working class we all know in love because they made their own fun. Okay, so let's not forget, though, the great balloon riot of 1864. You'd think that 80 years of ballooning would have given folks time to like chill the fuck out about balloons. But Henry Coxwell is proof that this wasn't the case.

So here he is pictured with a meteorologist named James Glacier. He was famous for an 1862 flight where they went up into the stratosphere just to like see what would happen because like that was a thing you could do now that you hadn't been able to do before. For science. Yeah, exactly, for science. And what happened for science is that Glacier went temporarily blind and passed out. And Coxwell was so hypoxic that he lost the use of his arms and he had to be. pull the cord with his teeth to send them back down to safety.

This is what he's famous for. He's a real hero. Very resourceful. A real British hero. A man of science, an explorer, really, a pioneer of the skies. And so he finds himself at a carnival in a neighborhood of London full of very well-to-do folk. You know, not like these riffraff in Australia. Yeah, he's safe.

Here's what was later written in The Times by Coxwell himself. myself. Early in the afternoon, a gentleman reported to be a professional man, gave it out that the balloon present was not my largest and newest balloon, but a small one. This was a cruel libel, he added, but the rumors spread all the same. This Coxwell, they muttered darkly, he's taking us for mugs, which I guess is the thing people said. So as the mood soured, people attacked, they started demanding instantaneous assent, which is impossible. And Coxwell was like, if you're going to act that way, I'm going to deflate the balloon. And he did.

And then they were like, if you're going to deflate the balloon, we're going to tear it up and set it on fire, which they did. And someone who had witnessed it later wrote to the Chronicle saying, I never witnessed such barbarous ignorance, baseness, and injustice in my life. I feared Mr. Coxwell would be killed. I was knocked down thrice myself simply for endeavor. to defend him, which like, okay, make it about you, whatever. And then he added a PS. They have burnt the balloon and are parading its remains through the town,

having just passed my window. So all of this is hilarious because it's fucking absurd, as I'm sure you'll agree. It sounds like the original fire festival. Yes. Yes. It was. The thing is, though, that in researching this one, I found the one we just talked about, which was a surprise. And then in putting together the show, I came across a third one. Now this, this is like pretty on a dark note. This is from

a news article I dug up. This was the Sydney Morning Herald in December 1856. So it describes the court proceedings surrounding the death of a young boy named Thomas Downs who had gone to see a balloon assent that turned into a riot because a bunch of sailors tugged the balloon down and set it on fire. Always with the fire. Balloon riots were apparently not uncommon and were sometimes fatal. That is the takeaway of this story. What the hell was

going on in the Victorian era? A frequent topic of discussion on weirdest thing I learned this week. And yeah, people should have learned their lesson in 1856 with poor Thomas Downs. And they did not. The balloon mania

persisted. It just goes on and on. It's crazy. Nia century. And that's my story. Those are the balloon riots. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. So we're back. And now Jess is going to get into her fact.

If you want to click over to your factoids. Great. Oh, yes. Oh, there he is. There's a goat. So as you might remember, my teaser was sending someone a bloody goat head in a box. So our story begins. On a rainy April afternoon in 2013 when a truck pulled up to 1060 West Addison Street,

Chicago's north side, a man got out and he walked up to the building and he handed a little white box to a security guard, you know, like a little box you might put a cake in. Then he got back in, he drove away, security examined the box, and it was not a cake. It was a box. Yeah, it was. Cupcakes. It was a bloody, severed head of a goat. Wow.

Animal lovers. So you might be thinking like why, right? Like why somebody might want to do this? The answer is because of this. Baseball. The goathead was delivered to Wrigley Field, 1060 West Addison, home of the Chicago Cubs. It was addressed to the team's owner,

and there was no note. And still you might be asking why this is happening and the reason is because of a curse. Spooky. Yeah, very spoopy. It began in 1945 when the clubs were hosting the World Series against the Detroit Tigers. They're playing very well, up two games to one. A local fan and tavern owner named William Sianis wanted to come watch the game, and he had two box seats, one for himself and one for his goat. Such a dapper goat. He's ready for a night on the town. Yeah. Yeah. So as you can see in this photo on the right, the staff at Wrigley was like, No, sir, you cannot bring your goat into this baseball stadium because it smells so bad. And Sianis was like extremely pissed off by this.

He was very mad. He was irate. So we went back to his tavern. And he sent a telegram to the Cubs owner, P.K. Wrigley. And he said the Cubs would lose this World Series and every other World Series that they would make it too. They would never win another one. Uh-oh. And what do you know?

They lost that World Series to the Tigers, after which Sianus sent another telegram saying, Who Stinks Now? Which absolutely fire, like iconic, legendary. And, yeah, so the Cubs didn't win another championship until three years ago in 2016. That was 108 years without a series win, which is the longest ever. And whenever they would get close to advancing in the playoffs, a weird, cursed event. what happened, as many Cubs fans will remember, including the black cat crossing the dugout incident. So after this, yes. I have never seen a more cursed image. Truly. And so the Cubs again

were playing well, but immediately crumbled after this black cat crossed the dugout. It's pretty distracting for a cat to enter your baseball field. I think it's understandable that their performance did not hold up after that. I don't, yeah. I mean, I guess. Fine. Fans were very, very distraught. So they did things to try and break this curse, like the goathead in a box. And in 07 and 09, people left goatheads at Wrigley-Sahn's box. People brought live goats to the stadium or, like, butchered goats.

They would go to, like, the butcher in Chicago and get a goat to hang up at the stadium. And the Cubs aren't the only cursed team. The Yankees Red Sox rivalry is largely based. based on a curse, which is the curse of the Bambino. That started in 1919 when the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth, the Bambino, who was largely regarded as the best player in baseball. The Red Sox traded him to the Yankees. And without Ruth, Boston didn't win a championship until 2004, while the Yankees

won 26 championships. Boston fans were also very desperate to break their curse. They hired exorcists to purify Fenway Park. And again, eventually, the curse was broken one, the Red Sex won. Boo. I have no skin in this game whatsoever. I'm glad everyone's having fun. And so, you know, growing up a Cubs fan myself, I always took this curse up as, you know,

it always felt very normal. I never, I didn't think twice about all this goat business. But looking back, like, yeah, it's like really weird. So it made me wonder why baseball fans are so superstitious out of, compared to any other pro sport, really, baseball fans are the most superstitious. So I decided to investigate, and I have learned that we are so superstitious for three main reasons. The first is how ingrained baseball is with American culture. So baseball, of course, is America's pastime. What else is America's pastime? Blaming things we don't understand on the supernatural.

Also, conspiracy theories. And this is a lot of it. goes back to 6093, Salem Witch Trials, moon landing, JFK assassination. In all of these cases, there's things that people can't really fully understand or explain, and so they turned

of course, naturally, to magic and conspiracy. So like in baseball, if your team is losing decade after decade, it's not coincidence, it's not bad management, it's magic, it's a curse. We love to fabricate these narratives to help us feel better. And this idea is at the heart

of baseball, in fact, at its inception. Baseball quite obviously evolved from English games like cricket, but Americans didn't want to accept that. They wanted to think that it had a red, white, and blue creation story that we invented baseball totally. So they decided to make up a creation story. In 1908, a quite impartial group of senators, baseball executives, and retired players decided that baseball was invented in 1839 by an American Civil War general named Abner Doubleday. That's cool. I make similar grand sweeping decisions with small groups of friends. Yeah, all the time.

Yeah, all the time. Yeah, it's understandable, I suppose. And they said that he invented it in Cooperstown, New York. Oh, nice. We've got a Cooperstown local. You didn't invent baseball. And as our friend in the audience might know, the baseball hall of fame is still in Cooperstown,

despite. That is. despite this whole thing being fabrication. And really, I mean, is anything else more American than claiming foreign culture for own benefit? I think not. But anyway, back to superstition. So the second reason baseball fans love their curses

is because of math. Math fans too? Wow. What a crowd. So baseball plays more games in a season than pretty much any other pro sport, 162 games each, and because there are 142 pitches in a game, that means roughly 23,000 pitches per team per year.

And with every pitch, there's a chance for something really, really weird to happen. Drink. Like Black Cat, for instance, or, I don't know, I'm just kind of like spitballing here, but maybe for a pitch to accidentally hit a bird. Oh, no. Wow, that's so much worse than I expect it.

Yeah, they said the bird was dead before it hit the ground. Yeah. The bird was like in a million pieces before it hit the ground. Yeah, it's just a puff of feathers. So many feathers. Yeah. And the pitcher who's like a very, very good all-star pitcher, his name is Randy Johnson.

There's more Google searches for Randy Johnson bird than there are for Randy Johnson baseball. And another weird thing that might happen. in again just kind of spitballing here. I don't know if I can take this. For large swarms of insects to descend on the field. Locus. Plague of Locus. Yes, it's quite biblical. Look at this guy.

Coming in with the off spray. I know. Derek Jeter didn't know what kind of bugs they were. They were small, but they were midges. And actually, this was because of global warming, it was thought, because playoffs last into October. So as temperatures lasted longer and longer, the midges stayed around for longer and longer and they were attracted to the lights at the night game.

So, you know, global warming has effects. It has no bounds. You can't see this full quote. It says, I'm not an expert on what kind of bugs they are. They were small. Derek Jeter. Thank you for that. So all of this to say is that baseball is just a game of variability.

And when moments like these strike, they often fit very nicely into a curse narrative. And finally, the last reason that baseball curses are such a thing is because they are fun. I love a good curse, personally. Yeah, same, truly. They're a fun group activity, often involve goats of your Cubs fan, but that has psychological implications. They're part of the culture of going to the ballpark or the bar with your friends or just in your living room with your parents. and all of that plays into a branch of psychology called crowd psychology or mob psychology. That line of research shows that people in large groups get a sense of anonymity

and kind of this thought that everybody's doing it. This is totally normal. And that's how you end up with goats in cake boxes. Wow. Amazing. Just a sassy hex to share among friends. We are going to have to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Hey, weirdos.

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Okay, and we're back. After that long break, we all got to scrudge our legs. We heard from some brands. I love brands. Now Eleanor is going to tell us her fact. Right. So the Bengal tiger is a fearsome beast, not that you would know from this image.

While people are often depicted writing them around, they are really, really scary. They can weigh up to 800 pounds. They can run in bursts of 40 miles an hour, which is faster than anyone in this room, that's for sure. And they can also bite, with a force of 1,000 pounds per square inch, which out does a great white shark.

So long story short, you don't want to run into one, and often you do not, because tigers are pretty scared of humans. They're nocturnal, and so they mind their own business. They apparently are kind of spooked out by, like, our bipedalism. They're not, like, big fans of moving on two feet. This is what the tiger experts tell me. But there are three cases in which you might run into a tiger,

And so those are very specific incidences. One is when a tiger has disabling wounds, so it's not able to stalk mightier prey. Another instance is when its typical food source has left for whatever reason. And the third instance is when its habitat is disappearing. And what do you know? All three of these things coincided in Nepal in about the year 1900, and that's where our story really begins. I'm taking care from a new book called No Beast So Fier by Dane Hucklebridge. And basically, as he tells the story, this female tiger was shot by a poacher in 1890 or 1900.

And obviously, he does not kill her. This is her origin story. This is how this all starts. Next Marvel movie? Yes, the Tigris. Yes. Wow, I would buy a ticket to see that film. Absolutely.

So it starts with her being shot, and a few of her teeth, it seemed. like are broken and she's definitely she gets some disabling wounds and this is at a time in Nepal where you know villages are expanding and more and more people are going to be coming into contact with tigers and it's just kind of the risk that you run

so she starts attacking and she's just a better attacker than most tigers by the end of her seven year reign as I like to think of it this queen she is this tigris who's called the Champawat man eater which is a great name.

She kills roughly 435 people, which makes her the deadliest animal. A busy lady. Yes, the deadliest animal that we know. She's leaning in. Absolutely. And so Death by Tiger, I've kind of forgotten what's in my slides.

Oh, here's the book. Death by Tiger is really brutal. I will give it that. They are able to sever a human spinal cord with their teeth, What she really likes to do, though, is she likes to drag people out of their huts in the middle of the night and take them away to eat them. That's kind of her move. It's really horrible. I wanted to give sort of a modern example.

I was reading this O-Bit from the New York Times an obituary of a tiger trainer named Mabel Stark. And in 1928, she was performing on the circus circuit. She was in carnivals. And no one told her that her tigers hadn't been fed for over 24 hours. So she goes out into the arena to perform, and here's what they describe happening. After slipping in mud, she was attacked by two of her tigers. Sheik tore into her left thigh while Zhu chewed her right leg. The deltoid muscle of one of her shoulders was ripped away, as was one of her breasts.

Her scalp had nearly been torn off, blood filled her boots. She was rescued by the circuses, Lion Tamer, and an attendant who dragged her out of the cage while fending off the tigers with guns and spears. So not great. No, not great. I wouldn't recommend it. And so what did they do in Nepal? They decide that they need to call in this guy named Jim Corbett. And so they decide to set him on this Champawat man eater.

And so he spends months trying to track her down. And in this book, they like describe the way that he's like trying to get into the mind of a tiger. And he's like trying to like think like the Champa Wat man eater. What are her motivations? What does she feel? How does she make her strategic decisions? He eventually tracks her down. And he actually tracks her down a few times and every time runs away.

But he finally does it. And he, three shots, kills her. And your reaction is weirdly the reaction that Jim Corbett had. He felt really good about having saved these Nepalese villagers who were being terrorized for years by this tiger. But later in his life, after killing quite a few other menacing cats, he became like a conservationist. And so in Nepal today, there's like a tiger refugee like censure

that's named after him because he was like, all of the reasons that these tigers kill now that I have had a sort of mind-meld with the Champawat man-eater indicate to me that their problems aren't because of us and we should feel not good about that. He really had a change of heart.

And the thing is, is that while we were better about conserving space for tigers and that's a real priority, they do still sometimes interact with humans in dangerous ways and I would like to just have us all to remember. In November of 2018, there was a man-eating tiger in Maharashtra, India,

and the authorities are like, well, we have to get her, how do we do it? And the answer is Calvin Klein's obsession perfume. So, turns out this lovely scent that we love to spray on ourselves is made partially of civetone, which is this chemical derived from civets, which are cat-like mammal, and tigers are very attracted to this. And it worked. And I would just like to leave you here tonight, with the Calvin Klein obsession ad.

When she devoured my very soul, please. When I had nothing left to surrender, she abandoned me to the wreckage of myself and smiled. The kingdom of passion, the ruler, is obsession. Calvin Klein's obsession. Oh, the smell of it. At Lord and Taylor.

Wow. Amazing, inspiring tale. I am obsessed with that ad. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Usually we vote amongst ourselves, but given that there are a bunch of people here, we will allow them to make noise and make a decision. So was it perhaps the psychological origins of our favorite sport myths? Or maybe it was not one, not two, but three balloon riots?

Okay, okay. Or was it this tigris? All right. Balloons. Oh, okay. I mean, I wasn't going to say it, but if you guys think so. Okay, great. Thank you.

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 iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at Popside. threadless.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, and our editor, Jason Letterman. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions,

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