The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Sleepiest Epidemic, Really Deep Holes, Goddess of Dirty Dishes

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

PopSci intern Jack Izzo talks about the deepest hole EVER. Plus, Rachel explains contagious sleepiness throughout history, and Sara Kiley divulges the captivating story of the woman who invented the dishwasher. 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!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Thanks to our Sponsors: Right now, get up to 55% off your subscription when you go to https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST Babbel—Language for life. Get 15% off OneSkin with the code [WEIRDEST] at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod Treat yourself to the best shapewear on the market and save 20% Off at honeylove.com/WEIRDEST. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 ocean front room.

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 tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of

popular science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. I'm Jack Issa. Jack, welcome to the show. Hey, yeah. So excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me. I'm very excited. Listeners, Jack is a recent graduate of pop size internship program. But Jack, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? Yeah, so I don't even know where to start. Like, I am from Southern California. And I I am a senior currently at Northwestern University. I am like, what, like one month, two months away from graduating, which is terrifying. So employers feel free to reach out.

I am still looking for employment opportunities. But yeah, last in the winter, I was interning at Popular Science, writing a bunch of cool scientific stories and stuff. and one of the stories I wrote was just like so interesting and not to not to let I fell into a hole put a pin in that will come back to it wow intriguing I wonder what it could possibly mean I'm excited um okay let's get into it so on the weirdest thing I win this week we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading writing reporting etc and then 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. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease?

So my tease is I'm here to talk about the girl boss behind this kitchen essential. Oh, oh, bye. Not even telling us which kitchen essential. You'll find out very soon. Leaving us on center hooks. Great. Okay. I just want any excuse to use the phrase on tenter hooks.

Jack, what's your tease? My tease is the like complete opposite of the space race. It's still a race, but in the opposite direction. It's a race to the bottom, relatable. Awesome. Okay, so my tease is that I want to talk about. about a mysterious disease outbreak that left people so, so, so, so sleepy, which is very relevant to my life at this time.

Sounds like every disease to me. Yeah, that's true. That is kind of, that that is kind of the point ultimately. So I can, I can get started with some, some sleepy, sleepy stories. Yes. This is now a sleepy time podcast. Just a weird epidemic, weird plague ASMR, which is basically what my TikTok channel is. This is a story I've talked about on my TikTok before. So if you follow me there, sorry, no, you're going to get here too. But you can follow me at Rachel Fultman. And honestly, right now I'm not really posting anything on TikTok.

But, you know, if you want me to do stuff like this on there, let me know and maybe I'll do it. So I'm going to start by referencing the graphic novel and Netflix series Sandman, where as one aspect of the plot, the world is struck by this mysterious plague called the sleepy sickness and it leaves sufferers in this fairy tale-like slumber for decades at a time. And believe it or not, this spooky sleepy sickness is based on a very real outbreak of disease that happened during the early 20th century. And it's one that scientists don't actually fully understand to date. Oh. Yeah. Very, very spooky. So as you can probably guess, in real life, this sleepy sickness did not actually strike millions of people simultaneously, like in the course of one night. But the truth is

only like slightly less unsettling. Great. So this disease, which extreme cases can cause victims to fall into a coma-like state, spread through the world for more than a decade starting in late 1916, and it affected at least a million people during that time. And it's called encephalitis lethargica. And the scariest thing about it is that we're still really not sure exactly what it is. Oh, lovely.

leave. Yeah, we love that. And we know it's shown up in like epidemic proportions, or at least we think it's shown up in epidemic proportions more than once throughout history. Oh, geez. Yeah, yeah. And just for any listeners wondering, this is not the same as sleeping sickness that you get from a titsy fly. That was something that some of my TikTok viewers were like, we already know what this is. It comes from a fly. And no, different thing. Different sleepy sickness. Yeah. Different sleepy sickness. Yeah. Different sleepy. sickness. But, you know, fair question. So encephalitis lethargica was first formally described by a Dr. Constantine von Economo from the University of Vienna in the winter of 1916. And he was treating like a glut of new patients who were presenting with neurological symptoms. And they'd been admitted with like all sorts of different diagnoses. There were people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which is an autoimmune disease where the body attacks brain and nerve cells. There were people who had been diagnosed with meningitis, which is the inflammation of the membrane that protects the brain and spinal cord. And there were even people who had just been diagnosed

with delirium, which was just like a generic term for severe mental confusion caused by fever intoxication or like question mark. But the thing is that the one thing that these patients all had in common is that none of them perfectly fit the profile of the diagnosis they'd been given. And Vaughan Economo noticed that they all seemed to share a profound lethargy or lack of energy. So in early 1917, he published this paper proposing that all of these cases might actually be an example of one new disease that he dubbed encephalitis lethargica. And here's some spooky stuff. Just a few days later, a French physician named René Crochet published his own paper, totally independent of Von Economo, making the same claim. I don't think he literally came up with the same name for it, but he was also like all these patients don't quite fit their diagnoses.

And the one thing they have in common is this really profound lethargy. So what's going on? And, yeah, other scientists kind of followed along after. There were ones that suggested that this strange sickness could have actually been the cause of, like, numerous unexplained historical epidemics, which kind of is still an open question. But it was something that people were already talking about at the time. So, like, you're saying that, like, sleepy sick, this particular sleepy sickness could have been, like, other things in the past in addition to this. particular outbreak of sleepy sickness. Right, right.

So there were scientists saying, you know, look at this time in history when, you know, some medieval monk said and everybody got super tight. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I'm like confused about is like, so like people have just been getting tired randomly for a very long time, it seems like, or at least that's the way. Like, like, I don't know. I feel like, I don't know.

Maybe if I'm a monk in medieval Italy or France or whatever, my first thought is not immediately like, man, why are people so tired? But evidently. You know, your perusal of the historical record may vary. But scientists were like, they were curious. They were like, what if this is something that has kind of periodically cropped up for reasons we don't quite understand? And what if it's like, you know, one cause of potentially like,

really mysterious sort of waves of weird symptoms that just like happen. And then everyone's like, well, that was weird that that happened. Maybe it was Satan, you know, et cetera. Yeah. Right, right. And so to get it to what encephalitis lethargica actually looks like, the answer is that it varied a lot. It may not have just been one thing.

But what these scientists and doctors were talking about was an illness that generally started with a gradual onset of vaguely. flu-like symptoms, like a low-grade fever, a sore throat, chills, aches and pains, all of that. But then there were also neurological symptoms, including partial paralysis in some people or spasms or eye problems or confusion. Some patients might be manic and have hallucinations and like uncontrollable twitches and vocalizations and then start sleeping all day and being restless all night, while other people would just be generally drowsy and confused all the time. In rare cases, patients would go totally stiff with like rigid limbs and a mask-like expression,

though they remained aware of what was happening around them, at least in some cases that we were able to, you know, learn more about later. And all of these symptoms could show up and evolve really rapidly in someone who otherwise just seemed to like have a cold or the flu. there's one case study of a young patient who developed hemoplegia, which is paralysis on one's end of the body while she was walking home from a concert. So she had been fine. She'd gone to a concert. She suddenly can't feel half her body. She fell asleep within the next half hour and she died less than two weeks later. So that's like a pretty extreme case. But that was kind of be like that that was like the textbook. encephalitis lethargica, that they were like, this is, something is happening. And then there are a

bunch of people who have like more mild stuff going on. And what if this is all one thing? And yeah, patients who survived those initial symptoms weren't necessarily out of the woods. Anywhere from a few days to a few years later, some of them would develop chronic disease symptoms that were really similar to Parkinson's. And in addition to slowed movements and body rigidity and tremors, Many of them also experience sleep disturbances, involuntary movements, and psychiatric problems. So hallucinations and mania were pretty common. Intriguingly, the medical literature also mentions joviality and excessive puns, which... What?

Excessive puns. Which I'm not sure really belongs in the same. The same thing I've ever seen ever. So you turn into Santa Claus, you're jovial and making little elf jokes. I'm not sure I would personally. put that into the same list of symptoms as like psychosis affects a third of patients. But this was the early 20th century. So medicine was a barrel of monkeys. I mean, joviality like vaguely makes sense for mania. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Excessive puns. That's incredible. That's

incredible. It really feels like that was just one doctor with one patient who was really getting on their nerves. Right. Right. Right. But now it's in the historical record forever. Yeah. And there are some like pretty graphic and disturbing instances of self-harm in people who had encephalitis lelagia, including in children. I won't get into the details because they're pretty gory, but that is something that people can find more information about if they are someone who also goes on dark Wikipedia spirals. And let's just say that Neil Gaiman definitely took a lot of thematic inspiration from the real world's illness. But what's interesting and kind of creepy,

in addition to all previously discussed creepy stuff, is that some researchers don't think that encephalitis lethargica, like the flu-like stuff and the paralysis and the sleep problems actually caused those later chronic symptoms that, you know, looked like Parkinson's or hallucinations or mania, but simply made them more likely to emerge. So there are some cases of similar symptoms in people who had something like the flu, but never had the typical symptoms of acute encephalitis lethargica,

which brings us to what we think caused it. So when scientists were first identifying encephalitis lethargica, They were also gearing up for and then like really in the thick of the so-called Spanish flu, which listeners know from my episode about why radiators are so hot, did not actually start in spate. The earliest documented case was in Kansas with others following in France, Germany, and the UK. But all of those countries were involved in World War I. So their governments didn't want newspapers talking about a surge in flu cases because that would make them look vulnerable. and Spain was neutral.

So they were like, yo, there's a flu happening. And so the name stuck. But the Spanish flu was a really horrible outbreak. It infected hundreds of millions of people around the world and killed tens of millions. And in particular, you know, was quite deadly in otherwise young, healthy people. So this coincidence in timing made it a pretty common assumption that the flu had something to do with this terrifying new illness. Some scientists thought the flu caused it directly. Other people thought it made people more vulnerable to other infections by weakening

their mucous membranes, which is totally a thing that happens. And one of the many reasons, you shouldn't run around unmasked in indoor spaces because you just have a cold, because having a cold makes you more likely to catch something nastier. You baboon. I don't know. This is rude to baboons, but I couldn't think of something to say to people who do that, but wasn't too mean. Anyway, so a few modern studies have supported this connection. Others have refuted it. No one has found another virus or bacteria to explain the infection, though. And to complicate matters, there were some cases during that early 20th century outbreak that made it seem like the condition itself was contagious, like,

symptoms would sweep through schools or households and like kill several people in rapid succession. But then other reports show families living in very close quarters and just like one child got sick and everyone else's spine. So again, like some of this may be due to just sort of like panic and people sort of seeing patterns where there weren't any and, you know, that kind of bias in what got written down. But the fact is we just like don't have enough information to like really get into the epidemiology of that big outbreak. Recently, researchers have suggested that encephalitis lethargica could be an example of an autoimmune disorder.

So that's when the body reacts to a perceived threat by attacking its own tissues. And that is one possible explanation for long COVID symptoms and other post-viral syndromes like myelogic encephalomyelitis or ME, which was previously known as chronic fatigue syndrome. which I actually have in part as a result of long COVID. So can confirm you get real sleepy. And a lot of weird other stuff happens too. It's pretty serious. Can be seriously disabling.

No joke. But because there aren't many samples of tissue from confirmed encephalitis, lethargica patients, there just isn't much good replicated research on its possible causes. But again, it's like we're kind of swirling around this idea that it's like a post viral autoimmune response, which is something that scientists were definitely interested in, but sort of was in this like realm of like, well, is that real or is that just what we decide people have when they keep complaining and we can't find anything else wrong with them? And, you know, a lot of research on long COVID is making scientists reexamine that and be like, ah, Turns out, actually, viruses and bacterial infections can just mess you up forever. So, given how little we know about encephalitis lethargica, Hapha would be sure it won't come back. Great question.

Scientists have argued that this is a condition that could resurge due to another pandemic and that we should still be working to improve our understanding of it. And, you know, one could argue, even if it's not exactly the same thing, that is kind of of what has happened with COVID. You know, we're seeing the impact of our very poor understanding of post-viral fallout. Yeah, because like COVID and I think other viruses can like pass the blood brain barrier, right? Yeah, totally. They can get into the brain.

So like, I don't know. I feel like it makes sense that like you can get an infection in the brain or like if the virus can make its way into the brain, you know, like there might be some resistance. damage from from fighting that virus just like I don't know totally the the the white blood cells targeting the wrong thing or whatever yeah yeah well you know a lot of one COVID research is looking at inflammation in the brain specifically as maybe being the cause of some of the long-term damage that we see and there have been a handful of reported one-off cases of encephalitis lethargica since the 1930s but most of those diagnoses are considered controversial and might have been due to other kinds of brain inflammation.

The symptom profile of encephalitis lethargica itself isn't so wild like your brain having severe inflammation can do all of those things and more. It was more of the like sudden surge of cases that that made it seem like its own thing. So because we know us a little about this illness, we also don't know of any particularly effective treatments or cures for it. But the good news is that some of the people who survived the 20th century pandemic only to suffer from symptoms like muscle rigidity and catatonia did eventually recover. And it was thanks to Oliver Sachs, the greatest neurologist and writer who ever lived who could wear the hell out of a leather jacket. And I'm going to make sure

we link to that picture of him riding a motorcycle on popside.com slash weird. So in the 1960s, Oliver Sacks was treating several survivors of this sleepy sickness pandemic who were living in a nursing home in the Bronx. And he noticed that while they were thought to be totally unresponsive, most of them showed like some kind of reaction to random bits of stimuli. Like one might reflexively catch things if, you know, you toss a soft object at them. Another person might react to music or touch. So he decided he was going to try treating them with elderly. dopa, which is an amino acid that's able to cross the blood brain barrier and raise dopamine levels because it was improving symptoms in patients with Parkinson's at the time. And he was thinking,

you know, the fact that these people are showing some responsiveness makes me think that maybe they're more like Parkinson's patients than like people who totally have like locked in syndrome of some kind. So the results were profound and joccing. Some of the patients regained consciousness and the ability to interact with the world after decades. And that story is the subject of the book and film Awakening's, which I definitely recommend, along with Oliver Sacks's work again. Just an absolute king.

RIP. We love him. So, yeah, takeaways. Insephalitis, LaSytaicca, is pretty spooky, and we don't know enough about it to say that we could keep it from coming back. But there is one takeaway that we should remember. which is that illnesses that seem mild can cause all sorts of symptoms later.

So even if you don't care about the idea of getting COVID at this point or think it's important to stop the spread of it, just understand that you really don't know that your cold-like symptoms won't turn into something much scary down the line. And I don't say that to like terrify people unnecessarily. I say that as someone who like that that is what happened to me and to many people I know. And like, listen, there are things you can do. Wear a mask. Don't get the plague if you can help it.

It'll probably be okay if you do. But like, don't like, don't like try to get it. Just be chill. Everyone please just be chill. That's my takeaway. Oh my God. So yeah, that's the sleepy thing. And yeah, I, for one, am very glad that I did not just like literally enter a rigid coma-like state for years at a time.

Knock on what. Not yet anyway. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Yeah, that's not. There's a lot of life left to catch the sleeper sickness. It puts things into perspective. Okay. Let's take a quick break. and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door?

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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. 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. Okay, we're back. Sarah Kylie, on a lighter note, I hope, tell me about a kitchen appliance girl boss.

Oh, my gosh, yeah. So this is something that I saw pop up over women's or national women's month in March. And I just, I loved this story. So I'm going to tell it for you guys. but today we're talking about Josephine Cochran, who invented the dishwasher because she was so tired of washing dishes. That is the reason. She's so real for that.

I know. So this is, she is the girl boss of all girl bosses. She is the original. She is mother. But so basically, I mean, behind most inventions are really interesting people. Like there's always weird,

creative people that are, you know, willed to bring devices into the world. And it's especially, true of the devices that we kind of take for granted, like the dishwasher. And so you might not think about the dishwasher that much, but you are thinking about it when you don't have one. Oh, sure. As someone who has lived in many a dorm room where I've washed many a gross dish in the tiniest sink possible. As somebody who currently does not have a dishwasher, yeah.

It is a, I'm well aware. Really, my condolences. Listen, listen, it's not that bad because we have in-unit laundry. Okay. And, like, I would rather have in-unit laundry than a dishwasher. Like, I don't have to, like, go to, like, a laundromat or, like, hike to my basement and, like, put in, like, $2. That is true. Quarters every time I need to do a load of laundry. Like, I do get that for free, and that is worth it for me.

But, but dishwasher's great invention. Great invention. I mean, if you had to like walk your dishes to the laundromat, I just simply would eat off of dirty plates forever. But yeah, so washing dishes in any shape or form is a huge chore. And back in the 1800s, chores were a full-time job. So things take a while to do now, but they took even longer back then. And Josephine, our girl of the moment, she did not have the time for this. So this is the story of an invention not driven by much more. other than frustration. So according to the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, which did this great deep dive, so shout out to them for letting me go through and read this long article and learn a lot. She was born March 8, 1839 in Ash Taluba County, Ohio. So she was actually born with a little bit of engineering magic in her already. She was the daughter and granddaughter of inventors and engineers. Her maternal grandfather was a revolutionary war vet named John Fitch, and he invented the first patent in steamboat in the United States.

Oh, wow. We've already got big shoes to fill. And then her dad, John Garris, was a civil engineer who supervised a number of mills, wool mills, sawmills, and grist mills on the Ohio River. So what I'm hearing is that they loved a big wheel in this family.

This is a family that is all about wheels, reinventing the wheels three different times. So very crucial stuff. We love it. But yeah, and Just Mean as a woman. And in the 1800s, things in general just like weren't super fun for most women.

Yeah, frowny face. The first state to grant the vote to women wouldn't even do so until Josephine was 30, and she wouldn't even live to see the 19th Amendment come around. And at 19, she was already married to some guy named William Cochran, and William really wanted to get rich off of the California gold rush, but he didn't make the cut. So he apparently moved to Illinois, and they started selling dry goods. So, I mean, they're still, you know, doing their thing, but it wasn't the gold rush. But yeah, they lived a couple hours south of Chicago, and Josephine was a socialite, and she was living it up, and she was hosting all these parties, and she had a collection of, quote, unquote, heirloom dishes that dated back to the 1600s.

But as nice china plates do, they chip. And this was stressing Josephine out a lot. She wouldn't even let her servants watch them after a while because she was so anxious about them. and she understandably hated doing the dishes herself but she was like there's gonna be a better way to do this that I don't have to do it and that I don't have to be stressed everybody in a group project where you're like if I the Josephine is just like if I do it like it'll be great like I just don't trust

other people that's so real though like that's how I am in group project sometimes and I like I've apologized to you I'm like hey tell me if I'm like just being like trying to do too much like I don't I don't have the time to worry about this. Right. It takes less time to do it than to be stressed about it, which is I'm guessing what was going on. But it was still taking too much time. Either of those options are too much time.

And so at this point, there actually was like a bad dishwasher. The first dishwashing device was the patent in 1850 by Joel Houghton. And it basically was like a big wood bucket that you could crank by hand and then water would spray on the dishes. But like it didn't work. So like we are already like, okay, we need to move past this. And it was slow. A little steam pug nerf gun.

Really. Yeah. Like I don't even want to think about it. Like it sounds like broken dishes to me. And it was slow and like cleaning the dishes with just spraying water and hoping for the best is just not it. And another guy did it, um, L.A. Alexander who added a cranked rack system. But it was still like pretty terrible and nobody was like trying to get the crank bucket washing machines. And Josephine's nice China does not deserve to go through that.

So she's moving on. She's putting, she's figuring it out. So that puts us around 1883. And what do you know, William, Mr. Failed Gold Rush, he dies. And he leaves like $1,500, which is like $44,000 today. But also a bunch of debt. So Josephine is like, okay, not only do I need to get these dishes washed, but I need some cash. So as one does.

She's like, okay, I'm doing this. She went to like go and she was trying to find like some men to help her to do this because obviously being a woman who's now got a dead husband and she's in debt and being an inventor, it's a lot going on. And she went and like tried to get somebody to help her and nobody was really giving her the time of day. She's quoted as saying, I couldn't get men to do the things I wanted in my way until they had tried and failed on their own.

And that was costly for me. They knew I knew nothing academically about mechanics and they insisted on having their own way with my invention until they convinced themselves my way was better, no matter how I arrived at it. And so she filed her first patent on New Year's Eve 1885. Nice. So again, she is just the leader of the group project. So that is the dishwasher. So she gets to work in her woodshed behind her house with the help with like a mechanic named George Butters, which hello amazing name. And so here's how Josephine's invention worked.

This is the first thing that she had. She had a wooden wheel, so again, queen of the wheel, that would lay flat in a copper boiler, and the wheel would be turned by hand or driven by a power source via a pulley. And she made wire-framed compartments that fit her dishes so that could be attached to the vice and really get the soapy, sudsy spinning water up in there. And this was the first dishwasher to use water pressure, not scrubbers. And those older additions had often required dumping, boiling water over the dishes. which we didn't have to do that anymore, which is thankful because, hello,

why dumping boiling water over anything, especially dishes is all very stressful. And fast forward to Christmas of 1886, she got her patent. And when she was finding customers, she would have really liked to sell her wares to women directly. But she ended up selling to larger institutions like hotels, restaurants, etc. And she had this kind of to say about women as customers. she had a lot of like really great great quotes so I'm just including as many as I possibly can and so this one was profound when it comes to buying something for the kitchen that costs 75 or 100 dollars a woman

begins at once to figure out all the other things she could do with that money she hates dishwashing what woman does not but she has not learned yet to think of her time and comfort as worth money besides she is in the deciding factor when it comes to spending comparatively large sums of money for the house so okay she went real deep with that one women did not think about their time and comfort as worth money in the same way that men probably did at that time. So she was a little bummed that she couldn't sell directly to women, but nevertheless, she found hotels and restaurants and they ate it up.

Her first buyer came through like a wealthy buddy of hers. And in 1887, she was introduced to the manager of Chicago's Palmer House, which was a big deal back in the day. So a lot of, I think it was like in like the 50, the 1950s. like a celebrity layover between New York and L.A., so you've got like Frank Sinatra and people like that. And in the late 1800s, rich folks actually like set up there to live permanently like Gossip Girl, which I love that fact. And the place is still up and running. And it's apparently also where the first reference to Brownie in the U.S. is tied back to. So like we've got celebrities.

Yeah, I think there's like a plaque outside of like of the hotel that's like this is where the brownie was invented or something like that. I don't remember exactly, but I, for some reason, I knew that brownies in the Palmer House were a thing. Right. I mean, I didn't. I have never, I've been to Chicago once and I was five. So this is all new to me. But yeah, the brownie recipe actually took off in the 1890s. So, like, theoretically, maybe the first brownie bakeware would have been washed with, like, Josephine's dishwasher, which I'm speculating. But, like, how great would that be? Like, she needs a plaque as well. But yes, so that was her first customer.

And then the next stop was the Sherman House Hotel, which isn't there anymore. It was there from like the 1870s to the 1970s. So unfortunately, no brownie plaques or anything. But she did do something very historic. At the time, she went to that pitch, that business pitch by herself unaccompanied by man. And she was like in her 50s at this point. But she said it was the hardest thing she ever did. And like, so here's another great quote from our friend, Josephine.

You cannot imagine what it is like in those days. woman across a hotel lobby alone. I had never been anywhere without my husband or father. The lobby seemed like a mile wide. I thought I would faint at every step, but I didn't. And I got an $800 order as my reward. So Icon. She did it. Love that. And her company is rocking and rolling, but it's like, it's taken a little bit of time. And things really blew up in 1893. Basically, there's a little bit of like an economic weirdest thing in here. So 1893 was a big year because there was the panic of 1893 and so I'll get back to that in like one second. But basically nobody, the big investors didn't want to invest in her because, yeah, unless she handed over the company to a man, nobody was going to

give her any money. So she was like, whatever, I'm just going to keep doing this. But in 1893, the panic of 1893 happens and this depression basically took down a bunch of heavily financed companies. So she was fine and all these people that had been like snubbing her weren't. So another win for Josephine. And she went to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. I think that's like where the first like the original Ferris wheel was and some stuff like that. Yeah. Oh, it comes up on weird thing all the time because a lot of people rolled out stuff there.

They'd really been saving it up for the world exposition. Sounds so fun. I wish, can we do that? I know. I wish we like now we just have like CES. which is like a piss poor institution. Like no fun. Where's the Ferris wheel?

I like want to go have a hot dog and look at like the like next like Dyson air wrap or whatever. Yeah. But anyway. But yeah, she went there and she got a ton of publicity and sales. She had orders rolling in throughout Illinois and nearby states. Places like hospitals and like colleges were really interested because they had to have these like strict sanitization. standards and stuff, which I guess is really great for the original dishwasher. And by this time, this is going to sound bananas, but her largest dishwasher could wash and

dry 240 dishes in two minutes. So I'm like, where are these? Where are these? Yeah, it takes like two hours on a good day if I like, you know, like say nice things to it. If you say a prayer to the dishwasher God. Yeah, I'm going to start like, leave. leaving like a candle burning for Josephine so that my dishwasher works.

Well, I mean, yeah, sorry, not dishwasher god, invented by a woman, dishwasher goddess. Goddess. Excuse me. There we go. But in 1898, so this five years later, she opens her first factory with George Butters as her manager. So they stayed friends throughout all of this. They were to continue to work together, which is amazing. I love that.

And so now, yeah, so we love a friendship story as well. And so it's now called Cochran's Crescent washing machine company. Oh, God, that's one. Cochran's Crescent washing machine company. And so they get these things like all over the place. They're in Alaska and Mexico, which, I mean, thinking about it in like 1898 terms. Yeah, that's pretty. Yeah, you're shipping a dishwasher in before like, yeah, so bananas.

But they were still really expensive. So they weren't in houses yet. There were $350, which at that time was a lot of money. So, yeah, alas, not in kitchens of normal folks really yet. And you couldn't even really have one, even if you were super rich, because you probably didn't have a giant boiler, which it also required, which is less than ideal. But yeah, so things are chugging along.

The goddess of dishwashing is running along. 15 years later, she's 74 and she dies in Chicago. but she received a second post-humus patent in 1917 for an improved version of her dishwasher and her dishwasher got like a trademark for like the Crescent Moon that was their logo a couple years later and then a little bit after that Hobart manufacturing acquires this company and they now produce the dishwashers under KitchenAid and the rest is kind of history and now we now now we kind of just have dishwashers everywhere and so yeah dishwashers are ubiquitous and it's all thanks to one very frustrated and determined socialite who was tired of doing the dishes all the time.

And in a quote, like towards the end of her life, she basically was like, I would have never had the courage to start if anyone told me how rough this would have been, but I'm really glad I did it, which is also just like iconic. So, yeah, I mean, that's the dishwasher story. She said what everybody was thinking. She really said what everybody was thinking. This woman was ahead of her time in so many ways. But yeah, so here's to Josephine the very frustrated, tired, girlie who hates dishes, hates washing dishes.

She's also, she really is a hashtag girl boss because crucially, she have the money to pay other people to do her dishes and just with like they're not doing it good enough. So I applaud Josephine for actually doing something productive with that energy for channeling it. into entrepreneurial spirit but I am really feeling for her domestic staff being like it's probably it was rough sounds like a Capricorn oh what is she she's March 8th what's March 8th is that um um she Pisces Pisces yes I guess that makes sense with the water though so uh water sign only a water sign she's definitely got some Capricorn in the chart like this is Capricorn behavior. I get really angry emails from men whenever we talk about astrology on weirdest thing,

but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. I'm just saying hi to them preemptively. I don't know much about astrology. Let people like things. I know my own science. I know because people always ask. I don't know what it means. If anybody wants to tell me what being an Aquarius means, go for it.

Oh, I'm an Aquarius to it, and so is Rachel. That'll tell you. Let's go. There you go. Here we are. Aquarius being an Aquarius means you get to go on the weirdest thing podcast. Pretty much. All right.

We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices

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So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. To help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money is. he's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work now hang says line out the door Hank makes the pizza co-pilot handles the spreadsheets learn more at m365 copilot dot com slash work okay we're back and uh dad tell me about people race into the bottom okay so before we get to people digging very deep holes i do need to do a little bit of background information about like the earth because

Because geology as a field is weirdly recent. Like, I didn't really, like, understand how recent it was until I started, like, doing research for the original story that I, like, found this fact through. And then for this, for this. But geology, like, dude, they, the geologists, like, did not know anything about the Earth until, like, maybe the 1900s. They were just, like, all making guesses. Like, so before this Croatian guy, who I will talk about, they were just like, earthquakes happen. Okay, cool. And so he starts, so this guy, his name is Moho.

Moharovitch, Andrea. Wow. Yeah. We'll put a pin in that. Put a put in Mohoovitch. We'll come back to him in terms of what geologists now call his namesake. his namesake discontinuity. But Mohorovicich is a Croatian like earthquake seismologist, I guess, geologists. And he's working in the early ninth or the early 20th century researching, you know,

earthquakes. And he noticed he's like looking at the waves, the seismic waves that produced by the earthquakes. And he's like looking at the refractory patterns because waves travel at different speeds through materials of different density. And he notices this really big, like, shift. And he's like, yo, I can find out where that shift is. That's really weird. Like, why is there a shift? Like, how deep is it? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he goes on, he finds this thing called the Mohirovichichik discontinuity, which geologists just now call the moho because Mohoovic is a mouthful. Of course they do. So the moho is, essentially, essentially the boundary between the crust of the earth and the mantle of the earth.

That's like the best way to think about it. It's not like, I mean, you know, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk geologists, I'm sure are like fighting me in the comments already being like, not always, not always, yes. In general, the Morvarovicich is the boundary between the crust and the earth in like the outer layer, right? So in the earth, you have the crust, then the outer mantle, then the inner mantle, than the outer core than the inner core. And if you look on PopularScience.com,

you can find a story about the innermost inner core written by yours truly. So, essentially, like, geologists are like, okay, cool, we have this thing, but they're still, like, trying to figure out what's at the center, like what makes up the earth, you know, like using the magnetic field to figure out, okay, there's probably, like, iron and nickel. But, like, what is actually, what is it like?

the temperatures, what are the materials there? And so this is why the density thing is important is because, you know, since the material is more dense, there's also probably going to be a change in the rock and the change in the material. And so then fast forward to like the late 1950s. And this is when plate tectonics, like the theory of plate tectonics is just starting to like take hold in the geological community. That is correct. Scientists did not really. understand that continents and plate tectonics were like just shifting about until the 1950s. That's like when it was confirmed. So in 57 there's a scientist Walter Monk at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography,

my hometown. Love it. And he suggests this idea of, hey, what if we drilled into the moho? Like what if we got all the way down to the mantle? like what would we find you know because before this really the only way that scientists had to figure out what was at the center of the mantle was a lot of guesswork using these seismic waves and just kind of preying that when a volcanic eruption happened that like rock from the mantle would just kind of get spit out and they just like go to volcanic sides after eruptions and be like I wonder if that

rocks from the mantle what so literally like I don't know, man. Science. Geology is a lot of guesswork. So, yeah, Walter, Walter is like, he goes to a couple other scientists who are kind of trying to push this theory of plate tectonics. He says, okay, what if we drill into the meho discontinuity? I think that this will help us prove plate tectonics. And they kind of agree.

And so in the early 1960s, at the same time that the Soviets are putting up Sputnik and JFK gives us. the, hey, we're going to go to the moon speech. There's a group of scientists funded by Congress in the U.S. that are attempting to drill down into the mantle. So thus beginning kind of the race for the bottom. So this is called Project Mohole. No. Really clever.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Agreed. No. I, like, spent, like, a good, like, two minutes thinking about whether it was Mohole, because they drilled off the coast of Hawaii or Mohole. and then I was like, it's moho and whole. It's moho and whole.

The worst on the worst. Yeah, agreed. So, yeah, this is like 1961, 1962. And there's a bunch of infighting in the scientists, because there are scientists on the West Coast at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and there are scientists on the East Coast at, like, Princeton and the University of Miami, like, citing about, like, hey, where do we drill? They knew they had to do this in the ocean because if you drill on land, you know, you have like a bunch of different, you know, there's a lot more earth to drill through. Yeah, it's a little lumpy. It's a lot more earth to drill through to get to the Mojo discontinuity.

So they knew they were going to do this in water. They're deciding where to do it. They eventually decide on the site outside of Hawaii. And they start drilling. And a famed author John Steinbeck goes there to cover this for LifeMax. magazine. Not making any of this up. Well, 100% true. And they actually made it, like, relatively far into the preliminary studies. So, right, they decide, okay, we're going to do this off the coast of Hawaii. And they start drilling holes, you know, they're like 10,000, 11,000

feet under the sea level already. And then they'll drill another borehole that's like 600 feet below the 11,000 feet in preliminary testing. And a bunch of oil companies start looking at this and go, oh, hey, we have technology that could be useful here. I wonder if there's oil in the ocean. And so that's where deep oil drilling comes from. But this is actually like a great success. Like strangely, this is one of the only times I think that an American funded scientific project

was like under budget and like worked. So they do this preliminary testing. Yeah, right. But you're just preliminary testing at the same time that the space race is just starting to heat up. And as one might imagine, the concept of going to the moon is a little bit more interesting to Congress than drilling into the mantle. And so between Congress and a bunch of other scientific squabbles and a couple bad contractors, the project is eventually canceled in like 1960. Which brings us to the other side of the race to the bottom, the USSR. At the same time that the space race is happening, actually just about towards the very end of the space race this time,

because presumably the USSR had looked at Project Millhole and gone, well, this started really well, and they looked like they were going to do great things and that it all fell apart. they said, well, how far can we get? Instead of drilling this in the water, they said, well, you know what, we're just going to do this on land and see how it goes. So on the Kola Peninsula of Russia, so if you think of Europe, you have like the Scandinavia Peninsula, the like Scandinavia and then kind of like on the other side, there's another small peninsula over there. It's called the Kola Peninsula. and they are like, well, we're going to use this machinery that oil companies have been using for decades, and we're just going to see how deep we can get.

So they start drilling in the Kola Peninsula, and they eventually make it down not 11,000 feet, but 11,000 meters. Dang. Before a drill bit breaks. Okay. And they're like, oh, gosh. God. So essentially, the way this works is you have this like, you know, nine inch hole that is just incredibly deep. And you have this like very large drill bit that they've just kind of like slowly shoved down there, I imagine. And as they get further and further, they're like

pulling up core samples. They find a bunch of hydrogen gas that they weren't expecting. One like report described like the the mud that was coming out of the hole as like bubbling with hydrogen gas they found a bunch of plankton like microscopic plankton like deeper than they expected to which was a shock um they found water deeper than they expected to so they did learn a lot um but they're like drilling this hole and as you go down you start to realize at a certain point in time you're going to hit rock that's like just not cooperating. And so at this point in time, they decide, okay, well, we have to like change our angles slightly. So instead of like being just like one hole straight down, it's kind of like a tree of like related holes, like off of one main

hole. So there's a bunch of like very slightly angled side shoots so that they can avoid the rock that they can't drill through. And over the course of about 20 years, They make it to a final depth of 12,262 meters, which is 40,230 feet in 1989. And as they get deeper, they keep stopping to like celebrate. Like they break 12,000 meters for the first time. And they like stop drilling for a year to celebrate. And then they like start drilling again and the drillbert breaks. And they're like, gosh, we have to start.

We have to like drill another whole. off the side. So when they get down to this kind of deepest point, they're expecting the temperatures to be like about 100 degrees Celsius boiling point of water, 20012 Fahrenheit. Instead, they find it like the oven temperature. We're talking like, what, 200, 280 degrees Celsius of 350 degrees Fahrenheit. And like, okay, well, we got to stop because at this point, the rock is behaving more like this kind of like amorphous plasticy thing than rock. So they're like, okay, we got to give up now. Still a very valiant effort.

So they start drilling a couple other holes, but they never make it deeper than this 40,230 feet hole. And that is as deepest that we have drilled to this day. It is not like the longest borehole. I think there are a couple oil wells that have like a drill. horizontally for longer, but is very deep. My favorite part of this story is that there are a couple pictures online of the hole, which has now since been like welded shut. And it's just like a hole surrounded by a bunch of rumble.

Like it looks completely normal. Like if you walk down, you were like, it's a hole. It's just the deep. It just happens to be the deepest hole in the world. and my other favorite part of this story is that just because of like I guess the spectacle of it all in terms of like we are drilling into the center of the earth somebody kind of came up with the idea that like this is like the hole to hell or whatever sure and you know if you like drill deep enough you'll be able to like hear the screams of the damned being tortured and so there's a whole

whole horror movie that came out in Russia pretty recently. About the mohull. It's based around this idea. Not the mohull. This is, this is, that was the U.S. The Russian mohull. But about the Russian one in the Kola Peninsula. So the Kola, the Kola is super deep borehole, it is called.

Super deep. It is indeed super deep. But yeah, this like hole to hell, you know, you can hear the screams of the damned. because it's so deep. They drilled into hell. And there's a whole horror movie about, oh, what if they actually did drill into hell? So that is the deepest hole.

The U.S. may have won the space race, but the Soviets won the deepest hole competition. Deepest competition. Wow. There have been a couple efforts after the cola hole was closed to kind of like make it to the moho discontinuity. None have really succeeded as of yet. So we're still kind of hoping for more direct samples of the mantle.

But until then, geologists will keep relying on rocks spewing out of volcanoes that might be from the mantle. Man, science is wild. Yeah. That's special. The deepest hole. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? A lot of good stuff. I'm definitely putting it.

vote for the mohole. Yeah. I'll be thinking about that for a while. If only because it's called the mohole. That's the weirdest thing I live this week. No, but truly, like, it's, that hole is shockingly deep, and yet it's still shocking to me that that's the deepest we've ever gone. Right, right.

There's a lot of earth below that. Yeah. Yeah, like, I think about, like, what if they had started digging, like, over water. Like, obviously, you know, there's water to deal with. could they actually have made it to the mantle? Or were they only able to get that far because they were overland? Yeah. Then they would have actually reached hell.

Right, right. Jack, thanks so much for coming on. Where can our listeners find you if they want to read more of your stories or offer you gainful employment? Yeah, thanks so much for having me. You can go to popular science.com to read some of my stories. I am on Twitter at It's Jack Izzo, I-S-J-A-C-K-I-Z-O. And yeah, I think I'm also on TikTok as something else,

but I don't know that I want to give my TikTok out. Fair enough. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bodey, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire, Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore

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