The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Torturous Treadmills, Champagne and Balls, History's Calendars

Episode Date: December 25, 2018

On the this special New Year's episode, the weirdest things we learned this week range from the origins of treadmills (your New Year's resolution) to the origin of the sparkling wine and the New Year's ball to the origin of the modern calendars. 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 social media: www.facebook.com/groups/theweirdestthing www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses 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? I'm 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're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident Restoration is guaranteed.

Pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Claire. Maldarelli.

Two months off and we've already forgotten her own name. 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 Feldman. I'm Claire Maldarelli.

And I'm Eleanor Cummins. Happy holidays, weirdos. We have a special New Year's themed episode because one, we really miss you. And two, we are really excited about season two, which is coming soon. It is going to be a New Year's miracle sometime in January. So stay tuned for that. We are going to be doing some super awesome, fast-moving, disruptive, innovative podcasting. Speaking of innovative podcasting, we actually have some really awesome news to share with you.

If you don't already know, weirdest thing was voted the most innovative podcast of 2018 by DiscoverPod. So first of all, thanks a whole bunch for that nomination Discover Pods, because what an awesome list of podcasts we were up there with. But secondly, the award was decided by online votes. So the fact that we won means that a whole bunch of you awesome weirdos thought we were worth getting on the net and click in that button for. So we are really grateful and we're really excited to do more of that innovating in 2019. Another piece of news is that our second ever live show is officially set for February 1st at Caviott in New York City. If you were with us last time or heard the episodes, you know it's a really awesome event. It's just like the show, but in person with drinks and prizes and weird visual aids.

So we really hope you will save the date and see us on February 1st. With all that out of the way, hi Claire. What's up? Hey, Eleanor. Hi. Do you remember how this goes? Vigley. I forgot my name earlier.

So long. So on the weirdest thing, we all start by pitching a little tidbit or fact that we found while reporting, reading, writing, getting ready for the holiday season. And we then decide which one we 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. Eleanor, why don't you start? I'm here for the calendar power hour. I have basically compiled a bunch of very strange facts about calendars, time zones, and the like, and I would love to share them with you. Ideally first, but at any point today.

Timely. Timely. Ooh, indeed. Indubidably. Zing. Wow. We're so good at podcasting. My facts are about champagne and balls.

That's it. That's the whole deal. On brand. Nice. I went the New Year's resolution route, and you will not believe what treadmills were originally used for. I know. Wow.

Well, with clickbait like that, I think we have to hear Claire's first. Yes. Okay. It's quite cold outside, and that really doesn't make me want to do any New Year's resolutions, mostly exercising outdoors, where your chest gets like frozen by the cold air. You don't want to get out of bed. All these things just like brew not following through

with your New Year's resolution. So most people turn to the treadmill, which in my opinion is just a thousand times worse. You're literally running in place, going nowhere fast. I feel like I'm a hamster. And I was like, who invented this device? And as it turns out, this engineer invented it as a torture device for prisoners.

Wow. Yes, that's correct. You must have been so satisfied. I was incredibly satisfied. I was like, I'm literally torturing myself because this is what it was made to do. So when was it a tortured way? Yes, Rachel, let me tell you. Okay, so back in 1818, there was this British engineer named

William Cubit. I might not be saying that right. And he was a well-to-do prominent English civil engineer and millwright. So his whole thing was he would design, build, and fix mills. But at the time, he was for some reason, I couldn't figure out why. They just said repeatedly that he was very concerned about prisoners just sitting around and doing nothing. And he was like, they need something to do, something that would help society. What a guy. that's the problem of prisons is that they just sat idly all day long so he was looking i'm assuming this is me making up in his mind because there wasn't as much information as i wanted so he was a he fixed windmills or just mills in general um and so i'm assuming he was like huh how can i

reconfigure this to torture people and so that's literally what he did he created this huge giant hollow cylinder with like an iron frame essentially around it and on that iron frame were these wooden steps that were built around it so it looked more like this huge sort of like stair master rather than a treadmill and he would put prisoners 40 at a time and they would essentially climb up those steps and as they climbed up the steps the mill would turn and once it started moving you would just have to keep climbing essentially like a stair master today. Oh my God. Yes. This is true. And then that was used to sort of do a multitude of things like mill, many types of grain and corn and things like that. And they would be on it for

hours at a time. And so they would put 40 these prisoners on at a time and they would go on for hours and hours. And some of the accounts showed that because they're doing all these really strenuous activities where they were burning so many calories that a lot of them would get these overuse injuries and illnesses that sound like there were these elite endurance athletes, but essentially all they were doing was being tortured by having to stay on this treadmill forever, which is insane to me. That was back in the late 1800s, and it wasn't until 1898 that Great Britain passed the Prisoners Act of 1898 that abolished this. He was like, please don't force people to walk on giant hamster wheels.

Have you seen that episode of Rick and Mourney where they like go, like Rick has created a bunch of series of worlds where people like like step on like a dial or like clap and dance in a certain way and that creates energy through this stream, right, all the way to his like time travel like warp like crossing car. That is what this sounds like to me. It is literally like turning people into into an energy source. Yeah, it's crazy. So then, okay, this rightfully. gets put away in 1898. And then, okay, why is it now in our home gym? Because we're idiot. So it turns out then in the early 1900s, a bunch of doctors were like, this sounds like a good way that we can test people for their cardiovascular endurance.

And so during World War I to test soldiers, they would use these treadmills to make sure they were in good cardiovascular health. But then it was put away again. And then in 1968, all of this research was coming out about how it's good for your health to be in good cardiovascular health, and it's good to run and do all these jogging exercises. And so this engineer in New Jersey, my home state, Rachel's two.

Yeah. Oh no. Was like, well, what happened to that treadmill thing from 1913 that they used? for soldiers. How can I reconfigure that to put it in my home so I don't have to go outside in the freezing cold? And that became, wait for it, the Pacemaster 600. It's a dumb name. Agreed. And that is the origins of the treadmill, and he sold it out of his home in Clifton and then Little Falls, New Jersey, and now it is used everywhere around the world. But it was originally

torture and it still is now in my opinion. Yeah, I mean I have I have always been of the opinion that things like elliptical machines are torture and once I started lifting so like obviously cardio is important you should get your cardio but I found that actually if I did like really intense cardio as part of like a sport once a week and then weight lifted like multiple times a week I was like much happier, healthier, et cetera. And I think it is just like an absurd tool of the patriarchy that we're told that like, just go to the gym and be on the elliptical for 45 minutes and you'll have worked out.

Unless you do it like Ariana Grande in that thank you next music video. Right. That is the only time it's acceptable by which I mean just like staring at the camera and like using it wildly and probably not that safely. Yeah, I definitely used to back when I was. at my parents' house and could use treadmills on elliptical machines in private without people staring at me. I was like a big treadmill dancer. I did not like jog on the treadmill. I just like okay goad it. I love that. Oh, I've never tried that. Oh yeah. It's, you know, it's not safe, but it is

way more exciting. Okay, I think we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back. Hey pals, palsy-popular science merch. We've got you covered at popsci.com. Pick up t-shirts, notebooks and mugs with iconic vintage covers and illustrations ripped from the magazine. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite shows like Last Week in Tech and the weirdest thing I learned this week. That's Popsi.threadless.com. P-O-P-S-C-I dot Thudlis.com. And we're back. And I'm going to jump in with my fact, which is really like a series of small facts. It's not, you know, the usual curiosity journey, I would say. But I was wondering about champagne. And, you know, a lot of people say the French monk, Dom Perignon, invented Champagne,

which would have been in 1697. But there is actually, I found out, a bit of controversy around that fact. So in 1667, an English scientist named Christopher Merritt. He wrote a scientific paper. He presented it to the newly formed Royal Society, describing how English winemakers had been adding sugar to wines for who knows how long, to give them a refreshing bubbly quality. And he actually was the first person, apparently, to use the word sparkling to describe wine.

He said, our wine coopers of recent times use vast quantities of sugar and molasses to all sorts of wines to make them drink brisk and sparkling and to give them spirit. So he at least seems to have figured out sparkling wine, both that it existed and how to make it, which is adding sugar. Because the reason wine sparkles is because there's this kind of second fermentation where yeast are coming in to eat the sugar in the wine. So then they create bubbles that are trapped in whatever vessel the already fermented wine is in. Wow, I did not know that. Yeah, me neither. to those yeast.

Woo! Love yeast. But that brings me to another intriguing fact about champagne. So for a long time, for like 100 years-ish, after Dom Pernion

made his supposed discovery, he did do cool stuff with wine. It's just, you know, debatable whether or not he was the first person to be like, yeah, put bubbles in it. He probably was not. So it still was, like,

very different from the champagne or other sparkling wine we have today. For starters, the French made it super sweet, like sweeter than dessert wines are today, which sounds disgusting. And it also was like a very cloudy beverage because the yeast would die after doing this fermentation, and they would just kind of like settle in the bottle,

like that stuff inside kombucha. Wait, that stuff in kombucha is dead. Yeah. Well, it's just, it's just dying. Yeah, it is the, it is yeast in various stages of life. True, true. But certainly the more there are that are dead or dying, that, you know, cloudier it's going to be.

So, yeah, it was like not a particularly attractive wine. And most people would deal with that by just kind of like opening up the bottle of champagne, pouring it out and straining a bunch of the yeast out, which meant that the bubbles would be quite disturbed upon it second. in unbottling. So who figured this out? I'm glad you asked. It was a lady, a French widow lady named Madame Clicoe, whose name you might recognize from many bottles of champagne and sparkling wines. So she basically, she got married during the, like, the French Revolution was in full swing. She actually was married in secret in a cellar auspiciously because her, I assume the family

involved were just like too rich to be having a big celebration at that time without people showing up and trying to kill them. They were given, she and her husband, a book by Dom Perignon, by the priest who wed them in secret in a cellar. I don't really, I don't really know why, because it doesn't seem like their family did much of anything with wines up until that point, but it kind of got them into the business, and they did a decent job of it. But then Madame Clicko's husband died and she was left with her children to care for. And she went to her father-in-law and basically said, like, I want to risk my inheritance by getting you to invest in me as a manager of this business. And he said yes, which was like unheard of at the time. Women were not

doing things like that. And he told her to do an apprenticeship, which she did. And then the sales were still not doing so great. And he gave her another investment, which again, like, kudos to him. This was not a thing that men did. And then she ended up cracking the yeast problem with process called riddling, which is basically the second fermentation is going on while the bottles are held at like an angle, and they're being turned slowly day after day. And that makes all of the yeast kind of settle in one spot of the bottle. So then it makes it much easier to open that and get it out without like super disturbing the bubbles.

So there have been some modern adapt. to that, but the general idea is still what we use. Speaking of bubbles, did you know, there are like 10 million of them in a glass of sparkling wine. Did someone count that? I guess someone did. And they bring aromatic molecules that, like, spray into the air under your nose, which is why they're supposed to be, like, so important to the experience of the drink.

One last champagne fact, if you shake a champagne bottle, at least according to one study, the cork will fly out at almost 25 miles per hour. Whoa. Which is why various eye doctors will warn around this time of year that you should be really careful of injuries while opening champagne. The actual incidence of eye injuries from opening champagne is probably pretty rare, but there are still precautions you can and should take. You should make sure the bubbly is cold because it's more likely to build more pressure

if it's warm, so you should chill it. Don't shake the bottle because, duh. You should place, like, a towel or something over the top of the bottle to, like, provide another barrier to keep the cork from just, like, flying out. You should tilt it at a 45-degree angle and away from people, because, again, duh. And you should, like, hold the bottle and the cork and twist the bottle to break the seal. Don't use a corkscrew. Because if you do, that corkscrew is just going to fly across the room with, the cork in it. And then you probably will damage someone's eyes because corkscrews are giant pieces of metal.

So be safe. Be safe, folks. I wonder if January 1st is our ophthalmologist's busiest day of the year. Yeah, I mean, everything I could find that was actually like trying to figure out the incidents of these injuries were like they're not that common. But I think the thing is that there have been some really gruesome case studies. So like if you do get hit in the eye, a cork. It can be bad. Yeah, it can go very badly for you. So it's not so much that like tons of people do this as like optimologists really want you to understand that you should avoid getting hit in the eye with a cork at all cost. I promise balls as well. And I do have something to say about balls. As I was thinking about New Year's Eve, I found myself wondering, why do we watch a ball drop?

Do I have you, like, do either of you guys have any idea? Like, have we ever thought about like why for those of you not in the U.S. and who have never watched TV on New Year's Eve, I guess. In New York City, we have this giant ball. And we literally drop. We just watch it drop. And I was like. Slowly. Yes, very slowly.

Like painfully slowly. So I was like, huh, I wonder what's up with that. And it turns out there is an answer, though it is a matter of some debate, you might say. So the first New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square was in 1904. and it was held by the owner of the New York Times, Adolf OX, because he was celebrating the opening of the newspaper's new headquarters. He was like, this is Times Square now. Wow, can you imagine those days of journalism?

Wow, heady days indeed. So they did a bunch of fireworks shows on the roof to celebrate the new year. There were like 200,000 people there. Until then, traditional celebrations had been at Trinity Church. which seems like probably the church was not thrilled, that these newspaper men were drawing their crowds. I found a couple of different explanations of why we then switched to a ball. Depending on who you ask, either Adolf was not satisfied with the level of spectacle

and wanted something weirder and decided that a giant ball was what we should go with, or some say the ashes that rain down from the roof onto passerby made the city outlaw fireworks of this fashion. And from those ashes the ball was born? Yes. And it comes from the concept of time balls do exist. Basically when you just have like a ball on a giant pole or some kind of structure that is designed to drop every hour or some other unit of time. And usually it would be like a maritime thing so that like ships passing by could be like, oh, the ball just dropped. An hour has passed.

But obviously none of those are giant celebratory balls. The first New Year's Eve ball was in 1907, I believe. And it was made of iron and wood. And really just looks like the head of the guy in Hellraiser. It's really just a ball covered in 25 watt light bulbs. I'm sure at the time it was a real marvel of engineering, but compared to the mom. ball. It just looked a little silly. The Times Square, little historical bio, has this great description of the 1907 to 1908 festivities where waiters in the fabled, quote, lobster palaces,

to which I say, what do you mean fables? I have no idea what a lobster palace is. It turns out a lobster palace is just what they called the like new spat of fancy restaurants. Red lobster. Right. It was the first red lobster in New York City. And other deluxe eateries and hotels surrounding Times Square were supplied with battery-powered top hats emblazen with the numbers 1908 fashioned of little tiny bulbs. Wow. And at the stroke of midnight, they all, quote, flipped their lids and the year on their foreheads lit up in conjunction with the numbers 1908 on the parapet of the Times Tower, lighting up to signal the arrival of the new year. And of course, the ball dropped. And at that time, and until the 90s, the ball was dropped manually.

There were four guys holding ropes and somebody with a stopwatch and a supervisor. And they would just do it all by hand. They would do it live every year. Now they don't do that. They realize they could automate it, apparently not until the 90s, which I find pretty amazing. It's a big draw, this random ball that we watch. The Department of Sanitation estimated after the 2013-14 drop that they collected over 50 tons of refuse in eight hours, which is disgusting. So if you're planning on coming to visit our Fair City to watch the ball drop, please not throw your garbage everywhere.

Thank you. An eternal message. So the entire thing is just a celebration of journalism. Yes. Wow. You could say that. And I will. It's a celebration of back when we could afford things.

Giant balls. Actually, I almost got to see the ball like up close once. I was invited to come see it. And one time square where it drops from is this really weird building where there's like a wall greens at the bottom and then it's actually empty space all the way up to the top. So there's like a secret entrance to an elevator in the Walgreens. So you have to like go into the Walgreens and like, look around for someone who looks like they might not work at the Walgreens and might know what's up

and then be like, I'm here for the thing with the ball. But the PR person ended up giving a bunch of journalists the wrong time. So we like all showed up and were told by someone in this Walgreens that actually we would not get to see the ball. Freckin Swarovsky. No, obviously it was it was great to even get the invite. And I got to experience the secret elevator in the Walgreens. Yeah, that's some like Harry Potter stuff right. Yeah. And, you know, I still get to enjoy the ball on TV half-heartedly while other stuff is going on, as is the American tradition.

What a great time of year. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be right back. 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. We're back. Apologies for any loss of sound quality. We are in a temporary recording space while we still prep for season two,

and you may hear a very annoying steam pipe. But we are going to carry on and know that in the new year, it will be a new us with no steam pipes. Eleanor, you're up. Hello, thank you. So I'm just going to share some really great calendar facts. And I decided, you know, in the spirit of things, I'd do them chronologically. So the year is 46 BC.

Julius Caesar is sick of the Roman calendar. Just for a little bit of context here, the Roman calendar was kind of a mess because it had this thing called the Mensis Intercolarsis, which was where kind of at random, they would add a 27 or 28th day month to the year. It was supposed to happen every two years, but it ended up being this really political thing where people would just decide, like, now is the time to insert it, or, you know, we're in the middle of a civil war, skip it. And so things were just kind of constantly crazy.

So Julius Caesar decided to rectify this, and that's where we get the Julian calendar, naturally. And what he did was he sort of based it on what we'd learned from Greek astronomy about the cycle as the Earth as it rotates the sun. Then he was inspired, as you know, Julius was dating, the hottest lady of the land, Cleopatra at this time. He was inspired by how the Egyptian calendar actually had a fixed length

that it didn't really go beyond. So he incorporated that as well. And then he kept the traditional 12 Roman months, and that was the Julian calendar. Which leads to my next fact, the Julian calendar is not what we use anymore. Does anybody know what we use now? Oh, boy.

He's the Gregorian calendar. Wow, that was my guess. And I was like, that's probably wrong. That was, yeah, it's right. It's correct. Grewarian calendar. It was developed by Pope Gregory, and Roman Catholic countries adopted it in 1582. Thanks, Greg.

Yeah. So Gregory, what he wanted to do was to sort of create his own calendar that he felt was a little bit more regimented. You know, we'd moved past the Mentis endocularis a few thousand years ago, but there was still room for improvement, he thought. So he created this new system. The thing was, a lot of people, as they are to this day, were very bothered by the Pope and his belief in his authority. And so a bunch of countries were just like we flat out refused to adopt this calendar. So you had the situation where, like, across Europe, like half the countries were on the Gregorian calendar and half the countries were still on the Julian calendar. Cool.

Yeah, not ideal. The last country actually to adopt the Gregorian calendar was Greece in 1923. So like yesterday. 1923. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, they really held off for a long time. And so this created this really interesting event where Red October, right, which is where the Bolsheviks had their revolution in the Russian Empire in 1917.

It wasn't actually in October. Oh. Yeah. It took place in the Julian calendar from October 24th to October 25th. But in the Gregorian calendar, that was actually November 7th to November 8th. So Red October took place in November, even now by Russian standards, because they eventually moved over to the Gregorian calendar as well. So to this day, the calendars are 13 days apart. So the Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar.

And it's going to stay that way until 2099. But I found out that when the clock switches over to 2100, the next Y2K, as it were, you're actually going to see the calendar's length. in like they are going to get farther apart. And that will just continue until the end of time, which I think is really funny. Wow. Now I really hope I live to be a hundred and eight. I've never hoped that before. Then you'll have a 14-day difference between these calendrical.

And you can really laugh at the Bolsheviks. But that's not all. So, you know, just to give a sense, like we started in 46 BC, but as I said, the Greeks weren't even going to adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1923. Today, there are actually still countries that are working off of different calendrical systems. So does anyone want to guess which country I'm talking about that's just refused to count time like anybody else? North Korea? Correct.

Cool. So North Korea has what is called the J-U-C-Ear. That's J-U-C-H-E. It's my favorite word. And it begins in 1912, marking the birth of the first North Korean dictator, Kim Il-Sang. And so they were like, you know, inspired by the way that, you know, other calendars are on the BC AD kind of paradigm with the birth of Jesus. And Kimmel Song was like, I'm that important, right? So we're actually now, that means that we're in Jusier or we will be in 2019.

That will be Jusheer 107. So a great thing to stay to your friends. Yeah. Tell your kids to write on their assignments, 11107. And I think that that's just really great to know that there are still people. out there working on a different system. Yeah. Wow. Do what you feel, I guess. Yeah, whatever calendar system is right for you. Right, because time is an illusion anyway. Yeah, it's a flat circle. Exactly. Who won? Oh, right. Wow, I've forgotten how those show works. I think Claire won.

Yes. Torture devices always win. Yes. I agree. I agree. And now we must say goodbye for just a little while, longer. Like I said, weirdest thing will be back with season two early in 2019 or early in year 107. 108. Wait. No, 107. 107. This is why we all need to agree on one calendar. And we can't wait to get back to spending every week with you weirdos. Please rate, review, and subscribe. It helps the magic algorithm tell other people to find our show. So it is very important. Even if you don't get your podcast on Apple Podcasts, just click on over there and do us a solid. We would think it was the best Christmas gift ever. And we'll see you in the new year.

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 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, towbags, 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, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. For Citizens Bank.