Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 147: SS Princess Alice Sinking

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Poop... poop everywhere... the horror... Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Okay, and we are going well not quite going because I got to get them get the slideshow going. God damn it. Wait, that's not what I wanted to do. Crap. How do I how do I? Hi, we're idiots and not that stupid. It's just a complicated, you know, series of free flight checks we have to do in order to get this plane flying. Flight checks DCS well. Yes, exactly. in order to get this plane flying. You fly checks, DCS world.

Yes, exactly. That's going, that's going, Zencasters going, we're going. Oh my God, all right. Welcome to Tuesday night, Maxion, no way. Yeah, so if you just cut in here, Reinhold Messner is Italian. Reinhold Messner.

So I've learned from the Reinhold Messner is Italian. So I've learned from a man's good board. Reinhold Messner is Italian. I stopped telling me that Reinhold Messner is a, I swear to God, I put in two whole slides about how I don't respect you people when you correct me on the facts. And what do you do? But correct me on the fact again.

I'm gonna get more stuff wrong on purpose. Right. I'm going to mess your Swiss now. Each shit. No, he's Swedish. We're going to keep moving him around. Yeah, the sort of like the thing at the start of the show is we announce what nationality Reinhold Messner is this, this fortnight.

I know Messner from swasely land. The joke that they wanted to do with Daniel Craig in the knives out series. Oh, giving me an accent every time. Yeah, inexplicably. Yeah. Oh, that'd be funny. I think what I would have made the second one a better film. But knives out too, but he's talking like the South African sands fromty Donna. Yeah, I'm very, very on board with this. Very into it. Hmm. Welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Reisnack, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are here and him, okay, go. I'm Alex Kordor Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her, and I'm a very sleepy girl because it's 11 p.m. where I am. So we'll see if I make it through this. Ye Liam. Ye Liam. Sorry.

I had a mouthful of C4 flavor. Plastic explosive. Yes. Frozen bomb sickle, of course. Delicious, delicious plastic. I'm not safe to burn, but I don't think it's safe to eat. No, I think, well, you buy a goddamn business, Nanny State? I'm so full of delicious sea full plastic explosive.

Sure. Someone gave me the nutrient facts sheet on that, you know, bad. Just bad. Hey, wait, all the sea full plastic explosive go Liam's like sitting there. So like shopping away. I don't find what Biden, what is it? Bunch of block of carry gold butter. Yeah, we do that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What you see on the screen in front of you is a big boat running into a small boat. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful illustration. Beautiful. I like that.

19th century illustration of, of peril. You know, you seldom sort of like see an illustrated peril anymore. You know, you don't see peril anymore in this way. No, you just see me. I'm not even. There's, yeah, there's more peril in the world, but there's less illustrations of it. Yeah, because the thing is the illustration of peril captures the like fateful moment in a very dramatic way where as now you're, you're're like, it's not to see like some cell phone footage that ends with someone like lying dead

on the ground or like scattered across like, you know, square or something. And the moment of peril passes by very quickly, whereas here you have like frozen and immortalized it to tell us the story. So immortalized peril is supposed to modern peril where you get hit by a missile that turns you into Mortadeela or something. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't like being turned into cold cuts. I can tell you that right now. Ryan Holt-Messon is presumably favorite cold cut on account of the fact that he is Italian. Of course he is. Of course he is. He is a fact Italian as we know. So. Fuck you.

But today, we're going to talk about a weird disaster, a surprisingly deadly disaster, and also a disgusting disaster. Yeah, it's a little poop. Yes, it does. Yeah. We are going to talk about the sinking of the SS Princess Alice. Oh, no, that's us. That's right.

The Princess Alice disaster, as I was known for the first year after I came out, I'm I'm excited to talk about this one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is I didn't realize how bad this one wasn't until I started looking into it. I'm interested in a disaster disaster in British history. Yes. Yeah. And for a sea faring nation, you know, we've killed a lot of people in our inland also ways. Not as many as here. Exactly. Inland waterway isn't the sea. Once you get in a river, they fucking suck. Yeah. Well, as soon as someone decides it's navigable, you've got to try and actually

navigate it and then then you're fucked. Then you're upset. Yeah. Yeah. 250 dead on canal boat. After it becomes mildly waterlogged. It's a boat. It's supposed to be water or waterlogged, I suppose. Yeah. You if anything, a boat is supposed not to be waterlogged. The log, the log it misses, you know, not where you keep the water. Before we talk about the peril, we have to talk about the peril. It's time to do the God-dean news. I have a free hand. No? Yes.

That'll go off. Oh, my God. I'm just open with the beloved Kil'James Bond news theme there. Yes. The ongoing peril in Palestine continues. They are hoping, now, Biden says, if you believe his, you know, I'll ask, that they are very close to a deal which will involve some kind of a prisoner swap where Hamas is going to release the women and children. It has an exchange for Israel releasing.

Some of it's also pretty like arbitrarily detained women and children in its prisons. And it's now, the question is, is this a deal that for the end time in his career, Benny from Cheltenham, BB Netanyahu, can sabotage at the 11th hour to try and retain his hold on power. I don't know.

We'll see, I guess. Though there was this kind of sea change where he actually was forced finally to meet with some of the families of the hostages. Oh boy. After like weeks of ducking their calls. And he still did the like dictator thing of having a guy with no connection

to the hostages just show up and tell him how great a job he was doing. Oh my God. You always gotta have a hype man, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is perhaps the most hyped man in Israel. And yeah, it's, we at time of recording, I presume we will have the big this episode was recorded

on the 21st of November thing up on screen. At time of recording, we don't know what's gonna happen. Possibly there's gonna be like a five-day ceasefire in exchange for this exchange of some prisoners. But yeah, meanwhile, of course, the IDF are doing everything they can to sort of like get more of Gaza destroyed and occupied before the kind of clock runs down on that, which is also sort of standard. Oh, yeah, they've been gone.

They've been gone real hard in on North, on Gaza City itself, you know, it seems like they're running out of things to blow up. You know, I guess maybe this is why they're going after the hospitals as they can't figure out what else to blow up anymore. Or they just like going after hospitals, which I think is the other thing. Yeah, well, don't. The new thing now is now having run out of stuff to Bob in the north looking at all the people who they made Flea to the south and going there's a bunch of people in the south and probably Hamas is like a conference room that we fell defined under the three sequential Hospitals at time for recording

Maybe that was in in in car units after all Maybe it was in in the south of Gaza. So we got to go in and we got to bomb that too. We had to go into the secret hospital conference room with the friends who made it along the way. Yeah, actually, they actually move the whole, they move the whole somewhere else. That's really easy. You know, what I'm interested, you know,

the thing is, I guess what they've been doing today is I think they hit the Indonesian hospital pretty hard. That's one of the big ones. But the Indonesian Navy is now sending a hospital ship over there, which I assume is still in root. So I'm wondering if they're going to have to say, well, there is a Hamas submarine underneath that we had to go in on the well. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of like an easy win for Muslim countries. Like the Jordanians have been building the field hospital on the border on the Egyptian side. So, you know, it's helpful, I suppose, but again, very

interesting. I don't know if it's an easy win if you lose a hospital ship, I mean. Yeah, that's true. Oh, things are expensive. Yeah, no, I mean, I don't know. I, everything about this has been continuing to make me feel absolutely insane. So it's what it's supposed to do. Yes. The whole whole thing is working very, very effectively.

I, you know, I said this on on Trash Future as well, but the thing is that like, I think it's very easy to, you know, as a podcast or whatever to say, okay, well, what new can I say about this other than? It feels like there's nothing other than just a bit. You know, I have a fucking microphone in front of me. So literally, I should be doing this. It should like have some measure of urgency to it. And, you know, now and previously and forever,

it is free Palestine. There is no possible end to this other than an end of occupation and some semblance of a peace process. One country, one language called language. That's right. I I have no longer the French doing it. It's Liam, baby. Yeah. I mean, there was one thing I wanted to get your opinion on Justin, which is there was an op-ed in the Israeli press that's like, even if the war ends, Gaza could not be rebuilt because of the network of Hamas conference runs, because of the tunnels. If they tried to rebuild it, it would just perfectly fall into the tunnels because it's undermined. That doesn't sound right to me.

That's kind of what I was asking. I'm pretty sure. The city of Reading, Pennsylvania can exist. If the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania can exist. Those are so many Hamas tunnels. Yep. Yeah, most of which have collapsed. Most of which is during Hamas's anthracite coal mining case. Oh, man. Yeah, that's how you say it in coal region dialect. Of course, of course.

Of course. I'm the idiot. Yeah. I don't know what to say. I've been continuing to do things. There was a fascinating thing with some activists like protested outside and shut down the gate of this arms manufacturer, Albert, in the US. And a bunch of them got extremely arrested,

vastly disproportionately on the usual sort of charges of riot and so on. But whether that's something that you yourself should be doing, I can't answer, but it seems to me like good trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Hamas is actually Hazelton, anthracite materials and services.

Oh, my God. It's like a sort of like red and blue thing. You know, like, you know, Buildersleek, you know, I said, yeah, it's exactly. Do you want to hit me with what an IDF is? You know, I need to bring up Google Maps to find out a Colour Agent town for this. Give me a second.

It's got to be a call region town still with an eye. Just put the Jeff, I mean, don't put the Jeffity music over. I'll do a copy right strike. Get copyright strike. Yeah. Just imagine, hum the Jeffity music. No, no, no, that's too close. I got nothing. I don't think there is one. Oh god dammit. Okay. Well, yeah, it's difficult to do comedy bits about the ongoing genocide. The fucking Auschwitz memorial, which is been ruthlessly politicized by a PIS by the law and justice party, the right wing is in Poland, and is now sort of like an ideological, like right wing project in a lot of ways. They did their official statement on it, and their official statement is sometimes you Sometimes you got a ball in the hospital, I guess.

It was really infuriating and insane. There was a comedy bit you all did on trash future, which I enjoyed, but was confused by, which was, what's the horrible violent football club? Millwall. Millwall, why are they pro-Israel because Because West Ham stands for West Hamass and you said that Alice on the show and I had to go back three times before I realized You weren't saying Worcester Mass I was like these are identical phrases damn

Yeah cross-cultural exchange it's a hell of a thing. So I just want to, okay, there is humor to be found here, but also people are getting killed a lot for no reason. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. It's not the kind of thing where you'd like, oh, this is a thing that you can donate to. You know, you can really do that. You can protest about it. You can get yourself arrested on Trumped Up charges of like riot and vandalism.

You can do that. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a, if you're up to it, you know, you can engage in direct action. We can't tell you how to do that. No, we can only tell you that if you engage in the extremely legal kinds of direct action, you might get arrested on suspicion of illegal ones anyway. Yes. Which, you know, obviously we don't endorse. It's just, I don't know.

You can get fired for your job for no reason. You could get absolutely fired me a job. You could get sort of blacklisted from getting like a job in future. You could get like filmed and identified and doxed and threatened and all of this. But you know, it's it's still the right thing to do. So don't be too discouraged and do be encouraged by the fact that if you look at the polling Like support for Palestine in the US even is higher than it's ever been It's it's really just like a hard core of Zionists and the very old who

Not repulsed by this and I think most normal people and especially young people repulsed by this and I think most normal people and especially young people are seeing what's happening and I like, no, this is insane. Why are we bankrolling this? Right. Yeah, I mean, unless you get all your news from cable news and like print news papers, like it's very hard to look away from this stuff. You know, and you need a lot of message discipline to spin this to the Israeli side, which exists in traditional media, but which does not exist elsewhere. And which has been fatally unbalanced, and is still in this kind of strange spiral of accusing more and more things of being secretly Hamas. The UN, the World Health Organization, don't really have a lot of borders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This podcast, this podcast is actually, we have a Hamas agent that's infiltrated us in the form of the Activate Windows logo. And we've talked about digging tunnels before and how you do it. So, you know,

could be us. You don't know. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. Could be milkshake, you know? Cook milkshake might be Hamas. That's true. You have a basement. Like it's that's literally like, or about that basement. I don't like to go down there. No, it's on the other. So, yeah, horror is still ongoing in Palestine. What more can you say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. I don't let you they don't let you say that anymore. That makes you have mass.

It's awesome. Yeah. Oh, we've gone woke. We've done it. Yeah. I think I think there's somebody in the comments to be like, why are they talking about shut the fuck up? It makes a hundred people so it's it. Shut the guy down. Feel very unsafe, apparently.

And you know, I don't I don't like to make people feel unsafe. I don't do it gratuitously, but I I simply think at this point you have to say, it shouldn't. There's no reason for it to. And maybe it's more important to talk about the people who are catastrophically unsafe. Yeah, points to the albatross, Hamas. Every time you say Hamas, it makes me want to die a little bit, I will say that. All right, in other news. All right, this is a giant shift in tone.

This is a fun. Iron shift in tone. Yeah. It's just fun. I mean, so, so you know how we said that, um, we didn't invent this, but we've copied it that climate change is recording a, like, climate disaster, watching a climate disaster on someone's phone, uh, until you're the one recording it. Well, same here, but for specifically Taylor Swift concerts.

So Taylor Swift has gone to Brazil and it's gone to holy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Brazil is currently in the grips of massive catastrophic heat wave. In Rio de Janeiro right now, it feels like 50 degrees Celsius. Don't know what that is and free to me, Gels. 130 or so.

Yeah, a lot. Before the tour even started, one of the fans just died outright. Actually, we don't know why yet, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to baselessly speculate that it's heat-related. And she tweaked a lyric, and that was how she paid tribute to them. Yeah, it's like, sorry. I love Taylor Swift, but get fucked. A 23-year-old woman, like, died. Another fan got stabbed. And then they got into the actual stadium and she didn't perform because of the high temperatures but left everybody waiting in the stadium in those high temperatures where in the stadium it was hitting like 60 degrees European like woke bigot units. There's a quote from a fan in a

reported by the AP where she says, can you see how much I'm sweating? All the pores in my body are dilated from the sweat. I'm wearing a geriatric diaper. Come on stage, I want to see you. Sixteen degrees Celsius is 140 degrees Fahrenheit. That's at sauna temperatures right there. I assume since it's Brazil, let's a million percent humidity. Yeah, I do not understand putting yourself

in that situation in already in a heat wave, wearing a diaper to go and see, like Taylor Swift, she's fine. The music is fine. You know, it's a river performer. I will show her. I've seen it live. I, but not to defend T-Swirls or here, but I have also seen Taylor Swift live. How I, the only one out of us who hasn't seen Taylor Swift live, that's a, I saw Taylor Swift

live accidentally. Ah. He said, like through his teeth. Swift Live. That's a I saw a Taylor Swift live accidentally. He said, live through his I I only contributed minimally to the campaign where whoever sent in the most texts per high school would get a Taylor Swift concert at their high school. And in the end, it came down through a race between two high schools, which was Bishop Irton High School and Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia.

Oh, fucking dreams. Yeah. And somehow our tech spots won. So, you know, the, I'm Taylor Swift. I have seen Taylor Swift, yes. Unlike unlike a lot of Brazilians, we're like fainting like a thousand people fainted in the audience at the first the first show People were falling over and like burning themselves on metal surfaces Oh And then there's there's a line in this AP story The postponement was followed by chaos outside the stadium under a light rain a massive concert goes left the area

Which is close to one of Rio's' working-class neighborhoods known as Ferveilas. Videos shown on social media showed groups of pickpockets robbing fans of their belongings. Many took refuge inside a burger king, ducking for cover under tables and behind the counter in the kitchen area as heavily armed police raided the restaurant's basement, as loud sirens bled, and those stuck outside the restaurant shouted. Some of those who were

able to escape intact these were overcharged by the drivers. It sounds hellish, absolutely hellish. It sounds like trying to get out of a pecked game at the metal land stadium, Jesus Christ. Yeah, and then she finally performed and she couldn't breathe on stage because it's like unbearably hot. At some point, I think you have to have some kind of safety mechanism to be able to say, no, it is too hot for you to do this. This is not a safe place for you to conduct any kind of activity even like outdoors, right? But it kind of doesn't matter. You see politicians routinely on Twitter like posting, Taylor Swift please come to location because she brings in so much money and people are like obsessed with her. And yeah, you sort of like fatally compromise

safety and I worry that as the world gets hotter This is only going to be more of a problem. I've got to start considering moving Taylor Swift Consuz to the opposite location Taylor Swift, please come to Nova, Sabirsk Taylor Swift, please come to climate proof Duluth Climate proof Duluth Mermansk Greenlands Tramzo. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's real sort of like, this is something that makes me feel particularly bad, you know, now that we're, you know, I read a thing on the Guardian

front page a couple of days ago that said that we're just going to like, as things are going, we're just going to blast straight through three degrees of warming, which is apocalyptic stuff. Oh yeah, we just had like a real had day yesterday, didn't we? We hit over 2C for the first time. And yeah, so aside from that, just sort of without anyone seeming to notice until it's on them,

huge swaths of the world just become like almost uninhabitably hot, at least like unlivably hot, for like weeks at a time, and that happens every year now? Yeah, yeah, not good for you, not good for you. Taylor Swift, come to a Monson Skat South Pole Station. Why can't we get the cold, apoccal?

I like too cold. I really, really don't like too hot. This is the worst temperature. I'm like, I'm a fat woman, right? I sweat a lot at the best of times. I don't want, give me the cold one. Give me the one where I go to wear like 50 lads, you know? Yeah, yeah, cold apoccal.

lips looks better if you're fat guy, you know? You can wear nicer clothes, you know? Yeah, yeah. Cold, that cold apocalypse looks better if you're fat guy, you know, because you can wear nicer clothes, you know, because fat guy in warm weather, that doesn't work very well. It's just, you know, you're never going to look good, unless you want to sweat your ass off. We're really pro layers podcasts, you know, give me some wings hairs, we're pros and like big coat. And yeah, if you if you tried to do that shit, get some extra hair for insulation, you know, and if you try and do that shit in the Nilton Santo Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, you sort of like broil yourself. Yeah, I would have been I would have been literally sizzling.

Yeah, I mean, like have fat dripping off me. You could have caught an egg in it, you know. So the George Roman krill, we've got like dark scumming out from under the big carpet jacket. I actually come out the other side of health here, because I would have lost a lot of body fat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's like you're like cussing weight like a boxer, you know. Yeah, exactly. Oh my God.

Yeah, so it's a chilling portant of things to come. I don't think it, I think it was a lot of things, but not chilling. A searing portrait. A searing, yeah, there we go. A searing, I guess. Searing at least a very at least a saute. Thank you for all the sautéless waft thank you for that. It's a Taylor Swift. I don't. She's really good.

She's pretty good. I mean, I might like, I don't understand. It feels disproportionate to me. Like the people who like drive themselves and say on the internet trying to convince herself that she's a lesbian, secretly. Oh, yeah, that's a thing I just found out about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, you listen to, yeah, that's a thing I just found out about. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I gave her. Yeah, I know. Yeah. I mean, I mean, you listen to to Cool Summer and tell

me that's not about a Carly gloss. No, no, you. Oh, wow, before we, um, I'm, I'm a swifty Twitter. Uh-huh. Well, the Swifties can like, adult you as one of their own. And I'm going to get pilloried in the comments again, you know, like we can't we can't talk too much about Gailor because that was already a subject two days ago on the QAnon anonymous podcast. right? We can't, I don't want to muscle in on anyone's turf. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. I recognize this city. Yeah. This is, this is my favorite place in the world. It's my hometown. It's where I'm from. This is a little sissy called.

Oh, I hate that. Yeah, this is London. It's in Ontario. The University of Western Ontario. What is it like? Yeah, 100 miles. 100 miles west of Toronto. Yeah, yeah. But notably London has the river Thames in it, right? It does. It's a bit of a coffee bit.

You can see it in the opening titles of EastEnders. Yes. There's a bunch of curvy bits, which we'll get to. They, in fact, tried to get planning permission for a version of this fear that they have in Las Vegas, the big like LEDs around the outside. Yeah. The thing that ruins your city and they would denied that planning permission. They're very salty about it, that they're not able to like beam cryptocurrency ads into

everyone's window and strat food. Yeah, as a novelty, that thing works in Las Vegas, but I think in the other city, I wouldn't want to live within two miles of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe if they put it where the dome is, I don't know, but yeah, so London, it's a beautiful city. It's where all the stuff is. I'm very, very fond of it. When a man is tired of London, he's tired of life. Plays to all genders. And you know, it's great. and it's great. I think it was one of the, I think it was, when it was the biggest city in the world that was during the Victorian era,

which is sort of the 1800s when Queen Victoria was Queen Victoria. Seen here. Yeah, the once in future Queen. So yeah, there's a lot of shipping on the Thames because during when the British Empire was when the sun never set on the British Empire, you were shipping a lot of stuff from a lot of places in the London. Yeah, and why doesn't the sun sit on the British Empire? Because it's in so many time zones. Because God doesn't trust

an Englishman in the dark. So I should say part of the reason why London becomes as successful as it does is because it has a very wide, very navigable river that like will be at curvy, goes straight up through the middle of it. And so you can bring all of your shit directly up to a wharf and unload it. And you get all of this like riverboat traffic, which is ultimately killed off by containerization and increasing draft of ships, which means that now the port of London is all at Tilbury and Essex, and they closed down all of the docklands which got redeveloped into a kind of yuppie housecape.

They got real weird. They did. I like the DLR, but really being in Darklands, being in that whole area is, it's sort of like, it has the kind of, it's not quite the same thing as the Sissy, but it has a kind of like ambient wealth and like, sort of corporate nature to it that makes my teeth edge. I was like, I was like 13 years old when I ran that, when I was on the Docklands Light Railway for the first and only time. I got to sit right at the front like I was driving the train. It was so cool.

Classic, yeah. Yeah. So one of the things is when you have all this riverboat traffic on account of being the biggest city in the world, you got to somehow regulate it or people will bump into each other, right? Yeah. Which they did a lot. A lot. Yeah. There's absolutely routine occurrence, but you can't do that. It impedes the commas, you know. So this is this river's busy with barges. It's got large sailing ships. It's got small river boats. It's got robots. It's got berries. It's got anything that floats. It's on a river. river boats, it's got robots, it's got berries, it's got anything that floats it's on a river. Dead bodies rolled up in carpet, you know. Well, before the necropolis railway, which I guess at some point we'll have to

talk about, well, they just stuffed a train full of corpses. Yes. So in the 1850s, it was decided in much of the world, I don't know the exact source on that because the source I got was what is it, the Thames River Police site. They aren't clear on what their source for that is though, well who exactly decided, but most river traffic in most of the world ran on the right-hand side. So, you know, as it would be, you know, right hand driving like in America, or in this case, you know,

you're on different sides of the road, depending on whether or not you're a boss or a cop. Yes, same thing for the one that underground too. So, you know, traffic on rivers should pass oncoming ships on their starboard hand. That is, you know, the ship turns the starboard and they pass each other on their port sides. It's port to port, right? Just keep right.

Sure. Got you. But the Thames did not submit to these regulations. So the Thames is a title river. And as such, it was very beneficial economically to hue towards the center of the river when the movement of the tide was beneficial to you. And then when the tide was against you, you sort of take more of an F1-style racing line through the inner corners of the river to cut off some distance and also go through

the slack water, which is where the movement of the river is the slowest at the inside of the turn It's fast. It's on the outside. It's slowest on the inside. That's where you get more erosion on the outside That's how you get oxbow legs and stuff like that But the net resulted this is you know boats are all over the place with no rhyme or reason. It's complete chaos and madness And only tempered by the fact that, boats are all over the place with no rhyme or reason. It's complete chaos and madness and only tempered by the fact that, well, boats are pretty slow. Yeah. I mean, this is like, it's under steam and it's like paddle steams and stuff, but even

so like in daylight and generally like you have enough kind of like room to get out of the way of shit, right? Yeah. I mean, the river is pretty wide in most places, especially anywhere where you're gonna be going fast. Yeah, the time's fast, you're already fast. 10 knots. It's fast moving river either.

Yeah. It'll drown you if you fall into it, but to actually to drive a boat on, it's pretty sedate as I understand. Yeah. I need to talk about pollution. Yeah. OK.

We'll just spend an hour on this slide. Yeah, exactly. I mean, shit used to be nasty. Quite literally. Yeah. I mean, basically London's sort of like sewage solution for the longest time was throwing the river, throwing one of several rivers.

One of several, yeah. No. Like some of those throw it in the river, throw it in one of several rivers. One of several, yeah. No. Like some of those rivers like the fleet just became sort of like garbage canals that just like open sewers that fed into the Thames. And the Thames became this kind of like fetted like solid waste dump, which ultimately got to the it's sort of like Apex, it's neither depending on how you view these things in 1858 when too much shit got real nasty. The great stink. The great stink of 1858, yeah,

the smell on a hot day was so untenable. Parliament had to move out of its building. Mm-hmm. And to the Oxford, I want to someone. Oxford, I will decide. Yeah, the Queen was complaining. So after that, the city father decided something must be done. This was also in tandem with an earlier discovery by John Snow from Game of Thrones, who discovered how, discovered how Colorado is transmitted in 1854. Full street epidemic.

Yes. Fantastic piece of sort of like epidemic detective work. Yes. Everybody who got cholero like use this, sucking this one water pump. It's amazing what you can achieve by knocking on doors and asking people questions sometimes. Yeah, just bother people. And it turns out, you know, of such things,

a civilization made. So something has to be done in order to move three million people's poop away from where those three million people live, right? And this leads to the construction of the northern and southern outfalls, which is the sort of system of massive brick tunnels and southern outfalls, which is the sort of system of massive brick tunnels and cast iron pipes, all of these all discharged, all the sewage, seven miles downriver near

barking. Thereby making this sewage, somebody else's problem. Yeah, barking and daginams, although now London has sort of like grown to include them. And because these people were Victorians, because they hired Victorians, most notably Joseph Basiljet, they were serious about this and they knew what they're about. What they're about was creating a kind of like series of secular temples to sanitation, you know, like the, just because you're dealing in like solid human waste doesn't mean that you can't make it be uplifting and edifying.

And so a lot of the infrastructure of both the sewers and the sort of like the pumping stations and all of this is is very, very elaborate and very decorative. Yeah, because you got all the nice iron work by Charles Henry Driver, even like the big beam steam engines or highly ornamented. That was very typical for the time for pretty much any steam engine, stationary ones at least. Argettactually, it's very, very pretty, but it is pumping sewage. These are big tanks

whole of poop. Like poop cathedral. Smells horrible in there. So this sewage was discharged into the river twice a day as the tide was going out there by sweeping it down river. Yeah, one big collective flush. Yes. It's like stored in like, you know, the big big systems and then like at certain time of day, you know, big sort of like horn goes. Everyone in barking sort of like is traumatized as 3 million Londoners, shit and piss. Plus someone pulls the someone pulls the plunger on the giant toilet. Plus someone pulls the someone pulls the plunger on the giant toilet

Big massive toilet. What if we created a turd so big even God couldn't flush it out. Yeah a lot of this is industrial waste too If you've seen those skimmy toilet videos, this is the real thing I should also say yeah like a lot of this is just like industrial effluent because the the system is like yeah, so some of that's going in there too. Right. That was also something that we were dumping straight into the river and like, realistically central London as well. Think about all the stuff that you don't want at a slaughterhouse or a tannery. Yeah.

All that stuff is gone straight through all these beautifully designed Victorian pumps. So yeah, this, this, this, sewage outflow system was completed by 1875. The river in the city was cleaned up considerably. I was still not clean, right? By any means, but it's much cleaner. So that means it's not clean now.

It's the first of all the terms is, it's an ugly river. There's no there's not getting away from it. It's a very like silty river, even when it's clean, it looks brown. The sort of the wildlife that's in it is not appealing. It's like eels and shit like that. Oh, it's not like these other European capitals where you know, like Paris, they're on track to have the the river swimmable by like two years from now.

I mean, people have swam the times, but I don't recommend it. I've swam in the Anacostia River in Washington, DC. I mean, it's doable. You shouldn't do it. Yeah. I did. I don't. There he was. I didn't do that. I don't know. Yeah.

It's, it's, it's clean niche now. There he was. There he was. Do that. Right in the middle. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's it's clean-ish now. Yeah. But you know, in 1875, it's it's clean-ish-ish, you know? Clean-ish-ish. It won't it won't immediately kill you if you fall in. Yeah.

I mean, my favorite tems fact right now is that all of the eels are on cocaine because Londoners do so much cocaine. And enough of that still goes into the river that it gets into the eels. And there's there's we are coaked up eels. Prince amazing. So they also got, okay, they got they still got the smog and

the air pollution. Those are big issues and illegal dumping so on and so forth. The city was considerably So they also got, okay, they still got the smog and the air pollution, those are big issues and illegal dumping, so on and so forth. The city was considerably more tolerable to be in at this point though. And this is why municipal sanitation is very important, and this is why New York City sanitation guys have cool dress uniforms. Absolutely. We don't get our sanitation guys' cool uniforms at all, which I think is a missed trick. No, you get cool buildings, we don't get our sanitation guys cool uniforms at all, which I think is a mist trick. No, you get cool buildings You don't get cool uniforms. Yeah, now another thing we have to talk about is the pleasure garden

We invented the middle class Yeah, 19th century and the middle class needs to distinguish itself by doing leisure And you know people people like new stuff, they like new things. Yeah. So not everyone's working 28 hours a day in the factories, even some of the people who are, they do occasionally get a day off to spend with the family, right? And they have a little bit of disposable income, right? They need something to do. There's no television, there's no radios, there's book books, but books are boring. So there's, there's musicals, but those are like, uh, baudi and like, dens of iniquity. And especially if you're a Victorian and you have the money to like, organize and build

things, what you want to build is something that's going to be improving. Mm-hmm. So you've got to get a pleasure garden. And you can go on a nice trip there to see and to be seen, take in the fresh air, have a nice walk around. Some of these things are like small tea gardens.

Some of them are very large affairs with like concert halls, hundreds of acres of grounds, formal gardens, restaurants, follies, fountain, gazeboes, and of course, bear pits. Oh, of course. Listen, it wouldn't be a 19th century attraction without some animal cruelty. Yes. I should also say that the main form of,

like, activity of entertainment here is not like sitting on your fat ass, right? It is promenading, which is something that has like standing on your fat ass. Walking on your fat ass. Walking on your fat ass. You and the wife and children wearing your like Sunday best walk up and down

this like sort of tree-lined avenue, looking as good as you can and sort of like being being seen and judging the appearance of others. And you just do this for God knows how long. It's a real like bygone form of entertainment, you know. It's sort of the opposite of a lazy river. Yeah, you know, you don't really do this anymore, just like walking up and down and just sort of like, you're a social thing being like running into your friends, but also like, you know, talking shit about people. And, you know, maybe seeing some like street entertainment.

I still do that. I love to walk around a talk shit. Yeah, but you're not doing it in the like a small place. Yeah, we should bring this back. We should bring this. I kind of like walking tour thing. Yeah. Yeah. So these things are, most of them are for profit affairs, right? They charge some kind of entry fee. They advertise most of the. Yeah, absolutely. Most of the successful ones were located in some form of public transportation and moving people back and forth from London to the various pleasure gardens was big business. Both the railways and the steamship lines competed for passengers.

Oh yeah, this is fantastic if you're a railway, you know, because it're sort of like trying to get those commuter fast, you can, you can get some more by like taking people to go and like walk up and down the like sort of promenade. Yeah. And this sort of fell out of fashion in the beginning of the 20th century. Most of these are closed down by then, which is supposedly a question. Yeah. These also built in the way that like railways here or inter cities would build, you know,

theme parks and shit. Was it that system or a little different? You know, I'm not actually sure because I think a lot of them predated the railways that were built to them, but certainly they acted in the same way as a revenue generator. Gotcha. You know, because you had to buy your ticket both to the pleasure garden, but also on the railway or steamship the pride of you there.

Yeah, right. But this is something that sort of went out of fashion by, you know, the 20th century. Just I'm not even sure why exactly. Because it seemed like they were posts, you know. Yeah, well, they were gone before like the radio existed. You know, yeah, I, there might, there had to be like 10, 20 years there were just everyone sad inside board.

The lost decade. Yeah. I, I, I think some of it might be down to the like the history of the respectable theatre, um, where that, but you know, becomes something that's accessible to you. You can go to like a concert hall that is in a music hall, that's in an assayty that's in London, you know. I should look up when the when the Royal Albert Hall was built, but this is all me speculating, you know.

Yeah, I should have got a historian on for this. Yeah, yeah, that would have been smart. You know, it's like, okay, we, you know, we, but they had like concert halls in these gardens too. Like you could go see, you could go see the latest Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in there. Um, be like, oh man, this is really topical. I'm sure they won't still be staging this and, you know, 140 years. Yeah. you know, 140 years. Yeah. So anyway, yeah.

So this is Rana Lake Gardens, Rana Lake Gardens. This is now. Rana. Yeah. Rana. Yeah. It's now the site of Chelsea Hospital. Oh.

Yeah. Okay. Nice. National Army Museum. Cool. Yeah, exactly walked past here. Now another another thing that was fueling these steamship companies was the C-shore. Yeah, different kind of promenading. You can promenade up and down this bitch as well. Yeah, Britain's world class beaches. Yeah, I mean you see why when a cheap air travel became a thing and you could just go to Magaloofe, you see why every British person decided to do that constantly. This is why every penny spent on reinforcing the dunes at New Jersey's beaches is a penny

well spent. Yeah, we don't want to wind up with this. No, it's real bad. Brighton people will get mad at me, but beaches. We have sandy beaches in Britain, but they're all in like fucking Cornwall or Northeast Scotland, where they're like architectically cold and Donald Trump. We've got a golf course next to them.

In general, I would say, they're like, arcticly cold and Donald Trump. We've got a golf course next to them. Yeah. Yeah. In general, I would say, this sort of like median seaside resort is Brighton Scarborough, someone like that, where it's like, yeah, what you're meant to do is you check into like a nice kind of like chocolate box hotel that overlooks the promenade. And then you promenade for a bit.

That sounds nice. Yeah. Those things also did not really survive the 20th century. You can still do it in Atlantic City. Oh, you can go down up here and you can see an extremely racist comedian who won't be able to perform anywhere else, you know, because of walkness, because of walkness, because of walkness is a walkness. Now the other thing, the other thing people went down to the C-shore for was, of course, the ozone. Yeah. Oh, three. Oh, three. That's normal oxygen

has two O's, but this has three. That makes it one better. Smells bad. Yeah. Some people think it smells pure and like sanitary, right? And because of this, there were a lot of perceived health benefits to ozone. These were entirely mythological, driven mainly because of the smell. I mean, Victorians love to sort of like quack health cure and entirely reasonable for doctors to prescribe. You go spend a week at the seaside

or go up a sanatorium in the mountains or whatever because the air is purer there, which is if you live in London, it's absolutely gonna be true just because there's fewer people and fewer industries and stuff. You know, if it were a nice C-shore, I would certainly improve my mood, which, you know, sometimes half the battle. I mean, the thing is that if you have tuberculosis, your mood is not half the battle.

Half the battle is tuberculosis. looses and the other half is two burky looses. Oh, I prefer Swiss cheese lug. Yes. I want to say this was originally something that mountaineers said is that, you know, the ozone makes me feel better and so on and so forth. I'm going to read the magic mountain, you know, then they then they drove into our Italians is possibly also, uh, whatever other, yeah, read right, hold mess is novel, the magic mountain. But the way the human body detects ozone is through smell and the smell of the seashore smells like ozone, but it's not. It's an all-factory illusion driven by marine life.

It's just like you're smelling various kinds of algeez and I don't know shrimp poop. I don't like the way the seasides smells. There's no ozone at the seaside. It's not actually there. Yeah, but like presumably this doesn't stop you from opening a hotel called, you know, Professor Quacks, Ozone, Oatorium, all that. Yeah, but like presumably this doesn't stop you from opening a hotel called, you know, Professor Quack's ozone atorian, all that. Yeah, and like having a whole, giving a bunch of money off people. Whole neighborhood in New York City called ozone park right next to the beach. Yeah. So, you know, throughout the 19th and early 20th century going down in the shore and taking the ozone was a popular pastime for if you were chronically ill, if you were acutely ill, or if you're just a

health nut, even with increasing scientific. So, the other thing is that this was simultaneous with increasing scientific evidence that ozone was actually extremely bad for you. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. I mean, like, and sort of absolutely, particularly Victorian Britain, nation of hypercontracts. Yeah. Only hypercontracts who also had unrelated a lot of serious things wrong with it. Yeah, they had contracts who also had unrelated a lot of serious things wrong with the head. They had every disease they didn't think they had. Yeah, just like absolutely like huge amounts of like lead consumption, you know, fucking antimony and the bread and stuff. And they're like,

I don't have enough ozone. I'm fucked. It's over, you know, yeah, the level of got bred. Yes. Yeah. The set of diseases you think you have does not intersect with the set of diseases you have. And both are very large sets. So anyway, how do you get down to the seaside? Well, you could take a train, but you could also take a boat. No,

don't do that. Yeah. Because the sort of very low energy flag that's just princess Alice, yes, I get one of these to fly one of these from the jack stuff. So one of the companies that was providing transportation to the pleasure gardens in the distance C. Shore was the London steamboat company, which are very descriptive. I mean, listen, it does what it says on the tin, these days, something called the London steamboat company makes like alcohol free IPAs. Yeah, yeah.

Ask me about the hotel I stayed in one time in Glasgow that was like in the former headquarters of the anchor line, and which had a bunch of anchor line like themed stuff, despite the fact that it was a hotel and not a steamship company. Or the hotel in London that's like in the sea containers building and has a bunch of sea containers, shit, despite being a hotel and not the headquarters of a company that trades in sea containers. I would kind of like those hotels though. Like, it's a circuit for a themed hotel.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, the real question is when you get the merchandise or the use in the are they, are they selling the merchandise of 20 foot and 40 foot containers? They're using the actual C containers, 35 foot containers. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's something I would be pedantic about.

Um, you've been able to do a lot of stuff, but, well, that's true. That's why we have this podcast. That's some sort of outlaw for patentry. Yes, exactly. This is so I don't do it in social situations. In my case, it funds the ability to do it in social situations. So this company, the London Steamboat Company, provided service from London to Kent, Essex and Suffolk via the Thames and some connecting railways because not all the railways made it to London.

There's a reason why these were able to compete. Because the railways, they were good. They weren't necessarily that good. Sometimes a regular speed, steamship could get you there in as much time or at least in better conditions than the railways could. Yeah, plus if you ignore the fact that all the turds floating past you, right, it's the romance. Yeah, it's a nice trip. Yeah. We're in Hailing so much ozone, we assume. Yes. You're not, but like you'll feel like you are.

Oh, you are at its worst as it turns out. So they have this fleet of large river boats, right, that were capable of carrying up to about 1000 people. But the popularity of the service was so great that trips were frequently overbooked and the ships overloaded. But you know, money is money and listen, it's a river, right? What's the worst that's going to happen? Right. river, right? What's the worst that's going to happen? Right. And suddenly you would not buy more. We're not a disaster's podcast. The thing where a success podcast, that's right. A podcast about business success and making yourself smarter.

Yeah. So pictured here is the SS Princess Alice. 200,000, a little bit insulting to name a boat after a woman, you know, like, Yeah, I've often thought that it would be a little insulting to be compared to the massive boat The boat boats are boats are female though. Yeah, why I mean in Russian, they're not in Russian The boat is a man in Russian yet gender can be language specific Generous, whatever you want it to be. Uh-huh, yeah. So it's bows.

Francis Alice was 219 feet long, 20 feet at the beam. You see why I think it's in soul-sac. 432 gross tons. Oh, but yeah, two side paddle wheels, two large steam boilers, rated to carry 964 people. Yeah, also true. Good laws, Dallas. Built as PS but in Granick, Scotland.

Greenick. Greenick. Yes, Clyde builds unsurprisingly, because that's where they built all the ships. It was built in 1865, it was used in Scotland for two years, presumably fending off dozens of Lake Monster attacks. I'm pretty sure we're doing a variation of the same thing of carrying people like doing the water, of like taking people from like Glasgow to, you know, the various

like seaside resorts where you can promenade and the freezing cold. I want to say it was actually owned by a railway of some kind and did sort of some kind of coastal service on the west coast there. But I forget I didn't, you know, I did not service to mile or something. Yeah, I did not put that in the notes, but it was bought by the London steamboat company for the pleasure garden trade gave many years of good service. One time it even carried the Shaw of Persia. Wow. Yeah.

So this is sometimes colloquially known as the Shaw's boat because, you know, the dining out on that one, I think. Yeah. Yeah. One time the Shaw was here. Now, one thing is never that one, I think. Yeah. Yeah. One time the show I was here. Now, one thing is, I'll never let it go. No. Yeah. This is like my friend's friend who is pretty sure that Joe Biden once used his toilet.

He bought a house from someone who was a family friend of Joe Biden. Uh, oh, okay. So not like in his presence, friend of Joe Biden. Oh, okay. So not like in his presence, not like Joe Biden, like not Joe Biden, just can I use it? It's your shit, I'm just like, no, Joe Biden has previously used this toilet. I see, I see, okay, yeah, plausible. I mean, the president's recording program begins.

Yes. Unless Biden is like one of those people who, wait a second, I know something related to the presidential cloning program through, through proofs, which is that when he stayed in the Soviet Union, Churchill's staff were like very worried about the concept of the Soviets like capturing their bosses' turds in order to, I guess, like, learn about his health, which it's Winston Churchill. The health is not going to be good. Yeah, that, but you just look at the guy, yeah. Yeah, but apparently this was a thing that the Soviets maybe sometimes did was like, you know, the, gonna, gonna get, like a full workup of various world leaders,

shit from a blast. Yeah. from unbless. Yeah. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent but you know it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear

on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't, it's your decision and we respect that back to the show. So one thing I noticed about this this this picture here is that it seems to make the boat look a lot bigger than it was.

I don't think this is the same boat because I can't or at least I can't definitively say this is the same boat because Pinterest is't or at least I can't definitively say this is the same boat because Pinterest is ruined image search. Oh, yeah, don't you? Yeah, Pinterest and the fucking file format thing. Oh, yes, yes, yes, web, whatever. Web P, web P and like image P have like fucking ruined image search. But I also know that I'm looking at this. I'm like, maybe this is a little bit too small.

So it's somewhere in the middle. These aren't huge boats. They're just designed to pack as many people on as possible. Oh, it's like standing remotely. Unless you're like, yeah, the sort of like, actual stuff. They got like four and a half outside benches. They also have seating actually on a lower deck.

They got a saloon. They got seating on the roof. Love a saloon. Love that it's not a bar. No, it's a saloon. Full of cowboys. It's got their like swing doors. Oh, cowboys.

It's yellow in Britain. In Britain, a saloon is fancy. You barely see a saloon anymore. Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, they got rid of those. They replaced them with pubs. Yeah. Well, time was that the pub would have a saloon, or would have a snug, which would be like a distinct, like slightly fancier area of the pub as distinct from the bar, where you

could like go and like, you know, sit down and sort of like drink and maybe get something to eat and like a slightly more rarefied atmosphere. You know, saloon, you got a retiring room, you got the, what are the other rooms that you had? I was only here all. I was, yeah, exactly. Well, that's just the upper deck. So anyway, it's something like this.

It's not very big, but it can look big if you want it to. Sure. It's like a passenger paddle steamer and in the grand scheme of things, there's larger boats going up and down the terms all the time, but also smaller ones. The other thing to note is very low, what you would call a free board here. The other thing to note is very low, what you would call free board here. The actual distance between deck and water. Yeah. So it's loaded with water in general, as opposed to our second contestant in the Red Corns worst game show. Yes.

Who's going to die of the attempts today? Yeah, so with London being, you know, still acting as in its traditional role as the consumer of last resort, of course, you know, there's lots of trade on the river and that includes lots of big ships. And some of it was coal. Volk carriers, to carry bulk. I mean, you need to burn a lot of coal to keep the, you know, keep the air as bad as it is and keep up the demand for the sort of ozone resorts. So. Yes, but weirdly, SS Biowell Castle was designed for exporting coal, not importing it.

Although I looked at a couple of sources here and I couldn't quite get it straight whether it was just a ship that frequently carried coal or if it was built for coal, it seems like this was sort of built as something that could do break bulk and bulk just as well. And weirdly had a few passenger cabins, apparently not very popular with the passengers. Yeah, you don't say. The track covered in cold dust. Yes. So, all right, this one, big tall ship. 254 feet, three inches long, 32 feet of beam,

draft of 19 feet, six inches, assessed at 1376 gross tons. Most of them named after a castle rather than a woman. Yes, SS Bywill Castle. You can do it the entire time. We just, yeah, yeah, choose not to. Yeah, so I had a compound steam engine developing a whopping 120 horsepower. Wow.

Going back to the old numbers and on like horse powers is always really fun to be like, yeah, this is, we assume enough to like, as much as anyone's ever going to need, it's like a huge industrial. 120 horsepower, well, the thing is, it's a steam engine, it's a whole compound. Powering this fucking thing.

It's a compound steam engine, so it uses the steam twice in two different cylinders, right? And because it's a steam engine, even though it doesn't have much horsepower, it has infinite torque. It's like dragging this fucking collier through the water, you know? Yeah, it's like, oh, there's no power, but sometimes the way the steam engine, like the relationship between

horse power and torque is sometimes confusing because yeah, this was more than sufficient to move this thing. It had a screw propeller. It was built 1869 to 1870 at a gyro on the river Tine for hall brothers. And unlike the Princess Alice, this was an ocean going vessel, regularly making voyages as far as South America and India and so on and so forth. Delivering like upwards of like four miserable passengers and a shitload of coal. Lot of coal coming back.

Imagine doing one of those passengers by a roommate's just a big lot of a throes. Just like this was the cheapest cabin available anywhere. It's sort of the Ryan air of its day, you know. They made me a stoker for day two weeks. Everybody works. I'm a fantastic way to go on the run though. Like if you went to a state London in a hurry. Yeah. Why?

Why do I want to join the French for Elijah, where you can simply be a stoker? I believe it's most frequent route between London and Alexandria in Egypt. Now this ship had a hell of a service history because it wound up saving the cruise of a half a dozen foundering vessels on the open seas. You know, it just happened to come across Rex all the time. It's like, all right, everyone off. We're going to go and get the guys. I'm going to die. How has this happened again? Right place at the right time. And then all those guys get to share the horrible cabins. All right. Bad news, you're a stoker now. We're going to get up to 130 horsepower.

The good news is you have been rescued. The bad news is you have to live in the cold scussell. And yeah, it was it was it was usually used outbound for coal. Oh no, I'm not sure what it was used for coal in this case. Again, the sources conflict on this. But it definitely was used for things other than coal. And apparently the voyages on this thing were pretty rough. The passengers did not like it. I mean, bulk carriers, you would think, generally, they're pretty stable, by design. Yeah. Pretty big, pretty sedate. So I don't know what's up with the design of this one. Other than this trying to be like neither fish nor foul, you know, it's not a bolt carrier. It's not like a a break bolt carrier. It's just. Well, it's also compared to like a ship of today.

It's not that big. 254 feet for that's 77 and a half meters. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like a huge thing. It's gonna get tossed around a bit, you know? Sure. So anyway, on the third of September, 1878,

SS Princess Alice was making a moonlight trip from Swan Pier, that's just upstream of London Bridge, right? As indicated here by the Red Dot, don't confuse it with tower bridge over here. That wasn't built yet. Yeah. That will do it. And it was going to go down the river Thames to the pleasure gardens, graves end, and then on to the shareness, which is on the sea. And is is not nice, churness. I mean, maybe that's just like sort of my modern prejudice is to what what it's been sort of like turned into now. But yeah, that was the beautiful world class beach. I showed a picture of earlier.

Oh, okay. Of course, of course. Left in the morning, it was going to return at night. Points of interest along the line, including including, Russiaville Gardens and Gravesend. And of course, Russiaville Gardens bear pit. points of interest along the line, including included, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including,

including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including,

including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including,

including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, including, Pull pull like abused bad. Just like you know, I think you might need some more ozone We need to dig a bear pit at the C-shore Take the bath of the sea take the bear to the sea We took a pit and put a bear in it That was that was that's the time of hundreds of years, you know, and now we now we invented podcasts. Yeah Now we're the bears in the pit. That's right. Yeah. It's us. So, coming increasingly concerned about my ozone levels. All journey. Sorry. Yeah. The whole journey was just under 50 miles each way. And a round trip ticket was a whopping two shillings. It's sort of like a moderate amount, you know. This is not

something that you drop casually. But it's like if you're sort of like middle income, if you're a clock or something, it's, you know, respectable. Yeah. These tickets were fungible, right? So you could take any London steamboat company operated ship that day on that route. So, you know, you could get off one ship at Gravesend, get on another ship and go all the way to Sheeranus or you know, you could stand and so forth. The ticket was valid for the whole day, right? Now, the first trip of the day went uneventfully.

Everyone made it out for their special day trip, the Rosherrville Gardens for the families in the school children and out to Sheeranus to take the healthful ozone for the elderly and infirm and the health nuts. There was no passenger manifest on this ship because of the way the ticketing was designed. No one knew how many people were on it and who they were. It seems like a good idea. But this is not like a boat full of hardened experience

semen, right? This is sort of, you know, women, kids in the elderly are disproportionately represented here. Sure. Oh, do I feel bad? Yeah. All right, let's talk about navigational lights. Uh, no red pole left in the bustle.

Yes. So in 1848, the Lord High Admiral required all British vessels to carry navigation lights. There's a red one on the port side. There's a green one on the starboard side. There's a white one on the mast. There's a white one on the stern that came later. Yeah, you have like your chiefly concerned with left and right here. Left and right is the most important thing so people know where you're going. The idea here being that if it was pitch blackout, you could still figure out which way a vessel was going so you didn't whack into it. We still put these lights on on ships. We still put them on planes.

Put them on planes too, yeah. Today these are high powered LEDs or some other kind of lighting source. Back in the day, these are like oil lanterns with a colored gel. People don't know how high powered those back in the day. These are like oil lanterns with a color gel. People don't know how high palettes those are, by the way, you can't, you gotta be very careful testing aircraft marking lines because if you hit them with ground curve around them, you will blind someone. Yeah, fun.

Anyway, this is called Galleon's Reach. It is incredible, incredible name. This section of river here, a reach is a straight section of river between bends, right? You know, each section is some other reach and I don't know what the other ones are, but this is the important one here. Sure.

Yeah, I don't know why I clear all this now because now there's gonna be more. Garrett told me. How do I clear? I'm gonna clear all this now, because now there's gonna be more. Garrett told me how to do this and I forgot. No, but. Oh, here we go. So SS Biewel Castle was traveling with the tide and was thus close to the center of the river. Trying to go for not by selling in the fast bit, right? Yes. So that's going to be red. Red, green. OK. SS Princess Alice is traveling against the tide. And was thus doing something more like this. We, and then was intending to do something like this,

because they had an intermediate stop right here near the Woolwich Ferry North Firminal, which at that point was not a ferry terminal. Maybe it could have done a donut though for the essential work. To respect Captain Tom, yeah. Yeah, exactly, by the way. Woolwich, don't pronounce anything as it spoke.

You're nowhere near as bad as the French. Right. So now, with that anything as it's both your nowhere near as bad as the French. So now with that in mind, that's sort of the intended path. I'm going to get rid of some of these markings. So hold on, I'm trying to select the right tool. There we go. I'm on the pen. Okay, some of the some of the precise actions of folks on the bridge of the SS Princess Alice are unclear at this point for reasons that are going to become obvious in a second. But haven't invented the like cockpit voice recording phonograph. Yes, exactly.

I don't think that even invented the phonograph. Damn. I mean, crazy. Wax cylinder that records the voices of the like the river. Black Wax cylinder. Yes. They even have that. You know, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So it's about half past seven. It's very dark.

It's hard to judge distances right now, right? September nice closing in. Yeah. You know, London is in a big sort of Meyer of cold dust. Yeah, cold dust smog. You know, they had the pea soup fog where they're like actually a little particles floating around. Yeah. Captain Thomas Harrison of SS Bible Castle was unfamiliar with the river. Oh, that's what you want to hear. So he hired an experienced river pilot. That's just for you. Yeah, exactly. He didn't even have to doix. So did you want to hear it? Yeah, exactly.

You know, he didn't even have to do it. He was not required to do it. He was like, let's do this by the, not even let's do this by the book. Let's use extra caution here. Beyond. Yeah. So he hired an experienced pilot named Christopher Dix. That's Dix was an ex.

And they Dix, yes. An experienced semen named Dix, yes, to navigate. And so Dix cited the port, that's the red lights of the Princess Alice coming around the corner into Galleon's Reach. And, right, as such, he assumed there would be a standard normal port to port crossing, right? He was going to turn Starbird to give them some room.

Yeah, you kind of like yield because they're going to like cut across you. Yeah. This is what they want to do too. Yeah, exactly. That's what they wanted to do. Yeah. Now Captain William Grinstead of SS Princess Alice is trying to get the dock in Woolwich as quick as possible as such.

He is taking the racing line. Now, so as I will castle moves over to Starbur, this is probably not the right arrow right here. I should draw this, something that gets us closer to the side of the incident. So as they're turning to make room, he's trying to keep in the, what, watch him call it the, uh, slack water, a slack water. Yes. I'm not that good with nondical terms. Uh, he's trying to stay in the slack water in his thus turning to port, right? Yeah, but even though the other ship is bearing down on him, he wants to keep on the south bank of the river, then cut across later

after Bio Castle has passed him. Yes. And Bio Castle assumes they're going straight on. So they are turning Starboard to give them more room. So now they's a never yield for anybody in crap. No, that's not a dry baby. In you call it inconsiderate. I call it defensive driving. Yeah. So right at the last second, the SS Princess Alice takes a very hard starboard turn to try and get out of the way. Hold on, Port turn, excuse me. I'm not that good at this. Well, yeah. This is the thing. It's difficult for us to remember the difference between our left and our right. It's probably harder to do in the dark in motion, even if you've

been doing it for your entire career. This is also actually something that comes into play when the media covers this, but we'll get into that in a couple of slides. And, uh, well, Biewel Castle isn't quite able to get out of their way. And... It's full of coal, you know, it's a big, fucking, it's a big honken, uh, sort of, uh, cargo ship. And so, uh, in this highly pixelated image, uh, the two ships collided at a very slight angle, something about 15 degrees, right? Um, I'm just going to like, plow like into and down. Right.

Yeah. So it's like, if you imagine, um, we have a big ship here, right? Uh, and the little ship is ship here, right? And the little ship is like here, right? Sure. So, you know, you might think they would bump off of each other, but that's not what happened. The bow of the Bible castle wrecked into the Princess Alice,

just forward of the paddle wheels, which it's rumored to have been a weak point in the vessel, but that probably didn't matter. It's like made a wood, you know which it's rumored to have been a weak point in the vessel, but that probably didn't matter. It's like made of wood, you know, it's like that. Yeah, for sure. And like the bow strongest part, you just like you, you have rammed it essentially. Yeah. So essentially it rams straight through the princess Alice and actually breaks it nearly clean and half.

A bunch of like sort of Carthaginian naval commanders from the Punic Wars, sort of watching this. Just cheering. Just like, yes, yes, yeah, did it. It's like painting a big sort of like atropper peg, that's not the word, like a big like evil eye on the front of the bioel castle, so it the princess Alice like wrapped around the bow of the bioel castle, broken to reared up and sank in four minutes. Jesus, okay, I mean, that's quick.

And it's Jesus. Okay. I mean, that's quick. You're not getting a kind of like safety briefing when you get on the Princess Alice, I imagine. You just know what you hope is a seat that's not covered in poop and. Yeah. Most of the passengers were not on deck.

They were in the saloon or in the cabins, right? So they said, have life jackets. They had, I want to say, a couple life preservers and two lifeboats. Oh, perfect. Yeah, there's no time to evacuate or to call for an evacuation, you know? And so essentially everyone below deck drowned instantly, right? There's very few survivors. Right.

Those who were lucky enough to make it into the water, because they were in a spot on the boat without a roof over it. They had more problems, because no one knew how to swim. Of course. The women were wearing those big, frilly dresses that make you sink like a rock. Yeah. I mean, everyone's wearing like a lot of heavy wool clothing, apart from anything else.

Yes. The crew of Bible Castle immediately lowered their lifeboats to try and rescue everyone. Those on deck still threw anything that could float into the water, including I think chicken coops. Just like you're like you're in the water. The water is full of turds and then a guy throws a chicken coop at you and it hits you in the air.

You drown feeling confused, betrayed, and like stinking of shit, and like with a massive chicken coop. And you're head. Yeah, and this is a legacy of, you know, we can see here in this modern image, you will note this line here, this is the path of the northern outflow,

which had begun in the previous hour since the tide was going out, discharging half of London's entire stock of sewage into exactly this part of the river. Oh boy. Yes, yes. Oh boy. Oh yes. Yes. The worst place for the shithead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if you did make it into the water, even if you were a strong swimmer, even if you were you hadn't drowned, you were now completely submerged in due to us. And like like abattoir blood and like tannery piss and like God knows what kind of canry trillion types of horrible chemicals. Oh, that's not enough ozone in the

world to come. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know. Oh, so it's hard to get the deathout. Yeah, I don't cover that out. Ooh. So it's hard to get the death toll. It's even harder to figure out how many people survived. But it's somewhere between... I mean, listen, I survived this. I'm taking showers that last the rest of my life and I'm not telling a fucking soul. Yeah.

I did read one thing about this that, like, generally speaking, when they were able to like find bodies in the record, it's like, uh, sort of beneath the beneath the water line, uh, beneath the roof even, it's just like people like absolutely like stuffed into, uh, like doorways and stuff because the first thing they know about it is the thing just collapses, and yeah, you just drown. So drown on the poop. Yeah, there might have been a crushing incident before people drowned by God. I'm, God, fuck that.

You're fucked that. Yeah, of the board, then 700 people aboard. Somewhere between like 30 and 130 survived. I'm very confused about the actual like, amount of survivors here. Again, this seems to be different in different sources. 30 survived. I'm very confused about the actual amount of survivors here again. This seems to be different in different sources. Yeah, I mean, a classic Victorian shit, especially with the press as it was, you know,

or the press here about to fuck this up bad. You can also do the reverse. There's an interesting bit about this in Halley Rubenhold's book, The Five, about the victims of Jack the Ripper, where one of them is a sort of a conwoman who notably steals valor, who lies about having survived this. It's like in order to be a more effective beggar, she's like, yeah, and I was on the princess Alice, and she wasn't. Yeah, well, again, there's no passenger manifest.

Thus, there's no great way to actually estimate the number of fatalities, but somewhere between 600 and 750 people or so were killed pretty much instantly. This all occurred less than 800 feet from shore. Jesus, yeah. I mean, the times't even like a particularly deep river either. It's it Yeah, it's not that deep. It's something that if if if you were like an okay swimmer today You could probably do it Yeah, I mean maybe not with the kind of like constant with the faster waves of turds

But like a different waves of turds. mean, the big thing was people would trap them the saloon. Yeah. That's that is kind of how I want to go down at least, trapped in the saloon. So there are like, you know, the rescue effort is largely over within like 10 minutes or so. It was not there were very few survivors to pick up. If you've made it into the water and you weren't wearing a frilly dress that pulled you to the bottom immediately. And you didn't succumb to horrible sewage. The lifeboats of the Bible castle picked you up or you swam to shore. Yeah, I mean, like the citizenship of the Princess Alice was like that in like 10 minutes after. Yeah, there's no one no one left to rescue.

There are these like amazing stories of escape, which bear may not be tall tales. One guy claims that when the bow of the Princess Alice reared up when it was sinking, he was right at the top. And simply stepped off the bow of the Princess Alice onto the bow of the Bible castle. How, yeah. Debris, you have to feed where, yeah. I deal. That's that's such a like I would simply, you know, think. I'm just different. Yeah.

Yeah. That was one guy on that boat who truly was built different. Look, sometimes when the boat is going up, you got to know when to climb over the railing. Do you know what your ancestors were doing in the mid-19th century? The press arrived on the scene very quickly. They immediately started writing some whatever they could get out of the survivors. And they're like, oh, Captain Harrison of the Bible castle

just rammed the ship because he's incompetent, right? With no evidence, you know, he was like, and you know, Harrison is there to defend himself. Grinstead on the Princess Alice was no longer there to testify because he was dead. Oh, wait. It's a loser PR battle. I would say. Yeah, but he was winning the PR battle at this point.

Fuck. Yeah. How do you lose a PR battle to a corpse? Well, I don't know. You just, you just whack your shit at more. You just whacked your ship into a Ship full of Watch McCallan women children in the elderly. Yeah The like instinctive sort of like class sympathies of like this is the leisure class that you know

They're doing this sort of like they're getting the deserving reward for working hard in the paper factory getting the deserving reward for working hard in the paper factory, therefore, you know, and this guy with his, sort of like coal, just like, there's a member of the labor in classes. Well, my understanding is that actually the, the, the Princess Alice says more carrying, sort of lower middle class and working class people. You know, but maybe, maybe the upper end of the working class here. Yeah, you know, because it was still like, okay, a coal ship wrecked into this passenger ferry

and immediately murdered everyone. And it's like, well, absent any other facts, I feel pretty strongly in favor of the passenger ship here. Sure, you know. So there's a recovery effort after this as part of like the investigation into what happens. The big effort is to try and recover and identify bodies. Eventually the authorities just offered five shillings for each body found. So not bad for like grim bounty hunting. Yeah, so you just had

some guys in robots who would go out in a river, get a big stick with a hook on the end, try and pick up some bodies. Cool. There's a detail about this too that I find really obsessing, which is that when they recovered bodies, often they were kind of like, you know, not just kind of like blow sitting the way that people who have died and you know been been left in water are but also Like covered in a kind of slime of like accumulated sewage and like rivergoop that was apparently like impossible to wash off Like it's some darn man. Yeah, I think I think at some point when they brought them to the improvised mortuary There's like okay, we're gonna wash out we're going to try and wash out the faces. So we're not going to worry about arrested this, you know, because it was a bounty system,

there were like arguments over who could fight over, yeah, whose corpse was who's, that's all very dignified. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Bible castle had returned upriver to debtford and was stuck there because other than the survivors, no one could disembark for fear of their lives. Which is what said that someone on every street in East London had been lost in the accident. Again, you see why people lied about it.

So East London 9-11. Yeah, but this is a solid quarter of a 9-11 right here. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we're using to measure things. It's real mix, but we have 9-11. 9-11s. Well, apparently now the thing is you have to adjust the 9-11 for population.

You have to do it proportionally. Yes, yes, yes. Actually, this is probably a lot more than 1 9-11. Good boy. Someone wants to do the math on that one. Yeah, it's about to say, go, go, in the comments, go to the math on that, because I don't feel like doing that. Some folks who have successfully made it out of the water began to die of strange diseases on account of full submersion into raw sewage. Horrible. Oh, terrible. Turbo sepsis. Yes. Yeah. Or just poisoning from any number of the things that are just in

there. Yeah. Tacked by cocaineals. Well, the thing in the problem with the coca-neils is they have a lot of energy, you know. Yes, this is true. They got more electricity in them. Yeah. Yeah. The wreck was raised and beached on September 8th to allow the search to continue properly. And they just found a bunch of, yeah, the corpses were just stacked up in the saloon. And again, this river is shallow enough that raising this boat was like trivial. Yeah, well, yeah, it was like, it was not difficult at all. They just picked it up and

beached it. It was fine. You know, it's, it, it, it happened so close to shore. It's just astonishing that it was as bad as it was. Right. Although there's another disaster, very similar to this, we will discuss in a future episode. General slope. I'm sure. General slope.

Yeah. So ultimately there were two inquiries into the disaster, right? By the coroner and the board of trade, right? There's a bunch of conflicting stories presented in the coroner's inquiry. There's differing accounts of the ship's paths. For instance, there was a stoker on the Biowell castle who claimed that the bridge crew were drunk. When, in fact, it was he, the stoker, who was drunk? Classic.

I'm not drunk, you're drunk. There's a character witness for him said, well, personal was like the generality of fireman. He was rather the worst for the drink, but not so bad he could not take his watch. That is, having with fate praise. Also, he was one of the guys rescuing folks in the lifeboat. So, yeah.

This is like getting hauled out of the out of the sewage nightmare by a slightly drunk man. Yeah, by slightly drunk, I mean, I mean, he's had like a catastrophic amount of rum or whiskey, but like is inured to it by like a habitual alcoholism and also being like, you know, both fat and strong. Bradley Porter actually. Yeah. Yeah. The coroner ultimately did not assign specific blame, but tentators indicating problems on the princess Alice. You know, that the death of the said William Beachy and others was occasioned by drowning in the waters the river Thames from a collision of the current after sunset between the steam vessel called the Bible Castle and a steam vessel called the Princess Alice whereby the Princess Alice was cut into and sunk. Such collision not being willful that the Bible castle did not take

the necessary precaution of easing, stopping and reversing your engines in time and that the Princess Alice contributed to the collision by not stopping and going stern, that all collisions in the opinion of the jury might and the future be avoided, a proper and stringent rules and regulations were laid down for all Steve navigation on the River Thames. Just like, I- We should invent some like rules about this. Yeah, I mean, it feels like the part where they talk about stopping and easing or perfunctory and really the thing is, well, we should probably have some navigation rules here.

But also, we consider that the Princess Alice was on the 3rd of September. See, worthy, we think the Princess Alice was not properly and sufficiently manned. We think the number of persons onboard the Princess Alice was more than prudent. And we think the means of saving life on board the Princess Alice were insufficient for a vessel of her class. Now that'll never happen again, I'm sure. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Well, both ships are responsible and nothing really came of that. Both companies tried to sue each other for the exact same amount. So 2000 pounds, which I guess was a lot of money back then.

It's the same. It's like almost entirely the princess Alex is full, you know? Yes. Yes, because Captain Harrison was completely exonerated at their son time, but his mental health was just in complete shambles. He never went to see again. Oh, God damn it. That's really sad.

Yeah. Yeah, it's about to say he did everything right. You know, the pilot. He got the pilot and everything. Yeah. But as a result of this, new navigation rules were implemented on the Thames. They were strictly enforced by the river police. The Thames River Police, which is like a separate maritime enforcement division. Yeah, I'm assumed by the Matt at some point. Ah, that sucks. Yeah,

I know. I'm sorry. There were new steam rescue launches placed its strategic locations along the river to be crude and on standby at all times. This also resulted in the idea that maybe we should treat sewage for the first time, rather than dumping it raw into the river, right? So they built the first sewage treatment plant right there at the north outflow. And after they had put all the sewage into settling ponds, they discharged only the water into the river and then the muck and the nasty sludge was taken out by barge into the North Sea and dumped. One of those barges was named Basiljant, by the way.

Yes. It's a real honor to be like, you know, I built you this cathedral of shit and then return, you give me a barge full of shit. Yes, exactly. The Royal Albert dock was constructed in 1880 to separate heavy shipping from river cruises and smaller boats up the Thames, right? You know, it's London City Airport. Oh, damn. Okay. Yeah. That's why there's water all around it. But yeah, this is sort of imagine that when something bad happened, the government did something other than I don't know starting a war.

You know, truly this was Britain's 9-11, but there was a completely different response. Well, I mean Victorians, the kind of like the wiggy history kind of like improvement thing. You know, okay, many, many people have to die, but you're like, oh, we should probably like sort this out then, whereas now, you know, what a guy. That's like, can we bomb someone? Is there someone we could bomb to fix this? Yeah. It's because of walkness is why.

SS Biowell Castle continue to operate with a new captain. It actually saved one more stricken ship in its career. We kind of misunderstood hero ship is going on here, you know. It was like full-ass passenger liner, the SS California, which they towed 900 miles to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Yeah, damn. This is, so like one one time a pleasure cruise, a hose itself in front of this ship. And now it's like the death ship.

It's like gross. It's been like fishing people out of the fucking water for like decades. Yeah, it's like, it's, it's, it, it, it, what's like the, it's not killed a death ratio. I guess killed a rescue ratio Very bad, but only because of one incident that was not its fault. Yeah. Yeah. It's not gonna get ragged at this right In 1883 it disappeared while on a voyage between Alexandria, Egypt and whole Yorkshire. I mean between Alexandria, Egypt and whole Yorkshire. I mean, you just seldom have a ship disappear, you know? Yeah, there's a kind of romance to it.

Yeah, it's just gone. No one knows what happened to it. And of course, what of the pleasure gardens? Well, I mean, I hope that they filled in the bath pit. The bear pit's still there, but with weird contemporary art on top of it instead of bears. I mean, I prefer that to the bears. It's weird that they kept the form of the bear pit. They kept the form of the bear pit's grade two listed, but apparently that doesn't mean

you have to keep it open. Yeah, you don't have to keep the bears in there. They filled in, they filled in the pit and put contemporary art over it and turn the whole thing into into housing development. And yeah, that's a story of Britain's worst inland maritime disaster. I think one of the worst man-made disasters of all time. Jen, you mean just like, yeah, it's just, and it's just bad driving.

It was just, don't drive. Across like a coal shit. Wee! shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the worst part is we'll never hear the princess Alice side because all those guys just died instantly. Yeah.

Yeah. Just hurtling themselves into a cold. I don't know. You know? Yeah. I did read from one source that for whatever reason, the normal Helmsman had left at the at Graves End and there was a more inexperienced semen on duty, but also that, um, come on guys. This is whole to pull. Easy.

Or port to port. This is not difficult. Even though it was not enforced, no one cared. I mean, you see how big that thing is. And the guys be a nice and moving over so you can get around. I know. I know. You try and practice defensive driving and what happens, you know, what happens that you, you can't pillorade by the press. That's the, that's another thing that happened. I neglected to mention it in the notes, but some of the original illustrations that showed up in the newspapers showed the Princess Alice being hit on the port side, which would indicate sort of a more like being rammed by the coal ship, rather than the very stupid maneuver.

Yeah, exactly. So it's it's it that's one of the reasons why, you know, the captain's mental health was like just in shambles afterwards is because you know, everyone's like, this idiot rectus ship into another ship. It's like, no, that idiot rectus ship into mine. But yeah, I don't know. This is this is, I don't know, this is a hell of a disaster.

A classic, classic one. Yeah, I don't want to be is this is, I don't know, this is the hell of a disaster. I'd be classic, classic one. Yeah, I don't want to be covered in the poop storm. Oh, yeah. The poop storm. No, the, the, the unwoshable slime is the one that haunts me. I don't like that. As people are still in a mass grave with the slime on them. I've been to war tour.

I don't need the unwoshable slide like the Nickelodeon gunk. Yeah. So I'm a dark, a dark port slide like the Nickelodeon gunk. Yeah So dark a dark portent of the Dave Matthews band incident That'll be a good good episode to do in like April maybe yeah, that'd be fun So what did we learn? Learn to drive Yeah Treat your sewage stay on the correct side of the river. Yeah, don't be that

at all. Don't don't don't trap bears and make them fight for human amusement. I gotta tell that to the guys in burn. Yeah. I still got a bear pit, although the bear pit is connected to an actual bear habitat. So the bears only go on the pit if they feel like it

They feel like they need to just do it out I think all the bears in the bear pit like each other good. It's like hanging out Yeah, they're just hanging out in the pit back conversation pit for the conversation pit. Yeah Well, we've segment on this podcast called safety third Thank you. Shake hands for danger. I was trying to time, I was trying to hold in the sneeze so I could hit the safety third and then mute myself.

And no, no, torture. Safety third, hello to the guest and no one else. It wrong. Yeah, shit. No, guest. No, this is not this entire joke here that you wrote does not work. I'm I'm I'm You're not reading it joke that only works in text removed I

Have something deeply embarrassing to admit which is that as a teenager I did white trash ocean gate Is ocean gate not already white trash ocean gate. Yeah, but let's hear it. Let's hear it. Yeah. When I was a young teenager in Michigan, I was obsessed with the idea of building my own diving bell helmet. Yes.

I got the idea. I got the idea after seeing a diving helmet that had been a gathering dust in the back of the family's woodshed for over years, that my great-grandfather had built out of galvanized steel sheet metal welded together. For those who don't know, welding galvanized steel is extremely difficult to do and dangerous for your health because of the zinc oxide that forms. Effects have inhaling zinc oxide fumes include a flu-like illness, neurological damage, cancer and eventually death.

To achieve natural buoyancy, this helmet used to large plates of lead bolted to the front and back. The lead plates. The lead plates looked to be custom cast in order to match the curvature of the helmet. Something tells me my great grandfathergrandfather didn't use proper PPE for working with leather zinc fumes while building this diving helmet in the 1950s. This is in the 50s?

Incredible. This is a rare multi-slide safety third. Wow, okay. Being young, lad, who was afraid of welding and on a budget, I needed to build my second diving helmet out of a material that was cheaper and easier to work with than galvanized steel. Naturally, I settled on plywood. Mattness. Mattness. In hindsight, I probably should have been more afraid of drowning than I was of welding. Oh boy. That's that's also the ocean gate sort of motto. Yeah, it is actually.

That's also the ocean gate sort of motto. Yeah, it is actually. Yeah. Yeah. Such a buoyant material obviously presents its own challenges for constructing a diving apparatus. However, with enough weight, the combined buoyancy of the air and wood could in theory be counteracted to achieve neutral buoyancy. This was achieved by tying sash counterways from old single-hung windows salvaged from a recently renovated house. Amazing. Wow. It sounds like living in full-out.

Like, what? So, someone got a bad deal on windows. You got those old counterweighted windows, they're so nice to move up and down. Come on, you got rid of those for what? Final garbage. I don't want to find yourself. I wanted to go even further though, so I constructed a liquid ballast tank on the back that could be filled with air or water using a series of valves and the same air supply I was using for breathing. Okay. Wow. A side effect of constructing it out of wood was that my helmet needed significantly more weight to keep it neutrally buoyant other than the one, more neutrally buoyant than the one my grandfather built. The design called for four weights to be slotted in the horizontal holes in the front and back

of the helmet, but I underestimated the needed weight. So additional weights had to be tied to the ends of the other way it's using rope in order to achieve neutral buoyancy. These are facts that will become important in a minute. I mean, it all sounds a little bit of a dangerous already. After some simple testing near the dock, I decided it was time to try something more ambitious. I wanted to inspect the crib of my neighbor's buoy out in the lake. This particular crib was an old bathtub filled with large rocks. I can see why you wanted to see it.

I mean, yeah, I'd love to see something like that. Underwater damn. Wow, it's in blue planet too. Blue planet. We found a clawfoot tub full of rocks. This was located at the depth of about 15 feet, but far enough away from the shore that my air supply would need to travel with me to supply the breathing air to the helmet. I had my buddy stationed in a tiny robot with a small 12 volt air mattress pump

and car battery. Using a rope, I pulled the boat behind me so there wouldn't be tension on my air supply hose, and my friend sat in the boat to make sure nothing went wrong with the air pump. For a while, everything was going fine. I slowly walked along the bottom surface of the lake like Captain Jack Sparrow in his upside down fine. I slowly walked along the bottom surface of the lake, like Captain Jack Sparrow, in his upside down canoe. Anyway, I think I forgot to copy paste into the previous slide and entire section about the horrible lung explosion that happens if you ascend to the surface while holding your breath.

Oh, the bends, yeah. No, not the, no, there's a different thing than the bends. Oh, yeah. The thing that always gives me nightmares about how if you're in a submarine escape, so you have to like breathe out constantly. If you breathe, then you damage it lungs. That makes me think about that. And I realized that I can't breathe out all the time when I'm like not having my lungs

constantly expanded by being. I'm about to say it's a panic and probably has, probably has a lot to do with the fact that there will be more volume of air in your lungs. Yeah, but I understand that like intellectually but psychologically I'm just yeah, no, yeah. You probably wouldn't be able to breathe in. Well, yeah, that's helpful. So here's the bathtub down here. Fantastic.

Here's our man in the box. Here's the dog. Beautiful tie. Here's a fun, moist fish. Yeah. So my liquid ballacist, I'm even functioned, allowing me to return to just below the surface of the water and dive back down by filling with my valves.

I approached the crib and was briefly able to observe some fish using it as a habitat from the relative comfort of the heavy, wet, and loud box my head was in. Here is where things started to go wrong. The sound of the air pump was quite loud and echoed down the hose and inside the hard surfaces of the heavily lacquered plywood. Suddenly, it got very quiet and the water level inside of the heavily lacquered plywood. Suddenly, I got very quiet, and the water level inside of the helmet began to rise. I did have a check valve inside the helmet, but only one I had recycled from an old snorkel mask, and it was not adequate to fully

counteract the pressure at my current depth. As the volume of air in the helmet decreased, the helmet became proportionally more heavy at an alarming rate. Much heavier than the old helmet my grandfather built, as I had needed to use much more weight to counteract the buoyancy of the wood and a larger cubic rather than cylindrical volume of air. Why is it a cube? It's plywood. Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

This is a kid. Yeah. I don't. There's more odds. Yeah, I don't recall the exact number, but I think I had 60 or 70 pounds of window weights tied to the helmet with a mess of rope. As the water started lapping at my chin, I tried to lift the helmet off my head as I didn't want the helmet to be on its side at

the bottom of the lake as it'd be much harder to recover. However, with the extreme weight and lack of handles, this was extremely hard to do. Moments later, I realized I would not have the luxury of lifting the helmet straight off my head as the water was up to my mouth and the added weight brought me to my knees to keep from falling over. The time had come to a band in ship. I tilted my body to the side, letting the helmet fill with water, and let the weights hit the bottom of the lake. All will be in careful not to get tangled in the ropes, holding the weights to my front and rear. I slipped out and swam to the surface, remembering to exhale the air in my lungs as I did.

Which again, I'm like, yeah. The whole event must have been mere seconds from start to finish, but it felt like minutes went by down there as I contemplated my watery grave. As I came to the surface and pulled myself onto the row above my friend and form made that the tiny pump, which was clearly inadequate for this application, had started squirting water out its air intake, so they turned it off. Yeah, fuck you buddy. I'm not sure exactly what the physics of this was as I was still receiving at least some surface air or at least pressure inside the helmet before the pump was turned off. Perhaps there was some kind of strange

bidirectional flow in the hose, and it was easier for the air to then going around the bottom lip, the diving ball at that depth and pressure, but that goes against my understanding of how fluids and pressure work. I'm not quite sure. I've never taken a fluid dynamics class. I suppose the pressure, the water and the pressure of the air, the mattress pump can generate must have been just about equilibrium at that depth. I think before you build the diving helmet, I would probably take a fluid dynamics class. You would take, right.

But yeah, well for those in high school. Yeah, that's true. I was upset. My friend had turned the pump off at that time, but looking back, if they hadn't, I might have been chilling with the fish at pressure equilibrium for a while, thus breathing my own exhalation in a tightly confined space and giving myself carbon monoxide poisoning. That's so that's so many different ways of killing yourself to look at a bathtub. Well, here's the thing you might you might you'd probably get carbon dioxide poisoning,

which is actually quite painful. You would notice very quickly. Now going unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning 15 feet under water, covered in ropes and weights would have been much more deadly than having to unexpectedly ditch the helmet would have been. Since the incident, I've been too much afraid for my life to take the helmets out again, both diving helmets sit in the attic, gathering dust and waiting for the oral history of their dangers to be forgotten. So they, they may once it, one day again, they inspire some progency of mine to shake hands with danger. Thanks to all of you creating this excellent podcast, bringing a much needed leftist perspective to discussions about engineering disasters, best regards

from Nico. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad you didn't die. Please do not also kill your great-grandchild. Yeah, well too late. It's up in the attic. Yeah, we have two post scripts here Oh boy. Yes, my great-great-grandfather was run down by run down by a paramarkay train Is a pair I always forget how this railroad is pronounced? How much cat? Yes, it's in Michigan At the Englewood station in Chicago while on his way to visit his wife and children in Michigan, the station was configured such that you had to walk across the tracks to access the outer platforms.

His obituary reads, the exact manner of his death is not known. No one recalls having seen him again until the train had gone in his body lay on the tracks. A broken box containing suckers. Yeah. A broken box containing candy and cakes evidently intended for his children was found behind beside his body. And his child was like, I am going to build an Iving helmet. Yeah. You're family or insane. Yes. We can go to it. You are honestly. Post. Post. Post. Post an insane. Yes. We can congratulate you on honestly. Post-post crepes.

Post-post crepes. I mean, congratulations on having found the original trauma that inspired this kind of like intergenerational diving helmet, Saga. Yeah. Post-post script. Here are some diagrams of the diving helmet that I used to build it. Cool. But please don't do it again.

Yeah. Kids, don't try this at home. No, we can't emphasize that one enough, really. Do it at school where your friends can see you. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like if you want to be underwater more than anything and you want to do it, you insist on doing it in your teens,

this is not a piece of advice I would give to many people, I fear you must join the Navy. This is a very elaborate project for a teenager. I will say that. Yeah. Not even for like a school project. No, just not even to like impress a girl. It's just like,

I'll see the bathtub. I just want to see my neighbors bathed up. I mean, I'm just going to build a diving helmet. It's bathtub. I mean, I'm just gonna build a diving helmet because it's funny. White trash ocean guy actually undersells it a little bit. Yeah. I think that was possible, but there we are. There we are. Amazing.

A salute to American ingenuity. American accent. This is the sort of stuff. This is the sort of stuff that the liberals won't let you do anymore Walk this and this is a work this yeah Well, that was safety third. Oh shit I'm so tired did our next episode will be sure noble. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Yeah, we have a patron subscribe to you already had that by yeah, bye everyone

Sure, no, we'll have any commercials before we go. No, we have a Patreon subscribe to it. You already heard that. Bye. Yeah. Bye, everyone.