Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for an older episode
Speaker 1: of the show. This one originally published on uh not October,
Speaker 1: What was I gonna say? This is August six. This
Speaker 1: is our episode on pie Crete. This was a good one.
Speaker 1: I think it generated a lot of listener mail, and
Speaker 1: it was It was a load of fun. All right,
Speaker 1: let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: materials today. But this is a really fun materials episode
Speaker 1: that will shatter like glass in our hands, or will it.
Speaker 1: I guess it's a big question mark. Yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking a lot about ice, but a lot of
Speaker 1: exciting stuff about ice. You're gonna learn some new things
Speaker 1: about ice, I think, and you're also going to think,
Speaker 1: uh a bit more deeply about what can be done
Speaker 1: and also what perhaps cannot or should not be done
Speaker 1: with ice. So if you've read any of George rr.
Speaker 1: Martin's a Song of Ice and Fire. If you've read
Speaker 1: that saga, or if you've viewed the TV adaptation Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones, you're well acquainted with the Wall. But to
Speaker 1: Reaquain everybody, this is a fantasy world that's based on
Speaker 1: sort of a medieval European model, and in the Far
Speaker 1: North you have this massive three hundred mile long, seven
Speaker 1: hundred foot tall wall of ice that we're told has
Speaker 1: stood there for eight thousand years as a barrier against
Speaker 1: the people's and the supernatural horrors of the Far North. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's basically Hadrian's Wall, except much bigger and made of magic. Yes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're told it was built by Brandon the Builder, with
Speaker 1: the aid of giants and the magical children of the forest.
Speaker 1: So we're definitely to understand that there is actual magic
Speaker 1: in its construction. But also there's this idea that Brandon
Speaker 1: was a master engineer, that he's in the vein of
Speaker 1: these various engineering cultural heroes that you see in various cultures.
Speaker 1: But of course, the real standout feature that makes this
Speaker 1: wall unique is that it is built out of ice,
Speaker 1: not out of stone, but out of frozen water. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is a wall of ice. So um, you know,
Speaker 1: ignoring the magic for a second here, it sounds like
Speaker 1: a great plan, right. I mean humans have been known
Speaker 1: to make shelters out of ice, glaciers and snow have
Speaker 1: served as natural barriers to travel. So why wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be ideal to construct this far northern barrier which is
Speaker 1: going to be dealing with, you know, with far northern climate,
Speaker 1: why not build it out of ice? Good question? Is
Speaker 1: a block of ice not just as good as a
Speaker 1: stone brick? Yeah? So I was looking around about this,
Speaker 1: and fortunately there is already a great book out there
Speaker 1: that dives into this very question. It's titled Fire, Ice
Speaker 1: and Physics, The Science of Game of Thrones by Rebecca C. Thompson, PhD,
Speaker 1: a physicist and author of the popular Spectra series of
Speaker 1: comic books about physics. And I should also note that
Speaker 1: Sean Carroll wrote the intro. Cool so she Uh. First
Speaker 1: of all, this is just a really fun book if
Speaker 1: you if if you're interested in Game of Thrones and science,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to pick it up. But I love
Speaker 1: books like this. Uh, you know, I have one about done,
Speaker 1: I've been eyeing one about Star wars um. But she
Speaker 1: goes through various aspects of the books and the world
Speaker 1: of West Roast and breaks them about scientifically, and does
Speaker 1: so in a very engaging, humorous but also um, you know,
Speaker 1: wester Roast loving style. So so there's there's one section
Speaker 1: in there where she tackles the wall and she points
Speaker 1: out that ultimately this question would an ice wall work.
Speaker 1: It's a lot more complex than you might think. So
Speaker 1: for starters, there's not just one type of ice crystal.
Speaker 1: There are seventeen types of crystalline ice that we oh off.
Speaker 1: Plus there are three different types of a Morpheus ice
Speaker 1: and three theoretically says there might be as many as
Speaker 1: three hundred different phases of ice. Uh, you know, depending
Speaker 1: on some of the research out there. Right. The different
Speaker 1: phases of ice having different physical properties is something that's
Speaker 1: been explored in science fiction for a while. Actually, it's
Speaker 1: in the novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which invents
Speaker 1: a fictional phase of ice. There is no actual phase
Speaker 1: of ice that does this, but there's a fictional phase
Speaker 1: of ice called ice nine, which acts as a seed crystal,
Speaker 1: and it is a it's a doomsday weapon because if
Speaker 1: you drop a piece of this ice into regular water.
Speaker 1: It will rearrange the structure of the regular water so
Speaker 1: that it freezes at room temperature, basically killing earth. Oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I've I've never read Cat's Cradle, but I
Speaker 1: I remember now that you mentioned. I remember like reading
Speaker 1: that on a summary or the back of the paperback
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah. But but to clarify again, that's a
Speaker 1: fictional phase of ice. There is no actual phase of
Speaker 1: ice that does that that we know about. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: phase of ice we're most familiar with is ice one H,
Speaker 1: also known as ice phase one, and this is the
Speaker 1: hexagonal crystal form of ordinary ice. And this is pretty
Speaker 1: much all the ice you ever come into contact with.
Speaker 1: And therefore we can assume that this is the same
Speaker 1: ice that we encounter in the world of West Ros.
Speaker 1: I think that's a safe assumption. Yeah, of course, you
Speaker 1: might say, well, what if it's not. What if somehow
Speaker 1: this is an alternate universe or a different planet where
Speaker 1: another form of ice is the predominant phase. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if that's even a reasonable question to raise though. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Thompson does a great overview of ice and the physical
Speaker 1: properties of ice, and I do want to throw in
Speaker 1: that she has an excellent bit where she weighs in
Speaker 1: on whiskey stones. Okay, so Robert explained the concept of
Speaker 1: a whiskey stone. Well, I do not I do not
Speaker 1: own these, but I assume you do not either. But
Speaker 1: I've heard of them. I guess I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I know anyone. I think I might know
Speaker 1: one person who has them. But the idea is that
Speaker 1: you you're such an afficionado of bourbon or whiskey, and
Speaker 1: you that you don't want anything to dilute it. You
Speaker 1: want it cold, but you don't want to put some
Speaker 1: ice in there which will kill the drink but also melt.
Speaker 1: So apparently these have been marketed before. The whiskey stones
Speaker 1: are like our rocks that somebody sells you, rocks that
Speaker 1: you keep in your freezer, and then when you want
Speaker 1: to have a cold glass of brown alcohol, you put
Speaker 1: the cold rock in there, and the rock, of course
Speaker 1: will not melt and dilute your beverage. Now, if you
Speaker 1: actually enjoy whiskey stones, no judgment at all, more power
Speaker 1: to you. But I would like to point out just
Speaker 1: real quickly that this is you can get into how
Speaker 1: it might be a little bit misguided from a physics standpoint,
Speaker 1: but it's also a little bit misguided, I think from
Speaker 1: a culinary standpoint, because I mean, I think most people
Speaker 1: believe that like whiskeys tend to kind of improve with
Speaker 1: the addition of a small amount of water. So like
Speaker 1: melting ice cools but also adds water to the drink,
Speaker 1: And this is an important part of many spirit and
Speaker 1: cocktail preparations. And this might be why if you've ever
Speaker 1: tried to mix a cocktail that is supposed to be
Speaker 1: shaken with ice, but then you make it without shaking
Speaker 1: it with ice, it kind of tastes wrong. And that's
Speaker 1: because one of the ingredients in this cocktail is actually water,
Speaker 1: and you have left that important ingredient out by not
Speaker 1: shaking it with ice that dilutes into the drink. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've definitely experienced this making cocktails before, where I'll end
Speaker 1: up for whatever reason, you know, due to whatever kind
Speaker 1: of ice I have on hand, I'll end up with
Speaker 1: a drink that doesn't taste perfect. But once the ice
Speaker 1: has melted a little bit, it's a different experience totally.
Speaker 1: And even with like a straight whiskey on on the rocks,
Speaker 1: I mean that that's always been my experience of of that,
Speaker 1: It's like the drink will change as the waking drinking
Speaker 1: experience will change as the ice melt, which I think
Speaker 1: is part of the experience. But then again, i'm i'm, i'm,
Speaker 1: I'm ultimately a novice when it comes to the appreciation
Speaker 1: of fine whiskeys. But Thompson also makes a physics point
Speaker 1: about the whiskey stones. Right right, she writes the following quote,
Speaker 1: The heat from the soda is used to melt the ice,
Speaker 1: so the surrounding soda cools off. This is also why
Speaker 1: whiskey stones are a total sham. Seriously, I can't stress
Speaker 1: this enough. Don't buy whiskey stones. If you want to
Speaker 1: keep your drink cold without watering it down, get yourself
Speaker 1: some water filled plastic ice cubes. They're less stylish but
Speaker 1: a more useful. Now she continues from here and get
Speaker 1: some more detail. What basically her point is that the
Speaker 1: whiskey stone will only take away enough energy to raise
Speaker 1: its temperature to the whiskey temperature. An ice cube will
Speaker 1: take the same energy plus the energy needed to break
Speaker 1: the molecular bonds which melts the ice. Right That phase
Speaker 1: transition takes energy the same way that boiling water takes energy, Like,
Speaker 1: why does your pot of water boiling on the stove
Speaker 1: not just keep increasing in temperature and until it's the
Speaker 1: same temperature as like the heating element below it. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's because it takes enormous energy to turn that water
Speaker 1: into steam, and that energy gets boiled off. Yeah. So anyway,
Speaker 1: that that does directly relate to the building of a
Speaker 1: giant wall made out of ice, But it was just
Speaker 1: too interesting in her writing on it was just too
Speaker 1: humorous to pass over. Well, let's get back to why
Speaker 1: exactly it is that ice is not a good building material.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, she points out that quote ice on
Speaker 1: a large scale is basically ketch up. So yeah, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: I sent a large scale is a non Newtonian fluid.
Speaker 1: In an ice wall or a glacier, the pressure of
Speaker 1: the structure's own weight causes it to creep, and this
Speaker 1: would occur even in low temperatures prevented the ice from
Speaker 1: ever really melting. Dislocation small cracks that cause ice crystals
Speaker 1: to move over each other would cause the creep even
Speaker 1: in a you know, a pretty stable, chilly environment. So
Speaker 1: this would be in play concerning the wall, along with
Speaker 1: temperature changes. Yeah, that's right, and creep actually is the
Speaker 1: technical term there. It comes up in a paper by
Speaker 1: a chemist that we're gonna look at later in the episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she says that ultimately the wall all she said, the
Speaker 1: wall would have probably been okay for like a year,
Speaker 1: but over the course of thousands of years, it would
Speaker 1: end up being just more of an ice dome or
Speaker 1: a plateau, depending on the temperature, So it would be
Speaker 1: far less of an obstacle to certainly intelligent beings looking
Speaker 1: to invade the South. Good thing. It's magic then, But
Speaker 1: but there's more. There's another huge issue and one that's
Speaker 1: key to the rest of the episode here. Ice tends
Speaker 1: to have a lot of defects in it due to
Speaker 1: the way the ice crystals are organized, and this leads
Speaker 1: to cracks, And of course cracks mean that the ice
Speaker 1: can ultimately fail, right, It can ultimately lose its structural integrity.
Speaker 1: And it's not just that the ice fails. All materials
Speaker 1: can fail, and we have to understand how they fail
Speaker 1: and what conditions cause them to fail. But with ice, quote,
Speaker 1: there's no specific set of conditions that cause ice to fail. Rather,
Speaker 1: it fails under a wide range of conditions. Yes. Another
Speaker 1: way of putting this is that ice is structurally unpre addictable. Uh.
Speaker 1: You take two blocks of ice that are the same size,
Speaker 1: made of the same water, and one might fail trying
Speaker 1: to hold up five pounds, while another one can hold
Speaker 1: up twenty pounds. And that that kind of difference, that
Speaker 1: variability is not a good characteristic of a building material.
Speaker 1: You could almost argue, I think that predictability is more
Speaker 1: important than strength when you're selecting a building material. Yes. Now,
Speaker 1: Thompson does point out that there are ways to strengthen
Speaker 1: the ice, There are ways to make it more dependable,
Speaker 1: more durable. And the interesting thing is the weird things
Speaker 1: that you do to ice. Uh. To do this we
Speaker 1: find fantastic examples of of this. Not in a fantasy
Speaker 1: world like a Game of Thrones. Uh. Instead we find
Speaker 1: these examples in the equally or perhaps even more bizarre
Speaker 1: world of our own real history. Right. This brings us
Speaker 1: to the subject of the rest of today's episode, which
Speaker 1: is going to be this fantastic frozen material real known
Speaker 1: as pike crete or ice that's about as strong as concrete. Yes,
Speaker 1: and and again, let me just say that if you're
Speaker 1: familiar with with this material and it's it's usage and
Speaker 1: uh in the project we're going to talk about. Then
Speaker 1: you know you're in for an exciting time. But if
Speaker 1: you haven't, just let me assure you that everything is
Speaker 1: about to get far stranger than a giant wall of
Speaker 1: ice made to keep undead invaders out. Right, We're more
Speaker 1: in the realm of a giant tub of ice used
Speaker 1: to bomb Nazis. But first we're gonna have to take
Speaker 1: a quick break, but we'll be right back with more ice.
Speaker 1: Thank Alright, we're back. So we're gonna be dealing with
Speaker 1: the Second World War here, a truly global war that
Speaker 1: worked kind of like a black hole just pulling in
Speaker 1: I mean, first and foremost human lives, but also human
Speaker 1: ingenuity and of course funds and resources as well. So
Speaker 1: there was more than enough room in all of this
Speaker 1: for the occasional hairbrained scheme to pick up a lot
Speaker 1: of steam. And this is one of them. I want
Speaker 1: to say, I'm not sure exactly how hairbrained it is,
Speaker 1: Like in some ways it's hair brained, and in other
Speaker 1: ways it's quite ingenious. It's the strange mixture of of
Speaker 1: genuine insight and good ideas with proposals so outlandish that
Speaker 1: they're laughable in their face. Yes, yeah, I I should rephrase.
Speaker 1: I guess that there are better examples of purely hairbrained
Speaker 1: schemes that were brought up during War two. This one.
Speaker 1: I guess it's just more of an idea that this is.
Speaker 1: This is a real outside the box idea and one
Speaker 1: that at least for a while, seemed like it might
Speaker 1: be the best solution to the problem given the resources
Speaker 1: at hand and the weight of the circumstances. Right, So,
Speaker 1: what was the problem that we're going to start with here, Well,
Speaker 1: the basic problem was the Allied forces needed better aerial
Speaker 1: coverage of the North Atlantic. Yeah. So to expand on this,
Speaker 1: I want to refer to a paper that we're going
Speaker 1: to be consulting extensively for the rest of this episode.
Speaker 1: It's called a Description of the Iceberg Aircraft Carrier and
Speaker 1: the Bearing of the mechanical properties of frozen wood Pulp
Speaker 1: upon some problems of glacier flow. And this is a
Speaker 1: report that was presented to a scientific organization called the
Speaker 1: International Glaciological Society in nineteen forty six, and it was
Speaker 1: written by a guy named Max Peruts. Now Max Peruts
Speaker 1: lived from nineteen fourteen until two thousand two. He was
Speaker 1: an Austrian born chemist and molecular biologist, and generally just
Speaker 1: an extremely accomplished scientist. He won the nineteen sixty two
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and this was for his work
Speaker 1: on the structure of hemoglobin. But Peruts was really just
Speaker 1: one of the great pioneers of molecular biology. I was
Speaker 1: listening to an interview between Brian Cox and the molecular
Speaker 1: biologist Vincy Rama Krishnan who was talking about Perutss work
Speaker 1: explaining the structure of proteins, and Rama Krishnan says that
Speaker 1: in many ways modern biology would be unthinkable without Peruts's contributions.
Speaker 1: He he did some of the most important pioneering work
Speaker 1: for the kinds of molecular biology that are you know,
Speaker 1: ubiquitous throughout the biology research and biotech world today. But
Speaker 1: before all this, Peruts was involved in the British war
Speaker 1: effort during World War Two, and specifically he was working
Speaker 1: with the ice based technology that we are discussing today,
Speaker 1: and in this paper he gives a firsthand account of
Speaker 1: the project and some scientific discoveries that came out of it.
Speaker 1: So to to establish the problem. Peruts writes that in
Speaker 1: the autumn of nineteen forty two, Allied leadership recognized that
Speaker 1: their war effort was really suffering from a lack of
Speaker 1: air power range, especially in response to German U boat
Speaker 1: attacks in the Atlantic, and this was affecting the transport
Speaker 1: of cargo across the Ocean between Great Britain and their
Speaker 1: allies in North America. So there's a U boat threat
Speaker 1: throughout the ocean. You never know if your your cargo
Speaker 1: resupply ships are going to be attacked, and you could
Speaker 1: defend them if you had better air coverage, But how
Speaker 1: are you going to get planes all the way out
Speaker 1: there in the middle of the Atlantic where the U
Speaker 1: boats can attack. That's right, you come down to the
Speaker 1: limits of aviation technology at that time. Yeah, and Peruts writes,
Speaker 1: quote it had been a common experience that the carrier
Speaker 1: based aircraft of the Allies were inferior in armament and
Speaker 1: speed to the land based planes of the enemy. And
Speaker 1: so what he's talking about was that there were aircraft
Speaker 1: carriers that the Allies had during World War Two, but
Speaker 1: these aircraft carriers at the time were relatively small, with
Speaker 1: short runways and limited parking, and storage space. So the
Speaker 1: kinds of planes that could take off from them tended
Speaker 1: to have light armor and wings that would like collapse
Speaker 1: and fold up to make them easier to store. The
Speaker 1: kinds of planes that were better armored, more powerful, and
Speaker 1: could do more damage. For example, I was reading an
Speaker 1: article by PAULK. Hollands from two thousand two in the
Speaker 1: magazine Cabinet about this project, and Collins mentioned spitfires and
Speaker 1: bomber planes as examples of these more powerful planes. Uh,
Speaker 1: they couldn't fit on or take off from aircraft carriers.
Speaker 1: They had to be launched from the ground. And this
Speaker 1: didn't only affect cargo transport and other operations in the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: it also had implications for future ground invasions of access
Speaker 1: occupied areas in say, continental Europe and in Asia. So
Speaker 1: you know, given the existing limitations on aircraft carriers, if
Speaker 1: you were to try to land on a distant shore,
Speaker 1: your airpower inland would be limited until you could capture
Speaker 1: or establish air fields there from which you could launch
Speaker 1: these more powerful land based planes like spitfires and bombers
Speaker 1: and so peruts, writes quote. It was only natural, therefore,
Speaker 1: that the proposal for the apparently cheap construction of gigantic
Speaker 1: aircraft carriers capable of opera rating land based aircraft thousands
Speaker 1: of miles from their base was seriously considered. So so
Speaker 1: that's the dilemma there, and they're trying to get more powerful,
Speaker 1: bigger planes farther out into the ocean, farther from home, right,
Speaker 1: and that that's a pretty tall order right there. But
Speaker 1: then on top of that, now not only does it
Speaker 1: have to be enormous and also inexpensive, it also would
Speaker 1: really help if it were essentially torpedo proof, if all
Speaker 1: these prowling U boats would be incapable of sinking it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to load a ship up with all
Speaker 1: of your most important, most expensive aircraft and then launch
Speaker 1: it out into the ocean to be sunk by a
Speaker 1: U boat. Yeah. So you know, in defensive of everything
Speaker 1: that comes after this, that is a that's a tall
Speaker 1: order that really invites outside the box thinking, right, And
Speaker 1: fortunately we had an outside the box thinker come onto
Speaker 1: the scene. Yes, enter English journalist turned inventor Jeffrey Pike,
Speaker 1: who of through nineteen Yeah, and so Paul Collins, writing
Speaker 1: for that Cabinet magazine article I mentioned from two thousand two.
Speaker 1: He quotes The Times of London calling Pike quote one
Speaker 1: of the most original, if unrecognized figures of the present century.
Speaker 1: And I just want to read collins brief summary of
Speaker 1: Pike's early life quote. His career began in nineteen fourteen, when,
Speaker 1: as a teenager at Cambridge University, he landed a foreign
Speaker 1: correspondent job by using a false passport to sneak into
Speaker 1: wartime Germany. After getting tossed into a concentration camp, he
Speaker 1: fled the country in a daring daytime escape. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, he virtually created progressive elementary education in Great Britain,
Speaker 1: all for the sake of his own son's education. Pike
Speaker 1: financed his own school by brilliantly writing futures markets and
Speaker 1: controlling a quarter of the world's supply of ten employ
Speaker 1: which brought him to financial ruin in nineteen twenty nine.
Speaker 1: He lived on as an eccentric hermit, publishing prescient warnings
Speaker 1: of Nazism and proposing one of the first media watchdogs.
Speaker 1: After the war, his freelance genius helped propel the creation
Speaker 1: of the National Health Service. That's quite a resume. So yeah,
Speaker 1: foreign journalists escaped enemy capture. Uh we weird investment portfolio
Speaker 1: huge Indo ten loses it all eccentric hermit, but then
Speaker 1: pioneers uh progressive political causes, and Pike was known for
Speaker 1: having some extremely weird, you could say, outside the box ideas.
Speaker 1: One that I was just briefly reading about was that
Speaker 1: in ninety three, as a proposal for for the war effort,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Pike got pipe fever and he started thinking, we
Speaker 1: need more pipes. We can transport things and people through pipes,
Speaker 1: and that's way more efficient than trying to transport them
Speaker 1: just straightforwardly over land and vehicles and all that. So
Speaker 1: he proposed the idea of transporting goods and soldiers like
Speaker 1: from ship at shore too deep inside enemy territory through pipes.
Speaker 1: And obviously this would have some drawbacks, especially when you're
Speaker 1: trying to ship people through pipes. But in order to
Speaker 1: combat claustrophobia and suffocation, the troops that were sent through
Speaker 1: the pipe could be supplied with barbiturates and oxygen tanks. Wow.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, that's quite a quite an alternate reality to
Speaker 1: try and envision, one in which you would have basically
Speaker 1: like hot and cold running um armed reinforcements. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So during World War Two, the British military established an
Speaker 1: office known as Combined Operations, and this was to coordinate
Speaker 1: actions that required the cooperation of multiple branches of the
Speaker 1: armed forces, so if you needed to combine naval and
Speaker 1: air forces or army, etcetera. And in ninety two the
Speaker 1: chief of Combined Operations was this guy named Lord Lewis
Speaker 1: mount Batton. Lord mountain Batton was a big figure in
Speaker 1: in twentieth century British history. He's sort of all over
Speaker 1: the place. But Collins writes that Pike resented himself to
Speaker 1: mount Batton's Office of Combined Operations and he basically told him, hey,
Speaker 1: you need to hire me quote, because I'm a man
Speaker 1: who thinks. And so Pike was thinking, and he came
Speaker 1: up with an idea a response to this problem of
Speaker 1: limited air power range in the Atlantic and elsewhere. That's
Speaker 1: right in October of Pike said, Hey, why don't we
Speaker 1: get an iceberg, hollow it out and use that as
Speaker 1: a floating base, because this would it would float, it
Speaker 1: would it would be torpedo proof, and it would it
Speaker 1: would certainly last long enough for us to then establish
Speaker 1: better land bases, Right, So the idea was that a
Speaker 1: platform capable of launching bigger, heavier planes like bombers and
Speaker 1: spitfires could be made out of ice, and and there
Speaker 1: were two approaches to this actually, So one is the
Speaker 1: naturalistic approach, where you just take an existing iceberg and
Speaker 1: you kind of plane it down and flatten the surface
Speaker 1: and create a runway. The other would be to create
Speaker 1: from scratch a giant barge made of ice. But in general,
Speaker 1: Pike saw a lot of potential for ice based technology
Speaker 1: since he claimed that manufacturing ice, even if you're gonna
Speaker 1: make it yourself, needed only one percent of the energy
Speaker 1: required to create the same amount of steel, right, which
Speaker 1: which I mean that's playing into the energy demands. But
Speaker 1: also just in general, you have a global war going on,
Speaker 1: your resources like like steel and even would like those
Speaker 1: are pretty much all already being contested, you know, like
Speaker 1: those are needed by to to build airplanes, to to
Speaker 1: build traditional ships, uh, munitions, et cetera. So if you
Speaker 1: have a solution that requires less energy and none of
Speaker 1: the steel that it needs to be used by all
Speaker 1: these other parts of the war, uh, then you have
Speaker 1: a potential, um potentially amazing solution on your hands. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be hugely advantageous if you could make something
Speaker 1: like this work. And as you already mentioned, ice naturally floats,
Speaker 1: just automatically floats in water, and this is because it's
Speaker 1: less than liquid water I think about nine percent less dents. Also,
Speaker 1: ice is fairly resistant to explosives. They had observed this
Speaker 1: just through the fact that icebergs that already existed were
Speaker 1: surprisingly resilient against shelling by ships. Yeah. I saw that
Speaker 1: tid that brought up as well, and I didn't I
Speaker 1: didn't have time to explore further. But of course that
Speaker 1: just illustrates that warships are firing, or at least we're
Speaker 1: firing at icebergs just for fun or for before the
Speaker 1: target target practice if I do well. Yeah, I wonder
Speaker 1: what the reason was. Why were they just trying it out?
Speaker 1: Maybe the iceberg was in the form of a lewd
Speaker 1: gesture they got kind of offended. Maybe so. And by
Speaker 1: the way, about the the idea of being resistant to explosives,
Speaker 1: I believe we're going to come back around to some
Speaker 1: more specific stats on this later. Ice was believed to
Speaker 1: be relatively resistant to explosives at the time, but it
Speaker 1: turns out I think that it's it's more variable than that.
Speaker 1: Uh well, one quick thing about ice floating. I have
Speaker 1: Thompson briefly mentions this like this being a a key
Speaker 1: attribute of ice because imagine what the shape of life
Speaker 1: on Earth if ice was heavier than liquid water, If
Speaker 1: if ice formed at the bottom of the sea, that
Speaker 1: would make that would just be a disastrous blow to
Speaker 1: um to life as we know it. Like imagine how
Speaker 1: organisms would would function or would fail to function in
Speaker 1: such an environment. Well, yeah, I've read about this before.
Speaker 1: Also that the fact that ice floats on water and
Speaker 1: means that ice forms over the top of say bodies
Speaker 1: of fresh water that freeze in the in the winter,
Speaker 1: or even you know, I guess over at the polar
Speaker 1: ice caps. That protects the water below from continuous freezing
Speaker 1: and exposure to the elements above. So the fact that
Speaker 1: that it floats allows life to continue in water in
Speaker 1: very cold places. And also it means you might be
Speaker 1: able to make a giant aircraft carrier out of it, exactly. So,
Speaker 1: so this is something from Collins here. Uh, Pike's dream
Speaker 1: became this hypothetical ice based ship that would be known
Speaker 1: as the HMS Havoc Cook. So I just want to
Speaker 1: read from Collins a little bit on the size. Here.
Speaker 1: It would be constructed from quote forty foot blocks of ice.
Speaker 1: His havocook would be two thousand feet long, three hundred
Speaker 1: feet wide, with walls forty ft thick. Its interior would
Speaker 1: easily accommodate two hundred spitfires. The largest ship then afloat
Speaker 1: was the HMS Queen Mary, which weighed in at eighty
Speaker 1: six thousand tons. The havocook would weigh two million tons.
Speaker 1: That's a big boat. And uh and strangely enough, it
Speaker 1: looks like leadership kind of went for it. Now, there
Speaker 1: would be some obvious problems with a boat that size. Uh.
Speaker 1: I mean, we can get into more of them as
Speaker 1: we go on. One of them that was mentioned in
Speaker 1: Collins article was that, of course you'd have a problem
Speaker 1: with a boat like this, uh, you know, getting advantage
Speaker 1: sneaking up on anything. It would probably be kind of
Speaker 1: slow moving, hard to steep year all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: But in response to that idea, apparently Pike said, quote,
Speaker 1: surprise can be obtained from permanence as well as suddenness.
Speaker 1: I like that. I'm not sure I fully get that,
Speaker 1: but okay, I'm like halfway there. So anyway, this idea
Speaker 1: definitely made it up the chain. Winston Churchill I thought
Speaker 1: it sounded promising, and according to Peruts in that forty
Speaker 1: six paper that we referenced earlier, Churchill thought that while
Speaker 1: it should be a high priority, he also thought that
Speaker 1: they should quote let nature do the work. Uh So
Speaker 1: in other words, uh, let's maybe not build something out
Speaker 1: of ice. Let's see what we can do. Uh we
Speaker 1: can do making taking advantage of what's already there. And
Speaker 1: in this this sounds like a like classic boss thinking,
Speaker 1: this is a great idea, but let's let's go towards
Speaker 1: the cheap version of the idea. I like that you
Speaker 1: brought me the expensive version too, but I really like
Speaker 1: that cheap version. Yeah, exactly, Let nature do the work.
Speaker 1: And I've got a great story about Churchill coming up
Speaker 1: in a minute. But just to expand on on Pike's thinking,
Speaker 1: this is a This is a great section from Collins
Speaker 1: quote in battle, the ice ships could put their onboard
Speaker 1: refrigeration systems to good use by spraying super cooled water
Speaker 1: enemy ships icing their hatches shut, clogging their guns, and
Speaker 1: freezing halfless sailors to death. Oh Man, in this Pike
Speaker 1: essentially sounds like Mr. Freeze from the sixties Batman TV show.
Speaker 1: Is it more from the sixties Batman or from Batman
Speaker 1: the animated series. I would say it sounds it's either
Speaker 1: the Arnold Schwartzenegger Mr. Freeze or the the TV show
Speaker 1: Mr Freeze. I feel like animated. Um. Mr Freeze was like,
Speaker 1: uh was the ideal balance like that that's my Mr Freeze,
Speaker 1: that's Freez. Yeah, that that was solid. Whereas if you're
Speaker 1: doing if you're talking about something ridiculous, you gotta go
Speaker 1: sixties or you gotta go Arnold. So Pike presents his
Speaker 1: idea for a two million ton aircraft carrier made out
Speaker 1: of ice, and in Churchill is like ice try, you know,
Speaker 1: the one of the just crazy things about this. First
Speaker 1: of all, this is not something that just came out,
Speaker 1: like clearly this is this idea has been public knowledge
Speaker 1: since uh uh you know at least since since the
Speaker 1: you know, the nineteen forties, right since forty six when
Speaker 1: that paper came out. And yet I feel like any
Speaker 1: like weird alternate history book or you know that say
Speaker 1: if it's like, um, you know, the Golden Compass or
Speaker 1: uh something by Alan Moore. For instance, if someone had said, Oh,
Speaker 1: I really like this alternate version of reality you've got
Speaker 1: go in here, but why don't you throw in a
Speaker 1: giant aircraft carrier made out of ice that also shoots
Speaker 1: freezing water at other ships. Put that in there, they
Speaker 1: would say, Now, that's just too far, that's just too silly.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not trying to create a farce here.
Speaker 1: That's gonna be in some Kevin Costner movie of the future.
Speaker 1: It's like in the water World and the Postman tradition. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or I guess I feel like there there has First
Speaker 1: of all, there has to be some sci fire fantasy
Speaker 1: out there that has really latched onto this idea. But
Speaker 1: I almost feel like it's such a weird idea. It's
Speaker 1: got to be the idea you lead with, you know,
Speaker 1: like everything has to be built around the ice ships
Speaker 1: of you know, TheBus or whatever the uh your world
Speaker 1: happens to be. Yeah, And so unfortunately, uh, this idea,
Speaker 1: as as amazing as it is, ran into some problems
Speaker 1: in the real world. Yeah. Yeah. Ultimately, the bird Ship
Speaker 1: never came to be because for for a few different reasons.
Speaker 1: One of the big ones though, was that icebergs didn't
Speaker 1: rise high enough above the waterline and ice flows were
Speaker 1: too thin. Because that was another idea, Right, you go
Speaker 1: get some ice flows, cut yourself out, as you know,
Speaker 1: the the amount that you needed, and use that as
Speaker 1: the basis for your ship tow them down from the Arctic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then also further research into you know, the matters
Speaker 1: concerning the feasibility of constructing an ice based carrier turned
Speaker 1: up some of the challenges the material, your challenges we've
Speaker 1: discussed already, Yeah, to go into a little more detail
Speaker 1: and that. So you mentioned the fact that natural ice
Speaker 1: just tends to not come out of the water high
Speaker 1: enough when it's floating in the water. Peruts talks about
Speaker 1: how the Fleet Air arm had figured out that in
Speaker 1: order to have a working aircraft carrier that planes could
Speaker 1: actually land on and take off from, you gotta you
Speaker 1: gotta have a freeboard, what's called a freeboard of at
Speaker 1: least fifteen meters or about fifty feet above the water.
Speaker 1: And the free board is just the height of a
Speaker 1: ship stick above the water line. Yeah, if you've ever
Speaker 1: seen a real aircraft carrier, you'll notice it it rides
Speaker 1: pretty high. And this is what you're talking about with
Speaker 1: ice flows being too thin, like the natural ice flows
Speaker 1: are just not tall enough, they're not going to do
Speaker 1: the job. So engineers were given the job of well, okay,
Speaker 1: we got to construct a man made aircraft carrier platform
Speaker 1: of ice. But there was a sort of dearth of
Speaker 1: knowledge about exactly what you could do with ice as
Speaker 1: a building material. Pre Existing research on the structural properties
Speaker 1: of ice was sort of all over the place with
Speaker 1: its findings. So experiments were carried out in Britain and
Speaker 1: in Canada to try to sort these claims out. They
Speaker 1: did a bunch of mechanical strength test results and actually
Speaker 1: we learned a lot about ice. But part of what
Speaker 1: they learned is that the way ice responds is in
Speaker 1: fact highly variable and unpredictable, like the way it responds
Speaker 1: to explosives is kind of unpredictable. Sometimes it's kind of resilient,
Speaker 1: sometimes it gets obliterated, right, and you just you can't
Speaker 1: just latch onto the results that you like now when
Speaker 1: you're especially now when you're gonna try and carry out
Speaker 1: a project like this, right, And so there was another
Speaker 1: thing they were testing for, which was the modulus of
Speaker 1: rupture for ice. Uh. This is also known as flexual
Speaker 1: strength or bend strength. Imagine a very simple test. Do
Speaker 1: you have like two supports, and you put a slab
Speaker 1: of a material on those two supports, and then you
Speaker 1: put a weight pressing down in the middle between the
Speaker 1: two supports, and for any given material, you see how
Speaker 1: much weight a slab of it can sustain of pressure
Speaker 1: and Peruts writes that quote. The rich modulus of rupture
Speaker 1: of ice beams in bending, for instance, was found to
Speaker 1: be about twenty two point five kilograms per square centimeter,
Speaker 1: but individual beams sometimes failed at stresses as low as
Speaker 1: four point nine kilograms per square centimeter, and this is
Speaker 1: not good. Peruts points out that just regular old pine
Speaker 1: lumber has a modulus of rupture somewhere around eight hundred kilograms,
Speaker 1: so way better in general. And again the ice is
Speaker 1: somewhat variable. You might get a weak beam of ice
Speaker 1: here there, and you wouldn't even know it until you
Speaker 1: press on it. Right, If you if you're gonna do
Speaker 1: if you're gonna build something out of this, if you're
Speaker 1: gonna design something built out of this this material, you
Speaker 1: need to know how far you can push it, and
Speaker 1: it needs to be at least you know a dependable
Speaker 1: range and not just a roll of the dice exactly.
Speaker 1: So ice is just really not sound as a large
Speaker 1: load bearing building material. And so this leaves us around
Speaker 1: February of ninette with ice looking like a bad candidate
Speaker 1: to build an aircraft carry y're out of That's right.
Speaker 1: Things look pretty bleak, at least until they read the
Speaker 1: work of Herman Mark and Walter P. Hollenstein. Yeah. These
Speaker 1: guys were working out of Brooklyn Polytechnic. Yeah, and they've
Speaker 1: been experimenting with frozen water with wood pulp inside it,
Speaker 1: and they found that this the resulting material like this,
Speaker 1: essentially a mixture of frozen water and wood pulp, was
Speaker 1: stronger than ice, significantly stronger. Apparently Herman Mark had formerly
Speaker 1: been Peruts's teacher at some point, and I found an
Speaker 1: account of the discovery written by Peruts and quoted in
Speaker 1: a piece for Chemistry World by Kit Chapman. Uh so
Speaker 1: these are Peruits's words. Quote. Pike handed me a report
Speaker 1: that he said he had found hard to understand. It
Speaker 1: was by Herman Mark, my former professor of physical chemistry.
Speaker 1: As an expert on plastics, he knew that many of
Speaker 1: them were brittle when pure, but could be toughened by
Speaker 1: embedding fibers such as cellulose in them, just as concrete
Speaker 1: can be reinforced with steel wires. Mark and his assistant
Speaker 1: stirred a little cotton wool or would pulp the raw
Speaker 1: material of newsprint into water before they froze it, and
Speaker 1: found that these editions strengthened the ice dramatically. And I
Speaker 1: love this comparison to actual building practices such as embedding
Speaker 1: rebars steal wires within concrete. When you're making a building,
Speaker 1: the fibers or wires running longitudinally through the material help
Speaker 1: prevent rupture. But so this stuff, this mixture of frozen
Speaker 1: water and would pulp, would come to be known as
Speaker 1: pike wrete in honor of Jeffrey Pike, a k a.
Speaker 1: Pike's Concrete. And there's an anecdote about the discovery of
Speaker 1: this material and trying to sell it up the chain
Speaker 1: that Collins reports, and he gets it from the book
Speaker 1: Pike the Unknown Genius, published by Evans Brothers in London
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty nine, biography of Jeffrey Pike written by
Speaker 1: David Lampey, and the story goes like this, So one
Speaker 1: day Prime Minister Winston Churchill gets a visit from Lord
Speaker 1: mount Batton while while Churchill is at the Prime Minister's
Speaker 1: country house known as Checkers, and reportedly when mount Batton
Speaker 1: arrived at the house, the staff informed him that the
Speaker 1: Prime Minister was in the bath. You know, he can't
Speaker 1: talk right now. He's he's having a good scrub. And
Speaker 1: Mount Batton was like, good, perfect, take me to him.
Speaker 1: So Mount Baton charged into the bathroom. And then from here,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read from Collins version of the account quote,
Speaker 1: I have Mount Batton explained a block of new material
Speaker 1: that I would like to put in your bath. Mount
Speaker 1: Batton opened his parcel and dropped its contents between the
Speaker 1: Prime Minister's bare legs in the water. It was a
Speaker 1: chunk of ice. Rather than bellow at his Chief of
Speaker 1: Combined Operations, Churchill stared at the ice intently, and so
Speaker 1: standing by the bathtub did Mount Batton himself. Minutes passed
Speaker 1: and they still looked into the steaming depths of bathwater
Speaker 1: before them. The ice was not melting. This is such
Speaker 1: a great moment in in in global history right here. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean it all and almost and certainly it has
Speaker 1: to be up there for like great, great nude moments
Speaker 1: in world history. You know, I'm just dealing with, say
Speaker 1: like that the non saucy moments in world history that
Speaker 1: mattered that also combined involved nudity, Like this has to
Speaker 1: be a naked Churchill in his bath beholding this, uh this,
Speaker 1: this floating block of wonder ice. Well, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: he was naked. Maybe Churchill bathed in a tuxedo with
Speaker 1: tales on the top hat you Well, maybe, but then
Speaker 1: we're just in a weirder territory. But so yeah, here
Speaker 1: here we have pike crete. And I should say that
Speaker 1: I'm a little confused about the timeline here because some
Speaker 1: sources I was looking at report that the pike crete
Speaker 1: thing came in like early nineteen forty three, but Collins
Speaker 1: puts this story in late nineteen forty two. So there
Speaker 1: might be some questions about the timeline here, and and
Speaker 1: and so I do wonder about the veracity of the story,
Speaker 1: but I have no reason to believe that it's fabricated,
Speaker 1: and I want to believe it's true. Well, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to dispel this mental image. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: take a quick break. Keep this in your head, and
Speaker 1: then after a word from our sponsors, we will return
Speaker 1: and bust open the pike cretan. Alright, we're back. So
Speaker 1: here we are at the birth of pike create the
Speaker 1: potential solution to the iceberg aircraft carrier problem. That's right.
Speaker 1: They realized that this was an avenue forward. This was
Speaker 1: a way we might be able to strengthen the ice
Speaker 1: so that we could do all the amazing things that
Speaker 1: we want to do with it. So they experimented. Different
Speaker 1: pulp ice combinations were tried. You know, they are different pulps,
Speaker 1: would pulp, rocks, other materials put in there, but they
Speaker 1: ultimately found that all you needed was as little as
Speaker 1: four percent pulp and you would experience a huge upgrade
Speaker 1: endurability compared to regular ice. Basically, these embedded materials prevented
Speaker 1: cracks in the ice from advancing. So I mean basically
Speaker 1: you could think of it as um um. You know,
Speaker 1: a crack starts and instead of being able to eventually
Speaker 1: vein its way through an entire block and bring it
Speaker 1: to pieces, it could only go so far um before
Speaker 1: it encountered something to stop it. So if you were
Speaker 1: going to make a wall out of ice, pike crete
Speaker 1: would be a better candidate than regular ice. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: s Thompson points out, it's not that it would make it.
Speaker 1: It makes it more durable, and it doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: it would be invincible. It would still fail, but it
Speaker 1: would fail in a much more predictable fashion. And and
Speaker 1: that's also why Thompson ultimately points out that if your brand,
Speaker 1: the builder brand, in the Builder the legendary brand, if
Speaker 1: you're looking to build a giant wall of ice, even
Speaker 1: with the help of some magical beings, uh, doing something
Speaker 1: like pike crete would be your best option for building
Speaker 1: that wall. Yeah. So I was reading Perutz's reports about
Speaker 1: these experiments with pike crete about like the optimal type
Speaker 1: of wood pulp to use, the optimal amount of wood
Speaker 1: pulp suspension of water to use. So it looks like
Speaker 1: they usually ended up using spruce or pine wood pulp
Speaker 1: that's ground up by machines. And this is the pulp
Speaker 1: that ultimately would become the pages of a newspaper in
Speaker 1: another context. Uh. And then when in liquid form, this
Speaker 1: this mixture has interesting properties, like a five percent suspension
Speaker 1: is sort of porridge like, it's kind of like oatmeal.
Speaker 1: But I tend to fifteen percent suspension is more like
Speaker 1: a sponge, and when you freeze it, you yeah, you
Speaker 1: get this resulting matrix of water, ice and saturated wood
Speaker 1: fiber that becomes extremely tough. You can bash it, shoot it.
Speaker 1: It tends to hold together very well. There's a famous
Speaker 1: story of Lord mount Batton taking out his pistol at
Speaker 1: a meeting of Allied commanders to shoot a block of ice.
Speaker 1: Of course, when he shoots the block of ice, it
Speaker 1: shatters all over the place, and then shoot a block
Speaker 1: of pi crete to demonstrate the difference. And apparently when
Speaker 1: he shot the pike crete, the bullet ricochet and graze
Speaker 1: the pant leg of an American admiral in the room.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. There are also reports that the people
Speaker 1: outside heard the shooting. They had not been warned, and
Speaker 1: they were like, who's shooting in there? Is there an
Speaker 1: assassination going on? But no, it's just just dashing Lord
Speaker 1: Mountbatton with his pistol shooting it materials to to make
Speaker 1: a point. Wow, this just said, this is so weird,
Speaker 1: and it's again, I don't think it has ever been
Speaker 1: in a in a film. I had a I had
Speaker 1: a Russian history professor wants who who was fond of
Speaker 1: pointing out that you know, you'll see some movies about um,
Speaker 1: for instance, the Eastern Front during World War Two, but
Speaker 1: you're always going to see the same stories, the same
Speaker 1: particular stories told time and time again. When when there's
Speaker 1: so many additional uh, you know, it's equally interesting and
Speaker 1: in many times strange stories that are spread out across
Speaker 1: that entire theater of the war. UM And and likewise,
Speaker 1: when you look at like all the things that are
Speaker 1: going on during this period, you have you have stuff
Speaker 1: like this that just for some reason has a way
Speaker 1: of falling through the cracks. Yeah, totally, and and it
Speaker 1: still keeps getting weirder. Is another thing about this project
Speaker 1: is that it had to be very secretive. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is top secret military research at the time.
Speaker 1: So you had people making just big troughs and buckets
Speaker 1: of wood pulp mixed with water. And this is like
Speaker 1: the same level of secrecy where the as where people
Speaker 1: are trying to create a death ray or something. Uh.
Speaker 1: They apparently they took out refrigerated rooms under a London
Speaker 1: meat market, I think it was Smithfield's market. They converted
Speaker 1: this into this top secret experimentation in manufacturing space for
Speaker 1: PI crete, and Perut says that a lot of people
Speaker 1: working on PI crete research had no idea what this
Speaker 1: was going to be used for, Like they were kept
Speaker 1: in the dark in order to maintain you know, ops seck.
Speaker 1: But a few of the things they determined in their research.
Speaker 1: One was that an ideal amount of wood pulp to
Speaker 1: make PI crete it's about fourteen percent, so you know,
Speaker 1: like eighty six percent water fourteen percent wood pulp. Uh.
Speaker 1: They also found that temperature can matter a lot this material.
Speaker 1: A lot of the good things about it become less
Speaker 1: reliable as it warms up, and so in order for
Speaker 1: it to have its optimal features, it really needs to
Speaker 1: be kept at about negative fifteen degrees celsius. But if
Speaker 1: you keep it cold, it is much stronger than regular ice.
Speaker 1: It behaves much more predictably than regular water ice. Karu
Speaker 1: says that it gave results which were reproducible to within
Speaker 1: about plus or minus, and the wood pulp actually decreased
Speaker 1: the brittle nous of ice so much that Peruit says
Speaker 1: that PI crete was ductal and could even be machined
Speaker 1: on a lathe. So ductle means that it can be
Speaker 1: stretched out into a wire, so that that's definitely showing
Speaker 1: you a material that is tough and not brittle. So
Speaker 1: he said, we come back around to just how torpedo
Speaker 1: proof pie crete would be. Uh. In researching this, they
Speaker 1: found that a torpedo would upon impact dig in about
Speaker 1: sixty centimeters and then he would, um, he would radar
Speaker 1: out a four point five meter area in the pike creet.
Speaker 1: So they figured, okay, we would need to have a
Speaker 1: nine meter thick hole that would do the work. Um
Speaker 1: and then of course also to accommodate the aircraft, as
Speaker 1: I think we already mentioned, it would need to be
Speaker 1: like six long and sixty wide, so huge again, yeah, enormous.
Speaker 1: So basically this is this is the sort of durability
Speaker 1: that would prevent a U boat from being able to
Speaker 1: like sneak in, pop off a torpedo and just bring
Speaker 1: the whole thing down, right, it was it was supposed
Speaker 1: to be sort of like a floating fortress or a
Speaker 1: floating island. It would just be for practical purposes invulnerable, yes,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean it was without problems. So like,
Speaker 1: one of the things that they observed while they were
Speaker 1: testing the material properties of PI crete was that PI
Speaker 1: crete is like other ice, subject to something we mentioned earlier. Creep. Yes,
Speaker 1: creep is again the slow deformation of materials under pressure
Speaker 1: over time, the slow flow. So if you put a
Speaker 1: heavy load on a slab of pike crete, it's not
Speaker 1: nearly as susceptible to cracking and rupture as regular ices.
Speaker 1: But if you just leave that load there, the slab
Speaker 1: will probably sag over time, which is not something you
Speaker 1: want to happen if you're going to be parking aircraft
Speaker 1: on it and stuff like that. So research revealed times
Speaker 1: and periods of creep were different for different substances, depending
Speaker 1: on you know, the kind of wood pulp, different percent
Speaker 1: suspensions and all that. But the temperature constraint was again
Speaker 1: very important they need. They determined that negative fifteen degrees
Speaker 1: celsius was like the highest permissible working temperature. If it
Speaker 1: gets warmer than that, this boat is going to be
Speaker 1: in trouble. Okay. So eventually in ninety three the naval
Speaker 1: engineers decided, yes, pike rete is strong enough, we can
Speaker 1: make this. We can do it, so get to work
Speaker 1: constructing our berg ship. Uh Peruts reports that they wanted
Speaker 1: to have a working prototype that would be ready within
Speaker 1: the next winter season, and then soon after that a
Speaker 1: fleet of them which would be ready for a possible
Speaker 1: invasion of Japan and uh Peruts notes that too many
Speaker 1: engineers this seemed impossible, but then he puts it within
Speaker 1: the context of the whole sort of like war orientation,
Speaker 1: and Peruts writes, quote in retrospect, this may seem the
Speaker 1: obvious verdicts, but it must be remembered that the Berkship
Speaker 1: plan was only one of several apparently impossible engineering feats
Speaker 1: conceived during during the war e g. The atomic bomb,
Speaker 1: and that the question was not so much one of
Speaker 1: absolute feasibility, but rather of whether the ultimate strategic advantages
Speaker 1: to be gained by the burg ships were in proportion
Speaker 1: to the expenditure of manpower and materials involved in their construction.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think that had not the course of
Speaker 1: the war and the state of our armaments changed, the
Speaker 1: birdship could have been constructed. So that's Peruts's opinion. He thinks,
Speaker 1: you know, if if things hadn't changed made it not
Speaker 1: so rewarding, we could have done it. Just a couple
Speaker 1: more physical details about the proposal that I thought were
Speaker 1: very interesting. One is that this hypothetical giant bird ship
Speaker 1: would have had a waterproof skin on the outside to
Speaker 1: help insulate the pike crete. But then also the material
Speaker 1: would have to be cooled with artificial refrigeration, right, because
Speaker 1: they've got to keep it at negative fifteen degrees celsius
Speaker 1: or colder. So they would have an air conditioning system
Speaker 1: on the aircraft carrier made of pike create to refrigerate
Speaker 1: the pike create, and it would be blowing compressed air
Speaker 1: on it to keep it cold. But the downside is
Speaker 1: if you think about that, oh man, if the air
Speaker 1: conditioning system breaks, then your ship could start melting and
Speaker 1: lose structural integrity. Though another good thing about pike Create,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned earlier, is that it melts more slowly
Speaker 1: than regular ice, so you'd still have a bigger window
Speaker 1: of time than you would on a regular iceberg. I
Speaker 1: can't help but be reminded of the old There was
Speaker 1: an old Disney cartoon with like Donald Duck and the
Speaker 1: nephews battling each other, you know, like an epic snowball fight.
Speaker 1: Do you remember this one? Yeah, yeah, yeah, And Donald
Speaker 1: Duck I believe builds like a warship out of ice,
Speaker 1: and it is He's you know, devastating his nephews until
Speaker 1: they they like they have like a flaming bow and arrow,
Speaker 1: which seems a little violent in retrospect, but they fired
Speaker 1: that into his ice ship and then melt it and
Speaker 1: it like melts into the shape of like a duck skull. Brutal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's weird stuff, okay, But a couple more questions
Speaker 1: about this aircraft carrier, Like if you're going to take
Speaker 1: this idea seriously and try to actually build it, first
Speaker 1: of all, where do you freeze it? Uh? You know,
Speaker 1: remember that Winston Churchill wanted to let nature do the job.
Speaker 1: That was his quote, That was the cheap boss idea.
Speaker 1: But it quickly became apparent that this was just not
Speaker 1: really feasible. There was just nowhere they could find on
Speaker 1: Earth where you could you could feasibly let natural cold
Speaker 1: freeze this thing in place. It just wasn't gonna work.
Speaker 1: So instead they turned to some artificial construction ideas that
Speaker 1: would be based in Canada perots rights quote. The locality
Speaker 1: eventually selected for building the prototype was corner Brook in
Speaker 1: Newfoundland where I said it right this time? Did yeah?
Speaker 1: And uh? And I but I was more reacting to
Speaker 1: the fact that I've been to Corner Brook. I barely
Speaker 1: remember it that I was a child at the time,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I've been to Corner Brook. Oh what's it like? Okay,
Speaker 1: I think I think I got to get a toy
Speaker 1: at a gas station or something there like. That's of
Speaker 1: course the only thing I remember because I was a child.
Speaker 1: But I remember the name. Well. It sounds lovely and
Speaker 1: it sounds cold, because Perutz said the the average daily
Speaker 1: temperature was negative five degrees celsius. I guess this would
Speaker 1: be in the winter time, but it could be expected
Speaker 1: for a hundred days straight and there you would have
Speaker 1: protected waters of sufficient depth in order to try to
Speaker 1: build one of these things now. Paruts also says, you know,
Speaker 1: even though it wasn't made of steel and didn't require
Speaker 1: steel like like a regular warship would, it is still
Speaker 1: a huge material and investment. One ship alone would require
Speaker 1: one point seven million tons of pi crete material. Where
Speaker 1: can you make that much? Peruts argues that this alone
Speaker 1: would have worked whired a refrigerated plant of something like
Speaker 1: a hundred acres or forty hectares, and this would take
Speaker 1: away from other industrial needs of the Allied war effort. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't build that out of ice. You're right to
Speaker 1: build that out of out of metal and wood, right, Yes.
Speaker 1: And so these difficulties we've been talking about, along with
Speaker 1: other changing circumstances, ultimately caused the Allies to abandon the
Speaker 1: plan for berd ships in nineteen forty four. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the other circumstances were a range of things. One was
Speaker 1: that there was that airplanes themselves started to get increasing
Speaker 1: flight range. Yeah. I just our aviation technology increased enough
Speaker 1: to where suddenly those um, uh, those distances weren't insurmountle anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And Paruts actually says that, Uh, it's I guess a
Speaker 1: lot of these changes started around nineteen forty two, at
Speaker 1: the same time this project started. But eventually you could
Speaker 1: get land based airplanes out far enough over the ocean
Speaker 1: to provide sufficient air cover even even if they had
Speaker 1: to launch from from bases on land. And other things
Speaker 1: were the acquiring of additional bases on land. So like
Speaker 1: a couple of sources mentioned the fact that Portugal granted
Speaker 1: the Allies use of the Azores in the Atlantic, and
Speaker 1: this helped helped them reach farther out into the ocean.
Speaker 1: So there's that on the one hand, and then on
Speaker 1: the other hand, some changes in airplanes also meant that
Speaker 1: you needed even more runway space than you had before.
Speaker 1: So it would mean that you could build this six
Speaker 1: hundred meter long floating runway, make this huge investment to
Speaker 1: build this thing, and then a lot of the new
Speaker 1: planes that you want to launch can't even get off
Speaker 1: of it because now that's not long enough for them.
Speaker 1: They've just got to be launched from the ground still,
Speaker 1: So as you're accommodating what kind of platform you can
Speaker 1: get out into the middle of the ocean, the planes
Speaker 1: are requiring more and more platform all the time. Finally,
Speaker 1: Peruts also notes that quote the island hopping campaign of
Speaker 1: the American forces in the Pacific had been six tessful
Speaker 1: beyond expectation and had made an eventual invasion of Japan
Speaker 1: appear feasible without large floating air bases. So just in general,
Speaker 1: in this short amount of time, the world had moved
Speaker 1: on and was leaving the idea of the birdship behind it. Right,
Speaker 1: So we never got to find out if this idea
Speaker 1: could really be achieved because it just it just sort
Speaker 1: of became obsolete as the war progressed. But there's an
Speaker 1: interesting note that that Peruts makes about this project as
Speaker 1: a contribution to ice science in general. He writes, quote, Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: the volume of first rate data produced within a period
Speaker 1: of six months in this country and in Canada under
Speaker 1: the pressure of war far exceeded the total volume of
Speaker 1: reliable work that had been done before on the mechanical
Speaker 1: properties of ice itself. So war, what is it good for? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: I still think the song is correct. Absolutely nothing. But
Speaker 1: I guess you could make an argument for the advancement
Speaker 1: of of our understanding of ice. Well, it may makes
Speaker 1: you wonder, like, what if we just put the amount
Speaker 1: of priorities on regular scientific research that we put that
Speaker 1: we put on that research when it's necessary to win
Speaker 1: a war. Yeah? Absolutely, Um. I remember Neil de grasse
Speaker 1: Tyson making this point about about space exploration. He was
Speaker 1: fore which book this was, But he's basically saying, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, if we really want to get serious about
Speaker 1: about space exploration, we need to fake the existence of
Speaker 1: an extraterrestrial enemy, because that if we can get the
Speaker 1: war machine behind it. If that well, if we can
Speaker 1: get that kind of political and public capital, uh supporting it,
Speaker 1: you know, then we could do all sorts of things. Um. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: in a way, I kind of agree. I guess this
Speaker 1: is the assymandias theory from Watchman, right, But um, but
Speaker 1: I think part of the problem is a lot of
Speaker 1: what you would end up researching was the creation of newer,
Speaker 1: more powerful weapons, which are maybe not exactly what we need. Right.
Speaker 1: I think we've discussed this before in terms of of
Speaker 1: of rocket science under the Third Reich. You know, there's
Speaker 1: there's often this uh, sort of fantastic misconception that there
Speaker 1: is you know, there's these great advancements in space technology,
Speaker 1: and there's oh there was a secret moon base that
Speaker 1: the Nazis had, that sort of thing that the Nazi
Speaker 1: space program. But and really you do, and of course
Speaker 1: you did have a lot of of of brilliant minds
Speaker 1: working at the time. But like so many other brilliant
Speaker 1: minds during this global war, they were sucked into that
Speaker 1: black hole of global conflict. So their value to these
Speaker 1: nations that they were, um, they were serving. We're we're
Speaker 1: just boiled down to warfare interests like oh, you're good
Speaker 1: at rocketry, Well, can you make a rocket bring death
Speaker 1: to this country? Oh? You you you know about how
Speaker 1: ice works? Well, that's great because we're trying to build
Speaker 1: a massive weapon out of it that sort of thing. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we don't want to downplay that.
Speaker 1: Like in in Germany there were actually advances made in
Speaker 1: rocketry that were later put to peaceful uses, but the
Speaker 1: uses they were put to, primarily during the war, were
Speaker 1: to rain held down on England and other allies. But
Speaker 1: so anyway, that's the end of the historical pike crete story.
Speaker 1: You know that that the project came to an end,
Speaker 1: and there has not been a lot of serious investigation
Speaker 1: of pi crete at certainly not at that scale. Since then,
Speaker 1: people have done little projects where people have built structures
Speaker 1: out of pike crete and stuff, and and that's interesting.
Speaker 1: And in fact there have even been like like MythBusters
Speaker 1: and some other TV shows kind of like this. I
Speaker 1: think there's one in in Britain called Bang Goes the
Speaker 1: Theory that have tested out small boats made of pike crete.
Speaker 1: I know in the MythBusters episode they tested the mechanical
Speaker 1: properties of pi crete, like trying to drop it from
Speaker 1: certain heights and smash it, and they confirmed the kind
Speaker 1: of stuff that pruits had already been saying that like
Speaker 1: a frozen block of water saturated wood pulp did indeed
Speaker 1: melt a lot more slowly than an equivalent sized block
Speaker 1: of water ice. It was also a lot more structurally
Speaker 1: sound when when dropped from a height of about six ft,
Speaker 1: a frozen block of water would, you know, shatter into
Speaker 1: a million pieces, just like you would expect. But a
Speaker 1: block of frozen pie crete would break, maybe in half,
Speaker 1: maybe lose a piece here and there, but it was
Speaker 1: not nearly as brittle as the water ice alone. And
Speaker 1: then in the MythBusters investigation, they actually make something they
Speaker 1: end up calling super pi crete, which is, instead of
Speaker 1: using wood pulp in its you know, very small shaved
Speaker 1: up form, they use whole sheets of newspaper frozen within
Speaker 1: the ice. And the sheet newspaper pike create was super strong.
Speaker 1: It was extremely resistant to shattering. Oh man, I have
Speaker 1: you used a newspaper that has really strong journalistic integrity.
Speaker 1: It's going to hold up even more. One other just
Speaker 1: sort of popular media thing I came across was that
Speaker 1: there is a YouTube channel called the Hydraulic Press Channel.
Speaker 1: Have you ever watched this? No? But I'm assuming it's
Speaker 1: it's like the old David Letterman bit, right, where the
Speaker 1: where he would take different things and put it in
Speaker 1: a hydraulic press. Okay, it's exactly that. It's just something, Okay, excellent.
Speaker 1: I did not know that was a David Letterman thing. Yes,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, it's like the old David Letterman show. They
Speaker 1: would do that. Yeah, that's great television. And I gotta admit,
Speaker 1: you know, I start one of these videos up, I'm
Speaker 1: probably gonna watch it to the end. I just I
Speaker 1: want to see what it looks like. So yeah, then
Speaker 1: you know why again it's James Cameron's fall because of
Speaker 1: Terminator one. Yes, as children, we watched that scene where
Speaker 1: the eight hundred is crushed in the hydraulic press, and
Speaker 1: it made an impact on it. It burned into our psyche,
Speaker 1: and there's just something about a hydraulic press we can't
Speaker 1: look away. Yeah, So the hydraulic press channel they tested
Speaker 1: out some PI crete, regular sawdust PI crete, and they found,
Speaker 1: of course, it does not shatter the way you would
Speaker 1: expect ice to shatter. Instead, I would say that it
Speaker 1: seems to under extreme pressure, it seems to first kind
Speaker 1: of melt around the edges and then crumble ultimately, I mean,
Speaker 1: under much more pressure than it takes to crush a
Speaker 1: similar amount of ice. It ultimately kind of crumbles in
Speaker 1: a sticky looking way, kind of like a crumbly block
Speaker 1: of feta cheese. Can you picture this? Yes, they can
Speaker 1: picture something that looks like a cross between crumbly feta
Speaker 1: cheese and maybe like orange juice concentrate, And so it's
Speaker 1: just kind of peeling off in pieces like that. They
Speaker 1: also they also try some newspaper mush pike crete. This
Speaker 1: this does also kind of a melt and a sticky crumble.
Speaker 1: The pieces are softer, less frozen, and then they end
Speaker 1: up using what looks to me like toilet paper. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure they call it sheet paper, but this one's
Speaker 1: got a really interesting texture. It's worth looking up. It
Speaker 1: kind of flakes when crushed, and the flakes are still
Speaker 1: they demonstrate very large and strong, so it it looks
Speaker 1: like something that would be soft and melt in your hand,
Speaker 1: like a piece of butter or cheese. But then when
Speaker 1: you pick it up it's like solid. You can bang
Speaker 1: it against stuff anyway. Very interesting material and something that
Speaker 1: I think you can quite easily make or make a
Speaker 1: version of at home. That's right, I mean, ultimately people
Speaker 1: can make their own pie create at home after listening
Speaker 1: to this show and then tell us about how it went.
Speaker 1: And there was a thing in that Cabinet magazine article
Speaker 1: by Paul Collins where he quotes a professor, a professor
Speaker 1: named Erlin Schulson, director of the Ice Research Laboratory at
Speaker 1: Dartmouth College, and Schulson uh is trying to answer the
Speaker 1: question of why modern people don't make better use of
Speaker 1: pie crete in the light of its benefits, and he
Speaker 1: just says, I don't really know why it has languished
Speaker 1: in obscurity. It seems like something that could actually be
Speaker 1: useful for a lot of things, but for some reason,
Speaker 1: nobody's not nobody. I mean, people have done things here
Speaker 1: and there, but it does not seem like it has
Speaker 1: been taken up in a in a large way. So
Speaker 1: that's the past and the present. We might well wonder
Speaker 1: about the future of ice based building. And Uh I
Speaker 1: was looking around a little on this and I ran
Speaker 1: across um the Uses of Martian ice papered by Charles
Speaker 1: su Cockle, published in the Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. This was
Speaker 1: back in two thousand four. Uh Cockle rights quote Martian
Speaker 1: polar ices could be used as a shield by human explorers.
Speaker 1: By covering a research station with ice, high energy solar
Speaker 1: particles could be absorbed, protecting explorers from potentially damaging radiation exposure. Finally,
Speaker 1: martian ices provide a substratum over which scientific and exploratory
Speaker 1: expeditions could traverse on their way to deep field sites
Speaker 1: and the geographic poles themselves. Martian polar ices have the
Speaker 1: potential to open a new and unique chapter in the
Speaker 1: long relationship between humans and ice. So that's a neat idea,
Speaker 1: like the idea of building structures out of ice, and
Speaker 1: it sounds like like highways of ice on the Red planet. Sure,
Speaker 1: and I think this has been proposed by other people
Speaker 1: in the past. Uh I can't remember where, but I
Speaker 1: know I've encountered the idea of using ice or even
Speaker 1: a mixed up matrix of of ice and and other
Speaker 1: fibers kind of like PI crete to build structures potentially
Speaker 1: on on like asteroid surfaces. Yeah, so there may be
Speaker 1: some potential for for PI create there. Um. I was
Speaker 1: looking around for some more takes on this, and uh
Speaker 1: I came across an interesting concept, the Mars ice House project,
Speaker 1: which is a concept at one at the two fifteen,
Speaker 1: New York makers fair. They have a really sleek website
Speaker 1: at Mars ice house dot com. But this is a
Speaker 1: concept from from Search that's uh, the Space Exploration, Space
Speaker 1: Exploration Architecture and clouds AO that's Clouds Architecture Office, and
Speaker 1: it basically the ideas too is to have robotic machines
Speaker 1: three D printing buildings and structures out of ice on
Speaker 1: the Martian surface. And they claim that quote in consultation
Speaker 1: with our team's expert scientific advisors, astrophysicist, geologists, structural engineers,
Speaker 1: and renowned three D printing experts, we have achieved positive
Speaker 1: experimentation with one to one and ice printing and successfully
Speaker 1: analyzed structural models. Now, obviously there are a lot of
Speaker 1: caveats here related both to the properties of ice and
Speaker 1: the particular challenges of the Martian environment. But I think
Speaker 1: it's really really a thought provoking concept. You know, imagine
Speaker 1: ghost cities made out of ice built on Mars by
Speaker 1: autonomous laborers yea, or robots build structures that nobody's in yet.
Speaker 1: I like it, yeah, yeah, just like weird like geometric
Speaker 1: egglue cities on Mars. And I had and I don't
Speaker 1: know that they really get into the pie creek concept
Speaker 1: as much, but it makes sense that that could be
Speaker 1: a part of it as well. I think part of
Speaker 1: the secret to this is don't let Kohagen buy up
Speaker 1: that city. He can't get in early because he's not
Speaker 1: going to give the people to air. That's true, He's
Speaker 1: he is stingy with the air. But the ice up
Speaker 1: for grabs, I guess all right. So there you have it,
Speaker 1: pie crete, ice, walls of ice. I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: this journey. It was a fun one to go on
Speaker 1: with you, and as always, we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: Do you have thoughts on on ice itself? On pie crete?
Speaker 1: Have you ever made pie crete? Uh? Do you just
Speaker 1: have any feedback on the various um contemplations regarding like
Speaker 1: eighties and nineties cinema that we have touched on. Uh?
Speaker 1: You know how to get in touch with this? Joe
Speaker 1: will provide the details here in a second um. As always,
Speaker 1: if you want to listen to other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind, you know where to find us.
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Speaker 1: Do that because that helps us out huge Thanks as
Speaker 1: always to our excellent audio producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
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Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic for the future, or just to say hi, you
Speaker 1: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
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