Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan, there's Jerry Rowland.
Speaker 1: And this is Stuff you Should Know. I don't know
Speaker 1: what addition this is should be a pretty interesting and
Speaker 1: entertaining how about that? Uh? This this is the interrupting
Speaker 1: Chuck from watching the Kabinaugh hearing addition. Yeah, really, man,
Speaker 1: talk about historic huh Oh. I was glued to it
Speaker 1: and then like I gotta go to do my job. Sorry.
Speaker 1: For some reason, I feel guilty, like I'm responsible for that. No, no,
Speaker 1: it's not your fault. Thanks for letting off the hook.
Speaker 1: We gotta make the donuts. M hmm. Man, don't get
Speaker 1: I'm recording it. So I'll just go back right after this. Okay, cool,
Speaker 1: Well we'll talk really fast. I'll go back to seething
Speaker 1: rage right after this. You'll just be like, uh, you'll
Speaker 1: be like, no one tell me what happens? Oh goodness,
Speaker 1: Uh all right, let's do it death by invention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess this would be the horribly ironic twist edition
Speaker 1: of Stuff you Should Know. Yeah, and um, you know
Speaker 1: we are talking up people who died by their own
Speaker 1: hand in a way, it's in and it's really sad.
Speaker 1: I mean, all these people are are pursuing their passions
Speaker 1: for the most part, Uh, and to die because you
Speaker 1: are a creative, inventive, passionate person, except maybe in the
Speaker 1: case of Lacy. Uh, it's really sad. It is I think, um,
Speaker 1: to die in any way, at any time, for any
Speaker 1: reason is is unnatural. It's just wrong, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they listed out a couple before the official list of five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like a whole I mean, we could do the
Speaker 1: same show like every white like once a quarter. Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe we will chuck five more people. Yeah, we'll see.
Speaker 1: We'll see how this one goes about that. Did you
Speaker 1: want to touch on in a couple of those other
Speaker 1: people though? Yeah, I mean, um, Henry wind Stanley is
Speaker 1: definitely a kind of a famous one. He built a
Speaker 1: very famous lighthouse, Eddie Stone Lighthouse back in and I
Speaker 1: think that was the first iteration of it. I think
Speaker 1: there's been four total, and we talked about it on
Speaker 1: the Lighthouse episode. Yeah, I think this was the first
Speaker 1: one on rock right, and this is like out out
Speaker 1: there on on some rocks in the ocean or in
Speaker 1: the channel, one of the two, or the sea. It's
Speaker 1: out in the water. Yeah. A candle light, old school
Speaker 1: candlelight lighthouse, very romantic lighthouse, very romantic, invented by, like
Speaker 1: you said, Mr Henry wind Stanley, great name, and speaking
Speaker 1: of great. Five years later there was a great storm
Speaker 1: and this lighthouse actually that he built, collapsed on him
Speaker 1: and killed him while he was trying to short up. Yeah, him,
Speaker 1: he and five other people, and they were never found.
Speaker 1: That's just sad. I guess the sweet, the sweet, the
Speaker 1: sweet swept him as the sweet does sweet swell sweet
Speaker 1: swells by the sweet war. Yeah, it's really that's it's
Speaker 1: such a tragedy. What about Marie Curry who died at
Speaker 1: sixty six from radiation poisoning, which technically she didn't invent
Speaker 1: radium and polonium, she discovered them, but I mean her work.
Speaker 1: She won Nobel prizes for it. Um. Yeah, like the
Speaker 1: dangers of working with us, I mean always dangerous, but
Speaker 1: especially back then and then again physicist Harry uh Daglion,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say, Dallian, Dallian, I like Daglion, Okay, Dallian,
Speaker 1: That's what I'm going with but hey man, it's up
Speaker 1: for grabs, so silent g silence, h yeah, kind of.
Speaker 1: I mean there's a little bit of a guttural in there.
Speaker 1: Why do you hate letters? Right? Those are superfluous right there.
Speaker 1: So Harry daly In was another scientists who he was
Speaker 1: working on the Manhattan Project on the Demon core, the
Speaker 1: core of the plutonium bomb, and he died by his
Speaker 1: own hand as well. He was stacking carbide bricks, tungsten
Speaker 1: carbide around the core and dropped one, which I can't imagine, Like,
Speaker 1: what a frightening moment that would be. Yeah, even more so, chuck.
Speaker 1: He he had a monitor he was trying to see
Speaker 1: how many tungsten bricks it took to make the plutonium
Speaker 1: go critical, which is like once it goes critical, you've
Speaker 1: got a nuclear explosion on your hands. So he's just
Speaker 1: sitting there messing around with this. He's got a monitor
Speaker 1: showing him and the bonitor said, hey man, that last
Speaker 1: brick will make this go go critical. Um. It was
Speaker 1: a monitor from the seventies, so it said things like
Speaker 1: hey man, and uh so he knew, like, I gotta
Speaker 1: get that brick away, and he went to go like
Speaker 1: pull it back away from the stack, but in going
Speaker 1: to pull it away, he accidentally knocked it onto the core,
Speaker 1: so he had to go into the stack after it
Speaker 1: to get it away from the core to make sure
Speaker 1: that the thing didn't blow up, and he did, but
Speaker 1: he supposedly suffered tremendously from um radiation poisoning. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean he died within a month, So that's that's pretty tragic.
Speaker 1: And you know, he it sounds like he was a
Speaker 1: hero because if that thing would have exploded, uh, many many,
Speaker 1: many lives lost. Yeah, he's definitely honored as a hero.
Speaker 1: He also was not going to follow the rules apparently
Speaker 1: because he was in there the lab by himself, which
Speaker 1: was against protocol. I think he went back to work
Speaker 1: after dinner and was sitting there working on a nuclear
Speaker 1: pile by himself that he was trying to see where
Speaker 1: the threshold was for getting it critical. Jeez, this is
Speaker 1: a little crazy. So these examples to serve as a
Speaker 1: set up though to the official five. Uh, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna start with lee cy L. I s I I
Speaker 1: got no love for Lecy. No. No, this is not
Speaker 1: one of the ones where just a great creative following
Speaker 1: their passion. I don't know. Maybe he was passionate about
Speaker 1: harming others and people and court intrigue for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. But we're going back to ancient
Speaker 1: China here roughly to b C E. Is that what
Speaker 1: we're saying now, and China this time was making the
Speaker 1: conversion from just a big mess of of warring states
Speaker 1: into what would be, uh eventually be the Keen dynasty.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Chin Chin? We've been corrected by that
Speaker 1: officially too. I looked it up because I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not following for this again here I
Speaker 1: did it. I think it was you last time. It
Speaker 1: definitely was so that, Yeah, the Chin dynasty finally being
Speaker 1: ruled by one dynasty. So it was it was a
Speaker 1: big change for China. It was um. But the way
Speaker 1: that they assembled um all of these kind of like
Speaker 1: facts fractious states into a single empire was through this
Speaker 1: practice called legalism, which is a political doctrine that basically said,
Speaker 1: it basically assumes the worst about people, that they're selfish
Speaker 1: and dumb, and that the best way to make a
Speaker 1: state out of your citizens is by exploiting them and
Speaker 1: lying to them and passing a law for everything and
Speaker 1: then brutally enforcing it. Yeah, and kind of the government
Speaker 1: just fully uh fully ruling with an iron fists citizens.
Speaker 1: It's like proto fascism, Like the point of your citizen
Speaker 1: read is not to serve them, It's for your citizen
Speaker 1: read to kind of give all their power and work
Speaker 1: and attention to the state to the emperor. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: there's this um sort of an outlier as far as
Speaker 1: uh where this guy started out Leacy. He became very,
Speaker 1: very prominent with the Chin dynasty, but he was he
Speaker 1: was not born into it. He was a commoner and
Speaker 1: he was a clerk at a at a local government office,
Speaker 1: and he really worked his way up through the system
Speaker 1: pretty yeah, all the way up to prime minister. So
Speaker 1: local government clerk to prime minister. And I mean this
Speaker 1: guy makes like Machiavelli and the Medici's look like cream puffs.
Speaker 1: Who yeah, so Medici's queen puffs. Yeah, I am compared
Speaker 1: to Lacy, Yes, and not not just Lisie. So like
Speaker 1: the emperor of the Chin dynasty, the founder of basically
Speaker 1: China was an emperor named Shi Wong d I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure that's tell you say it. I'm almost equally sure
Speaker 1: that I've gotten it wrong. But he was the King
Speaker 1: of Chin, the first Emperor of Chin, and Um he
Speaker 1: was pretty brutal, but he he found good company with
Speaker 1: Lesi in his brutality and the way that he saw
Speaker 1: citizens and people. And then also the king's eunuch, who
Speaker 1: was basically tied for second place with le cy Um.
Speaker 1: He was the king's official spokesman. His name was Choo Chow,
Speaker 1: and the three of them together just ruled quite brutally.
Speaker 1: It was you know, you you bribe people and if
Speaker 1: they didn't take bribes, you killed them. You tricked neighboring
Speaker 1: states into accepting your rule. Book burning was huge, and
Speaker 1: this is what lecy is most commonly remembered for is
Speaker 1: instituting a policy of burning most books, especially history books,
Speaker 1: in an effort to kind of form a um, a
Speaker 1: single way of thinking for all Chinese to to fall
Speaker 1: in line with. And the way that you start that
Speaker 1: is to get rid of everything that's been written that
Speaker 1: doesn't fall into that line of thinking. So he instituted
Speaker 1: like a an empire wide book burning drive. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think like the only thing that he said it was okay,
Speaker 1: or books on medicine, books on growing things in agriculture
Speaker 1: and then divination, which I think I can't believe we
Speaker 1: haven't done a podcast on that at this point. Is
Speaker 1: that water witching? Yeah? I think so, right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's probably also like reading frog guts and tea
Speaker 1: leaves and stuff to see the future. Oh well, that
Speaker 1: that part totally makes sense, right, because you got to
Speaker 1: know how it's gonna come, and had Lesi been at
Speaker 1: all capable of divination, he would have seen that his
Speaker 1: end was coming horribly ironically and it was going to
Speaker 1: be very painful for him. Yeah, so they like, speaking
Speaker 1: of Machiavelli, they they definitely lead the path in do
Speaker 1: anything necessary to get what you want. And he said,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm pretty I'm pretty into torture as
Speaker 1: a means of getting what I want. And I've invented
Speaker 1: a pretty full proof way to uh ensure that someone
Speaker 1: is dead or gives us what we want and imagine
Speaker 1: ended up dead anyway. It was called the Five Pains,
Speaker 1: and it's basically cutting things off of the body one
Speaker 1: at a time until you get to five, which is
Speaker 1: the body. You cut the nose off first, then you
Speaker 1: cut off a hand, then you cut off a foot,
Speaker 1: then you cut off the penis or the the vagina castration,
Speaker 1: and finally you just cut in half. Your body has
Speaker 1: cut in half. That come done with you. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: five pains really undersells it. It really does so, because
Speaker 1: the five pains for me are traffic, right, traffic, This
Speaker 1: is the five unbearable social media None of them involved
Speaker 1: cutting off hands and feet, a nose, man, can you
Speaker 1: imagine losing your nose? That's first too. So um Licy
Speaker 1: is credited in some circles with inventing that. Others say
Speaker 1: it's not entirely clear. But um Shi wangd the emperor
Speaker 1: when he died, he died abroad suddenly, and Choo Chow
Speaker 1: and Licy decided to conceal it because the king said,
Speaker 1: my eldest son is my heir. I want him to
Speaker 1: take over after I die. So Lesy and joo Chow
Speaker 1: got rid of that decree and forged a new decree
Speaker 1: to the oldest son, who had been exiled for opposing
Speaker 1: that book burning idea. Yeah, that that was the reason
Speaker 1: it was a problems because he was no friend of Licy,
Speaker 1: right exactly. So lesy U and Joo Chow drafted a
Speaker 1: new decree from the king and it said son, kill yourself,
Speaker 1: and they sent it to him and the son killed himself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they had now they had consolidated their power, and
Speaker 1: they named an infant son of she she Wangdi to
Speaker 1: be the new ruler. They decided that wasn't any good,
Speaker 1: so they killed the infant and then they turned on
Speaker 1: each other, and Joo Chow got the upper hand and said, licy,
Speaker 1: I have some terrible news for you. You're about to
Speaker 1: face the five pains yourself. Yeah. I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: thing is when you're when you've got to psychotic creeps
Speaker 1: working together, eventually one of them is going to turn
Speaker 1: on the other. That's how it always goes. Let's hope
Speaker 1: that never happens to us, because where a parapsychotic creeks
Speaker 1: working together? You know, Um, what is the king's eunuch?
Speaker 1: The so the eunuch was castrated? Unich is? But like,
Speaker 1: so the king's eunuch is? Why did they castrate them
Speaker 1: just to render them subjugated or whatever or trustworthy like
Speaker 1: now I can trust you around my wife or whatever. Sure,
Speaker 1: that's what why people were looking assized. But in this
Speaker 1: case he was like the spokesperson for the emperor. He
Speaker 1: was like the highest the imagine like the press secretary
Speaker 1: and the chief of staff combined. Right, that's kind of
Speaker 1: what he was. But no penis no right. So he
Speaker 1: uh so jow Chow turns on Leasy and and has
Speaker 1: him executed through the five five pains his invention supposedly
Speaker 1: about which I looked into that five pains thing. It
Speaker 1: seems to come under the tradition of ling Chi, which
Speaker 1: is called slow slicing, which is as bad as it sounds,
Speaker 1: and I think it's way worse than the five pains.
Speaker 1: It's there can be twenty four cuts or a thousand cuts.
Speaker 1: They call it um and they actually last used it
Speaker 1: in nineteen o five. And there's a horrible picture of
Speaker 1: the man who was executed in nineteen o five by this,
Speaker 1: like being executed through this the slow slicing method. He
Speaker 1: just cut all up and bloody. Yeah, it's pretty pretty rough.
Speaker 1: It's pretty awful to see. Um. But they did it
Speaker 1: up until nineteen o five. Remember the days when we
Speaker 1: would send each other those awful pictures. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: we got to a certain point where we're like, se
Speaker 1: seen too much. You find it on your own, More
Speaker 1: power to you. Yeah, you've become a father, you know,
Speaker 1: and I'm a father in my own way. I feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, we have to protect ourselves from that. Oh boy.
Speaker 1: All right, well let's go take a break. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go watch it. Four minutes of the Cabin all hearing? Okay,
Speaker 1: and we'll come right back right after this. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. Now, let's talk about parachuting Franz right cult. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know a little bit about this one because, uh
Speaker 1: I did something back when we were doing videos. I
Speaker 1: can't remember exactly what it was, but one of our
Speaker 1: half hearted attempts at a video series. I think it
Speaker 1: was a blog post, was it. Yeah? Those didn't work either.
Speaker 1: It was like in that same series of the Baby
Speaker 1: Cage that like hung out over. Yeah, that's right. Remember
Speaker 1: how what a relief it was when we were finally told, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: why don't you just podcast because that's a job. That
Speaker 1: was nice. Wasn't that great? Yeah? You don't have to
Speaker 1: dance like a monkey on YouTube? Yeah, we're blog like
Speaker 1: it's people missed that stuff though, It's crazy, I know,
Speaker 1: but we enjoyed this. Yeah, I love podcasting, Chuck, all right,
Speaker 1: So it's a late seventeen hundreds, we're in France and
Speaker 1: there's a series of men that are intent on jumping
Speaker 1: off of things and testing out this new thing called
Speaker 1: a parachute. Yeah, and so in the fourteen seventies, Da
Speaker 1: Vinci is credited with designing the first parachute just on paper.
Speaker 1: I've seen pictures and apparently somebody did. Somebody built it,
Speaker 1: and they're like, yeah, it works. Of course it's da Vinci.
Speaker 1: But something and I couldn't figure out what it was.
Speaker 1: But something in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century just
Speaker 1: caused like parachute fever in France, and there was like
Speaker 1: you really, you can't really attribute it to anybody else
Speaker 1: but the French that the development or the early development
Speaker 1: of the parachute. There was just a bunch of frenchmen
Speaker 1: working on the parachute at about the same time. And
Speaker 1: maybe it was the advent of hot air balloons, which
Speaker 1: was another huge thing in France, and they were like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm up here, and how am I going to get
Speaker 1: down there if my balloon starts to crash? So it's
Speaker 1: possible that was it. But there were a lot of
Speaker 1: French guys jumping off of like buildings in the late
Speaker 1: eighteenth in early nineteenth century trying out parachutes. Yes, I
Speaker 1: mean over a ten or fifteen year period. There was
Speaker 1: a guy named Joseph mont gulf Yer, great name that
Speaker 1: means golf mountain. Oh nice, Louis Sebastian Uh Lenoman, It's okay,
Speaker 1: I just dropped the last couple of letters on anything
Speaker 1: French and the ally do it. And then a third
Speaker 1: guy named Bourges he just he's like share right. All
Speaker 1: of them were kind of making parachutes. There was another
Speaker 1: one to um, Jean Pierre Blanchard, who actually realized that
Speaker 1: silk is pretty good for getting out of a hot
Speaker 1: air balloon as a parachute. He had to ditch once
Speaker 1: back in. So there are a bunch of them. And
Speaker 1: Lenormand is the guy who actually coined the term parachute,
Speaker 1: which para in the Greek means against and shoot in
Speaker 1: French means fall, so it's against falling. The parachute is
Speaker 1: yeah in a way, so they they The parachute was
Speaker 1: invented by a number of people, but there was one
Speaker 1: specific parachute kind of like a wing suit, but it
Speaker 1: differed from a wingsuit in that it didn't work at all,
Speaker 1: and it was invented typically by a guy named Franz Reichelt,
Speaker 1: and I would love to hear you say his name properly, France.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good. Yeah. That that's an interesting case too,
Speaker 1: because this was a full like close to a hundred
Speaker 1: years after people were successfully using parachutes. Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: wasn't like he was like, oh man, these things have
Speaker 1: not worked yet and I really need to figure out
Speaker 1: a better way. Um. So I think Franz was I
Speaker 1: don't think he had a death wish, but I think
Speaker 1: he was shooting for the stars. He was. He was
Speaker 1: an eccentric. This is what I've gathered. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: an eccentric. He was a very talented tailor. But this
Speaker 1: article points out, I think quite astutely as as part
Speaker 1: part of being an inventor is knowing where to draw
Speaker 1: inspiration from among other inventions and inventors. And this guy
Speaker 1: apparently just went through to um first principles like Elon
Speaker 1: Musk does, where it's like, um, oh, I can buy
Speaker 1: batteries on the market for this. Let me instead figure
Speaker 1: out what you need to make a battery, and I'll
Speaker 1: go by those parts and make it for way cheaper
Speaker 1: Franz Reicheld seemed to have the same impression about his
Speaker 1: flying suit. He just kind of made it up, not
Speaker 1: based on anything else. He just did it himself and
Speaker 1: he was quite proud of it. And he took it
Speaker 1: to the Arrow Club of France and said check this out,
Speaker 1: and they said, do not use that ever. Ever, the
Speaker 1: thing is not going to do anything, and he said, oh,
Speaker 1: nuts to you. And he started doing trials from his
Speaker 1: fifth floor apartment window with a dummy and it didn't work,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't dissuaded by any of that. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: only thing I can figure out is that um, because
Speaker 1: again I don't think he had a death wish. I
Speaker 1: think he must have thought. The only thing I can
Speaker 1: figure is he must have thought a dummy like it
Speaker 1: needs to be a real rigid human that can move
Speaker 1: their body, and a dummy is just not gonna cut it.
Speaker 1: So I need to try this thing out because I
Speaker 1: think it's gonna work. It was a time in nineteens
Speaker 1: well when apparently you could go to the Eiffel Tower
Speaker 1: and just tell the cops, Hey, I'm gonna throw a
Speaker 1: dummy um off of the Eiffel Tower to trap my
Speaker 1: flying suit and they said go ahead. Uh so he
Speaker 1: went up there. But UM, I don't think he changed
Speaker 1: his mind. I think by all accounts it was he
Speaker 1: intended fully to do this himself the whole time. And
Speaker 1: the suit like you have um been hinting at it
Speaker 1: didn't do anything. It didn't And actually I should have
Speaker 1: sent you this one to British Pete or Pete, I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure what what the the old newsreel service.
Speaker 1: They were there and and there is a haunting video
Speaker 1: of him. There is close up like it's not far away,
Speaker 1: but close up, like on the ledge of the first
Speaker 1: platform of the Eiffel Tower nine ft or almost fifty
Speaker 1: eight meters high, just like waiting, waiting, and then he
Speaker 1: jumps and he just goes straight down like a sack
Speaker 1: of potatoes and dies immediately hundred ninety feet very very tragic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And on the film that you see the police measuring
Speaker 1: the depth of the impression he made in the ground
Speaker 1: when he fell. When he hit the ground, it's really
Speaker 1: sad to see, like you're like, don't do it, don't
Speaker 1: do it, and you but you know obviously that he's
Speaker 1: going to do it, and he he died. Well, it
Speaker 1: was a time too where people were trying to figure
Speaker 1: all this stuff out, so they're all kind of crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know we haven't done one on the
Speaker 1: Right Brothers yet, but I mean you've seen all the
Speaker 1: crazy flying machines that people were trying to come up with.
Speaker 1: It was. It was a time of the spirit of
Speaker 1: adventure was in the air, and everyone there was probably like, man,
Speaker 1: check out this guy. He's going to fly off the
Speaker 1: Eiffel Tower. Yeah. I mean they thought that or they
Speaker 1: all had a lot of blood lust and we're coming
Speaker 1: out to see this guy die. You know, I don't
Speaker 1: think he had a death wish either, Chuck, And he
Speaker 1: actually applied for a permit. That's sweet. So I mean,
Speaker 1: why would you apply for a permit if you had
Speaker 1: a pretty good idea you were going to die. I
Speaker 1: think he thought very much that they was going to
Speaker 1: work and he was going to live, and he didn't
Speaker 1: want to get in trouble, so he applied for a
Speaker 1: permit first. That's a good point. How about moving on?
Speaker 1: Yes number three? Max Valierre would say it, Valier, I
Speaker 1: don't like I don't like extra letters, man, I need
Speaker 1: to take French. Um. Sure, Although this guy wasn't even French,
Speaker 1: was he. No, he was born Get this, he was
Speaker 1: born in Austria Hungary and the town of Bozen. But
Speaker 1: Austria Hungary broke up. It was very sad and um
Speaker 1: that town is now known as Bozano, Italy. But the
Speaker 1: guy's last name is Vollier. So that was the Italian
Speaker 1: or what we would consider Italian if he was. If
Speaker 1: he had been born after the Austro Hungarian Empire collapsed,
Speaker 1: he would have been Italian. But he was Austro Hungarian. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know what I mean. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: like said all you Austro Hungarians get out of here.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I really don't know. I would guess
Speaker 1: because it was an empire, there was probably a lot
Speaker 1: of movement around the empire. So who knows what his
Speaker 1: his his ethnicity or pedigree was in his family. Well,
Speaker 1: we know one thing for sure is that he was
Speaker 1: a smart dude. And he did not have a degree
Speaker 1: in science, but he was very good at figuring stuff out.
Speaker 1: He was and and I guess an amateur engineer would
Speaker 1: be the best thing to call him. Yeah, in a
Speaker 1: bit of a groupie, sure, but but like a groupie
Speaker 1: who put his his his actions where his mouth was. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he reads a book by um, a German engineer
Speaker 1: named erman O Birth and it was called The Rocket
Speaker 1: Into in an Interplanetary Space. Just just wonderful in the
Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century when books like this would
Speaker 1: be written. Yeah, this is this is I think credited
Speaker 1: with helping inspire the idea that like, um, we actually
Speaker 1: could do this. Yeah. Yeah, So this guy gets inspired
Speaker 1: by this book on an amateur level. He develops a
Speaker 1: four stage program and starts to get to work on
Speaker 1: what what would be with with a car company, Opal
Speaker 1: at his side, like in partnership on a rocket powered car,
Speaker 1: not a space rocket, but a car. And he built
Speaker 1: these things and he actually worked. Yeah, and Opal was
Speaker 1: involved in this to like a red bull degree. They
Speaker 1: were like, look at this crazy stuff. Check this out.
Speaker 1: We're making a rocket car. But Vollier was like, no,
Speaker 1: this is the future. Rockets are going to power everything.
Speaker 1: And he actually I think some of the first tests
Speaker 1: were pretty putsy, like one of them win a hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five in thirty five seconds. Not super fast,
Speaker 1: I mean like a football field in a quarter in
Speaker 1: thirty five seconds. Is not fast, but later on he
Speaker 1: got some of these rocket cars up to a hundred
Speaker 1: and forty five. That's impressive. And then he got a
Speaker 1: rocket sled up to two hundred and fifty miles an hour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is in Yeah, so like these rockets are working.
Speaker 1: He's he's making him work. But then there were there
Speaker 1: was a phase three and four of his four point plan,
Speaker 1: and it went from static engines just the rocket engine
Speaker 1: tests themselves, to rocket cars and rocket sleds, and then
Speaker 1: to rocket powered aircraft in then um space rockets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and to his credit, like, um, it's not like things
Speaker 1: were going really poorly and he was just pressing on anyway,
Speaker 1: Like like you said, he got one of them up
Speaker 1: to two hundred fifty miles an hour, so it would
Speaker 1: make sense to go to a stage three, the rocket
Speaker 1: assisted aircraft. And then very tragically May seventeen, Uh, he
Speaker 1: died working on phase three. He's working on a liquid
Speaker 1: oxygen gasoline fueled rocket motor. This thing explodes, a piece
Speaker 1: of shrapnel severs his aorta, and he's dead, like immediately, yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everything I saw was that he he just dropped it.
Speaker 1: So it must have been a heck of a severed
Speaker 1: a Yorda. I mean, right, there was hard I guess then, huh,
Speaker 1: I guess so jeez man. Yeah, an explosion that shoots
Speaker 1: a piece of strapnel that severed you a yorda. You're
Speaker 1: not gonna last much very long after that. And he
Speaker 1: was only thirty five years old at the time too.
Speaker 1: He had a pretty bright future. In all of this
Speaker 1: is self taught rocket guy. It's pretty impressive. But his
Speaker 1: um this article is hilarious. It talks about how his
Speaker 1: legacy continued. So he helped found u UM, an organization
Speaker 1: called you want to take that one? Uh sure, um,
Speaker 1: I love that. I take German and you take French,
Speaker 1: and both of us should have taken Spanish and neither
Speaker 1: one of us can do Chinese. That's right. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say Verine, fire Ram Chift, not bad Chuck. That's what
Speaker 1: I would have said too. It means a society for
Speaker 1: space travel, because again, at the time, this is like
Speaker 1: people smart people are saying, like we can actually do this,
Speaker 1: let's figure out how to do it. And some very
Speaker 1: famous UM people were members of this space society, and
Speaker 1: some of the members actually went on to work on
Speaker 1: the Saturn five project, including one member named Arthur Rudolph.
Speaker 1: And the thing that cracks me up about this article
Speaker 1: is Arthur Rudolph was a Nazi war criminal, right, who
Speaker 1: was basically plucked out of Nazi Germany at the end
Speaker 1: of the war from the V two rocket program, which
Speaker 1: just devastated Britain and other parts of Europe um and
Speaker 1: put to work on the the Apollo space mission. And
Speaker 1: then after that they said, okay, you have to go
Speaker 1: now be you're being accused of working people at death
Speaker 1: in your V two factory. But he carried on Max
Speaker 1: Valier's legacy. Yeah, in a way, I guess. So. Yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: Have you seen the trailer for the Neil Armstrong movie. No,
Speaker 1: I haven't. All of you here is Oscar Buzz looks good.
Speaker 1: I'm sure man. That the Ryan Gosling man. He's he's
Speaker 1: pretty good. He's great. You want to take a break, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do it, okay, alright, Chuck. I think we're down
Speaker 1: to two. And this is weird because normally we do
Speaker 1: top tens, but we only do seven or eight of them.
Speaker 1: This is a top five, and by god, we're doing
Speaker 1: all five. That's right. When the couple added on, ah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this one William Bullock, Old Bill Bullock in eighty two.
Speaker 1: That was the printing in the printing press. You know
Speaker 1: the history of the printing press. In fact, we should
Speaker 1: do one on that too, at some point, you bet.
Speaker 1: Really fascinating and many many people contributed to the printing
Speaker 1: press gaining attraction and gaining and speed and just getting
Speaker 1: more efficient and being able to pump out more and
Speaker 1: more what you would call sheets per hour paper sheets
Speaker 1: per hour, right and up to and by eight thirty
Speaker 1: two they're up to about four hundred sheets per hour.
Speaker 1: That was good, like, yeah, not bad at all. Um.
Speaker 1: It was like it was a flat press. You had
Speaker 1: the type set on like a flatboard that came down
Speaker 1: and you'd take the paper off or flip it over
Speaker 1: and then print another one another one. They could do
Speaker 1: like four hundred sheets per hour like that. And then
Speaker 1: this guy named Richard Hoe came up with He replaced
Speaker 1: that flat thing with the type setting with a cylinder
Speaker 1: with type setting, so it just spun and you just
Speaker 1: moved that paper on and off as fast as you could,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden you could do like a
Speaker 1: thousand to four thousand papers pages an hour. So there
Speaker 1: was a huge leap, right, and by I think eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty two is when Richard Hose invention came along. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so flash four word another thirty to thirty three years
Speaker 1: and William Bullock comes along again, a great period of
Speaker 1: invention in the world and in the United States, and
Speaker 1: he created the Bullock press, which was I think this
Speaker 1: is sort of the one we're more used to seeing now,
Speaker 1: which is a rotary press which had um, not sheets
Speaker 1: of paper, but one big, huge roll of paper. Some
Speaker 1: of these were up to five miles long, where you're
Speaker 1: just continually cranking these things through and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden you could get twelve thousand sheets per hour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what was amazing about? So before, like it didn't matter
Speaker 1: how fast that cylinder was moving, you still had a
Speaker 1: human who had to take a paper off after it
Speaker 1: was printed and put a piece of blank paper on
Speaker 1: to do the next one. With this, it was just
Speaker 1: fully automated, and you had a cylinder on top doing
Speaker 1: the front and you had a cylinder on bottom doing
Speaker 1: the backside of the paper. So you could print two
Speaker 1: sided twelve thousand chiefs per hour. And today, from what
Speaker 1: I saw, those rotary presses that um Bullock invented move
Speaker 1: paper through it like twenty miles an hour, and can
Speaker 1: do like I think, sixty four thousand, hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: eight page booklets in an hour. Now they're they're that fast,
Speaker 1: which is I'm impressed. It's it's come a long way.
Speaker 1: But Bill Bullock, like you said, kick the whole thing
Speaker 1: off with his web rotary printing press. And I mean,
Speaker 1: think about it, think about making an improvement to a
Speaker 1: machine where it was four thousand pages an hour, now
Speaker 1: it's twelve thousand thanks to you, You feel pretty good
Speaker 1: about yourself. Plus he was a newspaper editor too, so
Speaker 1: he was kind of doing this based on his own
Speaker 1: observations and how to make improvements in his own industry.
Speaker 1: And he was an orphan raised by his brother who
Speaker 1: was self taught in mechanics just from reading books. So
Speaker 1: I'm impressed with William Bullock, except for one of the
Speaker 1: last things he ever did in his life. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: because he was invented this machine, he would work on
Speaker 1: it himself. He would adjust it and make repairs himself. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there was the Philadelphia Public Ledger in eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: seven one of his Bullock presses needed some work, so
Speaker 1: he went in there himself, was working on it, and
Speaker 1: exactly what you think happened happened. His leg gets caught
Speaker 1: in one of these rollers and there was no pulling
Speaker 1: out at that point and crushed his leg. That turned gangrenous,
Speaker 1: and he died a few days after that. Yeah, during
Speaker 1: an operation to amputate the leg. Yeah, very like. I
Speaker 1: feel like he was close to making it. He was.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing though, from what I saw, what got
Speaker 1: him was he was trying to kick a belt back
Speaker 1: onto a pulley and if his leg got caught in
Speaker 1: there and sucked in, that means he was doing that
Speaker 1: while the machine was operating. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1: So yeah, not that impressive, but he um, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a terror by way to go Gang Green through complications
Speaker 1: of surgery from Gang Green, brought onto leg crushing, brought
Speaker 1: on by not just stopping to turn the machine off,
Speaker 1: brought on by being a brilliant inventor, great guy. Nothing
Speaker 1: makes me more relaxed and enthralled in watching a a
Speaker 1: newspaper operation being printed. I've said it before, have you?
Speaker 1: I have you because it doesn't ring a bell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I said it when we were talking about
Speaker 1: the the movie that last year, what's called The Paper, No,
Speaker 1: the Post, the Post there Um. One of the hokeyest
Speaker 1: shots I've ever seen in my life is in that
Speaker 1: movie what is It? Where the lawyers and the editors
Speaker 1: are all at um uh. I think they're at Tom
Speaker 1: Hanks's house and they're arguing and they like the cameras
Speaker 1: just moving around the room, just taking in all this
Speaker 1: frenetic scene. And one of the shots is Bob and
Speaker 1: David from Mr. Show like pointing into the chests of
Speaker 1: the lawyers like in rhythm, and then the lawyers are
Speaker 1: backing up in rhythm, almost like it's like a Rogers
Speaker 1: and Hammers Hammerstein musical. That's I suddenly is breaking out.
Speaker 1: It's crazy, And I was like, who directed this? And
Speaker 1: then I saw that Steven Spielberg directed this, and I thought,
Speaker 1: I think his maybe B or C director maybe came
Speaker 1: up with that one, like his second unit was hoping.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping. I just love that he cast Mr. Show
Speaker 1: and that it was pretty great. I did not expect
Speaker 1: to see that in that movie. Have you seen The
Speaker 1: Paper the Michael Keaton, Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.
Speaker 1: That's that is a world classman. That was a Ron
Speaker 1: Howard movie. Yeah. Those guys know how to make movies
Speaker 1: for the most part, unless it's a Star Wars movie.
Speaker 1: Uh do they make one? Yeah? Ron Howard made the
Speaker 1: Han solo movie. I didn't know that, did you see it?
Speaker 1: I didn't care for it. The what the one I
Speaker 1: saw that I liked was a rogue rogue one that
Speaker 1: was great. Yeah. I had nothing to do with anything, right,
Speaker 1: it was just its own thing. I mean that's great. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it had nothing to do with anything,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't like part of the I don't even
Speaker 1: know what Star Wars fans call that the cannon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna get slaughtered for this, So that's fine.
Speaker 1: I've been slaughtered for less, So let's move on. Then.
Speaker 1: How are you gonna how do you pronounce that guy's name?
Speaker 1: Ker Michael Dacre? That's what I'm going with, al Right,
Speaker 1: you're keeping all the letters. I looked it up, and um,
Speaker 1: I couldn't find any news coverage of it. That's usually
Speaker 1: how you can find somebody's Yeah, and this is surprising
Speaker 1: because this was very recently. Um, and we're going back
Speaker 1: to rockets again. With this one. Uh, and this is
Speaker 1: a really interesting idea for an invention. If you look
Speaker 1: at these things, I assume you checked out the pictures
Speaker 1: of the jet pod, dude. So this guy idea uh.
Speaker 1: He was born in the UK in ninety six, was
Speaker 1: a pilot in the British Army and um but good pilot,
Speaker 1: and he had this idea for something called the jetpod,
Speaker 1: which is basically an air taxi. So he was like,
Speaker 1: if I I think if I can invent something that
Speaker 1: goes uh, doesn't need very much runway to take off,
Speaker 1: can go really really fast and in a quick time um,
Speaker 1: and land in a in a kind of a truncated area,
Speaker 1: then I can speed up. I can make like a
Speaker 1: a jet taxi where people can get from like an
Speaker 1: airport to a city center. In the case of London,
Speaker 1: he said, in four minutes from heath he Throw to
Speaker 1: central London. Yes, dude, which I'm sure you know this
Speaker 1: from when we did our UK tour. It takes an
Speaker 1: hour at least to get there by regular like car taxi. Yeah,
Speaker 1: by the by black cab. It's horrible. So the idea
Speaker 1: of getting from central London to Heathrow in four minutes
Speaker 1: is a dream by itself, right, they really are. And
Speaker 1: from what I can tell, this was not just like
Speaker 1: some pie in this guy kind of thing, like this
Speaker 1: guy was on track. This thing was like the real deal.
Speaker 1: It was something called very quiet short takeoff and landing aircraft,
Speaker 1: which is a type of vt o L vertical takeoff
Speaker 1: and landing, which, like you said, it just needed a
Speaker 1: very short strip of land, which meant you didn't have
Speaker 1: to you didn't have to have an airport. You could
Speaker 1: have like a dedicated, say air strip, but it could
Speaker 1: be it would just take up a very small amount
Speaker 1: of land in the middle of the city. And they
Speaker 1: were going to sell them for a million dollars, which
Speaker 1: meant that trips on these things would have been like
Speaker 1: fifty sixty bucks, um, it's as much as yeah, and
Speaker 1: in four minutes rather than an hour. And the whole
Speaker 1: point was this was this was gonna ease congestion. It
Speaker 1: was going to be a cheap and easy way to
Speaker 1: kind of hop short distances or medium distances. And he
Speaker 1: had some ideas for military and like ambulance um uses
Speaker 1: for it as well. So it was close and who
Speaker 1: knows if we might have these things by now, because
Speaker 1: um and two thousand nine the guy died and he
Speaker 1: was It was during a test flight of one of
Speaker 1: the jet pods. Yeah, there were a few of them. Um.
Speaker 1: I don't think we said on any feet. About four
Speaker 1: feet to take off, um, which is about and it
Speaker 1: would go like three hundred and fifty miles an hour,
Speaker 1: which is awesome. But he had three models. The T
Speaker 1: one hundred UM sort of if you look these things up,
Speaker 1: it looks like a little ultra light plane, but it's
Speaker 1: a jet. This would take about fifty trips a day
Speaker 1: back and forth between the airport and city centers. It
Speaker 1: looks like a short bus plane, is what it looks like,
Speaker 1: because it's yellow, you know, it's totally and it's like stubby. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's stubby with wings and goes super super fast. Then
Speaker 1: he had the M three hundred, which was bigger, bigger.
Speaker 1: This is the one that like, um, he thought could
Speaker 1: take the place of like military helicopters, right or not
Speaker 1: take the place up, but you know, assist with removing
Speaker 1: injured soldiers from the battlefield. And then the E four
Speaker 1: hundred was like a like a flying ambulance. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: these things, like you said, they were speeding along again,
Speaker 1: not pyeing the sky. This was a real thing that
Speaker 1: was happening. And then on August six, two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: not very long ago, he took one of the eight
Speaker 1: Seedar models, a prototype UH in Malaysia for a test flight.
Speaker 1: I also saw I was in Taiwan. Oh really, yeah,
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell where it actually happened. Interesting, So he
Speaker 1: and this is where it gets a little frustrating, because
Speaker 1: he he could not get airborne on three attempts. And that,
Speaker 1: to me is when you're like, all right, let's just
Speaker 1: ground it for the day and figure this out. But
Speaker 1: he tried to fourth time, the aircraft went right straight
Speaker 1: up into the air vertically and then right back down
Speaker 1: and killed him. Yeah, it shut up five seven feet
Speaker 1: and then yawned left and crashed and that was that.
Speaker 1: And that was that. I don't I'm curious. I would
Speaker 1: imagine that this thing wasn't completely scrapped after that. I'm
Speaker 1: curious what the status is. I couldn't find anything about it.
Speaker 1: It's the company that he founded that was developing its
Speaker 1: absent a V C E N and I couldn't find
Speaker 1: what the status of that thing is. I hope they
Speaker 1: continue on with it because it would just be wonderful
Speaker 1: to have these things. Because another thing, I mean, these
Speaker 1: were jets, but something they had some sort of technology
Speaker 1: that cut the jet noise in half by fifty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not like we would just hear jets in
Speaker 1: our city skies constantly. It was relatively inexpensive. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you need to solve that straight up and straight down thing. Well,
Speaker 1: our I P, Michael Dacre and r He all those
Speaker 1: inventors except ly see are really interested in wishing him well.
Speaker 1: Um who who died by their own invention, hats off
Speaker 1: to you for your spirit of curiosity and ingenuity. Agreed. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about inventors who died
Speaker 1: by their own inventions, go onto the internet. There's all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff about that. And in the meantime, it's
Speaker 1: time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this. I love
Speaker 1: it when we get answers to questions that we asked
Speaker 1: because this from Scott Miller, and we asked about how
Speaker 1: they test for color blindness and animals, and he knows
Speaker 1: because he does that. Guys just finished that episode. In
Speaker 1: Chuck's question about how they test, I was very excited
Speaker 1: because This comes from my own area of study in
Speaker 1: behavior analysis. It's actually a very simple and clever experiment.
Speaker 1: Experiments will will teach an animal to respond to a color,
Speaker 1: often by pressing a lever or button, um or performing
Speaker 1: some action that is easy for them, and in doing so,
Speaker 1: the animal earns a treat. But the animals only get
Speaker 1: treats if they press the lever when certain colors are
Speaker 1: presented to them. So in this way, if an animal
Speaker 1: does not respond differently between two colors e g. Green
Speaker 1: and red for dogs, then that would indicate that they
Speaker 1: are deficient in detecting those colors. The same is true
Speaker 1: for birds, rodents, cats, and anything else. They have tried
Speaker 1: this with. Congratulations on being one of the greatest podcast ever.
Speaker 1: Love Scott Miller. Thanks Scott Geeze so as sweet as that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was very sweet and thanks for explaining. It makes
Speaker 1: total sense. The poor animals, they're like, I can't tell
Speaker 1: between red and green, so they don't give you mouse
Speaker 1: heads anymore. Can I get another mouse head? If you
Speaker 1: want to get in touch with this, like Scott did,
Speaker 1: we would love to hear from you. You can hang
Speaker 1: out with us at our home on the web. Stuff
Speaker 1: You should Know dot com. You can also find links
Speaker 1: to our social media accounts, where you can sometimes find
Speaker 1: us lurking around UM. Or you can send a plain
Speaker 1: old fashioned email to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works dot com Yah,