Speaker 1: Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
Speaker 1: fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
Speaker 1: tuning in. Previously on Ridiculous History, we examined the phenomenal
Speaker 1: story of people conducting trade craft of people conducting espionage
Speaker 1: and acts of spying through something as humble as knitting crafts.
Speaker 2: Crafts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there, we draft perfect, and we want to give
Speaker 1: a shout out to our big homie, our super producer,
Speaker 1: Max Crochet.
Speaker 2: Croquet Croquette. Wait a minute, different things, Williams. That is
Speaker 2: Bizar Falcons.
Speaker 1: We also have lightly pitched the idea of a Falcon
Speaker 1: tsar to ourselves off air. We took, we took a
Speaker 1: quick break, but through the magic of editing, we are
Speaker 1: rejoining you today. Let's hear it for none other than
Speaker 1: the one and only mister Noel Brown.
Speaker 2: Does I tis you?
Speaker 1: My friends, they called me Ben Bullen in this neck
Speaker 1: of the global woods for tax purposes. You can obviously
Speaker 1: communicate my comings and goings through a v or a
Speaker 1: pearl in a scarf.
Speaker 2: I'll bring a scarf right now because it's kind of
Speaker 2: got chilli today. It's unpredictable. I walked out, and I
Speaker 2: yelled at the sky, what that is such an old
Speaker 2: man thing to do with you been, and I'm here
Speaker 2: for it. I mean, you shake your fist.
Speaker 1: This is the thing, though, nol So we all reside
Speaker 1: in the Atlanta metro area, and everybody in Atlanta, if
Speaker 1: you've never had the privilege to visit, please please let
Speaker 1: us know and we'll hang out. But everybody in Atlanta
Speaker 1: will tend to speak to you as though they know
Speaker 1: you and you're vaguely related. So this is a true story.
Speaker 1: This morning when I walked out and as he said, Noel,
Speaker 1: the weather totally did a one to eighty on us.
Speaker 1: I yelled what because I was aggravated. It was very
Speaker 1: early in the morning, and there was a guy walking
Speaker 1: through the parking lot who turned around and said, I.
Speaker 2: Know, I said, seriously, I think I maybe did shake
Speaker 2: my fist a little bit. But then, as promised in
Speaker 2: our previous exploration of the nuts and bolts, the pearls
Speaker 2: and stitches, warp and weft, there you go of knitted coding,
Speaker 2: we are going to present you with a hand full
Speaker 2: of real life examples of folks doing this very thing
Speaker 2: in the service of various war efforts. So what do
Speaker 2: you say, we jump right into it. We got the spies,
Speaker 2: you knit it the Big Three, the Big Three.
Speaker 1: Yes, And this comes to us again courtesy of our
Speaker 1: research associate Maria. So let's start with Molly Rinker. Molly
Speaker 1: old Mom Rinker. That's a street name.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So this takes place way before World War One and
Speaker 1: World War Two. This is what the US calls the
Speaker 1: Revolutionary War. Rinker is an innkeeper in Philadelphia and she's
Speaker 1: one of those we're all big fans of RPGs and
Speaker 1: gaming and stuff, so she's to the powers of the beach.
Speaker 1: She's one of those n PCs at the local tavern.
Speaker 2: But they usually have some good intel for you, those
Speaker 2: bar maids and tavern keepers. Right, Yeah, you got to
Speaker 2: run out all the dialogue options. Quick pro tip from handkeepers.
Speaker 2: You get what I'm talking. Yeah, we got to run
Speaker 2: out all of the dialogue tree options to get to
Speaker 2: get the goods.
Speaker 1: So, because people were often ignoring women at this time,
Speaker 1: Molly Rinker was able to be around people that didn't
Speaker 1: really treat her as a person, and she used that
Speaker 1: to her advantage. She would gather intel eavesdropping on her
Speaker 1: tavern guest, specifically her British tavern guest, and.
Speaker 2: Her methods weren't the most sophisticated in terms of the
Speaker 2: types of crafty trade craft that we're talking about here,
Speaker 2: but it did still involve knitting supplies. She didn't encode messages, however,
Speaker 2: inside of her knitting, what she did do was deliver
Speaker 2: messages to George Washington, the General and the cotton An
Speaker 2: Army concealed inside balls of yarn. Yeah. So she would
Speaker 2: sit outside Reakerwood and she's knitting, and then when she
Speaker 2: saw Patriot couriers or Patriot troops pass by American forces,
Speaker 2: she would toss out small balls of yarn, just casually, like, well,
Speaker 2: here you go. You guys need yarn, right, you need a.
Speaker 1: Lot of stuff in general, which was true, but she
Speaker 1: had stuffed these small balls of yarn with wartime secrets
Speaker 1: on small scraps of paper. So it's kind of like
Speaker 1: how you have a message in a fortune cookie, or
Speaker 1: it's kind of like how you have soup in a dumpling.
Speaker 2: Right yeah, or you know the new git inside of
Speaker 2: the delicious sweet retreat, right. And her efforts were and
Speaker 2: are considered to have been absolutely as you like to say,
Speaker 2: Ben mission critical during these seventeen seventy seven to seventeen
Speaker 2: seventy eight Philadelphia campaign.
Speaker 1: Beautiful, thank you, Rinker. There are a lot of American
Speaker 1: heroes who don't get the credit they are due. So
Speaker 1: you want to shout you out.
Speaker 2: And then we also want to travel again in time.
Speaker 2: Let's go to what he say? May nineteen forty four. Oh,
Speaker 2: why the heck not? We're talking about Phyllis Pippolatour Doyle,
Speaker 2: a twenty three year old South African born British secret
Speaker 2: agent who parachuted into Nazi occupied Normandy in May of
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four. So hard, unbelievable, it's so.
Speaker 1: Cool, and she was not alone, right and all. She's
Speaker 1: one of thirty nine female secret agents who served in
Speaker 1: one of the coolest secret armies of the entirety of
Speaker 1: World War Two. Forget oss, folks, if you haven't heard
Speaker 1: about it before, we are so thrilled to introduce you
Speaker 1: to Winston Churchill's secret army, something called the Special Operations Executive.
Speaker 2: The more innocuous the name, the more sinister the plot.
Speaker 2: In France right during World War Two, she posed as
Speaker 2: a young woman with the cover name of Genevieve and
Speaker 2: she was actually assigned to the SOE Scientist Circuit where
Speaker 2: she was able to gather intelligence to help the RAF
Speaker 2: bombing missions, that's the Royal Air Force. She transmitted one
Speaker 2: hundred and thirty five coded messages Morse coded messages to
Speaker 2: be precise to Allied forces with her handy dandy wireless
Speaker 2: radio and of course her hairtyme. How's that work? Ben?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you morse code in the hairtie? She embeds these
Speaker 1: messages in the lace of her hair tie and get this, folks.
Speaker 1: She lives. Latour lives until two thousand and twenty three,
Speaker 1: and she will talk about her war efforts. She was
Speaker 1: speaking to New Zealand Army News about how she concealed
Speaker 1: her codes. She said, quote, I always carried knitting because
Speaker 1: my codes were on a piece of silk. I wrapped
Speaker 1: the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put
Speaker 1: it in a flat shoelace that I used to tie
Speaker 1: up my hair.
Speaker 2: Tricky, tricky. Sending coded messages took her around thirty minutes
Speaker 2: from her wireless radio, and it took the Germans ninety
Speaker 2: minutes to get a bead on where she actually was
Speaker 2: to trace the location of the signal that it was
Speaker 2: sent from. So the odds are certainly in her favor
Speaker 2: to make a clean getaway by the time the Germans
Speaker 2: knew what was up, yeah.
Speaker 1: At least for the first few iterations restaurant, because you
Speaker 1: have a window of time in which you need to
Speaker 1: move quickly. But the German intelligence community was, you know,
Speaker 1: they're not knuckle heads. They're not good people, but they're
Speaker 1: not knuckleheads, and they they start to clock the unusual
Speaker 1: activities of this person, so they interrogator, they detain her,
Speaker 1: and at least one time they strip searcher, but she
Speaker 1: always was able to slip the noose. She continually avoided
Speaker 1: detection because they would have to have looked in depth
Speaker 1: at the lace of her hairtie to figure out any
Speaker 1: coded information, and they just didn't because again, not to
Speaker 1: sound too soapboxy, they did not take women seriously.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and it was just it was literally a
Speaker 2: needle in a haystack, at least a needle and a
Speaker 2: hairtie kind of situation. And until they had gotten wind
Speaker 2: of this type of covert activity, they wouldn't have even
Speaker 2: thought to have looked in something like that. But you're
Speaker 2: absolutely right, Ben. There was a lot of dismissal involved
Speaker 2: as well. She never talked about her work much, if
Speaker 2: at all, and her own family never knew until very
Speaker 2: late in her life. She passed away in twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three at the age of one hundred and two years old,
Speaker 2: and it kept a lag a low until it became
Speaker 2: like a deathbed confession your real one, Tovo.
Speaker 1: We've got another person we want to introduce. We tease
Speaker 1: this a little bit in the first part of this series,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Bentley.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Bentley cooked up a plot to steal a lector
Speaker 2: cryptographic device from the Soviets and then sell it back
Speaker 2: to them. That's actually the plot of From Russia with Love. Sorry,
Speaker 2: I had to, I had to drop that one in there.
Speaker 2: A good one, Maria, but her actual story makes that
Speaker 2: kind of mix up a whole lot of sense, mixing
Speaker 2: up her plot with the plot of a Russian spy thriller.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Bentley was born in Connecticut. She went to Vassar
Speaker 2: and Columbia. No slouch academically speaking, and she was in
Speaker 2: fact an American communist m M yeah. Since in a twist,
Speaker 2: coming Ben card carrying yeah, she was known as the
Speaker 2: Red Spy Queen, and we're getting a lot of this
Speaker 2: from the official CIA website CIA dot gov. Check out
Speaker 2: Red Spy Queen, a biography of Elizabeth Bentley by Catherine
Speaker 2: s Olmsted. Coming to us out of University of North Carolina.
Speaker 2: So she considered herself more of and this is a
Speaker 2: quote a communist June Cleaver. So for seven years she
Speaker 2: worked as what we call a contact woman, which meant
Speaker 2: she gothered covert information, primarily Washington, DC, and then she
Speaker 2: would pass it along to her Soviet handler. That's correct, folks,
Speaker 2: this is an American, as you said, highly born in
Speaker 2: our socio economic pyramid. She was an American who spied
Speaker 2: for the other side, kind of like the Cambridge five,
Speaker 2: Say it ain't so, Lizzie, say it ain't so. Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is a thing that I think a lot of
Speaker 2: people miss when we're talking about the basics of tradecraft.
Speaker 2: It's not necessarily the shadowy guy in a nice suit
Speaker 2: that you have to be worried about. Right in a
Speaker 2: foreign hotel, It's going to be the people who are
Speaker 2: admin the people who are in housekeeping, the bartender, the
Speaker 2: bartender of people, the concierge. They're hearing all the d
Speaker 2: I met a few of them, Yeah, the people who
Speaker 2: surprisingly seemed to know four languages, You know what I mean.
Speaker 1: I've met a few. They're cool people. Just stay on
Speaker 1: their good side and be honest with yourself about why
Speaker 1: they're talking to you. All right, Okay, so here's another twist,
Speaker 1: like you were kind of teasing.
Speaker 2: There and all. A second twist, A second twist, almost
Speaker 2: as though we're making a not in fabric. The communist
Speaker 2: June Cleaver, as she styled herself, her activities, her early
Speaker 2: activities end in nineteen forty five, she goes to Uncle
Speaker 2: Sam and she outs herself to the FBI as fact. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they they.
Speaker 1: Do what any smart intel agency will do. They say, Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll just work for us. We're not the double cross. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the double cross. Heck, yeah, she turned double agent. And
Speaker 1: she said that she did this because she had become
Speaker 1: disillusioned by the party. As we know we often talk about,
Speaker 1: especially on our sister show stuff.
Speaker 2: They don't want you to know. Communism seems great on paper,
Speaker 2: but the inherent corruptibility of human beings tends to not
Speaker 2: make it work out so great in practice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The issue with communism as a theory is like you said,
Speaker 1: communism in practice is something that maybe the human brain
Speaker 1: in society hasn't evolved for yet, you know. But there's
Speaker 1: there's another factor here. Our character Bentley feels the walls
Speaker 1: closing in like she's Han Solo and Star Wars. She
Speaker 1: thinks the FBI is hot on her heels. She's just
Speaker 1: being paranoid. History will prove later she is not actually
Speaker 1: on the FBI's radar. She was incorrect in that assumption.
Speaker 1: But it's a very scary time and it's also very
Speaker 1: frightening and anxiety inducing to have to function as a spy.
Speaker 1: And then a third factor, Look, folks, not the soapbox here,
Speaker 1: but tradecraft is pretty brutal, and you are only you
Speaker 1: as an individual, are only worth the actions you can
Speaker 1: do in any kind of arrangement. As soon as you're
Speaker 1: done with those actions, as soon as your value is
Speaker 1: no longer relevant.
Speaker 2: They might kill you.
Speaker 1: She was worried that the Soviets would kill her because
Speaker 1: she had exhausted whatever her value was, and it turned
Speaker 1: out that bit of paranoia was true, so her going
Speaker 1: to the FBI may have been less of an altruistic
Speaker 1: crossroads moment for her it may have been something much
Speaker 1: more like self preservation.
Speaker 2: It's a good point, I mean, is it's a good
Speaker 2: story to you know, frame it in terms of she
Speaker 2: saw the lights or what have you. That, as we
Speaker 2: all know, in these types of situations, when you start
Speaker 2: thinking that maybe the walls are closing in, sometimes making
Speaker 2: a deal is the best move that you have.
Speaker 1: And so it comes to pass in the United States
Speaker 1: that Bentley the communist June Cleaver testifies in numerous very
Speaker 1: high profile investigations that Uncle Sam is conducting. This is
Speaker 1: also you know, shadows of the Red Scare, right, She's
Speaker 1: testified in communist influence investigations. She is a huge part
Speaker 1: in kicking off the second Red Scare. This is when,
Speaker 1: as we all recall, you could have your life and
Speaker 1: your career ruined because you went to the wrong meeting one.
Speaker 2: Time or Carthyism right, or you knew the wrong person. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you get pulled up in front of the House an
Speaker 2: Americans Committee and didn't get blacklisted from Hollywood. A lot
Speaker 2: of writers got thrown under the bus for previous membership
Speaker 2: in the US version of the Communist Party. It was
Speaker 2: it was not good. It was very much a witch hunt.
Speaker 1: Oh, very much so. And the House on American Volcanic Ready, yeah,
Speaker 1: the House on American Activities Committee. I love that you're
Speaker 1: mentioning that. A lot of people don't know that they
Speaker 1: started in nineteen thirty eight, but they continued all the
Speaker 1: way up until nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 2: Wow. I know they kind of went a little more underground, right,
Speaker 2: But they were weren't they keeping tabs on like John
Speaker 2: Lennon and stuff as well?
Speaker 1: Sure, everybody, Arthur Miller, anybody they could touch, so in these.
Speaker 2: But they weren't calling people publicly in front of their committee.
Speaker 2: They were just sort of operating a little more in
Speaker 2: the shadows. After that period, Yeah, they wouldn't.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't really pull people out into the public eye
Speaker 1: unless they felt they had some kind of evidence. In
Speaker 1: Bentley's testimony, often would consist of them saying, Hey, do
Speaker 1: you know this person in your work as a spy?
Speaker 1: Did you ever contact this person? Did you ever hear
Speaker 1: this code name or whatever? And I'm sure it got
Speaker 1: ridiculous at some point and they said, you know, have
Speaker 1: you ever interacted with the insert famous Hollywood screenwriter here
Speaker 1: or something like that.
Speaker 2: And know what was it? Dalton Trumbo was a big
Speaker 2: one that got railroaded. And lest we cast her in
Speaker 2: some kind of like, you know, again, we've already sort
Speaker 2: of couched it. This may well not have been some
Speaker 2: sort of moral about face, but less we cast her
Speaker 2: as some sort of you know, hero coming back and
Speaker 2: working for Uncle Sam. A lot of her testimony resulted
Speaker 2: in some people being very unfairly targeted and railroaded themselves
Speaker 2: as a direct result of her testimony. Oh yeah, man,
Speaker 2: one hundred percent. Her counter espionage was responsible for the
Speaker 2: conviction of party leaders eleven real life proven Communist Party leaders.
Speaker 2: But to your point, her testimonies also lit a match
Speaker 2: under that growing America paranoia of the Cold War. You know,
Speaker 2: who isn't a communist? Yeah, name names, report on your neighbors.
Speaker 2: It's very much like a similar situation with what was
Speaker 2: going on during the Cold War in Berlin. You know
Speaker 2: that was depicted in the film The Lives of Others,
Speaker 2: where you know, kids were even like reporting on their
Speaker 2: parents and all kinds of stuff like that, really really dirty,
Speaker 2: unclean stuff. As you would say, Ben, we're talking classified
Speaker 2: documents that she got her hands on, pieces of microfilm.
Speaker 2: She delivered information to the Soviets about Allied force plans
Speaker 2: regarding the invasion of Normandy. And she kept a lot
Speaker 2: of this stuff hidden in her knitting bag, which no
Speaker 2: one ever thought to dig through for information about what
Speaker 2: the B twenty nine bomber was going to be doing,
Speaker 2: but they really should have because that was definitely in there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she kind of got that far.
Speaker 1: Yes, specifically, she got the antela the B twenty nine.
Speaker 2: And when she testifies, she becomes a celebrity. For a time,
Speaker 2: She's all over the headlines. She is a.
Speaker 1: Legit, actual facts, public figure, as our friend Lauren would say.
Speaker 1: But as the years wend on and the news cycle
Speaker 1: and public attention shifts, her story falls into obscurity. Knitting
Speaker 1: espionage was so effective that multiple countries, including the United
Speaker 1: States Office of Censorship, restricted the international of knitting patterns.
Speaker 1: They did this in nineteen forty two. Because let's say
Speaker 1: you have correspondence right with a friend in Vienna who
Speaker 1: doesn't have a friend in Vienna, a.
Speaker 2: Friend in Vienna as a as a friend of mine.
Speaker 1: Doesn't it that it sounds like a weird album name.
Speaker 1: What band would have an album called a Friend in Vienna?
Speaker 1: Would it be Mountain goats, Billy Joe Joel.
Speaker 2: He has a song called Vienna Early Billy Joel slaps
Speaker 2: by the way, Oh yeah yeah. He was much more
Speaker 2: of a Leonard Cohen type figure early days, like really
Speaker 2: literate poetic song story type stuff, and Vienna is one
Speaker 2: of my favorites. Then I think we're about to reach
Speaker 2: the tangents and trivia part of our story, wherein we
Speaker 2: can set the record straight first and first and foremost,
Speaker 2: I think we owe this to the ridiculous historians out
Speaker 2: there to describe the difference between crocheting and knitting. They
Speaker 2: are not the same. They are not the same, and
Speaker 2: I know people were yelling at their podcast devices, but
Speaker 2: they are in fact distinctly different crafts. Knitting uses two
Speaker 2: needles to create much more stretchy and draping fabrics that
Speaker 2: might be better used for garments, while crocheting uses a
Speaker 2: hook and in order to produce a thicker and sturdier,
Speaker 2: a little rougher hewn fabric that might be better for
Speaker 2: blankets and the aforementioned little characters, little toys that your
Speaker 2: girlfriend and my kiddo like to craft. Knitting focuses much
Speaker 2: more on what's called live stitches, whereas crochet completes each
Speaker 2: stitch individually. Yeah. Yeah, and let's go over to Max
Speaker 2: as well, because Max, you wanted to clear the record
Speaker 2: on not just crochet, but also croquet croquette. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I've always had an issue with this one where I'm like,
Speaker 3: what's the difference between croquet, crochet, croquette? What is all
Speaker 3: these things? So obviously crochet is what we're talking about today,
Speaker 3: which is knitting, which is not to be confused with
Speaker 3: the sport croquet, which is an out of our game
Speaker 3: played on grass where players use malice to hit balls
Speaker 3: through a series of hoops, but also not to be
Speaker 3: confused with a croquette, which is a small breaded, fried
Speaker 3: and delicious.
Speaker 2: Which is what is it? Isn't it Cuban in origin?
Speaker 2: It is South American.
Speaker 3: Let's see, it's.
Speaker 2: A little pastry. It's a little savory pastry. I think
Speaker 2: it's everywhere it is. I guess, I guess where I
Speaker 2: typically see it is in.
Speaker 3: It's French.
Speaker 2: French, but the process of frying food is pretty common,
Speaker 2: especially with some bread crumbs. Yeah. No, it's a really
Speaker 2: good point. It also is another product of colonialism, where
Speaker 2: you will see potato croquettes and other types of croquettes
Speaker 2: very popular in some South American cuisine. I want to say,
Speaker 2: what is poppies. That's a Cuban, isn't it poppies the restaurant? Yeah, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: that's a place here at Balanta. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I find all this so interesting and so insightful,
Speaker 3: and I will forget it within an hour.
Speaker 1: That's okay, man, We'll have this episode out as long
Speaker 1: as society doesn't collapse, and maybe even a little bit after.
Speaker 2: And forgive me. The Caribbean and South American version of
Speaker 2: that food would typically be pronounced croquetas, but it very
Speaker 2: much comes from the same background and from that French
Speaker 2: culinary tradition, where you're going to see in Brazil, for example,
Speaker 2: yucca and mandioca croquettes, various fillings depending on the region
Speaker 2: that you're getting them from, and also differences in preparation.
Speaker 2: But just like we see the incredibly fantastic bond me
Speaker 2: sandwich in Vietnamese cuisine, you're going to see that French
Speaker 2: bread influence from the old colonial days of French influence
Speaker 2: over that region.
Speaker 1: And we have a proposition for you, folks. I have
Speaker 1: something we have to mention Just because knitting is no
Speaker 1: longer considered a very successful form of trade craft, like
Speaker 1: enemy forces know what to look for, it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that other innocuous things are not being used to communicate
Speaker 1: secret messages. One of the most interesting recent examples comes
Speaker 1: from our sister show stuff They Don't Want You To Know?
Speaker 1: Where was truly Nolan, Our pal Matt Frederick learned that
Speaker 1: the CIA was communicating secret messages through You'll Love this
Speaker 1: facs through purposefully dumb looking Star Wars fan sites.
Speaker 2: Oh god, I love it. It's such. It's another perfect
Speaker 2: example of this kind of stuff, things that are dismissed
Speaker 2: and hidden in planes like whoever you know? No one
Speaker 2: ever expects the the GeoCities Star Wars fan sites of old.
Speaker 2: But that is exactly what the covert agencies of the
Speaker 2: United States government were depending on when they used them
Speaker 2: as ways to communicate with their assets in the field. Yeah,
Speaker 2: did you ever hear about that with Max? No?
Speaker 3: But I don't spend much time on Star Wars fans
Speaker 3: dice because I spent all my time on.
Speaker 2: I'm kidding, that's not true. I'm gonna get canceled like
Speaker 2: Timothy Shallamy being dismissed of opera. Oh that was weird. No, no, no,
Speaker 2: much love to the Star Wars fan community out there.
Speaker 2: I guess the point, though, Ben, is that there were
Speaker 2: just a lot of them because it is so popular,
Speaker 2: and the lights we're talking about were like the bad ones,
Speaker 2: the low quality ones. You know.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, that's how they split it in so that
Speaker 1: that is the thing. History repeats itself quite often. So
Speaker 1: if just because knitting is no longer you know, a
Speaker 1: gold standard way of secretly communicating intelligence, that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that other things like that don't exist. Crappy, purposely crappy
Speaker 1: websites are I would propose a version of this same tactic.
Speaker 1: And you know what got me here, maybe we can
Speaker 1: start to end on this.
Speaker 2: Guys.
Speaker 1: What got me here is we're talking a little bit
Speaker 1: off air and when our research associate Maria first pitched
Speaker 1: this idea, it reminded me of another way of encoding
Speaker 1: messages through fabric. This is a true story, folks.
Speaker 2: The Incan Empire the key poo. Yeah, the Incan Empire.
Speaker 1: Had a coding system that we still don't understand that
Speaker 1: was entirely based upon notts.
Speaker 2: And shout out to our colleagues over it stuff to
Speaker 2: blow your mind. Robert and Joe who have done an
Speaker 2: extensive deep dive into the Keipoo on their podcast, Stuff
Speaker 2: to Blow your Mind, So do check them out as well.
Speaker 2: That's right, Ben, pictograms that they encoded using knotted string devices.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they were able to communicate similar to what
Speaker 1: you were saying in part one of this series. They
Speaker 1: were able to communicate pretty complex mathematical information that we
Speaker 1: can prove, uh through through these knots. They just used
Speaker 1: fleece and cotton and a lot of what modern society
Speaker 1: has figured out about the kipoo is that it was
Speaker 1: administrative stuff, census figures, tax allocation. You twist the strings,
Speaker 1: you make the knot, you show the information.
Speaker 2: Spreadsheets.
Speaker 1: Yeah you're making yeah, exactly, you're making a fabric spreadsheet
Speaker 1: just so, and uh, this is this is bizarre because
Speaker 1: I don't know about you guys, but Fellas to me,
Speaker 1: it makes sense that you could do that with knots,
Speaker 1: that you could do numerical information with knots, because it's
Speaker 1: no different from a spreadsheet or an abacus.
Speaker 2: Well, and maybe our boy Alan Turing, if he'd tried
Speaker 2: his hand at cracking the key poos, maybe would have
Speaker 2: had some success because, as we know, he famously cracked
Speaker 2: one of the most impenetrable codes in history, the Enigma,
Speaker 2: and also you know, won the war effort more or
Speaker 2: less for the Allies. But to this day we know
Speaker 2: some of what was encoded into these keipoos, but we
Speaker 2: have not been able to fully crack that code, and
Speaker 2: there are samples remaining today. A third of these devices,
Speaker 2: the so called narrative keypoos, appear to contain encoded non
Speaker 2: numerical narrative information, including names, stories, and even ancient philosophies.
Speaker 2: So if you're into puzzles and word games and things
Speaker 2: like that, if kipoos are something that you might dig, absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1: We wanted to mention this because, uh, it's it's still
Speaker 1: a real rumpic abyza, you know, like it's it's still
Speaker 1: a real head scratcher for people who, as you said,
Speaker 1: love puzzles. How do you use a series of knots
Speaker 1: to convey philosophy, to convey cultural myths or legend legendary traditions.
Speaker 1: We know you could spell a name right knitting figured
Speaker 1: that out for us later, But this happened before what
Speaker 1: we call Morse code. This happened before what we understand
Speaker 1: as binary reasoning. So if you can check this out,
Speaker 1: if you can help us solve the mystery of the
Speaker 1: over one thousand kipoos that remain unexplained in the modern day,
Speaker 1: that just like we say with the rational numbers, we
Speaker 1: will take you on an all expense paid trip to
Speaker 1: the David Busters of your choice asterisk, please keep it
Speaker 1: in the Atlanta metro area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are maybe three to choose from, and they
Speaker 2: are not all Dave and Busters are created equally, I
Speaker 2: might argue. And you know, we've been talking a lot
Speaker 2: about the kind of interchangeability of this type of coding
Speaker 2: with the foundations of modern computing. Unless you think it's
Speaker 2: just kind of parallel thinking, not entirely the case ben
Speaker 2: it would appear. And if you want to read a
Speaker 2: little further about this, we're going to hit you to
Speaker 2: an article that the Jacquard loom, which is a form
Speaker 2: of industrialized machine knitting, is actually considered a predecessor to
Speaker 2: modern computing, the punch card system, that big old room
Speaker 2: filling machines of the early days of computers. And you
Speaker 2: can check out programming patterns the story of the Karde
Speaker 2: loom Over at Science Industry Music Org dot UK. And
Speaker 2: it makes sense right because it is a form of automation.
Speaker 2: It's a surprising story and perhaps a story for another day.
Speaker 2: I think it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, folks, thank you so much for tuning in, fellow
Speaker 1: ridiculous historians. We hope this exploration finds you well and
Speaker 1: a mid grand adventure. We also want to thank our
Speaker 1: super producer, Max Croquet, Croquette, Crochet Williams.
Speaker 2: All different things. I do love a good game of croquet. Also,
Speaker 2: Patnk he ever played paatenk but not play. It's very
Speaker 2: similar to Bachi ball. I think French equivalent of boci ball,
Speaker 2: very similar.
Speaker 3: I thought of a lot of patnks.
Speaker 2: I don't understand.
Speaker 3: Oh, come on, you're the CLBs guy as well.
Speaker 2: I thought that that's right. There was a clarps I was.
Speaker 2: I was getting a Clarbscure reference in there. I need
Speaker 2: to jump back into that game. What a what a
Speaker 2: delet canvas? Oh boy?
Speaker 1: Thanks as well to Alex william M, Max's biological brother
Speaker 1: who composed this slap and bop Big Thanks to Rachel
Speaker 1: Doctor Big Spinach Lance as well as aj Bahamas Jacob's
Speaker 1: the Puzzler.
Speaker 2: And the rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime. If you
Speaker 2: dig our show, you're gonna dig theirs for sure. And
Speaker 2: thanks again to our research associate, brand new research associate, Maria,
Speaker 2: who absolutely knocked out of the park with this one.
Speaker 2: We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 2: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 2: to your favorite shows.