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