Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 2: We have something a little different and a little familiar
Speaker 2: for you here today on today's episode of Stuff to
Speaker 2: Blow Your Mind. In a way, this is kind of
Speaker 2: a spin off from our old anthology of horror series
Speaker 2: that we used to do, but it's also a response
Speaker 2: to listeners over the years who've written in about their
Speaker 2: nostalgia for marathons of TVs The Twilight Zone on the
Speaker 2: Sci Fi Channel on New Year's Eve and or New
Speaker 2: Year's Day?
Speaker 3: Do you know why they do that? Like, what's the
Speaker 3: connection with New Year's Is it just a coincidence or
Speaker 3: a coincidence?
Speaker 2: Is it random? I'm not entirely certain. I mean, I've
Speaker 2: been thinking about it a lot, Like why the Twilight
Speaker 2: Zone at New Year's And I guess it's because it's
Speaker 2: this space between right, I mean, I feel that heavily.
Speaker 2: Right now. It's like, all right, we're done with Christmas.
Speaker 2: The New Year's about to start, but it's not there yet,
Speaker 2: and even once it has started, it's not going to
Speaker 2: feel real for a little bit, so I don't know,
Speaker 2: it seems like maybe a fitting time. I'm also not
Speaker 2: super hip to all of like the cable channel business
Speaker 2: side of all of this, Like why does it even
Speaker 2: make sense to run, say a Turkey Day marathon? There
Speaker 2: may just be very like strong and pretty straightforward industry
Speaker 2: reasons why, you know, it's like, I don't know, you've
Speaker 2: got to put something on. Maybe there are more people
Speaker 2: watching at that time, but I don't know, over the years,
Speaker 2: you've seen these kind of holiday marathons really take root.
Speaker 2: Be it MST three K, Turkey Day, or I forget
Speaker 2: which turner channel would air a Christmas story just over
Speaker 2: and over again for like twenty four hour period.
Speaker 3: I wonder if it's that on days people are expected
Speaker 3: to be off work and home for a holiday, that
Speaker 3: they're more likely to just leave the TV on on
Speaker 3: a certain channel where they can expect to kind of
Speaker 3: some kind of like predictable stream in the background.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it could be it's something comforting and if
Speaker 2: you're like if you're a fan of the Twilight Zone
Speaker 2: or just old timey television in general, like there's a
Speaker 2: pretty good choice to put on in the background now
Speaker 2: for my own part. I think I probably watched episodes
Speaker 2: of the Twilight Zone this way because I believe they
Speaker 2: started doing these marathons on the Sci Fi Channel around
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety five, so I was definitely watching the channel,
Speaker 2: but I don't have strong specific memories of these marathons
Speaker 2: in the same way I do for the Turkey Day
Speaker 2: marathons or for particular tales from the crypt marathons that
Speaker 2: I caught like semi scrambled on HBO back in the day.
Speaker 2: And I think I was looking around. I think there
Speaker 2: may be some regional channels that did Twilight Zone marathons
Speaker 2: as far back as the nineteen eighties. So depending on
Speaker 2: where you are and where you were watching television, this
Speaker 2: might be very deeply rooted. So we figured, okay, let's
Speaker 2: lean into this idea. Let's take an episode of the
Speaker 2: Twilight Zone and consider it, give it sort of the
Speaker 2: old anthology of horror treatment, where we would in that
Speaker 2: we would take a horror anthology episode and we kind
Speaker 2: of like squeeze it out see what kind of science
Speaker 2: or culture we could get out of it. And we figured, Okay,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of episodes of the Twilight Zone
Speaker 2: we've talked about episodes of The Twilight Zone before, so
Speaker 2: there's got to be a good one. There's got to
Speaker 2: be a really juicy one that we can start juicing
Speaker 2: here on the show. And so we decided were to
Speaker 2: juice that it's got to be juicy. Yeah, it needs to.
Speaker 2: It needs to have at least three types of juice
Speaker 2: in it. So we decided to pick a season two episode.
Speaker 2: This is episode twenty four, the Rip Van Winkle Caper,
Speaker 2: which originally aired April twenty first, nineteen sixty one. Joe,
Speaker 2: is this one that you had seen previously?
Speaker 3: I think I had not seen this before, but I
Speaker 3: was aware of it, at least in part because a
Speaker 3: listener wrote in about it sometime in the past couple
Speaker 3: of years. And I forget what the original context of
Speaker 3: that was, but a listener wrote in about it, and
Speaker 3: so I had to explain it briefly in that listener
Speaker 3: mail episode where I was talking about that message. But yeah,
Speaker 3: I had not seen it before, at least as far
Speaker 3: as I remember. And so I laid down horizontally in
Speaker 3: my bed last night and watched it with a laptop
Speaker 3: sitting on my chest the way Rod Serling intended.
Speaker 2: Yes, clearly. Well, there's no bad way to watch a
Speaker 2: Twilight Zone episode. So this is one that I had
Speaker 2: seen on television a long time ago, and I do
Speaker 2: I do remember this one having an impact on me,
Speaker 2: Like it was clever and it's plotting, but also in
Speaker 2: its treatment of human value systems, so as we'll discuss,
Speaker 2: you know, it's it's very economic piece. And that's the
Speaker 2: thing about the Twilight Zone that they didn't have a
Speaker 2: lot of time to bust out their stories and their
Speaker 2: twist and really hit you over the head with some meaning.
Speaker 2: But you know, they generally managed to do a pretty
Speaker 2: good job of it. Sometimes they would, you know, these
Speaker 2: episodes would be more sci fi in nature, other times
Speaker 2: a little more magical realism or outright magical. This one,
Speaker 2: this one's I guess, more in the sci fi area,
Speaker 2: but not so much concerned with the SI so much.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, a significant chunk of it does take place
Speaker 3: in the future from our perspective, but also is only
Speaker 3: the slightest bit concerned with what that future is like.
Speaker 3: I mean, the characters barely encounter the future. They're just
Speaker 3: mostly wandering in a desert in the future, which would
Speaker 3: have been the same if it was one hundred years
Speaker 3: beyond or one hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And one thing that becomes clear if you watch
Speaker 2: a number of Twilight Zone episodes is that they'll frequently
Speaker 2: come back to the well on sort of a base,
Speaker 2: sort of gimmicks. So this is one of I think
Speaker 2: several wandering in the Desert episodes, you know, because it
Speaker 2: was it was a location that was attainable, and there
Speaker 2: are all sorts of stories you can tell about wandering
Speaker 2: through the desert, be it a situation where time traveling bandits,
Speaker 2: bandits are trying to get their gold to the nearest town,
Speaker 2: or astronauts who think they're on an alien planet but
Speaker 2: they're actually just outside of Las Vegas. There are so
Speaker 2: many different ways to spin it, you know.
Speaker 3: This episode does have the significant plot point of people
Speaker 3: trying to get their stash of gold ingots from a
Speaker 3: cave in the middle of the desert back to town
Speaker 3: by foot, and they're like dying along the way. You
Speaker 3: would think they would just stash the gold somewhere and
Speaker 3: walk without carrying it. I think they might have lived
Speaker 3: if they had done so, if they had made choices, Well,
Speaker 3: what is they think a porcupine is going to find
Speaker 3: their gold and take away or something. I don't know
Speaker 3: what lives in the desert. Not a porcupine, armadillo or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, heavily, this will come for the gold, all right. Well.
Speaker 2: This episode was written by Twilight Zone maestro Rod Serling,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen twenty four through nineteen seventy five, and
Speaker 2: it was directed by TV director Justice Attis who lived
Speaker 2: nineteen seventeen through nineteen seventy nine, who also directed two films,
Speaker 2: fifty eight's Cry Baby Killer and nineteen sixty six is
Speaker 2: the Magnificent Stranger, though this late. This latter picture was
Speaker 2: cobbled together from two episodes of TV's Raw Hide. This
Speaker 2: sounds great, Well, you know, I don't know. I've seen
Speaker 2: watchable films that were cobbled together in that manner, so
Speaker 2: who knows.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: So this particular episode of The Twilight Zone concerns a
Speaker 2: band of criminals working for a mastermind by the name
Speaker 2: of Farwell. Farwell is an intellectual we'll come to realize.
Speaker 2: He has expertise at least a couple of different areas,
Speaker 2: and he is played by Oscar Bareiki Junior lived nineteen
Speaker 2: eighteen through nineteen seventy six, a Hungarian born actor, whose father,
Speaker 2: Oscar Bragi Senior, escaped the Holocaust and had previously appeared
Speaker 2: in Fritz Lang's The Testament of Doctor Maiboos in nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty three. Baggie Junior did a lot of TV work
Speaker 2: and appeared in such films as seventy four as Young Frankenstein,
Speaker 2: but is perhaps best remembered for three Twilight Zone appearances,
Speaker 2: including sixty one's Deaths Had Revisited and also the episode Mute.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I know either of those.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're not two episodes. I'm that familiar with it,
Speaker 2: And I'm not sure if they fall into any of
Speaker 2: the sort of like standard buckets of like desert wanderers
Speaker 2: or weird airplane Shenanigans and so forth.
Speaker 3: Or Monkeys Paul scenarios.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Farwell's band here includes criminals played by John
Speaker 2: Mitcham that's Robert's younger brother, and most notably Simon Oakland,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen fifteen through nineteen eighty three as the
Speaker 2: merciless D'Cruz.
Speaker 3: Ooh, D'Cruz. He's a mean one, isn't.
Speaker 2: He he is? I remember being rather impressed by his
Speaker 2: meanness as a young viewer, because we learned pretty quickly
Speaker 2: that he's ruthless when it comes to the gold. Oakland
Speaker 2: will be familiar with many film fans out there for
Speaker 2: his roles in Psycho, West Side Story from sixty one,
Speaker 2: The Sand Pebbles from sixty six, and Bullet from sixty eight,
Speaker 2: And I realized, oh, yeah, that's as I was rewatching
Speaker 2: this episode. I think that's where i'd primarily seen it
Speaker 2: before Bullet.
Speaker 3: Now I'm trying to remember who is he in Psycho.
Speaker 3: He's not the detective or is he one of the
Speaker 3: cops At the end.
Speaker 2: He plays doctor Richmond. I haven't seen Psycho in a
Speaker 2: long time, so I don't remember who this character is.
Speaker 3: Could he be the psychiatrist who comes out at the
Speaker 3: end of the film to explain things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he could be. He's like each Psycho analysis one
Speaker 2: bar of gold. I think that's pretty standard. So this
Speaker 2: is a fun episode. Like I said, the location was
Speaker 2: readily available Death Valley National Park, and looking around at
Speaker 2: different rankings, this episode tends not to rank as highly
Speaker 2: as some of the really iconic episodes like Time Enough
Speaker 2: at Last or The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,
Speaker 2: or certainly the Airline episodes like Nightmare twenty thousand Feet
Speaker 2: or the Odyssey of Flight thirty three, but it does
Speaker 2: seem to be generally very well regarded by Twilight Zone fans,
Speaker 2: Like this is not one of those that people seem
Speaker 2: to just completely forget that it exists. I don't know
Speaker 2: if it's anyone's absolute top episode, but it's really solid
Speaker 2: and again, I remember being impressed by its brutality, its
Speaker 2: twist ending, and so forth when I watched it for
Speaker 2: the first time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like a lot of Twilight Zone episodes, not all,
Speaker 3: but a lot hinges a lot on the twist endings
Speaker 3: to really make its point.
Speaker 2: But it's a pretty great twist. So yeah, we'll just
Speaker 2: run through the plot really quickly here. So a crew
Speaker 2: of criminals, again led by former chemistry and physics professor
Speaker 2: mister Farewell, sets out to steal a bunch of gold.
Speaker 2: We're told it's ten million dollars worth of gold bars
Speaker 2: that are bound for Fort Knox.
Speaker 3: I think they had them in a truck going for
Speaker 3: a train. No, a train, right, yeah, yeah, a train
Speaker 3: because D'Cruz blows up the tracks. Yeah that's how they
Speaker 3: get the train to stop.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we we we do learn that each member
Speaker 2: of the crew has a different skill set as his
Speaker 2: standard for your heist. Though we don't see the heist really, right,
Speaker 2: it's just it's we're just kind of told it worked,
Speaker 2: they pulled it off, they got the gold. But then
Speaker 2: what And those skill sets, by the way, were mechanical engineering, firearms,
Speaker 2: and demolition.
Speaker 3: Right, so D'Cruz does demolition, mechanical engineering. Is this other
Speaker 3: guy named I forget his name, And then there's this
Speaker 3: this guy named Brooks who is sort of at odds
Speaker 3: with D'Cruz at multiple points, and he just seems to
Speaker 3: be the gun guy. He's the button man.
Speaker 2: So, as the characters point out, all right, we've got
Speaker 2: the gold, but one thing about crime is how do
Speaker 2: you get away with it? Where are you going to
Speaker 2: take your gold? Where are you going to spend it,
Speaker 2: where are you going to hide out? And indeed, where
Speaker 2: are you going to run to? But farwell as a
Speaker 2: smart cookie, and he has it figured out. They're going
Speaker 2: to escape into the future.
Speaker 3: The last place that the cops would look, and.
Speaker 2: They're going to They're going to accomplish this, you know,
Speaker 2: not via the standard method of going to the future
Speaker 2: by just continuing to exist at the normal pace of things.
Speaker 2: They're also not going to use a time machine, but
Speaker 2: they are going to use a set of suspended animation
Speaker 2: chambers that are secreted away in a death valley cave.
Speaker 3: Right, So their method of traveling into the future is
Speaker 3: to sleep for one hundred years when when at the
Speaker 3: time they emerge, it will be safe to spend their
Speaker 3: gold without raising any suspicion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the statute of limitations on stealing a bunch of
Speaker 2: gold from the US government will be will be, it
Speaker 2: will be over. Yeah, probably not. But their idea is like, okay,
Speaker 2: but by this time, like we'll be in the clear.
Speaker 2: Nobody will be looking for us this this gold will
Speaker 2: just be lost. There will maybe be you know, conspiracy
Speaker 2: theorists out there. They're like, remember the story the lost
Speaker 2: Gold and so forth. They'll they'll be in the clear.
Speaker 2: So that's that's the tactic here. They're just gonna park
Speaker 2: the loot and hibernate within these high tech chambers for
Speaker 2: a century and then then they're free. What could possibly
Speaker 2: go wrong?
Speaker 3: You know, maybe I don't know enough about gold. I
Speaker 3: would have assumed that gold is fairly easy to get,
Speaker 3: because it's not like you know, banknotes or something that
Speaker 3: would have serial numbers, or it's got a die pack
Speaker 3: in it. You know, gold you can melt down, and
Speaker 3: can't you just turned I don't know. Maybe maybe they
Speaker 3: could have special radioactive isotopes in them or something that
Speaker 3: would make it traceable. But but who knows. But my
Speaker 3: assumption would be the gold is fairly easy to disguise
Speaker 3: the origin of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it could melt it down, right, I don't
Speaker 2: At any rate, we can disagree on whether this is
Speaker 2: really a great plan or not, but it seems like
Speaker 2: a great idea within the context of the show. It's
Speaker 2: a best laid plan in fact, and we know what
Speaker 2: happens to those. So let's start talking about how things
Speaker 2: go wrong, the complications that occur. Yeah, So, first of all,
Speaker 2: in this one, I've strongly remembered from watching this when
Speaker 2: I was younger, When they wake up in their simplistic
Speaker 2: cryogenic chambers and they begin to emerge, they quickly learned
Speaker 2: that one of the criminals, mister Irby, is long dead
Speaker 2: because a random rock had fallen from the cavern ceiling
Speaker 2: and broken open the top of his suspension chamber. So
Speaker 2: it's just a skeleton in there.
Speaker 3: Now, yeah, just a skeleton with rings on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which pretty impressive. I liked it. And then things
Speaker 2: get more complicated because D'Cruz, again the demolition guy, the
Speaker 2: nastiest member of the team. He ends up killing Brooks,
Speaker 2: their firearm expert. In what are they fighting over? Who's
Speaker 2: going to drive the truck into civilization?
Speaker 3: That's what happens immediately before he kills him. But it
Speaker 3: is I think rather confusing. So it for yeah, they're
Speaker 3: arguing about who's going to be driving and who's going
Speaker 3: to be in the back of the truck watching the
Speaker 3: gold while they drive. Also, they have a truck that's
Speaker 3: been sitting in a cave for one hundred years and
Speaker 3: it still just starts up fine.
Speaker 2: It's for tough, right.
Speaker 3: But so yeah, they start up their truck just works
Speaker 3: fine after one hundred years, and for some reason, Brooks
Speaker 3: is out walking ahead of where the truck is and
Speaker 3: D'Cruz drives the truck into him, like runs him down
Speaker 3: with the truck, but jumps out of the truck so
Speaker 3: that the truck after that goes over the edge of
Speaker 3: a cliff and crashes on the rocks low and then
Speaker 3: he you know, says to Farwell, who's standing there looking
Speaker 3: on incredulous. He's like, you know, it looks like poor
Speaker 3: mister Brooks had an accident with a truck. But I
Speaker 3: was thinking, who is he trying to fool here? And
Speaker 3: how does it What does it mean that the truck
Speaker 3: was wrecked, Like, why would that affect anything? It just
Speaker 3: seems like they're I don't know, it seemed like they
Speaker 3: had to get rid of the truck somehow. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: that part made the least sense to me of anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it does deliver us to this resulting scenario. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we're down to just two people. Farwell again, the intellectual
Speaker 2: d'cruze the nasty demolitions expert. They have all the gold
Speaker 2: between them, but they don't have a truck. They're gonna
Speaker 2: have to lug what however much gold they can carry
Speaker 2: across the desert into civilization all by themselves. So they
Speaker 2: set out. They travel by day. Of course, that's the
Speaker 2: only proper time to travel with an enormous amount of gold.
Speaker 2: During the middle the day through the desert, they clearly
Speaker 2: needed a ranger or a desert survival expert in their crew.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think they just couldn't have anticipated that
Speaker 3: Dacruz would have this amazing idea of what to do
Speaker 3: with the.
Speaker 2: Trallic I mean, he demolished it. That's his skill set, right,
Speaker 2: you're right, yeah, they should have seen it coming. So
Speaker 2: our two surviving criminals, they're hiking along and Farwell quickly
Speaker 2: discovers that he's lost his canteen. They have one canteen each, apparently,
Speaker 2: which is the appropriate amount of water for trekking across
Speaker 2: the open desert during the middle of the day, and
Speaker 2: D'Cruz begins to sell Farwell SIPs from his own canteen
Speaker 2: at the extravagant price of one gold bar per sip.
Speaker 2: And I really like this. I think like it's an
Speaker 2: excellent introduction to the episode's core themes of the shifting
Speaker 2: value of resources. How much is a gold bar worth? Well,
Speaker 2: how much is a sip of water worth? The answers
Speaker 2: are highly conditional.
Speaker 3: Right, So obviously Farwell's logic is that gold is worth
Speaker 3: nothing if I'm not alive to spend it. So I
Speaker 3: will give you a whole gold bar for one sip
Speaker 3: of water, because that's my only chance to make it
Speaker 3: to the town we're going to. And D'Cruz is not
Speaker 3: going to take pity on him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So eventually Dacruz, relishing the Cruelty of it all,
Speaker 2: ups the price one more time, saying, what it's like
Speaker 2: two bars of gold for a sip or something, and
Speaker 2: Farwell's just basically out of gold. So Farwell loses it,
Speaker 2: beats the Cruz to death in the desert with one
Speaker 2: of the blocks of gold, I think maybe his last
Speaker 2: block of gold, and so now we just have Farwell
Speaker 2: as the lone survivor. He scoops up as much gold
Speaker 2: as he can carry, which isn't much at this point.
Speaker 2: He marches on, but as he wanders, you know, more
Speaker 2: and more through the desert and he doesn't encounter a
Speaker 2: single living soul, He's forced to steadily shed his gold
Speaker 2: bars until he collapses with just a single bar of
Speaker 2: gold clutched in his dying hands.
Speaker 3: Note that they have not met anyone in the future
Speaker 3: at this point, and at one point while they're walking,
Speaker 3: they speculate, They're like, you know, what if there is
Speaker 3: nobody to meet here, what if there's a war, and
Speaker 3: what if there was a war, what if we're living?
Speaker 3: You know, what if humanity no longer exists? And they
Speaker 3: decide that they think that there is somebody out there
Speaker 3: to meet because they see airplanes flying over in the sky.
Speaker 3: I remember, so they're like, okay, so there is still civilization,
Speaker 3: but who knows what it'll be like.
Speaker 2: It could the airplanes could be full of apes. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Serling of course. Yeah, credit due with that twist as well,
Speaker 2: but it did any rate. Farwell loses consciousness. Having collapsed,
Speaker 2: he opens his eyes and he finds a man looming
Speaker 2: over him. He offers this stranger his one remaining bar
Speaker 2: of gold and says, it's you know, this is gold.
Speaker 2: This is gold. It's yours if you just take me
Speaker 2: to the nearest town. But then he dies before the
Speaker 2: stranger can really respond to him, and the stranger is
Speaker 2: just kind of puzzled by this, and he turns around.
Speaker 2: He walks back to his future car, which I'm to
Speaker 2: understand is a reused prop from Forbidden Planet.
Speaker 3: Oh with the little bubbles in front of the face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I didn't do a side by side, so
Speaker 2: I don't know if they augmented it at all or
Speaker 2: if they just drove it right out of the lot
Speaker 2: and reused it.
Speaker 3: But I was wondering why it looked so familiar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he returned. He walks over to the future
Speaker 2: car and who we presume is his wife, I guess,
Speaker 2: is setting there and she's like, what's going on with
Speaker 2: that man? Is that dead man over there? And he's like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: he totally died. And the weird thing is is he
Speaker 2: gave me this piece of he said it was gold.
Speaker 2: What's he doing with gold? Out of here? Out here?
Speaker 2: And then they both reveal, uh, oh, gold is useless
Speaker 2: in this future getting there like, didn't gold used to
Speaker 2: be worth something? Didn't people make a big deal out
Speaker 2: of it? And he's like, yeah, yeah, back before we
Speaker 2: could just manufacture it. It will.
Speaker 3: So in Farwell's defense, based on what they say there,
Speaker 3: I would say gold is not worthless in this future.
Speaker 3: It's probably worth I don't know, twenty dollars a pound.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's worth something. That's why people make all
Speaker 2: they need of it, you know. And from our certainly
Speaker 2: we can assume it's used in all sorts of crazy
Speaker 2: futuristic electronic parts there. You know, there's probably a fair
Speaker 2: amount of gold in that future car that they're driving in.
Speaker 2: But yeah, that's that's the big twist of this episode,
Speaker 2: is this precious commodity that these criminals you know, stole,
Speaker 2: gave up their lives for, you know, traveled essentially traveled
Speaker 2: through time with and then killed each other and died
Speaker 2: for it. Turns out it was worth nothing.
Speaker 3: You can tell. Rod just loves this irony. Yes, he's
Speaker 3: really relishing the narration in this one, especially because I
Speaker 3: always forget that it does this where you don't you
Speaker 3: don't just get his narration at the beginning and the end.
Speaker 3: There's also a mid point stinger where you're in the
Speaker 3: cave with these four criminals and they're arguing, and the
Speaker 3: camera just pans over. Oh there's Rod. He's right there
Speaker 3: in the cave and he's like four men arguing over gold.
Speaker 3: You know what will become of them? We can only
Speaker 3: find out in the twilight Zone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he can appear at any moment, you never know.
Speaker 2: But yeah, his closing narration is juicy. He says, the
Speaker 2: last of four root van Winkles, who all died precisely
Speaker 2: the way they lived, chasing an idol across the sand
Speaker 2: to wind up bleach to dry in the hot sun.
Speaker 2: As so much desert flotsam worthless as the gold bullion,
Speaker 2: they built a shrine too Tonight's lesson in the Twilight Zone.
Speaker 3: I love how in these little narrated segments they're simultaneously
Speaker 3: trying to do so much in so few words, but
Speaker 3: also just recapping the plot of what you just saw.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I wonder how much of that, too, was thinking like, well,
Speaker 2: people might not have caught the beginning of the episode,
Speaker 2: and you can't just run it back, So yeah, you've
Speaker 2: got to do everything you can to make sure that
Speaker 2: meaning is at the forefront of the viewer's experience, even
Speaker 2: if they didn't catch the whole episode.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, TVO in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, well let's get into it. Obviously we're
Speaker 2: gonna be talking about value, because that's ultimately what this
Speaker 2: episode is about, and particularly when it comes to metals
Speaker 2: and specifically when it comes to gold. And I'll be honest,
Speaker 2: I grew up watching this episode and the Bond movie
Speaker 2: Goldfinger Finger, and my understanding of the economics of gold
Speaker 2: value still probably hinges mostly on these two treatments. Like
Speaker 2: I over heard something on NPR the other day where
Speaker 2: they were talking about, you know, the value of gold
Speaker 2: and the gold standard, and you know it, most of
Speaker 2: it made sense to me. But at heart, I just
Speaker 2: still come back to this episode, the Rip Van Winkle
Speaker 2: Caper and Goldfinger is my way of understanding the value
Speaker 2: of gold Man.
Speaker 3: When I was a kid, I thought the plot of
Speaker 3: Goldfinger was just brilliant, and I was like, I thought
Speaker 3: it was amazing. Oh my god, he's gonna, yeah, use
Speaker 3: a nuke on all the gold to make the gold
Speaker 3: he's already got worth so much more. That's nobody else
Speaker 3: would have thought of that. That's really good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Essentially his plot was to lick all the role
Speaker 2: dinner rolls. Yes, and then the unlicked dinner roles which
Speaker 2: are on his plate are the most valuable ones. Valuable ones.
Speaker 2: Then you know, I guess there's some there's a fair
Speaker 2: amount of economic truth to all of that. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I left these two media properties knowing that number one,
Speaker 2: less non radiated gold in circulation makes non radiated gold
Speaker 2: worth more. Okay, gold is worthless if you're thirsty. Gold
Speaker 2: is only worth as much as people are willing to
Speaker 2: pay for it.
Speaker 3: True, basically anything true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, an excess of gold makes that gold worthless. And
Speaker 2: if you paint a naked woman gold, she'll die. All
Speaker 2: these statements I think are essentially correct.
Speaker 3: I don't know, does painting somebody gold actually kill them?
Speaker 3: I have questions about that.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I haven't really done a deep biology
Speaker 2: dive on that recently. I guess that the logic was
Speaker 2: that her skin couldn't breathe anymore because she was covered
Speaker 2: in gold, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but we breathe through our lungs, not our skin.
Speaker 2: Well lungs too. I don't know. We'll put a pin
Speaker 2: in this one. We'll come back to the gold gold
Speaker 2: finger question in the future.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Maybe I only learned four things.
Speaker 3: I'm sure it wouldn't be good for you. Maybe it's fatal.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I'm just raising the question.
Speaker 2: All right, So why is gold valuable? Well, I mean
Speaker 2: it's gold, right, I mean it kind of comes back
Speaker 2: to like that's you know, everybody wants money, that's why
Speaker 2: they call it money. Right. But you know, the answer
Speaker 2: basically comes down to three factors in our modern age.
Speaker 2: The first one is that it's pretty. It's great to
Speaker 2: look at. It's the color of the sun all always
Speaker 2: has been and maybe always will be. Another aspect, of course,
Speaker 2: is that it's rare. Estimates very on this, but the
Speaker 2: amount of gold that has ever been mined on Earth
Speaker 2: can fit into something like three Olympic swimming pools. I've
Speaker 2: also read inside a twenty two meter cube. These these
Speaker 2: types of analogies can be a little confusing because you
Speaker 2: can sort of picture it, but you can't, and then
Speaker 2: you can think, oh, that doesn't sound like a lot
Speaker 2: of gold, and then you can easily be reminded that's
Speaker 2: an awful lot of anything. And then there's also the
Speaker 2: fact that most of it was mined since then, since
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty. So gold is rare throughout the universe, produced
Speaker 2: in high energy cosmic events, and rare on Earth because
Speaker 2: most of what wound up here sank deep into the
Speaker 2: Earth long ago, and most of what we do have
Speaker 2: came via asteroid bombardments later on. So gold is literally
Speaker 2: not of this world. I think we can say that,
Speaker 2: especially in an episode that we started via discussion of
Speaker 2: the Twilight Zone. It's rare, and it's made by cosmic
Speaker 2: events that are high energy in nature.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so the constrained supply of gold is one
Speaker 3: of the attributes that people prize it for when it's
Speaker 3: used as a currency or basis of currency. So the
Speaker 3: idea is like, well, you can't just, you know, infinitely
Speaker 3: inflate your currency if it's based on gold or so
Speaker 3: the thinking was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's where we get the you know, the
Speaker 2: idea of the gold standard, the historical monetary system where
Speaker 2: the currency value is tied to gold. This is what
Speaker 2: British economist John Maynard Keynes referred to as the barbarous relic,
Speaker 2: the idea that it was an outdated thing to base
Speaker 2: the nations and international wealth in general on, and yet
Speaker 2: it continues to to stand as a significant asset. Gold
Speaker 2: has not gone away. And then, of course, while gold
Speaker 2: was long valued for its decorative aspects, during the nineteen
Speaker 2: thirties and the nineteen forties, it began to become important
Speaker 2: in telecommunications, and then again during the fifties and sixties
Speaker 2: as a semiconductor. It also has various uses in aerospace.
Speaker 2: So we now live in a world where gold is
Speaker 2: valued for both esthetic and highly practical technological reasons. Gold
Speaker 2: is valued by people who just want to wear it,
Speaker 2: by people who want to shut it away in a vault,
Speaker 2: and by people who want to use it in the
Speaker 2: circuitry of a microchip or on the visor of a
Speaker 2: space helment. So it does make sense that we would
Speaker 2: want more of it from a number from a number
Speaker 2: of a vantage points. Right, want more of it because
Speaker 2: it's great to look at it, and I want to
Speaker 2: make more things out of it. But also there are
Speaker 2: all these practical applications for it, and one can imagine
Speaker 2: that the need for such precious metals will just continue
Speaker 2: in the future. So what can we do to get
Speaker 2: more of it as opposed to just the normal mining
Speaker 2: efforts that we already have. And there's some really interesting
Speaker 2: science here. One idea that scientists have discussed is, of course,
Speaker 2: to get it somewhere else, somewhere not of this Earth.
Speaker 2: And granted we have the universal rarity factor to consider,
Speaker 2: but that doesn't mean it can't be found in reasonable
Speaker 2: abundance in specific places, such as possibly the asteroid sixteen
Speaker 2: Psyche in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. In fact,
Speaker 2: NASA's Psyche spacecraft launched in twenty twenty three. It's not
Speaker 2: actually going to get to the asteroid toll I think
Speaker 2: twenty twenty nine, and even then it's just going to
Speaker 2: study it. It's not going to bring anything back. It's
Speaker 2: also not expressly going there to prospect for gold. There
Speaker 2: are a number of astrogeology objectives in play, and we
Speaker 2: used to think that Psyche was mostly metal. More recent
Speaker 2: estimates look at a possible thirty to sixty percent metal
Speaker 2: composite alongside rock. But it very well may contain significant
Speaker 2: amounts of metal from the core of a Planetismal, and
Speaker 2: that could mean a fair amount of gold. So that's
Speaker 2: one possibility. This asteroid is most like a survivor of
Speaker 2: multiple collisions during the formation of the Solar System, and
Speaker 2: thus it might have, on one level, just much to reveal,
Speaker 2: perhaps giving us a better understanding of how Earth's core
Speaker 2: and the cores of earth like worlds formed. But it
Speaker 2: could be a potential source of gold, as are various
Speaker 2: other suspected metal monster asteroids out there. So in theory, yes,
Speaker 2: we could harvest them, mine them, bring back gold, and
Speaker 2: bring it back in enough abundance to destabilize the value
Speaker 2: of gold here on Earth.
Speaker 3: So by mentioning this, are you trying to address the
Speaker 3: question of could we actually have a scenario like in
Speaker 3: the Rip Van Winkle Caper where we have criminals go
Speaker 3: to sleep and then they wake up and all the
Speaker 3: gold they stole is no longer as valuable as it
Speaker 3: once was.
Speaker 2: Correct, Yeah, could we have a situation like that occur? Essentially,
Speaker 2: could gold be devalued to such a degree on Earth?
Speaker 2: And it seems like yes it could. And the main
Speaker 2: way that it could happen would be if something like
Speaker 2: this occurred, if we did actually reach the point where
Speaker 2: we were harvesting gold from asteroids and bringing back to Earth,
Speaker 2: bearing in mind, of course, that there are multiple technological
Speaker 2: hurdles to that, and it would have to be you know,
Speaker 2: there would have to be some major will behind the
Speaker 2: quest to get that particular gold. Now, another possibility, and
Speaker 2: one that we've discussed in greater depth in the show before,
Speaker 2: is the capture of trace amounts of gold and seawater
Speaker 2: via absorption, electrochemical extraction, and biomineralization via gold loving bacteria. Yeah.
Speaker 3: We talked about this, I believe in an episode about
Speaker 3: the I don't remember if it had a specific name,
Speaker 3: but the Lubec Main Great Gold Hoax. There was a
Speaker 3: guy who went there and convinced a bunch of people
Speaker 3: that they could harvest vast amounts of gold from the seawater. Uh,
Speaker 3: And it turned out and he didn't actually have a
Speaker 3: method for doing that.
Speaker 2: It was all a.
Speaker 3: Scam, but that it is possible in principle to harvest
Speaker 3: some amount of gold from the ocean, and it has
Speaker 3: in ways been done with The question would be what
Speaker 3: is the efficiency of doing so?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah? Yeah? The problem, as I understand it, is
Speaker 2: you'd need to process and success successfully process a colossal
Speaker 2: amount of sea water in order to get even a
Speaker 2: gram of gold. And this means that it's it's currently
Speaker 2: not all that feasible as a primary process, but in
Speaker 2: the future, the idea is it might prove useful as
Speaker 2: a secondary process for something like industrial scale desalination. So
Speaker 2: you're already carrying out an industrial process with the salt water.
Speaker 2: Is it possible that you have this secondary process going
Speaker 2: on that is generating gold for you?
Speaker 3: Interesting?
Speaker 2: Okay. Likewise, there's apparently this one. I was not familiar
Speaker 2: with it because I don't think we talked about this.
Speaker 2: Maybe we did and I've forgotten it. But there's also
Speaker 2: the potential for gold capture in sewage like human sewitch. Okay, cool,
Speaker 2: there's gold and den Derek toilets.
Speaker 3: Is this from people drinking gold schlager. There's enough of
Speaker 3: that worldwide that you could recapture some of that and
Speaker 3: repurpose it.
Speaker 2: I think the answer is yes, But I don't think
Speaker 2: goldslager is is really singled out as like one of
Speaker 2: the primary factors here. But yeah, you're dealing with trace
Speaker 2: amounts of gold in our wist, in our waste water,
Speaker 2: and this apparently comes from traces of gold lost off
Speaker 2: of jewelry industrial waste, but also food additives, which I
Speaker 2: think that includes goldslagger. I'm going to throw it in
Speaker 2: there that in your like gold foil based fancy pastries
Speaker 2: and so forth. So essentially human.
Speaker 3: Life eat some of that gold.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know where it's going to go. But essentially,
Speaker 2: I guess the idea is lot human life lived alongside
Speaker 2: gold means tiny bits of gold make their way down
Speaker 2: our drains and toilets, and the process to reclaim this
Speaker 2: gold could also prove environmentally helpful in keeping harmful substances
Speaker 2: out of the environment.
Speaker 3: Oh you mean other things would be filtered out seage, Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so not just the gold, but various other substances
Speaker 2: as well. Kathleen Smith of the US Geological Survey is
Speaker 2: quoted in the twenty fifteen Guardian article gold in feces
Speaker 2: is worth millions and could save the environment. That was
Speaker 2: authored by Hannah Devlin at the time said that that
Speaker 2: gold had been found at the level of minimal mineral
Speaker 2: deposits in human sewage systems, and once more, kind of
Speaker 2: like with the oceanic gold capture example, there's a potential
Speaker 2: here for a secondary process. So you wouldn't have a
Speaker 2: harvesting scheme that was just going straight after the gold
Speaker 2: in the sewage, but perhaps it could become a secondary
Speaker 2: process alongside basic sewage management. Okay, cool, Though to be
Speaker 2: clear here, of the tactics we've discussed here, the sewage
Speaker 2: and the saltwater options are not going to devalue gold.
Speaker 2: I couldn't find anybody making that argument. I think the
Speaker 2: main way it could potentially happen at some point in
Speaker 2: the future would be if we were bringing a lot
Speaker 2: of gold back from asteroids.
Speaker 3: Okay, so if we have a space mining program, then
Speaker 3: there would be a significant impact obviously, right.
Speaker 2: But then there's another option. What about the alchemical solution
Speaker 2: the generation of gold as it's alluded to in this episode.
Speaker 2: So as already mentioned, we already mentioned gold is an
Speaker 2: extraterrestrial product of intense stellar energy, so we're talking neutron
Speaker 2: star collisions and supernova and this would surely mean that
Speaker 2: humans would need to have such power at their fingertips. Right,
Speaker 2: one would think, yeah, but this is not I mean,
Speaker 2: it's one of those things. The reality of it is
Speaker 2: not far fetched. The scalable reality of it might might
Speaker 2: be far fetched. But yeah, I was reading a bit
Speaker 2: about this. Much has been written on this topic. Tom
Speaker 2: Bartlett had a great article about this recently in the
Speaker 2: Atlantic The profiling a new San Francisco company that was
Speaker 2: arguing that gold could be generated as once more a
Speaker 2: byproduct of another process, in this case a byproduct of
Speaker 2: nuclear fusion, which of course is in many ways the
Speaker 2: holy grail of atomic energy, entailing not the splitting of
Speaker 2: the atom as in fission, but the process by which
Speaker 2: two or more atomic nuclei combine to form a larger
Speaker 2: nucleus and potentially release a tremendous amount of energy in
Speaker 2: the process. So the San Francisco company in question argues
Speaker 2: that by tweaking the process, one could create gold as
Speaker 2: a secondary byproduct of nuclear fusion, thus offsetting the cost
Speaker 2: of the energy production. Specifically, they think one could create
Speaker 2: gold from mercury one ninety eight by bombarding it with neutrons,
Speaker 2: changing it into the less stable mercury one ninety seven,
Speaker 2: which would then decay into gold one ninety seven, the
Speaker 2: stable isotope of gold. This is hypothetical, however, and the
Speaker 2: results in gold might be gold fingered and require lengthy
Speaker 2: storage before it could be utilized.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And as with anything about nuclear fusion, always you know,
Speaker 3: let's wait until we see the results, because they're you know,
Speaker 3: for years and years, always lots of claims about what
Speaker 3: could be done with nuclear fusion. And but yeah, interesting
Speaker 3: to think about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So again, the idea of creating gold through a
Speaker 2: technique like this at scale open question. But the basic idea,
Speaker 2: the basic thing they're hypothesizing about here isn't isn't all
Speaker 2: that new. It's called nuclear transmutation, and we've already successfully
Speaker 2: carried it out via particle accelerators. In fact, scientists pulled
Speaker 2: this off for the first time back in nineteen forty one. Granted,
Speaker 2: the resulting gold was radioactive and it was also an
Speaker 2: unstable isotope that decayed within days, but still quite an
Speaker 2: alchemical feat. And I think we have to acknowledge that
Speaker 2: given that this was achieved in nineteen forty one. That
Speaker 2: experiment was likely partial inspiration for this Twilight Zone episode,
Speaker 2: or at least they might have factored that into the plotting.
Speaker 3: Interesting though again obviously the amount of gold that you
Speaker 3: would be transmuting in particle accelerators once again would be
Speaker 3: quite physically tiny.
Speaker 2: In physically tiny, and then also if it's radioactive and
Speaker 2: or decays, then it's also useless in terms of all
Speaker 2: these uses for gold that we have. In nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seborg was able to successfully transmute
Speaker 2: bismuth into gold and an accelerator, producing several thousand atoms
Speaker 2: of statele gold, but it was essentially microscopic, and more recently,
Speaker 2: Cern has produced minuscule amounts of gold via the Large
Speaker 2: Hadron collider by colliding lead ions. So I mean that
Speaker 2: in itself is interesting because we're finally talking about the
Speaker 2: alchemical dream of turning lead into gold. But I believe
Speaker 2: the result here was also unstable and radioactive. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: in essence, yes, it can be done. We've done it,
Speaker 2: but we're a long way off from being able to
Speaker 2: do it at scale and in a way that could
Speaker 2: actually on any level impact the value of naturally occurring
Speaker 2: gold on Earth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I agree. Based on what I've been reading,
Speaker 3: it seems unlikely to me that we will ever be
Speaker 3: able to manufacture gold in an economically efficient way. But
Speaker 3: I did want to talk here at the end of
Speaker 3: the episode about how something like the scenario described in
Speaker 3: the Rip van Winkle caper not only could happen with
Speaker 3: some metals, it actually has happened in history, not with gold,
Speaker 3: but with a very surprising substance, and that is aluminum.
Speaker 3: So I just want to riff on aluminum here for
Speaker 3: a second. So, aluminum is the third most abundant element
Speaker 3: in Earth's crust, after only oxygen and silicon. It is
Speaker 3: more abundant than iron. Iron is only about five percent
Speaker 3: of the Earth's crust. Aluminum is about eight percent, so
Speaker 3: more abundant than iron. Today, aluminum is the second most
Speaker 3: important metal in human industry, with more than one hundred
Speaker 3: million tons produced annually. When you combine refinement from primary
Speaker 3: sources and recycling, and especially when combined with other materials
Speaker 3: as an alloy, aluminum is I think one of the
Speaker 3: most useful raw materials on Earth. It's strong, it's lightweight,
Speaker 3: it's highly versatile, which is why it's used in so
Speaker 3: many wide ranging applications, so many different things. You know,
Speaker 3: aluminum is it's the substance of your beer can, it's
Speaker 3: the substance of power lines, of airplane wings. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's a real range of what you can do with it.
Speaker 3: But there's a curious thing about aluminum. I wonder if
Speaker 3: you've ever noticed this, Rob, how come when you go
Speaker 3: looking through the artifacts of ancient civilizations in a museum,
Speaker 3: you never come across aluminum swords or aluminum arrowheads, or
Speaker 3: aluminum chariot wheels or plowshares or helmets. You see all
Speaker 3: these important ancient tools made out of iron, which is
Speaker 3: less abundant in the Earth's crust than aluminum. And you
Speaker 3: see them in bronze made from copper and tin, both
Speaker 3: of which are significantly harder to dig up than aluminum. So,
Speaker 3: if aluminum is so useful in human industry, and if
Speaker 3: there is more aluminium in the ground than iron, and
Speaker 3: it's always been this way, where are all the aluminum
Speaker 3: artifacts from history?
Speaker 2: You know, I'd never thought about this before, but you're right,
Speaker 2: there's like no aluminium age in the history books.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. The aluminium age does not emerge until the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century. In fact, the reason for this, I think
Speaker 3: is really interesting. I found this one of the most
Speaker 3: fascinating chemistry rabbit holes I've gone down in a bit.
Speaker 3: So metallic aluminum basically does not exist in nature. There
Speaker 3: are some extremely tiny exceptions to this, tiny globules from rare,
Speaker 3: strange kinds of sources, maybe like volcanic or extraterrestrial sources.
Speaker 3: But basically you can't find aluminum metal in nature. Almost
Speaker 3: all of the unrefined aluminum found on Earth comes in
Speaker 3: the form of a compound called aluminium oxide or AL
Speaker 3: two O three, also known as alumina, most of which
Speaker 3: is found within a type of reddish brown sedimentary rock
Speaker 3: called box side. Now, if you think you've never seen
Speaker 3: aluminium oxide on its own, and you can only picture,
Speaker 3: you can only picture aluminium as a metal. Here's a
Speaker 3: kind of strange fact. Did you know that rubies and
Speaker 3: sapphires are made mostly out of a crystalline form of
Speaker 3: aluminum oxide.
Speaker 2: I was not aware.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's the crystalline form of aluminum oxide called
Speaker 3: corundum a CO r U n d um, and different
Speaker 3: trace elements or impurities within it give it the different
Speaker 3: colors that make it a ruby or a sapphire. So like,
Speaker 3: if there's chromium in it, it'll turn red and it'll
Speaker 3: be a ruby, and there are other other elements and
Speaker 3: traces give it the sapphire color. And you know that
Speaker 3: just doesn't seem right. You don't look at a ruby
Speaker 3: or a sapphire, think I'm looking at aluminum. But remember
Speaker 3: the aluminum doesn't take on its metallic properties when in
Speaker 3: compound with oxygen, so forms of crystalline aluminum oxide really
Speaker 3: can look like precious gems. But when you separate the
Speaker 3: aluminum atoms from the compound, you get the opaque aluminum
Speaker 3: metal that we're familiar with today. So it's a complex
Speaker 3: process to get it. To get pure aluminum metal, you
Speaker 3: have to mine raw boxide or from the ground and
Speaker 3: then crush it up and heat it with caustic chemicals
Speaker 3: like sodium hydroxide like LYE to extract and isolate the
Speaker 3: aluminum oxide from it. And then at this point the
Speaker 3: aluminum oxide takes the form of a white powder that
Speaker 3: looks like sugar. And then so you've got this powder,
Speaker 3: and after that you have to find a way to
Speaker 3: isolate the pure metallic aluminum from the aluminum oxide. But
Speaker 3: for most most of history, this last step was really
Speaker 3: really difficult to do, so the amount of metallic aluminum
Speaker 3: produced in this way was minuscule now according to a
Speaker 3: commemorative article on something called the Hall Herald process, which
Speaker 3: I'll explain in a minute, this article is produced by
Speaker 3: the National Historic Chemical Landmarks Program of the American Chemical
Speaker 3: Society in nineteen ninety seven. According to this article, before
Speaker 3: the year eighteen eighty six, aluminum was a rare and
Speaker 3: precious metal with a price similar to that of silver.
Speaker 3: Scientists had by this point in the eighteen eighties they
Speaker 3: had already figured out ways to refine metallic aluminum, but
Speaker 3: they were complex, inefficient procedures with multiple steps, like one
Speaker 3: involved first producing aluminum chloride and then reacting that with
Speaker 3: metallic sodium to squirt out some tiny bits of aluminum metal.
Speaker 3: In the end, really inefficient, expensive, difficult to.
Speaker 2: Do, and so it was rare and it was as
Speaker 2: expensive as silver. I can't help but wonder if at
Speaker 2: the time, any like fiction writers were dreamed up a
Speaker 2: monster that could only be killed with aluminum. Oh, that's a.
Speaker 3: Good point, like the werewolf. Yeah, I heard, I can
Speaker 3: now I can't remember where I read this, but in
Speaker 3: one of the sources I was looking at for this episode,
Speaker 3: somebody was quoted talking about the appearance of this fad
Speaker 3: for aluminum jewelry in the mid nineteenth century because it
Speaker 3: was so precious, and I think the person said that
Speaker 3: it had the luster.
Speaker 2: Of the moon.
Speaker 3: People thought it was like a kind of moon metal.
Speaker 3: So one common way of illustrating the preciousness of aluminum
Speaker 3: before before the Hall herald process is that people point
Speaker 3: out that when the Washington Monument was deleted in eighteen
Speaker 3: eighty four, again this is two years before the whole
Speaker 3: heralds process in eighteen eighty six. It was completed in
Speaker 3: eighty four the tower was capped with a one hundred
Speaker 3: ounce cast aluminum pyramid, which was supposed to be an
Speaker 3: ornament of great power and ceremony. So this would be
Speaker 3: roughly six and a quarter pounds of aluminum, roughly enough
Speaker 3: to make two hundred Lacroix cans today. And just look
Speaker 3: on my work see mighty in despair. Look at all
Speaker 3: these cans worth.
Speaker 2: Oh wow. So this would have been exactly the wrong
Speaker 2: item to steal and then run into the future with.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so we're about to see exactly how wrong
Speaker 3: you would have been. But you wouldn't You wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been able to predict necessarily. You know that this would
Speaker 3: be good. I mean, this would be a precious, precious
Speaker 3: item to steal and take into the future for your
Speaker 3: group of criminals in eighteen eighty four. So, according to
Speaker 3: that ACS article, the pyramid at the top of the monument,
Speaker 3: weighing again a little over six pounds, was by itself
Speaker 3: about twenty percent of the roughly one hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: five pounds of aluminum produced in America in the year
Speaker 3: eighteen eighty four. So if the entire country's aluminum production
Speaker 3: infrastructure in eighty four eighteen eighty four had been harnessed,
Speaker 3: we could have made about five of these pyramids, or
Speaker 3: about one thousand La croix cans.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So, as hard as it is to believe, aluminum in
Speaker 3: the eighteen eighties, the early eighteen eighties was rare, precious
Speaker 3: and highly valuable like gold or silver. Another anecdote that
Speaker 3: people often cite to show the value of aluminum at
Speaker 3: the time is actually one that couldn't verify, but a
Speaker 3: figure it's worth mentioning because you come across it a lot.
Speaker 3: So the story is that the French Emperor Napoleon the
Speaker 3: Third would serve his most honored guests on aluminum plates. Mean,
Speaker 3: you know, if you got like the less pritt you know,
Speaker 3: silver plates or whatever, the less precious metals, you weren't
Speaker 3: quite as honored. I could now find a good early
Speaker 3: source for this claim, and as far as I could tell,
Speaker 3: it only pops up unsourced in later books from the
Speaker 3: twentieth century. But there absolutely were lavish royal luxury items
Speaker 3: in the mid nineteenth century, especially in France, made out
Speaker 3: of aluminum. So one example I came across is that
Speaker 3: a German chemist named Friedrich Wohler who was very much
Speaker 3: working on processes for isolating and extracting aluminum from these ores.
Speaker 3: Wohler designed an aluminum and gold rattle for the infant
Speaker 3: Prince Louis Napoleon in the eighteen fifties. This would have
Speaker 3: been Napoleon the third baby son. And at the eighteen
Speaker 3: fifty five Paris World's Fair also known as the eighteen
Speaker 3: fifty five Paris Exposition or the Exposition Universal Bars or
Speaker 3: a like, ingots of aluminum were exhibited in the same
Speaker 3: venue as the crown jewels of the French royals, and
Speaker 3: they were calling it the I don't remember the French phrase,
Speaker 3: but the French phrase they were using to describe it
Speaker 3: was the silver from clay, you know, because it came
Speaker 3: from this reddish brown ore and they could extract it
Speaker 3: through this laborious, expensive process and create a new type
Speaker 3: of silver from it. Apparently, aluminum jewelry, for a time
Speaker 3: in the mid nineteenth century became quite fashionable among the
Speaker 3: rich in Paris, and I think to some degree in
Speaker 3: England as well, but especially in France. Not just because
Speaker 3: it was novel and expensive. It's not just like this
Speaker 3: is a rare status item, but it did have some
Speaker 3: intrinsic qualities that made it desirable, like its light weight,
Speaker 3: it didn't it was thought not to tarnish, and it
Speaker 3: was considered beautiful by some, which is funny because you
Speaker 3: can imagine now like making jewelry out of aluminum foil
Speaker 3: from your kitchen, and you think you the same.
Speaker 2: I remember playing with aluminum foil a lot as a kid,
Speaker 2: where you could you could like take a little bit
Speaker 2: of it and wrap it around a g I. Joe
Speaker 2: figure's head and like, oh, now there is another desk
Speaker 2: stro kind of a situation. You know, there arell sorts
Speaker 2: of things like that you could do or make little
Speaker 2: arrow heads out of it, you know. And then over
Speaker 2: time we we come to realize, or at least we
Speaker 2: we get into our heads that aluminum isn't beautiful. It's
Speaker 2: just this thing you wrap up leftovers in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that's because it's abundant now, industrially abundant. So
Speaker 3: how did we get from preciousness to abundance. Well, it
Speaker 3: all changed in the year eighteen eighty six, when, at
Speaker 3: roughly around the same time, two different people on opposite
Speaker 3: sides of the Atlantic discovered a radically more cost effective
Speaker 3: process for refining metallic aluminum from aluminum oxide. And these
Speaker 3: two inventors were the American chemist Charles Martin Hall, who
Speaker 3: lived eighteen sixty three to nineteen fourteen, working out of
Speaker 3: the woodshed behind his house in Ohio, and a French
Speaker 3: scientist named Paul Harold who lived eighteen sixty three to
Speaker 3: nineteen fourteen, also working in France. Note they share the
Speaker 3: same birth and death years. Neither of these inventors, I
Speaker 3: think it's worth noting we're working in a vacuum lots
Speaker 3: of chemists in the university systems, in private industry, and
Speaker 3: even just in like independent laboratories at the time were
Speaker 3: working on the aluminum problem. So this was like a
Speaker 3: big thing a lot of people were feeding into. And
Speaker 3: these these scientists were you know, they had they had
Speaker 3: mentors and had been inspired by others, So they were
Speaker 3: not they were not just like loan geniuses striking.
Speaker 2: Getting an idea in a dream about right slated.
Speaker 3: But what Hall and Harold discovered was that you could
Speaker 3: produce metallic aluminum quite efficiently by well it's actually depending
Speaker 3: it's only efficient relative to the other processes. It's still
Speaker 3: quite costly, an energy intensive process, but you could do
Speaker 3: it by first melting the aluminum oxide in a furnace
Speaker 3: alongside a solvent mineral called cryolite. Now you might hear
Speaker 3: that name and intuitively detect some interesting etymology. You think, like, wait,
Speaker 3: cryo meaning ice and light meaning stone, ice, stone. Yes,
Speaker 3: that is what the name means. And if you look
Speaker 3: up pictures of cryolite, it will all become clear because
Speaker 3: it really does look like ice. It looks like a
Speaker 3: kind of a snowball or a chunk of ice somebody
Speaker 3: has squished together I couldn't find a a I was
Speaker 3: trying to find a video of this right before we
Speaker 3: got started, and I didn't turn it up. Maybe there
Speaker 3: is one out there I didn't connect to. But allegedly,
Speaker 3: if you submerge this rock in water, it becomes nearly
Speaker 3: invisible or takes on a kind of ghostly translucent appearance
Speaker 3: because it has a similar refractive index to water. The
Speaker 3: first major deposit of cryolite discovered on Earth was found
Speaker 3: on the southwest coast of Greenland at a place called Ivetut,
Speaker 3: and an important mining community sprang up there to support
Speaker 3: the extraction of this mineral. And so important was cryolite
Speaker 3: for the industrial production of aluminium that the protection of
Speaker 3: this mine in Greenland became an important point of strategic
Speaker 3: defense in World War II for the Allies, for the
Speaker 3: fear of what would happen if this big source of
Speaker 3: natural cryolite fell under Nazi attack or Nazi control. But
Speaker 3: coming back to the chemical properties of cryolite, So the
Speaker 3: chemical name for cryolite is sodium hexafluoro illuminate, and it's
Speaker 3: made from three sodium atoms, one aluminum, and six fluorines.
Speaker 3: When melted in an industrial furnace. Cryolite has the special
Speaker 3: attribute of dissolving and then greatly lowering the melting point
Speaker 3: of aluminum oxide dissolved with it, and this makes the
Speaker 3: aluminum oxide molecules susceptible to separation by electrolysis. So when
Speaker 3: you run electric current through this solution of cryolite with
Speaker 3: aluminum oxide dissolved in it, it causes the aluminum oxide
Speaker 3: to separate into waste products based on oxygen like carbon dioxide,
Speaker 3: carbon monoxide, and stuff. And then on the other end
Speaker 3: you get nearly pure metallic aluminium which gathers near the cathode. Now,
Speaker 3: this process uses a lot of energy and produces a
Speaker 3: lot of waste products, especially fumes released into the air.
Speaker 3: You get carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, perfluorocarbons. But fortunately, once
Speaker 3: the metal has been separated like this, it can be
Speaker 3: melted down, reused, and recycled pretty efficiently compared to the
Speaker 3: initial smelting process. So recycling aluminum is actually quite important
Speaker 3: when it comes to saving energy and preventing pollution, but
Speaker 3: getting it out of the oxide where it's found in
Speaker 3: nature initially is quite rough. But once the aluminum is
Speaker 3: in circulation, we can continue to do a lot with
Speaker 3: it over the life cycles of many products and uses.
Speaker 3: But coming back to the idea of a metal devalued
Speaker 3: like the gold and the rip Van Winkle caper. According
Speaker 3: to the ACS, within a few years of the invention
Speaker 3: of the Hall Herald process, the price of aluminum it
Speaker 3: just dropped through the floor, like as suddenly vastly greater
Speaker 3: amounts could be produced. So to read a quote from
Speaker 3: that article, quote, as Hall improved his process, the price
Speaker 3: of aluminum ingots dropped from four dollars and eighty six
Speaker 3: cents per pound. Remember that's eighteen eighty dollars four dollars
Speaker 3: and eighty six cents per pound in eighteen eighty eight
Speaker 3: to seventy eight cents per pound in eighteen ninety three.
Speaker 3: And then later they say, by the late nineteen thirties,
Speaker 3: a pound of aluminum costs just twenty cents. Its use
Speaker 3: is numbered more than two thousand. Oh wow, So drastic,
Speaker 3: drastic reduction. And you know remember in the episode they
Speaker 3: sleep for one hundred years. So if you you know stole, yeah,
Speaker 3: stole your one hundred pounds of aluminum in the early
Speaker 3: eighteen eighties, and you think I'm rich, I'm rich. I'm rich.
Speaker 3: I just need to go sleep for one hundred years
Speaker 3: and then wake up when I can put this into
Speaker 3: circulation and cash out. You would be, you know, not worthless,
Speaker 3: Like one hundred pounds of aluminium is I don't know.
Speaker 3: You can get something for that, but wouldn't be worth
Speaker 3: the squeeze.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Wow, it is fascinating how well this line's
Speaker 2: up with the idea here and in Indet. Maybe this
Speaker 2: was partially on the mind of Rod Serling as well.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but but but yeah, that's that's fascinating.
Speaker 2: This this brief aluminium age in which it was a
Speaker 2: highly valued moon metal, and you know, the richest people
Speaker 2: and most powerful people on Earth were wearing it and
Speaker 2: eating off of it. I mean, we're still eating out
Speaker 2: of it and off of it and drinking out of it,
Speaker 2: but without the air of sophistication. Now, this would be
Speaker 2: a good Twilight Zone twist. Some sort of an aluminium
Speaker 2: sensitive werewolf type creature escapes from the past to go
Speaker 2: into the future. Finally I'll be rid of my hunters,
Speaker 2: and then they realize no, every household in the world
Speaker 2: has a copious amounts of aluminum at its disposable they
Speaker 2: have sheets of it in their drawers, they have you know,
Speaker 2: cans of it all over the place. That would be good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the kids are fighting the werewolf by just like
Speaker 3: ripping out the foil. Yeah, makings just mummifying him in
Speaker 3: tenfoil from the kitchen.
Speaker 2: There you go. It rights itself, rights itself.
Speaker 3: Tonight's lesson in the Twilight Zone.
Speaker 2: Submitted for your approval. All right, well, we're gonna go
Speaker 2: ahead and close this episode out here, but we'd love
Speaker 2: to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts
Speaker 2: about the science and history that we've discussed here, if
Speaker 2: you have thoughts about this particular episode of the Twilight Zone,
Speaker 2: your history with this episode right in as well, and
Speaker 2: in general. Hey, you know, when New Year's rolls around
Speaker 2: once more, maybe we'll do another one of these if
Speaker 2: if that is something you want to see happen, let's
Speaker 2: get on top of it. Write in and let us
Speaker 2: know which episode we should consider. With the understanding that
Speaker 2: we have already covered to serve man and I believe
Speaker 2: we also discussed the one with the Grimlin on the
Speaker 2: wing of the plane. We've done those two, so we've
Speaker 2: done three now, but the rest are fair game.
Speaker 3: I talked about the one where the guy is sentenced
Speaker 3: to death and then he tells people that they are
Speaker 3: all exists within his dream and if they put him
Speaker 3: to death that they will stop existing.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we've done. We've essentially covered four episodes of
Speaker 2: the Twilight Zone. Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot more
Speaker 2: of them, so there's still a lot of possibilities. So
Speaker 2: if you have thoughts right in, we'd love to hear
Speaker 2: from you. Just to remind it that Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
Speaker 2: core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then we have
Speaker 2: a short form episode on Wednesday and on Fridays, we
Speaker 2: set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a
Speaker 2: weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
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