No Such Thing As A Fish: 497: No Such Thing As Oceans Eleven with Puffins

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of No Singers of Fish. This is another live show

which was recorded at the Soho Theatre in London and who is our special guest today?

Well if you are a podcast fan, if you are a fan of amazing books, if you were a fan

of the TV show Horrible Histories then you'll know who I'm talking about. Our guest was

the historian Greg Jenner. So like I say, Greg first came to prominence I suppose as

the historical consultant on Horrible Histories but he has since become a nerdy superstar

at his own right thanks to his podcast Your Dead To Me which you definitely, I'm sure

you've heard it but if you haven't heard it you definitely should check that out but

he also has written lots of books, the latest of which are called Ask A Historian and Dead

Famous and Unexpected History of Celebrity and the very exciting thing about those if

you are super quick off the blocks is that at the moment they are both 99p on ebook for

the rest of September. He also has an illustrated kids book called You Are History and that

is out in hardback and audiobook as well. Look, just go to the place where you buy your

books, ebooks and audiobooks and search for Greg Jenner and you will not be disappointed

and I hope you will also not be disappointed with this week's podcast so let's just get

on with it. On with the podcast!

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this

week coming to you live from the Soho Theatre in London!

My name is Jan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and

Greg Jenner and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite

facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go! Starting with

fact number one and that is my fact this week. My fact is when Virginia's Barter Theatre

first opened in 1933, it paid playwrights their royalties exclusively in ham.

Except for George Bernard Shaw, who was a vegetarian and managed to negotiate his payment

to be in spinach.

Yeah, this is an amazing thing that happened during the Great Depression in America and

this guy who was an actor, he was a very young actor at the time called Robert Porterfield,

he found that all these actors were out of work, the theatres weren't running because

no one could afford to go to the theatres but then he also noticed that there were a

lot of farmers who had a lot of produce that they weren't able to shift, so he thought

what if I set up a bartering theatre whereby you could trade ham for hamlet, that would

be the system, right? So you could come in and you could then give any kind of produce

that you wanted and that would get you a ticket and the bartering system worked very much

like how bartering does, you know, you negotiate as you're doing it. More like bartering.

Oh.

Very good, very good.

It was good, yeah.

Yeah, so it would be, it was good, Andy. Don't let everyone tell you differently.

Yeah, so the system, yeah, God, yeah.

Well, the stories are great because people have written about how this, you know, a lot

of these playwrights, so when George Bernard Shaw was first asked, he said, I'm not really

into it, and then Pygmalion came out and he said, oh, yes, Pygmalion.

Pygmalion.

Should have been Spinachmalion.

Should have been, yeah. So all the stories that he collected over the years, people got

interviews out of him and it's really fun, so there would be examples of, say, a farmer

who would bring his cow to the theatre and he'd say how much milk to get in to see the

play and they would tell him and then he'd go to the side and milk the cow to the amount

that they said, hand over the bucket and then he would start to go in and in the anecdote,

his wife was with him and they said, you're not going to get your wife to come in as well,

and he said, she can milk her own ticket.

I was wondering how they did change at the theatre because I thought you would say that.

Oh, you hadn't done your hum and you got a little bit of bacon back.

Well, yeah, kind of. I mean, you could have a pig which was worth ten tickets.

Wow.

So I think if you traded a whole pig, maybe you got like a season pass, that kind of

thing, but they accepted all sorts of, it wasn't just farm produce, they accepted toothpaste,

snakes and underwear as well, which is good if you don't have a pig, so you can, you

know, yeah.

With the toothpaste for the snakes. Do they have teeth? They have teeth, right? They've

got fangs.

They've got fangs, yeah.

Can you brush a snake's teeth? Sorry, derail the podcast, haven't I?

You can milk a snake's teeth.

Hello.

One ticket.

There was all sorts of weird, like there was a boy who said that he had some jam or some

kind of substance in a jar turned out to be mud, so people were trying to counterfeit

their way in there as well.

There was someone who did bring a pig saying, I'll pay with my pig, but then the pig got

loose and all the actors had to chase their money down the street.

And weirdly, there was a jail that was directly underneath the barter theatre.

So while they were doing the plays, there was always this slight concern that one of

the jailmates would break free and sort of come onto stage and murder everyone.

So there was added conflict, you know.

Yeah, it sounds like it was an amazing place.

And one of the things was a guy came in, he was a mountaineer, and he said, I don't have

any food, but I make coffins, do you all want a coffin?

And they said, no, we're fine.

He said, well, I make canes as well.

And he made so many canes that apparently every major actor in Broadway was seen walking

round with one of these canes because he just kept making them and kept going to more and

more shows.

That's cool.

Yeah.

I mean, to me, I know I am an ex-accountant, but it does sound like a massive tax dodge.

Oh, yeah.

Like, bartering is all well and good as long as you pay the tax on the actual amount of

the thing that you're bartering with.

Oh, yeah.

How much tax?

One slice of bacon?

Well, you know, 20% of your pig.

Oh, whatever.

That's the thing.

Like, there's that old story of Picasso, do you remember?

He was in a cafe.

I mean, I don't think this is true, but he was in...

Is it true?

Yeah, my mum's got one.

Wow.

So Picasso, if I know where you're going with it, Picasso used to buy his meals by doing

a tiny little doodle because it would be worth more than the meal.

He did thousands.

They're now valueless.

Really?

Like, is that what Gary Linnaker has been doing in all restaurants?

In the restaurants.

All the restaurants in the UK have a signed photo of Gary Linnaker.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, everyone, and you can see it like, I was young, Gary was here, oh, Gary was here

quite recently.

That's what he's doing.

I imagine that is what he's doing, right?

That probably is what he's doing.

It's probably getting free food.

Well, I don't want to do as much Gary Linnaker, but...

I'll have a go.

I don't mind.

We don't know.

The thing is, though, with Picasso, right, so the story goes, one of the story goes,

that he did this doodle and they said, well, Mr. Picasso, will you sign it?

And he said, well, I want to pay for lunch.

I don't want to pay for the entire establishment.

Oh.

Right, that's the story.

So the thing is...

What a wanker.

That's what he said.

It's okay.

I don't think anyone's saying that Picasso wasn't a wanker.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of all the artists, I think Picasso is very high in the wanker index.

Yeah.

Okay.

But the thing is, like, if you're an artist and you draw something and you're in a cafe

and they give you some food, there are tax implications of that.

And really, it is against the law to do that.

The only way they could get around it is if Picasso, instead of just having lunch, if

it was a business lunch, and if the people in the cafe were going to put the picture

up on the wall so that everyone in the cafe can enjoy it, so technically it's decoration,

then they're both business expenses, they're both tax deductible, that's fine.

Why do you think accountants have such a reputation for their illness?

Thank God James isn't at all these historical moments where Picasso lands an absolute zingo

and he's going, well, actually, the tax implications of that are...

Could he do a smaller drawing to be the tax?

No.

Yeah, he could.

In fact, I believe in some places in America sometimes they have accepted artwork as tax

payment from artists who couldn't afford to pay their tax and have done that.

So that is possible in theory, yeah.

I can't believe we're accepting this fact, given how much shit I took many episodes ago,

when I said that if Mozart was on the street and he was passing someone who asked him for

some money, a beggar, a homeless person was asking for some money, that he would say,

I have no money, but here, let me write you some music, and he would be like,

RAS, give it a go doody, and give it to them, and then they would take that and they would...

And do what?

Sell it.

What would you do with your Picasso?

You can sell it for a lot of money.

No, you can't.

No, you can't, because my mum has one, and you can't do anything with it.

Has your mum been trying to sell it?

Yeah, it's not worth anything.

I'll buy it.

All right.

I'll buy the on-site Picasso that we know is definitely him, yeah.

And also, how do you verify that the music is by Mozart when it's just one bar of music?

Because it sounds like Amber.

Right, yeah.

Barter.

Yeah.

Barter is a weird thing, isn't it?

Yeah.

Because there's a lot of debate about barter.

I think, I definitely thought it's the thing before money.

So the baker bakes some bread, and he goes to the butcher, and the butcher...

And the butcher has some meat, and between them they have a sandwich.

Well, they swap.

They have two sandwiches.

Exactly.

You end up with two sandwiches, and everyone's happy.

But of course, what if the butcher doesn't want any bread?

The baker starts to death.

Nightmare.

So you need money.

That's the basic, and I say very basic, premise.

But this is the weird thing about barter.

There's no...

I don't think there's any...

Actually, it seems like money produces barter systems.

Like, after the fall of the Roman Empire, people resorted to barter,

because there wasn't a stable currency anymore.

There doesn't seem to be any good evidence of a proper barter society

where someone says,

I'll give you these grapes if you give me that cloth.

It just doesn't seem to be any evidence for that.

Correct.

Oh, shit.

Not evidence that I found in a short look.

I mean, money's fascinating, right?

So coins are really new.

In terms of the history of the world, coins are...

They're like 2,700 years old, give or take.

They're really, really new.

So you've got these sort of enormous societies in the Bronze Age.

The Egyptians don't have money.

Oh, really?

The Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Akkadians don't have money.

Really?

And the first coin has got a little lion face,

and it's very cute, and it's ancient Greek.

And I think at the city, I think it was maybe Liddy, I can't remember,

but it's like 2,700 BCE.

So prior to that, you have economic structures,

and you've got kings, and you've got people with power,

and you have got distribution of wealth of a sort,

but it's not cash.

And even in the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries,

you get these coin hordes, you know, Viking coin hordes,

buried in the ground, and you're never entirely sure to what extent

they are someone going, I'm going to put that in the ground

and come back for it later, or it's someone's nicked it,

or someone has been killed in battle,

or, you know, we're never quite sure,

because the money's not in circulation.

So the history of money is really interesting,

because there's a lot of stuff we don't know.

But obviously, Barton must have been part of that equation.

Certainly in the Stone Age, no?

You're going to tell me there's no bartering in the Stone Age?

You're going to do that?

Go on, do it.

Yeah, sort it, why not?

Straight from nothing to Bitcoin.

That's what I'm saying.

But you are right that definitely when society breaks down,

or when there's problems in society, we do resort to barter.

That's definitely true, right?

So in Russia, in the 90s, there's a lot of it going on.

So there was not much...

Certainly in the late 90s, not much demand for rubles.

If you've got any rubles, you just want to swap them for US dollars.

That's pretty much all you'd ever do with them.

And so when companies run out of cash to pay their workers,

the workers would often just accept, you know,

whatever you're making, you would take some of them home,

and then you'd be able to swap that for dollars.

There's no point in having the rubles in between.

And so there was, like, Siberian workers who were paid in coffins,

as we were saying before.

There was a Volgograd factory where all the workers were paid in bras.

And then there was another factory in Volgograd called Actuba,

and they made navigation equipment.

But then they'd recently diversified into making dildos.

And the workers decided, well, we're not going to get paid otherwise,

so we'll just accept the dildos as payment.

And this is in the Economist, guys.

What's happening?

And so they got all these dildos

and then went to the local sex shops to try and sell them

and get some US dollars.

But it turned out that just around the same time,

the world had moved on to electronic vibrators,

and the dildos were virtually worthless.

Oh, nice.

So navigation to dildos.

Yeah, that's...

How do they diversify from that?

So it's what, from compass to compass, is that...?

Wow.

Yeah, I'd...

Sexton. You had sexton.

Sorry. Sorry.

Wow, is there a heartwarming end to the story

where they all use the dildos to build a new...

There's no heartwarming ending to any story

that begins in Russia in 1999.

Do you remember the story of that guy

who bought up a huge bulk amount of copies of Lance Armstrong's book?

It's all about the bike, and then...

It's not about the bike.

Did he do two books? No.

It's not about the bike.

Which turned out to be...

Um, and...

Yeah, this guy suddenly had a warehouse full of these books,

and no one was buying them,

because this guy was an untouched celebrity all of a sudden.

Did he buy them before...? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was, like, just before. He was like,

did the deal and suddenly, like, news headline, Lance Armstrong.

That's bad.

So was he sort of bulk ordering them

in the hope of then selling them a nice...

I think, like, they were remaindered,

and he thought, I'll buy them and I can do a trade of them somehow.

Here's a place that does have butter. This is good.

Zoos operate a barter system

with each other, even today,

because you need a permit

to buy and sell endangered animals,

but in America, zoos are allowed

to barter their creatures.

Yeah.

So in 2014, there was an aquarium in Boston

that needed some fish,

and North Carolina's aquarium had some of those fish.

And North Carolina wanted jellyfish and snipefish

in exchange for the fish that they were going to give to Boston.

But the Boston people didn't have snipefish.

So Boston had to...

Is this a riddle?

Hang on, Greg, hang on.

So they had to get some Japanese snipefish,

swap them for some bloodfish that they did have in Boston,

then they sent North Carolina those.

But they can't be on the craft

at the same time as the fox.

Yeah. And the fox is in a submarine.

Yeah.

The zookeeper was the mother.

That's it.

That's really cool, and it's because in the olden days,

if you had a zoo, you'd just send someone off

and say, I'd like two pandas, please.

And they'd just go and get you two pandas,

but you can't really do that anymore. No.

And there was one...

Because of Brexit.

There was one aquarium

that swapped 800 mackerel

for a dozen puffins.

Does that feel like a good deal for you?

I'd love a dozen puffins.

Yeah? I feel like a dozen puffins

is exactly the right number of puffins.

I feel like that's a bank job.

It's like Ocean's Eleven,

but puffins.

I think if your mother put up that Picasso,

you could trade that for 11 puffins.

The Picasso is a dove,

dove of peace.

We could swap a dove of peace for 12 puffins,

and then I could hit a bank

and take on a casino.

Sorry, are you the 13th puffin

in the costume?

I'm George Clooney puffin.

Yeah, nice.

And then we'll have Brad Pitt puffin, Matt Damon puffin,

and other puffins. I've forgotten who else is in the film.

Gently. Is he in the film?

I don't know.

Sorry, how did your mum come by this picture at the Picasso?

Did she buy it or...? No, she was gifted,

I think, because it's not value

and it's just got...it's not enough value

to be worth anything, so it's a gift

you give someone in return for, like,

oh, thanks, that was really nice. Here's a...

Here's a Picasso. James, are there any tax implications

to Greg's mum receiving this

priceless work of...

If she got them as part of her job, yes, there would be.

All right, she's a French teacher.

Where do we stand on that?

Oh!

Stop the podcast!

Stop the podcast!

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OK, on with the podcast.

On with the show.

OK, it is time for fact number two

and that is Greg.

My fact is complex, so I'm

apologizing in advance for it. But my fact

is this, at different times in history,

Mondays have been considered the first

day of the week, the second, the third

and the seventh.

Wow. And what is it now?

Right. So,

we've got six hours, yeah?

Yeah.

Now, it's officially, internationally

is the first day of the week.

OK. The International Standards Committee

or whatever they're called. Because I was always

taught at school that it's Sunday

is the first day of the week. Yeah, so in the

religious Christian calendar Mondays the second

day of the week now, it used to be the third

day of the week because in the Jewish calendar

it was the third day, Sabbath and the Saturday

Sunday and then Monday became the third.

But then when you get Christianity

becoming dominant in Rome in the sort of

second and third centuries, they move

Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. And so

Monday becomes the second day.

But the really tricky thing about it is that

the Industrial Revolution gives us

Mondays as we know them. The Garfield

one, the Monday. The Garfield Monday that he

hates. Yeah.

There's a lot of great philosophers who do

Mondays. Plutarch, Dio Cassius, Bob Geldof,

Garfield.

And so our Mondays

is an economic Monday. Our Monday

is the post-Industrial Revolution

where you get the invention of a brand new

temporal structure called the weekend,

right? The weekend is a new thing, it's about

100 years old. And so Mondays get

redefined. But in

ancient astronomy, Mondays

are wrong.

So the days of the week

should be, according to

astronomy, it should be

Saturday, Thursday,

Tuesday, Sunday,

Friday, Wednesday, Monday.

Poor Craig David. He'd be so good

to you.

Took her to a park on Monday.

Met her for the first time Tuesday.

What's happening?

So that's the order that astronomically the planet

should be in. And we've got this really lovely

ancient book we don't have, we've got the title

of, by Plutarch.

And the title is literally, why is the

days of the week ordered wrongly?

It's the kind of thing you Google at 3 a.m.

and you're like, well, Tuesday.

So Dio Cassius wrote

that thing saying what's happened here

is it's because there's 168 hours in a week.

There are 24 hours in a day which the Romans

are very keen on. Each hour

gets assigned to a god. The first

hour goes to the god and that

god gets that day named after them. The

second hour, next god, third, fourth, fifth,

seventh, and then you're back to the first god again.

By the time you get to the 25th hour, you're

on to the second god. So the day gets named

after him. And so

you end up with the days being in the wrong order.

So our Mondays are

in the wrong and the Romans are like,

oh no, we'll just have to live with it.

And we have, we've lived with it ever since.

That's amazing. That is incredible.

I've got a fact about Tuesday.

Is it Thursday, Tuesday or Saturday, Tuesday?

I'm going to go for my Tuesday,

which is tomorrow, yeah.

So we're doing this on a Monday, we should say,

for the audience listening at home.

So this is cool. This happened

last year. The 22nd

of February, 2022

was a Tuesday.

It was Tuesday.

It was very nice.

22, 22, 22,

Tuesday.

It was Tuesday. That's nice.

That's the end of the fact.

Mondays cause lightning.

The fact.

That's a good thing. Well, it's not a good thing, actually.

It's just a thing.

So it's because of car exhaust.

So more people commute

on Mondays.

So scientists counted lightning strikes in the USA

for a decade and worked out where they fall,

where the distribution is.

So this is particularly in southeastern states in the USA.

And lightning strikes rock it because

there's a bit more pollution in the air.

The air is moisture. There are low-lying clouds.

That creates the perfect conditions for lightning.

So yeah, for hundreds of miles,

you get more lightning on a Monday.

That's really interesting. I've got a Wednesday fact.

No.

Go on. Is this your Wednesday?

It's my Wednesday.

It's a day after tomorrow. We're recording this on a Monday.

People are having...

According to one study,

the best time to tweet

or X is to...

Oh, no.

Oh, my God.

Look at you staying in with Elon.

You creep.

Apparently, if you want to get maximum impact,

it's 5 p.m. on a Wednesday

is when you should send that tweet.

Really? Yeah, they've just scanned through

where most have engagement and so on,

and apparently that's the one.

I mean, that doesn't feel...

What's happening at 5 p.m. on a Wednesday?

They just found engagement was higher.

That's wrong. I don't like that stat.

I reckon it's because people aren't really

trying as hard because it's not Monday anymore.

Right. But you also haven't left early

because it's not Friday. It's just like the perfect time.

So you're stuck in the office.

You're looking your phone. It's 5 p.m. and you're out that door.

I reckon. Do you got any Thursday facts, then?

I do.

There's a theory that the universe was created

last Thursday.

It's called last Thursdayism.

And the idea is that...

And it's very hard to just prove this.

Was this fact three weeks old, in which case the universe

hasn't been created yet?

Was it always last Thursday?

It's always last Thursday.

The idea is that every memory that you have,

everything that's on our planet,

everything has been set to seem like it's been here

for millions and billions of years

in the case of the Age of the Universe.

So last Thursdayism says it's impossible

to deny the theory

that it's infallible as a fact

because it's impossible

to find a glitch in. Right.

Well, what if I put something in a box last Thursday

and then I open the box today? Your theory falls over.

No, it doesn't, because your memory is you put it last Thursday.

Yeah, but I know I did.

But I wrote a label.

I labelled it Thursday.

No, I labelled it Wednesday. I labelled it Wednesday.

I can't believe, Andy, that you found

the hole in the bearing.

Wow. How come Andy's underpants

that say Thursday on them

are still in the wash?

Yeah.

I've got a fact about Fridays.

Oh, yeah. You want to hear that? Do you know Dress Down Friday?

Dress Down Friday, yeah.

Do you know who invented that

or why it was invented?

Military thing. It's a military thing.

Yeah? Yeah. Like, every Friday

you don't have to wear your uniform.

Yeah, you're starting the city, but you're wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Yeah, exactly.

It's fun. It's good for morale.

It's bad for camouflage, but

it'll be fun.

Well, I gave you a clue there.

It was invented by people who made Hawaiian shirts

to sell more Hawaiian shirts.

Really?

Really? This was in the 60s.

Yeah, it was a company

it was the Hawaiian fashion guild, actually.

And they came up with the idea of

Aloha Fridays,

where everyone would wear a Hawaiian shirt

into work and then it just took off

and now we have people just wearing jeans

but do the people who work at the

Hawaiian fashion guild have to go in

in a three-piece suit on a Friday?

Just while we were talking about military

on Fridays as well, there's a thing

on Japanese Navy ships and submarines

that they have curry

every night on Friday nights

because on a ship it might, you might lose

the track of the days and that's a way of them going

oh, it's Friday, we're having curry.

It's a thing on the menu that allows for them to remember.

Yeah, because you do lose track.

And on a Saturday you feel like, you know?

Yeah.

No, that's, no.

I do have a Saturday fact if that's what

you're edging towards.

But it's absolutely not that.

Okay, go on, let's hear your Saturday fact.

My Saturday fact is that on US ships

and submarines they will have burgers

for dinner just so they remember what

day it is so that they know

and that's because you can lose track

when you're on a ship or a submarine.

They will have burgers and they're like, ah, Saturday.

Yeah, I feel like I'm losing track now.

Yeah.

Mondays, this is a study from 2006

but Mondays, most of us apparently

are tired and depressed on a Monday

and work that requires emotional involvement

or flair should be avoided.

Or flair?

I'm afraid so. Oh, wow.

It's best to be alone.

Our lines of communication mentally are largely closed

and communication with each other

is also poorer on a Monday.

So that's why we did this kick on a Monday, was it?

Yeah.

So we're proving it, are we?

Very quickly, because I just thought

Friday's are obviously Freyja.

So these are the Germanic gods, right?

So Saturday is Saturn.

It's the only one of the days of the week

that's named after a Roman god.

All the others are Monday, Sunday, and then Germanic gods.

Who's Freyja?

Anglo-Saxon and Norse goddess.

Very powerful, very cool.

Thursday's Thor, or Thunor,

Wednesday's Woden,

but the Romans called Venus the planet,

not Venus.

They called it Lucifer.

And the Greeks called it

Phosphorus, like Giver.

So it suddenly reminded me that Friday is named after Venus.

Aphrodite.

But they didn't call the planet Venus.

They called it Lucifer.

So they would see Lucifer in the sky and go,

There he is!

Quite a scary name.

Although they didn't call it Lucifer, they'd call it Lucifer.

Latin. Lucifer.

That's awesome. Go on, Dan, tell us your Sunday fact.

So, on Sundays,

in order for US Navy ships

and submarines

to know what day it is, they have steak

because you can lose track of time

when you're on ship. So they will have steak on a Sunday

and they're like, ah, it's a Sunday.

We're recording this on a Monday, by the way.

That's fine.

We're going to have to move on to our next fact

in one sec. Should we go for it?

I can give you a quick Sunday fact.

Obviously Sunday trading was a thing.

There are certain things you're allowed to sell on Sundays,

certain things you weren't.

And so if you're a shopkeeper, you're allowed to sell food

for horses because they were working animal,

but you weren't allowed to sell food for dogs

because it was a pet often.

This is in Hansard in 1968.

They were discussing this.

And apparently the reason that they wanted to change the rules

is because it was such nonsense

that a man could go into a shop

and say, I have a pony

who only eats dog biscuits.

Can I have some dog biscuits

for my pony?

And they had to give him the biscuits.

And that's when they thought maybe we need to change

our rules a little bit. That's so good.

That's amazing.

OK, it is time for fact number three

and that is Andy.

My fact is that the first electric cars

were taken away each night and delivered

back to your door fully charged

in the morning. So they were like

choose outside hotel rooms, basically.

They were taken out. So it takes them away.

Polishes them. Is that what happens?

I tell you what, we stay at travel lodges.

Where are you staying?

What are you talking about?

That's a thing.

I feel like I'm immediately distracted from the main point of the...

But that does happen in hotels.

You put your shoes outside the room and then they...

Like, if you want them polished, you don't have to...

What?

Do you leave a note on them?

It's bread, it's understood.

You don't need to leave a note.

I tell you what, I tell you what,

hotels where I stay and they would just get stolen.

Just by round of chews.

Has anyone heard of that in here?

OK, a few people.

Not as many heard of it.

Not enough for...

OK, can I retake my fact?

The fact is fine, it was the following.

First electric cars were taken away each night

and delivered to your door fully charged for the morning.

A unique occurrence.

When are we talking?

First electric cars.

So early, early days.

Late 19th, early 20th century.

This is from an interview with the head of Ford.

I was listening to a podcast the other day

which was interviewing him, he's called Jim Farley.

And he was talking about the firm Detroit Electric

who they made early cars.

Like, loads of the early cars

when combustion engines were just starting

were electric.

And the electric ones, they were kind of marketed at...

They were marketed at women, basically.

Yeah.

They are a bit daintier.

You don't have to hand crank them to start

because that's quite...

It's quite a physical...

The smell was particularly a big part.

Petrol stains and it's all...

Yeah, and also Wikipedia claims

they were sold to women drivers and physicians.

No idea why.

I think the idea was if you needed to go

and save someone's life really quickly

because they were sick, you wouldn't have to do all the cranking.

You just go straight away.

That's good. OK, OK, that tracks then.

Yeah. And they had this system with the doors

where they didn't have the charging capacity

in your home, obviously, because most houses

weren't even on the electric at that point.

And they sound like mad cars.

They were operated, this is incredible, from the back seat.

It's so amazing.

For the back seat, they had a rear-facing front seat

so you could face your passengers.

Oh, great.

You could put your passengers in the front seat

facing backwards to you. You can chat to them as you drive.

But you can't see the road.

And they also...

Instead of a steering wheel, boring, they had a tiller.

Yeah.

Because it was nice and calm.

It was like having a lovely sailboat or something.

What's a tiller? Like a rudder, basically.

On the back of the boat.

So it's left to go right to go left.

I know. So you have to do it backwards

from the back seat of the car, unable to see the road ahead of you.

The tiller thing is amazing.

So Ben's invented the steering wheel

in the 1890s.

Ben's and Jerry's, yeah.

Ben's and Jerry's.

But Americans just stuck with this tiller the whole time.

And there was a journalist

writing around the time who said,

few have adopted that foreign freak,

the steering wheel.

A car with a wheel would be a nerve-racker

of the worst kind.

Imagine that, a steering wheel.

It's amazing.

So it came back to your house fully charged.

Yep.

And we're talking not lithium-ion batteries,

we're talking what, lead-acid?

Exactly what the batteries were.

How do you charge it?

For sure, they were acid batteries, I'm pretty sure.

But I think what would happen most of the time

is they would replace the battery.

And then the battery would go back somewhere else

to be charged, which might take time, I don't know.

It was a lot of these places

which I think would be really cool now

as someone with an electric car.

I'd love to just, instead of plug in,

they just take the battery out and put another one back in

and you go straight away.

That's a cool idea.

People were used to changing horses.

And this was kind of the obvious way of doing it.

What was what? Like, you get up in the morning,

you look outside your door, you get your nice polished shoes,

go down, you take a fresh horse.

Someone has recharged your shoes.

Rechargeable batteries were invented in 1859.

Wow.

So it's quite early, right? So that's Gaston Plante

who invents them, and that's quite exciting.

But that's already 20-odd years after the first electric car.

It's really amazing how early they are.

Because we now look at electric cars

and we kind of go like, oh, you know, Elon Musk.

But, like, the electric car is, like,

so much more established

than fuel, than petrol.

But for 20 years

they couldn't recharge the batteries.

That's the thing. Got a battery, finished it, like, bang.

Throw the car away.

I mean, you just chuck it and you get a new one.

The guy I like is, have you heard of Sebran de Stratting?

No.

He's Dutch guy.

He sort of deserves more or renown.

He's quite cool.

He possibly invented the first electric car

that's, like, decent and we know about.

There's a Scotsman who called Robert Anderson

who maybe invented one in the 1830s

but we don't know much about it.

But Sebran de Stratting lived in Groningen.

He was a Dutch chemistry professor.

And in 1835 he makes an electric car.

It weighs about three kilos.

It's a tricycle.

He can carry about 1.5 kilos, which is a guinea pig.

I don't know. It's not great, is it?

It can go for 20 minutes.

And it's 1835, nearly 200 years ago.

Sebran de Stratting is already electrified.

But he's very cool because he also

he spoke 13 languages.

He built early electric light bulbs

50 years before Edison.

He fought a pandemic.

There was a malaria outbreak in Groningen

and he built a small chlorine factory

to create disinfectant for the people.

Wow.

And he built an electric boat.

So this one sort of chemistry professor

in the mid-1830s was just sort of going,

yeah, I'll do a bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of this.

Why don't we know his name?

I think he's sort of been slightly forgotten

and I discovered a PhD thesis by a Dutch historian

who's been trying to, like,

just get back to the basics because it's really fascinating.

And I've got a picture of the car here.

Perfect for a podcast.

Sorry.

God, that is an unbelievable picture.

What?

Wow.

And the genitals are so impressive.

And the polishing finish on those shoes.

Wow.

But yeah, I like him.

He's doing electric cars in the 1830s

way before Edison, way before Ford.

What's his name again?

I've forgotten it.

Zebrandes Strating.

Dutch listeners will yell at me for getting that horribly wrong.

But yeah, 1830s.

And it's very cool.

In 1908 there was a race Philadelphia

between Mrs Laura Duval

who owned an electric car

with a top speed of 17 miles an hour

and a guy who owned

a petrol car that could go 60 miles an hour

whose name appears to have been

Driver Middleton.

So his first name was Driver.

I don't understand that really.

But it was in the papers, this is true.

And they decided to have a race through the city

to see who would be the fastest see if electric cars

were better than petrol cars.

And the slight twist in kind of a top gear

style is they had to stop at a few shops

and do a few things on the way

through the city.

And the woman who had the electric car

she won by 10 minutes

and the reason being that she didn't have to crank it.

And the thing is like

you couldn't really go much faster than 20 miles an hour

in the cities in the time because there was so much other

traffic and the roads and people in the roads and stuff.

And so really that was the fastest you could go

even if you had a 60 mile an hour car.

And so the lack of cranking

meant it was a much better.

Lack of cranking. That feels like

that's a life lesson there.

So that's the reason that

electric cars didn't win the race against

petrol cars is because

people stopped having to crank

their cars into life.

So they invented the thing called the electric starter

which meant you no longer had to crank the car.

Electricity

meant that the electric car failed.

Dramatic irony.

I mean

dramatic irony up the wazoo.

That's insane.

And there was another thing, the muffler.

The muffler was invented which made petrol cars quieter.

Yeah, that was a big issue.

And they got cheaper and cheaper.

It's also the discovery of oil, right?

Yeah, the discovery of oil was a minor third element

which revolutionised the...

I mean Edison is talking to Ford, I think.

They're having conversations about whether to go big

and produce electric cars on mass because at this point

London got electric tube trains in 1890.

It got electric trams in 1901

and it got electric buses

called electro buses in 1907

and they were powered by batteries.

So if you go on YouTube there's footage of

like Leicester Square or Piccadilly Circus

in 1908 or something.

There are electric buses

pootling around. Crazy.

We were saying we did a show about suffragettes recently

but you do see these images where suffragettes

are on electric scooters.

And I mean it's basically London today.

Popping a wheelie. Yeah, exactly.

How they were getting to throw bricks

at parliament and stuff via electric scooter

which is mad.

And one of the big things I guess is that

there was so much resistance not only from

members of the public who might not have thought

that this was a useful thing

but by the rail workers as well

because trains were, you know, everyone would be out of a job

if suddenly these electric cars worked.

So early cars were being hit

by a whole group and whole industry

because they just thought, no way, we don't want to.

My favourite electric car from this era

is called the electro bat.

Oh yeah. 1894.

I feel like Batman

in an electric car

but like a really cute pootling 15 mile an hour one.

That's a Chris Nolan movie I want to see.

In order to defeat fear

you must become fear but only at 15 miles an hour.

In America

this is in the 50s now

they used to do

mass car blessings.

If you got a car you used to go to the church

and have your car blessed just for, you know,

good karma basically.

I'm mixing my religions there but yeah.

Oh nice.

Oh shit!

Oh wow!

You self-punned yourself.

Wow, that was cool.

Care to come back into the room Mr Shriver?

I'm just doing my victory lap, Andy.

So yeah, so you would take it to church

and you would have it blessed by a priest.

Is it like a drive through?

No but they did have on mass.

On mass?

Oh fuck!

I am on fire!

I feel like if I put my shoes on you they're going to recharge.

What puns coming next?

No one knows.

I'm too nervous.

I'm going to start trying to think a word and I should just say it.

Stay in that state.

I'll stay in the zone, yeah.

So yeah, so they would do mass blessings and so on

and it would be thousands. Yeah, pretty cool, hey.

We do need to move on in a second.

In 2010 Renault in France were sued

for trying to call their new electric car the Zoe.

Can you guess why?

The Zoe.

So was it by another person called Zoe

who didn't want to be

Zoe Wanamaker?

It was by two married couples

who both had daughters

named Zoe Renault.

Their surname was Renault, it's just a name.

And so they said

our children's, our daughters' lives

will be irreversibly damaged

if you call your new car the Renault Zoe.

And they basically

they brought a case saying first names are for humans.

Not for cars.

So French.

But listen to this.

This is from the reporting of the time, right?

The lawyer also argued

that all of France's thousands of Zoe's

could be affected with playground teasing

and, as they grow older,

comments in bars such as

Can I see your airbags?

Or

Can I shine your bumper?

The case was rejected flat out of hand.

Stop the podcast.

Stop the podcast.

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I did need to move us on to our final fact.

It is time for our final fact of the show

and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1908

the New York Times

reported on a dog in France

that was deliberately knocking

children into the sen before

rescuing them and claiming a reward.

So yeah, this is a thing that

happened. It was

in the New York Times that the

headline was dog a fake hero.

And they said

that he was doing it to win beef steaks.

And yeah, basically a child

had fallen into the river

and he'd gone and saved the child

and they'd given him a big old steak

and he thought, well, I could do with a bit more

of that.

And sure enough, over the next few days

more and more children started falling

in the sand and the same dog

kept saving them. That's amazing.

Isn't it cool? That's incredible, isn't it?

How long did the scam go before people went

hang on us? It was only a few times.

The newspaper article said it wasn't

too long before the jig was up.

But actually

this isn't the first dog who's done this.

I found an article

in the spectator from 1885

about a dog in Lake Ontario

who had pulled a boy out of

Lake Ontario and they'd taken him

and they said he went to a confectioner's

and given him a variety of cakes and other sweets.

I'm not sure if dogs are allowed

to eat cakes and other sweets, but they did anyway.

But sure enough, he started

pushing kids into the

lake.

It's such a good example of unintended consequences.

It's brilliant, isn't it?

I was looking into life-saving dogs

and I found a report.

This is from 2009, right? That Italy had

300 life-saving

dogs that were stationed at beaches.

OK, I'm just going to tell you what it said, right?

And then we can get into it because

the vice president of the training school

was a woman called Donna Pascuali and she said

that, I'm quoting here,

the dogs learned to tow their instructors out

to sea so they had

the medical strength to give attention to drowning

swimmers. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

Does it? Well, if you don't have a boat,

if you don't have a boat... OK, that's the if.

That's the big if. Yeah.

Because why can't you just have a boat?

But, OK...

They've spent on the money on dogs.

Exactly.

OK, OK, Dan, that's...

OK, so maybe you don't have a boat on any of the 300

beaches where you stationed the dogs.

Here's what

Ms Pascuali said.

The dogs are incredibly strong. Our record

is one dog towing 40 people at the same time.

Are they Newfoundland dogs?

Are they Newfoundland dogs?

Who fucking cares, Dan? It's 40 people!

Yeah.

One dog can't tow 40 people. That's impossible.

Are they not on a lilo?

Are they floating on the surface

at your still? Exactly.

So why are the dogs towing 40 doctors

on the same...

At that point, I feel, get a boat.

Sometimes, Andy,

and I only know this because I do watch a lot of Baywatch,

you can't

make it out past the surf

on a boat, right?

So when you're swimming, if you're on a speed boat

and the waves are coming in thick and high,

you're going to get flipped over.

You're not going to make it out. So that's why David Hasselhoff

always runs with that little red thing

that looks like a mini, like, micro surfboard

and does that. Now,

let me ask you this.

How much better would Baywatch be

if he had a dog under his arm

and was able to conserve his energy?

There you go. Not surf it,

but, like, get out there in that sort of way, right?

It makes total sense.

Well, you've put me back in my box, Dan.

I thought that was an insane thing about a dog towing 40 people,

but you've made me see it as a very reasonable...

The reason I mentioned

Newfoundland dogs is because a lot of

rescue boats take

Newfoundland dogs with them on it

in order to... They're amazing

at saving people. They're these big,

fluffy life rafts, basically.

They get into the water, you can lay on them

like your Kate Winslet on the door

and you can be saved, right?

And there's a story, and Greg, I wanted to ask you about this.

Actually, full disclosure,

it's the only time I've ever asked a guest

whether or not this is true, and you said,

no, but I'm going to ask you anyway.

Apparently, Napoleon

fell off a boat and a Newfoundland dog

jumped in after him and saved him.

No.

So your answer is still the same as before the show,

is what you're saying.

I mean, there's a billion stories about Napoleon

and you can never, ever rely on any of them,

so maybe, maybe, maybe.

I'm still... Upgraded to a maybe.

I'm still taken by your vision of Titanic's

closing scenes, Dan.

Get off the dog!

I've got some other hero dogs

who might be villains, but not really,

but they're not villains,

so they might have stolen a bit of thunder from other dogs.

So the most famous one is Balto.

Have you ever heard of Balto?

Balto, no. Balto.

He was a hero dog, really famous,

because he was part of a team of sled dogs,

sort of, you know, 120-odd dogs

and 20 mushes,

150 dogs, I think,

who saved a town in Alaska in 1925 called Nome,

and they had a terrifying

outbreak of a really horrible disease.

I think it was diphtheria.

They couldn't get the medicine to them because it was just frozen,

they couldn't get there, the ships wouldn't get there,

and a team of, kind of,

sled dog mushes, I guess,

volunteered, and they had to take this medicine

670 miles in terrifying,

you know, the worst possible

the Alaskan weather you can think of.

And it's called the Great Mercy Race for Nome,

and Balto was the lead dog

in the final leg

and became, like, a Hollywood celebrity.

They put a statue up in Central Park,

became really famous, he was stuffed,

put in a museum, and everyone was like,

Balto was a crap dog.

Really? Balto, the hero dog?

He was never a good dog, there were other dogs,

really that dog, that dog.

And it sort of turns out, maybe, that the musher

at the end, a guy called Gunnar Carson,

he had been doing the second to last leg

and he got to the, kind of, way station

and found the other guy who was meant to finish the run

was asleep, and he says,

oh, well, I didn't want to wake him up and delay,

I thought we just had to get to Nome

and so I did the final leg on my own as well,

so we did two legs with Balto as a lead dog.

But there's a sort of controversy as to whether

he stole this guy's thunder,

stole the other dog's thunder,

and the Balto, the, kind of, mediocre dog

and Carson, you know, but basically

nabbed the headlines and ended up as the hero

of this enormous, sort of, relay race

to save a town. But there's a bit of

kind of a controversy as to whether he maybe

nicked that from someone else.

And I guess they kind of don't care that much

because it gets a story out there still, right?

And it's, like, the face of the story,

so that's kind of the important part.

I've got another villain that I found out as well,

worth mentioning.

Have you heard of the DC superhero

called Dog Welder?

No?

No, it's not Dog Welder. So Dog Welder,

he was a villain, and what he used to do

was weld people's dogs to their faces.

That was his thing.

And he has, you can read a,

you can read a sort of bio on him,

so powers and abilities, abilities, dog welding.

Obsession has a strong compulsion

to weld dogs on people's faces.

Equipment.

Welding equipment.

Weapons. Dogs.

Which he welds onto people's faces.

And so this was a DC comic.

Yeah, yeah.

Wasn't he part of a, I think I remember,

there was, he was in a team, and one of the other

team was the defenestrator

who carried around a window to throw

people through.

I think you're thinking, because

he gets rid of now, I think you're thinking

of Dog Welder 2.

Who was, basically there was a husband

who one day goes to an antique shop.

He's possessed by original Dog Welder's

welding equipment, which happens to be in the shop.

And then he immediately

gets very obsessed with welding dogs

and welds the family dog to his children's

faces.

His wife is furious. She divorces him.

And so he's like struggling with it,

because he wants to get back with these kids.

He's like, why am I welding dogs to people's faces?

And then it turns out, and this is, he turns

into a good guy, because he learns

that actually, there's

a moment where the stars, Sirius A

and B, are expanding, and if they

touch, they'll explode and destroy

Earth. And so...

The dog stars.

And he realizes he's meant to weld them together.

So he punches

some massive astronauts in the face,

steals their outfits, their

astronaut suits, outfits.

And flies

beyond the moon to the Sirius

stars, where he welds the planets,

the stars back together, and he dies

in the process. But so he turns

good in the end, Dog Welder.

It's a brilliant thing.

When you weld a dog to a face,

do you go dog face to human face?

Do you do dog bum to human face?

Do you do dog side? Like a human

centipede kind of thing. Human centipede?

Is it schnauz as a schnauz?

I would have thought the side of the dog

to the side of the face, that's why I was thinking.

I would think so. But don't you have to have metal

to weld things together? Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, hang on. Sorry.

Just one dog can tow 40 people.

No, you're right, Andy.

Let me write to Fantasyland,

care of James and Andy.

If we

welded a Newfoundland to David Hasselhoff.

We must wrap up soon, but...

Can I tell you one last thing? Yeah.

In 2015, the Telegraph reported on a stray dog

called Archie, who had been rescued.

It was a really nice story and coached

back to strength by a volunteer.

Jack Russell, little dog.

And it was a lovely French nursery

school teacher who had been volunteering

at the centre and spending all of her weekends with him.

She sang him lots of songs in French

and she called him Mon Petit Choux and all of this.

And as a result, Archie now only reacts

to commands given in a French accent.

And if you want Archie to do anything,

you have to say,

what is a seat?

Anyone?

Do anything else?

Wackies!

I got a very, very quick story.

No, go for it. We have a few more minutes.

Okay, so about clever dogs.

So, the Spectator,

which is where I told you about the second

evil dog.

They actually got a bit of a reputation

in the 19th century for sort

of clever dog stories.

That's to such an extent that whenever

they write about them, they say,

oh, this is yet another Spectator dog.

But they would always get people writing in

with these stories and they all said

they were definitely true.

So, there was one person who said that they

were in church and there was a new priest.

And the priest was saying a sermon

and it was going on forever and ever and ever.

And there was a dog in there and he got restless

and the dog knew that an altar boy

would always go around with the plates

to collect money just before the end

of the church service.

And while this pastor was sort of droning on,

he went over to the boy

who always took it and sort of looked

at him, just stared at him

and said, when are you going to do your bloody thing?

And then when the boy

didn't do anything, he started

to beg for him to do the passing

the plate round. And when he didn't do anything about

that, he started nuzzling him and trying

to push him around the church to try and

get him to do this part of the mass.

And then knocked out the boy,

took his cassock,

dressed up as the boy,

conducted the search.

So not the search.

What's the free money thing

at the end of church? Free money?

You're doing it wrong if it's free money.

Not the like, the collection.

The collection, I'm not going to say the tipping, which is not.

Yeah.

Can I just ask, what is the tax implication

of the free money?

Free money?

All right.

That is it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us

about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland.

James.

At Andrew Hunter and Greg.

Greg underscore Jenner.

Or you can go to our group account, which is at

no such thing. Go to our website.

No such thing as a fish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Oh, wow. Quite a few. Okay, cool.

Join them. They sound fun.

And we will be back again next week

with another episode.

Thank you so much, Soho Theatre.

That was awesome. Thank you, Greg.

We will be back again as I say next week.

Goodbye!

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.