526: No Such Thing As An Angry Banana

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Hi everybody, Andy here.

Just before we start this week's show, I have a little announcement to make.

We're in Plug Corner because I have written a book.

I have offended again against all the people who say don't, don't do another one, just stop at two.

And I've written a third one.

And this one, for the first time ever, I've written something that is fun and funny, as well as being gripping.

It's called A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering.

It's about a young man called Al who lives in gorgeous, empty, second homes while the real owners are away.

He's got a whole set of rules to help him get into these beautiful houses he could never afford to live in.

He has a great life until about chapter three when he and his friends break into the wrong house on the wrong day, somebody ends up dead, and everything goes wrong from there.

It's funny, it's gripping, it's pacey.

There's a little bit of a message about housing in there.

It's a perfect summer read.

People have been really nice about it.

Val McDermid, Lisa Jewell, some of the queens of crime have been incredibly kind about it.

It's out on the 25th of April, so if you order it now, you will be among the first cohort globally to receive your gorgeous copy and they're really nice looking copies.

Please do pre-order it.

It can really be the difference between a book flying and not flying if it has a few pre-orders under its belt before that crucial first week.

It's out in all good bookshops.

It's in all bad bookshops.

It's in most bookshops in the Commonwealth, basically.

All you need to do is go in and say, I would like a copy of A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray.

Waterstones even have signed copies if you'd like to get a hold of one of those.

I I promise it's good.

I've put a lot into it.

I'm going to stop banging on about it now.

It's called A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering.

Thanks very much for listening to this.

On with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QA offices in Hoburn.

My name is Alex Bell and I'm joined by Anna Shazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin.

And once again, we are gathered around the microphone to share our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

So in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one and that is Andy.

My fact is that half the nitrogen in your body was made in a factory.

Which factory?

Ooh.

Well, it won't have been made in the UK anymore.

Because of Brexit.

It's a range of factories.

But the last nitrogen-making factory, I think, has just shut down.

Has it?

Yeah.

Is that the Billingham Manufacturing Plants?

Yes.

It is.

Has that closed?

I didn't know that.

It either has done or is about to.

But let's zoom out a little bit.

Just thinking, though.

Yeah.

No, let's keep on billing it.

I'm sorry.

Even if it's just closed, surely it takes a while for all the nitrogen to be replaced.

So maybe some of it's British nitrogen in the middle.

You might have some British nitrogen in you, but I'm afraid a lot of it will be filthy foreign nitrogen.

So,

right.

Everything, all life forms,

don't write in, most life forms, mammals and plants all contain nitrogen.

It's a really important component in your body.

It's required to make the protein in your body and all these various hormones, neurotransmitters, it's vital.

You know, nitrogen's very important.

And

most of the air is nitrogen, right?

78% of the atmosphere is nitrogen.

But that's not where you get your nitrogen from.

So you can't just breathe in the nitrogen from the air and get it in your body.

No, even if you hold your breath for ages, none of the nitrogen goes in that way.

It doesn't work.

What a waste.

What a waste.

But you get it from your food.

So meat, fish, dairy, vegetable, cereals, nuts, all of those foods contain some nitrogen, right?

Yeah.

So plants get it from the air.

I mean, there's a complicated bacterial process.

I'm sure we'll get there.

Nitrogen and plants.

Or lightning.

Or lightning, and that's another way.

We'll get there as well.

The point is that about two or three kilos of your body, roughly half of your forearm to the end of your hand, is nitrogen.

Is that where it all is?

And that's where it all is.

So the amount of you made in a factory is roughly your hand and wrist.

And that's because nitrogen-based fertilizer has become an enormous thing in the last century.

It's incredibly important.

It's why the human population has risen from one or two billion to now eight billion.

The sole reason is that we have enough...

ways of feeding people because we have enough fertilizers to grow crops.

And the way we do that is with this brilliant chemical process discovered at the start of the 20th century, which allows us to pull nitrogen from the sky and make it into fertilizer to make plants grow.

Does this mean I'm not organic?

Yeah.

Shit.

What's the point of buying all that nice food?

Nitrogen fixation.

Do you remember learning about that?

That was where I sort of lost interest.

And now coming back to it, I thought, God, this is fascinating.

But poor old nitrogen being told it has to be fixed.

So there's this conundrum which Andy sort of touched on where it's the air's full of it, but plants can't take it in without assistance and so it needs to be fixed by these bacteria that basically make plant roots grow these nodules which act as their homes and then they live in these nodules and they fix this nitrogen turning it into ammonia which plants can use.

And the nitrogen came originally from a star exploding.

Ooh.

That's essentially it.

Didn't know that?

The Big Bang can make hydrogen and helium but anything else needs to be made in stars.

The original nitrogen factory is a star.

Yeah exactly.

So some star created lots of nitrogen, then it exploded.

Eventually, it came to Earth.

Then eventually it got in the sky.

Then eventually a bacterium fixed it.

And then it got put into a carrot.

And then you ate the carrot.

And then it went into your bloodstream.

And then it got turned into proteins, which got turned into muscles.

It definitely gets less exciting, doesn't it?

Like, part of the journey starts off really well, and then it's sort of sitting in a carrot.

Yeah.

So how did we learn to make this stuff?

Oh, I'm so glad you asked.

Oh, it's like inside the factory with Greg Wallace.

i love that oh look at that nitrogen oh yeah lovely oh yeah

it's all thanks to something called the haber bosch process or haber bosch sometimes known so flitz haber and karl bosch were two german chemists and um the problem like everyone knew that we needed more nitrogen at the time but it was very hard to work out how we're going to actually get it and you know we talked about guano like the guano gold rush because bird poo contains lots of nitrates so that in the 19th century was used to increase crop yields and that saved everyone's bacon and you know it's brilliant for a while and everyone ran out of

bacon very nice um talking about the haber bosch process um

can i talk about bacon first

yeah go on yeah yeah um you know bacon is most bacon is cured with nitrates right as in that's what makes it last longer which is a type of nitrogen or it's a you know it's a molecule with nitrogen in it and when it goes green bacon that is something called nitrate burn and it's a reaction to the the chemical that's used to cure it, and it means that it's still good to eat.

So, if your bacon's gone a bit green, you can still eat it.

Amazing.

It's not bacteria, it's not anything that's bad for you, it's just a natural part of the process.

I thought it was rotten.

Yeah, I thought my bacon had gone off.

I'm not saying that all green bacon is good to eat.

No, that's what I've taken away from that.

But if you bought it only a week ago, it's probably fine.

Sorry, Andy, you were saying about Bosch and Harbour.

Harbour.

Yeah, so basically, he was a chemist, and it was a very

difficult process to work out.

He knew that lightning, as you said, James, breaks apart nitrogen bonds, because nitrogen molecules are really tightly bonded.

It takes a lot of effort to break them apart to turn them into ammonia.

But eventually, he worked out a sort of pressurized process to combine nitrogen and hydrogen, and that makes the ammonia fertilizer.

And he developed that in 1913, Harbor, and it was just before the war.

And there's a theory that it actually kept the First World War going for longer than it should have done, because German imports of fertilizer were blockaded.

But he was able, he had created a process where you could make, as they called it, bread from air.

So if we stopped any poo from getting over to Germany during the war, they could make their own stuff.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Basically, yeah.

I mean, that was it.

And he got the Nobel Prize for it, didn't he?

Which was extremely controversial.

It was very controversial.

On account of his other legacy.

Because he made poison gas.

Right.

That's so funny.

I can't believe the Nobel Prize in 1919 went to someone who'd invented which gas was it?

Was it?

Chlorine.

Chlorine gas.

It was bad.

It was quite controversial.

Yeah.

He did kill 90,000 people with it.

He didn't go around personally spraying it into the trenches.

Yeah, but he was responsible for the birth of arguably 6 billion.

So it's

roundabout.

Do you think on interviews and stuff, he's like, I don't want to talk about that.

I want to talk about my Nobel Prize winning work.

Because his wife, Clara, was a chemist as well.

And they had a huge dispute after

the first battle of Ypres,

where poison gas was used for the first time and killed thousands.

He said it was no different killing someone with a bomb or a bullet.

She said it is very different.

And then she killed herself.

She

was the ultimate act in an argument.

We don't know for sure that the argument is what led to the suicide.

I really didn't leave any notes or anything like that.

But we know she really, she's fascinating, Clara Haber and or Habert, if you're a German listening.

She was Germany's first female doctor of chemistry.

She got a PhD in 1900.

And she turned him down.

The first time Fritz proposed, she turned him down because she wanted to be financially independent, which is crazy in 1900 as a woman.

But she'd gone, hey, I want to live under my own steam.

And then she decided marriage would kind of empower her which it bloody well didn't which she did complain about understandably she was like hang on my husband turns out to be very self-serving constantly working i don't have a chance at all to develop my career yeah um and he's a mass murderer and it turns out he's a mass murderer and that's the final straw and he was like no no talk about the other stuff talk about the nobel price stuff did you see pictures of her i think she looks a bit like fenella dan's wife oh do you yeah i haven't seen a photo of her i'm not very good with faces as we all know right but that was was what I thought.

And do you associate Dan with Fritz Haber, the mass murdering but mass life-producing complex character?

In some ways, but I think Dan is more of a wife guy than Fritz Haber was.

So then Haber escaped to Switzerland wearing a false beard after the war.

That's amazing.

And then after World War I, because obviously we then had the Treaty of Versailles, which really punished Germany, right?

And so he came up with the idea of extracting gold from the ocean to pay off all of the war reparations because he knew that there was loads and loads of gold in the ocean.

And he thought, if I can get at that, we'll be rich beyond our wildest dreams.

It doesn't work.

And actually, we still can't do it, of course.

It's that term that I think you've told me about, James, for when Nobel Prize winners win a prize and then they come up with a really insane subsequent.

Nobleitis.

I'm like a serious case of serious assault.

But if he'd done it once before, he'd literally made bread from air.

Yeah.

The human population is going to grow by billions.

Thanks to the best.

From the guy who brought bread from air comes gold from the ocean.

It works.

I believe it.

That works.

And actually, sort of associated, the Nobel Prize in 1935 was awarded for basically being able to turn an element into another element.

which was the alchemy that people had dreamed of forever and ever.

People had tried to make gold, and actually this was turning boron into nitrogen, which wasn't quite the fantasy of the 17th century alchemists.

But like these factories were taking already existing nitrogen out of the air and making it into ammonia, which could be used.

But Mary Curie's daughter, who won that prize, right?

I can't remember her name, but that was actually making new nitrogen, which no one had ever done before.

Totally.

So this was amazing.

And I didn't realize that.

She was the second female to win a Nobel Prize, Mary Curie's daughter.

Was Mary Curie the first?

Yeah.

Yes.

Nepo baby.

But it was husband and wife as well.

So just like Mary Curie and her husband Pierre who won a joint prize, sweetly, it was Mary Curie's daughter Irene and her husband Frederick Joliot Curie who won the Nobel Prize in 1935.

Do you think that maybe they didn't have a chance unless you sort of did stand behind a man a bit?

I'm sure there was something to that.

Although her surname was Curie, so I think that probably helped.

In a few doors, yeah.

Yeah.

And also her way of making nitrogen was firing radioactivity at Boron, wasn't it?

I think.

Yeah.

So it's kind of, you know, in the parents' realm.

Okay.

Yeah, she probably had all the equipment in the garage.

Great.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a lot easier when you figure out.

And if memory serves, I think she died of leukemia, didn't she?

What, the younger?

I think Irene did.

Related to the work she'd done.

I'm sure.

Didn't know.

To be honest, I'm going off memory, but I think that's right.

Because Mary, it was the last thing that Mary almost did was see the results of her daughter's successful tests before she died of leukemia.

Yeah, nice.

One thing on the Billingham manufacturing plant.

Oh, thank God.

Thank God.

In Stockton-on-Tees, in England.

We'd better get a a free trip.

It's closed.

I'm not going to closed down 1900.

I've had worse day trips out of my credit card.

Aldous Huxley went there.

They gave him a trip around, and he based some of Brave New World on it.

So, you know, in Brave New World, they like have a factory making humans, I think, don't they?

Yeah.

And like, yeah, they make clones and stuff like that.

And he saw this Billingham factory that was effectively making life by making this nitrogen.

I am imagining like Willy Wonka style.

Like, it's so whimsical.

It's a reverse Willy Wonka because in Willy Wonka don't the kids go in and never come out?

Whereas in Brave New World you get loads of new kids from the factory.

The kids do come out they just come out in all weird shapes and colours and like they've all been really quite fucked up psychologically and physically.

Every chocolate factory has a nitrogen factory next to it to make new children.

It's a horrific process.

I learned about what I think is the most exciting moment in history, in all of history.

Wow.

As we said at the start, nitrogen is essential for life because it makes amino acids, which make proteins, and that's like the whole building blocks of what all living things are made of.

But there's this kind of mystery, which is how did the first life get its nitrogen?

Because as we've said, it needs this bacteria to be made accessible.

And it can also be made by lightning striking through it, but actually not enough seems to be generated by that.

And it seemed quite unlikely.

And it seems like the likeliest explanation for where the very first life ever came from.

So whatever, three and a half billion years ago, is God.

And there we go.

That is exciting.

This is like the original chicken and egg, really.

What is the actual answer?

What is the actual answer?

The answer is it happened with volcanic lightning, which I just think is the coolest moment.

So basically, when volcanoes erupt, then lots and lots of lightning can be generated from the eruption.

It's when all this ash goes up.

It's a really complicated process.

But basically, that ash rubbing against each other makes static electricity.

And if you look, you've got loads and loads of lightning bolts, hundreds of them, in this volcanic eruption.

And scientists scientists have looked at the soil around volcanoes, seen they're full of nitrates, which plants can use, and realized we think this must be how the first life ever was created, was when shed loads of lightning was firing above a volcano as it was erupting, and it allowed nitrogen to get into the soil in a way that could make it so.

That is cool.

That isn't like an origin story I can get behind.

I'm so glad it wasn't, this wasn't just like, oh, this cell touched this cell and the fish flopped out of a thing.

And like, all of the other origin stories are so lame.

That's like Frankenstein, electricity evil laughter lava yeah it's cool so metal yeah um james you just mentioned the treaty of versailles yes so the haber bosch process is so significant that it was part of the package of the treaty of versailles

yeah the western powers ordered via the treaty germany to hand over the secret of making these fertilizers really yeah

there's all sorts of stuff they cobbled on to the treaty of

crazy shit we've mentioned it in the past and i can't remember what it was something else that's really random champagne but But they also didn't

want to change the way that orchestras were tuned.

Yeah.

That's it.

Like, there must have been like...

And another thing.

It's like having an argument with your partner.

Yeah.

It starts with something else, and you're like, I'm just going to dredge up all these other things.

Yeah, the ultimate argument with a partner.

What was champagne?

Sorry.

Oh,

the fact that champagne can only be made in the Champagne region and anywhere else.

It's sparkling wine.

That comes from the Treaty of Versailles.

Does it?

I didn't know that.

Wow.

I was thinking, surely the French already had champagne.

The interesting part of that being that Russia didn't sign it, and America didn't sign it.

And in both those countries, you can buy champagne, which isn't from France.

No way.

They didn't sign the Treaty of Versailles.

The little-known fact, the First World War is still going on.

Yesterday had their own treaties.

They did.

Do America and Russia have a good culture of champagne?

Are they known for good champagne anywhere?

Californian white wine,

you must be able to make good champagne out of that.

Yeah, just stick an Alka Seltzer in it.

Bob's your uncle.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that Harriet Tubman once walked into a hospital and asked a doctor to cut her head open, and he immediately did.

Just mad.

So Harriet Tubman, extremely famous in America, probably less well known about here, I would say, but you know, one of the most influential, famous abolitionists ever, one of the conductors of the Underground Railroad, responsible for smuggling lots of enslaved people into freedom in the 19th century.

And one thing that I've learned through reading about her, she was insanely hardcore,

so tough,

so and this is just an element of it, she was very old at the time.

She must have been in her 60s or 70s, I think, in the 1890s.

And late 1890s, she's in Boston and she passed this big building and she asked what it was and someone said it was a hospital.

And she thought, well, I've had these terrible headaches my whole life.

She really had awful like headaches and like terrible vision problems, was probably disabled by it.

So she went right in and she said, I saw a young man there and I said, sir, are you a doctor?

And he said he was.

And then I said, sir, do you think you could cut my head open?

And he said, lay right down here on this table.

No.

And Son's painkillers, he sawed open her skull and raised it up, apparently.

And then then, as she put it, she got up, put on her bonnet, and started to walk home.

But her legs did get a bit wobbly and give out under her.

So they gave her an ambulance to take her the rest of the way.

It's astonishing.

Sorry, some questions.

Like, when you say he raised up, is there like a loft extension of her skull?

Was her brain too big?

What is going on?

I think this was a slightly

questionable medical procedure, which she said worked and may have been more placebo than placement.

Like, she didn't go and say, my brain is a bit low.

My brain's brain's a little bit low in my head.

It's almost in my neck.

Did she just wrench it?

Well, she did say it feels more comfortable now.

Yeah.

But apparently, she refused anesthetic, bit of bullet, as they did in the Civil War.

That is actually, I'm afraid, a myth, but it's a very interesting subject you raise, Alex, because it's the mythology of her life, which has been so turned into all these stories.

I personally don't believe any of this.

It sounds ridiculous.

It is interesting because the more you read, you're like, that's a great fact.

And then you read again, someone goes, no, that's a a myth.

And then a lot of the myths come from relatively close sources, don't they?

Like the first biography of her that was written, there's loads of myths in there.

She never got to write her own.

She wanted to write her own.

She never got to.

Well, you need to learn to read first, huh?

Yeah, it's true.

Well, have you heard of it?

Yeah.

That was one of the things that was interesting.

That time someone brought Harriet Tuppen down a bit more too.

That's why I decided to do fact value.

On the reading, did you hear?

I'm I imagine this could be an appropriate tale as well, but there's a story that she was many years after all of her time running the Underground Railroad that she was on a train and a former master of hers got on, and she was a known figure by that point.

And so, to avoid being recognised, she grabbed a nearby newspaper and pretended to read it because she was known for not being able to read.

Oh, yeah.

It was on the front cover of that newspaper.

The face was lined up perfectly without the wanted sign.

No, I

think it's probably untrue.

Because I've got a different version of it, which is that when she was on one of her missions, because she left the South where she'd been enslaved and she went back to free former slaves, and you know, she did a lot of that shuttling back forward.

But she was back in the South in 1856, and she overheard some men reading her wanted poster, right?

Which said clearly she's illiterate, and then she got out a book and pretended to read it.

And the ploy was enough to fool the men.

I mean, so like she looks just like Harriet Tubman, but she's reading, so it can't be her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She's reading a normal book upside down.

But why would you put on the wanted poster that the

one of the level things?

And also, I think the idea that people even knew who she was at the time is false.

So they knew that there was a person who was helping all these enslaved people be freed.

They knew that people were calling them some kind of Moses because they were freeing their people, but they didn't know anything about her personally.

And a lot of people assumed it was a white abolitionist who was helping enslaved people.

But it is interesting because

a lot of the stuff you read, you just think that that can't be true.

And it's not to do down her amazing achievements at all, but it's to show that

she's become this unbelievable cult figure.

It's almost mythological with some of the stories around her.

We've got to try quite a careful line between slamming one of the most beloved and famous women in American history and also sort of acknowledging

amazing stuff.

I find her the most incredible person, one of the most incredible people ever.

I don't have the energy sometimes to finish the research with this podcast.

And this woman who was like, she was very disabled.

She was female.

She was black.

She was enslaved.

Just this extraordinary life and she fought in the civil war as well she after being this abolitionist hero she fought in the civil war she was incredibly charitable i don't understand why she got the energy and it actually makes me quite angry

Her injury, her disability came when she was injured by an overseer who threw a stone weight at her head when she was quite young.

He actually threw it at someone else, I think, and it missed and hit her.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Oh, that's bad luck.

But yeah, she had sleeping spells quite often.

So she would just kind of fall asleep.

What we probably call narcolepsy today,

but she would have like these kind of hazy dreams while she was asleep.

And because she was very religious, she thought they were kind of premonitions from God.

It's quite stressful, the idea: let's say you've been enslaved, Harriet Tummer's come back, she's freed you, she's guiding you to the north, and then she just falls asleep.

It's a bit of a comedy scene.

There is sitcom potential in this life, is all I'm saying.

I think that might be the first time ever someone said there's sitcom potential in Harriet Tombstone's life.

She went back, she freed.

And the numbers vary.

So she rescued 60 or 70 people herself personally, and then she gave instructions to another 70-odd.

And that got slightly inflated to 300.

But she did go back.

I mean,

between about around 10 times, she made a mission back into the South, which was really perilous.

She also went back at one point to go free her husband, who she'd left, came back, found that he'd remarried.

And there's a line which, again, is probably just a biographer, right?

But it's sort of like she thought about making a scene but then decided against it and rescued him anyway.

But it's like the idea again of like the sort of two minutes where she's deciding whether to massively kick off that you've married another woman or to save him.

Well, he didn't need to be rescued per se because he was not enslaved, he was a free man, right?

But yeah, yeah, which was kind of a big deal at the time because a free man marrying an enslaved woman, you would lose a lot of your rights

because all your children would be automatically enslaved.

You wouldn't be able to get married unless you had permission of the woman's master, as they called them.

Yeah, so that was quite a big deal.

But yeah, like you say, once she was off doing her gallivanting, he was like, no, I'm just going to find another wife.

Again, the sitcom is taking shape.

One sweet thing I do like is that when she retired, eventually, she retired into a retirement home that she had founded.

So she in 1908, she opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Elderly, specifically for

indigent and aged African Americans, as it was described.

Are we sure they didn't misunderstand?

And she said, No, I called it the Harriet Tubman home because it's just a home.

Just for me.

Here's another good thing.

Okay, this is good.

And I'm pretty sure this is true as well.

So on the missions, when she was taking people over to the north, she would sing, right?

And there were particular songs.

And some people say she would sing things like Swing Low Sweet Chariot, but that hadn't been written yet.

But she was very ahead of her.

She was, yeah.

Assuming would rather be.

She was, yeah.

So there were songs called Go Down Moses and Bound for the Promised Land, right?

And those were real songs, which she did sing at the time.

And this is a cool thing.

She would change the tempo of the songs to indicate whether it was safe to come out or not.

So she would just be walking along singing.

But the way she was singing was a message to the people she was ferrying north.

Really?

Does that mean, like, you know, if everything's going well and they need to run, did she like, go,

if they needed to be slower, she would just do it.

Yeah.

And if she stops singing completely, she's fallen asleep.

I was looking into possibly what kind of brain surgery she had, and then I went on a bit of a journey and found a really fascinating syndrome, which I cannot believe we have never spoken about before.

And I feel like we all might have it actually.

It's called Forster syndrome, or also known as Witzel sucks, and it's the pathological urge to constantly make puns.

Witzel sucks.

I had that for a while.

Witzel sucked.

Somebody get a doctor.

Fucking hell.

So this was first noted in 1929 by a German neurologist called Ottfried Forster, which is

named after.

He was operating on a patient to remove a tumor, and the patient was awake, as often happens, as was the case with Harriet Tubman.

And as he started moving around this tumor, the man suddenly, he was face down, strapped to the table.

He suddenly just started talking manically and just like making pun after pun.

They all remember that?

I hardly even met him.

Literally that.

It was literally all about knives and surgery.

And he'd obviously, because that was what was on his mind, because he was was having brain surgery.

That's literally what was on his mind.

Literally, exactly.

Jesus, guys, can you stop?

It's absolutely fascinating.

And then there've been more recent examples of this.

There was a man a few years ago.

We just know his name is Derek because he was anonymous.

But he had a couple of strokes and his behavior changed in many ways.

He used to try and compulsively recycle stuff and things like that.

And he started waking up his wife in the middle of the night being like, I've just come up with another pun.

And eventually his wife was like, why don't you start writing them down and not telling me?

But eventually realized that this was like a pathological behavior change.

And the interesting other side effect is this is that it's a really simple, basic humor, like basic pun connections, basic, really basic jokes.

There's a lot of skill involved.

Yeah, neurologists studied this and they showed them more complex joke patterns.

They didn't find them funny at all.

And it's something to do with that really basic pleasure of making a connection in your head.

But they also didn't find other people's jokes funny at all.

That's basically every comedian, isn't it?

Another thing about Tubman is that she did get fame by the end of her life and was recognisable and a bunch of receptions were put on in her honour in the 1890s.

They were put on in Boston and she didn't live there, she had to get a train, but to pay for the train ticket she had to sell one of her cows.

So in order to get to a bunch of receptions thrown in her honour where she was the star guest, she sold her cow to get the train.

I think she was she spent so much of her life in different parts of her life in poverty just because she just gave away so much stuff.

And when she rescued people from slavery, she used to then follow through and like get them jobs and set them up in the new places.

She didn't just get them somewhere and be like, fear.

She did a lot of cooking too.

And that was relevant because she raised a lot of money for the missions by cooking, basically.

And there was a really interesting piece about this sort of facet of her life on NPR.

So she was once at a market.

She came face to face with a former sort of slave overseer, basically, and she was holding two chickens, right?

Oh, yeah.

What did she do?

She pretended to read the chickens.

Brilliant.

She said, oh, looks like there's three cocks at the room.

Very sassy.

We're going in the pilot script.

Did she shove her head into a chicken and to disguise herself as a chicken?

She hit him with a chicken.

She threw eggs at him.

She released one of the chickens and then pretended to chase it, causing a comic kerfuffle.

Ironically, by drawing attention to herself, she deflected attention from herself.

Again, another scene in the sitcom.

That's what happens in Mr.

Bean's holiday.

He chases a chicken for like 40 minutes.

Comedy goals.

Glad we've got the bean on Gripper.

Do you love Mr.

Bean?

So there's a link between her and Queen Victoria, which I find interesting.

So in 1897, Queen Victoria sent her a shawl to sort of mark her amazing work.

Yeah, it was a gift.

Yeah, a gift.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I thought I could do a little quiz for you now.

Brilliant.

Who was taller?

Queen Victoria or Harriet Tubman?

Ooh, God.

Well, Queen Victoria was no more than five foot, I think perhaps less, four foot eleven.

She's famously quite short.

Famously short.

I believe famously, her circumference ended up being more than her height at the end of her life.

Does this help us with Tubman, though?

Tubman's got to be taller.

I know she was on the small side.

I think she's going to be smaller because it's not a fun quiz because Queen Victor is quite short.

I think most people.

I think the fun ship has sailed.

I'm going to say, I think Tubman was an inch taller.

Okay.

I reckon she was five foot on the dot.

I'm going to say they're exactly the same height.

Brilliant.

I'm going to say Tubman was an inch shorter.

Well, Anna's closest.

Tubman was four foot eleven.

Oh.

Queen Victoria.

Now, James, I have read,

I went down a real rabbit hole.

I'm sure you're right.

Basically, we know there's a surviving tape measure kept by a portraitist in 1837

which shows she was 5'1.

Because she had been, Victoria, I mean, no, not Tubman, but Queen Victoria had been claimed to be 5'2.

And they boosted her height by an inch.

Obviously, it would be ridiculous to say she's 5'10 and, you know, really leggy.

Maybe she was wearing heels.

Yeah.

Basically, they were a bit embarrassed, the royal family, that she was only 5'1.

Because it made it seem like she hadn't been fed well in childhood.

And, you know, like taller children tend to be better fed.

They boosted her height, sort of her public height, to 5'2 so that she would seem a bit better.

But the portrait artist had the receipts.

What I think is interesting is that this means approximately that Queen Victoria was about the same height as Sandy Toxwig, and Harriet Tubman was about the same height as Susan Kalman.

Yeah.

So if we need people in your sitcom of Tubman.

I think that's some problematic casting there if you're saying Susan Kowman for the role of Harriet Tubman.

I do see that now, yeah.

Okay, time now for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that wasabi is good on sushi rolls and papyrus scrolls.

Hmm.

Lovely.

I beg to differ, personally.

What?

Never tasted papyrus, and yet I reckon I know it's not good.

Ah.

Even without wasabi.

Well, we come to the fact itself.

Oh, he's worded it humorously.

I wouldn't say that's even humorous, it's just a rhyme.

Lyrically,

you've worded it misleadingly in the hope of humor.

It charmed me.

I found it amusing.

It is not misleading at all.

So it's good on sushi rolls because it tastes good, in my opinion.

And there are other reasons that we might come to.

Papyrus scrolls, though, is the main interesting part, which is this new technique of looking after papyrus.

Now there is a problem that because papyrus is made from plants it can fall victim to fungal infections and the fungus can damage the papyrus and it can cause the paint to fade and stuff like that.

And so there has been a study in the Journal of Archaeological Science which has put some wasabi vapours onto the papyrus and these smells kill off the funguses or rather stop the funguses from growing very well and they they don't get rid of the colours so you can still read them and yeah this is a lot safer and better for the environment than what you might use before which is chemicals it's super non-invasive super non-invasive because they just put the wasabi near the papyrus yeah yeah what i really like in this study is that they didn't want to use actual you know ancient egyptian papyruses but they wanted to see if it worked on something like that so they did exactly what you would do at primary school which is heated up some papyrus to make it look like it was really old.

You know, like you might do if you were making a pirate bap at

the same time.

Well, they dip it in tea.

They didn't dip it in tea.

They made new papyrus.

They made new papyrus.

Aged it up fast.

They aged it fast by heating it up.

That's so clever.

Yeah.

And then they mix water and wasabi, almost like if you mix your wasabi with soy sauce, that kind of, you know.

And after the end of the process, you've got a snack.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm less worried about wasting papyri on this process and more worried about wasting good wasabi on this process.

It's very precious wasabi.

It's very hard to make, isn't it?

It's hard to obtain it.

And they're just like steaming away wasabi at papairi.

And isn't most wasabi not real wasabi?

I mean, I've probably never had real wasabi.

I think I've ever had real wasabi.

It's most wasabi.

It's just in Japan, though.

You must have done.

I have been, but I read that even in Japan, a lot of it is

horseradish.

What if I went to a really nice restaurant in Japan?

You'd probably find.

Would it be hard?

I think five or ten percent of wasabi served in Japan is real wasabi.

Really?

But in the West, it's like one percent is real wasabi.

It's really

horseradish, yeah.

And horseradish is really strong.

But I think wasabi is a bit gentler and a bit more interestingly delicate and a bit more flavoursome.

That's what I read.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And a bit gritti.

You can tell if you've got real stuff because it's a bit should be a bit grittier.

Also, I didn't realise that you need to eat it immediately, as soon as it's been grated, because it loses its zing.

So essentially, you...

Sometimes they bring a root to the table and a grater and you grate it fresh onto your food.

I think I prefer the horseradish.

If real wasabi is bland and gritty and you have to have it immediately fresh or it goes off even more.

No one said bland.

I just want to say if there are any chefs out there.

Oh, Alex said bland.

We didn't say bland.

I believe delicate.

And the other thing, the other reason wasabi is good on sushi rolls, so not just because it tastes good, but also because it has antimicrobial properties.

So as well as stopping funguses from growing, it can stop bacteria from growing.

And it has something in there called six

sulfinylhexyl isothiocyanate, which stops E.

coli, Staphylococcus, and salmonella from growing.

Really?

Yeah.

It sounds like we should be taking baths in it or something.

It would be good for us as an anti-I think even the delicate wasabi, if you have a bath in it, it's going to get right up your nose.

Yeah, bam, bam, bam.

And will it cost you a fair few bob.

But you could put a bit in your shoes and stop a fungal infection.

You could go for a bath, a nonson, in Japan, and maybe someone could come over and just grate a little bit of wasabi into a body.

the body.

That would be so lovely.

Yeah, that's luxurious.

You can lick it.

Sorry?

You can lick it and you won't taste the spice.

Oh.

So.

So there's no point in licking it.

No, unless you don't like spicy food but you want to eat wasabi in which case just lick it and then you won't get the spice but you'll have touched wasabi with your tongue.

If you have fungus or microbes on your tongue.

Yes.

Yes.

That's a good point.

I think that should work.

In fact and it's a lot like how lightning can split up nitrate.

So by grating wasabi, think of of the greater as the lightning, that splits up the wasabi plant and it splits up its cells.

What a tortured net.

I feel like I could have understood it without any of the previous callbacks.

Are you sure?

Is that what creates the flavour?

Do you think that's a good thing?

So it breaks up the cells and creates the flavouring.

So Anna, how does wasabi work?

Well, let me take you back to the dawn of the universe.

Did you know horseradish?

is poisonous to horses?

No.

Ouch.

So they don't know why it's called that, but I actually like both options.

So the word horseradish first appeared in 1597 in English.

People think it might be because it resembles a horse's genitalia.

It speaks of a time when more people were familiar with what horses' knackers look like.

True.

You know, I could probably draw you one, but I would

think about it that way anyway.

I probably could draw it in a bush if I had to.

You absolutely know you could do an amazing shaded sketch.

So it's either genitals, horseradish.

Yes, because they do look a bit like the horseradish is like a moolie.

I mean, that's probably less

like a long white radish, right?

That's what it looks like.

It's like a long white root.

Yeah.

Are they really big?

Yeah, it's probably, I would say, how big is that?

About a foot long?

It looks pretty normal.

I think your Mooley simile might have been up there with my confusing lightning simile for making things clearer.

What's a moolie?

A moolie is like a large radish.

Like a horseradish.

Yeah.

That's right.

They're similar.

I understand.

I can see us going around in circles.

I genuinely thought people would know what a moolie looked like.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, okay, fine.

What's the other option, Anna?

Well remembered.

Thanks, James.

It's because, so in German, you might say, you might be able to guess if I tell you that in German, a horseradish is called Meerotich, to mean sea radish, actually.

Oh.

Not to be confused with the sea radish, which is a different plant.

I know, because it looks like a seahorse's genitalia.

Yeah, very nice.

You're miles off.

In the olden days, everyone knew what that looked like.

Because we all row seahorses around town, didn't we?

What grows in the sea?

It looks like a radish.

It's more about the pronunciation.

It's a small square pattern.

It's about the pronunciation.

So when we were translating it into English, we heard mare radish.

Oh, mare, as in like the mare radish.

As in a female horse.

As in a horse.

Let me give you another reason why it might be called that.

Albertus Magnus was writing in the 13th century and he discussed horseradish.

He just called it radish, but he suggested it as a treatment for constipation in horses.

So it could be that we kind of heard the mer, thought we use it for constipation in horses anyway.

And so so maybe that's why we call it horseradish.

And is it up the bottom?

It didn't say, Albertus Magnus didn't say.

He just said it's used for constipation in horses.

It might have been up the bum because there's another thing called raffanidosis,

which is a punishment in ancient Greece of inserting the root of a radish up the bum as a punishment for adultery.

Now, we don't know what kind of radish that was.

It probably wasn't one of those little red ones that you get in Sainsbury.

That's a first offense,

but if it was horseradish, for instance, then that would be much more of a punishment because you're gonna get that kind of wasabi burning up the bum, as well as having something that's the size of a moolie going up your bum.

Not the size of a moolie,

I bet there was one person who got really turned on by it.

Do you think there was one example where someone's like, oh no, my adulterated again,

get the hammer,

the stories of ancient Greece

Here's a thing on papyrus.

Right.

Oh, my goodness.

Okay.

Have you...

Right.

You know the Library of Alexandria?

Yes.

Okay.

Ancient Egypt, founded in 295 BC.

Yeah.

They had a copy of every book.

Well, they were trying to get one.

So the Ptolemies, the pharaohs at the time, they're all called Ptolemy, basically, and they would hunt for manuscripts everywhere, right?

And they would send out, if a foreign ship sailed into Alexandria, it was searched for scrolls, and then they'd be confiscated and copied out and then given back.

And all of this was on papyrus, right?

And the Nile Valley was the center of the written word because papyrus grew on the banks of the Nile.

So the Ptolemies have basically a control supply.

And then there's this rival library that sets up.

King Eumenes of Pergamum founds a rival library, the Library of Pergamum.

And Pergamum was huge at the time.

It was a big kingdom, like massive.

Turkey.

Modern-day Turkey.

And more.

You know, they were a big deal, the Pergamites.

Anyway,

basically, talk about sitcom potential.

There's this spell in history.

The makers of Harriet Dummon.

Exclamation mark.

There's this spell in history where both libraries are trying to secure every book on the planet.

And they are bidding huge wages for scholars, like Premier League footballers for scholars and scribes.

Some scholars are in prison so they can't run off to the other library.

And then the huge move happens.

Ptolemy V takes the rivalry to a new level.

about 100 years after the founding.

He bans the export of papyrus.

Huge move.

Ouch.

That's cheating.

Eat it.

That's like taking the football off the pitch.

It basically is.

You can't make any scrolls.

You can't copy any manuscripts.

We own literature.

And so what did Pergamum do?

Well, invented paper?

Yes, he must have invented paper.

The audiobook.

He invented the audiobook.

They started manufacturing parchment from the skin of animals.

And parchment literally means from pergamum.

That's the etymology.

Oh way.

That's so cool.

And the thing about parchment is you can cut it up in layers and you don't need to roll it in a scroll, which is incredibly inefficient.

You can have pages.

You can have pages.

That's so interesting.

This is where, like, parchment already existed, but they, as it were, put a lot of manufacturing behind it and made it bigger, you know.

And the book is better than the scroll.

Wow.

Better is mighty than the sword.

And the book is better than the scroll.

But do you know what, Andy?

I'm going to come out and say it.

That etymology is even more interesting than the horse genitalia.

Wow.

Well done.

Wow.

Struggle disagree.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that bees smell like bananas when they get angry.

I've never seen an angry banana.

So I think this is just a weird coincidence, really.

Bees use pheromones a lot to communicate.

They release different chemicals which other bees can smell.

One of the pheromones that they release is a distress or alarm signal.

Maybe there's a predator, one of their bees is in trouble, makes them really angry too.

And one of the chemicals in this pheromone is called isoanyl acetate.

And that also happens to be the chemical which is banana flavor.

Yeah.

Can I just say, mostly...

Because I think people often say, what you would know is banana flavor is actually this very specific banana thing.

Most people know banana flavor from actual bananas, right?

I mean, I don't have that many banana-flavoured things.

Have more people eaten bananas or eaten a banana-flavored angel delight, maybe, or one of those little things.

I'm going to go out there and say more people have eaten bananas than banana-flavoured angels.

Well, that's because bananas have an entrenched advantage, you know.

Arguably, banana-flavoured angel delight is better than a banana.

If it grew on trees,

exactly, yeah.

But you have hit the point that banana flavour, artificial banana flavouring today, is not quite the same as the bananas we eat today.

And you have mentioned this on the podcast before, and there was a previous species of banana or strain of banana called the Groming Shell banana, which used to be all around the world.

I think it's still around in Thailand somewhere, but it's not commercially really available or used.

It was like nearly completely wiped out, if not completely wiped out.

Just by the Angel Delight Market.

So we eat Cavendish bananas now, I think.

And they're supposed to be less tasteful.

And so actually

the slightly tinier, stronger artificial banana flavor in those tiny sweets that we get.

And that's the one that you get from the bees.

The bees, bees, yes.

And people, it is a renowned thing in the bee community.

I was messaging Liz, who is one of our colleagues who's been at QI longer than all of us, in fact.

And she's a beekeeper as well.

And Liz,

unbelievable.

She says, yes, sometimes you will enter the hive and there's a real banana stench.

Is there, really?

And they also say, don't go near a hive with a banana.

Because the other thing's more.

Because it'll annoy them.

Yeah, absolutely, because they'll think it's a

reminder of a large bee.

Yeah, especially if you paint black stripes on the banana.

I think it's the equivalent of walking into a hive with a big sign that just says, I killed your friends.

Don't also go to a beehive with a pregnant mouse.

That's where I went wrong.

So pregnant mice smell like bananas.

They do.

Do they?

Yeah, they do.

It's a scent that they give off.

And it also stresses out male mice.

Isoamyl acetate.

The smell of a pregnant female mouse.

Yeah, it does.

It stresses out males.

Yeah, because mice are often cannibals and they will eat baby mice.

Uh-oh.

But not if you make yourself smell like a banana, the males will go, oh, I'm not going near that, and they won't eat your children.

That's so ironic.

They won't eat you if you make yourself smell like a banana.

And if a fox elbows are like, hmm, delicious children.

Oh, it's got a banana on it.

But I didn't know the range of pheromones that bees use.

There's so many.

There's a massive list online.

There's extraordinary weird things that they can do.

So, for example, the queen, there was a great artist.

She used to have bees, didn't she?

She smells bananas.

Queen Liz.

Brilliant.

I found a piece on this from 2014.

I just want to give a shout out to Luke Holman on the conversation.

I don't know if you wrote the headline, but it was called Smells Like Queen Spirit.

Fantastic.

So good.

So, Queen Bees, they broadcast data via pheromones to the rest of the hive.

And one of the things is to say they are the queen.

That just communicates, you know, clear leadership in place.

Another is whether or not they are mated and have been baiting around and also how well mated they are so they have pheromones to release to say how many males they've had sex with imagine if our queen did that it would be so funny he's opening a school and you're like oh

more promiscuous queens are better for the colony because they provide a bit more genetic diversity and that keeps the colony nice and healthy but also every every queen has to i was reading this interesting thing about how you introduce a queen to a colony if you just take your queen and plonk it in the bees bees will kill it because she's got the wrong pheromones.

She's from another hive and the worker bees need a chance to get used to her.

So the way that you do it is that you have a box and you put this box in the hive and the doorway to the box is sealed up with sugar, basically.

The bees eat through it and it takes them a while but it means that they end up being quite close to the queen who's sitting inside the little box waiting to be released from the box.

And so the time it takes for the bees to eat through the sugar, they can smell the queen on the other side and they get used to her and then they don't want to kill her.

So it's like she bursts out of a cake.

That is exactly how every new queen is introduced to a beehive.

Another use of isoamyl acetate is to make fake bananas.

And this happened during World War II.

Let's say we've stopped any poo get to Germany and they've said, right, well, you're not having any bananas then.

And so you can't get any bananas there.

So you have to make fake ones.

And they made mock bananas by using parsnips.

They would get some parsnips, they would add some isoamyl acetate, which was available banana essence, essentially, literally essentially, and they would eat them.

And apparently, there was a modern-day blogger called Carolyn Ekin who recreated it and said it's a rather strange and bizarre taste, but not unpleasant, although there is an aftertaste of parsnip.

I think it is so tragic.

The idea of like, yeah, mash up your parsnips.

Bananas.

Yeah, no, it really was.

When a queen bee dies, she stops releasing the pheromones that she's been using to keep the colony happy and

placid.

And this causes a big reaction.

And the workers basically get going on an emergency queen.

So this is really interesting.

They build these huge queen-sized chambers, like queen-sized bedrooms, effectively.

And they get 10 to 20 candidates, workers, and they start feeding them royal jelly.

And they find out who becomes the queen.

That sounds like a reality format.

It actually is.

And the first one to emerge kills all the others and then begins to lay eggs.

And that's.

Won't make it bars of the ethics commission to BBC, I don't think.

There is only one pheromone

which two dung beetles share.

Okay, so most dung beetles have their own pheromones, but there's one that's shared by both of them, and it's called anisole.

Where do they release it from?

It comes because it smells a bit like anise, like star anise.

Oh,

that is the name that works, I'm sure, brilliantly in the French market.

Isn't there a whole thing where beaver's anal glands are the origin of an awful lot of chemicals

of flavours, including

and strawberry raspberry flavouring?

They're not necessarily used anymore because I think it's still quite rare and expensive, and also people don't really want that on them.

Only 5% of strawberry angel delight is actually beaver anal gland juice.

Sadly.

And if I went to a really nice restaurant, I did really get beaver anal glands.

Don't worry, worry, you're not in your angel of delight.

Anal delight.

Can you guys smell ants?

Yeah, I want to.

Oh, my God.

The hand detector's going off.

Everyone, line up, pick up something much heavier than you, and file out of the building.

I'm not asking right now.

I'm saying, in general, if there was some ants on the table, do you think you'd be able to smell them?

I've never...

No, I don't think I would.

Yeah, so the interesting thing is that this is a thing that people have said on the internet.

A lot of people have said...

oh, I can smell ants.

And then other people have said, you can't smell ants.

And then there's been big arguments.

It's not like the internet to argue over something completely pointless.

But IFL Science, which we all love, that website, they carried out a Twitter poll and they found that 20% of respondents claim that they can detect the odour of an ant compared to 80% who can't.

Ants are heavily dependent on pheromones.

Were 20% of respondents ants?

Don't know.

Well, we don't know exactly.

I think one thing we can say is that this is not a particularly scientific survey.

Right.

But let's say, for instance, it is true.

There are various different reasons that it might be true.

It could be that some people have a certain gene that allows them to smell ants, like you can smell asparagus wee.

Some people can, some people can't.

It could be that some ants smell and the ones that live in certain areas smell and the ones that live in certain areas don't smell.

And that's the responses we got, but we don't know.

Well, they're living in smelly areas and we're smelling other things and it's covering them up.

I mean, if I'm in like the ground floor of John Lewis, like I'm not going to smell an ant because it's the perfume section.

Yeah, absolutely.

So if all of the UK's smelly ants live in perfume sections of John Lewis, we would never smell them.

That's a very relatable comparison point.

That's just something, it's a bugbear of mine.

How often?

Because I like going to John Lewis.

I nearly pass out every time I go in.

You have to sort of

standard perfume section in the department store.

I really like it.

I really like going in an airport and trying out all the samples.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, yeah.

And then getting on the plane and really offending everybody.

I've never tried that.

I should do it.

You should do it.

As you go through that wine.

As you go through the duty three, there's loads of free samples.

That's another bit I hate because it smells so awful, as in so strong, and it gives me heavy

breakfast.

I've probably got quite a sensitive set of pipes on it.

There's definitely an ant in this room.

Right.

Quite a lot of hotels have got cameras in their bedrooms these days.

In the beds, in fact.

What?

What's this?

What?

Beehood.

What?

You mean beehood in hotels?

Beer in hotels.

So this is something called the spotter gadget.

It's got loads of pheromones in it and a tiny camera.

And you put it in a hotel bed.

And the pheromones attract bed bugs.

And then when the bed bugs go into where the pheromones are, the tiny camera takes a photo of the bed bugs and sends it off to someone who looks at it and goes, yes, that's a bed bug.

And then if they say, Yes, it's definitely a bed bug, then it means that you have to go in and fumigate it.

These exterminators in.

Yeah, yeah.

But so these are in hotel rooms.

Yeah.

But can the camera capture anything else that's happening in the hotel room?

If your penis is the size of a bed bug, oh dear.

Then perhaps.

It was just drawn to that little tube.

I didn't know.

I didn't know.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in touch with us, we are all available on social media.

I'm on Instagram at Alex H.

Bell.

James?

I'm on Twitter at James Harkin.

Andy.

Me too at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

You can get in touch with the podcast by Twittering at No Such Thing or on Instagram at no such thing as a fish or you can email podcast at qi.com.

That's right.

And you can also subscribe to Clubfish if you'd like to get the ad-free version.

And you can buy merchandise from my website and allthings of nozzo things of fish.com.

Thank you so much for listening.

We'll be back again next week.

Goodbye.

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