384: No Such Thing As Jiminy's Cricket Shop

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

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting at a very comfortable distance from Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin.

And once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one, that is Anna.

My fact this week is that in 1877 all able-bodied men in Nebraska were required by law to spend up to 12 days killing grasshoppers.

Wow, wow.

Wait a minute, I'm always looking for the loophole up to 12 days.

It was, well, it was, they had to spend two days, definitely.

So you can't get out of a weekend.

And then, if there was further work needed, then the government, state government, could call on you to do an extra time.

So it was up to 12 days because some people enjoyed it so much it started to look psychopathic and it's like all right we need to cut you off here

or

develop something else you can't devote 365 to it how many grasshoppers can there be that everyone I mean I know Nebraska even though is quite sparsely populated but that's a lot of grasshoppers to kill isn't it definitely more than one grasshopper per person so it was a lot.

This was the Rocky Mountain locust, which is a grasshopper.

And it was this massive scourge in the 1870s and the 1860s.

It basically ruined the kind of Great Plains area.

So Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, those kind of areas.

And it destroyed crops, it ruined people's livelihoods.

It drove the population out, and they had to do something.

So the states passed various laws saying, get out and do your duty, murder grasshoppers.

Wow, it's insane.

There's a sighting in 1875, so two years before this law was put into place, where it was estimated that there was 198,000 square miles of locusts swarming.

So that's larger than the size of California.

In that area of 198,000 square miles, which I reckon is just a little bit smaller than England and Scotland combined, there were 12.5 trillion insects.

Okay, and to put that into perspective, if you imagine taking a normal keyboard on your computer and covering all of England and Scotland in keyboards so there's no gaps, each grasshopper would have one keyboard to sit on over the whole of England and Scotland.

Why?

Why are you putting grasshoppers on keyboards?

Grasshoppers given infinite keyboards will eventually.

They actually write out the works of Milton, don't they?

The accounts are extraordinary, aren't they?

I mean, even every able-bodied man in Nebraska wouldn't have been able to do a huge amount about this because they ate the wool off sheep when they were passing by.

They're just so decorative food.

They ate clothing off people's backs.

I don't believe that.

I mean, it's probably true, but like that is

an unsexy striptease.

There was a woman who claimed it, wasn't there?

Who said that she was wearing a white and green stripey dress and she was descended on by these grasshoppers and they ate all the green stripes.

At which point I guess all the white stripes fall off.

But that's where the white stripes got the name from actually.

The band, they were walking past this woman.

They were like, where's the rest of her dress?

There were stories about how trains came to a halt because they were skidding on locusts.

There were just so many on the ground that they were just, yeah, wiping out.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote The Little House on the Prairie, she was there when this happened.

And one of her stories on the banks of Plum Creek, they talk about this happening to her family.

And she said that her father had to walk 300 miles to find work on a farm that didn't have the grasshoppers on it.

Jesus.

If you can imagine that.

And that she would walk around and they would squish under her bare feet.

And she would hear the sound of millions of jaws biting and chewing.

Nice.

Wow.

I guess.

I mean, if you're faced with that, actually, what good can it do to spend 12 days?

12 days feels a bit under egg.

Yeah, you've got to devote the whole year to it.

Wait, how many did you say they were, James?

12 trillion?

12.5 trillion.

Okay, so then again, if every...

Hang on.

12 trillion.

No, if the whole of Nebraska gets a trillion a day.

Yes.

Then it just needs one guy?

If you have a million people in Nebraska, say,

they have to get a million each per day.

They are small, though.

It's a shame that we didn't just, you know, Nebraska didn't just allow this to just continue.

And there's just one spot on earth where humans are living just completely covered, naked, covered in locusts.

What?

With no food to eat.

That is a shame.

We send care packages just as an experiment.

You know how sometimes big experiments happen?

What are we experimenting on?

Is there a symbiotic life with locusts that we're missing out on that they were trying to introduce us to?

They actually only eat your clothes off you so they can become your clothes.

Exactly.

Well, some people did suggest that at the time, a symbiotic relationship with them, kind of.

So Missouri state entomologist, who's called Charles Riley, he just said that why don't we just eat them?

They could be turned into soup or prepared John the Baptist style.

And John the Baptist style is where you fry grasshoppers with honey because in Matthew verse 3 chapter 4 in the Bible, it says his meat was locusts and wild honey.

John the Baptist, when he goes into the desert.

Not sure it's going to take off as the next hit restaurant concept, is it?

No.

Yeah.

Wild honey, please.

Oh, no.

The portions are going to be massive.

Have you guys eaten locusts?

I haven't, but I do know that in Australia they rebranded them as sky prawns, you know, to make them a bit more appealing.

Very high in protein.

Like the North American communities who lived in that area around the time, so for instance, the Shoshone people, they would eat them.

So they would turn them into flour and they would make bread out of grasshoppers and stuff.

So that's how they dealt with it before it happened to the Westerners who went over.

Although I I don't think they ever had it quite as bad that we'd have no, I mean eating is not a solution to the 12 trillion, is it?

You can't just wander down your field with your mouth open and then go, well, problem solved.

My crop's absolutely fine.

So the Rocky Mountain locust, which we're talking about, which led to this plague, crazy at the time, and we did fight battle with them, and the battle was won by the humans to the point that they're now an extinct species.

Hang on, hang on, hang on.

You're giving us credit for that.

No, I'm saying long term, they are no longer on Earth.

How did we win the battle?

Well, in...

It might not because of us no no no i'm not i'm just saying history they're no longer here who writes the history books anna okay i'll say it's because of us i think you're right there well it was largely because of us but also as animals and it was changing agricultural conditions it was yeah who changes the agricultural conditions thank you james who brings the animals thank you man

there we go but we didn't do it on purpose it was an accident yeah we absolutely didn't want to do it and that's horrible to to decimate a species to extinction but they can still be found despite being extinct in glaciers around there.

There's this one place which is called the Grasshopper Glacier, and it's in Wyoming, where all of them have sort of just been frozen in time inside there.

And you can see them when you look into it and people change.

Can they come back like Cats in America?

There is a theory.

Some scientists think there might be a few lurking around somewhere.

Not ready to come back.

Like the glacier melts and suddenly the grasshoppers take over.

Not ready to mount the full counter-attack, but there are scientists who think they might still be out there somewhere.

Well, I thought, as in not in the glaciers, but but actually out there exactly yeah because so we don't we've even though we've said like it's agriculture or environment or climate change but really we don't know right this is massive mystery and they just vanished so it was 1877 it was still pretty bad pretty much by the 1880s they'd gone i think the last spotting was in the like the first 1901 or something or right at the start of the 20th century anyway and they vanished but it could just be that they stopped swarming because locusts just turn back into grasshoppers when they go out of a swarm and they could just be hiding as you say in plain sight waiting to regroup when you say they turn into grasshoppers yeah they don't change do they we just change our name for them yeah it's like literally

one one animal is called a grasshopper when it's with all its mates we call them locusts you're kidding yeah it's not like batman and suddenly it's all changing outfit they kind of they do change outfit they definitely do

they get stronger they get darker they get more mobile their colour changes and in fact until the 1920s they were assumed to be different species

It's really weird.

There were two versions of this desert locust.

One is in Hulk mode, and one is not.

And they were thought that they were completely different.

How quickly do they change, though?

That feels like that should take a while, right?

It's not as soon as they start swarming, they just all turn blue.

Kind of is.

It's really weird.

So basically, they have wild populations which swell up after rains because there's lots of food, so plants are growing, so they can eat lots.

But then, if the land gets parched, they get pushed into a smaller and smaller area, and then this chemical serotonin kicks in in their brain, which we have to, which is associated with happiness for us, I think.

Yeah.

But anyway, not for them, because the serotonin basically turns them into Hulk mode.

We don't know that they're not happy.

That's true.

They're going to be thrilled.

And they just set off and they go for it.

And it's very rare for them to switch out of swarm mode once they're in it because any offspring born during a swarm are also swarmers.

Yes, okay.

I actually do know how you can turn them into locusts.

Wow.

So the way you do that is you tickle them on the back of the legs.

Is that right?

So, yeah.

And scientists tried this.

They had this theory that what happens is they are incredibly antisocial.

Like grasshoppers hate each other, usually, but when they get hungry, they go to the same bit of food and they start rubbing up against each other.

And eventually that rubbing stimulates them to suddenly want to.

Do they become thigmotactic?

I think they become thigmotactic.

Yeah.

Favourite word?

Fish word?

It's really the fish word.

We should change our name.

It's a friend of word thigmotactic.

We should hover on.

That's really cool.

So that explains the serotonin thing, right?

Because they become like more loving to their fellow grasshopper.

Yes.

Is that right?

Yeah, or at least want to hang out with them.

Although there's also a theory that the reason they're swarming is because they all want to eat each other.

So I don't know how much they're going to do.

That's when I read that.

If they fall behind in the swarm, whoever's behind will chew them up.

I mean, that is a terrible

happens in the Tour de France as well.

So one really important thing of this locust swarm in the 1870s and 1880s is what did the farmers do?

Because basically all of their crops were taken.

They had no way of making any money, but also they had no food because all the crops had been eaten by locusts.

And so they asked the state for money, but the state couldn't give them enough because basically everyone was affected.

And so they went to the federal government and there was a real discussion about that because basically they thought that the farmers might be turned soft if they gave them any help, any charity, right?

And so they came up with these tests to make sure that you were worthy enough to get aid.

As a farmer, you had to pledge an oath that you possessed nothing of value that could be sold for food or clothing in order to get any charity at all.

Sounds like, is this where Jacob Reese Mogg started his career?

But yeah, I mean, in the end, though, eventually the federal government did step in and kind of gave aid packages and food packages to everyone.

And that was the start of what is now the typical response to disasters in America.

There was also a fire in Chicago a bit earlier that did a similar thing.

But yeah,

this was a big step for America as far as state aid was concerned.

So they sort of did them a favor.

Yeah.

In the long run.

Exactly.

Good old locus.

Good old locusts.

Another coping mechanism they had actually before that came in was in Minnesota.

They had huge vats of boiling water that they kept in the center of like some of the big cities there.

And there was a bounty of 50 cents a bushel on the locusts.

And apparently 130,000 grasshoppers equals one bushel.

So you've got to get quite a lot to get your 50 cents.

And then you bring them to the city and you chuck them in this vat of boiling water.

Right.

It's like cool, like a cauldron.

Yeah.

Or just to kill them off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not to make a soup.

No.

No, no.

Otherwise, you've just got a big locust lolly.

When they've tried that in various places around the world, what often happens is people just start breeding the animal, don't they?

Yes, exactly.

Four guys at Jimmy's cricket shop which breed crickets, seeing this cloud on the horizon.

Well, bango's business.

Why is he not calling it Jiminy crickets?

You're absolutely right.

Yeah, well, it did almost bankrupt the state, actually.

They had to cancel it almost straight away.

Because everyone's bringing in so many logo.

The bushel.

The bushel offer.

It's the 12-day thing, yeah, because too many businesses.

Yeah, can't afford it.

Have you guys heard of a mega-colon?

Oh, I thought that was you impersonating one before doing the punch.

Yeah, it's not a punctuation mark, unfortunately.

I think I involuntarily made that.

It's like I've been hypnotized to make that noise when I hear that being said.

Very obscure.

Darren Brown never thought that would come up in your life again.

A megacolon is you would.

Oh, dear.

Okay, so this thing which i was talking about it's what happens if you get an infection in your colon and there was a mummy from 1000 years ago um which had this infection and it was scanned with an electron microscope and what they found is that for the last few months of his life he'd been fed solely on grasshoppers so that's all he'd eaten and what they'd done is we could tell from the microscope that they'd taken all the legs off the grasshoppers and just and the heads and just got the bodies which is really high in protein and just kind of squished them together and given them to this guy.

And this, as far as we can tell, is the earliest example of any kind of nursing or hospice care in the humanities

that we have direct evidence for.

Wow.

But he had to prove that he'd sold off anything he had of value for.

That's awesome.

Omega colon.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that when Henriette Don Javille held a reception to celebrate being the first woman to climb Mont Blanc, one guest was Maria Paradis who had been to the top of the mountain 30 years earlier.

Riddle me that.

Okay.

She didn't climb it.

She swam up because it was underwater.

Yeah, okay.

Oh yeah, she was dropped on

from a plane.

First of all, Anna gets half a point because she didn't climb up, allegedly.

Okay.

But she wasn't dropped by a plane, so you get minus 10.

She was pretty happy.

She was born there.

She was born there.

She was on top of the mountain 30 years earlier.

That's where her mum gave birth to her.

But then her mother would also have had to be there, and so would have then been the first woman at the moment.

Except she was dropped from a plane.

And that's how she was with it.

What year was this, James?

So this was 1838 when Don Javille went up.

But Maria Paradis went up in 1808.

And what happened was she was dragged up, weeping.

Kicking and screaming.

Well, not really doing anything because she kind of passed out halfway up the mountain.

Wow.

Is that a really fun drunken night out prank kind of thing?

You'll have her wake up at the top of Mont Blanc.

You'd usually carry someone rather than drag.

That's very caveman, isn't it?

Yeah.

It was.

So basically what happened was in 1808, a few people had already gone up Mont Blanc and they kind of talked this 18-year-old servant from Chamonix called Marie Paradis to go up Mont Blanc.

And they said, if you do this, you'll become kind of famous and you'll be able to make a load of money and maybe it will help the hotel that you're working in.

It'll give them some publicity.

And so she's like, yeah, fine.

I mean, what's the worst that can happen?

We know about what happened because she spoke to Alexander Dumas in 1811 and she told him that as she was almost to the top, she felt her legs go to hell, she said.

And then the people who were going up with her decided to take her each under one arm and drag her to the top.

She was pulled, dragged, and carried to the top of the mountain.

Okay, and then 30 years later, this high society woman called Henriette Donjaville decided that she wanted to be the first person to really walk up Mont Blanc and she did that and then she invited this Maria Paradis to come to her party afterwards.

And there's a little bit of kind of classism because first of all, Marie Paradis was like, I can't believe that a real lady managed to get all the way up to a mountain.

I'm a peasant woman.

I know the country.

I should be able to do it.

I can't believe you would.

But then Henriette was kind of dismissive of her and she's like, well, at least I went up by my own accord and stuff.

She almost didn't get up on her own accord, did she?

She had exactly the same moment.

Yeah, Henriette, she had the same where she suddenly buckled and she was on her back and there were questions from the rest of the camp.

Do we carry her up?

And she managed, fortunately, to sort of get her wits about her and she said, no, I can do this.

I can do this.

But yeah, almost carried up herself.

The person who went up with her was called Joseph Coutet or Couté.

And when she kind of got near the top and she felt like falling asleep, she felt really woozy.

Coutet said, Look at her, asleep again.

This is the last lady I take up, Mont Blanc.

Although that does sound like a euphemism when I read it, doesn't it?

Oh, I took her up, Mont Blanc.

Oh, what if this whole fact is a euphemism?

A really raunchy night.

Oh my god.

Well, it was quite raunchy because Henriette Dangeville, when she climbed up, she was wearing a boa.

She was wearing a constrictor or feather?

Feather or fur, possibly.

But she

because obviously climbing gear for women did not exist at the time because only mad aristocratic ladies who were starting it.

She was wearing a petticoat over men's trousers and then a bonnet with a veil and then a boa.

The whole thing weighed about six kilos.

So it was really that's really

clear, isn't it?

That she basically had to wear the men's clothes because obviously that's the convenient way to get to the top, but she still felt like she had to wear the women's stuff over the top.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there is this amazing picture of her going over a crevasse with a ladder, which I actually didn't realize was a thing that you did in climbing.

And it looks absolutely terrifying when she's doing it because, you know, it's this massive drop in the middle of it.

The ladder's just going between these two cliff edges.

And she's there with these extremely heavy skirts, which you would have sort of scrambled over, which you would have thought is going to tip you over any minute.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And one of the reasons that she went up, supposedly, is that she was quite jealous of other well-known women that were kind of talking about going up Mont Blanc.

So the writer Georges Sonde, who you'll all know, I'm sure, who's kind of mostly famous for wearing men's clothes, but she was kind of a really famous writer who at the time was bigger than Victor Hugo and Balzac and people like that.

But she was kind of doing a lot of walking in the foothills of Mont Blanc and she was talking about how she might soon go up.

And Henriette Donchaville decided, no, she was going to do it first.

That's great.

Was that a prank?

That's what I would do if I was trying to trick someone into going out for a blood.

Oh, I might go tomorrow morning.

I know the weather looks a bit dodgy.

The clothing, I mean, it is mad that women were made to wear dresses.

And there were sort of, you know, there were a few women who were supposedly threatened with legal cases for the fact that they were wearing men's trousers.

It was so controversial at the time.

And there were systems where they did try to cheat it.

So I read about Aubrey LeBlonde, who climbed Rothorn, which is a mountain about 2,000 meters high.

And so there was a sort of of compromise, which is that you would leave where you were staying.

Let's say you're staying in a hotel wearing the dress or the skirt that you had with the trousers on, and then you would take it off while you were doing the actual mountain climbing, and maybe no one would tell each other.

But so she made it to the top, and then on the way down, realized she'd left her skirt up there.

So had to backtrack, go back up, reascend this giant mountain.

Wait, so she had to carry her skirt to the top after dropping.

She didn't just leave it in a bush or something where she took it off.

She carried it away with her.

You would leave it somewhere safe, like if you're going swimming or whatever.

Yeah, you don't swim holding your clothes up and over the water with you.

My sister once was climbing up a hill in the Lake District and then went to the top and when she got to the bottom, she realized she'd left her phone at the top and that's going all the way back up the hill again to get her phone.

Hey, have you all heard of Annie Smith Peck?

Annie Smith Peck is a mountaineer.

She climbed the Matterhorn in 1850.

And it's just so interesting because she had to do it with total hatred from all the male companions that were taking on.

Again, because they just didn't want women doing it.

She wore trousers.

They hated that.

Scandalous.

So when she went up, one thing that happened was they would constantly, like the guys were just always having temper tantrums, there would be strikes.

But at one point, because they kind of just wanted to get rid of her as part of the party, they said that, well, it said that when she was going across a crevasse field, when she went out of view, they cut the rope, the support rope that was looking after her, went back to camp, and then she had to make her way back and found them all sitting there.

And they were like, oh, you're still here.

No, it didn't actually happen.

That's according to the accounts, yeah.

And I think her accounts were not.

That was a lot of it.

I mean, she was she was really impressive.

She once hung a Votes for Women sign off the peak of a mountain in Peru, just to make a point.

I didn't see that.

I mean, good point.

No one, after her companions, cut the ropes from the sword.

You want to do it in the middle of Trafalgar Square or somewhere where people walk past all the days.

That's a really good point.

Yep, can't fault you on that.

And then another time, she climbed another mountain in Peru, the north peak of Huascarán, okay, with some Swiss guides and it was renamed in her honor.

It was renamed Cumbre Ana Peck.

But at that point, the record, I think the highest altitude, maybe for a woman or maybe for that peak, but it was held by another lady mountaineer called Fanny Workman.

And legend.

Well, another legend, but, you know, there was beef between them because...

Workman was so annoyed that Peck was claiming this record that she paid for engineers to go and recalculate the altitude of the mountain and establish that she had actually climbed 600 meters

less than she had claimed to than Peck had claimed so that she would see

that's pretty

so just while you're saying Annie Smith Peck having something named after her the Matterhorn not long after she went up that there was another explorer who had a bit of it named after her so this was a mountaineer called Felicite Carroll and she unfortunately didn't make it to the summit when she was going she was with her father, and it's because she was wearing a skirt, and the skirt ballooned in the wind.

They thought, This is too dangerous, you can't go any higher, your skirt's going to get in the way.

So, the spot where that happened is named the Matterhorns Coal of Felicite, and yeah, after her, but she never got to make it to the top as a result.

It could have blown her up there, like Mary Murray.

That's true.

Did you bring an umbrella as well?

Have you heard of the book Mountaineering in Scotland?

No, this is by an author called W.H.

Murray, William Hutchison Murray.

Any relation?

No, not as far as I know.

I wish, because this is an amazing sounding book.

It was written on sheets of toilet paper in prisoner of war camps in Germany during the war.

So Murray had been sent by his mother the complete works of Shakespeare in the post.

And that was an earlier time of the war when the Red Cross parcels were still getting through and you could receive posts and things like that.

It's a lot of postage, that, isn't it?

It's a lot of postage, yeah.

But he noticed that the paper was lovely and soft, and it was actually a lot better than the stuff that they were being given as toilet paper.

So it sounds like he used the complete works of Shakespeare as Lou Roll and he saved his Lou Roll and wrote his own book about engineering on the loo paper.

Oh my god, I know, but the worst thing was then he was moved.

He wrote for a year, presumably getting along quite well with his first drug.

What kind of, what was he writing with?

Do we know?

No, I don't.

Oh, I don't know, actually.

I don't know how he got a pen or a pencil.

Yes.

Was it 2B or not 2B?

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

He walked straight into that one.

But then he was moved.

He was moved to another another camp called Offlag 8F, and it was a much stricter prison camp.

I mean, I don't know how lenient the previous one was, but basically the Gestapo searched everyone very carefully on the way in, and his stash of toilet paper with a book on it was found and taken off him, and he had to write an entire second draft on more toilet paper.

No, yeah.

Oh, God.

I know.

He claimed that the Gestapo had done him a favor because his first draft was a bit flabby.

He needed a bit of tigering.

Yeah.

The most generous prisoner of war you've ever heard.

I actually kind of like the Gestapo.

Do you think that when he only had the toilet paper left, that he kind of would hold it in so that he didn't use it?

By the end, he would have had a mega colon area.

Oh my god.

Oh my god, God, God,

okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the queen in her garden has a collection of fake rocks.

She has a lot of gardens.

Do we have a lot of gardens?

She has gardens at Buckingham Palace, though.

specifically.

What's this in the main garden?

Her main garden, I would say.

There is a fake rock called Pulamite, and she's got a load of it.

Sorry, is that specific rock called?

Does she name it Pullomite?

Like, she's got Dave sitting next to it.

Sorry, yeah, this is a kind of rock invented by...

It's so weird that you can invent a rock.

There was a gardener called James Pullum, and

he invented this rock, and it became a craze.

Can you explain to us how you invent a rock?

Yeah.

So he was a gardener

and he noticed that there was a bit of a trend going on for when people had been traveling and they might bring plants back with them and this relates to the Victorian fern craze as well.

There's a big craze for having ferns and collecting ferns.

So the problem is that ferns don't like growing on lawns, you know, and most gardens at the time were, you know, nice flat lawns of grass.

And he was a gardener and also he knew a bit about engineering and he started offering people their own personal ravines to put their alpine plants and ferns in and he made this material from his own recipe and he took the recipe to his grave and so he started offering people their own personal rocks that you could shape and build and mold into the exactly the shapes that you wanted and this became a craze people lots and lots of gardens had these fake rocks in environmentally friendly because you don't have to go and dig it out of a mountain or something yeah i guess so it takes a lot less transportation yeah and it was because it does sound like a thing that would be shunted by the rich as something, you know, we just want natural stuff.

But as you say, you know, the Queen has it in Buckingham Palace.

Many famous families, the Rothschilds and so on, were all really keen on it.

So this was, yeah, it was a

big deal.

It was a big deal.

It's everywhere.

I no longer trust any rocks I see.

What if this is Pulamite?

There's a big list online, isn't there, of all the places you can find it, including Las Vegas.

Really?

Yeah, the Bellagio.

There's like, I think there's a fountain that's made out of it.

Well, the first time that we properly, I think, outside of a show, saw each other during the sort of first lockdown having ended was we were at St.

James's Park, weren't we?

We were sitting there, and the rocks by the Duck Island Cottage are also those kind of rocks.

Right next to them.

Exactly.

No rock is safe from Pulum.

It's really insane.

Even seaside towns, like Folkestone, Ramsgate, they went nuts for it.

They actually, I think, quite badly damaged the council finances by spending all their money on Pulamite because they wanted extra rocks for the sea to make it more rocky.

Oh, yeah.

This isn't rocky enough.

That just makes swimming in the sea more and more unpleasant.

Well I think it's not inside the sea.

So for example Folkestone got paths and tunnels to get people down from the cliffs.

They wanted a gorgeous natural way to show people down.

And so next time you see a rock, check.

Yeah, check.

So how can you check?

Can you give it a knock and it's hollow?

It's

rocks.

Most of the rocks you see day to day will be rocks.

Oh sure, absolutely.

Yeah, but that's just Laura of Averages.

But do take a photo and send them to Andy.

Anytime you see a rotten, go through them.

I'll tell you if you're not.

They're a bit lighter, aren't they?

They're lighter than normal rocks.

And they'll just look faker.

They'll look a little bit like when you're queuing at a theme park, you know, the rockeries that you have.

Not quite as plastic as the plastic.

There's something towards that.

It's a more realistic version of that, you're right.

They were incredibly successful, weren't they?

James Pullum.

He set up this company, which was James Pullum and Son.

And it was a company that just went on and on.

So when he retired, he handed it over to his son, James Pullum.

And then when he retired, he handed it over to his son, James Pullum.

And then when he retired, he handed it over to his son, James Pullum.

I think it was the second James Pullum who invented Pullumite, wasn't it?

As opposed to the first one.

I think you're right.

I think.

Okay, minus one of the James Pullums from that first thing.

He was helped by two of the other James Pullums later in life, but also helped by another brother called Michelangelo Pullum.

What a name.

He's not living up to that name.

Everyone else in the family is called James, and he's called Michelangelo.

But it's two names, isn't it?

He's Michael Angelo Pullum.

They've divided Michelangelo in two.

To the untrained eye, he's Michael Pullum.

He's the name Angelo.

But he did all of the designing, didn't he?

As well, yeah.

So if you ever needed a rock, but it needs to be in a certain shape, you gave it to Michelangelo Pullum, and he did the shaping for it.

That's brilliant.

If you ever want a cherub to be emerging from your rock.

We should give a shout out to the book about this by Claude Hitching.

Claude Hitching, what a man.

He is the man on Pullamite.

So he's written a book called The Pullum Legacy.

And I mean, he has spent, I think, decades tracking down bits of Pulamite because we still don't know where it all is.

That's why I'm saying you've got to check.

Yeah, yeah.

It's all over the country, but there weren't accurate records kept of everywhere this company worked.

I mean, it's not as urgent as landmines and stuff, is it?

Nothing's going to happen if we don't find it.

When he started looking into it, he discovered that five of his direct ancestors all had worked for the Pulum Company at some point.

And so he had a personal connection.

Yeah.

And so basically, he has, as Andy says, spent so long trying to track down where bits of missing Pulomite have gone, sort of historically important bits in the Pulomite world.

Where have they gone?

Where Pulamite fans are like, oh, I can't believe we lost this.

And some of them have turned up in places like he found there was the Q Fountain, which was made for the International Exhibition in 1862.

It had disappeared.

And where is it now?

It's where James said earlier, Las Vegas.

It found its way there.

Oh, that's the one of the Bellagrio.

Exactly.

Wow.

That was a famous one in the UK.

Pulomite fans, distressed that they couldn't find it anymore.

It disappeared.

That's incredible.

One amazing Pulim legacy, one of the biggest projects of James Pulham number three, is the landscape garden at Friar Park.

Oh, yeah.

Which is, yeah, I knew Dan would know about this.

It's near Henley, and you'll see why Dan knows about this.

It's maintained by a woman called Olivia Harrison, who is George Harrison's widow.

And they bought it, but it sounds incredible.

So originally, it was sort of designed by its owner, who's called Frank Crisp, this really eccentric guy who basically, why are you looking at me?

that's a nice name funny name he's a crisp by name crisp by nick

he was a crispy eccentric man who designed his garden to look like an alpine landscape basically so full of these fake rocks that he got done by pullam

and sorry just with the alpine thing he actually had a model of the matterhorn made

out of rock so actual size not actual size different scale yeah um but yeah the matterhorn is there that's incredible yeah amazing um so it takes up like lots of acres that matterhorn.

It's pretty big.

And that's not Pullum.

That was someone else.

But basically, it got really overgrown.

I think some nuns moved into it for a while and it got dilapidated.

And then George Harrison bought it and said, I'm going to take this over.

And they cleared it and they found all this stuff.

Like the Matterhorn was just sort of sticking out of a bunch of rubble.

They barely even knew it was there.

And it sounds like he had this incredible moment, George.

There's some sort of fake lakes built there.

And at one point, he lowered himself on a rope into this cavern that was below this lake.

So I guess this lake's lake's on a rope.

Yeah, there's like a cave below this lake.

Oh, sorry, it's a cavern club.

Oh, yeah, what?

What?

The cavern club where the Beatles played in Liverpool.

I should know that.

Even I know that.

Actual Beatle hater.

Maybe that's what drew him to it.

That's how he knew.

Because he lowered himself into this cavern and underneath was this whole grotto.

So like Pullermite Grotto with these sparkling kind of quartz and stuff on the walls, this like crazy magical landscape.

And yeah, and now you can kind of rove through it and look at all these diamonds glistening on the walls and stuff.

And yeah, it sounds incredible.

They do keep discovering these places.

So even recently in 2000, there was a couple who moved into a house, Deweystow house, it was called, and they started to notice all these weird rocks sticking out of the ground.

Okay.

And they then started digging.

And they discovered this huge labyrinthine underground environment, this massive rock garden, magical caverns, water flowing from one to another, tunnel systems, fountains, fake stalactites, the whole thing was this enormous mad Pulamite project, which a man called Henry Oakley had had commissioned.

He was a railway director, and he spent years having this incredible environment built for himself, which just got buried.

It got buried under the M4, as it were, because there were all these mounds of earth that were excavated to build the M4, and they just got dumped on top of it.

Okay.

And the owners started to notice, and they started excavating it.

And then, a few years after that, it won the award.

Alan Titchmarsh did a series on Britain's best back gardens and it came in at number eight.

Oh,

what a renaissance of that little bit of land.

Number eight, number eight.

Yeah, number eight.

Yeah, not a little five.

Top five, yeah.

Imagine how exciting it is.

I honestly think that all our listeners should go home now and dig up their entire gardens in case there's a Pulamite grotto under them.

It's worth a try.

It's such a good idea.

You know, Pulomite obviously wasn't the first fake rock,

and the sort of the only successful fake rock and the first of the 1700s was Code Stone.

So this was the 1770s, it was basically invented and it was the fake rock to have.

And there were lots of startups, lots of fake rock startups that tried to make their own.

Nothing came anywhere close to Codestone and it was this business that was run for 50 years by this amazing woman, Eleanor Code, who just decided, I think it was 1771, she met this guy who made some fake stone and she bought up this massive factory and said, okay, start making it.

And she fired him almost immediately because decided he wasn't good enough and brought on someone better at making fake rock.

And she was an amazing businesswoman.

So, 50 years, she made this stone, which, if you've seen the lion on the south bank, that big lion, that's made of code stone.

And that is hollow, so you can tell by knocking on it.

And if you look inside code stone, which usually you can't because it's like a statue, if you drill inside, you can see the fingerprints of the people who pushed it into the plaster molds on the inside.

Isn't that cool?

That is cool.

Code sounds awesome.

Doesn't it?

Eleanor Code because she worked with her mum for decades.

Also called Eleanor Code and there's a lot of confusion about which code was which.

Yeah.

And have you heard about her grandma?

No, Eleanor Code.

Her grandma.

I actually don't know first name of her grandma.

Is there a thing about having being a person who makes rocks and having no imagination for names?

And it's very much kept in the family, the rock thing.

Yeah, Eleanor Code's grandmother obviously had the business mindset as well.

She ran a textile business in Tiverton and she sent spies to Norwich, which was very good on textiles, who would then steal all of their tricks, then come back and be successful.

And she did things like she got carried around Tiverton in a sedan chair all the time.

She was a good character.

Wow.

She sounds awesome.

Yeah.

Have you guys heard of Gunnite?

It's another fake rock.

Can you guess how you make Gunnite?

Fire from a gun.

Correct.

No.

Yes.

You get a gun.

It's not a small gun.

It's like a big sort of hose pipe gun.

And you fire out this dry sort of concretey material.

And then you have a little bit of water at the nozzle of the gun, which kind of goes into the concrete as it comes out.

And then you can fire it wherever you want to put a rock.

So

it's almost like a 3D printer for rocks.

And it's used on bridges, isn't it?

If you ever see a bridge, really, or a tunnel, then it's probably gunnite.

Or shotcrete, it also gets called, the dry and wet version.

Schottkrete gets used in taxidermy, I think.

Yeah.

Does it?

Yeah.

It's because it's quite easy to shape.

Yeah, exactly.

And so, is it God, I've forgotten about it.

Is it you're shaping and then you're putting the scale on top of it?

Well, what you can do with guncrete is you can make the shape of something out of iron and you can fire the concrete onto it and it'll, yeah, like a mold and it'll go on that kind of thing.

You'd have to make a mold for it.

You can't fire it because what's it landing on?

You can't just fire it into mid-air in a sort of shape like a spark ball.

Of course.

That makes sense.

That's awesome.

Ugly rocks are sort of venerated in China.

I didn't really know about this thing, scholars' rocks, but you'd recognize them.

And since the 8th century, Confucians have, Confucian academics have basically said ugly, jagged rocks are great for contemplation.

And the idea is that they represent Confucianism, they're uncompromising.

So from the 8th century, there's been a trend for getting the ugliest rock you can find, or the most jagged, or pitted, or misshapen, putting it in your garden and watching it.

That's really see what happens.

Wow, I know Anna, I think I know this about you because I know it about me.

You used to collect rocks when you were a kid, right?

Yeah, that I found in my gravel, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Did you like look for the ugly ones or for the attractive ones?

I was very shallow.

I wasn't a philosopher.

I just went for the fit ones.

Yeah, something pink and sparkly.

Wow.

Are there competitions?

There actually should be.

There must be.

Because they're judged on certain qualities, so it must be for the sake of something.

There are four categories.

And these were determined by a guy called Mifu in the 12th century who used to when.

He was in charge of the Mifu movement.

Yeah, he was a great campaigner for his day.

And he used to bow to rocks.

So when he met royalty, he'd walk in and bow to the rock instead of the emperor.

And people got annoyed.

Instead of the emperor.

What a cavalier attitude he had for his own life.

Maybe he was just short-sighted.

I don't know.

I met the Queen

a couple of years ago, but I only only really talked to the Pelomite rocks when

I was.

Anyway, they're judged.

Just to finish that, they are judged on their thinness, their openness, their holes, and their wrinkles.

You want to max out on all of that?

Aren't we all?

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

My fact this week is that following a theory that they wouldn't burn up on re-entry, Japanese scientists once planned to fly paper airplanes from the International Space Station back onto Earth.

Okay.

Very cool.

Now, why does that mean therefore you do it?

Because I understand that maybe you wouldn't burn up because you're not going that fast.

But even so, is it instead of something?

Well, it's, I guess, we are always trying to work out different ways of doing space travel, constantly seeing, you know, who knows how important space paper travels.

Lightweight vehicles for re-entry would be immensely useful to have.

So if you can see...

So you're not going to sit on a paper aeroplane, are you?

No, but you might sit inside a big paper aeroplane which would treated card or something or, you know, there are chemical compounds.

I mean, that's what they said the justification was, was lighter vehicles for re-entry.

You don't need a reason for science, Hannah.

You can do science for science's sake.

Good point.

Quite right.

It discovers its own discoveries.

That's what the scientists say, isn't it?

Yeah,

that's the line.

That's the official line.

Cool.

In Latin.

So how come they never did these happen?

Well it's a really hard thing to do.

It was a really nice idea.

So this was in 2008 and there were researchers at the University of Tokyo who teamed up with Japan's origami airplane association.

So this was going to be origami paper planes that were put together and put through and so they did all these tests in wind tunnels at the university and they managed to show that this plane could actually hold its own at huge speeds of wind passing through it.

So it all looked like it could possibly work.

The problem is, is that if they did try it and it came back into the Earth, it's so tiny without any GPS device on it, we would just know nothing.

It would be impossible to tell in 2008.

I think another problem is I would say at least two-thirds of the paper airplanes that I ever make either kind of go straight up and stall and land where I threw them or go straight down and crash into the ground.

So you need to train your astronauts to be proper paper airplane makers, don't you?

It's true.

And they've already got a lot on their plate.

They've got a lot of training to do.

Well, origami is useful in space in other ways, isn't it?

So I guess I can see where they're coming from.

Is it?

I think it's been used by Japan on solar panels and, in fact, by NASA more recently.

They certainly had a plan to, and they use mirror folds.

And I think, is that how you pronounce it?

We've done it on QI.

Mirafolds are basically how you fold maps, for instance, you know, when they fold up really small and flat, and then you can spring them outwards so that they're really big.

It's almost like an accordion.

Like they're in a really small little square, and then you pull them out, and then you push them back in, and pull them out, and push them back in.

And then, like a normal map, you're always trying to find the folds and stuff, but these just kind of go back where they should do.

That's really cool.

Because it'd be so annoying if an accordion was like a normal map where every time you pushed it in, you had to fold it instead of the right way.

What do you think is the world record for folding 1,000 origami cranes?

A thousand.

Damn it.

What time?

How long do you think it took the person?

So do you remember I did this a few years ago?

Yeah.

It took me about two months.

Okay.

Yeah, you did it in the office as well because you were hiding it from your, it was a present for your wife.

And yeah, so I wasn't hiding it from my wife.

Yeah.

It was a present for her.

So you weren't.

I was really embarrassed and I, you know, didn't want to tell her.

No, it was a gift.

But yeah, how long do you reckon it takes to do a thousand?

Eight hours.

Eight hours.

That's a bit less than one a minute.

But this is going to be the record, right?

So this is someone who's,

I'm going to say, I'm going to go as low as like two hours just for

this.

A thousand?

Yeah, just because I.

How many seconds are there in an hour?

It's not going to take a second to do a crane.

Surely Surely a minute to do a crane.

A bit less, maybe.

I think it'll take a couple of minutes.

I don't know.

I think a couple of days.

Couple of days.

Thank you, Andy.

Because these two.

Sorry, Jay.

Poor Evelyn Chia of Colchester, England.

Henceforth known as the Slacker.

What has she done then?

She is a teenager from Colchester, and she did it in nine hours and 31 minutes.

Well, that's much more impressive than I would have thought, Dan and Anna.

I think.

Two hours.

How good do they have to be?

I mean, can I just scrunch up lots of bits of paper and claim they're cranes?

I'll be honest, when I did it towards the end of the thousand, they got less and less looking like did you hide those cranes at the back of the crown?

You really do, yeah.

But she did it as a fundraiser for NHS charities.

And in fact, I gave her some money for it because I was so impressed because it did take me literally two months to do it.

That's very cool.

But yeah.

That's lovely.

I was reading the Encyclopædia Britannica article on origami and the origins of it.

And it's the first unequivocal document that talks about origami is a poem by Ihara Saikaku which was written in 1680 which talks about these butterflies made from paper.

But this guy, Ihara Saikaku, he once composed 23,500 verses in a single day.

Jesus.

Wow.

Yeah.

Does it have a chorus?

Is it a cheat?

Like half of it the same?

I think they're on different subjects.

Are there even that many subjects?

And apparently, in the 20th century, origami was helped by the fact that it was used a lot in Rudolf Steiner's schools.

Which, Dan, you went to watch the school.

I was a Steiner.

Yeah, I'm a Steiner kid.

Did you learn how to make origami stuff?

Yeah, we did, but we did do Japanese classes.

So I don't know if it was integrated.

We didn't have separate origami.

Okay.

Because apparently, according to the article, they emphasize kind of hands-on learning for kids as opposed to rote learning.

And so, yeah, origami was very popular, especially in the German side of schools.

Okay, yeah.

Original.

No, I mean, we definitely did origami at school.

That's very interesting because I think Germany kind of brought advanced origami to Japan via kindergartens, the kindergarten movement.

Obviously, it started in Germany.

It's a German word.

And this is the 1830s.

And this guy, Friedrich Froebel, decided that origami would be a great way of educating children in both maths and art because it's very mathematical.

and logical and like very difficult spatial reasoning but also quite artistic and he exported this around the world with his kindergarten movement, and it was really taken up in Japan, where they were already doing quite a lot of slightly simpler origami, but then they started making pigs and houses and sofas.

Cool.

Germany exported origami to Japan, is what you're saying.

I'm saying Japan had a kind of origami, and then Germany exported a more advanced kind.

I think probably invented in China origami because paper was invented in China.

So

yeah, probably the first people to fold paper were the first people to invent it.

But then went to Japan and became big there.

Then came over, picked up by Germany, improved, sent back over to Japan again.

And if there are, for German, Japanese, Chinese listeners, we are not denigrating any origami achievements of any countries.

Okay?

Please don't write in.

And if you do, please don't fold it in such a way that we can't read the letters.

The person who popularized origami in the West is a guy called Gershon Legman.

And

was he a breastman or a legman?

Well, it's funny you should ask.

He did a bunch of other things.

So the way he popularized it was he found this origami prodigy called Akira Yoshizawa, and he put on exhibitions of his work and stuff, and it all spread.

But the other things he tried, he tried lots of stuff, Gershon, Legman.

He collected vulgar limericks, so he had a massive collection of obscene limericks.

He wrote the book, The Rationale of a Dirty Joe.

Yes.

Seminal set of books.

And it's by someone called Legman.

Well, it's also called by, what's his first name?

Gershon.

Gershon, but he uses G.

So G spot legman.

Wow.

Sorry, G spot.

Oh, as in G dot.

Yeah, so G spot legman was the name for his.

That's a stretch, though, Dan.

You don't call it a spot, do you?

You don't say, can you put a spot at the end of that sentence, please?

Yeah, yeah.

No,

that was his little gag.

Wow.

Cool.

It's so weird seeing the interests of Dan intersect with what we're talking about.

Not dirty jokes, I just mean jokes in general.

I just know, yeah, these books are like occult classics.

I just had no ideas.

Yeah, oral.

Well, and he wrote, yeah, because he wrote stuff about how to to give good oral sex, I think, like the best oral sex and gratification.

Maybe that's a good idea.

I'm not saying that I have that copy, but yeah, I've definitely got the joke books.

He invented the vibrating dildo.

Cop that, got that.

Okay, well,

you can have a spin-off Gersh on Legman podcast, but yeah, cool guy.

Wow.

The prodigy you just mentioned, Akira Yoshiwaza, he does sound very interesting.

He pioneered wet folding.

Before that, I'm not sure wet folding was a technique.

And can you explain what wet folding is?

Absolutely.

Wet folding is the main, I'd say, division in the origami world.

Oh, yeah.

Wet folders dampen the paper so they can get the curves just right.

Dry folders, I don't need to explain.

Don't.

Do the wettening.

And yeah, so Yoshiwaza was the guy who

worked as an origami man from 1937 onwards, I think when he was very young.

Right.

Yeah, and he

eliminated cutting from the procedure.

So you used to cut the paper, I think, before you were folding it.

And that's another, again,

Fosbury flop moment in the development of origami, where you're not cutting things because that's like making a snowflake when you're a kid.

You fold it up and you cut it.

That feels like the anti-Fosbury flop moment.

That's like you've banned the Fosbury flop and you're back stuck with a scissor kick again.

Ironically, because you're not allowed scissors.

It's a reverse Fosbury.

It's a reverse Fosbury.

Another very cool origami figure was this guy called Robert Lang.

Did you guys read from him?

Did you say he's an origami figure?

Is that a human in the origami world or was he made of paper?

He's not made of paper.

He is just into paper.

Got it.

And a bit like this guy, Andy, he was a physicist.

He worked at NASA's jet propulsion lab and then he decided he preferred folding paper.

And he was this math prodigy.

He was doing very well in physics.

And it was 2001 he finally decided to give it all up because it was taking up so much of his time folding paper things.

And he's been very useful with his origami.

So, for instance, airbags are made based on origami principles now and that's because they went to robert lang and they said look we really like the way that you can fold something really small and then it can expand really big like he was able to do that

on that note in 2013 there was a company which announced it was inventing an origami condom for bill gates not four miles

has he got such an unusually shaped penis yeah that he has to have a special condom right

is what i mean i was using it as shorthand and i'm sorry i'm sorry please don't sue

There was a designer called Danny Resnick and he had been, he'd worked out an origami condom which apparently was much more comfortable to put on.

It fit on more easily and it opened up like an accordion.

I can play the accordion a little bit and when you first open it up it makes quite a weird noise.

I don't know if it wheezed as it

as it was opened up.

Anyway, it never happened because Resnick himself was accused of fraud the next year and had to pay back the public funds he'd been granted.

So the world is still waiting for the origami condom.

It would be be great if it did play a tune as you can see.

You can't get that little keyboard onto something that size, I don't think.

It's going to sound, every time you have sex, it's going to sound like a sea shunty.

Soon will the weatherman come.

Well, I hope it is soon.

Okay, that's 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 Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M and Anna, you can email podcast at qi.com, or you could go to at no such thing or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are there.

Do check them out and do look at our upcoming tour dates.

We are back on the road later this year.

Hopefully we can see some of you there.

If not, keep listening because we will be back next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.