323: No Such Thing As Floating Vaseline

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Shriver, and I am sitting here with Anna Tuzzinski, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around 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, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that early proposals for raising the Titanic back to the ocean's surface included filling it up with ping-pong balls, injecting 180,000 tons of Vaseline into it, and turning the ship itself into an iceberg.

That would have been ironic.

What if another ship came along and then hit the Titanic iceberg?

It'd be a great reveal if you did hit an iceberg and it cracked open and suddenly there was the actual Titanic.

Exactly.

I mean, who's got enough ping-pong balls to do the first one of these things?

That is a large number of ping-pong balls.

Are these all entirely serious suggestions, I guess is what I'm trying trying to get.

Yeah, well, to an extent they are.

You know, they're not necessarily practical, but in most of the cases, we've seen that some of these methods work.

So, for example, the ping-pong ball idea, that was actually used, not actual ping-pong balls, but the premise of putting ping pong balls into a ship was used by a Danish engineer called Karl Kroyer.

And back in 1964, there was a crash of a ship in the harbor in Kuwait city, and the ship went down, 6,000 sheep were on it, and so they were going to block the ocean.

And the problem is, is that the harbor is where they pump drinking water from for the city.

So they needed to get the sheep out as quick as possible.

And they needed to get the ship up in one piece.

So this guy, Carl Croyer, had the idea of filling it with ping pong balls, an idea which he got from an old Disney comic strip of Donald Duck and how he salvaged a ship by pumping it full of ping pong balls and it raising.

And he developed these sort of new ping pong balls that were sort of a lot smaller, sort of pearl size.

And they did it.

They successfully raised the ship.

That's not a ping-pong ball.

If it's the size, if it's that small, it's not a ping-pong ball anymore.

Because I'd love to see you try and play ping-pong with one of those.

But no, so.

But this guy raised a bunch of ships using this method and he tried to patent it.

But the patent was rejected because they said the idea comes from Donald Duck.

He's the original holder of this idea.

Yeah, because it was in a cartoon.

So they refused him the patent.

Flash forward to modern times.

The Mythbusters tv show successfully raised a ship using ping pong balls um the ship was called the mythanic 2 and they pumped 27 000 ping pong balls into it and it brought the boat back to the surface so they claim it's plausible it's not a busted idea that donald duck could raise a ship with ping pongs so we're saying that the titanic thing is feasible is that what you're saying not really because when you get that low the ping pong balls would be crushed they'd be decimated uh before they even got to the bottom oh yeah because of the pressure exactly so that's where it's not practical however the the idea of lifting a ship is practical.

What's with the ping-pong balls?

Is it just that they're flotation devices?

So it's like having a really weird-looking life jacket.

Yeah, exactly.

That's exactly it.

Yeah, they float.

That's why you never see ping pong players being lost at sea.

It just doesn't happen.

Because they always keep a few in their pocket just in case.

And you can use the bat as an oar once you get to the surface and get yourself to safety.

There was a proposal to use dynamite to get the ship back up.

Well, there was a proposal to blow it up with dynamite five days after it sank.

Was that an idea that was come up with by Wiley Coyote?

Yes,

Donald Duck is coming up with ideas.

So this was genuinely five days after it sank, still April 1912.

Vincent Astor, who was the son of John Jacob Astor, the richest man on board the Titanic, his father had been lost on the Titanic, and he said we should just drop powerful explosives to recover the bodies, sort of to dislodge the bodies from the ship.

Number of problems with this.

Firstly, no one knew exactly where the ship was.

It turns out that it's, you know, in two pieces 600 meters apart.

And he was only deterred from this project when people said that the extreme pressure would have compressed all the passengers on board so they were jelly.

So you wouldn't get the bodies of your loved ones back.

You would just get a kind of jelly.

That actually turns out to be wrong.

But

the people did not turn into jelly.

Okay, okay.

What happened?

I think they is it that the water down there is really low in calcium and so your bones kind of dissolve?

I think I read that.

Okay.

I think.

So let's look at some of the other ideas that they had down.

This thing about Vaseline.

I looked at the website that you sent, which had all of these ideas on.

And on the website, it says there is no proof that Vaseline can float.

Yes, so not a practical suggestion, honestly.

There must be some evidence about whether Vaseline floats or not.

That's what I thought, right?

It must be, because it's not beyond the realms of man to check, right?

I don't have any Vaseline in my house and I can't leave the house to buy some, so I don't have any evidence.

And I googled it.

And if you search, does Vaseline Float, or Vaseline Doesn't Float, or Vaseline Floats, there doesn't seem to be any answers on Google.

So I actually still don't know whether Vaseline floats or not.

I've got a cup of Vaseline in my home.

Let's do it.

Oh, it's another experiment.

Experimentalized.

You'll take us to the bathroom.

Shall I go and get it?

Yeah.

Yeah, let's see.

Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on.

We've become Blue Peter.

Okay.

Okay, Andy's back with some Vaseline.

Yep.

Have you got some water to go with that Vaseline?

I've got some water.

I'm just putting it.

This is the stuff that Mythbusters rejected as being not quite good enough to make the grade.

Okay, so can you see this?

So I've got...

Yeah, we've got it.

I've got a little measuring jug of water.

It's like a Pyrex.

I'm just going to die.

I'm just going to try the whole tub of Vaseline.

The whole tub floats, but it's mostly air.

That proves nothing.

But what you could do is get maybe 100,000 of them and treat them like ping-pong balls.

Okay.

I'm just going to scoop out

a little knob of Vaseline.

Okay.

I'm dropping it in three, two, one.

It floats.

It floats.

There we go.

It definitely floats.

We've solved one of life's great mysteries.

Oh, look, and you're trying to make it not float, and it keeps floating.

Yeah.

So

your finger's the Titanic.

You're airborne.

Look how good that is.

What an underwhelming experiment.

We should mostly stick to just talking about facts, I'm thinking, just based on the last couple of episodes of experimenting.

So what about the iceberg?

Whose idea was that?

The iceberg,

this first cropped up, as far as I can tell, in a 1977 issue of New Scientist, and it was a man called Arthur Hickey, an unemployed haulage contractor from Walsall, who claims to be the officially appointed salvage master of the Titanic Salvage Company.

He claims.

So it's not verified in the article whether that's true or not.

That's interesting, though, that you said that he's unemployed, but also a haulage contractor and also the head of this Titanic raising thing.

He sounds like the least unemployed person I've ever heard.

You're right.

This guy's too much work.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so he approached, and this is according to the new scientist says according to a recent issue of the BOC Group newspaper, which is the British Oxygen Company, he approached them off the back of a vivid dream that he had about turning the ship into an iceberg and allowing it to float to the surface.

And I tried to find more about it.

I think the idea is that they'd have to pump like...

half a million tons of liquid nitrogen down to it in order to do it.

And I think the idea was there was going to be a mesh, a wire mesh that they would create around the Titanic for that to then be the basis for the block at which it would stop.

And then that would slowly bring it back up to the surface.

It is quite ethically dubious to get any of the Titanic back, isn't it?

I think a lot of the survivors were really anti-it when they were still alive.

And a lot of the families of the survivors now are saying, Look, you know, people died and they ended up at the bottom of the sea.

And probably it's not a good idea to, you know, disturb their rest.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah, it's sort of mass grave sites, isn't it?

But it can be extremely useful judging up ships because it might tell us the origin of the universe.

So sunken ships are a really, really crucial source of certain, of what's called low background metals.

And low background metals are totally essential for experiments like looking for dark matter.

So looking for like all this dark matter in the universe that we don't know where it is.

Looking for antimatter.

They're also really important for making Geiger counters, for instance, because they don't emit any radiation at all.

They don't emit any particles.

And the reason is, this is why they're called low background metals, that they're on ships that were built before the nuclear testing that started in the 1940s.

And so all metal that's been manufactured, taken out of the earth and made into something useful since then has had radioactivity in it, just like we all do, because of all that nuclear testing that left the world very radioactive.

So all these ships built before, non-radioactive, and then they were sunk to the bottom of the sea, so they're totally protected from the radioactivity.

and they're the only place that you can find these low background lead and steel which experiments need.

So for instance when they dredge them up there's always this debate between archaeologists who are like we want this for our museum please and the scientists who are like but we want to melt it all down for our experiments please and then the gravesite people who say please leave it there.

Isn't that cool?

That is really amazing.

That's very cool.

I've got an ethical dilemma for you.

Okay.

Titanic related, would you get married on the Titanic?

are we talking about now because that's quite a wet wedding yeah two people two people have genuinely got married on the titanic do you mean since it sounds that's impossible so they dive down in a diving bell or something they dive down in a submersible they're called david libowitz and kimberly miller and they won a trip to the titanic but i think they only won one ticket and they were told by the guys organizing it we'll let the other one of you come along, but only if you agree to get married.

Wow.

Because

they were a couple.

And it was a way of raising publicity for this thing, this trip.

And they had to wear flame-retardant suits and they had to crouch down on their knees for the ceremony because the submersible they were in was so tiny.

But they were actually on the bow of the ship,

you know, where the famous scene is in the movie, I'm the king of the world, all of this.

And anyway, it raised a lot of controversy, as you can probably imagine.

And the reports of it are really good.

Apparently, the couple rejected the assertion that their marriage was typically American and the height of bad taste.

And the guy organizing it said, What's got to be remembered is that every time a couple gets married in a church, they have to walk through a graveyard to get to the altar.

That's such a good point.

Well, it's a point.

It's a point.

It's incredible.

It's good on them.

Yeah.

Imagine how claustrophobic that would be.

I think that's the least enjoyable wedding I can imagine.

I think so.

Also, like if one of them changes their mind just before it happens, they've got a very long trip back up to the surface in a very

awkward, yeah.

One person who is seen as the person who survived the longest in the ocean and then was rescued and survived was a guy called Charles Joffin.

He was the chief baker on board the Titanic.

And when he plunged into the ocean, he was seen plunging with two bottles of whiskey on him, which he downed while he was in there.

And he survived for two hours.

Most people perished after 15 minutes, but he survived two hours.

He had the two bottles of whiskey and the alcohol somehow,

they claim helped him to keep his body temperature going.

He was also on a raft made out of baguettes, though, wasn't he?

Which did help.

Surely you would make your oars out of baguettes rather than your raft.

I guess the baguette is a multi-purpose tool.

You can lash 100 together and then use two more.

He was a complete legend.

So they interviewed him after the Titanic sunk.

And it sounds like he was just chilled the whole way through.

And he wasn't just downing whiskey.

He did try and save lots of people first.

So he made sure the lifeboats were all stocked with all his baked goods aside from the stuff he'd used to make the raft.

And he threw lots of deck chairs overboard to make makeshift kind of rafts for people so they could grab onto.

And then he said he just went back to his bed, downed whiskey, watched the water come under the door pretty calmly, just kind of chilled.

And then eventually

he knew that it was best to stay on the ship, much like Jack in Titanic, stay on the ship until the very last second because you want to minimize your time in the water.

Went in the water.

Usually if you're hammered, which he was, that would be really awful for you because all your vessels of vasodilated and you lose all the heat super fast.

But they think because he was so relaxed because of this whiskey and his general personality, it overrode the shock.

I think it's the shock that kills lots of people.

Right.

The trauma often is what kills you.

Imagine being that chilled as a human.

That even at the Titanic crash and sinking, you're still like, oh, it's all right.

I can't believe you moved the deckchairs around.

I mean, we always hear about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and this is the first evidence I've ever heard of what actually happened to the deck chairs.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1927, an owl was found that had another owl in its stomach, and that owl had a third owl in its stomach.

It's incredible.

I guess you could say they were cannibals.

You so could say that.

Honestly, I've been trying, I've been waiting to say that since you sent this fact around to all of us to research, and it was underwhelming as a moment for me.

It was up there with the the floating Vaseline for all of us and in underwhelming states.

This is amazing.

Yeah, this is what is called an interspecific owl trophic chain, which basically means an owl eats an owl which eats another owl.

And it's pretty much the only version of it I could find in owls at least.

And it was a barred owl.

It was shot in New England.

And when they opened it up, it had a long-eared owl inside it.

And when they opened that up, it had an Eastern Screech owl inside it.

And what we can say about it is that owls, they do eat other birds and they eat other owls.

We've kind of, we can learn about what they eat by looking in their stomachs.

But it also shows the second owl must have eaten the third owl quite quickly before it was eaten itself.

If you know that.

Oh, so it wasn't even remnants.

It was almost Russian dolls.

It was almost Russian dolls.

It wasn't full because obviously you have to chew your owls before you can't eat a whole owl.

I forgot that you don't just down an owl full.

yeah, but also Russian dolls would be incredibly distressing if you open them up and there were just the minced remains of another Russian doll inside that.

And then inside that were more bloodied remnants.

It would be more realistic though, Andy.

It would.

You absolutely died.

Yeah.

And yeah, owls, they eat other owls.

They eat lots of stuff.

They're amazing.

Well, so why did so this is the only example of this?

What's it called?

Owl trophic something rather?

Well, owl and owl action.

I call it owl and owl action.

I'm calling it interspecific owl trophic chain, but you can call it cannabowlism if you want.

Oh, I'm going to go cannabowism, because I think scientists need to wait for more than one instance of something before they come up with an unnecessarily long and convoluted name for it.

I think Andy might well have coined a new scientific term here.

This is exciting.

Our first scientific term.

Very quickly, this is like the only example of an animal eating an animal, eating an animal of the same species.

The closest I could think of was something we covered in one of the Book of the Years, which was when when a shark was eaten by a shark that was caught by the shark, Greg Norman, whose nickname is the shark.

I forgot about that.

He's a golfer whose nickname is the shark.

Yeah, so he was fishing.

Otherwise, we're just saying the shark, whose name is Greg Norman, doesn't make any sense.

If you have a pet shark, you're very unlikely to name it Greg Norman.

You're going to call it Snappy or something.

But yeah, Greg Norman, the golfer, was fishing, and he caught a shark, and then that shark started eating another shark.

So it was a three shark.

Yeah, we have a couple of examples in the fossil record of animals eating other animals that have just eaten other animals.

So for instance, they found a fish which was eaten by an amphibian, which was then eaten by a shark.

That was found in southwestern Germany.

And then we also found a snake which was eaten by a lizard, which had just eaten a beetle.

And weirdly, so these are the only two versions I could find in the whole fossil record.

And that was also found in Germany.

So it seems there was something about German animals in the late Cretaceous.

Don't want to get racist about it, but it seemed like they were up for this kind of thing.

I'm not counting the beetle.

No?

I just, a beetle, what the hell is that?

That doesn't count as an impressive matryoshka.

That's if you get to the end of your matryoshka and there's a grain of rice at the bottom or something, and you're supposed to count that.

You need something that's effectively the same size as the thing that's eaten it to be impressive.

Okay, yeah, you're right.

So an owl is the opposite of a duck, I think.

Yeah.

An owl is the opposite of a duck.

I think you're going to have to tell us a bit.

Give us a bit more.

Yeah, my question still holds.

So what is a duck famous for?

Quacking.

Quacking, yeah.

Okay, and owls don't quack, of course.

It's famous for having feathers which kind of repel water, right?

Water off a duck's back.

And so it can live in the water.

And

whenever it rains on them, or whenever any water gets on them, it just goes straight off them.

But owls are one of the few birds that don't have this at all.

And they have got rid of any ability to repel water from their feathers.

And so, if they get wet, it's an absolute nightmare.

If they go into the water to try and catch a fish or something like that, they can't even jump out and fly away because the feathers, it's like a sheep trying to fly away.

Their feathers are just so full of water, they can't get out, and so they'll end up swimming instead of flying.

That's how that's how clad they are.

But the reason is that if they had oil on their feathers, they would make more noise when they flew around.

And they want to be as stealthy as possible so they can catch their prey.

And so they've done away with the ability for water to flow off them in order to be more stealthy, which I think is really cool.

That is amazing.

They are the opposite of ducks.

Point proven.

Presumably, if it starts raining at night when an owl's hunting, you do hear the sound of owls just dropping out of the air and onto the ground.

You can't hear owls basically until they're about three feet from your head

Because they're so silent and so you we don't really We've got some idea about why they're so quiet, but I think the full mechanism has yet to be properly explained.

There was a review last year about just why they are so quiet.

Yeah, they've looked at their feathers, haven't they?

And they found that they've got like little wrinkly bits on the side, which means that when air comes, it kind of forms tiny little vortices, which make less noise than if there was a load of turbulence.

Wow.

Is that unique in the world of birds?

I haven't checked them all.

I think it is.

I think, I mean, there are about 200 species of owl, and some of them are really loud.

The largest owl in the world is the, I think it's called the Blackiston's fish owl.

And that, because it's hunting fish,

fish can't hear anything that you're doing above the water, and they don't care.

So those owls are incredibly loud because they're not trying to listen for mice.

But most owls are unbelievably quiet.

very cool and they're really slow as well this is the thing i think apart from birds that can actively hover um owls might be the slowest birds in the world they can fly as slowly as two miles an hour so you could easily outrun an owl um no that's not what i'm saying you're saying their top speed is two miles an hour so when they come at you and they're only three feet away it's fine because you have plenty of time to react you just walk over to the other side of the garden stroll away um did you know that owls were responsible for the Second World War?

Oh God.

This is from the book Owl.

This is a book all about owls by Desmond Morris.

And

there was

a mythical bird called the Chick Chani Owl.

I think it was Caribbean.

It was on Andros Island.

That's where it was.

And it looked like an owl, and it was based on a real owl, which had gone extinct a few hundred years before.

Anyway, as a young man, Neville Chamberlain was chopping down trees on Andros Island, and he came across a Chick Chani nest, a nest of of this, I must say, mythical bird.

This is all in the book, Owl.

His workmen refused to touch the nest, but he ignored them and he chopped down the tree himself and this created a curse on him.

Then, some years later, he became the British prime minister

and failed.

to stop Hitler's aggressive expansion.

And that's supposedly why his failure at the Munich conference happened.

Why is Andy allowed to say this kind of shit?

I think he's not.

I mean, who's supposing that?

Is it Desmond Morris, the author of the book Owl, who I must say has a vested interest in giving owls a stronger role in history?

Is it Desmond Morris who supposed that this curse happened?

I don't think he created this story.

I think the story is probably one that's quite local to the region and quite historically specific.

I'm not saying it was the only factor in the Second World War, but I don't think we can discount it.

That's a good point.

Hey, I was looking into people who've had owls for pets because I know that some people do keep owls, but I wondered if that was ever a fashion.

I I didn't find many people but one person who did have an owl for a pet was Florence Nightingale.

Florence Nightingale she had an owl that she got from Athens which was called Athena and she when she left Athens she took with her not only the owl but she had a cicada called Plato and two tortoises Mr.

and Mrs.

Hill.

Unfortunately

they must have felt like such intellectual inferiors at the dinner table with Athena and Plato.

Were Mr.

and Mrs.

Hill were they married or were they brother and sister?

Ooh, not specified.

Very good.

Well, they could have been unrelated hills, I guess.

And then Mrs.

Hill got married to another Hill, I guess, tortoise, but then still hung out with her brother.

Yeah.

And then she presumably split Mrs.

Hill up from her husband, the other Mr.

Hill, in order to adopt them as pets.

Exactly.

All the evidence points towards the spouses, doesn't it?

It does.

It does.

Unfortunately,

the animals became, so there were four of them, they became three when,

unfortunately athena ate plato um

cicada um so but she saw that as two pets merging into one which was more convenient because she carried she carried the owl around with her a lot in uh when she went on the walks and so on um wow but i wonder how many parents have ever tried that excuse on their children when the dog has just eaten the cat no it's all right you've you've got both of them there

uh so athena unfortunately you know florence nightingale known as someone who nursed a lot of people in the Crimean War, Athena is actually a casualty of the Crimean War because when Florence went to the Crimean War, she left Athena in her house, in the attic with some food and assuming that she would survive on any mice that would be running around.

And she abandoned that house and they eventually went back and they found Athena dead inside the attic because obviously...

I know what you're saying, but I wouldn't say that's a casualty of the Crimean War.

She didn't show up in the weekly stats.

stats.

That's something you read at the end of the traumatising news of another battle of the Crimean War.

And in lighter news, an owl has been abandoned to die in an attic.

Well, if you live in London, you can still visit Athena the Owl because it was...

There's no point now.

It was recovered and sent to taxidermy.

So Athena the Owl is kept at St.

Thomas's in the Florence Nightingale Museum.

I wonder if anyone's opened up Athena to see if Plato's still there.

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

My fact is that almost every Englishman at the Battle of Agincourt ate a small amount of soil just before the battle started.

Wow, why did they do that?

Yeah, why did they do that?

It's a good question.

I think it was symbolic.

Well, obviously it was symbolic because there was no practical value.

There was no nutritional value to this

steel.

So we should say briefly what Agincourt was.

It was one of the principally remembered battles of the Hundred Years' War or the series of wars that now we know as the Hundred Years' War.

It was in 1415 and the reason it's widely remembered in England is because it was a big English victory over France and a lot of the other battles of the Hundred Years' War have slightly been allowed to slip into.

They're quite well known in France, I would say, the other battles of the Hundred Years' War.

100%.

Between the two sides, we're covering memorials of all battles except the inconclusive ones.

All our French listeners right now are going, well, I've not heard this.

They've dug up something really niche here.

They genuinely, in France, it's not really taught.

I mean, do write in if you have heard of it, but I think it's not famous at all in France, which is bizarre because for any non-British listeners, Agincourt is...

extremely well known here for that reason.

Even though it was super short, it only lasted maybe half an hour.

I found the brilliant website.

It's run by the University of Southampton that has a list of everyone who was fighting at Agincourt.

Actually everyone who was who they could find from the whole Hundred Years War but they have the specific people who they know are at Agincourt

and it's a great long list obviously there were thousands and thousands of soldiers so I went through that and we had one guy called Thomas Sadler who actually was a saddler that was his job.

That's great.

There was a guy called John Horsey who was a knight and there was a guy called Matthew Boer who was an archer.

So

And they also have the whole French team as well.

Like all the French soldiers that were there.

And there were 64 French soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt called Colin.

Really?

Wow.

And four of those were called Colin Poisson.

Colin the fish.

Colin the fish.

Colin the fish.

Colin Poisson.

There were four Colin Poissons at the Battle of Agincourt.

Seriously?

Wow.

Are we sure that's real?

Those weren't

Plato cicadas there?

It's real?

They should get the academics onto this list because there's been debate raging since the Battle of Agincourt about how many soldiers fought there, and it's still very, very vigorous.

So they should just count all the names on that because there's all sorts of exaggeration.

So the English got taught for a good few hundred years that they were outnumbered about 10 times or 20 times.

You know, the French had hundreds of thousands of times more soldiers.

But I think they think now that it was about two to one, don't they, in terms of outnumbering, which is still good.

But the English had more archers, twice as many archers.

So if you do, again, if you're a broad listener, if you do a word association, Agincourt, I think people go longbow, because that was the huge deal at Agincourt.

It was the English decided we're going to just rely on having most of our people being archers.

We've got this great longbow that the Welsh gave us, thank you, Wales, and we're just going to fire at them from behind.

Whereas the French were a bit more into their chivalry and their knights.

in shining, heavy, annoying armour.

And they didn't really like the bow.

They thought it was a bit ungentlemanly.

so they just had shed loads of cavalry, which, as it turned out, when it was pissing with rain and the mud was thigh deep, and the horses just sank into it, was a disadvantage.

Well, the thing is, it's like in theory, it's not that much of a disadvantage because if you're wearing a full suit of armor, there's not many places that those arrows can get in.

Like, it could hit you in the neck, it could hit you in the groin.

There's one or two other places.

All the places where it could hit you are not very nice, but the chances are it would bounce off you.

But of course, what happened was the arrows hit the horses, and then the horses just went crazy because they'd been hit by an arrow and they unseated the riders who were then in a whole load of mud with a whole load of extremely heavy armor and just were sitting ducks for the English.

The opposite of sitting owls.

Yes.

There was a moment just before the battle because all the English archers were facing, or a lot of them facing the French lines, they had a stake in the ground in front of them as an anti-cavalry device, you know, which is a good thing.

And when you say stake, you mean a piece of wood.

No, I mean a nice T-bone steak.

Substrain so they would eat the ground.

It was to try and freak out the French horses.

They're saying, this is what you're going to be after this battle over.

No, sorry.

They had a massive sharpened wooden stake and they stuck it in the ground, you know, facing the French lines.

But there was this weird moment just before the battle where all the English were told, can you advance a bit so that we are in range of the French cavalry?

Because the French hadn't lined up and started moving yet and the English had to come around to the front of their stake all these archers

heave the stake out of the ground very

strong exercise required to do that it's quite an exertion move the stake forward a fair bit so you're in line so that you're in range of the French and then hammer the stake back into the ground facing the French cavalry again and you have to do all of this while you're completely exposed your back is to the enemy and the French observed this happening and did nothing about it it was a really strange lapse on the French side.

And I, yeah, I'm sure proper historians could account for it, but I just don't know why that happened.

Weird.

I think it was a big disadvantage to attack, so I always think the beginning of a battle reminds me a bit of the beginning of a cycling race.

You're one of those races, James, you like cycling, where they in the Velodrome.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, where they're all really, really slow to start off with, and as soon as one of them goes, oh, you're not going to be able to get it.

Exactly.

Omni one or something.

I can't remember.

Yes.

What's the disadvantage?

Why is it bad to start?

In cycling, what it is, is if you're in someone's slipstream, it's a lot easier.

So it's better for them to go first, you to go behind them, and then you can overtake them at the last second.

But I don't know why it's in battle.

In battle, same thing as a slipstream issue.

It's easier to defend than to attack, was the generally accepted wisdom.

So you didn't want to be the army attacking.

And I think you probably, you know, you start losing your shape when you attack, whereas you keep it when you defend.

So there was this weird moment where before the battle, they had their battle lines lined up and they sent some heralds to meet in the middle and say, hey, are you going to cave?

And then the other heralds said no, and vice versa.

So the heralds went back and said, okay, we're at war.

And then no one moved for ages.

They just stood staring at each other because no one wanted to be the first to attack.

And yeah, the French weren't attacking, weren't attacking.

And eventually the English thought, oh, sod it, we'll do it then.

Isn't that a large shot?

Wasn't there that stat about during wartime about how many bullets were shot to miss as opposed to kill?

People would fire above the heads of the enemy because they didn't want to be someone who took a life.

There's like a huge number of shots were aimed to miss.

They say that about Vietnam, don't they?

Yeah, I think that's a slightly different thing, more about the psychology of not wanting to kill someone, isn't it?

Oh, so you think that not starting it is just purely out of strategy?

That's the way that understood.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not starting it is out of.

These guys did not have a problem with killing as many people as they possibly could.

Okay.

Don't you write the benefit of the doubt there.

Right.

Do you know that a few years after the war, six years after the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V sent back a cavalry of soldiers back to France?

Do you guys know why?

He had left his wallet.

And that's inquiring.

No, I don't know.

He sent them in to collect the foreskin of Jesus.

Of course, that was going to be my next guess.

Yeah, I knew if I gave you a bit more time.

Wow.

Yeah, so because so he got married to Catherine, who was the daughter of the French king, and she was expecting her first baby, and he heard rumors that France had the foreskin of Jesus Christ there, one of the holy relics.

So he sent his men back in to pick it up without any sort of hassle or resistance.

And they brought it back, and it was brought to Catherine.

And supposedly, as it's reported, the scent of the foreskin helped her to give birth to Henry VI in a nice, calm way.

The scent that did you see?

As if they rub it under her nose and it...

Yeah, the sweet scent.

I don't know if they dangled it like an air freshener in front of her or if they actually physically rubbed it.

I don't think they used the fascination of Jesus as an air freshener.

You wouldn't have that in the Christmas tree dangling in your car, would you?

What flavor is this?

Yeah, no, but supposedly the scent of it, the sweet scent of it helped her for a natural birth.

So, yeah, I think.

What a great baby shower present.

That really outdoes all the other presents at a baby shower, doesn't it?

If you're the one who's brought Jesus' foreskin.

They always say about really

like privileged children, they were born with Jesus' foreskin in their mouth, don't they?

Yeah.

We've already been excommunicated multiple times for mentioning Jesus' foreskin, haven't we?

Yeah, why not one more time?

Yeah, sorry, go on.

Just while we're on Catherine, I read another thing, which is that Samuel Pepys kissed her.

Did he?

What?

Yeah.

But this was 200 years between.

200 years between.

Yeah.

So he wrote this in his diary.

It was Shrove Tuesday, 1669.

And she was buried in Westminster Abbey.

And she had an alabaster and all that sort of stuff.

But a lot of attacks happened on, like, I think it was Henry VIII who got rid of the alabaster, didn't like the idea of her.

But her coffin, her crypt, was still there.

And it busted open in 1669, revealing her corpse inside.

So the lid was open, and people could visit the open lid of Catherine.

And Samuel Pepys leaned in and gave her a kiss.

and reported it in his diary that

at 36 years old and I did kiss a queen, he wrote.

It was on his birthday.

I mean, did he really kiss a queen or did he just, you know.

Nuzzle a corpse.

Kiss the 200-year-old corpse, yeah.

Feels like a bit of a stretch.

It feels a bit me too, to be honest.

A queen's a queen forever.

But the queen always refers to Queen Elizabeth as Her Majesty, as Queen Elizabeth I.

So okay.

Yeah.

I'm with Peps.

I think he nailed it.

Great birthday present.

It's up there with Fortune and Jesus in terms of good gifts.

Some of the myths about Agincourt come from Shakespeare because he wrote Henry V,

a great play that is mostly set at the Battle of Agincourt.

And one of the characters in Henry V is Falstaff.

And he is based on a real person who was there, who was not called Falstaff, but was called Falstoff.

who was a famous person who was at the battle and later went on to run a pub in Southwark.

But this guy, I think the BBC need to make a massive budget TV series about Falstof because he is amazing.

He fought at the Battle of Agincourt.

He won another battle called the Battle of the Herrings, where he was at the sea and the French came to attack him.

He got a load of herring barrels and put them all in a big line and then hid behind them and attacked the French from there.

He fought against Joan of Arc at the Siege of Orleans.

There were rumors that John Fastolf was coming.

And the brother of Joan of Arc decided not to tell her because everyone was so scared of this guy and they thought, oh, if they know that Fastolf is coming, then everyone's going to panic.

So they didn't tell her.

And Joan of Arc said to her, brother, bastard, bastard, in the name of God, I command you that as soon as you hear of Fastolf's coming, you will let me know.

For if he gets through without my knowing it, I swear to you that I will have your head cut off.

And he was at another battle where the English got routed.

And he was one of the only people whose group of soldiers managed to survive.

But it meant that everyone else thought that he'd been cowardly.

When he hadn't been cowardly, it had just been the way that the battle had worked out.

And he lost his reputation and had to go back to the UK.

And he'd been a hero, but everyone thought he was a coward.

He's just amazing.

And then all of his money went to the foundation of Maudlin College.

So

he's like this.

So we're finally rejuvenating Full Staff's reputation.

Is that what we're doing today?

I think so.

We're saving Full Staff.

He was the Baron of Scilly in France.

I mean, what more do you need about this guy?

He was brilliant.

There's your title.

Although a bit of a misleading title, if I went to see the Baron of Scilly as a movie.

He is Shakespeare's recurring character, isn't he?

I always like that there's a, you know, pops up three times.

Yeah.

Feels like a funny Easter egg every time he comes, but little callback.

Henry V is obviously used a lot still today,

that rousing speech that he gives

for many things like football.

You know, if there's the World Cup, someone might do an advert giving that speech.

But one person who was particularly fond of it and got into movies as a result during World War II was Winston Churchill.

So Churchill actively became a producer or a sort of accredited help on a movie of Henry V and enlisted Lawrence Olivier to play it because he wanted it to be seen as a stirring thing for the British.

And trailers were released on the day that the troops were invading Normandy and they used a trailer where they showed modern day London and then brought it back back into the old London to sort of help people get excited that you know this is something we'll conquer and something that we'll do.

It's not the only time that Winston Churchill did that either during World War II.

He then got Laurence Olivier to make another and when I say got him he encouraged him but I guess that was a pretty strong encouragement during wartime to make a movie about Nelson and Emma Hamilton.

because in the movie, which was made predominantly for Americans, he wanted to draw parallels between Napoleon and Adolf Hitler and have the American public see that movie as something whereby they needed to come and get behind it.

So Laurence Olivier is a sort of like a bizarre propaganda spy for the British.

Maybe if Winston Churchill spent less time directing films and more time winning the war, it wouldn't have lasted six years.

Yeah, well, maybe ifn't seen that owl that time, then we wouldn't have had a good point about a war in the first place.

That's true.

There are so many big ifs.

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

My fact this week is that the first known colouring book was meant for adults.

Wow.

And it's just

been re-found, rediscovered.

Or in 2017, it was rediscovered.

Did they just find one that had been coloured in?

Is that what happened?

It actually hasn't been coloured in.

So someone obviously had it and then didn't even use it.

Because otherwise, you wouldn't be able to tell it was a colouring inbook.

If it's been coloured in really well, it's just a book.

That's a good point.

Imagine if if you had a kid so good at colouring in, people would browse through the colouring in book, just thought it was a book.

Yeah, they would think that you had a really weird taste of books, didn't they?

Oh, it seems to be all the books on your bookcase are just pictures of birds.

Well, this was pictures of flowers, in fact.

So this was a book called The Florist.

It was published in 1760 by a guy called Robert Sayre and rediscovered in a Missouri Botanic Garden in 2017.

And it said on the front front cover it was for the use and amusement of gentlemen and ladies and then inside it had instructions for how to colour all the pictures in so it was just lots of pictures you can look it up online it's very beautiful it's all publicly available and you know it had techniques it told you what colour you should do the flowers so none of this freedom that the kids have now and it had sort of recipes to mix your own colours or it said you know you can also get pre-mixed colours from the publisher of this book, FYI, if you want.

And it was great.

Don't know why the person didn't colour it in.

I I would have.

Well, maybe he didn't have all the specific coloured pencils that you'd needed to have to do it.

Because if you're not allowed to have your own freedom and colour all your flowers in black, like I used to do with all my colouring books, then

you're right.

Maybe it was like when, you know, when you buy an electric toy for a kid and they open it up and you realize it hasn't come with the batteries, it was like that.

You got home and then really have to order the bloody paints.

But actually, isn't it true true that someone had been using the book to press flowers?

I think this one that they found.

So they opened it up and they hadn't coloured it in, but they seem to have placed flowers on top of where they should have been coloured in.

Yes.

Completely misunderstood the focus of the book.

Well, it was the first one.

Like, it's not obvious what to do, is it?

Yeah, it's the first ever one.

Maybe it was built as a press your flowers book and we then changed it into a colouring book.

Oh, what?

As in, you were meant to put the flower on top of the outline of the flower and fill it in.

Like a football sticker album, basically.

Yes.

That's Panini.

Is this the first Panini album?

Yeah.

God, that would be such a good idea, actually, as a flower collecting book.

It's explicitly not what this is.

He's very clear in the instructions, but there should be one of those.

Anna, from the article you sent around, it looks like there were some earlier, not full colouring books, but that there were illustrations distributed, which were designed to be coloured in by readers.

These woodcuts of Christ.

Well, a lot of people did colour them in, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're from the 15th century.

And we know that people colour them in because we have all these different versions of them where some people have just done it's the picture of the crucifixion.

Some people have just done the blood or some people have just coloured in the Christ figure and then some people have gone to town and they've coloured in the angels and they've coloured in the background.

Did anyone colour everything in black or?

No.

No.

We went through so much charcoal when I was a child.

But they're gorgeous things, yeah.

They are and people used to hang them up, didn't they?

I like the idea of the art on your wall being something that you'd half-made.

So we just say a woodcut was just when they carved into wood and then the manufacturers rolled ink over the wood.

So all the bits that were carved had no ink in them.

And then, so you had the outline, and then, yeah, people would paint them at home and hang them on the walls to impress visitors.

But when do you look at some of those like woodcuts and stuff like that from the, you know, around that time, which would have been, what, 15th, 16th century?

Like Jura, for instance, things like that.

You kind of think, you look at those if you're in a museum and think, well, why didn't people colour those in?

It makes complete sense.

Yeah.

You know.

Well, they did.

So a lot of books, this was the first explicit colouring book meant for the purpose, but probably inspired by the fact that everyone was colouring in their manuscripts all the time.

So there are lots of manuscripts that exist that people at home would colour in because there was no colour printing.

And so, and even very limited by that point, colour printing.

So people just would do it themselves.

That's so cool.

Do you guys want to know one pleasing irony of colouring in?

Oh, yes.

In 1962, in the early 60s, there was a huge great craze for colouring in books.

Massive.

And lots of those were for adults too.

Barbara Streisand released a song in 1962 called My Colouring Book.

Really?

And it was a minor hit for her.

It made me realise how old Barbara Streisand is, for one thing.

But pleasingly, there is now a Barbara Streisand colouring in book.

Oh, very nice.

That is good.

Yeah.

I don't think it's linked to the song especially.

It's just that there are colouring books for everything.

Well, 60s, that was a huge boom for the colouring in book, wasn't it?

And particularly as a tool of satire.

So there were a few books.

There There was a JFK colouring in book which stayed in the charts for like 14 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list.

But they were released not to be colored in, basically.

They were colouring books that you were meant to leave alone because they were sort of a new version of a great satirical cartoon that would appear in the newspapers or in the magazines.

So they found that there was no boom in sales of crayons and color pencils in the period where there was the boom of all these big colouring books that were released.

Yeah.

They were more, I guess, like novelty novelty humor books where the captions underneath gave you a great gag.

So there was one about being corporate and so you would have to color in the suit that I have to wear, which is grey.

Please colour it in grey or I'll be fired.

That was the first one, I think.

So I like the fact the first modern colouring book was, you were supposed to color everything in grey.

James, you would have loved it with your little charcoal.

Yeah,

it's rock shape.

That was pretty dark, that one, wasn't it?

It was like, this is my train.

It takes me to the office every day.

You meet lots of interesting people on the train, Color them all grey.

And then the only bit where you had to put any color in, it was like, this is my pill.

It is round.

It is pink.

It makes me not care.

Yeah.

That's pretty.

It is really dark.

It's called the

executive coloring book, if anyone wants to check it out.

Did you see the conspiracy theory one, Den?

I thought this would be a good idea.

I did.

I loved it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So good.

There's one, it has a blank page and it says, how many communists can you find in this picture?

I can find 11.

Amazing.

There was a modern colouring book craze, which a lot of listeners will probably remember, which was about three years ago.

Almost all the listeners, I will say, Andy, unless we've got some very young ones.

Some of our older listeners might remember that.

I mean, you might not have been paying attention to the colouring in trend.

Oh, my word.

Yeah, but there was obviously a huge rash of new books published.

And I found an article from the Scottish Library website, the Scottish National Library, which has an article in 2016 headlined, yes, we have colouring books in our library, but sorry, you can't colour them in.

And this was just clarifying what you couldn't, couldn't do with Scottish books.

That's really interesting, though, isn't it?

If you go to the library and you get a colouring book, surely you should be like, what's the point of getting it out if you can't colour it in?

That's weird, isn't it?

Quite.

Well, it said it also went on to clarify: you can come and look at the Magic Eye books and squint at them and see the pictures hidden in the pages, but you could look at it but not solve our Sudoku books.

What you could do is colour them in and then Tipex out your colouring afterwards.

And then the next person could colour over the tipx.

Well, I sometimes think it's fun to try and do a crossword.

If you don't have a pen on you, you can just do the crossword in your head.

And that's a fun way of spending time.

So you could do your colouring buck in your head.

Oh, went out the lines again.

Oh, fuck.

Does the website also say, can the guy who keeps pressing plants into our books, please refrain from that in the future?

Do we think they're good or bad?

There's some controversy about whether you should even give colouring books to children because maybe there's huge controversy.

Is there?

What?

As in because it might make them violent or something.

Wow, James, I know you had a very dark upbringing, but some of us put colours in our colouring books.

I was just thinking, like, usually when there's a moral panic about not giving things to children, it's because it's going to turn them to drugs or violence, isn't it?

The Call of Duty colouring book might prompt children to violence or whatever.

It's a really good point.

I don't think this is something that's been considered yet, but this was first raised in the 1950s by the sort of leader in art education, a guy called Victor Lovenfeld.

And he said colouring books have a devastating effect on children.

And it's because they don't let them develop their own ideas.

So the idea is that you've given them a picture and they just have to stick within the confines of that picture.

And he was saying they not only do they not inspire children to be imaginative, but also they kind of make them have really low self-confidence because children look at these really good pictures in the colouring book and they think, well I'm never going to draw as well as that I've just tried to draw sunshine and it ended up a square and so they're not even going to attempt to draw themselves and there is quite a lot of back and forth about whether it's bad for you know children's imagination then they start getting violence i guess after that and then they get punched in the face yeah that that's really interesting you know these colouring books where they it's coloured by numbers so oh yeah it might be when you look at it Sometimes you might look at it, you might not see what the image is until you colour it in and then you realise what it is.

Love it.

There was one of those in the Netherlands, and it turned out that when you coloured it in, it was actually Adolf Hitler.

And the problem was that

they'd bought these colouring books, but they'd never colored them in to see what the images were.

And it was only when people took them home and coloured them in that they realized that it was Adolf Hitler.

Wow.

And they said they deeply regretted the incident, and it remains unclear why Hitler was included in their colouring books.

And the guy said his suspicion is that the man who created it, because it was someone in India who'd created this book, they just didn't know who Hitler was and they'd taken him out of

just a book of historical figures.

Well, they just took the time man of the year for 1938.

While we're on paint by numbers,

this is very similar to colouring in, obviously.

So Dan, we know who invented them.

Again, because it's relatively recently it was invented, but it was a guy called Dan Robbins, who only died last year, actually.

It was in 1951.

And he was working at a paint company, and he was given the task of selling more paint.

And he came up with this method to sell small quantities of paint.

But if it was popular, obviously you'd sell a lot.

And

there's an online museum of Paint My Numbers, which has 60,000 of them.

And it says that he is the most exhibited artist in the world.

His work...

you know he does all the drawings it has been displayed on more walls than any other artist which is quite a pleasing idea

it's a loose definition of the word artist, isn't it?

Well, he always said this is not, when you're doing a paint by numbers, it's not art per se, but you are getting the same sensation as people have when they are creating art.

And that's a kind of gateway in some ways.

So he was always very modest about what it was.

So was the idea that like if they had a lot of orange paint to sell, for instance,

they might do a load of paint by numbers with umpalumpas in them or something.

Like they would sell more.

Oranges.

Or oranges, yeah.

I knew there was something famous that was orange in colour, but I just couldn't think of it.

I almost went for blackpool football kits.

Oh, wow, that would have been niche.

It's too niche.

If they had a lot of black paint to sell, they specifically marketed to the Harkin family.

He always claimed that he was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci.

So in his autobiography, he wrote that he'd once heard Leonardo da Vinci would hand out numbered patterns to his apprentices in his workshops, and then the apprentices could fill in the colours.

And I must have wasted about six hours yesterday trying to find any original evidence that Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, which is also sometimes claimed, did this.

And I can't.

So I'm begging you, any art historians out there, if you've got evidence of this,

please write in.

But they used to be hung on people's walls, which I find odd.

When I did paint by numbers, it wasn't the sort of thing my mum would then frame put on the wall.

But people would hang them on their walls in the 50s.

What were you doing?

President Eisenhower had them hung up in the corridor in the White House.

Oh, what?

Really?

That's so cool.

Look, if Donald Trump could do it without going out of the lines, he he would do exactly the same thing.

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've said over the course of this podcast, you can get us 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.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Links to merchandise are there as well.

And yeah, guys, still hope you're safe.

Still hope you're doing okay.

Hopefully we'll get past all this very soon and back out into the world.

Until then, we'll be back again next week with another episode and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

I've wasted a full cycling trip's worth of Vaseline here.

What do you do?

Where do you put it for your cycling?

Oh, Anna, you will be able to find that if you look it up online.

Yeah, okay.

It's certainly not going inside your pants.

Put it that way.

No, hang on.

It's certainly not going outside your pants.

Yeah.

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