314: No Such Thing As A Tiny Ferris Wheel

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Hey, everyone.

Welcome to this week's episode of Phish.

We hope you're well.

We hope you're safe.

And we hope you're not going outside.

This week's episode is actually our first work from home episode.

We're all in different locations.

Andy actually is so far away that he actually didn't make it onto the show at all.

So Alex Bell is joining us for this one.

But Andy will be back next week.

He will be back next week.

He certainly will.

He can't wait.

All right, mate, not yet.

But we, yeah, so this will be our first episode.

But we thought in order to help distract you, to stop your mind from going crazy, we re-uploaded 52 episodes that were taken off a few years back.

It's our second complete year of fish, and you can listen to them wherever you get your podcast from.

That's over 30 hours of old material that we've brought back to the surface.

So, we hope you enjoy those.

We hope you are staying safe, and we'll continue to do this.

So, here we go.

Let's do our first work from home episode.

On with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you not from the QI offices in Colvin Garden, but from four self-isolated bits of the UK that we cannot disclose the locations of.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I'm sitting not with Anna Chaczynski or James Harkin or Alex Bell, but once again we have gathered together over the internet to share our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Anna.

My fact this week is that before we had the technology to take photos for mug shots, policemen had to visit prisons to memorise all the inmates' appearances.

All of them?

Well,

in some prisons, I think.

Is that like the knowledge for taxi drivers?

It was exactly that, yes.

And then a lot of it got automated and put a lot of the old school taxi drivers/slash memorisers out of business.

Does that mean if you're like me and you can't recognise people's faces, you can't be a policeman?

You would not have fared well in that phase of the interview process, certainly.

So I'm reading the Pickwick papers at the moment.

And there's a scene where, spoiler alert, Mr.

Pickwick goes to a debtor's prison.

And then there suddenly the scene came up which was Mr.

Pickwick sits for his portrait and described him being sat down and a policeman saying, Okay, it's time to sit for your portrait, sir.

And it said, a long, thin man planted himself opposite and took a good long view of him.

A surly-looking gentleman stationed himself close and rested his hands on his hips to inspect him narrowly.

And then two others came in and studied his features with the most intent and thoughtful faces.

And then they took this likeness and at length it was completed.

And then they said, okay, you can go into the prison.

And it seemed to be just standard practice as you're going into jail.

Sounds like a date.

Sounds like a date.

What very weird, awkward dates you have.

Do you just stare at the person across the table?

Well, otherwise he'll never know on the second date who it is if he hasn't memorised what they look like.

Dickens must have have known the Pickwick paper debtor's jail really well, because his dad was in there for a long time, wasn't he?

Yes.

Well, he based another little Dorrit is based, sort of half in a debtor's prison, and this was like his warm-up.

Yeah, he knew it very well.

And it was Fleet Prison that this was set in, and Fleet Prison was next to the River Fleet, which is a now underground river that runs through London.

Wow.

So that was the thing that you used to get your portrait done, because that's a very lengthy process.

No, no, it wasn't taking his portrait.

No one was drawing his portrait.

It meant getting his portrait done, as in people staring at him and memorising his face.

It was a metaphorical portrait.

A metaphorical portrait.

But then, the first things that they did record when they started thinking, actually, we should probably just stop trying to work everything out by memory, is they didn't, they didn't, they still didn't take pictures or portraits or photographs or anything, or even do sketches.

They started taking measurements.

So, a Belgian prison warden called Stevens in 1860 is one of the first people who started measuring criminals' like heads and their ears and their feet and like how tall they were.

Like basically, if you were like measuring them up for a suit or something, which feels like an incredibly

lengthy way to you then have to re-measure every single suspect that comes in and like line up all of the measurements with everyone.

Yeah.

Also, a lot of people have quite similar measurements.

You know, when you're roughly six foot with brown hair, average weight, it's very hard to narrow it down.

It's not going to be like this person's ear is two and a half feet long and this person's

lips are five inches in width.

No.

I should say that I did further research into this, other than just assuming that a fictional book contained the truth.

So, just to be clear,

this was definitely the case, and it was a thing that was done to identify criminals.

And it's mostly to spot re-offenders, right?

So, if someone comes into the prison, it's to it's so policemen can say, oh, yeah, he's been in three times before.

And it was really pioneered by this guy called Eugene-François Vidoc, who was right at the start of the 19th century a criminal, in fact, a criminal turned policeman who pioneered this mass memorization program.

So he would train up all his agents to make regular trips to all the prisons around the country and memorize, you know, wander around the prison yards and memorise all their faces.

And it was thousands of faces they memorized.

I think something like 30,000 prisoners they had committed to memory.

So it did happen.

He was an extraordinary character, this guy, wasn't he?

Eugene Vidok.

So he was first put into jail when he was quite young by his own father.

He had robbed his dad's pawn shop.

Can I just say, when you say porn shop, you mean people were giving goods to get money back for them or no pornography shop?

No, specifically that one chess piece.

Yeah, a lot of people losing them.

So, yeah, did a good business out of that.

Yeah, no, it was for pawning items into a shop.

So he stole from there.

His dad put him into prison.

He stayed there for about two weeks.

Then when he came out, he robbed the shop again, took all the money and ran away and was going to go on a ship to America, but then heard that there was a circus in town, so tried to join that, but quit because he was too afraid to bite the heads off chickens, as was one of the acts they needed him to do.

Also, he started making out with the puppeteer's wife while they were doing the show.

Yeah, that was geeks, wasn't it?

Wasn't it geeks who were the people who bit the heads off chickens at circuses?

Is that right?

That's right.

Yes, that's right.

That's why they called me a geek at school.

Sure, it is, Alex.

So Vidok had a really good memory, didn't he?

He could memorize all these people absolutely perfectly.

But he said that he couldn't really require the same of his agents because he initially hired 28 detectives, all of whom were also criminals, to join his kind of police force.

And then he decided that he would set up index cards with all of these different aliases, convictions, what they would do, how they would like to break into places and stuff like that.

And basically, that was the start of intelligence.

Yeah.

So it was like flash cards, but for criminals.

Exactly.

We're like a massive game of guess who.

Yes.

James is looking so blank, like he has no idea what that game is.

I know.

James would be so terrible at guess who.

Yeah, it's just the same face on every card.

He wasn't very popular.

He wasn't super popular because of his habit of just employing criminals.

So he wasn't very popular among criminals because he went to prison and then he used the fact that he was a criminal to report on all his other mates who were criminals and get them in trouble.

And then, yeah, he employed these people in the force who kept on just recommitting crimes.

And so I think the police weren't weren't huge fans of him.

And in fact, when he became the head of what was essentially the sort of undercover police force, then he was still a wanted criminal in another place.

And there was this constant back and forth between the police force that he was running saying, no, no, we need him, and the prison saying, well, we want to put him in jail.

Fingerprinting, another

useful technology we use a lot.

And so this was proven to be superior to the old just like taking someone's measurements, height and weight, or memorizing their faces.

was proven to be vital with the case of Albert and Ebenezer Fox.

But I didn't know about these guys.

They were identical twins, and this was the turn of the 20th century, and they were both serial criminals.

They were poachers and thieves.

And because they were identical twins, they just played this really fun game where whenever one of them got arrested, they'd sort of say, no, it's my brother mate.

And what are you going to do to prove it wasn't?

All you can do is memorize my face.

And so there was this one policeman who said, we've got to get a better system here and realized that their fingerprints were actually different to one another's, even when everyone else is the same.

But what I like is that there's an estate in Woolmer Green, which is a place in Hertfordshire.

It would be so great if there was someone listening who lives there and who didn't know this.

There's an estate in Woolmer Green called the Twin Foxes Estate.

And these guys are pretty obscure now, almost lost to history.

But the Twin Foxes Estate has these two busts at the entrance to it of the identical Twin Fox brothers.

So it's an estate which is just in honour of these serial criminals.

That's incredible.

Do you think

if you were the sculptor of that, would you do two different sittings with the two different brothers?

Or would you just think, you know what?

Well, you think he sculpted the individual fingerprints on the fingers.

Just back very quickly to Vidok.

So he was quite famous in his day, wasn't he?

He was someone who was notorious for these stories of adventure and espionage and so on.

So much so that he was actually, he inspired characters in fiction.

So Les Miz,

it's said that he is the inspiration for Jean Varjean.

Oh, is he?

Yeah, but not only that, he is also the inspiration in the same book for the policeman character.

What's his name?

Javier?

Did I read it, mate?

Did you read it James in you?

Well, I read the first hundred pages

over the course of about four years.

In the movie, he's played by Russell Crowe, so I think he's called Javier,

but I might be pronouncing that wrong, but it's the two different stages of his life.

He was so inspiring both in his notorious criminal activity and his police work.

He appears twice as inspiration.

Either that or Victor Hugo's an incredibly lazy author who just couldn't easily be bothered to reach to two sources for inspiration.

Yeah.

Well, I was wondering if it's just like one of those really hack horror movies where it turns out that it's two parts of the same person's psyche that does the murder or whatever.

Do you know what I mean?

Oh, yeah.

Like he's a shekyl in hyde.

Are you describing Fight Club as a really hack movie?

I haven't seen Fight Club or even be dreaded.

Wow, you just spoiled it for him, Anna.

I have just done that.

Do you not know the first rule of Fight Club for fuck's sake?

Damn it.

Let's be real.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that scientists working in the Arctic Ocean have caught chlamydia and they can't explain how.

Okay.

So when I say caught in this respect I mean like catching a fish or catching some species of organism because they've gone down to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and they've extracted some sediments from there and they've looked at what life forms are down there and they found chlamydia And it's strains of the chlamydiae family.

So it's not the chlamydia that you get as humans, but they're related organisms of the same family.

And they can't work out why they're there.

It doesn't make any sense.

Chlamydia tends to, or always, as far as we know, needs a host.

So it needs to live inside the body of another animal.

But when they found these things, there was no other animals there.

So they just can't work out why it's there and how it got there.

And has the Arctic denied all knowledge?

It said, I'm, you know, me and the Pacific are just good good friends.

I don't know what you're suggesting.

I think protesting that it's not quite the chlamydia you know doesn't really make it any better.

No.

I think well, the thing is that the Arctic is being penetrated by the Atlantic at the moment because of the change in temperature on Earth and warm salty water coming from the Atlantic is kind of coming into the Arctic at the moment and causing quite a few problems for the you know global climate.

So maybe it's something to do with that.

You'd think there'd be enough plastic in the oceans that they could penetrate each other safely, but apparently not.

Indeed.

Yeah, the number of condoms we've given them over the years.

So there you go.

That's a thing that's happened, and they found it out quite recently, and it's been in a lot of the science-see kind of publications and new scientists and a few things like that.

And I just find it really interesting.

So are we going to give the ocean bed antibiotics, or are we just going to let them suffer?

If that's what we need to do, pour more chemicals into the ocean.

I think it's not that they're suffering.

These are just organisms that live there.

They're just living their life.

As far as I know, they're not doing anyone any harm.

They just are part of the biosphere, really.

Okay.

So, like I say, we don't really know why they're there because they've tried to get the microbes and grow them in the lab, but they've not been able to do it because the pressure underneath the sea

and basically the conditions down there are very different than what we can make in the lab.

So it's really, really hard to study.

And it could be that they're using other microbes that are living in these sediments and they're using their bodies, as it were, to live.

But we really just don't know.

I was reading about other symptoms of, just for this podcast, of normal chlamydia.

And did you know that if it goes untreated, you can get a symptom called saxophone penis, which is when the penis bends into the shape of a saxophone.

Okay.

Hang on, with a big open end bit.

No, you can't play it.

It doesn't turn into a saxophone.

No, but you said the shape, so does that mean it's kind of thin at the top and then bends round and it's got a big bell at the end?

It's basically a big bend where it shouldn't be, and it looks a bit like a saxophone.

Sexy is more like,

yeah, good luck getting that one.

Convincing pickup line.

You sure?

That does look like extreme chlamydia to me.

Speaking of the Arctic and penises,

there is a thing called polar penis that you can get.

Oh, wow.

This was an Antarctic adventurer called Alex Brazier, who reported this only last year, I think it was.

So he was walking through the Antarctic, and obviously his trousers were not thick enough, and he said he suffered from an extremely cold, painful, and swollen member.

And the only way he knew how to treat it was to put a hat on it.

Right.

Is that

a wonderful treatment ever?

In this case, he had a woolly hat.

His penis was too cold and it was getting sore, so he put a hat on it.

And it was funny.

And I like to think, you know, those innocent smoothie bottles that have the little woolly hats on?

Yes.

I like to think it'd be like one of those little hats that you carry around with you or something.

Wow.

You just made them a lot less cute for a lot of people.

I don't think that warrants.

A cold dick doesn't warrant a medical name.

You didn't need to do that.

Well, I believe it was a lot more, you know, it wasn't just like it suddenly started to look like a piccolo.

It was like really kind of quite painful.

There's quite a lot of instruments we could get out of penis conditions.

I've got a trombona.

Oh God.

Wow.

Do you know who has chlamydia?

Is it you?

Okay.

This is just a gossip.

Of course it's koalas, famously.

Koalas have chlamydia.

But it's actually not the same strain of chlamydia that infects humans.

But it does seem that they get it through sex, and it's probably around 100% of wild koalas who have this.

There's one or two populations that don't have it famously.

I think there's one on Kangaroo Island that don't have it, but pretty much all koalas in the wild have this disease.

And the problem with it, the main problem is, of course, antibiotics are quite good against chlamydia, but if you're a koala, you can't have antibiotics.

Do you know why?

You can't open the bottle because it's like having kittens.

No.

Are they just too embarrassed to get it checked up?

They just never get get it diagnosed.

These are all great answers, but the answer is that they have a very, very specific gut microbiome because they eat eucalyptus leaves only, don't they?

And they have very, very specific bacteria that live in their stomachs that let them eat that and nothing else.

And if they take antibiotics, then it can upset that and they can even die because they're not getting all the nutrients they need.

Someone needs to introduce the koala community to yakle, surely,

get some good bacteria in them.

Because I think they aren't, they're talking about giving they're talking about giving them fecal transplants, aren't they?

Which obviously you do for humans to regenerate their gut bacteria.

So they could have that, which seems sort of fitting because I think they get chlamydia from fecal matter.

So there are two ways you can get it.

You can get it sexually as a koala, or you can get it from your mother's pap, which is this disgusting substance that they consume between drinking their mother's milk and eating eucalyptus.

And it's thought that they eat their mother's pap, which is essentially fecal matter that their mum feeds to them, their own poo, and then it's thought that that's what builds up their gut bacteria to help them digest eucalyptus.

Can you imagine ever going to a dinner party if you have that job and someone asks you, and so what do you do?

You know, I give fecal transplants to koala bears.

I don't know about you.

That is the kind of person I want to be sat next to at a dinner party.

I want fecal transplants on the left, I want saxophone penis on the right.

I am

dream dinner party.

Do you know who else has chlamydia?

Parrots.

So, parrots can get something called

cittacosis, but with a silent P at the start, and it's known as parrot fever.

Very tasty.

Very good.

But yeah, this is an illness that they can get, and it's caused by a chlamydia bacterium.

And it can sometimes go to humans.

And that is one theory.

And actually, it's definitely where the popularization of the phrase sick as a parrot comes from.

No way.

Yeah, so there are bits in, I think there might be in Shakespeare somewhere, where someone says you're sick like a parrot,

but the specific sick as a parrot came from the 1970s, and it was just at a time when there was a bit of a worry about parrot fever.

Wow, which is a type of chlamydia you get from parrots.

Wait, and when you say it can go to humans, is that sexually transmitted?

It is not.

It's because it's zoonotically transmitted.

Okay, fine.

It's not, because they can sweet talk you, parrots.

But with your own words, your own actions.

They're the sexiest words around, most people.

You're like, oh, you're looking nice today.

You're looking nice today.

All right.

Is it more embarrassing to say to your spouse that the reason you've got chlamydia is that you've been having an affair or that it's from the pet parrot?

It's just they're both quite embarrassing.

I've got chlamydia.

I've got chlamydia.

Imagine trying to hang up on a nice late-night phone call with your parrot.

No, you hang up first.

No, you hang up first.

No, you hang up first.

I found a story from 2004 from Sweden when the number of chlamydia cases were like really spiking, and the government had to do something about it.

So they started offering a service three days a week.

I think it was something like Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays,

where you could ring, you could ring a condom ambulance.

And it was called the Chusan Express because the Chusan is a well-known make of condoms.

And for about four quids worth,

they would deliver 10 condoms to any address within the city of Gothenburg or Stockholm or Malmo.

Okay, that's great.

It's pretty good value.

Did they get the sort of ambulance-level siren thing?

It's the kind of urgency you want when you can't find a condom.

Yeah, especially the people who feel embarrassed buying condoms, and you just get this big sad amount of money.

I want the St.

John's air ambulance outside my window, airlifting.

I was once in a shop in Bolton, and there was like a middle-aged man wanting to buy condoms, and he was really embarrassed because it was a lady behind the counter.

And he just went, Excuse me, love, you got any rubber gloves?

She went, What?

He went, You got any rubber gloves?

And she took him to the other part of the store and gave him some actual rubber gloves.

And then he had to go, No, I don't mean those.

Poor guy.

I just felt so embarrassed for him I mean it's just a story if only if only he'd had five small penises that would

he had a penis like a set of bagpipes

okay it is time for fact number three and that is Alex.

My fact this week is that Jessica Alba has ridden the London Eye 31 times.

She holds the record for the international overseas celebrity to have ridden it the most times.

It's such a good fact.

So, do you know, is it because she really loves the London Eye?

I wish it was because that, because I just love the idea of her being a massive fan of it.

But no, it's actually because she was doing press for the movie Fantastic Four, Rise of the Silver Surfer, which came out a few years ago.

And she did the press interviews on The London Eye because part of it takes place in London.

Hang on.

Did she go off it and go back on it?

No.

I don't think she went and queued every time she had a new interview.

Oh, so she's done 31 rotations.

A one single rotation

visit.

Yes, that's right.

What happened was

it was like a press junket and it was Jess Karalba, Michael Chiklis, and Chris Evans.

And they were all doing this thing and they went around 30 times and then she must have gone on one more time to just enjoy it like as a punter, right?

But what that says to me is that the other people don't really like it very much and they decided, nah, we've done our 30 times now.

We're not going to go back again.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

Do you?

Well, I think it's a bit weird that she went, can I have just one more just for me?

Isn't that the longest press junket of all time?

That is a 15-hour press junket.

It's a long time, isn't it?

Is that right?

Yeah, because it takes about half an hour to go around, yeah.

Holy moly.

Wow.

I wonder if she did it all in one day, though, or maybe they did it over two days.

We'll never know.

If only she had some kind of media outlet that she was.

I messaged her Instagram feed to see if she'd tell me anything about it.

She never replied.

In the article I read about this, it had a few other celebrities that have been on it quite a few times.

Matt Damon, I think I've tied with.

I think we've been on about the same number of times, which means, well, he's been at least five times, and I've done at least six.

Really?

Why have you been on it six times?

See,

I mean, 31 sounds ridiculous, but then I know six actually is outrageous as well for a normal.

Well, I used to live outside of London, so if I came and visited family of friends in london they always it was a touristy thing that they would take you to do and then i became that person who they would say could we go and do it so i've been on it quite a few times um yeah six but you've been on the same number as charlie chaplin have you yeah

amazing

dan is such a fan of charlie chaff and he's so happy that james shares that very very ubiquitous thing no i that my pause was i was suddenly very annoyed that james knows something about charlie chaplin that i didn't so much so that i didn't notice the joke and what he was saying all I know is that he died before the London Eye was built that's all I know and I I saw that entire thought process in Dan's face on my laptop gradually happening

so the London Eye really it rejuvenated the Ferris wheel industry

before it came along they it came around again the Ferris wheel industry after that didn't it very good it did um so it was a big deal around the turn of the 20th century and the tallest ferris wheel in the world was the Grand Rue de Paris, which was built in 1900 for the World's Fair and demolished in 1920, but it was 100 meters high, and that wasn't beaten for almost 90 years.

It's amazing, isn't it,

how the tallest wheel is not that much taller than the first Ferris wheel.

You'd think that the first one would have been like, I don't know, four meters or something hilarious.

And it's actually pretty, it was a pretty good, like for a first attempt, I was pretty impressed.

Decent.

Also, do you know what one of the limiting factors, which is why they can't really go any taller?

This is according to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, who are one of the world's biggest manufacturers of giant various wheels.

I don't know how many there are,

but take a guess.

A problem that I don't know how Jessica Albert dealt with, for instance.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Is it because

they can't go that fast?

So if they're really, really big, it's going to take you ages to get all the way back around to the start again and people just get bored.

And is it going to be something

counterweighting?

It's close.

No, James is a lot closer.

It's bored.

And also, bearing in mind, maybe it's quite a lot of older people or very small children.

It's about

bugs.

No toilets.

No toilets.

Yeah.

And there's sort of like a maximum amount of time that you can have people trapped in a room without lose before there starts being sort of disastrous situations and more cleaners need to be brought on board and it's just not worth it.

I do have a fact about Jessica Albrampoo, actually, if you want to hear it.

Yeah, please.

Why not?

That she was in the, she starred, in in fact, in the 2011 movie Spy Kids 4D, and the director, Robert Rodriguez, was inspired to write that movie after he watched Jessica Albert's baby do a poo.

Interesting.

Sorry, what was the movie again?

Spy Kids 4D.

What's the relation?

What's the relation?

He thought, I'll just maybe write a shit movie?

No, yeah, pretty much, yeah.

No, he, so

he was working with her and she was doing another press thing, and she, her baby did a big poo in the nappy just as she was about to go on camera.

So he watched her change a nappy like really quickly while kind of like getting ready and doing all of her like makeup and stuff and he had he like was amazed at her watching her kind of be a mother and also do this very professional job at like literally at the same time and so he thought wouldn't it be fun to have a spy who's also a mum and then he wrote the movie with a spy who's a mum in it really is that what it's about yeah oh weirdly the first three are also about that so i don't know why he required new inspiration

but this is what it says in the in the yeah that's amazing um you You know, you were saying about how they can't get much bigger.

Have you seen the new biggest Ferris wheel, which is about to be opened this year?

Is that the one in Dubai or something?

Yeah, the one in Dubai is called Ain Dubai, A-I-N Dubai.

It's going to be 210 meters tall.

And the current highest, which is in Las Vegas, is 167 meters tall.

So it's way, way, way, way bigger than that one.

London Eyes about 130, something like that.

And it means that each of the spokes of the wheel is about the same length as a football pitch.

Wow.

That's how big it is.

On the flip side, I tried to find the smallest Ferris wheel that we have.

And there's a list on Wikipedia of Ferris wheels.

And unfortunately, the smallest Ferris wheel didn't have a hyperlink to it.

But the second smallest did.

So I can tell you about the second smallest Ferris wheel.

It's called the Uni Royal Giant Tire.

And it was built by the same team or company that built the Empire State building.

Right.

Wow.

How cool is that?

How is this?

It is,

but that's extraordinary.

Someone has deleted that information from my notes.

Have they?

Wow.

That's amazing.

It's unbelievable that my son is in so much trouble right now.

Can you give us a rough size?

Yes, okay.

Imagine the largest non-production tire.

So it looks like it's the tire.

Okay, hang on, hang on.

I need a largest largest non-production tyre let me just bring up a very clear image and scale in my mind because i'm so familiar with that is it like a monster truck tyre yeah but like about 10 times the size it's massive okay yeah yeah i mean this is this is guys it's really big i've seen smaller ferris wheels than that you see like kids ones don't you in the fairground what about our legoland they have a tiny model one or like those with connects ones you get in the windows of harrods probably someone's made one on the eye of a needle out of chromium or something.

Yeah.

I suspect that Wikipedia decided not to list every single Ferris wheel in the world, right down to the very smallest.

Guys, I did say it was the second smallest.

That's a good point.

Hey, Dan, do you remember in 2013, before we started this podcast, we did a whole load of practices, and one of the first ones we ever did was someone asked us a question, what is the name for a phobia of Ferris wheels?

Yes.

Do you remember that?

I do.

Do you know what?

Weirdly, I got really emotional researching this fact because that was the conversation that we had that has led to this whole podcast.

That singular one, yeah.

I went through and found all my old emails and went through all my old research for it, which is crazy.

It's actually quite common for people to have a phobia of Ferris wheels, as I see if I Google it or go on Twitter and type in phobia of Ferris Wheels.

It seems to be quite common.

And I went onto bigroundwheel.com, which is like a Ferris wheel fan site.

And there's an FAQs there, and they say, you know, what am I going to do if I'm scared of Ferris wheels?

And they say, consider sitting on a park bench, which could probably support about a thousand pounds.

While sitting on this bench, are you afraid the bench will suddenly break and you will fall?

Most likely not, because the consequences of falling 18 inches are not very dangerous.

Now consider the Ferris wheel seat.

Yes, it is much higher, but it is also designed to carry about three times the weight of that park bench it is designed for.

So basically, if you are worried and it goes on and it goes on, but you're not going to be able to do it.

But you are worried there's no I don't think, you know, giving people fear therapy, you don't have to use that mocking tone, James.

I think you have to understand you.

You fucking idiot, Facebook Ferris wheel.

It didn't have the tone on the website because I was just reading it, but that's how I imagine they wrote it.

So when we had that initial fish chat before fish started, one of the topics we also spoke about was the person who created the Ferris wheel,

the first one being George Washington Gail Ferris Jr.,

which is where Ferris gets its name from.

And I read about its inaugural run.

It's the very first time it showed members of the public and press the first time it was spinning in all its glory.

And the first time it did that, it did it with no carriages hanging onto the end of the spokes.

So what did people just hang on with their hands?

They had the people, the construction site workers, climb to the end of the spokes and sit there on a nice angle as it was going.

Now

that's a legit fear, I think.

Like, if you're scared of Ferris Wills and they make you ride it like that,

because have you imagined just sitting on like a log for instance you don't worry about falling off a log do you so why should you worry sure it's a log famously very easy to fall off a log James

but this was in 1893 so this was first showed at the Chicago World Columbian Exposition and it was just a ridiculous thing to do it was so ginormous it was bigger than the tallest buildings really at the time

or at least on par with them

a pretty extraordinary feat well well the reason they did it is because they wanted something that was better than the Eiffel Tower

because the Eiffel Tower had been built in Paris of course and everyone that was thought this was amazing but they had this new world fair and they thought well we can't be outdone by Paris we need something which is as good as that and so they had almost a competition to see what might come in the place of you know as their kind of version of the Eiffel Tower one idea was they were going to have a 4,000 foot tower with a car that seated 200 people people that was on a bit of bungee rope and then people would push this car off the top of the tower and then all 200 people inside this pod would do like a joint bungee jump.

So a bungee jump but inside a bus.

Exactly like that, yeah.

What a blood bus.

That was, well, that can only be the reason they didn't do it.

Another idea was they would have a 5,000 foot tower made of logs and at the very top of this log tower there would be a log cabin.

I don't know how you would get there.

There was another one which was a 9,000-foot tower, and at the very top, they would have a toboggan slide, and you would kind of go on like a crest to run all the way down to the bottom.

Oh, no, no, no, that sounds amazing.

With these increasingly desperate pictures from the same person, they kept saying nope, and they were just like, he was like going down, down the list.

What about a 20,000-foot-fur tower?

Monkey tennis?

And then what happened was they looked at all these things and thought, this is ridiculous.

And they got a letter from Gustave Eiffel himself who said, You know what?

I'll just make you another Eiffel Tower.

I'll make it a little bit bigger than the other one, so it's better than the one in Paris.

And that's what they were going to go for.

But then it got into the newspapers, and everyone was like, No, you can't have a French person building something in America, it needs to be an American.

And then that's when this guy, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., came along and said, I've got this idea for a big wheel.

Didn't a French person build the Statue of Liberty?

Sure.

Because they did.

I was told yeah.

And it was like built in the head.

There, there's an amazing picture.

I nearly put it in the QI titles actually, but like it's a it's just the head of the Statue of Liberty sitting in a park in Paris where they sort of put it on display before they shipped it over.

It's really cool.

Yeah, that is cool.

Do you know why George Washington Gail Ferris Jr.

was called George Washington Gail Ferris Jr., by the way?

Was it because his dad was called George Washington Gail Ferris?

No, it wasn't, weirdly, actually.

That's quite weird, isn't it?

You'd think so, but no, he wasn't.

It's it's just such a stupid name I thought I'd look it up and the reason was that he was from a town called Galesburg that was named after a guy called George Washington Gale and his parents were so proud of the town they decided to give him the entire name of the founder and then just put their family name Ferris at the end no way so it's like me calling my children Andrew Hunter Murray Harkin

it's like putting the entire name before your surname although it does sound like the mum did have an affair with George Washington Gale and had to pull the wool over the eyes of the husband when Gale insisted he have his son named after him.

That is a convoluted situation you've set up there, Dan.

So the mum's had an affair with a guy who's insisted that even though she's married to someone else, she name her son after him.

He's the founder of the city.

He's got ego running through his veins.

Fair point.

And she's just got to cover that up.

That is a difficult position you're putting that woman in.

I don't know why she tagged him in the first place.

He sounds like a dickhead.

Did you know that one of the two feet of the London Eye, so the London Eye have to pay rent on one of the feet of the London Eye, but not the other one?

Oh, yeah.

Because why?

Well, because the, let me see,

the foot that is closer to the South Bank Centre is owned by the South.

The land is owned by the South Bank Centre.

And when it was built as the Millennium Wheel, it was supposed to be a temporary structure and there was an agreement for five years.

And then when everybody wanted to keep it

and make it a permanent installation, the Southbank Centre

asked for, well, they pay half a million pounds a year as a lease.

It's a lot of money for.

But did you read about the dispute?

It's crazy, I know.

And because the Southbank Centre were basically able to hold them to ransom.

The South Bank Centre served the London Eye with an eviction notice.

It's crazy.

They wrote to them, and at the time, the London Eye was paying rent of 65 grand for this one foot that was on their lap.

It was just on a bit of concrete.

It wasn't like it was in the middle of the South Bank Centre itself.

And the South Bank centre said, we're going to up that from 65 grand to 2.5 million pounds.

Or you have to, and they said this in May, I think, and they said, or you have to clear off our property by the 1st of July.

Wow, by July.

By July.

That's a month.

That's too big.

See, that's the benefit when you're a smaller...

Ferris wheel that you can relocate to different places, much like the second smallest Ferris wheel in the world, which did relocate.

Easy to do when you're only 86 feet tall.

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

My fact this week is that in 2003, the county of Ottawa, Michigan released a brochure for would-be residents to prepare them for living in the countryside.

It included a scratch and sniff that emitted the smell of manure.

So, yeah, you can see this brochure online.

It's really good.

And the whole premise behind it was that they kept having people move to these rural bits of Ottawa and complaining all the time about the realities of it.

One of the main things being a lot of places you live in will be coated in the odour of manure.

So at the Scratch and Sniff, they say, if you're not ready for this, maybe you're not ready to live here.

I think it would have been more effective to just send them a small sample pack, like a welcome box of shit.

Yeah.

It's very confusing that there's a place in Michigan called Ottawa.

Yes.

That is relatively quite close to Ottawa.

It's closer to Ottawa than I'm comfortable with it being without getting confused.

So scratch and sniff is quite an interesting technology actually.

Yeah.

So it works.

I didn't realize how long they can last, scratch and sniff patches.

They work in this really clever way, which is that you basically have the scent chemicals.

So whatever is scent you're trying to broadcast, whether it's a smell of shit that you want to send to an urban dweller or whether it's a smell of perfume in a magazine that you want a lady to buy or a man,

then it's tiny little scent molecules encased in tiny bits of plastic or gelatin.

And when you scratch it, you break a few of those bits of gelatin or plastic and it releases the smell.

So it's kind of like there are hundreds and thousands of tiny little bottles and every time you scratch it, you smash some of those bottles and the scent goes up into your nose.

And what this means is that it does last for years.

So it can last for you know more than a decade because the bottles that you haven't broken by scratching, the scent's still in there waiting for you to experience it.

That's insane.

I just feel like we should be, we should be, there should be be a smell archive and a smell library where we can preserve smells and put them in a pyramid maybe and then in thousands of years time.

I feel like there must be one of those things mustn't there's something they put it in a pyramid though I want it to be quite epic

the pyramid is the main thing yeah you're yeah I want someone to uncover it yeah I went to a smell museum once

it was in Sunderland I think for some reason and you went there and they showed you lots of things from history and you could go next to them and they would fire smells out and tell you what it was like.

So they had like

a pharaoh's tomb because they were buried with lots of specific plants and perfumes and things like that.

And you could smell that.

And then in another room.

That was my idea.

Well, this happened a long time ago.

This is like 10 years ago I went to this.

So I had the idea originally.

It's a proof of concept.

And they also had a smell of the sun.

So you went in this room and they had a big picture of the sun and you can go over and they sent out the scent of the sun and it just smelled really metallic and got you at the back of your throat.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

And then I bought the book that went with

the exhibition and had that book in my house and I had to throw it away after less than a week because it just stunk out my entire house.

My whole house smelled like the sun.

Wow.

Was it a scratch and sniff book or was it just smells?

I think it was supposed to be scratch and sniff, but someone might have scratched it before I brought it home because it just smelled really bad.

They're not that reliable.

So I found a story from 1987 where

the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company sent out letters to educate the public on the smell of gas leaks and how to detect gas leaks.

And they included a scratch and sniff sticker that you could scratch and get a sample of what the gas smells like.

The result was that the gas was too strong and leaked out of the envelopes and the stickers before anyone had opened them and resulted in hundreds of ringing up thinking that there had been a gaslick in their house, and it was a false alarm.

Wow.

Where was it that you bought that book, James?

Did you say?

It was in Sunderland, I think.

Sunderland, cool.

Sunderland.

Is that why the sun's there?

Sunderland.

Wow.

Well, I mean, it makes sense that it would smell metallic as well, because as we established on this podcast a while ago, the sun is not, in fact, on fire.

It is electromagnetic

things.

Oh, go on, go on,

tell us, Mark.

So the second smallest paraswigle,

if it was attached to a car that could fit it, would be 200 feet high, that car.

Anyway, so back to Sunderland.

The thing about Sunderland is they've got that book, and I found another book, which is actually a scratch and sniff book, and it's in York.

And it's the smells of the city of York, basically.

It's just a beautiful collection.

So you get horse stables,

you get the York Moors, you can smell the Moors.

But I particularly want to get this book because one of the smells is the smell of a ghost.

Right.

How cool is that?

Okay, and what does that smell like?

Do you know?

Apparently it's not very good.

It's a bit musky, according to people who've bought the book.

Weirdly, the people who complain about the smell of the ghost say it doesn't smell like a ghost,

which begs the question, how do they know what one smells like?

Wow, what two combinations of madness do you have to have to have thought that you've seen lots of ghosts and then to decide to create a smell that people can experience the ghost with?

There's a Scratch and Sniff movie that was released in the cinemas once

called Polyester.

It was by this guy called John Waters.

He makes quite cultish movies.

And this was a real gimmicky thing where he called it, you know, on the poster, it said it was being released in Odor Vision, and it was a sensational sensational movie that kind of terrible punning.

You'd love that.

The kind of thing that gets bums on seats.

Yeah.

And yeah, so the idea was that you got 10 scratch and sniff cards and you sat there and as the movie was going on it would come up with a number and everyone in the audience would scratch it as they were going along, smell what it was and he tried to toy with the audience so you would think it was definitely going to be the object that was on the screen and as you were scratching it they would suddenly chuck in some old shoes so it was suddenly the smell of a boot.

Do you know what there were 10 smells and do you know what some of them were?

I have some of them.

Oh yeah, go for it.

So there was flatulence, obviously, because that's the first smell you're going to put into anything.

Okay.

But then do you have to write your script to include these things?

Because it sounds to me like you're saying, well, you have to have flatulence in, because that's an obvious thing.

But then if you have a really kind of tender love story, you just have to have someone farting half the way through just so you get that smell.

Exactly.

I think they probably, I bet there was a bit of a kind of putting the cart before the horse, sort of like, we've got these smells available to us and you're going to have to include them if you want.

But there was fatulence, there was skunk, so really not a great, great.

Do you mean the drug?

No, I think the animal.

Natural gas, which again, like, you know.

It's the same as starting.

It's a bit, yeah, it's true.

I don't know.

I feel like you're going to empty the cinema if they can all smell gas.

And air freshener, which I presume got rid of all the other smells.

Yeah.

That just sounds like a necessary one

after all the rest of it.

So Dan, with this, what's the idea of having the smell not relate to the image?

That's like showing a film and have it be a funny gimmick that the visuals you're seeing don't match up with the sound.

No, no, that just sounds quite annoying.

No, it always matched up.

What it would do is you thought you were gonna scratch and it would be the smell of, say, roses, because there was a big vase full of roses on the screen.

And as you scratch, suddenly in shot comes smelly shoes.

So it flips your yeah.

That's clever.

Do you know know what other film employed the use of scratch and sniff technology?

Spotty Kids 4D.

You're kidding.

No, true.

That's what the 4D was.

It was

the fourth dimension was smell.

Did they send in the smell of Jessica Alba's child's poo?

Is that how that worked?

Right at the beginning of the movie, you show the inspiration, yeah.

At the same time, did you say it was aromorama?

Dan, or smell-o-vision, your

I think is odorama.

Odorama.

Okay, so there were a few of them around at the same time that were trying different methods to get smells in.

And the reason was TV had taken off and the cinemas were really worried that they'd go out of business because everyone was watching TV at home.

And another one that they had was Smell-O-Vision.

And the way that Smell-O-Vision worked is all the bits of the cinema had little kind of

vents which would send out smells rather than scratch and sniff.

But unfortunately, it didn't really work that well because people who were in the balcony would get the smell a little bit too late.

So you would be like,

you were supposed to smell one thing and then the scenes moved on and then suddenly you'd get the smell.

And then in other parts of the theatre, the odours were too faint.

And so you would just have lots of people going

and then just sniffing the air, and then everyone else just got really annoyed because they couldn't hear the movie because everyone was just sniffing the air.

On the plus side, you could get away with farting whenever you liked.

You could be like, oh, I guess there's a farting scene coming up.

And then, if they heard you, you can be like, wow, this surround sound is really getting amazing.

The bass and our seats.

Did you feel that?

The seats are moving.

It's 40.

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 at James Harkin, Alex, at Alex Bell, and Chaczynski, you can email podcast at qi.com.

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

We have all of our previous episodes up there.

Um, we're gonna be back again next week, guys, with another one of these pods where we're all in four separate places.

Hopefully, we'll have you listening to us then, but in the meantime, stay safe, stay at home, and let's beat the shit out of this horrible thing going around.

Okay, we love you all.

Thanks so so much for listening.

We'll be back again next week.

Goodbye.

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