118: No Such Thing As Dinner On A Spider

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that the fear of lifts can be cured by starving the subject and forcing them to eat all of their meals in lifts.

How long do you have to eat all your meals in a lift for?

I think they only did it for a day or two, but then they checked back on this person a few years later and it worked.

And this is in an old paper from 1973 that I stumbled across this week.

And the paper's called A Brief Treatment of Elevator Phobia, and it's by S.

Brintwick and Leslie Soljom.

So, what's the idea?

You would sit inside an elevator and you'd be distracted?

So, what happens is, what you do is you've got someone who's scared of elevators or lifts, and you say to them, you're not allowed to eat for 24 hours, and they go, okay, I'm not going to eat.

And you say, you're not allowed to drink water either.

And they say, okay.

And then you say to them, Okay, well, you can have something to eat now.

You can have some cornflakes or whatever, but you can only have it if you're inside that lift.

And so they have to go in the lift because they're so hungry.

And then I reckon just because they've gone in there and they're kind of getting used to it, then they feel.

This is insane.

This is like pan mob.

Well, and then they're okay with being in the lift because they're enjoying the eating process.

No, because what it is with phobias, one good way of getting over it is by forcing yourself to kind of go to these places or see these things or touch these things that you're scared of.

And slowly you kind of build up resistance and you realize they're not maybe as bad as you think and you kind of get over it.

Really, the food is genuinely just to lure them into the lip.

It really is.

I mean just pick the guy up and push him in.

I think that might be a bit more humane.

Wouldn't that make the phobia a bit worse?

Well the thing is they think a lot of it is something bad has happened that you associate with this thing and usually it happens when you're between four and seven as a child and then later on you kind of even if it's subconsciously you put these two things together and so you're you're scared.

I'm scared of mushrooms, so when I was four years old, I must have been attacked by a mushroom or something.

I don't know.

Playing a lot of Mario.

So, if I'm scared of spiders, do I have to eat all my food off a spider?

Is that how it's going to work?

Well, they think that one good way of stopping being scared of spiders is by to touch spiders.

So, you go to like a zoo and they put a tarantula on your hand, and maybe it makes you feel better.

They call it in vivo exposure.

But the problem is that people don't really like to go to the spider house and have the spiders put on them and I was reading an article in improbable.com and they said that a way of doing this is by augmented reality so say you're sat in front of a computer and you put your hand down and there's a camera looking at your hand the computer makes it look as if there's like cockroaches running across your hand you'll think that they're running across your hand when they're not actually and that can maybe kind of cure you of being scared of cockroaches.

Wait, why is that better than just having the cockroaches run over you?

Because people don't like to go, if they see cockroaches, they'll just freak out.

But if they put the hand down and they're just looking at a computer, then it's easier to get someone in front of a computer than in front of a cockroach house.

Okay.

Clever.

There are more computers than cockroach houses, for one.

Just way more.

There's quite an interesting theory about where phobias come from that scientists have just come up with.

So you were saying that it's probably a memory that you have, maybe a memory that you have from childhood.

Yeah, maybe.

But in 2013, there was some new research done that showed you could sort of inherit memories from your ancestors.

No.

And so, yeah, so what happens is if one of your ancestors had a horrible experience, like they've been bitten by a spider a long, long time ago, then their response to that makes a chemical imprint on your DNA.

And that chemical imprint can then be passed down.

So then you'll have this phobia.

So this is new research that was done in 2013.

Wow.

Is this why I'm scared of Nazis?

That explains your totally irrational phobia of the Nazi pastoral.

Just because my grandparents had to, you know, go and sort of a lot of deprivation.

I think that's definitely true in mice, isn't it?

They showed that that was true in mice.

Yes.

I'm not sure it's true in humans.

Yeah, it's weird that that can be imprinted into DNA.

Yeah, so it is quite a new thing.

Into my sperm, the fact that I was attacked by a dog, my sperm will have that knowledge as it goes across.

Yeah, I mean, not the fact.

You're not going to have a grandchild who's like, hey, I remember this weird time in the QIA offices when a dog bit my birds.

No, I know, but.

But is the response to that makes a chemical imprint on your head?

Yeah, that's mad.

Yeah, that's mad.

That is mad.

Fear of clowns.

That's a big thing.

Coolerophobia.

Yes, exactly.

Sorry, I thought you were saying it was a cool phobia.

Cooler phobia.

I thought you were saying it was a fear of coolers.

Well, everyone's confused.

So what they do now,

circuses are starting to do this.

They have sessions before the circus starts where if you're afraid of clowns, you can go and watch the clown do their makeup, start from a normal person, and do their makeup.

So by the time the circus starts, you you feel comfortable with them.

And they call it clounseling.

Oh, my God.

It's true.

This is true.

You do counseling, and you can watch clowns get their makeup done, and it's meant to help you massively to see the transformation happen.

But it's quite obvious that the name preceded the actual idea.

A good method is to starve someone for a day, and then they can only eat custard pies.

I read a report that for people who are afraid of elevators, in some cases, they will opt for a job that pays less less if it's in a lower floor of a building.

Wow.

So this is the thing.

Otis, the elevator company, they estimate that every five days the equivalent of the entire population of the planet uses a lift.

So 7 billion journeys are made in a lift every five days.

I think it was even in their lifts.

Exactly, yes.

Yeah, so just the brand Otis, not even a Schindler.

I read about an amazing lift that maybe the three of you have heard of, but I haven't have.

And I discovered it.

I discovered a great website called Elevatorpedia, which is just the Wikipedia of elevators it's got 492 articles 9 million registered users over 9 million ah but yeah active users was about 22

but 9 million registered users they're just spam buttons aren't they probably yeah but they're proud

so yeah so I started reading about I pressed random page and just brought up different random pages and the first one that came up was the double decker elevator have you heard of that no no I like the idea of pressing random article and it you have to wait 30 seconds for it actually actually to go out.

Yeah, so a double-deck elevator stops at two floors at a time.

So you're able to cut the journey in half effectively.

But it's impossible to go from the very bottom floor to the very top floor because you're

yeah.

And vice versa.

Unless you're thinking of a little thing on the roof where it just pops out.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I'm pretty sure that you're either in a lift that goes into a sort of attic that has no door to let you out when the lift below you is trying to go, and there's a basement for the below lift to not.

So, yeah, you can still go to the top floor.

That's very unsatisfying to get to a floor where you're not allowed to get out.

Yeah, this sounds like almost as terrible as what I imagined you were describing then when I imagined that they would just stop at the same floor on both levels, and either the lift would open and you'd have a six-foot drop as you stepped out, or it would open and you'd just be faced with the wall because you're on the lower level.

Yeah, I think what we're saying is that this isn't a particularly good idea.

It's they're using it in so many different countries.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's extremely popular.

The Burj Khalif has it, and so do a lot of Taiwan and Hong Kong and Japan skyscrapers have it as well.

Wow.

The thing about that is, about Burj Al Khalifa and that, is it not the case that lifts can only go a certain number of floors because after that the

cable gets too heavy or something?

Well, exciting times in lift news because they've got a new technology which means that lifts might be able to go twice as far.

Oh, really?

They've got a new kind of rope.

It's called ultra-rope and it's made of carbon fibre.

And the maximum used to be about 500 meters, meters, but now it's much bigger.

And they reckon that this is the only thing preventing us from building 2,000-metre-high skyscrapers.

I've been reading loads of reviews of this book called Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator by Andreas Bernard.

I haven't read the book yet, but I found one review which started off just from a member of the public.

It said, This book had its ups and downs.

And then it went on, now that the joke is out of the way, this is a very interesting book.

And didn't I?

So they did have kind of elevator type things, didn't they?

But then the first modern elevators

came in the 19th century.

And I read that the first elevator shaft preceded the first elevator by four years.

What?

Wow.

This is in the Wikipedia, actually, but I think it does stack up.

Just normal Wikipedia.

Yeah, it wasn't liftopedia.

No, no, elevator pedal.

Yeah, it wasn't in that one.

So this was in the Cooper Union Foundation building in New York in 1853.

And they built it with a lift shaft because the guy who built it was sure that lifts would be invented quite soon.

Wow.

He was so confident.

Oh, my God.

He did that.

And sure enough, four years later, they did invent them.

But his shaft was circular, and all lifts aren't circular.

And so they couldn't fit the lifts in.

They couldn't.

Oh, no.

They couldn't fit a square lift in a round hole.

That's interesting.

Why could they not just make a

circle a lift?

A bit later, Otis designed a special lift just for that building.

Right.

So

Do you know the secret override for a lift?

If you press up, down, left, right.

There are some lifts which use particular.

There's a system called Logic Controller, which is the sort of the brain of the lift, basically.

If the lift uses logic controller, if you press your floor and the closed door button at the same time, you can go to whatever floor you like in a lift immediately and bypass all the others, right?

What?

So, this is according to someone on the internet who I read who said he works in a a building with loads of lifts.

So he didn't.

How many...

Sorry.

How many of us worked?

He worked on a lift system.

He was sort of part of the lift team for the building.

He said that if the list uses this system, that does work.

But obviously you can't tell.

That sounds very much like an urban myth.

Give it a go.

Give it a go listening to this.

I don't know, but then if everyone knows us that when you were the guy who walks it and tries to do it, you're now stuck in a lift with someone who's going, you dickhead.

It doesn't work, but you tried to ruin my lift ride by going past my floor.

If you're already in the lift, you you can just press a button.

It's for people on the outside who've requested the lift.

Well, that's an extremely selfish thing to do, though.

Yeah.

Or you might be in a hurry.

I don't care.

You might need a pee.

We're not advocating it.

We're just saying it's a possibility.

Andy's a very selfish man.

The rest of us would advise against it.

I want to know if

this is a myth.

And I imagine it is.

People say that pressing the close button doesn't actually.

There's no consensus on this, I swear to God.

No one's properly refuted it.

No people on the internet who work in Andy's lift companies.

We film QI in a building with a lot of lifts.

And so I

realized we had an expert amongst us.

And I press the closed door and I reckon they do work.

Maybe not.

They never do in thrillers and horror movies.

They're always in there pressing it like crazy and the lift is just chilled.

It's definitely true that there are some road crossings where the button doesn't really work.

Yeah, because they're just on timers, especially busy crossings.

I think that the closed door button is likelier to work on older lifts before health and safety was invented and you want to just cut people up in lifts.

You know, lifts in Singapore have urine detector devices in them.

And I can't work out whether this is'cause the Singaporean authorities are really paranoid about this or'cause there was a spate of urinating.

Because they did say in the nineties uh there was in a year there was something like forty incidents of lifts opening and there being a puddle of urine left in them.

Right.

And so now if you urinate in a lift in Singapore that has one of these devices in it, then an alarm gets set off, the lifts stop, so you're stuck in the elevator, the police are called and they come around and then start the lift so that you can get out and be arrested by the police for weighing in an elevator.

Wow.

So don't do that.

How can it tell that it's urine, these urine detectors?

What if I spilt my bottle of water, for example?

And it had like a lot of kind of urea in it.

Yeah.

Yeah, like all my water does.

I just think buy water from different outlets to start.

Yeah, it is.

I think you can just tell people that you've got urine detection devices, and I think that will deal with the majority of cases.

Right, it's like that stuff they don't put in swimming pools, isn't it?

It's like an ink that turns color when you pee in the pool.

Is that not actually in there?

No, it doesn't exist.

Oh my god, I always get so worried when I actually do have a piss and waiting for a color to emerge and then I wonder if there's something wrong with my piss.

Go to the doctor.

I'm really worried my piss isn't blue.

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

My fact this week is that the Russian space agency light their rockets using giant wooden matchsticks.

So

this is to me unbelievable.

But it's real.

This is from Popular Mechanics.

So it's been verified.

And the idea is that the Soyuz rockets, when they're going up, so this is not for every single rocket that they launch.

However, it's been used hundreds of times.

And the idea is that you need a consistency.

There's so many booster rockets.

You need a consistency of all of them to be lit at the same time, and something needs to light them.

So what they've created are these giant bits of birchwood all put together, created into effectively a giant looking match.

They're sat underneath the boosters.

They all have little wiring that goes right to the top.

And the problem is obviously as the fire picks up, the wiring gets cut off.

So the idea of using the wood is to keep it lit like a match, to have the wood just flaming up.

And so they can light all these rockets at the same time.

And then that's how it goes into space.

Giant matchsticks.

It's nuts.

It's very cool.

It's so old-fashioned.

They've been doing that for 60 years.

Wow.

Yeah.

I read that it's the only part of a modern rocket launch system that's made of wood.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Unsurprisingly, I suppose.

Yeah, reassuringly.

Did you guys know that the first lighters were guns?

So they were flintlock guns, and they were converted to the purpose of becoming lighters in the 16th century.

So flintlock guns are any firearm that uses flint to strike up and create a flame which would propel the bullets out of it.

And people realized that you could turn this ignition mechanism into a lighter, and that was the world's first lighters.

Wow.

How cool is that?

And they're like big, hardcore-looking guns.

It is cool because then you get the actual lighters today that look like guns but aren't really guns.

Exactly.

This was the original one of those for the real cowboys.

There were novelty lighters before there were lighters, but

what we're saying.

That's exactly what I'm saying.

I found one of the earliest references to matchsticks from ancient China, and they were originally in their translation described as light-bringing slaves.

That was their name.

And they were from a book called The Records of Unworldly, sorry, Records of the Unworldly and the Strange, which is a great title for a book.

And I've never heard of that before.

It's an old ancient Chinese book, and that's where it comes from.

Yeah, the old Chinese ones, they had sulphur on the end of them, didn't they?

But you had to light them from another light.

Basically, you needed another fire source in order to light them.

So I don't know if that counts as matches.

Definitely cheating.

Yeah.

Definitely cheating.

Sulphur was used in the uh for 19th century matches as well.

And that was where matches really took off.

And that's when you got match factories and match girls and things like this.

Yeah.

The problem with matches in the first place was that they would they were very easy to light and so they would set fires and things like this.

But in 1844 the safety match was invented.

It was by a Swedish professor called Pasch.

And what he did was he just split up the chemicals that you needed to set the match aflame.

So the phosphorus that you did need, he just put on that's what's on the surface of the box.

So you you have to combine the two elements which had originally been both in the match head together.

Oh, wow.

And that was why

it could have been ignited so easily.

It's because it's all there, ready for you.

Whereas this is guaranteed.

Because before that, I think, if because it was all together, if you just sort of accidentally rubbed your match up against any surface, what it could ignite.

So you get people sort of striking it on, you know, jeans or stubble or the gravitor or a wall or whatever.

Yeah, so these dodgy ones were the ones invented by the guy from Stockton called John Walker.

And they were banned in France and Germany because they were so dangerous.

And they were giant matches as well.

Proper matches were giant matches.

They were a yard long.

What?

Yes.

Well, and to light them, you had to pull you'd got a fold of sandpaper, put the match in between there, pulled it out.

And they were so dangerous, though, because often a flaming ball of material would fall off the end of the match and set fire to the ground

or the carpet or wherever you wa or someone's dress.

He was he was a good guy though, John Walker, because he refused to patent his matches.

He had a decent amount of money, so he he really did invent the lighting match, even though it was a little bit dodgy dodgy to start with.

It was based on what he did.

Everyone else built their match technology.

And he, yeah, had enough money and said he didn't want to patent the invention at all.

Michael Faraday and other people like that said that he should get money out of it.

He never made a penny and he never got the credit for it until after he died.

There was actually a Frenchman called Chancellor who came up with one 20 years before him.

Oh, was there?

Yeah, and that one had an end tipped with potassium chlorate and sulphur, and you had to put acid on it to to set that one up.

Safe.

Even more dangerous.

And the one, there was another Frenchman, Charles Sauria, who invented one very shortly after John Walker, and it relied on phosphorus.

And they kept using the phosphorus in this country, so it sounds like they banned it in other countries.

But in this country, they kept using phosphorus in matches until 1906.

And it was incredibly poisonous.

So everyone who worked in those factories got this thing called fossil jaw, which was where your teeth would rot and your whole face would swell up and your jaw bones would rot because the phosphorus was so toxic, your hair would fall out.

So anyone who used regularly or worked with making these matches would just

fall apart.

And I read that it would make you vomit, even a tiny amount breathing it in would make you vomit, and you could see the way people walked home from the phosphorus factory because there would be like pools of fluorescent vomit on the way.

Wow.

Do you know the world matchstick model record?

What are we going for?

Size or number of matchsticks?

Let's say number of matches.

A million.

280,000.

I do know, so I'm only choosing for me to say.

The answer is it's a model of an oil rig.

It's made by a man called David Reynolds, who used to work uh on oil rigs, and it contains four million seventy-five thousand matches.

Wow.

It's huge.

That's amazing.

It's really good.

It took him over fifteen years to make, I think.

Yeah.

No, there's other people who watch Telly in the Evenings and he just does this, you know.

Yeah, it's quite cool.

But we are not suggesting you build the world's biggest matchstick thing instead of watching our show on Fridays.

Good point.

Casual little plug there.

Yeah, I feel really sorry for his son because he said that it was just that one Christmas his son bought him a matchstick kit of a train to build a train out of matchsticks.

And that feels really like the son doesn't know what to get his dad.

I'll just get him this.

Who cares?

He can put it in a corner, forget about it.

And I bet he really regrets that 20 years later when all his dad's done or talked about is the fact that he's built 100,000 matchstick items.

Or he's forever been trying to make up for this shit present that he got by going, No, I really love it.

Look, I'm making my next thing.

Look, I'm going to make my.

You're right.

He hates it.

So there are, and Guinness has two other matchstick-related world records.

Okay, let's hear them.

Most matchsticks stacked into a tower in one minute.

Yeah, great.

Let's say one a second, 60.

Very close.

59.

Not bad.

4 million.

It's 74.

Wow.

Yeah, and the other one, this is the one which I think is most beatable, possibly.

It's the largest collection of musical instruments made from MASTICS.

Okay.

It's about 10.

I know what I'm getting you for your next birthday.

11 kits.

Yeah.

I've just got a couple of things on, I've been looking into odd ways things are lit.

I suddenly thought, how do you light the Olympic torch?

What's the process there?

And so probably we all know it's lit in Olympia.

It's got a classic kind of thing.

It actually is a flame that goes there.

But I had no idea how much backup flame that they have, should it go out.

Have you heard about this?

I thought it pretty much went out all the time, actually.

Yes, it does.

They have backup flame that they've brought with them from Olympia from the very same fire, and they relight it using that exact flame.

So the flame is broken up into all different little compartments so that it can be relit with the original flame.

Wait, so what are they storing the flame on?

And there's lots of other people holding backup Olympic torches.

They're in buses and stuff that travel with them, yeah.

Buses just containing giant fires.

Yeah, you can see a photo.

So when they leave Olympia, they take live flame on the planes over to where they're going.

So you can see there's a photo of British Airways where two seats have live flames,

four capsules of live flames.

They're obviously got a lid on them.

And they carry that by.

I think that's the only live flame that you're allowed to take on a plane.

I just think that backup Olympic flame thing is the stupidest thing I've ever.

It's so it doesn't matter.

It's a flame.

It's symbolic.

I guess that's what they're going for.

It's symbolic and invented by the Nazis as well.

Was it?

I think so.

Fire?

No, I think they invented the idea of like an Olympic flame relay.

Yeah, yeah, I think you're right there.

I've got such a cool thing about fire,

making fire.

Just do you guys know about the new fire ceremony that the Aztecs had?

No.

This was this, so the Aztec calendar cycle was every 52 years.

And at the end of every 52 years, the Aztecs ordered that all fires in the whole Aztec empire were extinguished, and they had to start again.

So, every single person after 52 years had to put out their fire and then they go on top of this on top of this mountain.

A priest would light the first fire for the new calendar cycle and what was called the new fire ceremony.

And what he did was he'd light it inside the chest cavity of a sacrificed person.

So, they'd sacrifice someone, they'd take them up to the top of this mountain, they open up their chest, and then the Aztec priest lights a fire inside his chest.

And then a bunch of people would be allowed to come forward and dip their sticks in the fire, and they could

the weirdest tasting barbecue I ever had.

Wow.

And then the fire would be distributed throughout the Empire again and that marked the start of their new calendar.

Wow.

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

My fact is that the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit is based on a true story.

Okay.

A heartwarming story of a rabbit.

No, so it's loosely based, but it is based on an actual story of something that happened in America in the early 20th century.

So, can you explain to me what happens in Who Framed Roadshow Rabbit?

Because I haven't seen it.

It's very complicated, but basically, there's a transport conspiracy.

You don't want to give away all the spoilers of the film.

And it's about the car and about...

And there's a giant rabbit, isn't there?

He's not a giant rabbit.

No, is he not?

I'm thinking of Donny Dahl.

No, he is bigger than a normal rabbit.

But he's not taller than Bob Hoskins.

Well, I still think that that's...

He's in between the size of a rabbit and Bob Hoskins, if you can imagine such a thing.

And he's got a bow tie on.

How tall would you say he is?

Taller than four feet?

Yeah.

I think that cat's a very big rabbit.

With ears upright, he's probably taller than Bob Hoskins, is the thing.

No, I don't think he is.

No, no, he's not.

He never is taller than Bob Hoskins, even ears poised.

Really?

And Bob Hoskins was a very short man.

Exactly.

So in fact, perhaps it is normal rabbit size.

Anyway, I think we're...

This isn't the true element of the story.

It sounds like a great film, actually.

It is a really good film.

But the story that it's based on is the thing that actually happened.

It's a group of car and oil companies.

They were called National City Lines, right?

And it was controlled by General Motors.

And the thing that they did in the early years of the 20th century, they bought up loads of streetcar lines, so these streetcars with rails,

trolleybuses, things like this, all across America.

They bought these up and they dismantled them and shut them off.

And they also ran a lot of buses.

So, as an automobile buses running on roads as opposed to running on rails.

And they were eventually fined a huge amount for kind of monopolising, attempting to monopolise the market for transport equipment.

So some people think that this was a huge conspiracy designed to create the age of the car and to shut down public transport in favour of

cars.

Because it was oil and car companies that were doing this.

It's a bit more complicated than that because the streetcar industry was already in decline and it's also a lot easier to run a bus which doesn't need a rail than it is to run a streetcar.

I'm glad you debunked that popular business.

This was absolutely huge, and loads of people still believe it.

I think in America, it's a really big, sort of, it's a really big idea that the age of the car was stitched up by a load of these companies.

I've got to say, Roger Abbott didn't really do justice to the seriousness of the

I am starting to understand why they felt the need to add cartoon characters to live in our story.

Just to give a quick proper background on Roger Abbott as a movie, it was Robert Zemekis who directed it, which was the Back to the Future director.

It came out in 1988, and the technology of the animation mixed with real-life footage was so advanced, so new, that the very same year that it was made, or let's say the Oscars that happened post-the movie's release, recognized its animator, Richard Williams, as an innovator and gave him a special Oscar, like just a completely separate special Oscar to say, this movie has changed everything for filmmaking with animation.

So it's a really important movie in the history of cinema.

Also, it's the only film where Looney Tunes characters and Disney cartoon characters appear in the same films.

That was very rare to see, for example, Mickey Mouse and Porky Pig.

And they insisted, both companies insisted that their characters have exactly equal amount of screen time as the other company's characters, didn't they?

And that was why, and like I say, I haven't seen it, but apparently

Bogs Bunny, so wherever you see Warner Brothers character, that's accompanied by a Disney character.

So I think there are two pairings of characters in the film, and the pairings are always a Warner Brothers character and a Disney character, because both companies said, if your guy's getting screen time, my guy's going to get screen time.

Yeah, because Roger Rabbit was Looney Tunes, and Bob Hoskins is, of course, a Disney.

So one thing that's interesting about this is that it mustn't necessarily be the movie that was based on real-life stuff, because Roger Rabbit was based off a novel called Who Censored Roger Rabbit, which was written by Gary K.

Wolfe.

Very dark and very different to the had no Looney Tune characters, for example.

So

I'm wondering if that's where the original political message about what you were so interestingly talking about earlier.

That's beyond the pale.

Did you see that Bill Murray was the first choice to play the Bob Hoskins character?

He was too tall.

He was just that bit bigger than a rabbit.

He made the rabbit look like a rabbit.

No, they couldn't get hold of him because you know Bill Murray has that famous thing where he refuses to have an agent.

Oh, really?

And so he was Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielbertberg's first choice.

They couldn't get hold of him.

And Bill Murray said afterwards it was a real regret and he wished he could have done it.

And it does make you think, well, get a sorting agent then, mate.

But yeah, so they went with Bob Hoskins instead.

Right.

I did read reviews for who censored Roger Abbott, the first one.

And it's got my favorite opening line of

a review here.

This person said, this would have been a decent airplane book, but I wasn't flying anywhere.

And there's a lot of differences.

Like in the book, Roger Rabbit actually is killed.

And they have a really interesting literary device where cartoon characters are able to create a doppelganger of themselves immediately to do stunt double work in movies.

So in the novel, Roger Rabbit is killed, but he creates a doppelganger who can last a few days, the longest doppelganger of any of them, who helps with the story.

The rules of cartoons are very different to the rules of real life, aren't they?

What?

Yeah.

I'll make my plans for jumping off that building later.

This, I haven't seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but I think they kind of explore this in the film, don't they?

There's a thing called the O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion,

which was in Esquire.

And there are a few rules that happen in cartoons which don't happen in real life.

So anybody suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.

Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.

Everything falls faster than an anvil, is another one.

And the idea being that if you're falling down and so is an anvil, you'll hit the floor and then the anvil will hit your head.

And there was a guy called Art Babbitt who was an animator from Walt Disney Studios, and he said, animation follows the laws of physics unless it's funnier otherwise.

And I think they mentioned that in the movie as well, don't they?

Something similar to that.

Yeah, and they've got things like, you know, tunnels that you throw onto walls and then you can run into the tunnel.

But, you know, you can't follow them.

If you follow as a human, you hit the wall.

Yeah.

This kind of thing.

Yeah.

So Bob Hoskins' son didn't speak to him for a while after he made Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Do you know why?

It was because, so his son Jack was three at the time, and Hoskins said in an interview a few years ago that when his son Jack found out what he'd been working on, he wouldn't speak to him for a long time.

And Hoskins was really upset.

And after about two weeks, his son admitted that the reason he wasn't speaking to him was because he'd been working with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck the whole time and hadn't even introduced him to them.

Oh, amazing.

That's great.

That's sweet.

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Okay, it is time for a final fact of the show, and that is Chasinski.

My fact is that the first ever wristwatch doubled up as a thermometer.

Yeah, I just really like this.

It's like a modern-day gadget, but what sort of thermometer?

As in

oral,

or as James says, rectal?

It was a wristal.

A wristal thermometer.

Just a little thermometer on the

you had to shove your wrist up your butt.

It was designed for very flexible people.

So this was a watch that was designed by Abraham Louis Bregway, who was known as the father of modern horology.

He was sort of the leading

person in watch making, in clock making and watch making at the turn of the 19th century.

And one of the things he did work out how to do was to stop changes in the temperature altering a clock mechanism.

So watches at the time, pocket watches, because wrist watches didn't exist yet.

Watches at the time, if the temperature changed, would be a bit disrupted by that, so you could only guarantee that your watch would be correct within about two hours at the end of the 18th century.

And he created a little thing, like a thermostat, inside watches, which would work out when the temperature had got to a certain point and adjust the watch accordingly.

And so he thought, well, I'll just add a little thermometer in, seeing as I'm sensing the temperature anyway.

And so he made this watch, and it was for Napoleon's sister, actually, the Queen of Naples.

She was called Caroline Murat.

And he made it in 1810, started making it in 1810, and he delivered to her in 1812.

And yeah, it was the first ever wristwatch.

And the bracelet was made of a thread of hair and a little bit of gold thread.

A thread of hair.

A few threads of hair.

Yeah.

It was made of sort of hair.

Lots of threads of hair.

More than one thread.

She had a thick hair.

Oh, my God.

I find it amazing how wristwatches were seen as really sort of effeminate and not suitable for proper men was the basic implication for loads of their history.

It was only in the First World War that they really took off because it was very important for officers to be able to consult at the same time and also pocket watches are pretty impractical in the trenches.

I read an article in the Atlantic about the history of the wristwatch and they said that someone at the time when they first became popular after the war, someone said vaudeville artists and moving picture actors have utilized it as a fun maker, as a silly ass fad.

Yeah.

Silly ass fad, the woman's watch.

Fools.

Did you guys know about repeaters on watches?

Because I didn't really understand what they were until I was reading up on this.

No.

So this was a technology that was found on watches at the turn of the 19th century.

It was on this watch that Breguet

gave to the Queen of Naples.

And what it was was, it was a way of telling the time in the dark.

If you wanted wanted to tell the time, but it was dark, so you couldn't see a watch, you would press a little button on it, and an alarm would go off that would tell you the hour, and then how many quarters passed the hour you passed.

So you could tell the time to within a quarter of an hour.

So if it was, let's say, 5:30, it would give five chimes in a certain deep tone, and then it would give two chimes in a lighter tone, which would show you it was five o'clock, and then two quarter hours had passed.

That's really cool.

And all watches at this time had this, this quarter-repeater thing.

Or a half-repeater, which would give it to, obviously, within within half an hour.

That's amazing.

Yeah, really cool.

Yeah.

I was at the Design Museum last year, and they had

a wristwatch for blind people, which was,

if I remember rightly, it just kind of looked like a normal face, but it had these little marbles on it.

And they were magnetic, and they moved around depending on the time.

So you could kind of feel like a Braille watch.

That's amazing.

That was really, really cool.

That's awesome.

That's really incredible.

I was reading about what we used to do before we had watches and clocks.

Because obviously I know about the sun dial, but I was just thinking, like, what if you just didn't, if you went further back?

And what people used to do, and spots of Africa used to do this, you would just, you would know

the arc of the sun throughout the day.

You'd know where it would pass, and so what you would do is you would point to a bit of the sky and say, let's meet.

when the sun's there in the sky, when it's reached that bit of the sky.

And because they know the mapping of how the sun goes across so well, they would just know to look up and go, oh yeah, it's effectively four o'clock.

I better go and meet Mike now.

That's how it works.

Yeah, was it not confusing, though?

Because if you point and you say, Let's meet there, and you point it somewhere, would people go, Do you mean then at that time or there in that place?

You're pointing to the sky, so no one, unless it was a really mountainous region.

Yeah, I guess you were so you just turn to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, yeah, and you're like, Where is Mike?

Oh no, he must have meant four o'clock.

I'm so embarrassed.

Um, so this reminds me of uh something that we've covered on QI, which is about how it was hard actually to know the exact time in the 19th century, even most people didn't have watches.

And there was one family in London who for a hundred years made a living out of letting people look at their watches, which is so cool.

So this is this woman called Ruth Belleville and her parents, and her father started the company in 1836.

They worked in Greenwich, and so he'd set his watch to Greenwich time at the start of the day, and then he'd get what's described as a buggy, which I'm not sure what that was in 1836, and he'd drive around London and he'd have people on contract who would pay him in exchange for him telling them the time.

And she kept doing that.

She did it up until 1940.

Yeah.

I think you could kind of get season tickets from them as well, couldn't you?

Like it'd be a bit cheaper and they'd come every week or something.

Oh, couldn't you?

There was a guy called Mr.

St.

John Wynne, who in 1908 wrote to the Times saying that her methods were completely out of date and it was ridiculous.

And he suggested that she was using her femininity to gain business.

So maybe she kept the watch in a cleavage or something like that.

Something a bit saucy.

Did the Lest of the Times say, Dear the Times, you of all newspapers should know that

this guy, sorry, this guy, Sir John Wynne, he was the director of Standard Time Company, who happened to be one of her biggest kind of competitors.

Did they make watches?

They were the people who were supposedly in charge of Standard Time in London.

Yeah, okay, makes sense.

But it gave her massive publicity, is what they said off the back of it.

So actually, business boomed for her.

So, in your face, Mr.

St.

John, what's you called?

Win.

Yeah.

So it was a lot of fun.

St.

John lost all the time.

Oh, my God.

So in 1936, there was a big moment for her business in a bad way, which was the telephone speaking clock.

That really stopped a lot of business.

But weirdly, then, it was voiced by a lady, and her name was Ethel Kane.

And Ethel Kane lived in the exact same town as Ruth.

They were virtually next-door neighbours.

Oh, but I bet they never spoke to each other.

What a sitcom.

What a sitcom there is to be written there.

Outskirts of Croydon is where they both lived.

Wow.

God, the tension.

The tension in that neighbourhood must have been palpable.

I do think it's amazing that the sort of, just to go back to wristwatches very, very briefly, the sort of, it was...

Basically homophobia was what it was going on was people were saying that people who wear wristwatches are effeminate and not sort of not the right sort of people.

So if you had a wristwatch, you would be called a wristwatch boy.

And people would say this about you and really in an insulting way.

Yeah, and there was so here's something from the Albuquerque Journal in May 1914.

The fellow who wears a wristwatch is frequently suspected of having lace on his lingerie and of braiding his hair at night.

I mean, it's pretty plain.

And in New Orleans, there was a theatre where there was a play-on, and they said the main character is not portrayed by a wristwatch screen actor dude, but by a man's man.

I'm not surprised of dude being used in that sense.

Dude is very dude is 19th century, I think.

Really?

Cattle ranching word.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

But basically, it took the First World War to shift that perception.

Shall we wrap up, Sunish?

Yeah, there's a really cool story related to wristwatches and the original guy in this fact.

And this is about the Marie Antoinette watch, which was another watch that Abraham Louis Breguet made.

So this was commissioned by a guy who fancied Marie Antoinette in 1782, and it was completed by Breguet's son in 1827, 44 years after it had been ordered, 34 years after Marie Antoinette had died and four years after he'd actually died.

But it was unbelievably complicated so it's still considered the fifth most complicated watch ever made.

It was really, really beautiful and it was handed down various generations and it ended up in the Maya Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem.

in 1983 where it got stolen in that year.

And so there was a big police hunt.

No one could could find where it was.

This original watch made for Marie Antoinette.

And then this guy called Nicholas Hayek, who is the CEO of the Swatch Group, which had taken over the Breguet company, said in 1999 that he was determined that they'd make a replica.

And so he went about making this replica, and that even took a few years.

So that was commissioned in 2004.

And just before the replica was about to be completed and displayed, then a lawyer in America got a letter from a woman who said that she had to return a bunch of objects that her husband had left in his will, saying that he'd stolen them decades earlier.

And one of those objects was the Marie Antoinette watch.

And so, just as this replica was about to reappear, the watch itself surfaced.

Wow.

How great is that?

Yeah.

Okay, that's it.

That's 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, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At Egg Shapes.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Chaczynski.

you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to at qi podcast, that's our group Twitter account, or no such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our previous episodes.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.

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