43: No Such Thing As The Human Cigarette

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

My name's Andy, and I'm sitting here with three of the regular elves, James Harkin, Alex Bell, and Anna Tazhinsky.

And we've gathered our favourite facts from the last seven days, and we're now going to talk about them in no particular order.

First fact is

Alex.

Okay, my fact is cows have friends and they get sad when you separate them.

How are they cow friends?

Yeah, so basically, Northampton University did a study.

So cows are herd animals, obviously.

Unseen.

Yeah.

Yeah, so they live in a herd, but they get separated a lot because, you know, they need to be milked, they need to be taken to the vets, etc.

And Northampton University did a study where they looked at cows when they were in a field and monitored all their behaviour to see which cows hung out with which other cows.

And then they separated them out into different combinations.

So sometimes they'd be removed from the herd in pairs, and sometimes they'd be with a cow they'd never hung out with before, or sometimes they'd be with their best friend.

I don't know how we've worked that out.

Bracelets, do they wear bracelets?

Yeah.

And sometimes they were on their own, and

each time their heart rates and cortisol levels were monitored.

And from that, that, apparently, we can work out whether cows get stressed or not.

Cortisol, we should say, is the stress hormone, is that right?

Yeah.

Apparently, there's quite a high level of stress with integrating into a new herd.

So, if you take a cow and you put it into her.

I was going to say, how stressful could it be being a cow?

Well,

very

fast.

If you know what your demise is going to be, I would say very, but they don't.

Given how little is going on in their lives, I think any change is pretty stressful.

I mean, if you're moving a cow from one field to the other, that's probably groundbreaking to them.

You think about it.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it's hard to tell if that counts as a friend.

Yeah, we're kind of anthropomorphising them, aren't we?

I think elephants always feel like

they're the ones that we're most justified in anthropomorphising because

they mainly have a weirdly human attitude towards their dead, don't they?

They mourn, don't they?

Yeah, they mourn their dead and they bury them sometimes with leaves and earth and they'll come back to visit where the elephant died, the family member died.

The thing about elephant graveyards, is that a myth or is that real?

It is a myth, yeah.

Yeah, so that's the idea that um the elephants will go to a certain place to die and then you'll find lots of bones there because it's a special place for elephants.

But you'd feel terrible if you were an elephant and everyone else said, Hey, come on, we're going to the elephant graveyard and you said, Why?

They said, No reason.

That's like the um the cartoon, The Daily Mash of the Turkey, um, which is saying, Just before Christmas it's a bubble speech bubble coming out of the turkey's mouth saying, Hey guys, so are you doing anything for New Year?

I'm pretty

sad.

But elephants, something really weird about elephants are on it, is if you show them a piece of ivory and then a piece of wood, they get much more agitated by the ivory.

And if you show them an elephant's skull and then the skull of another large animal, like a hippo skull, they're much more agitated by the elephant skull.

Really?

Which seems to say that.

Elephant skulls are quite scary though, aren't they?

Because they have like a big hole.

Yes.

That is true.

The idea is that's where Cyclops

myth might have come from.

Oh, really?

Because it looks like there's a massive eye hole in the middle, but actually it's where the trunk comes out from.

Cow skulls only have they only have bottom teeth.

So

we have two sets of teeth obviously is in top teeth and bottom teeth.

They only have bottom teeth and where the top teeth should be there's just a sort of long area of bone.

So they they grind up what they eat with teeth yeah cows don't have upper teeth.

So I was basically I was looking into how the digestive system of a cow so they're they're ruminants which means that they basically ferment the grass first.

So they pick up the grass by they actually curl their tongues round the grass instead of ripping it up with their teeth which I thought is really interesting.

Then they chew it then they it goes down into their stomach and sits there for a while and ferments for a bit, so they get nutrients out, and then they regurgitate it back into their mouths and chew it some more, which is the ruminating bit.

And that's cud now, so that's where chewing the cud comes from.

And then they swallow it again.

Winding your tongue around a blade of grass is quite sexy, isn't it?

You know, when women do.

For yourself.

You know, when, like, I've never seen a woman doing that.

I need to go on more picnics.

I bet cows tie cherries in knots as a final.

That's what I

What's that?

You know, when you tie a cherry in a knot with your tongue, and then that kind of shows that you're...

Yeah, cherry stock.

That sounds incredibly difficult, and I don't think anyone.

It's not that hard.

I can't do that.

My brother can.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's not as hard as it seems.

Once you learn how to do it, it's pretty easy.

And you're a bay magnet, then.

I can also pick up blades of grass with my tongues.

Another animal which has friends is sharks, if you can believe.

Sharks have friends.

I don't believe that.

Oh, okay.

Some scientists analysed a group of a particular species of sharks which swim around together, and they couldn't work out if they were swimming together because there were just food sources which were close to each other, or their home ranges were in the same place.

But they discovered that actually some shark preferred the company of certain other sharks and actively avoided other ones, even though they were all in the same area if their territories overlapped.

So they've concluded these sharks basically have friends.

It could be that they have friends, or it could be that they just have enemies and they're hanging around around these other guys'cause they're not enemies.

What's the definition of an enemy or a friend?

True.

Yeah.

This is it is quite interesting, though, like why would animals have friends and there must be an evolutionary reason for it.

And I read two possible explanations I'd never heard before.

So one of them was the enemies enemy thing, and uh evidence for that is in dolphins who they there were two dolphins who had avoided each other, so they didn't particularly like each other, and then as soon as another dolphin came along that wasn't part of their group and that was effectively an enemy to both of them, those first two dolphins started hanging out with each other, became bestest buddies because suddenly they unite against their common enemy.

What I feel is happening with this podcast, actually.

I'm the new guy, and you're all ganging up on me and being horrible.

Shut up, Alex.

Okay, sorry.

But wait, the other good explanation I thought about why animals have friends to be attracted to the opposite sex.

So they studied macaques, and there was a macaque who was super attractive, like really good physical build, etc., but he wasn't very good at making friends with other males, and women stopped shagging him.

So, same as with humans, I guess.

If someone's unpopular, again, we need to say female macaques.

I think, just going back to the dolphins for a second,

they hang out in pods, I think, to feed, though, don't they?

Because they swim around in a circle, making bubbles and trapping fish in those bubbles so that they can eat them.

So, that's kind of a useful reason for having friends, I suppose.

I think the smallest unit of dolphins is two or three males, and they club up to guard the females, basically, that they perceive as being theirs.

And then several of those little units will group together to steal females from other males.

But sometimes two of those, even larger units, will club up and form a kind of coalition, even though normally they're rivals.

Wow.

Then there must come an awkward moment where the dolphins have to decide which one of them actually gets to copulate with the female.

Well, dolphins have a very varied sex life.

So they can all do it, you're saying?

Yeah,

they have blowhole sex,

and

they have all kinds of sex sex.

Blowhole jobs.

Okay, there is one other sign that could be an indicator that animals are friends with each other, which is they measured the levels of oxytocin inside them, which is known in humans as the love hormone.

And if you have it, you are more inclined to trust other people and love them.

And they tested, this is interspecies friendship, so that's very exciting.

Oh, like Disney film friendships.

Yeah, exactly.

They tested a terrier and a goat, which were both young males, and they were used to playing and having play fights and playfully nipping each other, rolling around and this stuff.

And so they played for 15 minutes, and then after that, they measured the levels of oxytocin.

The amount of oxytocin in the dog had increased by 48%,

which they said suggested the dog was quite attached to the goat.

However, the goat's increase in oxytocin was 210%,

and the authors of this said, we essentially found that the goat might have been in love with the dog,

which is a tragic, unrequited thing.

Isn't that great?

Well, now that's sad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just so animal friendships, most people thought that animals with big brains are more likely to make friends, and they found that fruit bats can make friends as well, and they have tiny brains.

So that's quite confusing.

But they found this because things like there was a pregnant fruit bat, and they found that she was being groomed and hugged repeatedly by another bat who was unrelated to her, another female bat, and then when she gave birth, then the other female bat who'd been grooming her and a third female fanned her with their wings to keep her cool.

Wow.

Just being nice to each other for no reason.

I don't don't know if bats can fan each other with their wings.

That's amazing in itself, I think.

Yeah, that is cool.

Now I wish I had wings.

It's because that's the primary use for wings, isn't it?

That's the best thing, is that you can use them to keep yourself cool.

You can fly as well, but vaguely.

I love the idea of James as a bird just sitting there and I'm sort of going up to him going, James, why don't you ever.

Oh, you can do that with them too?

D.H.

Lawrence had a cow called Susan,

which he loved and wrote a lot about.

And there's one other celebrity cow that I found.

Elm Farm Ollie, also known as the Sky Queen, was the first cow to

fly in an aeroplane.

The Sky Queen was.

She struggled with landing, but for a while she was at the controls.

That's how I got over the moon, right?

Yeah, so she was the first cow to fly in an aeroplane.

It was in 1930 at the International Air Exposition in Missouri.

A man called Ellsworth Bunts became the first man to milk a cow mid-flight, which he did in that flight.

He parachuted cartons of milk down to the spectators below.

That is the stupidest, most brilliant thing.

That's fantastic.

Another thing that, sorry, another thing that.

If that was intentional, Anna, you're fired from the podcast.

Another thing that affects cow lactation is slow songs.

Paranay, if you play slow ballads to a cow, then their lactation increases.

But if you play fast, clubby songs to a cow, I think it was was described as Euro Club classics, there's no effect on lactation at all.

I wonder what the Euro Club classics are.

Yeah.

Eiffel 65, probably that one.

Moo.

Deba Deba Die.

Thank you very much.

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Okay, time for fact number two, which this week is James Harkin.

Okay, my fact is that it's illegal to take a selfie with a tiger in New York City.

What?

So many questions.

Well, it kind of speaks for itself, really.

This is a new law that's come in, and it prohibits direct contact between members of the public and big cats.

So it's like with traveling circuses or that kind of thing.

And really, it's that you're not allowed any photos, but obviously the the press have put it forward as no tiger selfies, because apparently, tiger selfies are a thing on dating websites.

Yes, to make.

I've just realised someone's told me about this, and to make men look extra-manly.

Apparently, they photograph themselves next to big,

cool-looking animals.

It's simultaneously manly and cuddly.

Because you're cuddling a tiger, but it's a tiger.

Oh, no, Alex, you've done it, haven't you?

I've been to.

I've been to.

I have visited the blog which I found this morning called Tinder Guys with Tigers.

But actually, thinking about it now, if you're next to a tiger, the tiger is big and manly, and well, not manly, but big and powerful.

And next to him, you're just going to look less powerful.

So you want to be next to a really weak, like a hamster or something.

There's lots of baby tiger photos.

Are there?

Well, maybe women will be very disappointed on the eventual dates because they assumed that it was the tiger in the photo.

Well, this is the technique that was surely first patented by Vladimir Putin.

Oh, yeah.

Who has photos taken with every wild animal.

But they're many dead, aren't they?

No, a lot of them.

Well, he does some hunting ones.

There is genuinely Putin swimming with dolphins on the internet.

Dolphins who were previously enemies ganged up and became dolphins.

He's trying to ban blowhole sex.

That's satire.

Right there.

I was looking into history of selfies because it seems quite like a modern thing, so I had a look.

The earliest photograph of, actually, the earliest photograph of a person in American history is actually a selfie.

It was taken by a guy called Robert Cornelius, and he took it in 1839.

He was a lamp maker, and he was responsible for developing a process called daguerreopety, which was a short-lived photographic process of some sort, which was popular during the 1840s.

The process was so slow that he was actually able to set up the camera, then run into shot for about a minute or so, and then go and close the lens cap, which is quite quite more difficult.

And the photos were called daguerreotypes.

Well, that was it.

Wikipedia describes the photo, which you can go and see, as an off-centre portrait of a man with crossed arms and toutled hair.

So I reckon it would do pretty well on Instagram because that's pretty close to the mark.

For the first selfie, that's quite cool.

Pretty well done.

Do we think that was the first self portrait?

No, because people have been drawing themselves for years.

But I had a look into what the first ever.

There's a collection of lines in a cave

which may, which may be a drawing of a face.

27,000 years old.

We're kind of assuming it's the same person who drew it, though, if we're saying it's a selfie.

Exactly, yeah.

It's it's open to debate.

There are a few lines next to it that look a bit like a tiger.

Um nineteenth century portraits are fun.

Um have we talked about headless photos?

Headless photos.

So so yeah, Victorians like to like to photograph themselves headless, I think, and carrying their heads or with their heads in their laps.

They managed to doctor photos from a really early time.

So you get portraits from the eighteen fifties and sixties.

They weren't necessarily doctored.

They were like illusions.

They actually did have heads.

The photo was so prestigious prestigious back then that you would have your own head cut off to have a photo made of you so that it would look better.

No,

a lot of them would be like, it's hard to describe, but as in they would be illusions.

So you'd have two people in the photo, and one person would be sort of on the end of a table with their head resting on it and the rest of their body sort of out of shot.

And then another person would be organised in a way that you didn't look like their head was there.

And when you line them up, it looked like their head was not where it was supposed to be.

Oh, that's very good.

And

have you heard of Snapshoting, which was a game that people played?

No.

This is in the very early days of handheld cameras.

It's so much fun.

You had to escape while someone else tried to take a photo of you.

Oh, really?

Isn't that cool?

It's a bit like LaserQuest.

Yeah.

But it's LaserQuest where you don't know the results for three days until you get the photos developed.

It sounds like a fun game.

This is really interesting, I thought.

So after

National Geographic published its first wildlife photographs in 1906 in the magazine, and two of the National Geographic Society board members resigned in disgust.

Wildlife photos.

They said it was becoming a mere picture book, and that wasn't what the National Geographic was all about.

Wow.

Yeah.

A few more selfie things.

You know these selfie sticks that you get in the house.

There's a thing called a belfie stick.

Do you know what that is?

A belfie stick.

Is it?

Well, a belfie, I know, to my shame, is a selfie of your own bottom.

Yes.

So it's a stick to take a photo of your own bottom?

That's right.

A self-choloscopy kit.

No, it's not that.

The article I read said it's curiously out of stock at the moment, but is ostensibly a real product, so I'm not sure if it's even real.

But the idea is that you hold it and then it takes a picture of your bum, and then you can send it to people, presumably, who want to see that kind of thing.

Oh, brave new world.

The Statue of Liberty is taking one continuous long self-foot.

I found this on Reddit today.

There's her hand which is holding up the torch.

There's a camera, video camera, which you can stream a live feed from online, and it's pointing down to her face, so she's taking one.

That's pretty cool, right?

That is great.

That's really good.

That's such a good fact.

Yeah.

Vainest woman in the world.

Does anyone have more?

Some stuff about things illegal in New York.

Oh, yeah?

Okay, so it's strangely, it's illegal to honk your horn in New York City unless it's an emergency.

So that's another film accuracy then, because any time there's an establishing shot of New York, there's the soundtrack is lots and lots of horns.

No, it's not accurate.

It's just that everyone's breaking the law.

Right, well there's a constant state of emergency.

It's also illegal for three or more people to dance in New York City.

This is the rave laws that they have there.

So, what constitutes a rave?

Also, in the same place.

Yeah, you can have to book an appointment with the city.

Can I dance now?

But what do you mean in the same place?

It's okay if you're in your own home, actually, but it's got to be the people in your home have to be yourself, people who live there, or bona fide guests.

It's legal in churches, and weirdly, it's also legal in premises licensed as retail cigarette dealers.

For cigarette buying dance, you have to do in order to get your 20 more licenses.

That's right.

So, if you're in a bar and three of you are dancing, you need a license.

You need a dancing license.

So, the bar might have a dancing license.

Yeah, otherwise, it constitutes an illegal rape.

And also, pinball machines were illegal in a lot of America, but in New York until the 70s.

Wow.

And it was because it was kind of gambling.

And in the 1940s, Mayor LaGuardia smashed up a load of pinball machines in front of the press and threw them in the sea.

He threw the press into the sea!

Recently, the mayor of Riga drove a tank over an illegally parked car to make a point.

Although he had legally parked the car himself, so

it wasn't just a random illegal parked car.

What was the point he was making?

That look at my big tank.

Yeah, clearly.

Literally, it was parked properly.

Big issues in Latvia.

Well,

we're talking about it now.

So it's worked.

Yeah, actually, guys, I'm double parked out there, so I'm just going to have to go before the Bear of Riga gets in.

All right, time for fact number three, which is Anna.

Yep, my fact this week is that morgue refrigerators in Turkey are equipped with motion sensors, alarms, and handles that open them from the inside in case anyone in there wakes up.

Perfectly sensible precaution.

I think so.

Does it happen ever?

It has, I don't think there's been any instances, certainly not in that place of it happening.

But I think there's a sort of widespread paranoia in that area of Turkey.

It's in Malatya in Turkey, and they have yes, they've got like door handles on the inside.

There are sensors all around the inside compartment so that if anything touches the walls, then automatically the drawer comes open so the corpse is free to leave.

But um but corpses move around a little bit, don't they?

Because the escaping gases and I think eventually we're gonna move

but not very much.

And also when they become zombies.

Yes.

Yes, that is a concern.

In which case, why have we built

easy exit

wall compartments?

That's true.

If the zombie apocalypse happens, these are going to be the first guys out, aren't they?

Yeah, and they'll let all the others out.

In the nineteenth century, there was no reliable indicator for death.

People did not know that it was your heartbeat.

Ah, but that's still kind of true because it could be brain activity.

That's true.

So I think actually there is a slight kind of argument about how you can actually say that someone's dead, whether it's a heartbeat, whether it's a brain activity, or whether it's.

It's almost like we know so much now that we've blurred the boundary that we originally set.

Yeah.

Well, they just didn't have a boundary at all, they knew nothing at all of it.

And they had competitions

to enter where you would be given 1,500 francs if you worked out an easy and reliable sign of death.

The winner was the heartbeat, and it was the man, Eugene Bouchu, who invented the stethoscope.

And Eugene Bouchou sounds like what you might hear down a stethoscope, doesn't it?

But it was fantastic.

And he got a lot of criticism for being so impetuous as to say that you could bury someone only two minutes after ascertaining that they were dead.

Everyone else said, No, no, no, no, no, you should wait.

And it took years.

Did you say that he invented the stethoscope?

Sorry.

Sorry, he didn't.

Ah, yeah.

Because the stethoscope was invented by a guy who was embarrassed when he had to take the heartbeat of a particularly buxom lady, wasn't it?

And the way that you used to do it was you would put your head right down next to someone's chest, and he was embarrassed to kind of go into the breast area.

So he left her alone.

Excuse me while I go and invent something.

I'll be back shortly.

I think, I might be wrong about this, but I think he did it with a rolled-up newspaper or something, and then thought, well, this works quite well, and now I'm going to make something even better.

I might be wrong about the last bit.

I'm not sure.

The other ideas suggested for the prize included

sticking a thermometer into the stomach to see if you were cold enough to be buried.

Into the rectum would be good.

I don't think anyone suggested that for the prize.

Because you've got two different ways.

One, the shock of having something up your bum, bottom, and two, the temperature.

Yeah.

Okay, well, they're not actually still taking submissions, but I will pass it on.

They also had attaching pincers to the nipples of the presumed corpse,

just burning the patient's arm with boiling water and seeing what happened, putting a multitude of leeches near the bottom, or sticking

a very long needle with a flag at one end into the heart.

And if the patient was alive and there was any movement, the flag would wave a bit

and not for long.

And then when he died, it would come down to half mass.

One doctor said that the patient's tongue should be rhythmically pulled for three hours.

We should say a lot of this is from a fantastic book by John Bonderson called Buried Alive, and it has a huge amount of unbelievably interesting information about this cultural fear over the centuries.

Since you mentioned pulling stuff up the anus, in the late eighteenth century, doctors William Hawes and Thomas Cogan decided that the best treatment for someone who seemed dead after drowning was a tobacco enema.

And so they used to shove things up your anus, didn't they?

And that had like a dual purpose of testing if someone was dead because they giving you a nice hit of tobacco.

Exactly.

And it was thought that, first of all, it would warm up the drowned person by pumping tobacco up their bum, and second it would stimulate their respiration again.

And it got a lot more popular when they started doing it with bellows.

So there were kits.

So before this, they were just doing it with their mouth to the bum.

No.

So mouth to arse resuscitation.

Yeah, it was mouth-to-bum resuscitation, which is problematic.

There's a lot of people that died of illnesses which involve quite a lot of fecal matter being infected.

So quite a few people who tried this, doctors who tried this, ended up dying themselves.

Well, to be fair, they were supposed to blow and not suck.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

They did it wrong.

But then once that doctor's died, presumably another doctor will come along and say, My God, this patient has died.

I must resuscitate it.

This is an awful chain reaction.

If you've just stuck to back up someone's ass, then your girths suck instead of blow because you've basically made a human cigarette.

It's going to be the sequel to the human centre.

They used to hang those tobacco enema bellows up by the River Thames, where you would have life belts today or life rings.

They would just have as standard.

Have you guys heard of the Toten House?

No.

So these were, literally, that means house of the dead.

Obviously, that's

19th century Germany.

They're very popular.

These were basically large halls, which are sometimes very lavish and ornately decorated, in which bodies were kept for several days to ensure that they were really dead.

I think this is a pretty grim job.

If you were an attendant at this hall, you possibly had 12-hour shifts waiting for any signs of life.

Terrifying, horrible job.

Very criminal.

It's very easy, actually.

You can watch a corpse.

Not a lot of times at which anyone actually wakes up, I guess.

Yeah, but if you missed that one time, then.

Yeah, if you fell asleep for that one five-minute window.

When that zombie apocalypse

came up and they're like, Jeff, what were you doing?

You were supposed to be watching them.

You just woke up as an empty hole and you're like, oh, shit.

Yeah, the Paris morgue actually

was around the turn of the 20th century.

It was arguably the most popular tourist destination in Paris.

And that's at a time when the Eiffel Tower was built as well.

They were getting up to 40,000 visitors in a single day.

Did you see that with mental asylums as well?

They were in some weird tourist attractions.

Last week, I was in Portugal, and anyone who follows me on Twitter will know this already, but I went to a bone chapel.

It was in Evora, which is a town in the middle of Portugal.

And it was made by the monks, and they took all of the bodies out of the town and then sort of put them on the walls in like some kind of weird tiling.

Yeah, it's like tiling, yeah.

Wow.

So it decorates the whole chapel.

The best thing about it was I took a photo of it and put it on Facebook, and Facebook recognised the skulls and tried to make me tag them as my friends because they thought they were people.

That's crazy.

So they've just got real skeletons.

Yeah, real skeletons, yeah.

Hanging up.

And they have actual dead bodies as well, but when we were there, the dead bodies had been taken down for restoration.

That's pretty shit.

But it was supposed to be a place where you would go and you would think about your mortality and whatever.

So, you know, memento moris?

No.

Well, they're kind of things that are reminders that you're going to die, basically, and that all this is temporary and all flesh is dust and all of this stuff.

So it's just something to remind you.

So in lots of medieval Renaissance pictures, there's a skull there, just to point out you're going to die.

Like watching Countdown.

Oh, right.

The Memento Mari and Countdown could be the big clock.

Oh, that's great.

Dong.

Oh, basically, as well as a Memento Mori, there's also a Memento Vivare.

Oh, yeah.

Which is a really nice thing.

It's a reminder that you are alive and to take pleasure in life.

And you don't really hear much about it.

so there was a thread of people who worked in mortuaries comparing their experiences.

And there was someone who'd had a job in a mortuary, and they got in someone who'd died who'd been a hand model.

And he said it was really weird because he went into the service, the funeral service that they were having, and they have lots of photographs up all over the place.

And almost all of the photographs were just of this person's hands.

This was a funeral of that character from the Addams family.

That thing.

There was another one where a clown had died and the person was buried in full clown costume.

The whole family were clowns.

All the friends were clowns.

And at the family's request, the funeral directors had to dress up as clowns as well.

Didn't the shoes not fit in the coffin?

They put him in the coffin and all the sides fell out.

This is Bethany Frankl from Just Be with Bethany Frankl.

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Okay, and the final fact is my fact this week, and it is that Henry VIII had two official cradle rockers who were paid three pounds a year each to rock his cradle.

I should stress, this is when he was a baby.

I had a great image in my head before you told me that.

Three pounds a year would have been a lot in those days, presumably.

It would have been more, but not a huge amount.

And also, my question is: did they go in shifts or did they need two people to rock one cradle?

Well, his cradle was massive.

It was five feet long and two feet wide.

And this is the rocking one as well.

This isn't just a crib for a baby.

This is an actual rocking cradle.

Suspended from a wooden canvas, covered with crimson cloth of gold and trimmed with ermine.

I mean, it was ridiculous.

Nice.

It was Henry VIII.

He went into the camera.

Well, not at the time.

It was just a small baby at the time.

His daughter, Mary I, had even, she had four cradle rockers.

Four?

Yeah, and she had two cradles as well.

She had an everyday cradle, which was silver and gold, I think, and then a cradle of estate for special occasions for receiving visitors.

The current queen has 733 cradle rockers.

Just goes up every time because they want to outdo the previous one.

Edward VI

was given a baby replica of a court when he was not yet one year old.

He had a chamberlain, a vice-chamberlain, a steward, a cofferer, lots of other staff.

They were other people.

Sorry, they weren't other babies.

That's a fantastic idea.

That would be brilliant.

Yeah.

That's the most adorable thing I can think of.

They're all dressed as a little Thomas Cranmer baby and there's a Walsey baby.

That's how I imagine CBBs is wrong.

No, so when Henry VIII's first son was born, Henry appointed him 40 staff immediately, immediately, including a baker and a keeper of the cellar for some reason.

It would be brilliant if they were babies as well, though, wouldn't it?

I just love this idea of just a community of babies looking after you, like a tiny baby.

Maybe a miniature Buckingham Palace.

This is the Muppet babies of the Tudor court.

I like it.

They didn't call themselves Tudor, did they?

Didn't like that.

No, what is that?

It reminded them of their Welsh background, Tudor, and they didn't like that.

Henry VIII referred to himself as the embodiment of the union of the families of Lancaster and York, rather than Tudor.

Tudor's snappier, isn't it?

It is snappier.

It was like 100, 200 years afterwards when it became more common.

Moving down the line a little bit, Queen Victoria.

Well, basically, she sounds like she had a phobia of babies.

She described them as rather disgusting.

She described her own babies as frog-like and frightful when undressed.

And she had nine.

When she was a baby, her father described her as plump as a partridge and more a pocket Hercules than a pocket Venus.

I think she was quite a fat baby.

Hercules supposedly killed two snakes in his crib.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, he did.

Some vengeful goddess released them towards him, didn't he?

And he smashed them together.

Is that where the rattle was invented?

Yes.

He killed the snakes.

So they were rattlesnake and then he turned around and used them as rattles.

And someone was like, if I take out the snake aspect of this, it would make a great toy.

But Queen Victoria, named Victoria, very controversial.

Victoria wasn't really a name in Britain at the time, was it?

Not a girl's name.

And she was named after her mother, who was German.

A lot of politicians and men at court tried to make her change her name when she was going to accede to the throne.

Something more conventional.

So I think Elizabeth was suggested originally.

When the Queen gave birth to Prince Charles, Prince Philip was playing squash at the time.

Was he?

Yep.

Did he leave the game?

No, the Queen was in labour for 30 hours, but he played.

He was a long game of squash.

He must have been tired at the end of that.

I know someone was taking care of him.

Well, he just comes and goes, Oh, I'm exhausted.

What a day it's been.

How was your day?

Do you know swaddling?

Yeah.

Which is where you just restrict babies very tightly in their movements for the first few months of their life.

It's incredible that this happened and that we still happens around the world, I think.

Yeah?

To simulate womb environment, is that right?

I don't know.

And this used to happen.

Babies who were in their swaddling clothes would sometimes be

hung up from a nail on the wall, which was to give their care.

So you just sort of loop a bit of the swaddling over a nail on the wall, and the baby would just be entertained by its surroundings.

This is according to the Victorian Albert Museum, to give their carers a rest and to entertain them with the surrounding environment.

Like a ball-mounted ball.

It's a really funny idea, like a wall-mounted baby.

It'd be good if you had, like, sex tuplets and they were just hanging up around the whole thing.

Or you could put them like plaster ducks, you could put them going up in a diagonal line.

It was phased out.

I think it was widely perceived as being bad for the baby's health.

Obviously.

Cradles and cots.

The first, in fact, actually, I was looking into cradles and cots and I started accidentally looking into prams, but the first pram was invented in 1733 and it was made to be pulled along.

So it was like a small pram and it had a harness so it could be pulled along by a goat or a dog.

That's adorable.

Imagine the mini Henry VIII baby being pulled along by a dog.

A dog and a goat who are best friends.

Oh god.

The Disney film rinds itself.

But Pram is short for Parambulator.

Yeah.

But there was no one walking, I guess.

That's true.

It was being pulled by an animal.

Well, the dog and the goat would have been walking.

Walking into our hearts.

Oh, Jesus.

They called the first Prams that when Prams started becoming popular in the mid-19th century, I think they were called male carts because they were based on design for male carts when you just push

big packages along.

And because female babies weren't allowed in them.

Sexes.

I read that.

There's one book, I've read this in, and I can't find it verified, but children's cots were initially used to be bassinets which would just sit on the floor.

And then they were raised off the floor due to a perception that there were noxious fumes that existed below knee level and explosive vapours that existed near the ceiling, and that the middle air of a room was the healthy air you had to breathe.

Technically, isn't that true?

Because oxygen is flammable, so it would be near the top, and carbon dioxide is...

The gas in a room just moves around too much due to

the very, very still room.

They were onto the right idea.

and we're killing our babies by leaving them on the floor.

It's very unusual putting babies in cradles, having them sleep in cradles and cots and stuff in most parts of the world.

It's really weird that we do that.

Yeah, like vast majority of countries, I think, that's pretty much unheard of, and babies just sleep with their parents.

Parents used to not really worry about washing their babies too much either.

Oh, yeah.

Mothers in medieval times would dry nappies rather than wash them.

And in the book I was reading about this, A History of Childhood, this was because of the healing powers of urine.

And in bits of France,

people thought that if you washed a child's head, you would make it simple-minded.

And if you cut its nails and hair before it was a year and a day old, it would be respectively mute and a thief.

Being mute is good if you're a thief because you make less noise.

That's a really good point.

Okay, he is a thief now, so we might as well make sure he's doing it as well.

Please make sure he's doing it.

Okay, cut his nails then.

Yeah, extraordinary.

Can I just do one thing about an unusual job that I read today?

Okay, so I was reading a book earlier on.

It's called Sex on Earth.

Sex on Earth is that?

I don't know what you're doing a phrase.

Sorry.

They were talking about the way that horses have sex, specifically in stud.

So they have a stallion that will come in and have sex with a female horse,

and they were explaining how this happens.

And there is a guy whose one and only job is to hold the base of the stallion's penis while it is in the mare's vagina.

And his job is to feel for the telltale throbbing of ejaculation so that he knows when it's finished.

Oh my gosh.

Why does he need to know?

Well, it's so they can

stop the act.

Why do you need to know?

Surely it stops anyway in nature.

In that much of a hurry, that we need to, right?

The usual bit's over.

I'm going to say it's a brilliant book.

It's by Jules Howard.

It's absolutely okay.

But that's presumably why in nature you see a lot of skeletons of horses which have just died because they didn't know when to stop having sex.

Imagine how the stallion feels during all that.

Embarrassed, I presume.

I don't know if I would if a horse turned up and started holding the eggs penis in his scoops.

Did you just say I'm a stallion in bed?

No, except there's a stallion in our bed.

Okay, that's all of our facts.

Thank you very much indeed for listening.

We hope you have enjoyed it, and we will, of course, be back next week with another podcast.

Until then, you can follow us on Twitter.

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you can email podcast at qi.com, but also hashtag get Anna on Twitter.

Thank you very much indeed for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed it and we have had a lot of fun.

So, see you next week.

Bye.

to me.

I hold on to you.

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