39: No Such Thing As A Rocking Chair In Space

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We ran it on QI a few years ago,

which was there's no such thing as a fish.

There's no such thing as a fish.

No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life.

It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andy Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we've gathered round the microphone with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the San Francisco Fire Department's ladders are made of wood, which is not perhaps the material you would think would be good for putting near fire.

No, why are they?

It's because in San Francisco, you have the wires that go over for the trams.

They're electrified.

And so if they use metal ladders, they might get electrocuted.

Yeah, they have had stories of people who, when

they were trying to fight fires, they'd put the metal ladder and it'd hit a wire of some sort and just blow up the firefighters who were climbing.

Not completely blowing up.

No, no, no.

But like, yeah.

And so they use

this wood, which is very high quality, and they think that it's still fire-resistant enough that it won't settle fire.

High-quality, like, I've got a high-quality mahogany table at home.

A bit like that, yeah.

It is quite hard to set fire to wood under the right circumstances.

It doesn't just burst into flame like paper, you know.

Yeah.

So, this fact came from an email which I get sent to my inbox every day.

It's called Now I Know.

It's by a guy called Dan Lewis, and it's every day full of interesting stuff.

It's really good.

We're all fans.

We're all fans, yeah, exactly.

No, it's just full of QIA-style material, and it's really good.

So that's very cool about fire ladders being made of wood.

Are there any fire engines made of wood?

No, I don't know.

Are there any fire men made of wood?

No.

Fireman's poles are made of wood still, aren't they?

Quite often.

Well, they normally don't have poles anymore, do they?

A lot of stations these days, when they're built, are on ground level.

And there was a rumour they were being eradicated in Britain because of health and safety concerns, which has been denied, although they are being eradicated in the US.

So new fire stations don't have fireman's poles built in them usually anymore.

It is a weird thing, a fireman's pole, because I can get downstairs quite fast.

I think it's also because

fire stations always used to have spiral staircases, which I think are slower to get down because.

the reason they had spiral staircases was because in the nineteenth century when uh fire trucks were obviously drawn by horses, they kept the horses downstairs, which is why fire stations are built on two floors often.

And there was a problem with horses running up the stairs and then not being able to get down the stairs again until they injured.

I think as well it's because you're about to do something extremely dangerous, lives do get lost and you can say, oh, he had some fun just before he went.

Do you know about the first fire engine that we ever had, like, that wasn't horse-drawn?

There was a guy called John Lofting, and he created what was called the sucking worm fire engine.

That was right.

Yeah, and that was his first.

That was, he sort of patented that.

He worked on the name a bit.

Why is it called that?

Because it has nice water up.

I guess because

it sucks something, and it looks like a worm.

I'm guessing that's why it is.

He invented a number of things.

He also invented a horse-powered thimble canerling machine.

I don't know what canerling is.

Canerling, you know, on the end of a thimble, they have the kind of bumpy bits that help you grip things.

It's making that

horse bump.

That's horse-powered.

Yeah, he did that.

Horse-powered.

So, fire horses are quite useful, easily scared.

Hence, the reason that Dalmatians are known as fire dogs.

So, you know, Dalmatians always accompanied fire engines in the 19th century.

I did not know that.

And what were they used for?

Loads of things.

So, first of all, they would keep the horses calm around the fire so horses will freak out around the fire and apparently they were there as a comforting influence.

But also I like the idea that the first fire siren, fire engine siren, was Dalmatians barking because one of their purposes was to

if once the alarm sounded in a fire station then Dalmatians would know that they had to run outside the fire station barking and the people would know to clear the way because the firemen would have to get out and get in the fire and then they would run in front because they can run really really fast for really long distances.

They would run in front of or around the fire engine, Horstawn fire engine, barking and raising the alarm to everyone around, saying, Get out of the way.

That's fantastic.

The original fire alarm.

That's wonderful.

Firemen these days, they don't want to rescue animals from trees anymore.

Do they not?

Well, it's not that they don't want to.

It's a heartless button.

They're saying that it's much more effective to call the RSPCA because it costs about 300 quid every time somebody calls out.

I heard a thing from the RSPCA that says, if you see a cat up a tree, we advise you to leave it for 24 hours before calling the RSPCA, as they usually manage to get down by themselves.

That's interesting.

After all, when was the last time you saw a cat skeleton up a tree?

Wow.

It's quite a good point.

It is a good point.

It's really grim, the RSPCA.

Also, the RSPCA have issued a press statement saying, Can people please stop bringing them when there's a fire?

Yeah,

it's much more effective to call the fire brigade.

Some animals that the London Fire Department have rescued recently.

A kitten with its head stuck in a bongo in 2009.

Two dogs in a toilet in Bromley in 2009.

That's a big toilet, isn't it?

It could be tiny dogs, couldn't it?

It could be, yeah.

Sorry.

A chimp in a chimney in Tower Hamlets.

Oh, chimpney.

That's so cool.

And an adult hamster trapped in a disabled lift in Greenwich.

So I feel sorry for fire.

So they always release these press statements, emergency departments, saying these are the ridiculous calls we've got.

And the reason we're saying this is because we want you to stop making them.

And the only effect it has is that on podcasts like this, I guess we repeat what they've told us and laugh at it.

But so recent calls to the fire service include: there are loads of people who get stuck in handcuffs.

I think someone said about 70 people a year call his fire department.

Nine instances of men with rings stuck in awkward places.

Do you know what that means?

It means penis.

Is it not?

So it's not the ring going into something.

Well, I have a statistic of nine instances of men with rings stuck on their penises, so I think it might be the same as the one.

That's the worst proposal ever, isn't it?

She'll say no, and you'll be asked to leave the restaurant.

Other reasons people have called Fire Engine, someone with a Lucy stuck on his head, which I really like that guy.

He was only going in to get the dogs, to be fair.

Did you guys know that George Washington was a volunteer firefighter?

Yeah, not.

Yeah.

Yeah, other famous firefighters.

There was a guy who effectively was kind of like the evil knievel of the firefighting world called the Red Adair.

Have you heard of the Red Adair?

Yeah, so he was he was he was uh he would fly in planes and he would put out fires from the skies.

And I just read about one of the fires that he put out that I'd not heard of, which I find amazing.

It was in the Sahara and it was nicknamed the Devil's Cigarette Lighter.

It was a plume of flame that went as high as 450 feet.

Imagine that image of just a 450-foot pillar of flame.

What was it from?

Was it just a very deep hole in the ground that went on to the magma layer?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

yeah.

They'll have a seam of coal, and it would have set on fire one time, and it's just all fuel is coming back again.

I don't know for sure, but I imagine that's it will be that, and I'm always amazed that they leave it.

It's like if this office set on fire, me just strolling out into the street.

Oh, never mind.

Anyway, that's what we're supposed to do if there's a fire.

Goes well, designates by us.

Yeah, don't stay.

Yeah, don't stay.

Yeah, so he had the biggest business, and then, but all of his best kind of associates who he had working for him set up their own businesses, which is a shame.

My favourite one was two of his top right-hand men, Asgard Boots Hansen and Ed Coots Matthews, left, and I think they only left so they could start a business called Boots and Coots.

Yeah.

Which is what their business was called.

That's great.

Rome burned down, didn't it?

In

64 AD?

Is that the fiddling while Rome burnt moment?

What was the fiddling?

Nero, the emperor, supposedly

he was caring so little about the fire that he was playing the fiddle.

Well, there are two contrasting reports, one of which says he saved everyone from the fire, and one of which suggests that he started it because he wanted to rebuild Rome.

Two-thirds of it burned out in a day.

He probably claimed that.

But I do like the fact that he blamed, when he realised that people were blaming the Great Fire of Rome on him, he diverted the blame to Christians and he had a bunch of Christians burned and have them.

And he would hold garden parties where he used the burning Christians' corpses as torches to light the garden party.

Wow.

Being at that party.

Yeah.

Going, isn't that Mike?

Are you invited to the party?

Yeah, a bit been nervous about that actually.

I like that as the invitation.

Does yours say guest or outdoor heater?

Let's just finish on some ways that things have caught fire in London over the last few years.

This is another London Fire Department press release.

There was a fire started after someone tried to dry out a toilet roll they had dropped down the loo by popping it in the microwave for a few minutes.

Another one is: a man using a pair of boxer shorts to vigorously apply linseed oil to a floor, caused the pants to overheat and a fire to start.

That must have been so vigorous.

Why was he cleaning them with his pants?

He wasn't cleaning, I think he was adding the oil to kind of make it more durable.

Is that what you do with linseed oil?

That's what I'm saying.

Right, he was putting linseed oil on the floor and then rubbing it with his pants.

Yes, right.

That's what I question.

Oh, the use of pants rather than another rag.

Yeah.

Imagine if you employed a cleaner, they turned up.

You don't even have brought a cloth.

Got these guys.

You have got a vacuum cleaner.

Meet my sucking worm.

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

And my fact this week is astronauts do not snore.

So they don't snore at all.

You can't be an astronaut if you don't, if you snore, or they don't snore once they're in space.

A mixture of the both.

Let's start it on Earth.

Mostly, when they're trying to find astronauts, they go through all sorts of rigorous challenges and they test them for certain things that they know won't work in space.

One of the things that they know won't work in space is that you'll become very irritated very quickly if one of the people in the International Space Station has a very loud snore.

That's one of the things that I find.

So they immediately disqualify people who have loud snores from being an astronaut.

And they did a test where they showed five astronauts who snore roughly at 16% of the time of their sleeping time.

In space, once they got there, that sixteen was reduced to less than one percent.

So space actually reduces your snoring level.

And they think it's because of the gravity.

They think it's because your tongue is not touching and blocking in the same way in your head.

Seventy five percent of astronauts take sleeping pills, which I find interesting if they're on the International Space Station.

Because most sleeping pills have warnings like may cause drowsiness, decrease mental alertness, problems with coordination, don't drive or operate machinery, don't engage in hazardous occupations requiring complete mental alertness or motor coordination.

That's possibly the heaviest machinery

specific warning on there: do not operate the International Space Station if you're taking this bill.

Okay, so you're not allowed to go into space if you snar too much.

Yes.

But when you go into space, people don't snar as much anyway.

So it doesn't seem really fair that you're stopping the snarers from going in.

You just don't snar as much anyway.

I suppose it's too big a risk to send too Too big a risk.

No, no, but it's not.

What's the greatest risk of outer space travel?

If you send a really heavy snorer into space and then they have huge rows with their colleagues because their colleagues can't sleep at all, that is a risk to a mission, surely.

Yeah, it is.

It's very odd.

The amount of tests that, or the amount of things that can get you disqualified from being an astronaut these days, it's all to do with stuff that will irritate people who you're hanging out with.

So I got this fact, by the way, from a book called Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.

And it's the most fantastic book.

If anyone listening to this likes astronauts, space, Mars, read it.

It's perfect as a book.

And she has all these examples that the tiny things are the things that are going to irritate you most in space.

So, and anywhere, people who are Arctic explorers and stuff, she has all these passages taken out from like French anthropologists saying, you know, it got to the point where the way he would sip his soup or the look or the way he'd blow out a candle pissed me off so much.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why are you taking candles to the international space?

No, no, this would be like an Arctic explorer.

Again.

Again.

So it's his birthday on the 18th.

Make sure that we bring the candle.

We put him one of those really funny candles that never goes out.

Unlike him.

Should we do snoring?

Britain's loudest snorer is a woman, as far as I could tell.

And she, so she's 60 years old.

She snores at 111.6 decibels, which is 8 decibels louder than the roar of a low-flying jet.

Wow.

Yeah.

Presumably, she was snoring so loud that either her husband or her kids or something said, listen, this is ridiculously loud, but I feel like we could do something with this.

We could at least get a bit of press out of this.

Yeah,

let's call someone to come and register your snore as the loudest.

The only way they realized it was so loud, it was quite sad, really.

She went on that programme that was on a couple of years ago, this like snore school thing, where it was a reality TV show where people with sleep problems all hung out together in the same house and so her husband said please can you do this because this is terrible for me and she went on it and everyone else who also had serious snoring problems heard her and went wow this woman is out of this world and that's when they tested it

okay well that's good she said that's when she realized that it wasn't normal okay okay so you know when you see pictures of the astronauts on the moon and they're kind of hopping around yeah do you know why they're hopping around

no so you might think it's because there's less gravity so that's just a good way of moving about.

But it's actually because their spacesuits weren't built for walking.

They were really solid, so the only way to move around really was to kind of saltate like

a kangaroo.

Like a kangaroo.

That's amazing.

Kangaroos in space.

Just speaking of them being on the moon, Buzz Aldrin did an AMA not too long ago on Reddit, Ask Me Anything on Reddit.

And he revealed that when he jumped onto the moon,

so when they landed, they didn't land hard enough that they'd gone, they expected the lunar module to go right into the moon, but it kind of just landed so softly that it didn't actually really dig into the ground.

So, the ladder from which they were meant to land on the moon on the outside was a lot higher than

it was meant to be.

So, they had to do a big drop to the moon.

So, Neil, you see him drop down, and same with Buzz.

Now,

when they're wearing their astronaut suits, they all have this kind of diaper system for both urine and for crapping.

And what happened was, Faffes, when Buzz Aldrin jumped down onto the moon, he landed so hard that he knocked the bit of the diaper system off that was meant to collect his urine completely away.

And if we all remember, one of the first things he did on the moon was have a pee.

And the pee went straight down into his boot.

So his whole two hours on the moon was him.

Yeah, was him just with a full bladder's worth of pee hanging out in his left foot.

He had a terrible time.

Yeah.

Buzz Aldrin on the moon was hating him.

While he was hopping around, there was sloshing urine by his foot.

That's going to to spoil it, isn't it?

A bit.

Yeah, you would have that on your mind.

Or maybe it's the one situation where it's big enough you don't mind about sloshing around in your own week.

I don't know though, because Yuri Gagarin, when he went back to Russia after coming back down, he says one of the biggest moments was when he was presented to the nation effectively and he was being presented with some kind of award.

And he looked down and he noticed that his shoelace was untied.

And that's all he can remember from the event, the nervousness of just knowing that his shoelace was untied.

So actually, big moments don't necessarily.

He didn't have pea in his shoes.

Well, that was the other thing.

He'd then.

You're in Gagarin.

Oh, my God.

You know, there's no seats in space.

What?

Yeah, they used to have seats on Mir, and they realised you obviously just don't need seats in space.

Who's using a seat?

Isn't that why, when you come back down from space to re-acclimatise, one of the first things I was reading about the crew, I think it was Chris Hadville crew that arrived back on Earth a couple of years ago, and one of the first things they give you, like this crew come and carry you out of the airship that you've landed on, and they put you in a specially designed reclining chair which apparently helps you.

So one of the things that's going to be a little bit more you sit for like half an hour to an hour just in these chairs once you get out.

They do have chairs in the module that comes back into Earth's atmosphere.

So you do sit in a chair there but apparently nowhere else is there a chair.

You don't need it.

I would be really gutted to get up there and find out there were no chairs.

But how would you even sit?

I would try and strap myself into the chair.

You'd have to because of the zero gravity.

I appreciate that that's an obstacle.

But what about at the end of the day?

Would you want to sit down?

You'd look like a dick.

Like you would be the one astronaut in space who's like, oh, what's Murray doing?

That would be an irritant.

Why is he sitting on a chair?

We're in fucking space.

Floating around on a rocking chair.

Yeah.

Well, thanks to astronaut Murray, we have had to spend $18 million sending a lazy boy into space.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Trasinski.

My fact is that in March 1876, it rained mutton-tasting meat in Kentucky.

Ugh.

Well, actually, you say uh, but the reason that they knew it was mutton-tasting was obviously because they tasted it when it happened, and um, it was pronounced by various people who tasted it as very palatable and a fresh meat.

A butcher tasted it and said that it tasted like sort of high-quality meat.

Colonel Sanders tasted it and said this is the best thing I've ever tasted.

Yeah, so what I find interesting about this, obviously, there's lots of you know, weird stuff, fell from the sky stories, but we still have specimens of this meat and we're still trying to work out what it was.

Wow.

Do we know what it was?

We don't know what it was.

It went through various scientists at the time trying to work out what it was.

So bits of this meat kept getting posted from one scientist to the next.

It all tasted.

When you said it went through several sales, that sounds very disgusting.

So then it was sent to this guy called Leopold Brandeis, who said it tasted like frog or spring chicken legs,

which was...

And then I read in a British newspaper at the time, and they were saying, we have heard of showers of frogs, which ought to be acceptable in France, but we do prefer the idea of mutton tasting meat in Britain, which is just another nice example of nineteenth century newspaper racism, really.

I read as well that someone, and this is a callback for long-term listeners, but someone, after they thought that it wasn't mutton, they thought that it was star jelly.

That they thought it was the mythical appearance.

This was Leopold Brandeis.

Right, yeah.

He said it tasted like frog

and all chicken legs, and that's what he imagined star jelly would taste like, so it was that.

And then it was sent to lots of other scientists who said, No, it's not.

And they concluded it definitely had animal cartilage and lung tissue.

Seven samples were examined by several scientists who confirmed some of it to be lung tissue, some of it to be muscular tissue, and two samples to be made of cartilage.

Can I tell you a theory that arose at the time?

This was from the New York Times.

It was a journalist called William Alden, William Livingston Alden.

He said, and he was not being entirely serious here, but it was a kind of meteor shower.

Meteor showers.

He said, according to the present theory of astronomers, an enormous belt of meteoric stones constantly revolves around the sun, and where the earth comes into contact with this belt, she is soundly pelted.

Similarly, we may suppose that there revolves about the sun a belt of venison, mutton, and other meats divided into small fragments, which are precipitated upon the earth.

Not a serious theory.

He was trying to be funny.

So, the most serious theory which arose at the time, and this is what they thought it was, is vulture vomit, because vultures, as as I think we know, vomit as a defence mechanism and they can vomit quite a lot.

The combination of stuff it was seems to imply that vultures would have been soaring really high above, which they can soar up to seven miles above the ground.

So it would have caused it to scatter that far.

Seven miles?

Yeah, seven miles in the air.

They float.

The highest bird ever found was found when it crashed into a plane, actually, but it was flying much higher than Mount Everest.

Pretty harsh for this bird that's like, I'm higher than anyone's ever been.

Smack.

This is why they don't do that.

So, vulture vomit is done as a defense mechanism.

And one of the things I was reading about it was: if a vulture has a predator attacking it, the reason it will vomit,

one reason might be that it's quite, it's got a bit of acidic stuff in the vomit, and it could go in the eyes of the predator and sting and make them go off.

But the other reason is that it's an offering to say, if you're hungry, have this instead of me.

I know coyotes can eat vulture vomit, but it is so acidic because vultures' stomachs, that's why vultures can eat like dead, rotting, gross meat.

Yeah, yeah.

Their stomachs can really break that shit down.

Yeah.

Because they're so acidic.

So I'm surprised that many things can eat vulture vomit.

But also, it doesn't sound like much of an offering, does it?

It's like, oh, don't eat me, eat this disgusting, acidic, rotting meat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you're like, I don't know, actually, I'm going to eat you.

Yeah.

Bearded vultures eat 70 to 90% bone.

Oh, do they?

That's amazing.

And that's, as you say, their stomach acid is what allows them, them, it's incredibly strong.

And also, it's what lets them have,

they can destroy cholera and anthrax bacteria.

Oh, yeah.

Which is why they can eat such a lot of fun.

Yeah, they've got lots of antibodies that nothing else has.

Yeah.

Vultures will often peck at dead animals through their anus.

I'm sorry to say.

How do they get the beak back through their anus?

It's to get at the entrails, which are full of good stuff.

Do you guys know what a group of vultures is called?

Oh, there are some.

What is it?

The kettle.

Kettle, yes.

That is one of many.

There are

really good.

Another one, a vault?

Yep.

There's five in total.

Wow, well, what are the others?

Kettle, vault.

Anna, do you want to throw one in?

Ah, damn it.

I can't remember.

A culture of vultures.

Oh, that'd be very good, but no.

There's a wake

and a committee

and a venue.

Oh, venue?

That would be terrible, wouldn't it, if you were having a party?

Hello, I'd like to book a venue, please.

A party.

Three weeks later, a load of vultures turn up at your door.

Petle, you can't say this is.

This is worse than Nero's party.

Yeah, the kettle refers to vultures in flight.

Committee's vault and venue refers to them when they're resting in trees.

Awake must be when they're eating dead stuff.

It's when they're feeding.

Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah.

Turkey vultures wee on their own legs.

Yeah.

So does Aldrin.

Yep.

Was he doing it for the same reason?

I was just trying to cool myself down.

I think that's why they do it.

They do it to cool themselves down.

And also, there's a theory that the urine is quite acidic, and it might be a way of sterilising their legs because they stand in a lot of rotting flesh to feed.

Oh, that's a good idea.

I wanted to move on just quickly to things falling from the sky.

I found an article from a few years ago, and this was a woman who described how a mysterious rock fell from the sky onto a derby street, knocked a passing goose to the ground.

That is mysterious.

He thought it might have been a meteorite or something like that, but Dr.

Andrew Johnson, a geologist of the University of Derby, didn't think he was.

He thought it was something like a piece of limestone from the Peak District.

And they asked him, Yeah, but how come it came from the sky?

And he said, I haven't got a clue where it came from unless somebody threw it in the air.

Did you see that story this week about a guy in San Francisco who owned a Chinese restaurant who was trying to defrost some meat out on the street.

He was caught tenderizing his meat by bashing it on the pavement and stamping on it.

And so they examined the pavement, which was covered in blackened gum, cigarette butts, and foot track bacteria of all gut-twisting varieties.

According to the article.

Well, at least it's tender.

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Okay, time for our final fact, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that the Victorians invented a coat which doubled up as a boat.

Invented by whom?

By coots and boots.

By coats and boats.

There was a Scottish version.

Coots and boots.

That's amazing.

It was designed by a man called Peter Halkett, who was a naval officer, and he wanted something which you could go exploring with and take it over frozen terrain, but which would cope in extreme weather and which might get you out of a tight spot.

So if the frozen terrain started melting, I guess the idea is it's getting warmer, so I don't need my coat anymore.

But I do need something.

How did it work?

It was amazing.

It was made of rubber, and you should look for it online.

We should try and put up a picture of it.

I'll put it on your Twitter.

I'll put up one on my Twitter.

Which is that it had four separate compartments, very sensibly, in case one of them got punctured and it took a few minutes to inflate, and then it can support the weight of eight people on it.

Yeah.

And I mean, the designs are.

He tested a prototype on the River Thames, and he went nine miles on it and some explorers did genuinely take it with them.

So I guess if you're one of the seven people who doesn't have the coat you have to not take the piss out of the idiot in the huge boat-shaped rubber coat just in case it floods.

Yeah, well it's like that bra gas mask that won the Igno

Prizes, Ignor Prize a few years ago.

It's got two cups, therefore can support two people.

This is like an earlier version of that.

Another thing that Bra has been made to do, it's called the wine rack.

And it's a bra that can carry more than a bottle's worth of wine.

And so it has the double benefit of increasing your cup size.

So you pour the wine into it and you can kind of suck it out.

You pour the wine into it, it's got a straw attached, it's made to hold the wine.

Like one of those cool sports hats that you have

when you watch baseball.

One of those cool sports hats.

Dan's wearing one now.

He's been wearing one since the first episode.

I'm actually wearing a bra as well.

There's another one for men, which is the beer belly, which is much less attractive.

It can carry equivalent of a six pack of beer.

So

very good.

But but then during the night the man gets slimmer and the woman's breast gets smaller so he's getting more attractive while she's in the back of the bottom of the bottom.

It should have been like in his trousers to make his bulge look bigger, shouldn't it?

Yes.

The cocktail.

That movie has an old different meaning now, doesn't it?

Yeah, so this this boat.

Fantastic invention.

Yeah.

Wi how would you inflate it?

Or is it.

I don't know.

I think it was.

I mean, it's quite a big thing, so I presume you wouldn't have to be blowing it up flights.

No, I think you'd have to pump it up.

Yeah, possibly.

Because that would be amazing at dinner when you're taking your coat off.

And an eight-seater boat inflates around the table.

Just come back to the restaurant cloakroom with your little ticket.

Which one is yours?

Yeah, it's the black one that looks like a boat.

Yeah, we've got eight of those.

Which one is it?

You explorers.

The last time we're hosting the Royal Geographical Society dinner here.

Well, the idea of the thing, it came with a walking stick, which can fold out into either a paddle or a large umbrella.

And so you can set sail with the umbrella or row with the paddle.

Actually, I read about a really interesting invention from roughly the same period, which was a cane.

It was a multi-purpose cane, effectively the Swiss Army knife of canes.

And it could do a number of things.

It could be transformed into a flute.

So you could play your cane as a flute.

You could catch butterflies with it.

So it must have had some sort of net that came out of it.

You could measure horses with it.

That was one of the selling points.

I don't know who's measuring horses.

You can measure horses with any cane.

If you do, this is three canes high.

That's true.

That's true.

Well, this had a specific, I don't know what it is that you use for it.

What was the measure horses?

Butterfly net.

Butterfly is net.

Flute.

And then it could also be an umbrella.

And this is my favourite thing in the advertising of it.

It's say that it can be an umbrella.

Why an umbrella?

Why, of course, to keep you dry while you smoke your cane pipe.

So it was also a pipe.

So it was fantastic.

And another one with more than one use.

Albert Pratt invented a thing called a gun helmet, which was a helmet with a gun on it.

You would aim your helmet towards a target

and fire.

And it was very good, but the one minor disadvantage during trials was that the recoil broke the wearer's neck.

The eternal mystery.

How did both armies end up completely wiped out?

Do you think there's a fault with our gun helmet?

No, no more than there is with our leg grenade.

There's some really funny footage online, which I think Richard Wiseman found first.

Or it might have been in this really good blog called Brain Pickings, but it's of when they were testing bullets and bulletproof glass.

And it's a man and a woman testing it, and the man's holding this gun, standing about 25 feet from this woman, who's just holding this tiny piece of bulletproof glass in front of her face and letting him shoot at her.

Whoa.

It's great.

And she just kind of rocks back and it's like, go again, hit me again.

It's very terrifying seeing someone being shot at.

It's really counterintuitive.

Yeah, it's confusing to me why they always put the person behind the bulletproof glass to test it.

Well, if they put it in front of it, it's not really going to work.

It was an ancestor of Annas who invented the gun helmet.

I found a patent in 1890 for

a combined stepladder, cot, ironing board, and chair.

And it was designed, it was invented by one Stephen Fry.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

In what, yeah?

1890.

Wow, prodigious.

Maybe that's what he was doing before Black Adder.

Yeah.

I have one funny thing on coats.

Okay.

So, Draco, who wrote down the first legal code, I I think it was in the 7th century BC in extra.

Where Draconian comes from.

Where Draconian comes from.

Do you guys know how he died?

No.

It is written that it was a sign of appreciation if someone was doing a public performance, which he would, to

in public throw your coat at him as like a hello, I guess that we throw flowers or something at someone now.

You threw your coat at him.

And the way he died was.

There's one person who had a boat.

An eight-seater boat crushed Draco.

It was basically that.

The way he died was he suffocated under a huge pile of appreciative coats.

Really?

Oh, yeah, because people actually liked him, didn't they?

People liked him, yeah, despite his draconian measures.

Oh, my God.

Why are there no pictures of people?

Most appreciated person of the year, and it's just a picture of coats.

You don't see the person, it's just a mountain.

If that was still true, cloakroom attendants would be the most respected people in society.

That's true.

Someone's invented a jacket where you wear it as a normal jacket, but there's an extra arm that hangs out so that your girlfriend can get underneath the arm, but you don't need to have your arm over her, so you have two functioning arms and it's a third arm.

But does that not knock people over in the street when you're just walking on?

When you've been dumped.

Yeah, that's a sad sight walking home.

As you will be five minutes after you say, don't worry, darling, just put this fake arm over yourself and feel comforted.

I've delegated the touching of you to this product I have bought.

They've also developed mattresses which have grooves in them so that you can put your arm underneath rather than getting your arm trapped under whoever you're in bed with.

Because there's always a problem that if you're lying on your side, where do you put your other arm, which is underneath you?

Oh, yeah, so it's got an armhole.

Okay.

The armhole, yeah, yeah, and then you can just.

Hold on, you're saying the armhole is for a girlfriend.

Well, as a man, you would lie in bed and put your arm in the groove, and then your girlfriend would lie on the other side of the bed, so you are.

I'm with you, but James is.

So that implies a horizontal groove.

But then James's way, which I prefer, because I'm not into the whole arms in bed, what's that about?

With a boyfriend thing,

is I have a fake arm product you might be interested in.

I like the idea of somewhere to put your arm when you're sleeping.

That has been invented on your side.

I think they're two different inventions, yeah, they are.

I feel like someone's plagiarizing someone else there

from the people who brought you the horizontal bed groove.

The vertical bed groove.

One more thing about inventions.

So, you know how car horns are kind of like

quite horrible noises or whatever.

They used to be much nicer.

And they changed that because one of Edison's assistants had a car and he nearly ran over someone in Newark and noted that his angel's harp noise of his horn didn't have any impact on the pedestrian.

And he realised that you had to have a much harsher-sounding horn.

It'd be quite a nice ending if you did actually hit someone because they didn't see your car coming.

And as they were dying, you play the angel noise to make them think

they're going somewhere nice.

That might be a nice, comforting ending.

Nice ending.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you want to get in touch with any of us about the things we've said during the course of this podcast, you can get us either on our at QI podcast Twitter feed, or you can get us individually on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna, you can email podcastatqi.com.

and if you want to hear all of our previous episodes you can just head to no such thing as a fish.com we have all of our episodes there and we will be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye

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