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- [00:04]
Aaron Manke
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.
- [00:13]
Erin Menke
Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
- [00:36]
Aaron Manke
Science and the military share an uneasy alliance in the course of human history. Some of the most remarkable inventions only came about because of a war effort, the latter providing the impetus and infrastructure for a country to outstrip its enemy, not just in weapons, but in development. William Lawrence Bragg was already an acclaimed scientist by the time he was drafted into the army. The youngest man ever to be honored with a Nobel Prize for physics, an award he shared with his father, by the way. He had to put his promising career on hold when all of Europe descended into the First World War. And so the 25 year old Nobel laureate found himself in a cavalry unit in France. In the war years, Bragg eventually shifted into a more technical position and he was given a very specific assignment. His commanding officers wanted to know how to determine the position of the German artillery based entirely on the sound that their cannons made. The cannons were loud enough for the average person to hear, but with no real accuracy and not from a great distance. The main system for pinpointing cannon fire was based on a series of microphones lined up along frontline trenches. Army technicians could see the flare of a distant cannon shot and measure how long it was before their microphones picked up the boom, since sound travels slower than light. But the system was based on guesswork and it was imprecise when it came to actually locating the cannons. After all, a cannon makes three enormous booms when fired. There's the initial blast of the gun, the sound of the shell breaking the sound barrier, and then the eventual impact when it strikes the target. And on top of all of this, the microphones at the time were not able to detect lower frequency sounds. Bragg would be stumped by this conundrum for a very long time, until one fateful day in a latrine in Flanders. As the story goes, the army toilet had a door and no window, so that when a soldier was using it, he was completely cut off from the outside world. Bragg was sitting on the toilet one day when his rear end lifted fully off the toilet seat. And this was caused by infrasound generated by a nearby piece of British artillery on their side. And around the same time, a member of Bragg's team, a guy named William Sansom Tucker, noticed that his Quarters would shiver every time a gun went off, Even if he could not hear the blast. Bragg, Tucker, and the rest of their team set to work trying to develop a sensor that could properly detect not the audible sounds of the cannon itself, but the infrasound generated by the initial cannon fire. It took them many months of frustrating work, but eventually they developed a system where, based on Tucker's observations of how infrasound affected his sleeping quarters, their wave detector was an ammunition box with a hot wire running through it. They drilled a hole near the wire, and when a cannon went off, the infrasound pressure would force a puff of air through the hole and onto the heated wire. The changing current in the wire would give them data that they could measure. This device was named the Tucker microphone after William Tucker, the man who had designed the specific wire mechanism and. And this was the first piece in a far more effective method of detecting the location of enemy guns. Unlike those older, imprecise microphones of the early war, the Tucker microphone could place German guns within 25 to 50 meters, mere minutes after the gun had been fired. By September of 1916, all sound ranging stations were using Tucker microphones. It was an instrument developed in the war effort, leading to several key victories. Not every scientific breakthrough has a true eureka moment. Most come through steady, unglamorous hard work. But none of these sound ranging developments would have happened if not for the observation that William Lawrence Bragg made while sitting on an army toilet somewhere in Belgium. Even if it's not audible to the naked ear, there's no sound like inspiration.
- [04:31]
Erin Menke
Foreign.
- [04:40]
Aaron Manke
Our health is an ever changing concept. 100 years ago, what we may have considered healthy looked very different from today. Back then, dangerous narcotics were marketed as cold medicine and used in soft drinks. Doctors would actually recommend smoking to help with asthma. And many people believe that radioactivity was the hot new thing in health. So it's no surprise that the guidelines for living well can change pretty quickly. We sometimes find out something we thought was healthy was based actually on faulty science or bad data, or in one case, even fraud. In 2004, researchers published a study in the journal Experimental Gerontology about the areas in the world where people live the longest. The authors speculated that people live longer in certain regions because of traditional diets, lifestyles, or genetics. On the map published with these studies, the regions were shaded in blue, leading to the term blue zones. The Next year, in 2005, National Geographic reporter Dan Buettner published an exhaustive story on these blue zones and launched them into fame. According to Dan in places like Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Nicoya, Costa Rica, Icaria, Greece, and Loma Linda, California, people simply live longer. And those who do live longer live better, healthier lives. Dan set out to find the keys to these Blue Zones and found the original researchers speculations rang true. Visiting each place and performing exhaustive in person research, he discovered that Blue Zone dwellers were more likely to live the following lifestyle. They ate nutritiously with lots of fruits and vegetables. They were physically active and active in their community. They abstained from smoking, drank only occasionally, managed their stress, and of course, felt that they had a purpose in life. Basically, Dan concluded that living well led to a longer life. Over the next 20 years, the Blue Zones became a brand in themselves. Dan's Blue Zones LLC published books, launched a line of soups and iced tea, and even created a program for cities to become Blue Zone certified. But if you've heard of the Blue Zones, it's likely because of the Netflix documentary series from just a couple of years ago. Basically, Blue Zones weren't just a big deal, they were also big business. Which is why it came as a shock in 2019 when one researcher made a new claim. The Blue Zones, according to him, were actually bunk. That year, researcher Saul Newman of University College London first released his study on long lived populations. In it, he found that areas with the highest concentration of centenarians have another unifying feature, poor record keeping. What Saul argued was that it all came down to poverty. Many places that on paper have exceedingly long lived populations are also often poor or have been poor in the past few decades. As a result, it's often the case that birth, baptism, and other records that could prove age went missing or were never recorded at all. Meaning many of the folks who believed that they were over 100 may be younger than they think. According to an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in 2024, Saul gave this example. After traveling through Japan and going back through birth records, he found that 82% of Japanese centenarians were either missing or had died without the death being recorded, which is another reason why the numbers might be lying in impoverished areas. It's much more likely for an elderly person's relatives to simply not report their death to the government. That way, they can keep collecting pension or social welfare checks, meaning that a good chunk of the Blue Zone dwellers may have also been frauds. So who's right? Are the people in Sardinia or Costa Rica just healthier than average? Or is their life expectancy just a case of shoddy record keeping? For his part, Dan Buettner and Blue Zone supporters have refuted Saul Neumann's claims. They assert that they've done exhaustive research to confirm ages and birth dates of the people they've studied, and that their points about diet and lifestyle hold up. And of course, Saul has his detractors. But he also managed to win a cleverly named IG Nobel Prize for his work. Meant as the colorful counterpart to the Nobel Prize, IG nobles are supposed to honor achievements that make people laugh and then think it's hard to tell who's really in the right here. After all, the Blue Zone lifestyle does sound like a great way to live, but data is sometimes difficult to correctly interpret, and that difficulty curve gets steeper the deeper a project goes. Because the Blue Zone concept is aiming for highly specific signs and markers, getting it all perfectly right is a lofty goal, but then again, so is living to 100.
- [09:23]
Erin Menke
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting curiosityspodcast. The show was created by me, Aaron Manke, in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series and television show and you can learn all about it over@theworldoflore.com and until next time, stay curious.