SPEAKER_02: New, immune-supporting Emergen-C crystals brings you the goodness of Emergen-C and a fun new popping experience. There is no water needed so it's super convenient, just throw it back in your mouth. Feel the pop, hear the fizz, and taste the delicious natural fruit flavors. Emergen-C crystals orange vitality and strawberry burst flavors for ages 9 and up have 500 mg of vitamin C per stick pack. Look for Emergen-C crystals wherever you shop. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixcel.com slash invisible. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The whole premise, the whole conceit of this show is that if you look at the world in the right way, you'll see stories everywhere. Some of these stories are epic power struggles chronicling the construction of a world famous skyscraper or the founding of a city, but other stories are more modest, smaller in scope and scale. We call those mini stories. Mini stories are an end of the year tradition where 99PI producers and friends of the show join me on mic to tell me about something cool. That's all I want. I want to hear something cool, something fun, something that you could tell your friends or family during a holiday get together. Speaking of family, I have someone here with me. Please tell these nice people who you are.
SPEAKER_09: I'm Lee Mars. I'm your big sister. What do you do besides that? When I'm not big sistering you, I write books or I've written a book about silence.
SPEAKER_02: The book is called Golden, the power of silence in a world of noise.
SPEAKER_09: And so it is about silence, about why it's important, about what it is and how to find it in any situation.
SPEAKER_02: So what's an example of finding silence in any situation?
SPEAKER_09: So this is not a book for people running off to retreats and silent retreats, for example, for months on end. This is really about finding silence in the midst of a noise soaked, dizzy, full life. Something you might know something about, something I know something about, something my co-author Justin certainly knows something about.
SPEAKER_02: And what kind of noise are we talking about?
SPEAKER_09: So the noise we look at in the world is auditory, that which happens in our ears, informational, that which comes at us usually through our screens and internal, that which happens inside internal chatter, rumination, worry about the future, fretting about the past.
SPEAKER_02: So I was reading your book. I'm getting a lot out of it, especially the sections about silencing your inner chatter, because my inner chatter is very loud. And I came across this example that is a perfect little design related 99PI mini story. And it's about the loudness of emergency sirens. Can you tell us about that?
SPEAKER_09: So we use emergency vehicles as a proxy indicator for how loud the surrounding environment is because it has to pierce through the surrounding din in order to get our attention, right? So the composer and environmentalist R. Marie Schaeffer found that fire engine sirens in 1912 reached about 96 decibels when measured 11 feet away. And then in 1974, it reached 114 decibels at 11 feet away, that same distance. Bianca Bosker, a journalist, recently looked at the sounds of sirens, modern day sirens, and found that they reached up to 123 decibels at about that same distance.
SPEAKER_02: That might not sound like a big increase, 96 to 114 to 123, but that's on a logarithmic scale.
SPEAKER_09: And that means that it's an exponential increase. Every 10 decibels is 10 times the sound pressure to the ears and twice as loud in our experience of hearing it. So from 1912 to 2019, the siren levels have increased six fold. They're six times louder. So that shows you how loud it's become in that surrounding environment that our sirens have to be six times as loud to get our attention.
SPEAKER_02: That's so cool. Okay, so tell everyone again, the name of the book.
SPEAKER_09: It's called Golden, the power of silence in a world of noise written by your big sister, Lee Mars and Justin Zorn, my other brother.
SPEAKER_11: What? Get out.
SPEAKER_02: And with that, the 2022, 2023, many stories are underway. You'll hear about a very, very long escalator, beavers dropping from the sky. You hear from Janet, Miss Jackson, if you're nasty and a visit from the queen. Let's go. So I'm here with producer Chris Perrupe.
SPEAKER_13: Hey Chris. Roman, it is the most wonderful time of the year. It is fantastic. So what do you got for me? So my mini stories about Queen Elizabeth, who died this year back in September. And of course, being Canadian, it's something I heard about a lot. It was something everybody was talking about for a solid month. Right, right.
SPEAKER_02: Because I don't know if I really fully understand the relationship between the queen and Canadians, but so what is she to you exactly? Yeah, she was Canada's head of state, which is a little esoteric, to be honest.
SPEAKER_13: I mean, she's on the money. She wasn't really that present in day to day life. I mean, it used to be different. It used to be, you know, you look at pictures of old hockey games and during the national anthem, all the players are, you know, looking up at a painting of the queen during the national anthem. But mostly for Canadians, you know, especially in the 21st century, the only times we really thought about her were during royal visits, like when she would come to visit Canada. And that's actually what I want to talk about today is one of those. Oh, fantastic. Okay, hit me. Okay, so back in 2002, the queen came by my old workplace, the CBC. And this is before I worked there, I did not get to meet the queen. But I've spoken to a couple of people who were involved. And they all tell me it was pretty intense, like they were preparing for this thing for months in advance.
SPEAKER_05: She only has like, it might be 12 minutes or eight to 12 minutes. But there's been a year of preparation of we need a bathroom built on the on that floor in case the queen has to fart or whatever.
SPEAKER_13: Okay, so this is Luciano Casamiri. He's a comedy writer. And back in 2002, he was working at the CBC. And all this prep is going on. And his boss comes up to him and says, Hey, we need a writer to work on the event. And Luciano was like, well, that's confusing. Like why would you need a comedy writer? I don't plan events. And his boss says, Well, we need somebody to write all the dialogue, all the dialogue
SPEAKER_02: for like a real life visit. What does that mean?
SPEAKER_13: Right. So the boss tells him, okay, everything that is going to be said to the queen during this visit, it must be written out in advance. And we are going to send all the dialogue to Buckingham Palace.
SPEAKER_14: For like approval.
SPEAKER_13: Oh, my goodness. I know. So okay, his job was to write dialogue for 30 people who worked at the CBC. These are regular people that they were going to say to the Queen of England. So what kind of dialogue is he writing? Yeah, Luciano explained a typical back and forth to me and the way he described it like it sounded pretty boilerplate. This is Chris.
SPEAKER_05: He's a writer. He's a podcaster. And he's been with us for 17 years. And it's still Chris. It's really nice to meet you. What exactly is a podcast? And then you would go off script. It's like radio and it's, you know, all us nerds do it. It's crazy. You should do it.
SPEAKER_14: Well, he's got us pegged.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, 100%. So for like a month, Luciano's writing this dialogue for 30 people and he's sending it to Buckingham Palace and they're coming back with these notes. You can't hug her.
SPEAKER_05: You can't get a selfie with her unless she asks for one. One of the protocols that still blows away is they tell you, oh, don't ask if the jewels are real because they're real.
SPEAKER_02: That is hilarious. So this just brings to mind a ton of questions like, is this how it is all the time?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, me too. So many questions. First question, obviously, is everybody who meets her reading off the script, right? How much does she know about this? Is the queen living inside the Truman Show? Like do you remember the movie, The Truman Show? I did.
SPEAKER_02: I saw it originally when it came out.
SPEAKER_11: Good morning. Morning. Good morning. Oh, and in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and good night.
SPEAKER_03: Morning, Truman.
SPEAKER_11: Morning, Spencer.
SPEAKER_02: Jim Carrey's inside of a TV show, but in that case, he doesn't, everyone else knows it, but he doesn't know it. Like she could be the Truman of The Truman Show or she could be in on it. I don't know.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, exactly. So I asked Luciano and he doesn't know, right? He only knows that this one time he had to write dialogue for the queen. So when I heard that the queen died, you know, I first heard the story about 10 years ago and I decided, you know what, I got to get to the bottom of this. Like how common was this for the queen? Excellent. So what did you do? Well, first off, I actually called Buckingham Palace. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: I didn't know you could actually just call it, but yeah, I've heard of it.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, they actually have this public phone number for journalists. So if you have a press inquiry, you can just call and ask Buckingham Palace a question. And the rules are you can't record. So I was not allowed to record that. So I called them up and I'm like, hey, you know, weird question. Did the queen live inside the Truman Show? And they're like, we'll get back to you on that. And they obviously haven't gotten back to me on that. So my next step is I decided I was going to email people who had met the queen on royal visits. So people who were in photos with the queen. So I emailed a bunch and within an hour I actually heard back from somebody and I'm kind of surprised he got back to me. Hello, John Manley speaking.
SPEAKER_12: Oh, hello. This is Chris Berube. Your Honourable John Manley. I'm sorry, what do I actually call you? No, whatever you want.
SPEAKER_13: Okay, so the Honourable John Manley was the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada from 2002 to 2003. And during the royal visit in 2002, he was the Queen's escort when she visited Parliament Hill, which sounds very official. But according to him, the whole experience was, it was kind of a little uninspiring.
SPEAKER_06: I met her at the aircraft. I was in the motorcade, but there's not a lot to do. There's not a lot of opportunity to talk with her to be with her. I mean, you don't travel with the queen. She's in her own vehicle.
SPEAKER_13: So John Manley says, much like Luciano, he was given this long list of things you're not supposed to do when you meet the queen, like you're supposed to bow, you're supposed to call her Your Majesty, stuff like that. So I'm building up to it and obviously, it's weird to ask someone, were you reading off a script? But I built up the courage, I asked him, I told him the whole story about Luciano, and John Manley said, no, he did not have to read off a script when he met the queen.
SPEAKER_06: I never experienced the palace being that involved in the details moment by moment.
SPEAKER_12: Does that sound plausible to you? That like everybody speaking to the queen is reading off a script of some kind?
SPEAKER_06: Well, my guess is that wasn't dictated by the palace. It was probably dictated by the CBC. The queen's coming to our building. Here's how we're going to receive her. Now somebody may have decided they should tell the palace what they plan to do. So my guess is that was the CBC's plan.
SPEAKER_02: So do you have any theories as to why the CBC would do that?
SPEAKER_13: So I asked a few people about this and it seems like the big reason was timing. Like they had less than 15 minutes. They wanted to get to 30 people. It's just a lot more efficient if you script everything out. But also like the CBC is a public institution. I can see them being worried that if somebody goes off the cuff, they offend the queen. That could be a terrible headline. You know, there's lots of reasons this might have happened. But regardless, whatever the reason was that day, everybody was scripted. And so like, how did it go with the CBC?
SPEAKER_02: Like did people actually stick to the script?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah, so Luciano told me, you know, after all the prep, writing the dialogue for 30 people, they actually did a run through where Luciano played the queen and went up and was like, hello, I'm the queen. And the whole visit after all that, it went totally fine. It was 12 minutes long. Luciano actually was able to sneak himself into the line to meet the queen.
SPEAKER_05: And she had like a emerald necklace and tiara. And all I could think of was like, holy, is that real? Like it's like, I guess that's why they have the rule because you're so gobsmacked by the
SPEAKER_02: jewels. Like everyone just, you know, mouth agape says, are those real?
SPEAKER_13: Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, Roman, that's why I never ask you about your recording tiara. I feel like it's kind of an important question.
SPEAKER_02: Well, and you should just always assume it's real.
SPEAKER_14: This is so great. Well, thank you, Chris.
SPEAKER_02: This is the sound of the longest escalator in the United States. It's at Wheaton Station, which is a stop on Washington, D.C.'s metro subway system. The escalator is 230 feet long and it takes about three minutes to travel from top to bottom. 99PI's intern, Olivia Green, lives in D.C. and she's going to tell you about this escalator and some of the lore surrounding the metro station that it's a part of in the length of time it takes for her to ride the escalator.
SPEAKER_14: So here's Olivia.
SPEAKER_00: I'm a regular metro commuter, but standing here is always kind of an eerie experience. In addition to the sounds of the machines and just how deep the tunnel goes, if you look up, the walls are curved, gray, and stark looking. Engineers chose to build this particular station so deep because the rock in this area is especially soft, so they needed to dig the train tunnels in more solid rock further down. The tunnel's visual inspiration came from a team of architects led by a man named Harry Weese back in the 1960s.
SPEAKER_11: So prior to taking on Metro, Weese had not worked on a subway system before.
SPEAKER_00: This is Zachary Schrag, a historian who studied the Washington metro system.
SPEAKER_11: And so as part of this contract, he managed to get a first-class, round-the-world trip, spending a lot of time in Western Europe, but also in the Soviet Union, I believe in Japan, looking at subway systems and sketching them rapidly and trying to think about what parts of them could be adapted to Washington.
SPEAKER_00: Weese was inspired by those train systems from around the world, and he ended up designing these vaulted underground stations with coffered ceilings that look kind of like a waffle. The stations are lit with hidden lights that cast dramatic shadows.
SPEAKER_11: Harry Weese rightly gets tremendous credit for the overall appearance of Metro. It's unforgettable appearance, really. But it's important to understand that he was the leader of a team, and a very crucial member of that team was a lighting designer named William Lamb.
SPEAKER_00: Lamb was responsible for the lights that shine upwards and illuminate the vault, turning it into a kind of underground sky.
SPEAKER_11: I think what Weese was trying to do was to make the stations seem like a little bit of the outdoors underground. So the vault is a bit like the sky, the granite edges on the platforms might resemble the curbs of a sidewalk.
SPEAKER_00: But as I ride the escalator, I can't help but feel like the overall effect of this design isn't always reassuring. It's kind of spooky, and I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way. In fact, the DC Metro system has inspired quite a bit of extraterrestrial lore. You can see hints of it in stations across the city, like small tags of flying saucers on the outsides of stations, and lots of stories, mostly shared on Reddit, of encounters with ghost trains passing by filled with alien creatures. And while it's mostly playful, there is something about the Metro's design that lends itself to being an imaginative space for its passengers. Zachary Schrag hasn't personally seen any aliens on the Metro, but he still kind of gets it.
SPEAKER_11: And so when a train comes in, it casts a shadow up on the vault. So there's this dark shadow coming in and slowing down and then speeding up again as it disappears.
SPEAKER_00: And here we are at the end of the longest escalator in one of the country's most iconic Metro stations.
SPEAKER_14: Thanks, Olivia. This was great.
SPEAKER_02: A few months back, a story went around the internet about a bizarre computer issue from the mid 2000s. It was from a blog post by Microsoft developer Raymond Chen.
SPEAKER_08: So a laptop manufacturer came to the Windows team and reported a serious problem. It turns out when they played a song by one specific artist, and in fact it was one specific song, the laptop crashed.
SPEAKER_02: But things got even weirder when they started testing it out.
SPEAKER_08: They found that this song crashed some of their competitors' laptops also. But the weirdest thing was that if you played this song, it not only crashed the laptop that was playing it, it also crashed a laptop that was sitting next to it that wasn't playing the song at all.
SPEAKER_02: Now, before I play this song, if you have a laptop that's over 15 years old, you might want to cover its ears. This is Janet Jackson's 1989 smash hit Rhythm Nation. Now I found this story fascinating and bizarre, but even after reading the blog post, I still didn't really understand what was going on. So I asked our engineer, Martin Gonzalez, to come explain. Hey, Raymond, what's up? Hey.
SPEAKER_04: What do you have for me? Okay, well, disclaimer up front, I'm a music school dropout, not a computer scientist. I wouldn't have it any other way. So here's my best understanding of what happened. These engineers were trying to figure out how this particular song was crashing all these different computers, and they narrowed it down to the hard drive. So all the laptops use the same model of hard drive. So computer storage has come a long way since then, and solid state drives are in a lot of laptops now. But the basic concept of a hard drive has been around since the 60s. There's a spinning platter with the data and an arm over it that reads and writes the data. So think of like a really tiny little record player inside of a box. Yes.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I remember that you could actually hear the spinning of the drive. It would spin fast when you started up or click on a file. It was a mechanical thing you felt.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, like my 2005 era power book would sound kind of like this. Yeah, totally. And so without getting too into the weeds of the physics, it's spinning fast enough to actually hit a musical note. And the pitch it makes depends on the speed of the hard drive. So the hard drive has all these resonant frequencies that are actually musical notes. And if you played one loud enough, you could actually knock the hard drive physically out of whack. Yeah, you know, like the trope of like an opera singer shattering glass with a high note. Same idea. Okay, got it. Yeah. So when the laptop manufacturer was trying to pinpoint the problem, they figured out that rhythm nation had a frequency in it that was breaking these hard drives that way. And they even narrowed it down to one particular model of hard drive that was used in a bunch of different companies' laptops. But like, why just this one song?
SPEAKER_02: Because I can't imagine it's so, I mean, I love Janet Jackson, but it's so musically innovative that it creates a sound that no other songs have ever created. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so there's two big reasons why only Janet Jackson song has this frequency. The first one is the song is sped up very slightly to make it a little more exciting. This is a really common trick. So here's the speed the song was actually recorded at. And here's the slightly faster final version.
SPEAKER_14: Whoa, I didn't know that at all.
SPEAKER_02: That's amazing. It does work. I like the first one. I was like, oh, this totally is the song I recognize. And I'm like, oh, no, it's the second one that I really recognize. Yeah, that's great.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it makes it like a little more exciting, a little groovier. So this was recorded in the era of tape machines. And you can hear that when you speed the tape up, it also goes up in pitch. So the notes in Rhythm Nation fall between the ones you'd normally hear in a pop hit. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_02: I see. So that's why the song contains frequencies that other songs might not have ever had.
SPEAKER_04: Exactly. And when you first asked me about this, I naturally went, well, what is that frequency? I was doing a little research and this YouTuber, Adam Neely, explained the speed change and he theorized that it moved the bass notes into the frequency range that would just vibrate this platter out of control.
SPEAKER_02: Right, right. And this makes sense to me because, you know, if you're at a show or you're just like walking down a neighborhood and a car is playing loud music, it is the bass that you feel like in your sternum. Like that's what's really rattling you.
SPEAKER_04: Right, right. So here's why I think it might not actually be the bass. Like remember when there was that Mazda virus and people were like, maybe Roman's voice is sooo icy it's breaking the stereo? The amount of bass you would need to break a laptop sitting next to it would be way beyond the capability of like a 2005 era laptop. Like you need some Jamaica-sized subwoofers. And you know, also the bass line moves around a lot. It doesn't hang out on any one sustained frequency for very long. So I looked up this study of laptop hard drive resonant frequencies and saw that there's a couple around 2000 hertz, which is the same whiny high pitch that the hard drive I played earlier was making. So that's why I suspect it might actually be that frequency that was the issue. And so does Rhythm Nation have that frequency buried in there?
SPEAKER_04: Yep, it is not buried. It is loud and clear. It's these couple of sustained piercing synthesizers. I know. Woah. Yeah, and this third sustained one is at right about 2000 hertz, which if that was the resonant frequency of that one particular hard drive, it happens enough in the song where it could totally knock it out of whack. And tiny little laptop speakers can really blast this frequency clearly. So it would be possible if you played it loud enough that it could affect a neighboring hard drive.
SPEAKER_14: That's so cool. Wow.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and there's this other kind of crazy sound in there that might be a factor as well.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that itself sounds like a broken hard drive.
SPEAKER_04: Right, right. And it's a very weird sound. It's like a jankily looped hi-hat kind of thing. It's got a lot of energy around that same 2000 hertz area. So if my theory is right, those two sounds together could really cause a lot of chaos.
SPEAKER_02: So this is an amazing string of coincidences. So this song happened to have these uncommon pitches. They lined up exactly with the frequencies of one specific model of hard drive. So I mean, it's really something. Yeah, and in the blog post, Raymond Chen said there was actually a fairly simple solution.
SPEAKER_04: They programmed in a really sharp EQ cut that just targeted the problem frequency without affecting any of the other ones. And it's way easier to narrowly remove individual high frequencies than bass ones. So here's what it sounds like if I just took 2000 hertz completely out of the song.
SPEAKER_02: Am I supposed to be hearing a difference? Because I really don't.
SPEAKER_04: Well that's exactly the point. The only difference is that that synthesizer part is almost inaudible, but it would be totally impossible to notice the difference through these crappy laptop speakers. Wow, that's such a great solution.
SPEAKER_02: I love it.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and the funny part is Raymond says there's also a possibility this code is just still lurking out there, cutting out frequencies on certain models of laptop for hard drives that aren't used anymore.
SPEAKER_02: That's so funny to me that there's this code that may be still out there in hard drives, this legacy code that is deprecating your speakers just a little bit just to guard us from Janet Jackson. Yeah, the people who put it in there are all long gone, no one dares touch it in case it
SPEAKER_04: breaks something. Just a remnant of the mid-2000s. Yeah, no, it's so funny.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, well this is perfect. Thank you so much for explaining this to me. It is such a fun story. Yeah, no problem. Bye, Raymond. After the break, Operation Beaver Drop. I mean, how could not come back for that? USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides long-term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence, and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day, displaced families struggle to meet basic needs like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many, the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19 formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. UNHCR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large-scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance. Help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life-saving care and hope for a better future. donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org slash donation. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything—your products, content you create, and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses, or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter? Or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades? Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new vlogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So I'm here with Kurt Kohlstedt, digital director and co-author of the 99% Invisible City. Hey Kurt. Hey Roman. What is your mini story this year?
SPEAKER_03: A few years back, an employee of Idaho Fish and Game turned up this long lost archival video filmed in the late 1940s entitled Fur for the Future. Now this film had been misfiled and mislabeled for over half a century and had gained a kind of legendary quality around the office for reasons we'll get into in a bit. Okay, keep going. But basically it documents Idaho's practice of relocating specific mammal species for conservation purposes, including muskrats and martens and beavers. And the film starts off simply enough just explaining conventional relocation projects like this one.
SPEAKER_07: This man is carrying beaver live traps. He is on his way to a beaver pond where he will remove the busy engineers who have become too numerous. When this happens, or when activities of the beaver cause damage to private lands, they are live trapped and moved to distant mountain lakes and streams.
SPEAKER_03: By the 1930s relocating beavers was actually a pretty common practice. And partly this was to get them out of the way of encroaching humans, but it also had become increasingly clear to ecologists that beavers were hugely important to ecosystems. They helped establish and maintain wetlands, reduced erosion, created habitats, and so on.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so it was in part to keep the beavers clear of people, but also in part to preserve the population.
SPEAKER_03: Right. And we're talking about a population in serious crisis at this point. So for context, when colonists first arrived in America, there were hundreds of millions of American beavers. But by the turn of the 20th century, that number had dropped to around 100,000. And so conservationists naturally wanted to seed small populations all over the place to try to build those numbers back up.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so how were these beavers relocated? Well, often they were just caught, created, and taken by trucks somewhere up the road.
SPEAKER_03: But in a lot of cases, the best places to move beavers were really far out there, located in remote stretches of wilderness with few, if any, roads or trails. And so agencies like the Department of Natural Resources tried all kinds of solutions, including strapping boxes of beavers to the backs of horses and mules. And these pack animals were then led by people, sometimes for days, deep into the wilderness with their live cargo. And as you might imagine, none of the animals involved in this liked this.
SPEAKER_02: You mean angry beavers in crates strapped to horses and then no one liked that? Nobody liked that. Nobody liked that. That's fair enough.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And it was so bad, in fact, that some of the beavers that were moved around this way didn't actually survive the journey. I assume they were just essentially scared to death. Oh, that's awful. And of course, the horses are spooked too. It just wasn't a good time. And so finally, in the late 1940s, this employee of Idaho Fish and Game began trying to figure out how to relocate beavers more safely, in this case to a very remote part of the state, which has since come to be known as the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.
SPEAKER_02: The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Okay. That sounds very remote.
SPEAKER_03: Yes. Yes. Very far out there. I think there's a warning in the name. I think it's probably best if you don't wander out there. Right. Totally. Yeah. No return. And it's hard to get beavers out there too, right? And so they had to start thinking outside the proverbial box and work on faster and cheaper and ultimately safer ways to ship dozens of beavers into the middle of nowhere. And in the end, they came up with this pretty wild idea.
SPEAKER_07: On the shores of Payette Lake are crates full of beavers, part of a shipment to be dropped by parachute from an airplane. Okay.
SPEAKER_02: Just so I get this straight. They've got these boxes full of beavers that they're going to drop with parachutes into the wilderness. How did they settle on this as the way to do this? Well, it was a lot of circumstance involved in the decision.
SPEAKER_03: Like, for example, this was the post-war era. And so they were looking around for available materials and realized they could secure some World War II parachutes for pretty cheap at this point, right? They're not being used anymore. And so with those in hand, they then worked on designing a delivery box that would open once it landed to let out the beavers. And they considered some pretty crazy ideas for that too, like using a kind of wood that would be easy for the beavers to chew so that there wouldn't need to be a door. They would just let themselves out. But they realized there could be a problem if they got working on that, you know, before they were dropped from the airplane.
SPEAKER_14: Right. Or if they're dropped and in midair. Right. Well, either way, it's a problem because either they chew their way out while the plane is
SPEAKER_02: flying and then there's beavers wreaking havoc all over your airplane. Or even worse, maybe I don't even know, is that they chew their way while they're floating down and then that would be just a mess. That would be terrible. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, certainly for the beavers, that would be the worst. And so they pretty quickly abandoned that approach. And what they landed on instead was this fairly plain wooden box with a rope and hinge system that would pop the door open automatically on impact.
SPEAKER_07: Into the drop box. Nearly ready for that flight back into the mountain.
SPEAKER_03: And the box has this array of circular air holes. It kind of looks like a giant block of Swiss cheese.
SPEAKER_07: The drop crates are loaded into the airplane. Parachutes are attached to cargo line.
SPEAKER_03: Two to a crate, Noah's Ark style, because the point is to get them to start a colony.
SPEAKER_07: Ten boxes to a load. Twenty beaver ready for the flight to Mountain Meadows.
SPEAKER_03: And then they're off, heading toward the river of no return. The plane makes a careful approach, ready for the drop.
SPEAKER_07: Now into the air and down they swing, down to the ground near a stream or a lake.
SPEAKER_03: And because the planes are flying so low, the chutes open basically right away and then land pretty gently. At which point. The box opens and a most unusual and novel trip ends for Mr. Beaver.
SPEAKER_07: He's on his way now. His nose and his instinct tell him where to find the water. There's room here for a new home.
SPEAKER_02: This is amazing. And so did they know this would work? I mean, how much testing did they do before they just started throwing beavers off of planes?
SPEAKER_03: They did a fair amount of testing, actually. Their primary test candidate was this beaver aptly named Geronimo. And apparently Geronimo got so used to these flights, he started just waiting for the crew to come and pick him up after each landing. And thanks in part to these tests, they determined that the optimal altitude for a drop was around 500 to 800 feet. And this is a bit obvious, but ideally in low wind conditions. Well, yeah, of course you don't want to drop your beavers in high winds.
SPEAKER_02: Definitely not. I mean, but I'm glad to hear that they put a good amount of thought into this, you know?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, no, they really did. And not only into the production of these crates and the kind of design of this experimental relocation process, but also into documenting it all. And so, you know, somebody as part of this program had the brilliant idea of filming this, everything from the box designs to the field test to the actual deployments in 1950. And so this video is really rich, resulting in this thing that got lost for a long time, but is now out in the world and just the world is better for it. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_02: So in the end, how many beavers did they actually relocate in this way?
SPEAKER_03: In the end, they airdropped a total of 76 beavers. And thanks to all of that design and testing and planning, only one beaver perished. 75 of them made it to the ground safe and sound. And so the program was a success. These beavers started multiplying and spreading out and really redeveloping the local ecosystem. But on a grander scale, perhaps the more lasting legacy of this project is all the other animal airlifts that are now normal today, like suspending goats from helicopters to relocate them or dumping tons of fish from the bellies of planes into lakes to repopulate them.
SPEAKER_02: Well, this is cool stuff. And it's fun to imagine a bunch of beavers floating gently down in boxes, seeding the landscape.
SPEAKER_03: And you know, when I was telling somebody this story a couple of days ago, they told me that they were picturing beavers with little parachutes on them. And honestly, it's such a brilliant mental image. And I kind of wish that's what they've done. Obviously, it probably would not have worked as well and would have caused all kinds of problems. But it's so cute. Like beaver paratroopers, like just just like you can imagine them just single file, like hopping out of the plane. Go, go, go. You know, I love it. Yeah. If only.
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_14: So if only. It seems like they landed on the right solution, but it is fun to imagine.
SPEAKER_02: And little beaver paratroopers. It really is. Just taking over the river of no good friends. This is awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kurt. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.
SPEAKER_03: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, Martín González, Kurt Kohlstedt,
SPEAKER_02: and our intern, Olivia Green. This is our last week with us as an intern. She will be missed. Music by our director of sound, Swan Riel. Delaney Hall is the senior editor for us the team includes Vivian Lay, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, LaShama Dawn, Jason De Leon, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Alex Malatko, Jonathan Torrance, Raymond Chen, and my sister, Lee Mars. This is called Golden.
SPEAKER_08: You should buy it.
SPEAKER_02: We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.
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