Josh Clark
Appearances
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
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Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
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Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
So Haney and Abbott, they were like, we're going to do this. And they came upon a great idea that they would visit a toy industry convention, like the big one in Canada. I think it was the Canadian Toy Manufacturers Trade Show. I can't remember what it was called. I looked it up. I couldn't find anything on it. But they went, remember, they were journalists.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
So they went as reporters as if they were on an assignment to do a story on the toy industry, specifically the board game industry. So they used that cover to pick the brains of a bunch of people who were in the board game industry. And one of the, well, they found out a couple of things very quickly. They found out that the board game industry was in a slump.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
They also found out that is a very, very closed industry. Where if you're a newcomer with an idea, just hit the bricks. They're not going to listen to you. That's not how the board game industry works. And they figured this out. So they decided that from going to this conference, they were going to have to do this themselves.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
If they wanted to get this game out there, they couldn't just sell the idea. They had to make the game first. And that's what they set about doing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Right. You know, very similar to that. Not quite as lucrative, but still pretty, pretty well. The people who bought several shares each were set for life basically after the game hit. Oh, yeah. But at the time, Chris Haney told his mom she shouldn't invest.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And this is his idea, his business venture. That's how much he believed in it, I guess. But there's a guy named Michael Wurstlin. And so this iconic, really elegant design for the package, the board itself, cards, all that stuff. It was Michael Wurstlin's work. He was 18 at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And he didn't get a dime up front for it. He did this work for five shares of stock in the company of equity. And, yeah, it was very smart, as we'll see.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's here, too. We're just rolling the dice and moving the pies. I call them pies, too. Yeah, because, I mean, it was like a pie piece. Yeah, I can't think of anything else you would call them. I think some people call them wedges, but they're clearly sickos.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, we should explain because I've never understood it until I started researching this. It's called genus because genus, you know, like in taxonomy, genus is above species. So there's a bunch of different variations of this thing. Another way to interpret or another definition of it, it's general. It's not specific. And so the questions in here were not, they were very general.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
You didn't have to be like a specialist in anything. To play Trivial Pursuit. And if you were, you're kind of handicapped because there was a bunch of other questions that had nothing to do with your specialist or special. Yes. Specialist. Specialism. What is the word I'm looking for? Specialty. There you go.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
I think there's somebody behind me with a hammer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. We were like, well, what about plastic? They're like, keep guessing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, we've said it before and we'll say it again. Like they were the greatest bunch of people that I've ever worked with as a group. Like as a group, they were as good as it comes. It was amazing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, hugely consequential. And this was Christmas 1981. So this is the first Christmas that Trivial Pursuit comes out and makes a big splash because they sold out of those 1,100 games so quickly that by the time the next Christmas rolled around, they'd already sold 100,000 copies in Canada. And that's a lot.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Well, I've seen the guys who invented the game, so.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And it turns out it's even more than you think it is, because at the time, a board game to be a bestseller sold about 10,000 copies. So this little this little independent. Yeah. A very independent game created by a couple of outsiders sold 10 times more than you would expect it to sell as a bestseller in this first year.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. Oh, boy. We should probably tell everybody what we're talking about. First, this is stuff you should know. Second, we're talking about Trivial Pursuit, arguably one of the greatest board games ever created. And we're not just saying that because stuff you should know has its own Trivial Pursuit edition. It's because it legitimately is such a great game.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And I saw one hundred and twenty five today. Oh, really? Yeah, I put $40 in for 1983 in West Egg, and it said $125. It told me $90. Oh, God. Oh, no. All of our inflation calculations are now in question.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
It must be having a bad day. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to us, our beloved West Egg.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Voluptuous, too. So you said heavy. Each game package weighed six pounds because they really pulled out the stops and the materials. And like, yeah, it was cardboard and yeah, it was plastic, but it was really, really well-made, well-manufactured, well-designed cardboard and plastic put together. And again, just the look of it had such an elegant look. It just didn't.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
It did not look like other board games at the time. It was like Sorry or Trouble or something like that, you know, where it's like wacky and there's like a cartoon explosion or something like that. A bunch of kids rolling dice on there. And that was a big deal, too. There was no kid, no person anywhere on the box. The only person who showed up was the poet, the English poet Alexander Pope.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
whose quote, what mighty contests arrive from trivial things, was on the box. So this whole thing is so highbrow that it just doesn't even make sense. And yet that made people want it all the more. It was a brand new thing. It was a revival of board games is what Trivial Pursuit was when it came out.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. And maybe make some extra allowance in the bargain.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
So this was Christmas 1983 that it blew up in the United States. And when it blew up in the U.S., it really just changed everything. Like you said, that first year, they sold 1.3 million games. They sold 20 million the next year in 1984. Wow.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And by January of 1984, right after it started to come out in the United States, the New York Times reported that people in New York were trading cocktail parties for trivial pursuit parties. And I was thinking about it. Yeah, right. Yeah. I don't think there's anything more insufferable than the New York Times reporting on what cool New Yorkers are doing right now.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
This was a great example of that, the 80s version, too.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, I've never seen that movie, but I do know that one of the characters lets her husband, I guess, impregnate, serve as like a surrogate sperm donor to her friend. Yeah. And the only reason I know that is because there is a great Saturday Night Live skit about it. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And I guess did they show the the the wife who is like hanging out downstairs in the movie while they went upstairs or something like that?
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
So in the Saturday Night Live one, like she's just sitting there like reflecting, like drinking tea and like thinking about how great and just beautiful this is. The sound coming from upstairs, they're like really getting into it. And she's getting like more and more concerned and worried. I think I remember that. Yeah, I think it was Jan Hooks who was like the woman downstairs.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
I'll bet. Yeah, looking at the board and pictures of the board and some of the question cards and all that. Like I was just overwhelmed with nostalgia because it was a huge thing in my family to playing Trivial Pursuit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
That became kind of an urban legend. Like your cousin's friend memorized all 6,000 questions. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. And there were some other cute or interesting anecdotes, I guess, that kind of came out around the time. One was Ronald Reagan was reported on having played the game while he was waiting for the election results in 1984. And during the game, he got two questions about himself.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And you can relax, he got them correct, both of them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
One of the facts I saw bandied about in some of the reporting, that was a great Reagan, by the way, was that either Ronald Reagan signed Clark Gable's discharge papers from the Army or Clark Gable signed Ronald Reagan's. Oh, really? It depends on who you ask, yes.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
No, no. Like they just happened to be like, that was just happened to be the luck of the draw as far as the arrangement went.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
No, I think like let's say it was Clark Gable who signed them. He would have maybe been like a higher up to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was getting out. It happened to be Clark Gable rather than Colonel Joe Schmo. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
I love that game. Yeah, for sure. As it turns out. For sure. And what's funny is it indoctrinated us into everything that boomers like. Like it was a really like huge cultural transfer from one generation to the other in that way.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And so at each Christmas 1983, it was like you could not find that thing. Yeah. And 1984, same same deal. Like it was really hard to find. But this time, Selchow and Ryder had like learned their lesson and were like keeping up with supply a lot better than they were at the very beginning of this whole thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And so at the peak of this, I think it really peaked in 84, but that certainly continued on into 1985. Oh, yeah. In the spring of 1985, 15% of households in America had a Trivial Pursuit game in their house. I saw at some point it was 20%, one in five.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, I'm sure it's just a little bit frayed and the parts where it folded and the rest of it's just fine.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Nice. There's a little cocaine in the little folds and tequila stains on some of the spots. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, and Worsland, the guy, the 18-year-old who did all the art, he founded a company called Worsland Group, all one word, that became pretty successful marketers in Toronto. And he used his money from his shares to start that. So it definitely paid off. And then, yeah, like you said, the Haney's and Chris Abbott or Scott Abbott were just mega rich from this.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
I mean, this game made hundreds of millions of dollars in the 80s, like 80s money. God knows what West Egg would convert that to. Yeah. But it was there was a lot of money made off this. And you got to think back like these were just a couple of dudes who had an idea and went with it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Although there were people who were like, yeah, that's questionable whether you had that idea like you kind of referred to earlier. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, and Spiro Agnew from Mad Magazine. Oh, yeah. So we should probably start at the start, and that actually goes long before Trivial Pursuit was created, but not as far back as you would think. Like, in the United States, we did a live episode on game shows. That was really cool, and we talked about this some.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. I mean, imagine being that guy. You're like, you owe me tens of millions of dollars. And then 10 years later, you owe them a million dollars. Like, yeah, this is just some guy. He wasn't some like high flying jet setter who had a bunch of money. I don't know what happened to him.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. But I mean, this is the one guy who said that. And like you said, he didn't come up with witnesses or any kind of supporting evidence. And yeah, it's just not clear what the deal was, whether he was just looking for a payday or if he did get ripped off. But as far as the court's concerned, he definitely did not get ripped off.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Well, if it was like a David and Goliath thing where Goliath won, that would be very sad indeed. Yeah, what about the other one? I can't imagine that. Yeah, we'll move on because this one's getting really sad. The other one is the story of a guy named Fred L. Wirth. And if you are into trivia, Fred Wirth is essentially your messiah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
He is the original trivia dude who's been writing books on trivia, books containing trivia for decades and decades now. I don't know if he's still alive, but if he is, he's probably still going strong. And he apparently had published a three-volume encyclopedia of trivia at some point. This was before Trivia Pursuit was launched. And he did something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
You know how we've talked about mapmakers, like, including, like, a fake town to basically protect their property, see if somebody ripped them off? Yeah. He did something with trivia question. He included a trick question in his stuff.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
But back as far back to the 30s on the radio and then later on TV, quiz shows were like all the rage. And America's had like fascinations with trivia and then got bored with it and then came and found it again and then got bored with it. And back in the 30s, that was one of the peaks where everybody was super into it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. I mean, they said that they used his book for creating these things. They didn't deny that at all. But yeah, I guess it was just their case was based on the idea that a fact's a fact. This guy, it's not a creation of his own.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
He found it. Right. No, I get it. And I imagine Fred Worth probably thought that was like an iron proof defense. Like, yeah, I got these people into putting this question in there and it didn't work out. I'm sure he was astonished when that came along, that ruling.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
But also just before we move on, Chuck, I just want to tell all of our hardcore Colombo fan listeners to just stop your emails right now. We know for a fact that Frank is not, as far as canon goes, Columbo's first name. Canonically, Columbo doesn't have a first name or else his first name is Lieutenant.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
So Frank Columbo just happened to show up in a couple of screenshots that the producers of the show originally never intended anybody to be able to zoom in on. Right.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Sure. Yeah, we got all kinds. Takes all kinds, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Oh, so they're they're now the Brampton Battalion, but they were the North Bay Battalion, right? No, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Okay. I always get North Bay and Brampton confused. I do too. So Olivia dug up a pretty interesting article written by who, Chuck? A guy named Ron Rodriguez. No, it's Juan Rodriguez.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
So, Mr. Rodriguez is what we're going to call him for now, because his name is really hard to say, it turns out. He wrote, I think, a daily quota of 40 trivial pursuit questions a day, obviously, and only about half would get picked. And we kind of went through that, too, because we helped out putting questions together for our version. And they asked for hundreds and hundreds of them.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And you're like, OK, well, we're done. They're like, OK, well, we're going to use about a third of those. So we're going to have to do this again a couple more times. And it was like, there weren't that many facts in all of the episodes of Stuff You Should Know, you guys. But we pulled it out. But I can feel Mr. Rodriguez's pain.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, I should say we weren't actually writing the questions. We were coming up with the source material for the questions from the podcast.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. There's some writer at Hasbro who's like, uh.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And then I think now, over the years, there's been about 300 editions published. Wow. And very early on, they stayed fairly generalist. Although, I mean, let me take that back. They went from genus to silver screen edition, baby boomers edition, and I think a sports edition. But compared to some of the editions that they've come out with now, those are still pretty generalist. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
So another one was Disney. Disney was the first tie in that they had in 1985. And that was still pretty general. It wasn't like Donald Duck facts specifically. Right. Weirdly, here's a piece of trivia for you. The second brand tie in that Trivial Pursuit released a game around was Fame, the TV show and movie. Oh, wow. Like I'm Going to Live Forever had its own Trivial Pursuit edition back in 1993.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
No, in that Slate article that you referred to, the author makes a case. They were basically saying, I think the whole premise was Trivial Pursuit lost its way. And this was written about 10 years ago or something.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And the premise or the thesis this author had was that it went from being general, where basically anybody could come along and try their hand at it, to increasingly more specific, to where now you had to know everything there is to know about Harry Potter. or everything there is to know about the Lord of the Rings, or Friends, or The Nightmare Before Christmas, or that kind of thing.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
And that it just made it more and more narrow. It narrowed the pool, so you have to have more and more additions to appeal to as many people as possible. Whereas if you just made more generalist versions of the game, then you were always going to appeal to the most people possible.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Maybe. Yeah. Because you're not just talking about trivia. You're also poking fun at your own game. Like like you're putting all this effort into something that doesn't really matter in the end.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
That's awesome. I will be very disappointed if the Seinfeld edition doesn't have a question about who invaded Spain in the 900s and the answer is the moops. Right. It's got to. It has to.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Probably. They've come up with some other pretty cool ones, too. One's called X. It's much more adult, edgy questions. I think it's for 18 and up. And it's a stamp game where if you get it wrong, they stamp an X onto your forehead in ink. And once you get five stamps on your forehead, you're out. Interesting. It is interesting. And then the weirdest edition I found, Chuck, was the EMS edition.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Emergency Medical Services came out in 2012. Wow. And it had categories like trauma, illness, anatomy.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. I'd like to see some of those questions. I couldn't find them. And you can also play free online. There's a new version that came out this year called Trivial Pursuit Infinite. It uses generative AI to come up with questions. And if you are a TV watcher, you can watch the new Trivial Pursuit game on the CW that's hosted by the lovable LeVar Burton. Oh, we love LeVar. Everyone loves LeVar.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Can you give an example of how it didn't hold up or a general example?
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
I thought you were going to say it was like deeply sexist or something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
I love these Christmas episodes, the pre-Christmas special, usually Christmas toy episode.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
So happy holidays to all of you out there. And the next time you see us, we're going to be on that ad-free holiday special. It's coming soon. Do you have a listener mail today?
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
I took it seriously, too, for sure. I love Trivial Pursuit, too, but it was definitely in the vein of the people who invented this thing that kind of poke fun at themselves and even at you, the player, for playing it.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Oh, great. Well, since Chuck answered in the affirmative when I asked him if he had a listener mail, it's time for listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Wowee. Yeah, so good to be back in touch with Chris. Yeah, thanks a lot, Chris. Thanks for getting back in touch. I think that that's no longer parasocial. That's just social.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Well, if you want to be like Chris and remind us that we've hung out with you before and also share some pretty great information and correct us for not shouting out an independent version of something we talked about, we love that kind of stuff. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
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Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
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Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
He and another guy named Dan Karlinsky wrote a book simply called Trivia. But he's credited as one of like the early people to spread the whole concept of being quizzed about inconsequential, usually pop culture questions to just show like how much you knew about your childhood. And that Edwin Goodgold thing, two things about him. He went on to become the manager of Sha Na Na.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. Oh, wow. And he wrote in Columbia University's, I guess, their newspaper. He was one of their writers. He wrote that this is that these trivia games that are like the hot new thing on campus are played by young adults who, on the one hand, realize they have misspent their youth. Yet, on the other hand, do not want to let go of it. And that was the whole idea.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
It was about all the stuff that you learned in your childhood from reading Superman comic books and listening to like gangster or seeing like gangster TV shows just from being a kid. That's what the whole thing was based on. And that kind of became a tradition, too, that it was largely stuff in the past. A lot of it was pop culture.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, and I didn't see it anywhere, but I would put some serious money on the idea that Trivial Pursuit's success revived Jeopardy. Yeah, I bet it did. Because it was a huge, huge deal, as we'll see. Yeah, for sure.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
But the whole thing starts all the way back in 1979, in December of 1979, appropriately, because Trivial Pursuit and Christmas, for its first few years of being out, were synonymous with one another, essentially. Yeah. Maybe synonymous isn't the right word, but they were. It was a big deal around Christmas time when it first came out about that.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
For sure. And these two guys, they're two Canadians. I read an article about them that was contemporary to them in the Toronto Star. It said that they come off like the two original hosers. Like even bigger hosers than Bob and Doug McKenzie is what they were saying.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, I think they definitely did. They certainly covered it. One of them, Scott Abbott, was a sports reporter for the Canadian press who I think his focus was on hockey. The other guy was Chris Haney. He was a photo editor at the Montreal Gazette. So these are a couple of late 70s, early 80s journalist dudes who wear mustaches and drink beer during their interviews on the news. And smoke. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, and smoke during them, too. Like, these were the guys who invented Trivial Pursuit.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, that's how I was born. They just realized how many times he bought a Scrabble game and they were like, we could do that. What a story. Yeah, these guys, that was the kind of thing that they would talk about doing is making a game because they realized that other people have made money off of it. Up to this point, their big claim to fame in their circle was having
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
carried out a pyramid scheme with a chain letter that was actually successful in that they made money off of it, and they never got caught for it either. So up to this point, so these were, that was these kind of guys, right? And this particular idea, though, kind of started to take shape really, really quickly. I think it was Chris Abbott or Scott Abbott,
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Who was like, well, how about something with trivia? And remember at the time, like trivia was not a hot item. And also, as we'll see, board games were not a hot item. So these were like two bad ideas that these guys decided to put together and accidentally became a success or not accidentally. It ended up becoming a success. But it was like they figured it out really quickly, didn't they?
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yes. Well put. I am not one for boasting typically, but I will say that I once confirmed won a game doing all the things you just said in 20 minutes. Wow. By yourself? Yeah. No, no, no, not by myself. I was playing a dude at work at the liquor store. No, no, no.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
I mean, I guess if you were really honest, you could play by yourself, you know? You could sit around and read cards.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
That's not honest. I'm saying you could roll, you could move, you could ask yourself questions, answer them, and if you got it wrong. Yeah, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
No, good try, Chuck. Right. Great guess. You kind of ruined my 20-minute anecdote, frankly.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, yeah. It could take a while, especially if you just had a lot of people who, yeah, didn't know trivia. But yeah, it would usually take, yeah, 45 minutes, an hour, depending on how fast everybody was moving. Usually it took longer because the whole point was almost every question and answer would like generate a quick conversation or usually short conversation, sometimes longer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Right. Exactly to that, too. But that was the point. And that's one of the reasons it became so popular is like it was really easy to have a party centered on trivial pursuits.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, that was typically how it was done. So you could argue and be mad at one another when the other one insisted on the wrong answer.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah, that was always my weak one, too. And that was always the one that would get picked for me if I ever made it to the middle.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Yeah. My worst was definitely sports and leisure. And I would, yeah, geography was probably second.
Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
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Stuff You Should Know
The Trivial Pursuit Trivia Edition
Oh, OK. Well, if that's the end of the intro, then, Chuck, I think we have to put an ad break in here.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
That was the state of the art at the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah. Toledo has something called the Canal Experience or Historic Canal Experience. There's some canals running through part of the town from the early 19th century that you can walk along and you're like, wow, this is an old donkey path, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, I remember when he was at the mic asking the question or making the suggestion, he kept moving around because he still had his sea legs.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, but still, like, it was working. That was the key.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Right. And you can bet that every donkey in Scotland was like, whew, thank God they invented these things, right? Yeah, probably. So there was also, as we talked about, one of the big problems with sailboats as shipping vessels was that they had trouble getting in and out of harbors. They had trouble navigating. They had to wait for the wind.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So very quickly, it seemed kind of obvious that you could, if you could get one of these boats into port, into harbor, which you could use a tugboat for, you could also pull it up river. It wouldn't have to navigate any longer because you could just pull it by a helper vessel into some of the cities that were not located on the coast, but they were located on a river.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
One example I can think of is London and the Thames.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So, yeah, hopefully we'll do Thomas proud because we know a little bit about tugboats now after researching them for a little while. Big shout out to our friend Dave Ruse for helping us with this. You could do worse than going to check out Ruse's podcast, Bible Time Machine. And that has nothing to do with tugboats. But let's talk about that.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So, like I said, it was in Scotland that tugboats got their name back in 1817 in Dumberton. I think I'm saying that right.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Okay. Well, we'll go with one of those two. How about that? Sure. Somebody built a steamship, a tugboat. They named tug. They weren't called tugboats until this time. And I guess that name stuck because it also makes sense practically. You're tugging a boat behind you. So that from henceforth on, they were known as tugboats.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah. Remember that Simpsons where Lenny goes little kid Lenny's like, oh, I just logged on to my Internet because he pooped his pants out of he pooped his bathing suit with the little Internet. So he said he logged on to his Internet. Oh, that's so good.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Right. And then the owners were like, well, we don't go on these boats. We just own them. So sure. I mean, that's fine. They can blow up. But yes, they were viewed skeptically, I think. Right. Like it was it was not just a done deal that these things were like going to save the industry or shipping.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
But there was a proving ground. What ended up being a proving ground on the Tyne River that connected Newcastle to the North Sea. They were facing a problem, right? They had these barges that were called colliers, and they were sailboats, but they were coal movers because Newcastle was a huge coal producer. And these colliers could do a lot of damage because they were hard to navigate.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
They had all the same problems that any sailing vessel had. So there was a guy named Joseph Price who in 1818 was like, I think I've got a solution to this. I'm going to buy some of these steamships that they're now being called tugboats. And I'm going to have them pull these colliers, these coal ships up and down the Tyne. And I think it's going to revolutionize shipping.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And Joseph Price was right on the money. The price was right.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Right. And these new towns that were getting coal for the first time were able to give up having to burn dried donkey poop that they scraped up off the donkey trails along the canals. It was huge for them.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So, yeah, Joseph Price proved to the world, like, no, these things are extraordinarily valuable, so much so that they're going to completely change shipping from this point on. And they definitely have. And they're still just as useful as ever. And they made a name for themselves so much that when the Royal Navy purchased their first steamships of any kind, they were tugboats.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
The Comet and the Monkey. Comet and Monkey. And I can't decide whether it's a band name or a cartoon name.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So, yeah, they definitely proved their worth pretty early on. I mean, this is 1818, and the first ones were used shortly before that, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Sure. That's where they're most famous.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
It's the exact same thing because those two paddle wheels were able to be moved independent of one another. And once you can do that, yes, you just start doing donuts to show off in the harbor, you know? Yeah. So the 19th century came and went and those paddle wheel tugs were replaced with screw propellers, which is another term for a propeller like you see on a ship.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Like that's just called a screw propeller. So like any ship, they were propelled by propellers. And then diesel engines came along, and that's when everything really kind of changed. Because when you have a diesel engine, you can get some amazing horsepower out of it, way more than steam. It's also less dangerous. I think we talked about all this in our Rudolph diesel episode.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And that's when the tugboats became, started to become the tugboats that we think of today. Okay.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So you mentioned tugboat strike, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Oh, well, there's a tugboat strike we have to talk about that really kind of demonstrates how important tugboats made themselves over the years. In New York Harbor in 1946, every single tugboat operator, there were 300 of them in the harbor at the time. They all went on strike.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Nope, not that far. Oh, 2020. But one of the things that tugboats are that makes them like the workhorses of the sea, as you could put it, is that they have really impressive power to tonnage ratios. Yeah. So the size of the tugboat, the actual weight the tugboat weighs, compared to the amount of power output its engines can create, usually in horsepower, is really lopsided. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And this was very quickly, it became evident how essential tugboats were for everything in New York, because there was coal coming from Lake Erie through the Erie Canal to the Hudson down to the harbor. And it would be spread all throughout Manhattan and all throughout New York. Food shipments came in by barge. Garbage went out by barge. New York operated on barges.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And if you're using barges, you need a tugboat to tow or push those barges. So when the tugboat stopped working, New York stopped working. And within 12 days, the tugboat operators got their demands fulfilled. Wow. Which turns out to have just been nicer hats from what I read.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Right. I said float, by the way, but gloat works even better.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah. They were gloating while they were floating. Oh, okay. So there were some things that changed. Stuff you would not at all connect to why tugboats became less vital over the years. Still incredibly important. And you can make a case that world shipping would essentially just stop if tugboats stopped.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So they're really important, but just not in exactly the same ways as they were before, because we started getting our energy over things like pipelines. We started using things that weren't coal. Trucking and shipping containers became a much bigger thing than, say, barges over the years. So with each of those things, the tugboat became... Less and less able to do what it did in 1946.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And yet it's still so vital that you just can't do anything without them.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I saw that there's one called the E-Wolf, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
It is awesome, and let's talk about why. Here's why, Chuck. Remember we said that these things generate crazy amounts of horsepower? Yes. Some harbor tugs are ocean-going tugs. generate 27,000 plus horsepower. Yeah. It's like having 27,000 horses just running at the back of this thing, like kicking their legs all at once. Right. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And to do that, you, um, use a lot of fuel, a ton of diesel fuel. Um, Some of these boats can carry way more than they need in a day, like 30,000 gallons of diesel. But I saw that the average harbor tug, which is working almost constantly, will use about 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day. And that is a lot of fuel to use, right? So it's using this non-renewable resource.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
It's also putting out crazy amounts of diesel emissions.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And that's just one tugboat using 3000 gallons of diesel a day.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
The reason also I was like, why do they carry so much more than they need? Because doesn't that make the tugboat heavier and therefore you have to use more fuel to get more horsepower out of it?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And the reason that I came up with that I found was that time is of such value in a harbor at a port that it's more costly to stop what you're doing and go refuel than it is to carry around all that extra fuel. They have those capacities so that they take way longer in between refuelings. That's the point. That's how crazy important time is in ports. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
so that these fairly comparatively light boats, compared to the horsepower they create, can pull, pull, pull. And they can push, push, push, and they can do all sorts of amazing stuff, which is why they can move these enormous, huge oil tankers and shipping container ships with just the mighty might of their little hearts. You'd think I would have practiced something like that.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I also read about something called a tractor tug, which has basically two outboard motors, like those two side paddle wheels. And so you can move them independently. And they have a lot of power, too, just not as much as the azimuth, I think. But they're controlled by two joysticks. So it's hard enough. Just think about using one. Imagine using two to move a tugboat around like a huge ship.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
that you're trying not to knock into other ships. It's just, I can't, it's got to be one of the more stressful jobs around piling a tugboat, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
uh that is gumming up the works um you're gonna send a tugboat in there to get those things out of there so we yeah we talked about that um the ship the ever given which uh blocked the suez canal for i think weeks which is a huge dent in global shipping right we talked about that in detail and i could not for the life of me remember what episode that was in do you
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
If we did, we didn't name it that.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I don't remember doing any canal episode.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I think we just earlier talking about donkey paths and stuff did our canal episode. Hmm. Wait, wait, wait. I guess that's possible. We might have done one that included like the Panama Canal. Yes, I'll bet it was in the Panama Canal episode. I think we did that one.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
We did. A little different, but yeah. Also, by the way, the Navy just unveiled a whole new group of search and rescue ships. They're called Navajo-class tugboats, and they're pretty cool looking.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, they're called FIFIs. Cute. Either FIFI or FIFI. I've only seen it spelled out.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
FIFI would be weird. Yeah, FIFI is not weird in the sea. Well, it's...
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Let's try this out. Arrgh, look at that Fifi. Arrgh, look at that Fifi. I think Fifi wins the day. OK. Yeah. So what else?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Right. A tugboat just goes in between two people struggling to find something to talk about. And now all of a sudden they can talk about the tugboat that just went in between.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
There's also anchor handling. There's actually special tugboats called anchor handling tugs, appropriately enough. And the anchors they're talking about are oil platform tankers. And these are ocean-going tugs, the ones that carry 100,000 gallons of diesel fuel because they're out to sea for indefinite periods of time. And the anchors that they're pulling around are massive.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
They're like keeping oil rigs out in the open ocean from floating away. So obviously they're really big anchors. But it's hard to get across how big they are unless you go look up photos of them. Try to find a photo of a human being standing or working near an oil rig anchor. And it'll really kind of drive home what these tugboats are pulling around. Makes it even more impressive. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, I was reading an LA Times article about, remember the shipping shutdown, the cargo container backup in LA and Long Beach at the pandemic that just killed everything. The writer went out on a tugboat and he was just kind of chronicling like a morning in the life of this tugboat.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And they were talking about how recently two deckhands, one had been injured and one had been killed by a line tightening and pressing them up against the side of the tugboat. So- Oh, like Jaws. Yeah, exactly. But killed them. Yeah. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So it was a I mean, you can just imagine like this is a three inch thick rope that just suddenly is, you know, thousands of kilonewtons pressing you against a metal, a big piece of metal, which is the inside of the ship. That's not it. It's not the place that you want to be. So it is being a deckhand, which is one of the jobs on the tugboat, is very dangerous. And as we'll see later.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Kind of the job you want to work your way up out of, I think.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
That is too short. I mean, you're like, oh, six hour shift. That's not bad. But then you have to eat and sleep in the next six hours. That's yeah. I don't know why they do it like that. It seems like you would wear your crew out really fast with that schedule.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
No, I think even eight hours, that extra two hours to unwind and eat and then get six hours sleep is adequate. Because, I mean, seriously, you think about it, you're like you're not doing six hours off and then you just fall over and sleep where you were just standing while you were working.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Now that you're off the clock, you're going to like unwind, you got to eat, you're going to just do whatever, shave, shower. And then you're going to get what, three and a half, four hours sleep if you're lucky, maybe five. I think that's a little whack, as they say.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, and I'm sure they're significant others like, oh, you're awake again, huh?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I don't know, man. It's a hard life. I'm sure Thomas can tell us.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, that one's fine. But I like the articulated tug barge or ATB. The sexiest link. It's an improved version of this, right? So the barge and the tugboat have like a notch and a corresponding like pointy part.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
You put them together and put a pin through the two, and now you've got like one single machine, but the tugboat can still maneuver like fishtail and move that barge in all sorts of crazy hard angles, right? And I was like, why don't you just mechanize or motorize the barge And apparently, they use this mostly for oil tank, oil shipping. And you just get more oil out of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And the barges are cheaper because they don't have any self-propulsion. So it's kind of like a shipping container in a truck. Like the tractor is different than the trailer. And so you can hook all sorts of different trailers up to the same tractor time and time again, rather than just having to pilot that trailer all the time.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
It made more sense to me when I was researching it than it is now that I'm explaining it.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, I think the expense, the added expense, I think they're cheaper because it's just a barge that is just basically a floating container that a tug can hook onto. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So I think it kind of, from what I understand, it bears a bit of a resemblance to like the shipping, like trucking industry, where somebody needs a tow or an escort or something like that in or out of the harbor. And you just contract with somebody then. I don't know if like you contract with one specific shipping company or you just kind of go back and forth depending on who needs what when.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Or it's a mixture of both. I'm not sure. But I know that back in the day, it used to be whoever got there first. So as a ship was coming in, tugboats would race out to meet them. And whoever got there first had that contract right there because they were the first ones on the scene. And they were the ones who were going to pull the ship into its berth.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah. No, I don't think it's like that for sure. But I read another article. The AP did an article on the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore last year, earlier this year. You remember when that ship ran into the bridge and the bridge collapsed in Baltimore?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So there was like heavy criticism because that ship wasn't being escorted by a tugboat. And everybody's like, where was the tugboat? Why was this allowed to happen? And the AP was explaining, that's just not how it works. Like the tugboat pulls the ship out of its berth and kind of gets it on its way. And then it goes back and attaches to another ship.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
It's making too much sense. I've never considered myself the tugboat of the lake. Can I be doing this with my teeth? Can I be holding the rope with my teeth? Because that'd be much cooler.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And then that ship has to find its way out of harbor, including navigating under and next to bridges and other stuff, right? And the reason why is money. It costs an extra 10 grand to pay a tugboat to pull you safely out into a harbor so you can make way. And the shipping industry holds the cards now.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Because if you start charging more at a port or you start, say, requiring ships to have a tugboat all the way out into the harbor, It's going to cost more money. And if another port nearby doesn't force you to do that, it's going to be less.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And so everybody's going to go to that port and all of your dock workers are going to lose their jobs and you're not going to get reelected as mayor of Baltimore. You see what I'm saying? Wow. Yeah. It's crazy how weirdly entrenched it is. And again, it's just so discouraging.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
It seems like every episode we talk about, you can trace it back to some group of people who are cutting corners because of money. And then something bad happens and nobody does anything about it. I'm so sick of it.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, I'm all right now. Let me just apologize to Thomas. Sorry, Thomas.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
There's some other stuff you can do too, but that's probably the best. Okay. Good. I'd like to do the best thing. Good. You got anything more on tugboats, Charles?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I was reading like a kid's maritime museum website about tugboats and they were trying to explain why everyone loves tugboats because it's true. Like there's nobody who doesn't like tugboats, especially if you have nothing to do with the industry, right? You're just watching them from afar. And they explained that they're very powerful and they're small, but they're also very helpful.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
We'll go do some third-league trials for it and figure out the one right way to pull a pontoon in a lake.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And I think they kind of nailed it on the head.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Okay. So Chuck gets it, and he mentioned beards twice in quick succession, which of course unlocks listener mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Oh, gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah. I got it now.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Edward Scissorhands? Sleepy Hollow?
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
He's got a whole. I disagree. Sleepy Hall is one of my all time favorite movies. That's one of those ones I can watch like any time.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I understand what you're saying. I mean, the 1990 Batman, not the best. I would say that that's not a great movie, too, for sure.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I understand what you're saying. Fair enough.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yes, I think Catherine O'Hara did great.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I keep forgetting to recommend a movie to you that I'll see it and remember how great it was. And then I forget to tell you about it again. It's called A Dark Song. Okay. It's about a woman who seeks revenge. So she finds an occultist to help her conjure demons to enact revenge.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I don't know how I found that one. I really don't remember. But it's on Amazon Prime, if I'm not mistaken. And it sounds like a hokey premise, but the research that the writers did is so dead on that it's entirely possible there's people out there who believe that you can do this exact thing that they're doing and conjure this exact demon. It's nuts. It's really a good movie. It's pretty rough.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I would not watch it with the kids. Um, but it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very good art house horror film.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
It's a little, there's a part in there that she should not see.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yep. Uh, did you ever read the, um, listener mail?
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I said that. You said something in quick succession, and you unlocked listener mail. Jerry already ran the chime.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I did tell you, and you didn't jump. And everything broke down as if the tugboat stopped tugging.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
No. I'm going to lash you to the tugboats.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Oh, I know where this one's going.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
They do. And I've seen that often converted to tons. And it's the same thing. The more kilonewtons you have or the more tons you have, the more pulling power, towing power, pushing power that tugboat has. So there's this one boat that Dave found called the Island Victory. At least one article called it the most powerful boat in the world.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
That poor kid. I don't remember what island he was on.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Great. And it was Fex, Subways of Your Mind. And who wrote in? Because, I mean, a million people wrote in. I don't think we've ever got more email about the same thing in less time than on this one. It was astounding. It was like when those post office workers come in at the end of Miracle on 34th Street and start dumping Santa letters onto the judge's bench. Right.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
It was like that, but with emails about the most mysterious song on the internet.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Oh, dude, we'll be getting them for years, Chuck. We got an email from somebody this week, and the subject line was, Chuck predicted Sharknado. That is an old, old classic.
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Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Thanks a lot, Michael. Very much appreciated. Thanks to everybody who wrote in. We don't mean to sound ungrateful. We're just joshing around.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yep, thank you. Yeah, keep us informed as best you can all the time. And since I said that, and you want to be like Michael, I should tell you that you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
I saw other articles that named some other shipping container vessel. But this tugboat, say it's probably the most powerful tugboat around. The Island Victory has a bollard pull of 4,680 kilonewtons, which converts to 477 tons. A typical harbor tug, which is nothing to sneeze at, has a bollard pull between 500 and 600 kilonewtons. 600 kilonewtons converts to 61 tons.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So this is an enormously powerful boat. And that's the whole point. They're not fast. They aren't pretty. They're cute in a really weird way. But they can generate so much power that they can push a shipping container vessel around. More importantly, if you have a really high bollard pull, the reason that this rating is even there is to find out which tug you can connect to which vessel.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Because if a vessel is starting to go in the wrong direction and it's about to crash into, say, a bridge… Um, the tugboat has to be able to go from zero, not moving at all in the water to pulling that boat in the opposite direction away from that bridge in a moment's notice. And it has to have that much power. And they do, they do.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah, it's just what they use, like you said, when they purposely or accidentally bump up against a larger ship. You can't just have the tugboat, like, crack up. So you have a fender. They're built to bump. They are built to bump. And some tugboats aren't necessarily built with a beard. They'll have tires strung along the side to use as a bumper as well.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Okay, fine. So one other thing that you're going to find about tugboats that we'll talk about more in depth later is that they're extremely nimble. They're agile. They can move in a different direction very quickly.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And that is a really important thing, too, because one of the big jobs that the tugboat plays in, say, like a shipping lane, like a port, is to help ships avoid other ships coming in or out. So they have to be able to move, not just pull a ship very easily, but they have to be able to move quickly and move that ship out of the way of, say, like another ship.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
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Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too for the present moment. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Every holiday season starts with the best of intentions. Bake that homemade pie. Get all your holiday shopping done early. But then, life gets in the way. But don't feel bad. It happens to everyone. And luckily, you've got DoorDash.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yep, and now through the 24th, DoorDash has big deals running for the holidays from Best Buy, Ulta Beauty, Wingstop, Aldi, and more. You can save money and the holidays all with DoorDash. Whether you tell people is up to you.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
That's right. There was another problem, too, even for a ship that was nimble enough to kind of navigate its way into port, say like the mouth of a river in a harbor or something, right? Once it got in there, it had to wait for the wind to whip up again to set sail once more. And this was not something that happened every hour on the hour, even twice a day like the tide.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Sometimes you would have to wait for days or weeks for the right wind to come up that you could catch and ship back out to sea again. Also not at all efficient. So there was like a real need for tugboats to be invented. But what's nuts is tugboats were invented and then ignored for decades.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
And then finally, the guy who invented them, who was just totally made fun of, as we'll see, for inventing tugboats, was vindicated. But I think he was dead already.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yes, I do. It was Thomas because this episode is tugboats for Thomas.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
Yeah. Not only that, the people in his hometown of Gloucester, they wrote a song about him. They wrote a song. They wrote like they thought this guy was so terrible and just such a lousy inventor that there was a song. I'm guessing people would sing in pubs.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
About him specifically, his name's in the song. Imagine sitting there nursing like you're mead while everybody around you is singing that song about you. You're not going to try? Whip up a melody. Oh, oh. Jonathan Holes with his patent skulls invented a machine to go against the wind and stream. You should finish.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
You went with the Gilbert and Sullivan version.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
They're like, get out of Gloucester.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
So, yeah, Hulls was definitely ahead of his time, but it would be 60 years before the first steam powered tugboats. His invention were actually put into good use and they were deployed in Scotland and Yeah. And as we'll see, actually, Scotland was where the tugboat got its name. At the time, I'm not sure what they called them. Maybe still helper vessels. I don't know.
Stuff You Should Know
Tugboats: Pushing Their Way Around Since 1803
But one of the first things they did was to start pulling cargo along canals. Because at the time, if you wanted to move cargo easily over land, you did it over water that was cut into land. And you would do it with a donkey pulling your cargo along the shore. The donkey was walking on the shore with the line going from the donkey. to a little barge that was being pulled down a water-filled canal.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Right, in front of Frances Perkins. She didn't jump to her death. No, no, no. So she's literally witnessing one of the turning points in history. As it happens, seeing women, teenage girls jump out of the ninth floor of this building because it's on fire. And not only is she witnessing a fire that will change history, she is one of the people that will force history to change because of this fire.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
The... the fate or the destiny that put her a block away from this fire when it happened is... It's just astounding to me that she was there because she went on to be one of the people who said, this is never going to happen again. And under her watch... It basically didn't. It was the worst that it ever got.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And it never got that bad again because of the safeguards she forced the state and then later on other states and the federal government to adopt.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, we need to do an entire episode on that. At the very least, just to shame the two owners who were just totally responsible for all those deaths.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, it was. But at the same time, those guys were particularly nasty examples of the system. They weren't average by any means from what I understand. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I know. I'm not a big fan anyway.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
She did. She was appointed to the New York Committee on Safety under the recommendation of Teddy Roosevelt, which says a lot because that means she'd already made a name for herself in her 20s in New York City politics to the point where Teddy Roosevelt would say, like, you really kind of need this woman on there.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And then let's not forget the fact that the operative word here was woman as far as society was concerned at the time. And this legislation that she got passed through in New York or that she helped get passed through in New York, like I was saying, it became a model for other states and then eventually the federal fire codes. Right. because of this, largely because of her efforts.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And she made a name for herself. She'd already made a name for herself, but this really kind of helped cement her name. And she started working closely with a guy named Alfred E. Smith, who was an assemblyman from New York. But she won his respect pretty easily. I think they worked on this New York Committee on Safety together. And so when he became governor, she kind of rose along with him.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
She was appointed by him to New York State's Industrial Commission, which made her the first woman to be appointed to a state government position in the country. And with her $8,000 salary, she was the highest paid woman to hold any office in the United States at the time. So she became important pretty quick. But she became important, everybody. This is really important to remember.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
By hard work and heart, which is just a wonderful combination. Like amazing things happen from people who have that combination.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Totally agree. Had never heard her name before. Had never even known she existed. But, yeah, the more you dig into her, the more you're just like, it was almost a crime that this woman was virtually written out of the history books.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And not just works harder. She was known as a policy expert about worker safety and wage justice by this time, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
No, we're not kidding at all, Chuck.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So like you were saying, she first kind of rose to prominence with Alfred E. Smith, who, from what I could tell, I didn't get to research him very much. But the stuff that I ran across the references to him, he seemed like a genuine, like, true believer, crusader in justice, social justice as well. So they were like a good pair. And he made it as far as New York governor.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
He ran for president and didn't win. And when he didn't win, he, I guess, lost the governorship and was succeeded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so Roosevelt came into power in New York as the governor of New York. And Francis Perkins was already there and had already built up a reputation. And Roosevelt recognized... the kind of person she was pretty quickly.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Because a lot of people are, you know, you can give a lot of credit or a lot of vilification to Roosevelt for his New Deal policies, depending on your political stripes. But if you, you know, if you admire him for it, as I think most people should, he... It wasn't just him.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
One of his great talents was to recognize talent in others and to bring those people together and then enact policies based on their expertise and their recommendations. And one of those people was Francis Perkins, starting when he was governor of New York and then also when he became president, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
They really did. I mean, like she was the first cabinet, first woman to serve as a cabinet member. I mean, women had just gotten the right to vote about 13, 12 or 13 years before.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I know. Isn't that crazy? And yet she held public appointed offices and still couldn't vote.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Right, exactly, yeah. So it was a really big deal that FDR appointed a woman to a cabinet position, and an important cabinet position, too. I mean, like, it's not like there's any necessarily unimportant cabinet positions, but Secretary of Labor is pretty big. Yeah, especially then. Yeah, especially then, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And especially, you know, at a time when this emerging superpower took a huge punch in the face and got knocked on its butt like the rest of the world by the Great Depression. This was important stuff that they were trying to figure out on the fly. But he chose a really great person who wasn't really accepted at first, not just by the public, but by virtually anybody.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
The labor unions weren't happy she was there because she had a background in social work and policy, not labor.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yes, but she eventually won them over just by virtue of what she did. Like the labor movement was on the ropes at the time. The progressive era ran from... I think 1890 to about 1920. So by the time 1929, 1930 comes around, it's dying off the labor movement. But under her leadership as the Department of Labor secretary, she revived it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And by the time she either died or left office, I can't remember, I think a third of all Americans were members of unions, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
That's right. And every single person who's getting a check as measly as they've gotten lately is getting one because of this system that Frances Perkins set up. And what's really, I think, worth noting, too, is this is exactly the kind of situation that she got this passed for, that she helped design this for. Totally. Totally.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
It did, and it also helped reinforce and build out America's infrastructure too because they had all this labor that the government was putting to work doing it, right?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So she was in charge of overseeing that. And one of the other, I guess the next big thing, I think it was before Social Security, was something called the Wagner Act.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
The Wagner-Wagner Act, depending on your persuasion. It gave workers the right to unionize and the right to collectively bargain. And one of her roles was to go out and promote this stuff, not just to, you know, other members of the government or members of industry, but to individual Americans, too.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So in 1933 alone, she gave 100 different policy speeches in just that one year on New Deal projects, promoting them. And one of the speeches she gave, I don't know if it was in that year or not, but she went to Homestead, Pennsylvania, right across the river from Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Steel was headquartered.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And she was going to inform these workers about their newly won rights through the Wagner Act. And Carnegie Steel and the local government would not give her any place to hold this meeting. They wouldn't give the secretary of labor a place to talk to voters. So she, and there's apparently a famous picture of her leading all of these steel workers on foot to a post office.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
She's like, oh, I can think of a place where I can assemble legally, and that is the post office. So she gave her speech on the grounds of the Homestead Post Office to thousands of steel workers, informing them that they could legally unionize and bargain collectively for workers' rights.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, mostly the second one.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Okay, Chuck, so we were saying at the outset that if you got an unemployment check, thank Frances Perkins. Or if you ever get an unemployment check, if you even like the idea of the fact that an unemployment insurance policy is out there for you in case you ever need it, thank Frances Perkins.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And the reason you thank Frances Perkins is because she basically oversaw the creation of the legislation that became the Social Security Act of 1935. And when I say oversaw the creation of that legislation, like she, that was it. She was the head of this cabinet level committee that was assigned the task of coming up with a social insurance policy, a social safety net for the country.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And they came up with this within six months successfully. this full policy report. And within two days of delivering the report, FDR turned around and unveiled the Social Security program idea to Congress. And another six months or so later, maybe eight, it passed into law.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I agree. I think we have, man. I'm almost positive. Yeah, it really rings a bell.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Because there's a quote, I can't remember exactly what a quote was, but to paraphrase it, it's basically like we need to always keep our eye on the long term and plan for the worst case scenario. While, yes, there's a lot of immediate needs that we need, but there's always going to be something that comes down the road. And if we have planned for it, we're way better off.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah. While we're reading these emails, while we're having to sweep up the studio. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And I feel like it really shows in the podcast.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Self-deprecation, Chuck. That's our specialty. That's right. That's right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Right. That's the brilliance of the whole thing is it's a transfer payment system to where you are directly funding the people who have retired now. But it's on the premise that people behind you are going to fund into this to support you later on. Right. It's beautiful. It's a genius idea.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And apparently FDR sent her, Frances Perkins, to study the British system of unemployment insurance even before he was president, back when he was governor of New York. And he became the first public official to commit to developing an unemployment insurance plan. And it was at the persistent behest of Frances Perkins that he did that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Well, yeah, that's the thing. A lot of people say, like, if it weren't for her, no joke, this stuff probably wouldn't exist. Certainly not in the form that it does now. And that's not necessarily fair. There are, like, there were programs that had, like, Social Security-type programs among the states, including unemployment programs, but they were ad hoc. They were patchwork.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Just imagine how disastrous it would be on top of the current disaster if there wasn't such a thing as unemployment insurance. And this is how we found out that we really kind of need it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Most states didn't have them. And it's kind of the... the beauty of the federal program is they're basically like, okay, states do this, but we're going to oversee it and organize it and help fund it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yes, and that was like her whole thing. Like we do need to make sure that people get peanut butter sandwiches because their families are going to starve. Like, yes, these immediate needs have to be met, but we also simultaneously have to plan for the future too. It was just this persistent drum that she beat. Like we're going to continue to have problems. Let's plan for them now.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Like the level of visionariness – In this person was, you just don't see that. I can't think of too many other people who've come and gone in the federal government, in the United States at least, that had that level of, I guess, awareness of looking down the line that far rather than just, you know, four years out or to the next election. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And you can make the case, Chuck, that she is the woman who gave America's kids the concept of a childhood.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah. So if you have gotten your unemployment insurance check and it has helped you, thank Francis Perkins somehow.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
At the very least, she extended it by many, many years.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I've got another amazing fact about her. She, I believe, is the first cabinet member who Congress ever sought to impeach. Oh, really? Yes. I'm almost positive that's correct. I know that they did try to impeach her and they failed in the impeachment, not just the conviction. They couldn't get enough support for articles of impeachment.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
But it was because she refused to deport an Australian longshoreman who'd successfully organized a general strike in San Francisco. And the anti-communist elements in Congress suspected that this guy was a communist and wanted him out. And she said, you know, I don't think very highly of this guy. I don't really agree with a lot of what he stands for.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
But I don't think that you have really good evidence. And I think this is all retaliation for the strike you organized. So I'm not going to deport him. And you might say, well, what did this lady have to do with deporting? Apparently, back in the day, the immigration system the power of immigration or control of immigration was up to the Department of Labor.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So the Secretary of Labor was also in charge of immigration, which really kind of gives you an idea of where America's immigration policies, you know, where their mind was at.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
That it was about importing, you know, good workers or also controlling who came in to keep competition for jobs down.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So she was in charge of immigration, which, as we'll see later on, she used to great effect.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, I think so. Okay. That's a good idea. It's the kid with the last question in Q&A.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yeah, which is kind of a bummer. Some people might say it's a bummer. Some people might say good. Sure. She also played drums for Dokken for a brief time. For a little bit. She did it all. And all while wearing a frumpy tricornered hat. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yes, there are a couple of other things to throw in too. Both her husband and her daughter suffered from what we today call bipolar disorder. She cared for them their entire lives. That little thing. Yeah, right.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
No, while she's doing all this other stuff, she made sure that they were cared for, took care of them directly herself. And one of the other things I think is worth mentioning, too, that before FDR became president, while she was working in New York, she was already known publicly as,
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
before she became secretary of labor, because she was the first, uh, public official to call Hoover out on his BS when he was downplaying, uh, joblessness numbers and unemployment figures. Um, and just general terrible economic news and pretending things were way better than they were, she was the first person to step up and publicly contradict him and made national news for that. Wow.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And, you know, again, this is a woman doing this in, like, 1930, so just that alone makes national news, but she was also calling him out on his BS. And one thing that we have to say before you finish with the cherry on top, Chuck, is she had guys figure it out. She had a folder called, called Notes on the Male Mind.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And she would just take notes on guys and men that she worked with and just kind of try to get an understanding of them. And she realized that the way to get male colleagues to treat you normally or maybe even respect you is to remind them of their mother. Wow. That's what it takes apparently to get a guy to treat a woman with respect at work.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
It almost seems malicious in a weird way. Like, I like to think that that's not the case, but what other explanation is there?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
After she turned that essay in, you bet your bippy she did.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Yes, she made sure that about at least 55,000 Jewish German immigrants made their way into the United States through these Department of Labor immigration quotas. And another, I think, 200,000 people in general were rescued from Europe as World War II was starting to develop over there because of her.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Just on top of everything else, she also saved a bunch of tens of thousands of Jewish people from Hitler in World War II. Amazing. Amazing Chuck. I guess that's it for Frances Perkins, huh? That's it. Well, if you want to know more about Frances Perkins, go start reading about her because there's even more detail to her life than we captured here. And she's worth reading about.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Very admirable person. And since I said admirable, it's time for Listener Mail.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Well, yeah. Okay. If she wasn't talking about Tommy Chong, I'll tell you that.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Go to them, and they will help you.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
It's kind of like if you're afraid of flying, watch the flight attendants, and as long as they're not freaking out, you're fine. It's the exact same thing. He's saying when the S goes down, there's people helping, so that's always good. God bless Mr. Rogers and you, Tony. Oh, man, man. Yep, thanks a lot.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I couldn't tell if you were just putting a little mustard on the Tony. No, like Tawny Katane. Sure, yeah, from the Whitesnake videos. That cultural icon. Well, thanks a lot, Tawny. I apologize for Chuck calling you Tawny Katane. Okay. Can I apologize for you, Charles? Sure. Okay. Well, I'm going to do that. If you want to get me to apologize for Charles, let's see if you can do it.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
You can send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Right. They're like, oh, we don't need to help her put on airs. Well, then just like, you know, I don't ask, I don't tell, I just don't, whatever.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I want to say also before the residents of Newcastle bust a vein in their forehead, she's also cited as a native of Newcastle, Maine. Oh, okay. And they're right across the Damariscotta River from one another. I think she's from Newcastle.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Maybe. Maybe, except imagine if neither town knew what shoes were. I think that would be a pretty accurate analogy. Oh, boy. I love the Mainers. So she came from really dyed-in-the-wool Yankee stock. Her family came over, I think, in the 1680s. Her family had built an outpost during the French-Indian War.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Her grandmother, who had more of an influence on her, she said, than anybody, had a cousin who she was close to who founded Howard University and fought for the rights of newly freed African-Americans. She came from like a long line of people who like cared about other people. Yeah. And yet, surprisingly, her parents were very conservative.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
They were in favor of, you know, helping the poor, but not mingling with them helping them. Like, helping them by, like, you know, sending some money or something like that. Okay. And they produced a child, Fanny Francis. She changed her name, I think, in, I don't know, her 20s or 30s. She was the opposite way. She was like, no, like...
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
People are people, and they all deserve help, and there's a lot of injustice in this world, and I want to change it myself. And she's one of those people who actually did enact tremendous change for all the right reasons.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
She said people are people, so why should it be? You and I should get along so awfully.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Depeche Mode was before New Order, huh? Yes. I mean, technically, if you count New Order as an outcropping of Joy Division, then they were first. Oh, so, well, Joy Division was different, though. It was pretty different. Different enough that they might as well be two different bands.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
You know who we need to give us the judgment call? Who? Is Frances Perkins, who apparently would not have enjoyed our banter. She was very much known as like a dour, serious woman. But from what I can tell, that's actually a public persona that she wore to get men to take her seriously. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And apparently she had made it all the way through college. And in her senior year, I think she attended an economics lecture by Florence Kelly, who was a huge wage justice crusader. And that just changed her life.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Hello, friends. It's Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our September 2020 episode on Frances Perkins. If you haven't heard of her, that's okay. She's one of the most unsung Americans ever and was even left out of the history books for a while, all because she was a woman. Check out this episode where Frances Perkins gets her due.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
And we should say like she's getting all of this schooling, but at the same time, she's also set herself off on a what's that like learn while you work program called? Internship. Internship. I guess so. That's not exactly what I'm looking for. But yeah, I mean, it makes sense. So she set herself up on a real world internship program.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So while she was in Philly working for that bureau, she was investigating those fake employment rackets. Like she was on the ground doing this stuff, like carrying out these inspections, investigating factories, like taking notes. In her early 20s. Yeah, basically, yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
While she's studying this stuff, she's also out doing and seeing the stuff firsthand that she's learning about, which, from what I can tell, she really kind of digested and held on to, and it just kept driving her for the rest of her life what she saw. I think that's called the School of Hard Knocks.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
It is, but she enrolled in the Wharton School and the School of Hard Knocks at the same time, which is pretty impressive.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
But there's—she did—this is one of the things she did. There's very few more depressing words than these strung together. She improved working conditions for children.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
That was one of the things she did. I know. And that was at the Consumers League of New York. And she got there and was like, yes, I've achieved one of my first goals, which is working directly with the same Florence Kelly who gave the economics lecture that changed her life years before Mount Holyoke. That's right. Yeah.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
So she was one of those ones who said, I want to do this and then would do it and then would move on to the next thing.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the amazing unsung woman edition, volume two at least. No, more than two. What number would you say then?
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
I think it's an NYU building now.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Let's see. 727. Wait, I can't do math out loud.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
No, no. It was way more than that. 12 times 7 equals 84. Yeah, that's what I said. 84 hours a week. But like even that doesn't sound that big. 12-hour days, seven days a week just to keep your job.
Stuff You Should Know
Selects: Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown
Which was not good even back then.