No Such Thing As Half-Past Purple

Live from the Royal Institution, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss warmed fog, weird fines and wind farms. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast, this week coming to you live from the Royal Institution in London.

• 0:27Dan Schreiber?

  My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray and James Harkin, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  My fact is, the first ever megawatt scale wind turbine was erected at a Vermont mountain called Grandpa's Knob.

• 0:54Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  So this is a wind turbine, and it's a megawatt scale, you know, it could generate a megawatt of electricity at any one time, that was the capacity. We're in 1941, October 1941, just before Pearl Harbour, coincidence?

• 1:08Speaker 02

  So America had nothing to do at that time, I guess?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  No, it was easy breezy times, but no, that's just setting the scene for you. And there was a guy called Palmer Putnam, who was both a sailor and an engineer. He lived very near Grandpa's Knob, Cape Cod, and he had two problems. One was constantly windy, just constantly, the wind blowing in off the Atlantic, just constant. Secondly, his electricity bills were too high, and he thought, I wonder if I could combine these problems into one solution. And he had a bit of expertise in the field, and he built this wind turbine. It lasted about, not very long sadly, about two years, but it was groundbreaking, because there had been turbines before, they could generate electricity, but this was the biggest that had ever been built, you know, a megawatt is a symbolic threshold, I guess, to get over.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it only lasted two years because it got blown over.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58Dan Schreiber?

  Did it?

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Which I think is sometimes a problem with wind turbines, isn't it?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Occasionally, yeah, you do need to build them to withstand that.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  I know in Denmark, if it gets too windy, they turn off.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  That's true, that kind of, yeah, if it's sort of very stormy conditions.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  But this guy was like, he was really famous in his time, wasn't he? I read that he went to, he did a lecture at NASA about wind power, and then he signed autographs for 45 minutes afterwards.

• 2:22Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 2:23Speaker 03

  And that's because they all thought he was going to be like the Edison of wind power, and they thought wind power was going to be the next big thing, so we're going to get his autograph fast.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Amazing. I should say how important this was, because a megawatt, it was 10 times bigger than the biggest windmill that had ever been produced, in terms of the electricity it could generate.

• 2:41Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  And in fact, most people had windmills at the time, they were about one thousandth of this scale in generation.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Like those little ones that you stick in your garden on a little pole?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, farmers had them, farmers had them for grinding corn and for other boring, you know.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  If you go even now to like the Midwest of America, and like in old movies and stuff, you see them, they're like bits of metal with tiny windmills on.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're sort of like ugly versions of European windmills, aren't they? They're like disparate with a tiny head and a massive body.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess, but the thing is, like, because they were pioneers going out west, they had to make do with what they had, they couldn't just get loads and loads of planks and make an enormous beautiful windmill, they had to just make it as minimalistic as possible. But I think it's quite ironic that kind of, America was built on those windmills, but now the right wing in America just hates wind farms.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  That's true, that's true. And after Putnam built this, it took, so this was 41, it took until really the 1970s for wind to take off in a big way, which was partly thanks to the oil crisis, two oil crises in the 70s.

• 3:43Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  When there was a, you know, cut off of fuel from the Middle East, but those problems...

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Those days are gone.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Those days were, yeah, it was resolved, so we don't need to worry about that.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  I just wanted to ask the question on everyone's lips, the most important question about this, whose grandpa?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Well...

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Can we be introduced? No.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  I don't think I found why it was called Grandpa's Knob, I did look.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  No, I don't think we, I don't think anyone knows unless someone around here has found it.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  But there is next to it another place called Bidde Knob, and it seems like maybe grandpa, because Bidde, it's short for Bridget, but it was also used in America in those days to mean like an old lady, so it might have been that Grandpa Knob and Bidde Knob together made a couple, and they might have been named after two people from the area.

• 4:29Dan Schreiber?

  Hey Andy, is there, I think the other main question that listeners of our show want to know, is there a society to do with wind turbines and windmills, and have you joined?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  I haven't found one yet, but I don't think there's a Grandpa's Knob Preservation Society, because it got taken, as you said, James, it got blown over and damaged in a storm, and then a few years ago, someone proposed putting up a modern turbine, kind of the same size, as a tribute to this amazing engineering first, and someone else said, oh, what if it vibrates? And so they cancelled the plan.

• 5:01Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  So they've got, but they have got a phone mast there now, so, you know, that's...

• 5:05Speaker 02

  That's something, isn't it?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Progress of sorts, isn't it?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Now, one more thing on Palmer Putnam, he also designed amphibious landing craft used during the Normandy landings.

• 5:14Dan Schreiber?

  Wow, oh my god.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's a big deal, and later in life, he got into gardening, and he always planted vegetables next to each other that he knew would grow to the exact same height.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  What?

• 5:25Speaker 03

  One of those inventions is more useful than the other, I'd say.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  And so they're really big now, aren't they? They're even bigger than the Grandpa's Knob.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, way bigger.

• 5:34Dan Schreiber?

  Wind turbines?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Wind turbines, yes, and in fact, the biggest wind turbine in the world is currently being built in Germany, it's going to be 360 metres high, which is 100 storeys high, which is quite cool, and difficult, because cranes can only get up to about half that height, so you build half of it, they are currently building half of it with cranes, and then the other half is just telescoped on the inside, so you get to halfway up, and then you pull the rest out like a telescope, yeah. I don't know if it's as simple as that, construction wise, but it's essentially it, the other half is inside.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  So cool.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Clever.

• 6:10Dan Schreiber?

  I've been reading about windmills, old school.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Oh yeah?

• 6:13Dan Schreiber?

  Fascinating, fascinating history. I didn't realise there was a code of the windmills, so you would do social announcements via your windmill.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:22Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, so I printed out this thing, so you can probably have a go at guessing, but okay, so you never used to leave your windmill with the, so if you had four sails, you would never leave it with the vertical right up.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Can I say why?

• 6:36Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Because the vertical one going down would stop you getting out the door.

• 6:44Dan Schreiber?

  No, I mean, probably correct, but what it really was, was back in the day, it was lightning bolts. You would have the highest thing, and so attract lightning bolts. You can leave it there like that now, because they have rods that attract the lightning in its place, but that used to be a way that people, if they saw that the windmill sail was up like that, it meant, okay, they're not at home, but they'll be back, because no fool would leave their sail fully vertical.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Oh wow, so it's like back in five minutes.

• 7:10Dan Schreiber?

  Exactly, back in five minutes, exactly.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  And they still use that today in, for mourning, so if someone dies, like when the Queen died, then all Dutch windmills were in that position, right? It's like us having flags at half mast. Yeah, all windmills go to mourning windmill position, which is like the crucifix position, as opposed to the X marks the spot position.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  That is amazing.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 7:30Dan Schreiber?

  And incorrect, so what you would do is...

• 7:36Dan Schreiber?

  It was more of a diagonal direction that you would have it, that would be the mourning to suggest that there was a death, yeah, there's, I can just go and show you a little photo here.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  He's absolutely, he's absolutely right, he's absolutely right, I was just testing you, Dan, and you do, you have learnt the windmill language correctly, well done.

• 7:50Dan Schreiber?

  Thank you. And then if you were 12 o'clock and you went to say, like, you're on your way to 1 o'clock, it's like half 12, the small hands on its way, that is celebration, we've had a baby! And so you would know, you would see the windmill and go, oh my god, they've had another baby!

• 8:05Speaker 03

  But when it's actually working, do you think, baby mourning, baby mourning, baby mourning?

• 8:12Dan Schreiber?

  Picking your moment when to go into the house, through the door, and not be decapitated. But yeah, so isn't that cool, it had its own language as well.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Very cool, and they go backwards.

• 8:21Dan Schreiber?

  Do they?

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, Dutch windmills go round the wrong way, or as they would see, the right way, counterclockwise, whereas all windmills that are built in the modern day go round clockwise, and...

• 8:32Speaker 03

  We know why.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Well, it's kind of arbitrary and not a good thing, so it's basically because in the 70s, when everyone was getting the big windmill contracts, there was an engineer called Leif Nielsen, a Danish engineer, and he had a brother working at a rival windmill company, and his brother was going for the standard counterclockwise direction, and he didn't like his brother much, so said, okay, I'm going to make my turbines go round clockwise, and then he got all the contracts, and that's why all windmills go round clockwise today.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  You're joking, this is like Aldi little...

• 9:02Speaker 02

  It's all over again, yeah, yeah, and it's actually the worst way for them to go round in the northern hemisphere.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  How can it be worse?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  It's, there was a study done which showed it actually can generate 30% more energy if they go backwards...

• 9:14Speaker 01

  No way.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Slash anticlockwise, because of the Coriolis effect in the northern hemisphere, which sends the little whirlwinds of air that the turbines generate in the opposite direction, it generates more energy.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Why don't they just put them the other way around?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  What, you mean why don't they spin them the other way around?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  No, no, no, just put them facing the other way, then they'll go backwards, right?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  I'll put you in touch.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Why do I have to do all the work?

• 9:37Speaker 03

  I read also that a windmill can never give you more than 16 27ths of the energy of the wind.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  And this is something called Betz's limit. And I'd love to tell you more about it, but literally someone sent us that fact two minutes before we came on stage. So I didn't really have a chance to read up on it. But I think it's because basically the energy of the wind has to go through the sails. So if it got 100% of the energy onto it, it would just stop there, but they wouldn't spin around. So the air has to go through them, I think.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  From a one minute reading of a Wikipedia page.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Well.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  But thank you to whoever sent that in.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Here's a cool thing. First windmill that generated electricity, first turbine, created by James Blythe, who was a professor at Glasgow College. It was 10 metres high. It was tiny. I mean, he used it to charge some batteries and at the time batteries were incredibly primitive as well. But two nice things about that. Villagers nearby thought this is the work of the devil and they refused to sign off on it. That's not one of the nice things. It could light up 10 light bulbs. That's not one of the nice things either. That's just an example of what size this was. I'm struggling to find the nice things about this now. The nice things are, A, he's got the National Wind Turbine Testing Facility named after him now. He's a big deal in the wind world.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  That's nice.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And that's where they test them to the absolute maximum. They sort of put them through unbelievable stress until they snap. And when they snap, you can feel an earthquake 500 metres away because these blades are so huge. The tips are going around at 200 miles an hour.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  It's incredible. It's so good.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  And then they snap and you have to build a whole new one. Send that to the testing facility, snaps, build a new one. How do they ever get made?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I know, I know, but that's science for you, isn't it? But no, the other thing is, the first ever wind powered home was in 1887.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  1887.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  And that means that, you know, Jack the Ripper could have seen a wind turbine.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  That's nice.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  All right, that's the nice thing.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Or pick your person who was alive in 1887.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Just anyone else. Queen Victoria.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Oscar Wilde.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  All good examples. Someone say Gandhi. Gandhi would have been very young.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Very young.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  But he would have been alive. Good point. Touche. Touche. No, but hang on, I'm sorry to quibble, but you need someone who, because Gandhi could have seen a wind turbine later on, you know, for the, for the rest of his life. I mean, in the 30s or 40s, he could have seen the one at grandpa's knob. What we're looking for ideally is the most famous person who died in late 1887.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  And ideally one who didn't murder lots of people.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Ideally not Jack the Ripper. No, Gandhi is a great point. Thank you. So are we all clear on who could and couldn't see a wind turbine?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Oh, good. That's what this room was all about. Scientific debate and.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that when he was a child, notable Royal Institution lecturer Humphrey Davy's favourite hobby was to lock himself in his room and give hour long talks to a bunch of empty chairs. This is Humphrey Davy, who is one of the most spectacular names ever to have walked into this building, an absolute juggernaut of science. We're going to talk about him in a second, but one of the things he was notable for outside of his discoveries was he was an astonishing lecturer. He delivered the most amazing lectures and it turns out not only did he have an amazing love of science from childhood, but he also just had, he loved having a crowd of people

• 13:19Speaker 01

  listen to him and he didn't even need the crowd. He just needed the idea of a crowd. So when he was a child, he used to go out and he used to gather kids at the local market and he would just rant at them based on anything that he found interesting, giving them letters.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  It's really sweet.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  And then back at home, he would just, yeah, he would set up those chairs.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Forcing children to gather at the market while you scream about, you know, electricity to them.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  It sounds like he's a child too. He's a child too.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. No, that is better.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But he was a really, he was a, he was a science minded child and he was always in chemicals. He was obsessed with them and he used to do tricks on his family. So for his sisters, he used to take chemicals that would be phosphorescent and at night, when they turned the, well, when it got dark, suddenly these monsters were on their bedroom wall that he'd painted on. Yeah. So he played lots of tricks with the chemicals even as a child.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  That's cool. And then he kind of went into poetry, didn't he? He really loved poetry when he was a young man.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  And he even had some poems published by Robert Southey. Southey?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Southey.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  But then what seems to have happened, because he's from Cornwall, there was a big shipwreck. And on that shipwreck, there was loads of instruments from French surgeons and stuff. And then he managed to get all of these instruments and then started doing loads of experiments and then got into science afterwards. But he was into science, but this is where he started to do all of this.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Gosh, that's very romantic. Because he was from, was it Penzance, I think? He's a very proud son of Cornwall and all this. So he went to Bristol first of all to start his career. And this was the really first really exciting thing. At the age of 20, he was in Bristol, working for someone called Thomas Beddoe, Beddoes. And he was working on laughing gas. And he was just the sort of young man in the room who was to a certain extent a guinea pig. He was really interested in science, but.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  That is the best job ever though, isn't it? When all your friends are interning at their dad's printing company, you're the guinea pig for laughing gas.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he really got into it. I mean, he took a lot of laughing gas for a long time. And it was, that was the time when he knew all these poets. So he knew Southey, he knew Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this is all in Bristol. He was friends with Roger of thesaurus fame.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  I know.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Do you know what? I read Roger's account of taking laughing gas, because what Humphrey Davy did was, he said, you can come to all these laughing gas parties I'm throwing, but you have to write down notes of exactly how you found it. And so he compiled this book of all their notes and Roger.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  It sounds dreadful. It sounds like a load of people's anecdotes about getting stoned.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Oh, it's brilliant. I've read it.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Oh, is it?

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Of course. Well, maybe it's more up my street than yours because it is just what you described.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  I suppose it's not like your mates telling you, it's like the greatest poets of the 19th century.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. I still think drug experiences and dreams are the two things that are terrific in your own head and then kind of. No, it's the original, Davy's the original Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception. That's what he was doing. He was trying to show that your brain went into a different state of consciousness when you were on these things and what you were opening yourself up to. That's the bit I can see, Hannah, you didn't like.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  To be honest, that is the most tedious thing about people who've taken drugs is when they talk about the older states of consciousness. I just want to hear that they sort of shat themselves in a corner.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  At their grandma's house.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  If it's that, then fine. Yeah. That's true, yeah.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Which is, and Roger of thesaurus fame, his account, well, here's what it is. He said, "I was incapable of speaking, lost all consciousness of where I was. My whole frame was violently agitated. I panted violently and my heart seemed to palpitate and every artery to throb with violence." Of thesaurus fame. He uses the word violent about 19 times in his account.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  So cool.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  He hated it. Most of them loved it. He said, "I cannot remember that I experienced the least pleasure from these sensations."

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Really?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Because Coleridge loved it.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Davy really loved it. Like he, they got to a point where the party died down and no one wanted to do it anymore, but he just kept doing it. And he went around with a sort of green silk bag that he would just fill up with the stuff and he would go for long walks and he would, he would do it to the point where he'd pass out and wake up two hours later, not realising how much he had done. And then get back on the horse and do it some more. He, yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Everyone's got that friend from uni, haven't they? Sort of 10 years later, oh, you're still.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did move on. He moved, he moved to London and he came to the Royal Institution and invented the miners' safety lamp and the rest is history.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. But yeah, he did loads of lectures in this very room, didn't he? And they were so popular that the traffic around here got really, really busy and they made a one way street so that people could get in and out. And it was the first one way street in the whole of England.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Royal Institution is on Albemarle Street, which is just outside us. And so many people were coming, horse and carriage and walking and crowding to see Davy speak, that they had to change the whole system so that they could just stop London coming to a standstill.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Which is actually a huge faff when you're cycling here on the way to a show and you're late. So good to know I have him to blame for my near death experience today.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  He also, he discovered five elements, which he showed at the Royal Institution for the first time. So calcium.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Biggie.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Biggie. Strontium.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Yes, like B-side, yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Barium.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  Barium.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Unless it was named after a guy called Barry.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:45Dan Schreiber?

  Boron?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:47Dan Schreiber?

  Magnesium.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Biggie.

• 18:49Dan Schreiber?

  Biggie. These are huge. And but he said his greatest discovery of all was not a chemical. It was not any of the experiments. It was a little student called Michael Faraday. And Michael Faraday is also.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Ooh, good noise.

• 19:04Dan Schreiber?

  Ah, not many rooms you'd get that noise in.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:08Dan Schreiber?

  When you drop Faraday's name. Faraday had come to a bunch of lectures that he'd seen Davy do when he was younger. And he scribbled down this big booklet of ideas and so on. He sent it to Davy and Davy saw so much potential that he brought him in. But Faraday is also one of the great giants of of this room.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Didn't Davy have a big accident or something? He was working with nitrogen trichloride, which is a huge explosive. And it exploded in his face and he went partially blind for quite a long time. And he needed a helper. And that's when he brought Faraday in to help him. So this one big accident was what brought them together.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  To work together, what really gave us Faraday.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  He was reckless, I would say. He he used to shut himself in a box with the gases he was inhaling to make sure he got the most intense high possible. And there was one time when he sent all of his servants away because he really just wanted to. You know, if you're having a big high, you want to enjoy it by yourself alone. And one of his servants didn't get, I'm told, one of his servants didn't get the memo, didn't realise that they'd all been dismissed. And so he came to see if Humphrey wanted, you know, a cigar or something. Came in, found him in this, you know, shut box that Humphrey had built for himself specifically, completely unconscious, asphyxiating and dragged him out. And he would have died had this servant not rescued him. So he did take self experimentation to, some would say, quite stupid limits.

• 20:30Dan Schreiber?

  Hmm.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  But can we say the thing about the safety lamp? Well, he saved a lot of lives.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  This is incredible. So miners were dying by the dozen. And in fact, many more than that, due to something called fire damp, which we would call methane. We have these pockets of methane underground that catch fire. And the only way of lighting your mine underground is with candles. So this is a huge problem. And he spent, I think it was about two weeks on the problem before designing a lamp. And there was, there is a bit of debate about whether there was a different kind of lamp. Stevenson of Rocket fame came up with another version of one. But this, I mean, from what it looks like, this definitely was Davy's invention. And it's basically just a fine sort of cylinder of gauze around the light that you're using.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  It kind of encloses the light, doesn't it?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you still get the light, but you don't get the methane exploding, even if you're in a dangerous area. And he refused to patent it, which was very exciting. And I think for over a century, coal miners carried these things and did not die due to that. At least due to methane, they died to plenty of other things. But it was, and what this did was it made deeper and bigger seams of coal accessible. And a lot of the industrial revolution was powered by miners being able to access lots more coal. So, you know, that huge change in the world was at least partly thanks to Davy's lamp.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  But did any of you think that it's quite basic? It's literally all he does is put, it's like you put a sieve over a candle. That's all it is. Miners are going into mines, candles are causing explosions. And Davy says, you know what? If you put a sieve over this, a metal gauze, because it's metal, it absorbs all the heat. So you don't have the heat for that big explosion. And that's it, put a sieve over it.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Well, the best ideas do seem simple once they've been discovered, right?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  I just reckon I would have come up with that in my kitchen at some point. I'm not.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Are you sure?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I can't be 100%, but.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  I just think, yeah, combining it with any utensil in your house, I wouldn't think of the sieve first of all.

• 22:28Dan Schreiber?

  Had we invented the sieve at this point?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the sieve was, ooh.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, my god.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Didn't invent the sieve because then the headline would have been sieve man.

• 22:37Dan Schreiber?

  Sieve man, it does.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Sieve man helps with coal mine stuff.

• 22:39Dan Schreiber?

  When was the sieve around?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  When was the sieve?

• 22:42Dan Schreiber?

  Who came first, Gandhi or the sieve? That's what I want to know.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  No one knows.

• 22:47Dan Schreiber?

  No one knows.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:49Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Can we talk about his wife as well?

• 22:51Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, of course.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  So he married a very wealthy heiress, the done thing at the time, Jane Apriese. And she is responsible for a very interesting bit of his story because he went on a very dangerous journey in 1813. So what's going on in 1813?

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Probably fighting the French.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Fighting the French. Fighting the French.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  You said that a little bit too enthusiastically.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  I will serve if called.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  But only if it was the French.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  If it was the French, I'm not, yeah, just to limit it, yeah. So there was, there was a thing called the Prix du Galvanisme created in 1801 by Napoleon Bonaparte, which was a prize for, you know, scientific advances. He had won it and in 1813, so really, you know, Napoleon's march from Moscow has just ended catastrophically. We're, we're gearing up for Waterloo, it's a great time. Davy and his wife Jane Apriese and Faraday went to Brittany to present themselves to Napoleon to pick up the medal and the cheque. They were arrested mistakenly when they got there. So it was, this was quite a perilous trip they made, but they did make it, got the gong and the money and all of that.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  But there was a really big appeal a few years ago by the Royal Society of Chemistry, saying, where is this medal? And it turned out that Jane, his widow, had been so embarrassed to have this French medal and the French money in the house, that she had hurled it into the sea.

• 24:17Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Off the Cornish coast after he died. They knew roughly where they had done it and they spent four days diving in, I think it was 2013 they did this.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Really?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Or 2014, yeah, they didn't find it, obviously, because, you know, it's very, it's very hard to find. Yeah, yeah.

• 24:30Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, but it's, so it still might be out there, there still might be.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  It's still definitely out there.

• 24:34Dan Schreiber?

  Wow, the Davy tragedy, that's cool.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Find it, go and find it.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  He actually was very much against the French though, wasn't he, Davy? I think.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Good lad.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  He went to the.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Sorry, sorry.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  I'll tell you what, you know what? Over the last two or three weeks, we've been talking about football every single day. And Andy has not been interested until we said that we beat France.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Excited.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  But no, he went to the Louvre and then he wrote back to his friends saying, yeah, it's all right. It's just full of stuff that Napoleon stole, isn't it?

• 25:02Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. He went to, there was an anti-British play on at the time. And he went and sort of sat in the back and watched to see what they were saying about us. And the main thing was, there was another chemist called Lavoisier. And Lavoisier had done all this stuff about the science of heat. And Davy disagreed with Lavoisier's theories. And in the end, he managed to prove it. And when he proved it in his paper, he was just all about how the French were so dogmatic about their ideas and how we've finally proven them wrong. And so, yeah, he was just like a real, he was like the Andrew Hunter Murray of his day.

• 25:42Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Okay, my fact this week is that it's not as foggy as it used to be.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  This is a fact or a conversation opener?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  It's such a, it's such a boomer opinion to have.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  I'm not saying you're a boomer, I'm just saying.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Do you think?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's got Daily Express article written all over it, like, what's wrong with a bit of good old British fog?

• 26:10Speaker 03

  And it's the immigrants' fault.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  And you know what? The young people couldn't handle it anyway.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  I don't think it would be in the express because it's probably due to climate change.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  So, yeah, this is quite a few studies that have been done over the last few years. And every single one shows a big decrease in fog. 2009 study showed that in Europe, there is a 50% drop in low visibility events, which just is fog, mist, haze, all of that stuff since the 1970s. And in 2010, the Berkeley University looked at America and they found that fog has declined 33% since 1951. And what it seems is that basically climate change means that as the oceans warm, the conditions you need for sea fog especially, you need like a cold water surface in order for the fog to form. Because it's when the warm air from the water kind of hits the land. You just don't really get those conditions anymore. So we just get less fog than we used to.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  And it's important, fog is the new moss.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  I'm in.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Fog is really important. So there's lots of crops which use fog in places where it doesn't rain so much. For instance, in California, where they make lots of lettuce or they make lots of strawberries. It's the fog which nourishes them and keeps them hydrated. And in cities, the fog can sort of move away pollutants from the air. So it's really useful there as well. We need our fog and it's all going.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Bring back the fog.

• 27:35Dan Schreiber?

  It's really, it's really important as well for London tourism. As early as the 1970s, the tourist board would urge Americans to come to England and to London in particular, when it was winter, so that it would be at its foggiest. Because Americans love foggy London.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Americans, write in if you agree with this.

• 27:53Dan Schreiber?

  It might have changed recently, but it certainly was. And there were mass.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Probably changed a bit recently.

• 27:57Dan Schreiber?

  So don't ask anyone, don't ask anyone, just believe it.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  I can see that, like, if you want, if you're American, you come to London and you want to see the London of Sherlock Holmes.

• 28:04Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Or the London of Humphrey Davy, it's going to be like that kind of.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  You know who else loved a bit of London fog? Jack the Ripper.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Keen, very keen. But like, there was a company in America that did coats, still do coats. I think they were called London Town initially. They changed their name to London Fog.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  But I think that's because it was famous back in the day. I mean, by the 70s, it was gone. Poor, we'd nailed it. This was, this was the big smog, wasn't it? That was, yeah, Victorian era, start of the 20th century, bit of a disaster in London. No one could see anything. Americans flocked because, you know, Thomas Cook organised fog holidays, apparently. But aside from that, it was quite bad. And then we had the Clean Air Act in 1956, which is kind of an amazing success story, which basically sorted it out. But it was a massive issue before that, and it was particularly an issue for Hollywood, in fact, and for filmmakers. So it wasn't just bad for filming outdoors, it would get inside film studios in London because it was so, there was so much of it, and they didn't know how to get rid of it.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  So some films in the 1920s that were shot in London had to shoot at night because, you know, you can penetrate darkness with a light, but you can't penetrate it. As anyone who's ever tried to turn on fog lights knows, when they do fuck all, anyone knows that you can't penetrate fog with any light. So if you wanted to film something, then you had to film it at night. So film schedules would be from 9pm until 6am.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  My god.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  It was mad.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Alfred Hitchcock's first ever full-length film was called The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. It was a bit, it was a big bit of brand Britain, certainly London, actually. And, you know, any other big industrial cities, because we've, I think we might have mentioned before that London in particular was a term for the fog. But there was also the Manchester entire, you know, where you just couldn't see anything in Manchester.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Oh, Andy Burnham, stop trying to make it happen.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  It is incredible reading about it now, like just how thick the air was. So in 1901, not far from here, in Piccadilly Circus, they needed to turn the lights on in Piccadilly, even though the sun was shining and it was daytime, it was so foggy. You couldn't see where you were going. You couldn't see to drive around. Sometimes you would be standing by the window during the day and you couldn't read a book. I mean, it was, it was so foggy. It was coal, basically. Every home was heated by coal. There were big coal power plants in the centre of town. It was coal, coal, coal. But the cool thing was fog changed colour. You could tell what time of day it was by the colour of the fog.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Really?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So yellow in the morning, because people are burning coal to heat their homes and all of this. And the tar in particular made it yellow. Later in the day, when the industries got going, trains and ships, it would turn dark brown.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  None of these are nice colours.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  No, they're not. Okay, well, there were green fogs, purple fogs, black fogs. But it was, it was just such a mega thing.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  And how precise was this? Because you say to someone, I'll meet you at yellow o'clock.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  And half past purple.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Sadly, you can't see where the fuck you're going, but...

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Is this more smog than fog? I thought fog was just water, pure fog.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah. This was smog for sure.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  It was combined, wasn't it?

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Spooky fog.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Foggy and then a lot of pollution.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  You do get super fog, which is even foggier than normal fog and even foggier than...

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Really?

• 31:14Speaker 03

  It happens if there's like forest fires and stuff, because water vapour condenses onto the smoke particles. And so the reason that Anna's fog lights don't work is because the light goes in, but then it's dissipated by all the tiny little water particles. But in the super fog, it dissipates it even more, and so you literally can't see anything. It just, you're driving along, there's a little bit of fog, and then suddenly it just goes dark, completely black. You can't see a single thing and loads of accidents because of that.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. It's black, black fog.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  So you were pro-fog before, but now we're...

• 31:46Speaker 03

  I think fog is, it's got many facets. It's like, there's lots of advantages to it. So I said before that it can clean the cities. It turns out the fog is alive, and it is. So it is.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  In what way?

• 32:02Speaker 03

  So there's bacteria in the fog, and if you take a thimbleful of fog water, it has about 10 million bacteria, which is the same as if you took the average bit of seawater. So it's all really, yes, it's all really dissipated, but the actual amount of bacteria in there is the same. And this bacteria, they eat the chemicals, things like formaldehyde, which is in the air, which is very bad for you. The bacteria can eat that and turn it into things that aren't bad for you. So that's why they get, kind of get rid of all of these chemicals from our air.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  You get things like fog catchers now, humans, like the crocodile hunter, you get, you get fog hunter. So there's a guy called Abel Cruz, and in Peru, Bolivia and so on, where they don't have necessarily access to clean water, he's worked a system of nets that are up at night and they collect the fog water as it's coming through. That's how a lot of places are now getting their drinking water.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Although they seem, they seem to have had trouble scaling it up. I couldn't find anywhere that's really done it on a big scale. And so the only useful version I found of fog catchers was in San Francisco, where in 2016, they worked out how to turn fog into vodka,

• 33:16Speaker 02

  which you can buy. And this is a project of a nonprofit, actually, which claims to be trying to provide water to developing countries, but took some time out to collect fog in San Francisco with, yeah, it looks like, two goalposts with a net in between, catches the fog and then collects them and then turns it into water. And the fog catcher on that project was called Chris Fogliati.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Oh, come on.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Why would there be an international agreement on what fog is? There's an international definition of fog.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Okay, why do we have that? Something else has to be standardised which fog is important for. So it's the strength of your fog lights in your car, so they're the same in every car in the world.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  To do with transport.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Is it to do with shipping?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  It's not to do with shipping.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  It's to do with aeroplanes.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  It's to do with aeroplanes.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Oh, so when you're allowed to fly versus not? When you're allowed to fly.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  Ah, god damn.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  So that's just for aviation, yeah.

• 34:09Dan Schreiber?

  You've just got to wait at the back, James, and let everyone do the work.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  But there is this tool, so basically, yeah, that's it. Just if it's foggy, you know, you can't land safely on a runway. And they've got, they've got some tools to do with it now. But there was a great tool invented way back when, I think this might have been before the Second World War, called the Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation, FIDO for short. And it was designed to just clear fog off airfields so that planes could land safely.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  And it's basically two pipelines going along the runway and you just produce a wall of flame. Like, oh, it is quite rock and roll. And it's just, the standard FIDO system apparently used 100,000 gallons of fuel every hour. So it's

• 34:52Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  A bit of a luxury. It's a bit of a treat, more if it's a long runway. But the amount of money it saved by having a plane not crashing into the ground was probably, you know, made it useful for a while.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  So that's what's reassuring as a pilot. If you're flying towards the runway and there's a huge wall of fire in front of you, you know you're good to go.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  It did decide a crucial thing in the 15th century. And I think you might have had an opinion about this, James, because it was in the Wars of the Roses and it cemented a Yorkist victory. It was one of the most important victories. It was the Battle of Barnet.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  I've gone off fog a little bit.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  I thought you might. Yeah, this was Battle of Barnet. And it was King Edward IV of York versus Earl of Warwick, who was Lancastrian. And there was very thick fog and this screwed things up in various ways. One of the ways was the armies didn't line up right against each other, which I find kind of amazing anyway, that you'd like organise at the start of battle and be like, okay, your furthest left man has to be exactly opposite our furthest right guy. And they weren't lined up. This meant when they charged towards each other, one side of the army totally surrounded the other and were like, oh my god, we're winning this. But the other side of that army totally surrounded them and thought, oh my god, we're winning this. And because it's foggy, they can't see the other side of their line. So they don't know they're losing on the other side.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  This is like a Dotsey Doe, isn't it?

• 36:18Speaker 02

  It was very much the country dancing of the 1400s, yes.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  So what happened?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  What is war but a keighley? It, so eventually this, it was all chaos for a long time. And then eventually, at one point, one of the sides, I think it was Warwick's side, sort of went off the battlefield and tried to regroup. The problem was they had in their heraldry a picture of stars and streamers. And King Edward had a sun in sort of splendor, and they look in very thick fog, very similar. And so Warwick's men all started firing on themselves and killed each other without Edward really having to do anything. And then there we go. And that led to the Yorkists being in charge for a decade or two. So there you go, fog is your enemy, James.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  We should move on, guys, to our final fact.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  I got one more thing about climate change and things that are changing. So snowshoe hairs, they have a little trick. So in the winter, they're white, and in the spring, they turn brown.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Brilliant.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  It's for camouflage, obviously, so they can camouflage in the snow. Unfortunately, due to climate change, the snow is not around as long as it used to be. And so for a certain amount of the year, they're bright white, but there's no snow to camouflage. And the guy who, I was reading an article about a guy called Alex Kumar, says that they act like you can't see them.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  They're stood there and they're thinking, nah, nah, you can't see me. But actually, everyone can see exactly what's happening.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Wow, they are not long for this world. If you want to see them, get there fast.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  That's like my three-year-old playing hide and seek when you walk in the room and they're hiding behind a lamp that's just literally, they're holding it.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  My fact this week is that in 2024, Google was fined more than the world's total GDP. A lot more, in fact.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Good.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Do it again.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  You want them to double it?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Okay, right.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  Well, they are doubling it.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Oh, are they?

• 38:26Speaker 02

  They are, indeed, yes, yes. So this is a Russian court which fined, had fined Google two undecillion rubles, which is a two followed by 36 zeros, as I'm sure you know, it's 20 decillion US dollars, if you're interested, and it's for restricting Russian state media channels on Google services.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Still think it's good, Andy?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Uh, I've changed my opinion a bit. I did read an article about it, saying it's 20 decillion dollars, brackets, 15.4 decillion pounds. Yeah. Oh, great.

• 38:56Dan Schreiber?

  Imagine being sued for amounts you've never heard of before.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't feel good.

• 39:00Dan Schreiber?

  I didn't know decillion existed.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  There was a guy from the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, who said, "I cannot even pronounce this number," which is weird, because a Russian for "undecillion" is "undecillion."

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So I believe it's more dollars than there are grains of sand on earth.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:19Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 39:19Speaker 03

  And the article that Anna sent round said that it was whatever undecillion it was, but it was doubling every single day.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's way more now. I mean...

• 39:28Speaker 03

  It's way more now. According to my calculation, oh, this was when I did it a few days ago, so it's doubled a few times since then, the current fine is two times 10 to the 225 rubles.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  So if you were to take every atom in the universe, and every single atom had another universe in it, and every single atom in that universe had another universe attached to it, then the total number of atoms that you have will be nowhere near this number.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And that's why you've got to pay in the first 14 days.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 40:06Dan Schreiber?

  So are they gonna do like a payment plan? What's the...

• 40:10Speaker 02

  It's hard to know. I think they have to earn over a certain amount in their salary before they start.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  I think they just wait until the ruble collapses by so much that it's actually just about 20 quid.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  It did start off much more reasonable, as you say. It started off as 91.5 quintillion rubles, and yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  What was it? Was it four something? Sorry?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  According to Russia, they were deliberately not allowing people to see Russian news on Google searches.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's, you know, it's barring a lot of Russian sites, because, and it was coinciding with the war in Ukraine, and Google saying that there's a lot of misinformation out there, that it was blocking, because Google doesn't like misinformation to spread. And Google subsidiary has gone bankrupt in Russia as a result of all these massive debts that they're being asked to pay, and they've got quite basic functionality there, but I don't think the Kremlin really minds. So we're at a bit of a stalemate.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  So does it, do fines work, is the question?

• 41:01Speaker 02

  It feels like at that level, you're starting to not work, doesn't it? But they certainly have worked with the EU and tech companies. In fact, do you know who has been the only sort of barrier between tech companies and going completely insane and doing whatever the hell they want? It's, I'm gonna say it's a single person, this is my claim.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  It's not Nick Clegg.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  It's Clegggy. Uh, no, he's got nothing to do with it. It's Borgon.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Borgon, the TV show.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Do you guys know the TV show Borgon?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Danish detective? Or Danish prime minister?

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Danish prime minister. But yeah, Borgon has been holding back Google.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  In what way?

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Well, because the character in it, who's Burjit Nyborg, who is the prime minister, is based on this woman called Marguerite Vestea, and she was EU's antitrust chief from 2014 to 2024, and she was the person who basically led the charge preventing tech monopolies. So as soon as there was any kind of like online rigging that Google was doing to rig things in its favor, as soon as there's any anti-competitive stuff, she brought lawsuits against them, against Google, Apple, Amazon, X, Starbucks, Ikea, Gazprom. I feel like Ikea's kind of the good guy in there, actually, but it's made a huge difference to them, just this woman, and a large team of people also in the EU.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  But leading the charge.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  There you go. And prime minister of a fictional country at the same time, so.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  That's very cool. You asked whether fines work, Andy. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, I think is the answer. If you fine people for being late, let's say for instance, you are late picking your child up from the nursery, and it means that the teachers have to stay a little bit longer, everyone's a little bit annoyed, so you get told off. Or they change it, so you don't get told off anymore, but you get a fine. It turns out people are way more likely to accept the fine and then just be late anyway. And the reason is, they kind of see it as an exchange of money for time.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  And people think, well, you know what, I'm paying a little bit of a fine, so it's actually no problem if I'm late, because at least I'm...

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I'm paying, I'm paying, I'm buying the right to be a bit late.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  And you're not allowed to be cross with me, because you're fining me.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  That's the idea.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  And people are more unhappy about someone very cross from the nursery.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Especially because I've told you, you can just tie her to the railing outside and leave her there.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  As long as she has a little bowl of water, she can lick from.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I've got a show to do in London.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  So this is the really interesting thing. Yes, there've been lots of studies of whether fines have any power, and it's because, you know, you need to calculate the cross-section between the chance of being caught and how severe the punishment is if you are caught, and lots of firms, especially the huge firms, treat it as the cost of doing business. You know, well, we may as well, we know that they won't fine us much more than this, even if we are caught, therefore, there's no real incentive to change. Yeah. So I think unpredictable fines are maybe the way to go.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So, okay, so I'm caught speeding.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  And I get the letter through the post.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Two million quid fine.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  I was hoping it was gonna be 10p.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, Noel Levens picked it out of the box, and it's like, I think there would be a case to be made for chaos fines, where it could go really badly.

• 44:10Dan Schreiber?

  What's, what's the country where the fine is?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  There's a couple. There's Switzerland and Finland, I think, are two of the ones that do it.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  You mean proportional to income?

• 44:19Dan Schreiber?

  Proportional to your income, yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Proportional to your income, and also they, they increase it based on various other fun factors, so you get to kind of spin the wheel. Have you been fined before recently? Bigger fine. Do you earn a lot of money? Bigger fine. So I think the biggest fine ever was a Swiss driver, this was a couple of years ago, and he was caught going at 290 kilometers an hour, so actually not that much in miles an hour, but...

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Was he going directly off one of the mountains?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  I think he got done for just over one million euros.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:51Dan Schreiber?

  That's right.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  It was.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Did he do it again? Don't know, but it doesn't matter, we've got a million euros now if we're the Swiss government.

• 44:58Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  So I think, yeah, I think that is a good case to be made for that.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. In fact, there was a guy in Finland, the other place that does it, a guy in 2023 called Anders Wickloff, who was only driving at 51 miles an hour, so it does feel like this guy, driving at 180 miles an hour, it was, has done a big one, but...

• 45:14Speaker 01

  What's the limit, though?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  This guy, oh, yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  This guy who was going at 290 kilometers an hour, he was actually in a 280 zone, so he was only...

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're right.

• 45:24Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  No, this, this was obviously in like a 31 mile an hour speed limit, converted to kilometers an hour. He was fined 121,000 euros. He'd been fined before, in 2018, he'd been fined 63,000 euros, and he'd been fined 95,000 in 2013, and he was asked in 2023, you know, how he felt about this 121 grand he'd lost again, and he said, "Look, I've heard the government wants to save some money on healthcare, so I hope my money can help fill a gap."

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  There you go. Isn't that nice?

• 45:54Dan Schreiber?

  That's good. Yeah, I mean, you do read about some fines, I do think, like James is saying, "Oh, yeah, it's worth it. It's worth it to pay it." I was reading a story about a guy in Portsmouth who went around Portsmouth Cemetery with his arms in the air pretending to be a ghost, going "woo, woo, woo," and he got fined 75 pounds.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Why?

• 46:13Speaker 03

  He was doing it while people were mourning.

• 46:15Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Okay, there's my context. I'm not a monster, that's, yeah. But a fine feels a bit...

• 46:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Well, what would you do? Well, write, I'd say a letter of apology.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  I think that's a good, letter of apology is another good one, you know.

• 46:29Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  For grownups.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, for grownups.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Right, okay.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Everyone's busy, no one's got time to write a bloody letter. It's a huge pain in the arse.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  I suppose whether it's a bank transfer, is just click of a button and you're there.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. Having to write two sides, you're not allowed to do double spacing either. Suddenly, people are thinking, before they get the sheet on and run around Portsmouth Cemetery.

• 46:50Dan Schreiber?

  But you could use up a lot of the space on the page by saying, "I'm sorry, I said, woo."

• 47:01Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  So how much was this guy fined?

• 47:04Dan Schreiber?

  Seventy-five pounds.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Okay, more or less for this fine. Roy Marsh was sitting by a boating lake in Lincolnshire when a gust of wind blew a bit of grass into his mouth and he spat it out. And two enforcement officers immediately approached him and told him they'd seen him spitting on the ground. More or less is 75 quid.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  I think a fine for spitting... Oh, this is...

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  This is a brucy moment.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  I think we've got something here, haven't we?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  This is a format.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:32Dan Schreiber?

  So the rumour is saying more?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I think more. Yeah, more.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  We all think more. Okay, the answer is more.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  Three hundred pounds.

• 47:40Dan Schreiber?

  Three hundred?

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Wow, they didn't think it was that much.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Sorry, did someone say more, Arthur?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Okay, more or less than 300 pounds. A Florida priest was fined for feeding the homeless.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  They're just paying for blood here.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  It sounds punitive, the way you guys are screaming it, yeah.

• 48:03Dan Schreiber?

  So they're saying more in the...

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Less, I'll go less.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  I'll say more.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  This one.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  More. Okay, so you said more, you said more. It is more, but I'll just to make it sort of still a bit of a competition, how much more?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Two million pounds.

• 48:17Dan Schreiber?

  Ah, good, like 50 quid more.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Dan is just closer.

• 48:21Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Because he was fined more than $500,000.

• 48:26Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Because a bit like this Russian fine, it kind of just went up and up and up. And he was doing it every single day for quite a few years.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Why was it not allowed?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  It was in an area that was not where his church was. And the annoying thing was, it's the area where his church used to be. And then it got rezoned and he carried on feeding the people in that zone. And they said, you're not allowed to do it. And he got fined for every single day that he did it. And it racked up to half a million dollars.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Where's this? Where do you get fined for feeding homeless people?

• 48:56Speaker 03

  This was in Florida.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Wow. Everyone's going, yeah, that checks out.

• 49:01Dan Schreiber?

  That's amazing. Do you know Freddie Flintoff, when he was an England cricketer, he once got fined 2,000 pounds because he was scared by a ghost. And...

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Was he in Portsmouth Cemetery at the time?

• 49:13Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Because Portsmouth Council, they're cleaning up here.

• 49:16Dan Schreiber?

  They really are.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Both ends of the transaction.

• 49:18Dan Schreiber?

  No, he was in Zimbabwe at the time. They were on, they were playing a game overseas. And Mal Loy, is that his name? Do you know him, James? He starts telling ghost stories. And Freddie gets freaked out because he doesn't like ghosts. And so he runs off to his friend's room, who's called Vikram. Vikram's very religious and the logic was that maybe ghosts won't go near him because he's very religious. So then he couldn't go to sleep, both of them were freaked out. They then sleep in and they're late for practice. And so they get fined 2,000 pounds because they were late for practice, all because this ghost was freaking them out. But according to Freddie, Mal got in trouble as well and fined for telling a ghost story that scared Freddie.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds fair.

• 50:04Dan Schreiber?

  So you don't tell ghost stories to our key player? Who's terrified of them, you dick?

• 50:08Speaker 03

  I can, knowing Freddie Flintoff, I can imagine there were spirits involved somewhere.

• 50:14Dan Schreiber?

  We've got to wrap up very soon.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Can I briefly talk about the greatest fining nation in Europe?

• 50:19Dan Schreiber?

  Sure.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  I hate to give it to them, it's the French.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  They are so good at fining you for minor social infractions. It's unbelievable. So there are all sorts of people, especially on the French trains. They have very strict rules and they have lots of enforcement people. So there have been French pilgrims who were fined by police for doing some chanting in Latin at a station, having been to a cathedral. There was a middle-aged man who was fined 200 euros quite recently for just having a call on loudspeaker in a train station? Not even on a train? More!

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. This is how the revolution started, guys, all right? It's not petty.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  And five officers approached him and they said they'd... Okay.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  People just want social norms observed, and quite right. There was... Okay, we'll see what you think of this one, guys.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  Oh, my god.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  There was a French woman was fined 110...

• 51:33Speaker 01

  But you have to wait, okay? There was a French woman who was fined 110 euros because her cat meowed too loudly

• 51:43Speaker 01

  on a high-speed train, despite the fact the cat had a ticket.

• 51:55Dan Schreiber?

  That's it, that is all of our facts. Thank you for being here, everyone, in this amazing room. And we're going to be back again next week with more No Such Thing As A Fish from the Royal Institution. So we'll see you again. Goodbye, everyone.