pplpod

If you tried to fake a giant spreadsheet by spreading the leading digits evenly, a forensic auditor could prove you were lying. In large naturally occurring data sets, the number one leads about 30 percent of the time while nine leads less than 5 percent. This episode traces the discovery from astronomer Simon Newcomb noticing grimy front pages in logarithm tables in 1881, to physicist Frank Benfo...

In 1950s Kochi, India, members of the local Jewish community were still playing a 20-square race game they called Aasha, unaware that its board matched a pastime of Mesopotamian kings that the rest of the world had forgotten. This episode follows the Royal Game of Ur from Sir Leonard Woolley's excavations of the Royal Cemetery at Ur between 1922 and 1934, where he found boards of shell, red limest...

In 1882, guests aboard a test run from Paris to Vienna ate oysters, turbot, chicken chasseur and fillet of beef while traveling at 40 miles an hour. This episode profiles Georges Nagelmackers, the Belgian banker's son who founded the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits and built luxury carriages without owning a single locomotive or inch of track. We explain how pivoting bogie wheels kept the...

For centuries, naval planners simply accepted that half a crew might die at sea, and George Anson's 18th century voyage lost nearly two thirds of its men to a single disease. This episode explains what scurvy actually does to the body: a vitamin C deficiency that collapses catecholamine production, carnitine-driven energy metabolism and collagen synthesis, leading first to depression and lethargy,...

After Caracalla murdered his brother Geta, speaking Geta's name became a capital crime in Rome, yet his face kept circulating on silver coins that the state could not recall. This episode uses that paradox to explore damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory, a Latin label actually coined by two German scholars in 1689. We look at how the Roman Senate seized property, struck names from registr...

Before the 1970s, deaf people in Nicaragua were largely isolated, communicating with hearing family members through improvised home signs that had no grammar and no consistency from one household to the next. When a special education center opened in Managua in 1977, followed by a vocational school in 1980, hundreds of deaf children were brought together for the first time. The official plan to te...

In 2001, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook declared chicken tikka masala a true British national dish, and the debate over who owns it has not stopped since. This episode separates the two components: the dry, yogurt-marinated chicken tikka cooked in a tandoor that dates to the Mughal Empire of the 1520s, and the creamy tomato masala sauce added centuries later. We explain why yogurt's lactic a...

In 1931, unemployed architect Alfred Mosher Butts sat at a kitchen table in Poughkeepsie, New York, counting individual letters on the front pages of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune and the Saturday Evening Post. That manual frequency analysis set the tile counts and point values that Scrabble still uses today. This episode follows his first version, Lexico, the evolution into Criss-Crosswo...

The legendary capital of Caribbean piracy was a 69 square mile rock off the northwest coast of Haiti that Columbus named for its turtle-shell shape in 1492. This episode strips away the Hollywood tavern fantasy to look at how Tortuga became a pirate base almost by accident. French and English colonists from St. Kitts aimed for Hispaniola in 1625 and landed there by chance, and the overextended Spa...

The origin story printed on millions of bottles of Worcestershire sauce is a 19th century fabrication. This episode follows chemists John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins of 63 Broad Street, Worcester, who in 1837 claimed their recipe came from a Lord Sandys, a supposed ex-governor of Bengal. Historians have found no Lord Sandys who ever held that post or set foot in India. The real story, by...

One of the most recognizable toys in American history traces back to a German gag gift based on a satirical comic strip about a call girl. This episode follows Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler from watching her daughter Barbara project adult roles onto paper dolls, through the all-male board's rejection of an adult-bodied doll, to the 1956 Swiss trip where she bought three Bild Lilli dolls and broug...

Every August, the small town of Bunol, Spain, spends one hour pelting itself with roughly 145,000 kilograms of overripe tomatoes, and the cobblestones come out cleaner than they were before. This episode traces how the world's largest sanctioned food fight began in August 1945 when a parade participant dropped his giant papier-mache head, flew into a rage, and started hurling produce from a market...

This dual biography starts with a popcorn can lid tossed after Thanksgiving dinner in 1937 and a stranger on a Los Angeles beach offering Walter Frederick Morrison 25 cents for a five-cent cake pan. Morrison went on to fly P-47 Thunderbolts in World War II, survive time as a prisoner of war, and return with a working understanding of lift and drag that he applied to the Whirlo-Way, later renamed t...

In 1941, Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral returned from a hunting trip in the Alps with his trousers and his dog covered in burdock burrs. Rather than throw them away, he put one under a microscope and found hundreds of tiny stiff hooks snagging the loops of fabric and fur. This episode follows how that moment of curiosity became a decade-long engineering struggle to build a hook-and-lo...

Before it filled bright yellow cans in preschools, Play-Doh was a putty engineered in the 1930s to scrub coal soot off delicate, non-washable wallpaper. This episode follows Noah McVicker of Cincinnati soap maker Kutol Products, who created the cleaner at the request of grocery chain Kroger, and explains how the post-war shift to natural gas heating and vinyl wallpaper made the product obsolete al...

In 1945, Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer noticed a peanut cluster candy bar melting in his pocket while standing near an active radar set. Instead of leaving, he popped corn kernels and exploded an egg in the beam, and a patent for microwave cooking followed that October. This episode traces the microwave oven from the 1933 Chicago World's Fair shortwave sandwich demonstration, through the British...

On the last Tuesday of January, up to a thousand torch-bearing guizers in Viking costume march through Lerwick, Shetland, encircle a hand-built replica longship, and burn it to the ground while singing The Norseman's Home. This episode explains the machinery behind Up Helly Aa: the single-seat annual election to the committee, the 15-year wait to become Guizer Jarl, the handcrafted torches of hess...

The most feared sea monster in history is named after a crooked tree. This episode traces the Kraken from the Norwegian word krake, a makeshift grapnel anchor of spruce branches and stone that came up from the deep draped in seaweed, through synonyms like horven and krabbe that all describe a dragging, many-limbed shape. Written accounts followed in 1646 and 1729, and Olaus Magnus drew a horned be...

The glowing object families watched cross the sky in October 1957 was not Sputnik at all but the discarded 26-meter core stage of its R-7 rocket; the satellite itself was a polished 58-centimeter sphere. This episode follows Sergei Korolev's scramble to beat America's Vanguard program after the 1955 International Geophysical Year announcements, his abandonment of the thousand-kilogram Object D lab...

From 1566 to 1790 the Spanish treasure fleet ran the first permanent transatlantic trade route, a convoy system designed by admirals Pedro Menendez de Aviles and Bernardino de Mendoza after French privateers sacked Havana. Every year two fleets left Seville under the monopoly of the Casa de Contratacion: the New Spain fleet to Veracruz for Mexican silver, cochineal, and Asian goods hauled by mule...

In 1937 Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota had a warehouse problem: mountains of unpopular pork shoulder. The solution was to grind it with ham, salt, water, sugar, sodium nitrate, and modified potato starch, seal it in a can, and cook it inside the tin, creating a shelf-stable product that needed no refrigeration. A New Year's Eve naming contest won Ken Daigneau 100 dollars for the word Spam. The...

Step into a Victorian parlor drenched in a brilliant yellow-green: wallpaper, upholstery, dresses, children's toys. Every surface is shedding arsenic. This episode explains how Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele created the pigment in 1775 by dissolving arsenic oxide in boiling sodium carbonate, reacting it with copper sulfate, and heating the precipitate to 158 degrees Fahrenheit to lock copper...

For more than a century, an island roughly the size of Manhattan appeared in the Coral Sea on atlases, nautical charts, and eventually Google Maps. It was never there. This episode traces Sandy Island back to the whaling ship Velocity, whose master reported heavy breakers and sandy islets in 1876, and to the cartographic principle of marking any reported hazard just in case. The most likely explan...

Prester John was a priest-king who supposedly ruled a utopian Christian empire from Persia to India, carried an emerald scepter, and descended from the Magi. He never existed, yet popes wrote him letters and explorers died looking for him. This episode traces the legend from 1145, when a Syrian bishop told Pope Eugene III that an eastern Christian king had crushed a Muslim army, a garbled account...

In the 1940s New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia smashed pinball machines with a sledgehammer and had the wreckage dumped in the river, part of a ban that lasted until 1976. This episode traces how the game got there, from French tabletop billiards under Louis XIV and the spring-plunger Billard Japonais, to Montague Redgrave's 1871 patent that shrank bagatelle onto a bar counter, to David Gottlieb's...