SPEAKER_03: Some companies are big, others are small. To Robert Half, their hiring needs are equally huge. At Robert Half, our specialized recruiting professionals elevate their expertise with proprietary AI tools to transform candidate discovery, assessment, and selection. Whether sourcing talent locally or in any geography that works for you, Robert Half can pinpoint hard-to-find candidates in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, we know talent. Learn more at roberthalf.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather. From soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear, and t-shirts are the number one, two, and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless, and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bomba socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to bombas.com slash 99pi and use code 99pi for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas. B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99pi. Code 99pi. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So years ago I was talking to John Mar. He's the guy who first uttered this bedrock 99pi mantra. Always read the plaque. And we were talking about the show and he said, you know what you should do a story about? It's one of my favorite places in San Francisco. So I went to the address and I checked it out and I kid you not, he sent me to a gas station on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. He told me to look around and discover what was weird about it. In almost every respect, it's a normal Chevron gas station. It has a blue awning and the red and blue Chevron logo on the sign. But the sign and awning don't say Chevron. They say Standard as in Standard Oil, the massive oil monopoly broken up in the early 20th century by the Sherman Antitrust Act. One of the independent companies created by that breakup was Chevron. And for some reason, even though this gas station is a modern Chevron station in every way, it's called Standard. If you call the station, they will answer the phone saying Chevron. And the attendant cannot tell you why it says Standard on the sign. I've tried. But a trademark lawyer like Amanda Lewandowski can. A trademark can be any word, name, symbol, device used by someone who has the keyword here is bona fide intent to use the mark in commerce.
SPEAKER_00: And they're using that word, symbol, device to identify the source of their goods or services.
SPEAKER_03: That phrase, bona fide intent, means that if you want to keep a trademark, you have to use it.
SPEAKER_00: In this particular case, when Standard Oil was busted up, the Standard Oil trademark still retained a lot of goodwill and value. And if for whatever reason down the line Chevron wants to take advantage of that value, the name Standard has to be used.
SPEAKER_03: And it has to be used in connection with whatever the underlying goods or services are.
SPEAKER_00: So they couldn't just print pamphlets that occasionally used mixed Chevron Standard branding and say that they were still using it for oil and gas.
SPEAKER_03: They have to prominently use the Standard name in conjunction with oil and gas services if they want to keep it. So that's why there's a Standard gas station that for all intents and purposes operates as a Chevron station in San Francisco and 15 other locations in the U.S. This week, you should do a story. We're researching and presenting short design stories requested by our listeners and seeing where that path takes us. And in the spirit of the exercise, we're starting with what I think is the most requested design topic of all time. Here's our digital director, Kurt Kohlstedt, talking with me about desire paths.
SPEAKER_02: As the name suggests, desire paths are these unplanned routes that people just really want to take and they're shaped by repeated use. And I think part of it is that they're found everywhere. You can just see them all over the place. And the most common type that you see are shortcuts, which are often just visible as rough dirt trails through grassy areas and cities. So most commonly, when you think of desire path, you think of like, imagine like a circuitous or maybe like a 90 degree turn on a sidewalk.
SPEAKER_03: And then there's this like 45 degree dirt path that cuts across and creates a shortcut. And that's the most common idea of what a desire path is, is people want to take the shortest path. But desire paths are not always a shortcut.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, sometimes they end up being a long cut. And this can happen for all kinds of reasons. In some places, there are superstitions about walking under utility poles. And so people end up taking this long way around and you can see that marked in the dirt. Or like when there's like a slope going down to a crossover underneath a road. And normally, you know, a biker would bike down that hill and then bike back up the other side. But often there's like a way to just, you know, take the grass and go off to the side. And it ends up being a longer path. But, you know, they don't have to go up and down the hill. Right. So it's still like a shortcut in the sense of energy.
SPEAKER_03: Right. It'll take them less work ultimately. But it also is just kind of weird because it bows out to the side.
SPEAKER_02: And that's not how we normally think of these things. We don't really think of them. That's just like, yeah, the short way across. So this can be really frustrating as an urban planner because a lot of reason you design things the way you do is to use the built environment to shape the behavior you want.
SPEAKER_03: But desire paths can also be illuminating because they can really show a designer how to make their design work better for people. Right. Sometimes they frustrate the plans of urban planners and trail makers.
SPEAKER_02: But other times these people can actually evaluate the behaviors that people have naturally and use that to inform their designs. So, for example, college campuses have been known to map out a basic grid of sidewalks, but then leave some sidewalks unpaved and just sort of see where people walk to fill in the gaps. And then they come back in and they pave that based on the natural behavior of those people walking. And in Finland, park planners have been known to watch and see where people walk after a big snowfall. So there's sort of a blank slate and people cross the park and they just trace their paths, then use that to inform a year-round pathway for that park. Oh, that's so cool. Which actually reminds me of my favorite form of snow-based desire path, the snek down, which is this portmanteau of snowy and neck down.
SPEAKER_03: Which is, a neck down is actually kind of hard to picture. It's like a part of the curb, like if you can imagine like a straight street and then like a little bit of a bump out of the curb, an extension of the curb is called a neck down. So how do the people use snek downs in particular? So like those Finnish park planners that are evaluating where people walk after snowfalls, urban planners can use snek downs to evaluate where cars drive after a snowfall.
SPEAKER_02: And more specifically, they can look at where they don't drive. So when the fresh snow covers the road, drivers tend to follow a narrower path and then other cars follow in that narrower path, which leaves a lot of area actually untouched. And this results in what is effectively like a temporary curb extension and can also form sort of traffic islands in the middle of streets where cars just don't go.
SPEAKER_03: But then did they ever take this information and like use it for other parts of the year when it isn't snowy? That's really the key is urban planners can evaluate where people don't go and use that information to advocate for curb extensions and traffic islands where they don't currently exist.
SPEAKER_02: And the argument is pretty straightforward. I mean if the cars don't need to go there in the winter, why do they need to go there at all, right? Right, right. That's smart. I like it. It gives you like a little sandbox to play in once the snow falls and all of a sudden you realize that you have this opportunity to replan your city in these little tiny ways.
SPEAKER_03: A lot of this analysis is really kind of lovely. It's like people go out and they take pictures and they make videos and then they trace over these places where the cars don't go and suddenly it becomes very clear that the cars don't actually need that space.
SPEAKER_02: One of the reasons why desire paths and snackdowns resonate so much with our audience and not because they're urban planners is because they're this great metaphor for design in general.
SPEAKER_03: Yes, and a lot of people use them in usability design and think about them in terms of interface design.
SPEAKER_02: So a really common tactic is to not just decide we're going to make this thing this way and people are going to have to use it this way, but instead to actually look at how people are already using something and then take that and give it a more official way to work. So for example on Twitter, you know, at's and hashtags, those weren't built in with Twitter. Users evolved those over time and then Twitter eventually said, oh, well if users are using them, we're going to support this usage and you know, evolve what they can do. I never really thought about that, that at's and hashtags were basically desire paths created by the user.
SPEAKER_03: Digital desire paths.
SPEAKER_03: If you want to take a deeper dive into the hash mark or octothorpe as I prefer to call it, Avery Toffelman did a whole episode about its origins. So if you turn your hymnals to episode number 145, you will find it. Many of the story suggestions we get come through Twitter because I'm on Twitter a lot and we get a lot from emails too. But this suggestion came to senior producer Katie Mingle in person. Yeah, so this was after our recent live show that we did in L.A.
SPEAKER_01: A fan came up to me and he was like, nice job. Also, I have a story idea for you. So I was like, lay it on me. And he started telling me about it and it was like about electrical current, clocks, and this time in Southern California when people had to make this big switch. I don't know. I didn't absorb that much of it at the time. But it did sound neat. It did kind of sound like up our alley. So I went back. I started looking into it. And basically the story starts back in the late 1800s when the Los Angeles area and sort of surrounding to other towns in Southern California were starting to get their first power plants. And the main motivation at the time was to bring refrigeration to the citrus growers. So they could put oranges inside of refrigerators.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. For cold orange juice.
SPEAKER_01: Of course. And so back in these early days of electricity, there wasn't a national standard for like what frequency of current these power plants should deliver us. What does an electrical frequency really mean and what are the options that you have to work with when it comes to electrical frequencies?
SPEAKER_03: Okay. Now the part of the show where I explain electricity.
SPEAKER_01: No. I don't want to actually do you the complete disservice of talking too much about the physics of electricity, but the way I understand it is that electricity basically comes into our homes in waves of alternating current. And you can actually think of them like pulses. And the number of pulses per second is the frequency of the current. So if you're on a 50 cycle system or like a 50 hertz system, the pulses are coming at 50 a second and then 60 hertz would be 60 a second. And 50 and 60 are sort of the two most common frequencies. And why would you use one like instead of the other? Like what determines whether or not you're going to use one or the other?
SPEAKER_01: They're both fine. They both do all the things we need them to do. And you can deliver current at lots of different frequencies. But if you slow it down enough, like say to 30 hertz, when you screw in a light bulb, you apparently can actually perceive a sort of that pulsing and it sort of is perceived as like a flicker in the light bulb. So in the early 1900s, Southern California, so like Los Angeles, Burbank, Pasadena, they all start kind of getting on this like 50 hertz system. And meanwhile, the rest of the country is getting on a 60 hertz system for the most part. And there's like some exceptions.
SPEAKER_03: Right. And so right now, that's not that big a deal in the early 1900s. But eventually this grid is going to all meet up and that would not be good to have two different systems.
SPEAKER_01: Right. And so it starts to become a problem. And one of the things that becomes a problem is like manufacturers had to make different products for people in Southern California. Because anything with like an electrical motor that was designed to work on a 60 cycle system is not going to work as well on a 50 cycle system. And one of the things that definitely didn't work as well was electric clocks. So if you had a clock that you got in New York City and then you moved to L.A. and you plug in your clock, it would actually lose 10 minutes every hour. Yeah. And that is because electric clocks actually use those pulses of current to keep track of the time. You know, some clocks have pendulums, but keeping track of those pulses of current is the way that electric clocks know what time it is or when to move the second hand. And at that point, electric clocks were really popular. Like a lot of people had them. They're not quite as common anymore. So, yeah, clocks were a problem. Other things with motors. And then in the 30s, California started to receive power from new dams like the Hoover Dam. And this power was coming into California at the wrong frequency. And then the power companies would have to convert it. And the conversion process was difficult and expensive. So in 1936, the city of Los Angeles decided to switch all their customers to 60 cycle current. And then in 1945, the Southern California Edison Company decided to switch everyone else in Southern California over to the 60 cycle current. And that must have been crazy because you're talking about every appliance that plugs into a wall is now being run at a suboptimal frequency and therefore you have to change everything along the way.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it was nuts. It was a huge undertaking. Like they weren't just like, okay, sorry, like throw out your stuff.
SPEAKER_01: They sent crews into people's homes to retrofit their washing machines. They sent people into factories to make sure all the machinery worked right. And it was hundreds of thousands of customers, like I think nearly a million customers. And then the power companies also had to change all their own equipment, all the electric meters. And then for clocks, you could actually go and drop your clock off at something called a clock depot. And there were just like rows and rows and tables of clocks being worked on and sort of men sitting there working to make your clock work. It was good old days. When you had this big infrastructure project and then everyone just got to work and made it work for everybody.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like I have no idea how many people they employed for this, but it sounds like quite a few.
SPEAKER_01: So by 1948, all of Southern California had switched to the new system and the final tally was like 500,000 clocks and almost 400,000 lighting fixtures, 58,000 refrigerators. And if you think of how the population of L.A. exploded in the following years, it's so lucky that they decided to take this on when they did. You couldn't possibly do it now.
SPEAKER_01: No, like no way. And that's sort of why you'll never see an international standard for electrical current. So you may know if you've traveled to Europe that you have to buy like a little adapter because most of Europe is still on a 50 cycle system and they'll never change because it would just be too much.
SPEAKER_01: And I think the United States and Mexico and most of like Central America, maybe South America are 60 cycle. And Japan is actually, I think, the only country that still uses two different frequencies in their one country. So basically one half of the country has 50 hertz and the other half is using 60 hertz.
SPEAKER_03: Well, that must be such a pain.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it actually like was a really big problem after the Fukushima accident because a big portion of the country lost power. There was a tsunami and they were trying to send power from one part of the country to the other, which is a fairly common thing that, you know, we do. But they couldn't do it. You can convert from one frequency to another, but it's hard to do it in really big quantities. And so every so often in Japan, actually, there will be this little movement that bubbles up that's like, we should all be on the same frequency. And then it just like really quickly dies because like one side is like, well, we're not going to switch. And the other side is like, well, we're definitely not going to switch either. And then that's the end of that. So it stays the same.
SPEAKER_03: And so it stays the same. And yeah, we just can thank those early pioneers in L.A. that were like, let's go ahead and do this before things are just out of control.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Thanks, those guys.
SPEAKER_03: And thanks to Jay Kennan for suggesting the story for us. Yeah, thank you, Jay Kennan.
SPEAKER_03: And you talked to a couple other people that you want to thank. I talked to a horologist named Ken Reindell for this story.
SPEAKER_01: I thought the story was actually going to be more about clocks than it ended up being. So I learned all about how electric clocks work. Anyway, he was great. He helped me a ton. I asked him if he'd heard S-Town. He said no. Of course, I immediately sent him a link. And then I also talked to an electrical engineer named Daryl Heinrich, who was also really, really helpful.
SPEAKER_03: So for a long time, Kurt Kohlstedt has been obsessed with European style tilt and turn windows. Really, ever since he was a kid living in Bayreuth, Germany. I can't really explain them in audio, but they're really functional and worthy of his design obsession. So Kurt wrote about them recently on the website, and several readers shared and appreciated his design obsession. And to some, they were completely new. And then there was a bunch of Europeans who were just confused because they didn't understand that these windows weren't already everywhere.
SPEAKER_02: Half the readers were astonished these things exist and wanted to have them. And the other half were shocked that anybody would think that they were shocking because they were totally ordinary, everyday window designs for them.
SPEAKER_03: So this web article prompted a bunch of our audience to send in suggestions for other clever regional design solutions that we should also do a story about.
SPEAKER_02: One of the things that somebody suggested right off the bat, which I was instantly fascinated by, are these things called finish dish drying closets. They're also known as dish drying cabinets.
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to try to pronounce it. It's Ostean Cuy Valskopi. Ostean Cuy Valskopi. That's what it's called. That's what it's called. Ostean Cus- I can't do it.
SPEAKER_02: Ostean Cuy Valskopi. Yes. Okay, so go ahead. So the design has a pretty simple premise. If dishes can dry themselves in storage, there's no need to dry them manually. Right. So instead of having a drying rack next to your sink, you put your dishes away in a cabinet above the sink, and this cabinet has special shelves with slots so the water falls down through each level. And it lands ultimately in the sink or on a sloped surface which then drains into that sink. And as a nice sort of design byproduct, this ends up clearing up clutter in your kitchen so you don't have this annoying dish drying rack that's always half full of dishes sitting next to your sink. So your dish drying rack is essentially the same cabinet you put your dishes away in.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. It's a one-step process. You just, you know, take the dishes, put them away, they dry themselves.
SPEAKER_02: I love it. It's so beautifully simple. They should do that everywhere. That's for sure.
SPEAKER_03: We should have those everywhere. So this regional design masterpiece was suggested by Anton Hegman.
SPEAKER_02: Now that he lives abroad, Anton says, I have to dry my dishes on a rack that sits on the counter like a barbarian.
SPEAKER_03: It's true, Anton. I agree with you. We are barbarians. So you wrote an article about that one. It was a huge hit. And then it caused people to send in other little regional design solutions. And suddenly I had a lot of regional design solutions to work with.
SPEAKER_02: And one of the first ones that came out was this kotatsu table, which is a Japanese furnishing that doubles as a heating fixture. So picture a really tall coffee table with a quilt over the sides that you put your legs under.
SPEAKER_02: And underneath these tables, there's a small space heater. And this top layer of the table, it's a little hard to picture, but just like two two panels sandwich this blanket. So you have a surface that you can set things on, but you also have this blanket, you know, or comforter extending out on all sides. Instead of sitting around in an arc facing a fireplace, you can actually sit around in a circle and face each other and pull up sections of this cover and then sort of interact around this this central heating element. Why is this a Japanese thing? So these historically been really useful in Japan specifically because home insulation is often sparse and whole house heating can be difficult and expensive. And then traditional Japanese clothing also lends itself especially well to this form of space heating because warm air can flow up through the folds of a spacious kimono and then out the neck and arm holes. I mean, that's sort of what I like about it is it has a lot of very specific reasons that it comes out of Japan. Yeah. But a lot of those aren't necessary to it functioning either. A lot of those things would work for really any place or culture. But the way that it's optimized for a kimono suggests that it didn't used to be electric heating elements underneath.
SPEAKER_03: No.
SPEAKER_02: Historically, they came from a food cooking system that was in the floor. So they had these charcoal burning food cookers on the floor and this morphed into a system where they would try to use that to heat the home. And then eventually, in the modern era, this sort of more dangerous prone to fire solution was replaced by an electrical heating system. Right. Cool.
SPEAKER_03: What are those called again? Kotatsu tables. Kotatsu tables. So these would be great everywhere as long as you didn't burn your legs. Is there any instance that you read about anything about people burning their legs? Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Like there are advisories that say like don't fall asleep under your kotatsu table. Like it can definitely like lead to injuries and things. It's not a perfect design solution. It's not a perfect design solution. But you also just shouldn't sleep under tables in general probably. Especially not hot tables.
SPEAKER_03: Especially not hot tables. So it's really important to use the kotatsu table as described. But that is not like our next design solution, which one of its powers is the versatility of this object. It's called the Hill's Hoist. The Hill's Hoist is effectively the opposite use case.
SPEAKER_02: It can be used for everything that it's not designed for. So describe the Hill's Hoist. Basically it's a rotating clothesline. It has a central metal pole that sticks up from the ground like the trunk of a tree with smaller clothesline supports that branch out from the top. And then this thing sits in backyards and it spins slowly in the breeze drying clothes on a series of lines that just sort of circle that central pole. And where is the Hill's Hoist from?
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_02: The Hill's Hoist was developed in Australia and pioneered by this guy in the 1940s who was coming back from the war. And decided to basically build his own backyard rotary clothesline. And it wasn't the first of its kind but his really took off. They became a commercial success and now that company sells millions of the things every year.
SPEAKER_03: This is not just a thing for drying clothes in your backyard. This has become an iconic design that's really tied to Australia. Yeah, one of our listeners wrote in with a really great, very detailed explanation of its role in Australian culture.
SPEAKER_02: And basically as she explains it, it's this kind of critical fixture of the suburban Australian dream. You get this quarter acre lot with a beautiful backyard and in your beautiful backyard you have this Hill's Hoist. And it's sort of an incomplete picture without that iconic thing. But unlike the single use case of the finished cabinet or even the katatsu table, you see pictures of Hill's Hoist being used as things that kids hang on and spin around.
SPEAKER_03: And pinatas or whatever. Anything that you can hang something and want to spin it, the Hill's Hoist is the perfect solution for you. Yeah, and there's a great YouTube video out there of these guys who hooked up lines to the thing and a motor and have it spinning super fast.
SPEAKER_02: And they're whipping kids around on a water slide on the ground. And if there's a wedding or a holiday party, you decorate your Hill's Hoist. There's a drinking game where people hang bags of wine from the thing and spin those around. And one of the things I kind of love about it is that for every stage of your life, there is some activity that you do. Whether you're a kid who's swinging on the thing or somebody who's much older and sitting in the shade structure that you put on top of the thing. Everybody has some use for this. Right. So if you combine the ubiquity of this object with boredom of sitting in your backyard, you will get some kind of creative solution for something.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, that's the thing. It's this big thing and it's there.
SPEAKER_02: And so inevitably people figure out new things to do with it besides, you know, hanging clothes. So hats off to the Hill's Hoist. It's something special.
SPEAKER_03: Thanks to Alyssa Stevens for letting us know about the Hill's Hoist. If you want to see pictures of any of these or if you have a regional design solution from your home country or state, we'd love to hear about it. You can reach us at 99pi.org. Ninety nine percent invisible was produced this week by Kirk Colstead, Katie Mingle and me, Roman Mars. The rest of the team is Emmett Fitzgerald, Delaney Hall, Taran Maza, Sean Real, Avery Truffleman and Sharif Yousif. We are a project of ninety one point seven K.A.L.W. in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant based super blend made up of super foods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10 percent off for a limited time. Just go to Kachava dot com slash invisible spelled K A C H A V A and get 10 percent off your first order. That's K A C H A V A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. What's more important, making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time with annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial. You're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility in their life. Insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to Lincoln financial dot com slash. Get started now to learn how to plan, protect and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Products sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors, Inc., a broker dealer.
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SPEAKER_03: Radiotopia. From PRX.
