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SPEAKER_09: It's the end of the year and time for our annual mini stories episodes. Mini stories are quick hit stories that were maybe pitched to us from someone in the audience or something interesting we saw on Twitter or just a cool tidbit that we found in our research that just got stuck in our heads and wouldn't come out. But they didn't quite warrant the full episode treatment for whatever reason. They're also this great opportunity for us to get to know the non-scripted version of the fine people who work on this show and as the person who gets to interview them, that is my favorite part of this. We have some real charmers on staff. We'll have stories of mysterious ice boats, green ruins, sack dresses, steampunk violins, and a little update from a couple of the notable city flags that have been redesigned around the country. It's going to be fun. First up is senior producer Katie Mingle.
SPEAKER_06: So okay, we're going to start out by meeting Denise. Hi, my name is Denise Boniface and I own Aquanuts Diving in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, Canada.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so Denise is from Alberta, Canada, where she owns a scuba diving company. And Alberta, as you may know, is not a coastal province. So if you're scuba diving in Alberta, you're doing it in lakes. They're cold, they're dark, they're murky, they're kind of creepy.
SPEAKER_09: Sounds delightful.
SPEAKER_06: Sometimes. So there's this one lake called Lake Patricia. It's surrounded by mountains.
SPEAKER_02: It's right in a mountain valley. Very, very remote.
SPEAKER_06: And if you find the right spot on the lake and dive about 30 feet down, you'll find a shipwreck. It doesn't really look like a ship.
SPEAKER_02: It looks like kind of there's a kind of pile of lumber that's all broken up and laying there. And then there's a lot of refrigeration coils. What are the refrigeration coils for?
SPEAKER_06: We're going to get to that, but just, okay, for now, so you make your way down sort of through this murky darkness, this like pile of lumber and debris. 50 feet, 60 feet. And then you'll find a plaque. Oh. Right? This is where Roman gets excited. It's pitch dark, but if you shine a light on it, you can read it.
SPEAKER_06: And Denise has read it.
SPEAKER_02: That says Operation Hubbicut, a secret World War II project involving the use of ice in ship construction. This vessel built January to April, 1943 was a prototype. For more information, contact the Canadian Park Service, Jasper. Wow.
SPEAKER_09: So there's like a hyperlink in the bottom of a lake.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. There's a QR code. Yeah. Okay. So there's so many things about this plaque that I love. I love that it's at the bottom of a lake. I love the part where it says for more info, contact the Canadian Park Service because it sort of implies you could just stumble across this while like strolling at the bottom of a Canadian lake. And then I actually, I asked Denise that and she was like, yeah, you could because there's a lot of people that dive in this lake. And of course the most intriguing part of the plaque is the part about the secret World War II project involving the use of ice in ship construction. So what was that about? So, okay. So in the early 1940s during World War II, German submarines or U-boats as they were called were basically wreaking havoc on allied ships in the Atlantic Ocean, just sinking them left and right. And so eventually this person named Admiral Mountbatten goes to Winston Churchill and he's like, we have to do something about this. And I think I know what the solution is. A giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier sized ship made of ice. Of course. And actually Churchill is intrigued. It sounds like one of those far-fetched ideas that kind of gets floated during times of war but never actually gets built, except for this really did get built or at least a prototype of it got built. And that is the shipwreck at the bottom of Patricia Lake. And that's what the plaque commemorates. Wow.
SPEAKER_09: So what in the world made Admiral Mountbatten think that an unsinkable ship should be made of ice?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So like what the hell? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair enough. So steel and aluminum were in really short supply. So that was a big thing. They were actively looking for alternatives. And then the second thing is that they hoped that this ice ship would be so dense that it would basically be indestructible.
SPEAKER_09: And what made them think that ice would be indestructible? Because it doesn't seem like that. Right.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it actually wasn't just plain ice. They were going to build these ships out of a mixture of ice and sawdust called Pykrete, named after its inventor, a guy named Jeffrey Pike. So if you mixed sort of water and wood chips together and then froze it, it made the ice really, really strong. And so this guy Jeffrey Pike, he invented not only Pykrete, but he came up with the idea of building a ship out of it. And then he got that idea to Admiral Mountbatten. So the ships would be built from blocks of Pykrete and then there would basically be pipes with coolant running through the whole thing. To keep it ice. Yeah. So that's the refrigerator coils that Denise saw at the bottom of the lake. And Pykrete really was this like incredibly strong and dense mixture. And there's this amazing anecdote in this story where Admiral Mountbatten, who again is not the inventor of Pykrete, but he's like the main kind of evangelist for this idea. And he was so hype about it that he brings a piece of Pykrete to a meeting. This is a meeting in which they were trying to convince the Americans, so the British were trying to convince the Americans to get on board this crazy ice ship plan. So he brings a block of Pykrete to the meeting along with a regular block of ice. And at some point he does this demonstration where he takes out his revolver and he shoots the regular ice and it splinters into a thousand little pieces. And then he shoots the Pykrete and the bullet bounces off the Pykrete and actually sort of ricochets into the leg of one of his colleagues. And like successful tests actually like declared a total success. And they're all like thumbs up, like green light, full speed ahead. And yeah, they decide to go forward with this crazy plan. Winston Churchill signs off on it. I'm not sure what all Americans signed off on it, but the Americans said, we'll help you do this. And then I guess at some point they also got Canadians involved because they end up building this prototype on this little lake in Alberta, Canada.
SPEAKER_09: Lake Patricia.
SPEAKER_06: Yes, Lake Patricia. And they name it Project Habakkuk after a Bible verse. And I think the verse is pretty interesting. So I'm going to read it. It goes, behold ye among the nations and look and wonder marvelously for I am working a work in your days, which ye will not believe though it be told to you. It's basically like the Bible verse that's like, we are building a crazy thing. And Habakkuk apparently was the name of a Hebrew prophet, which I certainly never knew. And then the prototype itself was built by Canadian conscientious objectors who didn't know what they were building and who had opted for alternative service jobs. And they were like given this job and not really told that it actually was a worship for the war. So in just a few months, they built a prototype of this ship, but it ended up being harder to build and more expensive than they thought. And by the time the prototype was ready, the war had kind of moved on. Like they were figuring out how to build the atomic bomb. They figured out how to mass produce smaller aircraft carriers. And in the end, they basically scrapped the project and ultimately let it sink into the bottom of Lake Patricia. And as we know, you can still see it there today. Well, the coolest thing about diving the Habakkuk is being able to say that you dove the Habakkuk.
SPEAKER_02: Like it is cool to dive it and it's nice to see it once, but to dive it too many times, it's not that interesting. But I'm not aware of it, but that doesn't really help you for your program, does it?
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So apparently like if you build a ship out of ice, it just sort of like turns into nothing. You're slush at the bottom of the ocean.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. And if you've seen it once, you've seen it enough. That's fine. That's awesome. I love that story.
SPEAKER_09: Special thanks to Debbie Schneiderman who sent in the tip about Project Habakkuk. She actually sent it in response to the mini stories episode that we did last year. So if you also have a mini story suggestion, we do read them. Reach us through the contact page at 99pi.org. Next up, producer Emmett Fitzgerald. All right.
SPEAKER_05: Are you ready?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, you should just start because I don't know what you're going to do.
SPEAKER_05: Okay. So this is a story about a ruin. It's probably the most famous ruin maybe in the world, the Roman Colosseum. Oh, cool. Have you ever been?
SPEAKER_09: I have never been.
SPEAKER_05: I've also never been. But you can picture it, right?
SPEAKER_09: Absolutely you can picture it. You can picture white columns, kind of dusty, denuded of all life, and it just looks like a classic ruin. Right.
SPEAKER_05: So what color would you say? White, maybe brown, off kind of old sand colored stone. I think that's sort of the image we have of ruins. But I was on Twitter the other day and I found this kind of amazing thread that featured all these paintings from the 19th century and the Colosseum is totally green. It's like this greenhouse covered in vines and plants and all this different plant life. And it was a thread put together by this guy named Paul Cooper. He's a novelist and a PhD researcher at the University of East Anglia and he studies the history of ruins. And he says that until the middle of the 19th century, the Colosseum was totally overrun with plants. There were trees and shrubs and vines growing everywhere and all these artists and poets would write about the Colosseum as this verdant greenhouse. Charles Dickens visited the ruin and wrote about its walls and arches overrun with green. And in the 1850s, this British botanist, a man named Richard Deacon, decides to do a botanical survey of the Colosseum cataloging all of the plants growing on the ruin.
SPEAKER_07: Well, he found a great many plants, over 400 species that were growing among the crumbling ruins. So that's Paul Cooper.
SPEAKER_09: That's the fellow who put together the Twitter thread.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. And he told me about all the different plants that this guy, Richard Deacon, found.
SPEAKER_07: 56 varieties of grass and cypresses and hollies. Yeah, just a real incredible variety. And what comes out of Deacon's book is that is this incredibly poetic description of this crumbling landscape that has become this kind of overgrown garden of great variety. Describes how it's damp and cool in the low arcades of the Colosseum, but dry and warm on the top layers. So you get this incredible kind of microclimate, this biodome of overflowing life. But he found specifically that some of the plants were so rare that they didn't actually occur anywhere else in Western Europe.
SPEAKER_05: And so Deacon sits down and he tries to sort of work out how these plants ended up in this one spot. And this like iconic cultural spot is sort of a botanical wonder. And he comes up with a kind of wild hypothesis.
SPEAKER_07: These plants must have been brought into the Colosseum on the fur or even in the stomachs of the animals that the Romans brought into the arena to fight.
SPEAKER_05: Romans brought in lions to fight gladiators and they brought in giraffes and other kinds of African wildlife for ceremonial hunts inside the Colosseum. And the theory was, as plants do, traveling on the backs of other animals that move around that we've moved around the world, that that might be the cause of what brought these plants to the Colosseum. Oh, that's so great. It's a little hard to verify how true that was. But it's a cool story. And Paul Cooper really likes this image. There's something poetic about the idea that these ritual animal hunts, they were held
SPEAKER_07: as a way of proving that humans had reached a level of civilization that they now had complete dominion over the animals. And we'd shown that we'd triumphed over the wild and destructive nature of the natural world. But buried in the fur and guts of these animals were these natural seeds that were ultimately going to invade and climb over this whole magnificent ruin.
SPEAKER_09: So how did it happen that this verdant microclimate, almost greenhouse, become the dusty dry ruin that we think of today?
SPEAKER_05: So in 1870, Italy gets unified under a secular democratic government. And they take control of the city of Rome, which had previously been in the hands of the Papacy. And this new government is really trying to create a rational, scientific, modern Italian identity. But they see that as really rooted in this ancient Roman history. And so they care a lot about these old ruins like the Colosseum and projecting a certain Italian-ness to what these buildings represent. And the plants don't quite fit with the image that they're looking for.
SPEAKER_07: They see these plants as invaders that are damaging the ruins. And they begin to take the plants off the ruins.
SPEAKER_05: And even at the time, there's some real pushback from scientists from the botanical community who say, you know, stop, this is this like special micro-ecosystem filled with all these totally unique plant species.
SPEAKER_07: Italian botanist and countess Marzanti says that, you know, nature liked to dress poetically the venerable walls, and that now archaeological cupidity, archaeological greed has destroyed everything. And people were giving a bit of an outcry about this at the time. But the archaeology went ahead and later on, as you get into the rule of Mussolini and his fascist party, the ruin was completely stripped and excavated, completely cleaned, which is, in my view, unfortunately, the state we find in today.
SPEAKER_09: So it's really about whatever you think is the proper thing to preserve. I mean, do you preserve? I mean, because it is true, the vines were destroying the ruin. Right, right. There's a certain truth to that. There is truth to that. But what is the cost of removing all the vines? And what is the history represented in the natural history of the things that are there?
SPEAKER_05: Right, exactly. And I think, you know, Cooper says that when he sees these beautiful paintings of the Colosseum, these rare plants that traveled there potentially on the backs of lions, you know, it raises, yeah, it raises some interesting questions about what state we should preserve a ruin in. Is it just the rocks? Is that the only thing that we care about? And yeah, that there are stories embedded potentially within other aspects of what's there that tell important parts of the history. Yeah, it does make me sad to think that we've lost the romantic potential of this site and
SPEAKER_07: this incredible ruin overgrown with greenery. And also the fact that, you know, there are buried stories hidden in these different layers of history. And also in the more intangible elements, like the flora growing in a particular ruin can tell a huge part of the story.
SPEAKER_05: So talking to Paul and, you know, seeing that the Twitter thread that he put together and then later turned into an article, it really just made me think about historical preservation and archaeological preservation and really what gets to be a part of what lives on and what we choose not to leave, what doesn't make the cut. Which in this case is all these plants. I mean, the story of the built world is not just the things we build, it's all the stuff
SPEAKER_09: around it. And it could be the natural flora and fauna that it affects. And that's an amazing thing.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And there are still some plants in the Coliseum and, you know, there are people that make decisions about what to pick and what to weed out. And now there's this whole city that's built up around this space. And so they're even more kind of outliers within the rest of the built environment. It's a little bit of greenery in a gray concrete world.
SPEAKER_09: So a while back, 99PI's digital director, Kurt Kohlstedt, started researching a story about sackcloth dresses. It's a type of DIY clothing made from upcycled flour and feed sacks. And we considered it for a full episode for a while, but Kurt had a connection to the story that made it even better as a mini story.
SPEAKER_10: Homemade sackcloth apparel grew really popular during the Great Depression. But as I was looking into it, I thought the idea seemed familiar somehow. So I call up this historian I know to see if maybe she had told me about them when I was a bit younger. Okay, so, Mom, can you tell us briefly who you are and what you do?
SPEAKER_03: I'm Sally Gregory Kohlstedt. I'm a professor at the University of Minnesota, where I teach courses on science and American culture and also courses on women, gender, and science.
SPEAKER_10: So my mom was born in Michigan during World War II, and her dad worked in Detroit at the time.
SPEAKER_03: And when I was born, my father was shipped overseas, and so my mother went home to live with her family on a farm in the thumb of Michigan.
SPEAKER_09: So like all people from Michigan, she refers to the shape of Michigan as looking like a gloved hand and refers to it as the thumb or the where it is in the hand, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: And so people, if they're trying to tell you where they are from in Michigan, they'll just hold up their hand and like point to part of that. And like other places in America, people in Michigan had developed ways to deal with shortages in the late 1920s and going through World War II.
SPEAKER_03: Well, when I was a little girl, my grandmother did most of the sewing for all of us. And so the fabric that she used for what were called our everyday dress was actually fabric that she would pick out by going to the local general store.
SPEAKER_10: So my great grandmother would buy sacks of flour and then reuse those sacks.
SPEAKER_03: And the flour sacks became then the fabric for these dresses.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, was the fabric any, like I picture the sacks that hold rice or something, which are terrible burlap style sacks? Like what was the fabric like?
SPEAKER_10: Well, it actually had to be pretty finely woven because it was made to hold flour. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Okay, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_03: It was an all cotton kind of fabric. It's a very decent quality of fabric.
SPEAKER_10: So these days we think of flour as being something that comes in these smaller five or 10 pound bags often made of paper. But back then it was a different story.
SPEAKER_03: They were huge sacks, as I remember. They were as big as I was because I had to hold 50 or 100 pounds of flour.
SPEAKER_09: So did the flour companies know that people were using their flour sacks and upscaling them as dresses? Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, they started to figure this out over time and they started to adjust their designs accordingly. And so some of them actually used ink that would wash back out so you could have this clean white cloth and others went the other direction with it and they designed these patterns. And so you'd buy flour sacks with dancers or jockeys or bunnies or flowers or other interesting things. And my mom's grandmother would sift through those options and bring home favorites from the store.
SPEAKER_03: She learned quickly that I didn't like pink. So I think she avoided giving me pink fabric or pink flowers on fabric because she knew
SPEAKER_10: what I liked. People at the time also turned sacks into quilts, curtains, even diapers. And farmers reused livestock feed bags too. That fabric was rougher, but it still worked for things like towels.
SPEAKER_03: So my very first sewing experience was taking a piece of that fabric and hemming it so that we could use it for dish towels.
SPEAKER_10: Apparently my great grandfather had a feed bag apron my great grandmother made him for doing really dirty work, like too dirty even for work clothes. For example, helping out cows in labor. For example, he was birthing a calf.
SPEAKER_03: You really didn't want to wear even your ordinary work clothes because that was really a pretty bloody mess.
SPEAKER_10: Wow. So you'd buy a sack of feed for the cows and then you'd use that sack to help birth new cows. That's pretty crazy. That's what I recall. So companies of course caught on to this sack fabric trend and they realized they could boost their sales with nicer cotton and fresh and more sort of fashionable patterns along the way. And some manufacturers even sponsored national sackcloth dressmaking competitions. Wow.
SPEAKER_03: That's right. It was very clever marketing as I think about it as a historian.
SPEAKER_10: So the first time I talked to my mom about this, she actually said this quote that I really liked, that it was part of the quote fabric of life of living in rural America, which seemed really apt. Ultimately these designs, they evolved beyond just being born of necessity. They became about like fashion and identity for these people too, which I think is really fascinating.
SPEAKER_03: And so once in a while you got to go to a fabric store and buy velvet or wool or linen, but woven into ordinary life in these farm communities was going to the general store, picking out your fabric and then trying not to pick out the same fabric as some neighbor might have.
SPEAKER_09: Because no matter what, even if you're wearing a dress made out of sackcloth, you want to look good. You want to have it express yourself. That's like a universal thing.
SPEAKER_10: In some cases they'd buy a batch of bags, bring them home and everybody in the same family would be kind of wearing the same patterns of sackcloth. So you could actually tell who was from what family by the patterns that they were wearing.
SPEAKER_09: Like a tartan, like a kilt or something. Exactly, exactly. Like a modern day kilt.
SPEAKER_10: That's so cool. This has been really great. I love talking to you about this. I love the fact that my mom's a historian and is just so interested in these things and has these great sort of personal histories too. Thank you so much, mom, for agreeing to do this and talking to me about this.
SPEAKER_03: I think 99% invisible is terrific and I'm happy to be part of any part of it. That's so great, mom.
SPEAKER_10: I love you a lot. Give my best to dad and I'll talk to you soon, okay? Okay, love you too, Kurt. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_09: Bye. Isn't that charming?
SPEAKER_10: Oh, I love it. Avery, who helped me get set up with all this, she was like, okay, you can cut any part of this you want, but you've got to keep that. You've got to keep that sign off. That's why she knows what she's doing, Avery.
SPEAKER_09: All right, thanks so much. Since the beginning of the year, astute listeners who listen all the way to the end of the show, you're my favorite nerds, the nerds who listen all the way to the end of the show, you may have noticed a new production credit since we started using all original music. Since I haven't had your voice on here, why don't you actually introduce yourself and what you do at the show?
SPEAKER_08: I'm Sean Riehl. I'm the composer for I do all the music. Cool.
SPEAKER_09: And so you have a mini story. This is your first mini story. It's my first radio story ever.
SPEAKER_08: At all.
SPEAKER_09: There we go. Okay, well, congratulations.
SPEAKER_08: So let's hear it. So it's the late 1800s and people are just starting to consume recorded music. And the process of recording at this time was kind of hectic and I like to imagine a lot of fun, but maybe more hectic. So before they used microphones in studios, sound was captured by these big horns, which were made of like mainly brass or copper. And these recording horns would collect and focus the sound vibrations into this little diaphragm and the diaphragm would vibrate a stylus that cut a groove into a wax disc.
SPEAKER_09: Should I be picturing these recording horns pretty much like a phonograph, like an old fashioned phonograph that plays out through one of these horns? Yeah, it's like the same thing except just backwards.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, cool. Yeah, so yeah, that's like part of it is just same backwards as forwards. But the problem with this process was that these recording horns were limited in what sound frequencies they'd respond to. So certain instruments like tubas and French horns, which were also made of brass, would get picked up much louder than string instruments like guitars or violins. That makes sense. So nowadays, we record every instrument on its own track and do a lot of leveling after the fact. But back then, they had to record whole orchestras with just one or sometimes two, if they were really fancy, of these like big recording horns in a single room. And then they just make copies of the disc that they recorded on. There was no editing. If there was too much French horn or if an opera singer like, you know, blew out the recording with their falsetto, you throw the disc away and you do it again. So in order to get a balanced mix of different instruments and voices, sound engineers would arrange the musicians all around the studio at various distances from the recording horns. Sometimes they'd have like the louder instruments like French horns pointed at the back wall away from the recording horn and the musicians would be watching their conductor like in a mirror. Wow. And they put pianos on top of platforms so that, you know, like the mallets and chords that are inside would be lined up with the recording horn. And this one's one of my favorites. They'd sometimes put a singer like on a little trolley so that an assistant could wheel them closer to the horn for quieter vocal passages and wheel them away during loud ones. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_09: Well, that sounds chaotic. It's like a Rube Goldberg recording of an orchestra. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_08: Okay. But the string instruments were the hardest to record. And because of that, like stand up bass parts were often just played on tuba instead. And a lot of engineers like didn't want to deal with recording violins at all. So there were very few recordings with the violins on them before a certain time.
SPEAKER_09: Is that true?
SPEAKER_08: Well, there were actually a fair amount of recordings of violins, but it was part because of the engineers going through all this trouble to do these elaborate sessions, but also because of this. Oh my God.
SPEAKER_09: Okay. So could you describe what you're holding?
SPEAKER_08: I'm holding a strobe violin, which my bandmate found at this novelty music shop. And it's got like the neck and like head and bridge of a violin and the strings. But instead of like a body, it's just got this like wooden rod and then this like huge horn that's coming out of it.
SPEAKER_09: So imagine like a violin with no, what do you call the body? The body that has the, you know, like we think of that resonates that goes up against your neck when you play a violin, that's all gone. And then instead is this basically a trumpet sitting on, you know, pointed, you know, folded back into itself. And the sound comes out of the end of the, of the trumpet horn.
SPEAKER_08: Just like how recording was like the gramophone backwards. This is also the same concept of the gramophone. Like the vibrating of the strings goes into this diaphragm that's down here by the bridge and it vibrates the sound, which gets projected out by the horn. Wow.
SPEAKER_09: That's amazing. It looks really, it's like, it would be the centerpiece of a steampunk orchestra, basically. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: There are, there are, um, steampunk bands that use this. Of course. You want to hear what it sounds like? I would love to.
SPEAKER_04: That's awesome.
SPEAKER_09: In a way in its native state, like in this room, it kind of sounds like, like an old recording of a violin because it's going through that diaphragm and horn. It has a little bit of a electro acoustic sort of seeming processing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: And that's part of it is that like the reason why I'm recording sound that way is because that's what the old recording horns were like able to pick up. And so what this was doing was it was actually just amplifying the frequencies that like the recording horns would pick up. Right.
SPEAKER_09: So it was sort of designed to speak to the horn that is doing the recording in some ways. Like it's the, it's the analog, the match on the other side of it to make it even better to be picked up. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: Another thing that it did was it actually like the horn, it made the sound more directional because all of these musicians had to like funnel their sounds like into this like one acoustic horn in the corner of the room. It was really helpful when you could have a violin that would point at sound directly at the horn rather than like just radiating out into the room, which is like, you know, what the resonant body usually does. Oh, that's awesome. And for a little while, it was a big deal in the recording industry. And these designs were applied to like all kinds of instruments, Strow guitars, Strow cellos, Strow mandolins, Strow ukuleles, and actually a lot of instruments that like weren't under the Strow name, but there were just a lot of different instruments, like from different companies that utilize this design. And Strow is the brand name. Yeah, Strow is the name of the person who invented the first one. He was John Matthias Augustus Strow.
SPEAKER_09: And so were they all manufactured by a company that was the Strow company or was it just a design that was used by anybody? Yeah, it was the Strow Violin Company and they kept manufacturing them even past Strow's
SPEAKER_08: death in 1914. His son picked up where he left off. And there were a lot of articles that were speculating about where it fit in to the broader world of music, like this one in Strand Magazine from 1902 that I found that was pushing hard that these instruments were the future.
SPEAKER_01: The harmonics are loud and pure, but what is of great importance is an entire absence of scrape. This is a point that solo players will value highly. Of course, the idea of a new violin that can be played upon immediately at its finish and that will produce marvelous tone and quality of sound will possibly come as a shock to old fashioned people to whom the original violin has been a cherished idol, but the spirit of invention respects no one's prejudices.
SPEAKER_08: And those are actually phono fiddles playing underneath which are kind of a relative to the Strow Violin. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_09: So I see you have one, but what happened to these instruments in the larger world?
SPEAKER_08: So around 1925, electric microphone technology made its way into recording studios and broader ranges of instruments became more possible to capture so these modified instruments no longer made the same practical sense to the recording industry. So the Strow Violin Company slowed production and then finally shut down in 1942. Can you tell I'm sad about it? I can tell.
SPEAKER_08: And a lot of people write about them as kind of like this silly flash in the pan thing, but they were a really valuable tool for the beginnings of the recording industry and without them there are a lot of records where violins wouldn't have been as present probably or studios just wouldn't have bothered to record them at all.
SPEAKER_09: So after they weren't necessary because recording technology had advanced, did they just kind of fizzle out as an instrument?
SPEAKER_08: Well, they're actually still around. Like you can find them in wide use and folk music from Romania or Myanmar. Shakira you had a Strow Violin player as part of her 2010-2011 tour. And Resonator Guitars, you know those ones with like the partly metal bodies and they got kind of like the nice designs like cut into them. So those are the same technology as the Strow Violin. And one of the inventors of the Resonator Guitar had visited the Strow factory like
SPEAKER_08: in its heyday and there are a number of articles that say that he based his designs off what he saw there.
SPEAKER_09: So it still lives on to this day. And what is it that you, I mean you said you're a little sad about it, but why are you sad? What does it do for you? What do you enjoy about it?
SPEAKER_08: Well, I think what I feel sad about is that like it's just it's just so different than a violin and like, you know, like the Strand Magazine article was like trying to be like, this is like better than the violin. And of course, you know, like violins would have been around had been around for a long time or like, nope. Better than a violin. I mean, it's actually kind of a little bit more limited range by definition than a violin,
SPEAKER_09: but it has a really kind of, there's something nice about that sound. Yeah, it's a different kind of range of frequencies.
SPEAKER_08: I don't know, I just think that like, it's wonderful to have like different kinds of sounds. Right. So, well, cool.
SPEAKER_09: Well, thanks for introducing us to the Stroh violin. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you, Roman.
SPEAKER_09: We're going to take a quick break and I'll catch you up on a couple of notable stories in the flurry of flag redesigns that were catalyzed by the TED Talk I gave a couple years back. Stay tuned. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. 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So in March of 2015, I did a main stage TED talk where I talked about the design of flags and how many city flags around the country were particularly awful and I performed it live like a live podcast on the TED stage and I used the voice of excellent air extraordinaire Ted Kay to explain his flag design principles and it was a total blast. And what's great is that since then there have been over a hundred flag redesigns in the US and it's been fun to watch people engage with their civic symbols in a new way. Burlington, Vermont had an open call flag redesign contest to replace their coat of arms style flag and the competition was won by twin 12 year old brothers Owen and Lucas Martiso. It's a white, green and white zigzag stripe on a blue field. It's a very handsome flag. Congrats guys. A particular note in the flag redesign world is the flag of Pocatello, Idaho. Pocatello was voted the worst city flag in North America by the members of the North American Vuxillological Association and it was kind of the punchline of the TED talk. And after they heard about the talk, they invited me up to Pocatello to spur their flag redesign efforts and they couldn't have been nicer and more gracious. I had a fantastic time there. I had breakfast with the mayor. CBS Sunday morning came to Pocatello to do a national news piece about their redesign. And I think even though, you know, I was having a little fun with them, the city came away from the experience really excited and enjoyed the attention. And best of all, after a year long effort, they got a new beautiful flag. The new flag is called mountains left and it has three red peaks symbolizing three local mountains on a field of blue and a blue line at the bottom that represents the Port Knuff River. And at the top of the highest peak is a golden compass rose representing Pocatello's transportation history. It is a fine flag. I hope to see it everywhere next time I'm up there. If you're curious to see a picture of it, Google it's 2017 just like use your phone, but we'll also have a picture of it on our website at 99pi.org. Well done, Pocatello. It was a real honor to be your guest. We're going to take a little break until 2018, but I'm going to put some surprise 99 PI stories in the feed that I know you'll dig. So you might not even notice we're gone. Have a happy new year. We'll be back in 2018 with another mini stories installment featuring the rest of the crew and a couple of listeners suggested stories as well. See you then. 99% invisible is Avery Troughman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sharif Yousif, Delaney Hall, Taryn Mazza, composer Shawn Rial, senior producer, Katie Mingle, digital director, Kurt Kohlstedt, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Knight Foundation and sticker loving listeners just like you. You can find 99% invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But the real 99 PI HQ is at 99PI.org.
SPEAKER_12: Thanks for watching.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from
SPEAKER_11: Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops, the same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops, find the loopy side.
