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SPEAKER_04: This is part two of the 2017-2018 mini stories episodes where I interview the staff and our collaborators about their favorite little design stories that don't quite fill out an entire episode for whatever reason, but they are cool 99PI stories nonetheless. We have underground tunnels, alarms, mysterious filing cabinets, and gold. Tiny, tiny amounts of gold. Prepare to be very interesting at your next party. Let's do this. Why don't you start with who you are actually? Okay. Yeah. So I am Delaney Hall and I am a producer and senior editor on staff.
SPEAKER_10: All right. So what is your story today?
SPEAKER_03: Well, first I'm going to introduce you to Peter Sokolowski.
SPEAKER_10: And my levels are okay? Okay. So I'm not too loud. I'm not pop. I try to not pop my peas, but I get excited. I'll try not to talk too fast.
SPEAKER_10: And the stuff that Peter gets really excited about, the stuff that makes him pop his peas and talk really fast is language because he's the editor at large at Merriam-Webster and he's a lexicographer. Lexicographer is a person who compiles and edits dictionaries. That's the old definition.
SPEAKER_05: The great Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer in London in the mid 18th century very famously defined a lexicographer as a harmless drudge.
SPEAKER_10: And Peter actually said that they use that term affectionately now as like a kind of badge of honor. They like to be called harmless drudges. So don't worry about insulting them if you want to use that term. So what does a harmless drudge like Peter do all day at Merriam-Webster?
SPEAKER_04: Well, from his description, it sounds like they work in an office that is very, very quiet, silent basically.
SPEAKER_10: And it's filled with these massive steel filing cabinets. And I've kind of been imagining it like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark at the end where the man is pushing that crate through a huge warehouse. But instead of stacks of enormous crates, it's filled with metal filing cabinets. And those metal filing cabinets are filled with index cards. As far as I know, it's the largest body of collected evidence of any language in the world.
SPEAKER_05: It's 15 or 16 million index cards with a word in use, that is to say in context, with its full bibliography. So we know who wrote it and where it was published and when it was published.
SPEAKER_10: And so that is the work of lexicographers. They're the keepers of that word history. And for a long time before computers came along, this is how they did it with these massive systems of filing cabinets. There's the file for the phonetician, for the pronunciation editor. There's the file for our dating editors who do the etymological dating. So it's a place full of file cabinets.
SPEAKER_05: But this isn't actually a story about how the Merriam-Webster offices are filled with filing cabinets.
SPEAKER_10: It's not, okay. No, it's not. It's a story about one special filing cabinet in their office. Okay, so here's where it gets really interesting. So one day, Peter was wandering through these endless rows of filing cabinets and he came across this one.
SPEAKER_05: And one of them simply said, backward index on it. And so he opens up the cabinet that says backward index.
SPEAKER_05: And I realized what it was, which was, you know, all of the headwords of the Unabridged Dictionary, some 315,000 separate index cards with only one word on them. And it was a headword typed backwards.
SPEAKER_04: And so the headword is the entry in the dictionary? That's the first word? That's the word in question? Right. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_10: So this index is like, imagine all the words in the dictionary, but typed backwards and then organized alphabetically. Okay. Okay. So why would you do that?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that is the question. Because the utility of it is not immediately obvious, at least not to non-lexicographers like you and me.
SPEAKER_10: But Peter, the harmless drudge, he kind of got it.
SPEAKER_05: Lexicography is an extreme sport. This is a kind of a radical practice of collection and of archiving. And so to a certain degree, this is maybe the weirdest example of that kind of archiving. But it made a kind of sense to me.
SPEAKER_10: And to really understand why it makes any kind of sense, you have to think back to when lexicographers first started compiling the backward index, which was in the 1930s, it turns out. Which was a time before computers and all of the search possibilities that they allow. In the pre-digital era, how else could we have known that there are, for example, 500 words in the dictionary that end in ology?
SPEAKER_10: And yeah, yeah, you're getting it. That's because with a regular dictionary just organized in a regular alphabetical way, a word like ecology would not appear next to a word like technology because one starts with e and one starts with t. Got it. Okay. So with a backward index, all the words that end in ology, for example, will be grouped together.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So you couldn't actually look up ology words. You would look up y-g-o-l-o words.
SPEAKER_10: But in doing that, you would find them. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So cool. Kind of ingenious. And there are actually a lot of other examples of why this is useful. There was no way that they could know, for example, how many words in English are made with the compound like, like, you know, block like, clock like, rock like, sock like, chalk like.
SPEAKER_05: Or how many open compounds, that is to say two word phrases that use pony. So Highland pony, Shetland pony, Welsh pony, that kind of thing. And then it gets a little deeper. Those words that are related morphologically like ethological, lithological, ornithological, you know, things that end in that particular sequence of letters. And then just basic rhyming sequences, steepy, weepy, sweepy, 40, shorty, snorty.
SPEAKER_10: And in fact, this backward index was instrumental in the creation of Merriam-Webster's first rhyming dictionary. Oh, yeah. I have one of those. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're still, they're very popular.
SPEAKER_10: They're really, really good. So by reading words backwards, you can start to see new kinds of patterns like the ology pattern or the logical pattern or just rhyming patterns. That's so cool.
SPEAKER_04: The kind of lexical detail that we can get into by looking at the language backwards does sort of illuminate our knowledge of the language as we read it in a normal way.
SPEAKER_04: So you said it came from the 1930s before there were computers, but does Peter know anything about who actually made this mysterious falling cabinet? Yeah. So after he discovered it, he started doing some research. And exactly who invented it is still a bit of a mystery.
SPEAKER_10: He figured out that it dates back to the 1930s, and there's some evidence that lexicographers worked on it up until the 1970s. So he knows how long it was actively being compiled. And he also found out that the project was a kind of favorite pet project of this one editor named Philip Gove. He edited Webster's third unabridged dictionary in the 1950s, and it sounds like he was very rigorous and rule-oriented. Who is sort of famous for his organizational skills and for making the dictionary apparatus, that is to say, the things that we use as kind of code in the dictionary.
SPEAKER_05: Things like, you know, what does a boldface colon mean? What does a light-faced, you know, italic semicolon mean? When can we use commas? There's a rule for everything. And so it was really Gove who systematized all of that.
SPEAKER_10: He made a rule book for us, for the editors, that was followed to the T. It was really, really strict and very kind of innovative in its way.
SPEAKER_05: And also kind of proto-digital, because when we finally did digitize that dictionary, we recognized how very regular the apparatus was. So Gove, from Peter's description, it seems like he thought about the dictionary with the logic of a computer programmer, but before computers were a thing.
SPEAKER_04: And now that computers are a thing, I mean, you mentioned the backward index sort of fell out in the 1970s, which makes tons of sense. The computers must have really changed the way lexicographers or the dictionary really works. Yeah, totally. I mean, for one thing, they have made the old school backwards index totally obsolete.
SPEAKER_10: On the Merriam-Webster website, there's an advanced search function where you can type in ology or phobia. And you don't have to spell it backwards. No, you don't have to spell it backwards. It pulls up all the words that end with ology or phobia so easy. We have it so easy. We really do. We really do.
SPEAKER_10: And then computers have also allowed lexicographers like Peter to see other kinds of interesting patterns. For example. Well, my favorite that we talked about in this interview is this function on Merriam-Webster's website, which is called Time Traveler. By which you can reorder the dictionary in chronological order as opposed to alphabetical order.
SPEAKER_05: Because ultimately alphabetical order is random. It's arbitrary. But chronological order isn't because English develops in a very particular way. All the words, for example, about train travel and train tracks and coal and engines, they all come at a certain time. All words that have to do with repeating firearms, they all come at a certain time. The words that entered the language regarding the law that are derived from French, they all come in at a similar time. So reorganizing the dictionary in a digital way turns out to be a way to sort of turn the dictionary into a three-dimensional search. Rather than just simply a list, we can go in greater depth.
SPEAKER_03: That's amazing.
SPEAKER_04: Isn't that fascinating? That's so cool. I love the idea of the time traveler.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's such a good way to order knowledge in a certain way. And it's sort of like the backwards index was an early pre-digital attempt at achieving that kind of three-dimensional search.
SPEAKER_10: Right.
SPEAKER_03: That's so cool. Well, thanks.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, thank you.
SPEAKER_01: We got to know Vivian Lee when she was a finalist in the Radiotopia podquest contest.
SPEAKER_04: Her show Villain-ish is premiering this year, but she's also going to do a couple of 99PI stories for us, including this one, a mini story. And she decided to start big.
SPEAKER_07: So I want to start with the worst nuclear accident in US history. Oh, goodness.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, go ahead.
SPEAKER_00: For many years, there has been a vigorous debate in this country about the safety of the nation's 72 nuclear energy power plants. That debate is likely to be intensified because of what happened early this morning at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Max? So you probably heard about this before because it was big news, but back in 1979, there was a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
SPEAKER_07: A cooling pump broke down and the plant did just what it was supposed to do, shut itself off, but not before some radioactivity had escaped.
SPEAKER_01: We have two reports. A bunch of communities around the reactor ended up having to evacuate and it just freaked a lot of people out.
SPEAKER_07: Well, they should have been freaked out.
SPEAKER_04: That was freaking scary. So in the aftermath of what happened, the president ordered a commission to investigate what happened and there was this big postmortem report to try to understand what had gone wrong.
SPEAKER_07: And what actually did go wrong?
SPEAKER_07: Well, it was kind of complicated because a lot of things went wrong. But Three Mile Island was a classic cascading failure type accident. So essentially, a relief valve in one of the reactor units got stuck in the open position, which caused all the coolant to be released. So the coolant ran out of the core and it started to overheat. And in the end, it ended up being a pretty minor mechanical breakdown. But what they found out was that it was actually human error that made the whole situation worse. Humans make everything worse.
SPEAKER_04: They really do. They really do.
SPEAKER_04: A cascading failure of humans.
SPEAKER_07: But, you know, the plant operators could see and they could hear that something was wrong because all these lights are flashing and alarms are sounding. But it wasn't clear exactly what was wrong because all the alarms were really confusing and just made the situation worse. Because they went off all at the same time, that would have hindered communication at the very time when they needed to communicate.
SPEAKER_09: And who is that?
SPEAKER_04: So that's Judy Edworthy. She studies psychoacoustics and alarm design at the University of Plymouth.
SPEAKER_07: And she told me that Three Mile Island is actually a really common case study when it comes to bad and ineffective alarm design. Three Mile Island is very well known for having hundreds of alarms going off in a very short period of time.
SPEAKER_09: Now, that's an example where there was no alarm philosophy because that shouldn't have happened.
SPEAKER_04: So alarm design really matters. Yes, it definitely matters.
SPEAKER_07: And there have actually been other major accidents where alarms that were supposed to help people respond to emergency. But instead they made the situation worse, like the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010, which caused a ton of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico. I didn't know that had anything to do with alarm failure.
SPEAKER_07: Oh yeah, yeah. It turned out that a bunch of the alarm systems on the Deepwater rig had actually been inhibited for at least a year before the accidents happened. Because Transocean, which is the company that ran the rig, didn't want false alarms to wake up the crew while they were sleeping. So the alarms were too easily triggered and so they just turned them off so they didn't upset the operation of the rig.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly. False alarm syndrome basically.
SPEAKER_07: So this is the kind of stuff that Professor Edworthy thinks about a lot.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, yeah. She thinks about the best ways to design alarms so that they can accomplish what they need to do.
SPEAKER_07: And one of her big concerns is that humans are just bombarded by so many alarms in our everyday life that we just start tuning them out. Or turning them off.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Because I think the whole world suffers from alarm fatigue because I think we're just so used to alarms just going off all the time. And they're almost, they're just a backdrop to our lives.
SPEAKER_07: She says that the average person probably hears about 100 different types of alarms a day. They just all the time, you stand at a cash register and it's beeping away and then you hear cars, car alarms going off and you've got microwaves and you've got, everything beeps.
SPEAKER_09: And for no good reason quite a lot of the time. And so people just start tuning them out and they lose track of which alarms are important and which ones aren't.
SPEAKER_07: If everything in the world is beeping we kind of forget that those beeps are trying to point out actual problems. But another consideration is that alarm tones themselves should communicate something about what the problem is.
SPEAKER_03: And so how does that work? Okay. So when you think of an alarm sound, what do you think of?
SPEAKER_07: Well I think of a bracing, clocks on, beeping, siren, high pitched, shrill, alarming, upsetting.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_07: So we basically all have like one cultural reference point for what an alarm should sound like. And that's because like in the olden days we didn't really have much range in terms of alarm mechanisms. In the past alarms, you could only make an alarm by either pushing air through an object like a klaxon or by hitting something like a bell.
SPEAKER_07: We associate these archaic noises like bells and whistles and sirens and klaxons with auditory alarms because that's just what the technology at the time allowed for and we got used to it. So Judy made actually this kind of funny point which is that we have such a narrow idea of what an alarm should sound like that it even shows up in futuristic sci-fi movies. Sci-fi films, all sorts of wonderful things happen in the film but when you put alarms off and they're just the same alarms that we're just used to.
SPEAKER_09: It's like in the film The Martian, right? They can do all this wonderful things and go to Mars but they can't design better alarms than we've got now.
SPEAKER_04: That's a lot of alarm sounds. Yeah. Oh lordy. And they all kind of sound the same. That guy's in trouble.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Totally. But yeah, but with digital sound, you know, so much more is possible you can make an alarm sound like basically anything. You can use music. Some people use tones or sequences or melodies. You can use sounds that are the sounds of real objects doing real things and we tend to refer to these as auditory icons but really they're just metaphors.
SPEAKER_09: And I love this. I love the idea of auditory icons and metaphorical sounds. It's just really interesting and cool to me.
SPEAKER_07: So what's a good example of an auditory icon?
SPEAKER_04: Okay. So hospitals are notorious for having these terrible soundscapes because the sheer amount of alarms that are just constantly going off and like at all hours of the night.
SPEAKER_07: Right. And they're all just beeps and tones that are kind of variations of each other. So Judy designed this new tone that's meant to be used when there's a problem related to a patient's medication and this is how it works. What you might do is you would announce an alarm by using something like this.
SPEAKER_09: That gets your attention. That's followed by.
SPEAKER_07: See?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I mean, that's interesting. So there's a little bit of an attention grabber and then something metaphorical so you can really tell what it is. Right. The sound of the pill bottle kind of cues medication in your head. So you kind of already know what the problem is before you even address it.
SPEAKER_07: What we find with these auditory icons is that they're very, very easy to learn. You just tell people once what they mean and then they're away. They've understood it.
SPEAKER_07: So instead of some generic and alarming alarm sound that could literally mean anything, which is what happened at Three Mile Island, you can imagine these auditory icons that kind of communicate exactly what the problem is. So there wouldn't be this confusion about trying to decipher what this one tone means. Except for at Three Mile Island, when there's 100 things going wrong, it would sound like a preschool classroom.
SPEAKER_04: Sounds and rattle. But that becomes the sound design challenge of like, how do you preference which one you hear the loudest and in what order do you hear them and all that sort of thing, which, you know, is really cool concept to begin to tackle. Yeah. Yeah. You basically have to rethink an environment from the top down in terms of what it sounds like.
SPEAKER_07: Cool. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_03: No, thank you.
SPEAKER_04: Since your voice isn't heard as much on the air, why don't you say who you are?
SPEAKER_02: Cool. I'm Sharif Yousif. I am. What did we settle on? Technical producer. Technical producer. Yeah. Technical producer for the show, which basically means I try to make things sound good. That's awesome. And you do make things sound good. Nice. So what kind of story do you have for us today?
SPEAKER_04: I have, I believe it's called a mini story. And it is about alchemy.
SPEAKER_02: Whoo! Alchemy. I know what alchemy is.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. What is it? It is the idea of using chemistry to turn lead into gold. Yeah, basically. Or any other base metal.
SPEAKER_02: It was this loony idea that folks in the medieval ages were obsessed with turning base metals like lead or mercury into gold, which of course is preposterous nowadays. But there's this time when alchemists were these like really dope people backed by rich folks and powerful folks, including King Henry IV of France. A lot of Catholic monks practice alchemy. Even Sir Isaac Newton was super into alchemy. He apparently wrote about it more than physics and optics. So for a long time, hundreds and hundreds of years across the entire world in the Middle East and Europe, there were these blurred lines between science and alchemy. In fact, alchemy can actually be traced back to the Arabic alqimiya, which means chemistry, because apparently Egyptians were pretty big into alchemy back in the day, especially during the Hellenistic times in Alexandria, which is where I used to live. So shout out to Alexandria. And so alchemy was this really big thing, and it is still really prevalent in pop culture today. Like, I don't know if your kids play like Minecraft or Warcraft. Based on a cursory Google search, I think there are some alchemist characters involved in those. And one of the examples from my childhood is in Harry Potter. The whole first book is about the Sorcerer's Stone, or in the British version, the Philosopher's Stone, which is this thing that turns metals into gold and also apparently makes people immortal, which is why Voldemort was all about it. Or sorry, he who must not be named was all about it. Anyway, that's all to say that this idea that you could design or kind of design gold from other metals was a really big pseudoscientific quest for a really long time. But that all sort of went by the wayside when modern chemistry started to become its own discipline, you know, with atoms and neutrons and electrons and all that stuff sort of started taking hold. Well, the ironic thing is, is that with modern chemistry, it is actually possible to create gold from other elements. It actually happens in nature, like when neutron stars collide, and it can happen in labs if you have nuclear capabilities or like a particle accelerator. Which brings us to Maryland in the 1960s. There was a physicist there named Judith Temperley, and there with a nuclear reactor, she managed to turn mercury into gold. Well, she actually transmuted it, which is the technical term. And as I understand, it means she modified the nucleus of one element until it had the same amount of protons as gold. Should I do a quick chemistry lesson? I mean, go for it. Okay, cool. So quick chemistry lesson. Elements are defined by the number of protons in their nucleus. Like hydrogen is number one in the periodic table, which means it has one proton in its nucleus. Sodium is number 11, it has 11 protons, so on, so on. So the idea was that if you got an element that had, you know, close to the number of protons as gold, then maybe like with a particle accelerator, you could add protons to it or strip protons away. But to do that, you need a huge amount of energy because if you collide two positive things, which protons are, then they would like bounce off each other. So you need a particle accelerator to do that. And mercury is number 80 on the periodic table of elements. Gold is number 79. So they're very close. So she was like, okay, cool, I'll put mercury in there, which has 80 protons. I'll try to smack one of those off and maybe one of the protons will fall off and I'll be left with gold. Totally. And she did that. She, I think, successfully converted one atom into gold, which, you know, great. That was really great job. And she proved that this idea that was really crazy but was so obsessed over for so many hundreds of years was actually scientifically possible. And then in the 1980s, this professor named Glenn T. Seaborg, who was a Nobel winning chemist at Berkeley, made even more gold, transmuted it the same way. Except this time he used bismuth, which, you know, unlike mercury isn't poisonous. And it was also pretty close to gold on the periodic table. It's like, I think it was 83 protons, number 83, compared to gold 79. So he smacked some carbon into it using a particle accelerator and he managed to create several thousand atoms of gold. You know, in both cases, the end results were sort of invisible, like to the naked eye. So it doesn't seem like the best option for, you know, creating wealth. Exactly. Yeah, especially considering that you need a particle accelerator to do it, which I hear is pretty expensive to build.
SPEAKER_04: So this centuries long quest becomes possible. But in the end, it's pretty impractical because you really have to spend way more gold than could ever be made creating a gold atom out of bismuth.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah. I think Seaborg the chemist told the Associated Press at the time that in order to create an ounce of gold using his process that he did in Berkeley, it would take one quadrillion dollars to create an ounce of gold. And I had to look up quadrillion. It's a one with 15 zeros after it. And at the same time, the going rate for gold was about $560 an ounce. So not the most cost effective, but pretty cool that we did it. Absolutely. Thanks so much. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Last but certainly not least is the longest serving soldier in the 99 P.I. Army. Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_08: I want to start with a question for you. So how long have you lived in the Bay Area? I moved here in 1997.
SPEAKER_08: So are there any tourist attractions that you still haven't been to?
SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Let me think.
SPEAKER_08: Alcatraz, Pier 39. Lombard Street. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: I've never driven down Lombard Street. Really?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: That's so funny that you would love Lombard Street. Well, it's OK. So I grew up in New York, lived there for my whole childhood and adulthood or youthhood, and I never, ever went to the crown of the Statue of Liberty. And now it's too late. And it was the kind of thing that everyone always told me to do. And it's, you know, just kind of a typical thing that locals have a very different experience of their town and their city than visitors. Because by and large, they don't see the attractions.
SPEAKER_13: The vast majority of our visitors are from out of town. Overwhelming majority. Think about locals doing tourist activities in any town around the United States. Many people do not go to the tourist thing in their town. This is Dean Najarian.
SPEAKER_08: He is a tour guide in an area of downtown Seattle called Pioneer Square. It's very touristy. And he works for a company called Bill Spiedel's Underground Tour. And as the name suggests, the tour allows you to descend some steps and find yourself below street level.
SPEAKER_04: Like literally underground. Under the ground.
SPEAKER_08: I lived here for 12 years before I knew about it.
SPEAKER_13: Safe to say easily the majority of people who live and work in Seattle do not know this. They don't know that as we look around up above there, that all of the sidewalks you see up there, all of those sidewalks are hollow. What does he mean that the sidewalks are hollow?
SPEAKER_04: To explain that, we have to go back to 1851 to the founding of Seattle when the first white settlers arrived.
SPEAKER_08: And back then, the land looked completely different. Like topographically. It was, I mean, shockingly different. If you look at a map, Seattle was this tiny little peninsula that used to sometimes flood into an island periodically. And it was not the best place to establish a city. But some young white guys went ahead and established it. And Pioneer Square quickly became this little logging town full of tiny wooden houses and a logging mill.
SPEAKER_11: That was the original Pioneer Square area. And that's where the dock was. That's where some of the only businesses were. This is historian Alan Stein.
SPEAKER_08: And he says even after the settlement, the town would still flood sometimes. And this meant plumbing was impossible. The toilets were at sea level.
SPEAKER_11: So the problem is, any time the tide came in, it would blast water through. And so, you know, these toilets erupting with water. Well, that just sounds awful.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah. It was a stupid place to establish a town.
SPEAKER_08: It was a bad idea. But the settlers decided to grin and bear it. And they put up with the many faults of their little city, as long as they could continue to sell its lumber. Until they accidentally burned the entire city to the ground. And when the Great Fire hit in 89, that burned down.
SPEAKER_11: That started in Pioneer Square. That burned down most of that area because by this time wooden buildings had been built up.
SPEAKER_08: In 1889, the Great Fire hit Seattle and it just pretty much levels downtown. It's just destroyed. But miraculously, no one died in the Great Fire. So the city actually sees this as an opportunity. Seattle's like, okay, this is our big chance to get the town above sea level and we can start again. They thought, well, let's grade it over.
SPEAKER_11: Let's pack up the streets so that they're 11 feet higher in the air. And that way it's a little more stable. But the business owners had already started building. The city didn't want to tell the businesses in Pioneer Square to wait until the project was done to rebuild.
SPEAKER_08: Because raising up the streets was this really ambitious project. It was going to take like 10 years to do. So you can't tell all the businesses in your town to take a 10-year hiatus. So the Pioneer Square businesses were asked that when they rebuild, first they should do it in brick and stone, not wood. Learn their lesson. And then secondly, they should add another entrance on their second floors. And slowly, in increments, the city raised up the streets five to 11 feet up around the businesses. So they built their businesses with an entrance on the first floor and an entrance on basically the second story for the eventuality that the street would raise to meet it.
SPEAKER_04: And there was a while where the streets were raised up and then the sidewalk and the building were lower than the streets.
SPEAKER_08: So, for example, if you wanted to park your carriage in the street and then leave your carriage and go into a store. You had to actually go down sets of stairs or even ladders to get to these storefronts.
SPEAKER_11: Basically, the sidewalk at this point wasn't really joined to that second story.
SPEAKER_04: But the street was there, but the sidewalk wasn't there.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, the sidewalk was still down at the old flooded... At the first level. Yeah, first level. It didn't all happen at once. It happened in increments. But yeah, and then the street was above it. So eventually the city connected the raised streets to the new second story entrances with a new sidewalk. And so this covered up the old sidewalk and created this hollow space between the old sidewalk and the current one. Once the streets were graded and level, then businesses moved to the upper, the second story.
SPEAKER_11: And that's where their storefronts later became. So all these original storefronts were then covered over underground. And that's what became underground Seattle. So the underground was rumored to have a lot of different uses throughout its history.
SPEAKER_08: People speculate about its life as speakeasies and gay clubs and paths for espionage or smuggling. But honestly, for most of its existence, it was just abandoned or forgotten or used as storage space by the shops above it in Pioneer Square. But then in the 1960s, most of the businesses started to leave Pioneer Square and the area became kind of down and out. And so this was the 60s. Everyone was like, great, let's just tear down all the old buildings in Pioneer Square so we can build more space-agey stuff like the Space Needle. The Space Age, the future. People were more looking forward than they were to the past.
SPEAKER_11: Except for a man named Bill Spiedel.
SPEAKER_08: So Bill, he was a columnist for the Seattle Times, and he had an interest in history.
SPEAKER_11: A lot of it was because he had a lot of contacts.
SPEAKER_08: Like contacts with direct descendants of the founders of the city. Bill Spiedel knew people who were the sons or grandsons of the founding Pioneer families because Seattle has a young history.
SPEAKER_11: As far as white settlement goes, here in Seattle, really, it's just three generations away if you really think about it. And through these old timers, through stories, through rumors, Spiedel hears about these underground kind of tunnels in downtown Seattle.
SPEAKER_08: And he eventually learns about the razing of the streets and these hollow spaces between the current sidewalk and the old sidewalk. And in 1965, Bill Spiedel's underground tour was officially born. And he used the tour as an opportunity to show Seattleites that they had a history and they had a historic district that they were ignoring. And they thought they didn't. They thought they were this young city. This got the ball rolling on preserving Pioneer Square.
SPEAKER_11: And by 1969, it worked because it became a national historic district. And still is to this day. Bill Spiedel passed away in 1988.
SPEAKER_08: But today, if you go to Pioneer Square, you will see hordes of tourists roving around in groups of 47 taking Bill Spiedel's underground tour. And they turn out these massive tours every day. 188 people come through every hour. And one time I went, there was this woman translating the tour in real time on her phone into Chinese. I mean, they're from all over the world. And the tour very much continues in Bill Spiedel's original style. It's a lot more dedicated to fun than facts. There are a lot of gags and dad jokes. They talk a lot about the exploding toilets. And they tell tales about drunken debauchery on the razed streets. In the first year of construction alone, 17 men walked out of bars, tried to cross the street, fell to their death, stepping from the street to the sidewalk below.
SPEAKER_13: Bill Spiedel said that that was, it worked in a way because that was early Seattle's original one-step program. Oh, I love that joke.
SPEAKER_08: So it's a lot of unverified stuff and a few exaggerations. But honestly, that's true with a lot of touristy tours. They kind of turn into this giant game of telephone. But in this case, without Spiedel's legends and dad jokes, we might not have this part of town at all. Or this piece of Seattle history that tourists know better than the locals. Since literally thousands of you asked, I'm going to tell you what I think of the redesigned Donald Trump presidential challenge coin right after this.
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SPEAKER_04: is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. You might not remember December 22nd, 2017 as a particularly notable day, but I will always remember it as the day the world first saw Donald Trump's redesigned presidential challenge coin. If you were unfamiliar with challenge coins, please turn your hymnals to episode number 156 of 99PI. It's called Coin Check and you'll know everything you need to know. But if you've been here a while, you know I know about challenge coins and I care about them deeply. In fact, if you didn't serve in the military, there's a good chance you learned about challenge coins for the first time from 99% Invisible. This show has its own challenge coins, so does Radio Topia, so my association with challenge coins is strong. And because of that, I was forwarded the December 22nd Washington Post article about Trump's garishly over-the-top challenge coin by about 9,000 people. So on my other podcast, What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law, we take the tweets of Donald Trump and we use them as a jumping off point to learn about the US Constitution. And if you haven't heard it, it's a really fun show and it's not nearly as snarky and angry as you might think. Plus, my co-host on that show is a law professor and a friend of mine, her name is Elizabeth Jo, and she's super smart and just delightful to listen to. So check it out. One of the things we discuss a lot on the show is that Donald Trump has a tendency to subvert constitutional norms. And if you're into Trump, you can actually appreciate that tendency. I know I totally dig people who push on rules to achieve the things I want them to achieve. Anyway, with the redesign of the presidential challenge coin, it's clear that Trump also likes to break the norms of taste and good design and tradition. The new Trump challenge coin dispenses with the presidential seal and replaces it with a similar-looking eagle image, but the head of the eagle is pointed in the opposite direction for some reason, and it has Donald Trump's signature across the bottom. Instead of E Pluribus Unum, it says, Make America Great Again. Then it says Donald Trump again on a ribbon that extends below the traditional circle of the coin. It is twice as thick as the most recent presidential challenge coins and instead of the muted colors befitting a dignified office, this coin is gold. A very, very cheap-looking gold. In terms of taste, I consider this new coin an impeachable offense. I will personally draw up the articles of impeachment myself. Just give me a call. However, I also must consider this from a design perspective, and the key question in design is, does the thing do what it was designed to do? In that sense, one could argue that the Donald Trump challenge coin is perfectly designed. It completely reflects the taste and style of Trump and his presidency in every way. It is in your face and untraditional. I find it unbelievably ugly and tacky and I don't like the ribbon protruding from the bottom of the circle, but it's fitting, much like the man himself wears his wide, shiny ties that calm down way too low. So just like I didn't really get the red MAGA hats, I can't argue that they weren't effective icons that did the job they were designed to do. So in a way, you kind of have to admire the new coin and judge it for what it is. And that is the limit to how far my generosity will extend because it is awful.
SPEAKER_04: It is really awful. It is awful to look at in every way. It is just, it is, it is, it is so bad. It's so bad. You heard it here first.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_04: 99% Invisible is Avery Trelferman, Emmet Fitzgerald, Sharif Yousif, Delaney Hall, Taryn Masa, composer Sean 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 a 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 99pi HQ is only at 99pi.org.
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SPEAKER_12: Is there any trip more delightfully unpredictable than a road trip? After all, who knows where the road will take you? Who knows where you'll stay? Will it be that no-name hotel that says no to every request?
SPEAKER_00: No, you'll have to find the elevators yourself. Or maybe the one with the extra stale Danish for breakfast.
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SPEAKER_12: Hilton, for the stay.
