SPEAKER_06: AppleCard is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. AppleCard subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.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. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This is part two of the 2019-2020 mini stories episodes where I interview the staff about their favorite little stories from the built world that don't quite fill out an entire episode for whatever reason but they are cool 99 PI stories nonetheless. We have centuries-old bonds, standard tunings mandated by international treaty, abandoned mansions and secret babies. If you ever need a conversation starter, these mini stories are our gift to you. Stay with us. Up first is producer Joe Rosenberg. Okay, so Joe, what do you have for me?
SPEAKER_12: What I have for you, Roman, is a story that I have been sitting on for quite some time. You know, it's one of those Planet Money pitches that I never sent to Planet Money. I got a drawer full. And it actually starts, or rather my familiarity with it starts about five years ago when I was reading the news and I came across this weird little AP wire service item.
SPEAKER_06: Weird AP wire service items are our specialty. Exactly.
SPEAKER_12: And it was about this announcement in Britain by George Osborne, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, that Britain was finally going to finish paying off its bonds from World War One. Like 100 years ago, World War One, not World War Two, World War One.
SPEAKER_06: Yes, bonds from the war to end all wars.
SPEAKER_13: Still counting the cost of the Great War, Britain is only now redeeming most of the remaining bonds raised to pay for World War One 100 years after it started. Britain has remembered its debt to the fallen.
SPEAKER_10: Another country is set to repay its financial debt.
SPEAKER_13: The government will pay off more than $300 million worth of those bonds in February. And I was like, how is it possible that it's only now paid off its bonds from World War
SPEAKER_12: One? Because I mean, I know it must have been expensive. And obviously, Britain issued a lot of bonds to pay for it. But I figured, you know, Britain, one of the wealthiest countries in the world must have paid off those bonds like a long time ago.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Just so I make sure I'm up to speed, a bond generally is like, when the government needs funds for something, and they don't have enough cash on hand. They go to the populace, essentially, and they say, buy this bond for x amount of money. And then over the course of 10, 20, 30 years, we will pay you back that amount of money plus a little bit of interest. And this is guaranteed by the government. So it's a really, really safe investment.
SPEAKER_12: Right. And after like, max 30 years, usually the bond matures. That's the term at which point the government has redeemed the bond.
SPEAKER_06: So they paid back everything and the interest in 30 years time.
SPEAKER_12: Correct. And they are no longer in your debt. Right.
SPEAKER_06: But these World War One bonds weren't redeemed until they were 95 years old. So that seemed way too long for a bond. Yeah, no, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_12: But then it got weirder because it turned out World War One was just like the most well known thing the British government wasn't done paying off. There were actually older bonds from their books that they announced they were also redeeming as part of this package, including bonds from wait for it, the Crimean War, a relief effort for the Irish Potato Famine, the Slavery Abolition Act, the Napoleonic Wars. Goodness gracious. And even that wasn't the oldest of the debts. Because after making the announcement about World War One, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer must have felt that he was like on a roll, because he then sent out a tweet, which just might be the most anachronistic tweet that you'll ever see. Check this out.
SPEAKER_12: Okay, it says, we'll redeem 218 million pounds of debts incurred because of the South Sea
SPEAKER_06: bubble another financial crisis. We're cleaning up after what was the South Sea bubble? What is he talking about?
SPEAKER_12: So what he's referring to, there are bonds from a government bailout of investors who were ruined by the infamous South Sea China bubble in 1720. Oh, of course, how could I forget the South Sea China bubble in 1720?
SPEAKER_12: Right, of course. I mean, apparently, obviously, like these bondholders who were still getting paid back by the UK government 300 years later, they had not forgotten that they were still expecting their money.
SPEAKER_06: That is incredible. 300 years of bonds. How is that possible?
SPEAKER_12: So it turns out what is going on and the reason there were these old, old debts? Is that all these were examples of a very rare type of bond called a perpetual bond.
SPEAKER_06: So how does a perpetual bond work?
SPEAKER_12: Okay, so a perpetual bond is quite simply a bond that never matures. It promises that instead of paying you back your principal plus interest in full after say 30 years, the government will just keep the principal. And instead, they'll pay you your children and your children's children's children's children, a small amount of interest every year for basically all eternity, or at least until they decide to redeem the bond, which means they finally decide to pay you back the principal, which is what the British finally did with 1200 or so perpetual bondholders in 2014. Wow.
SPEAKER_06: So when did they make a perpetual bond? I mean, maybe a better question is why did they do it in the first place? Because it seems like a really bad idea to borrow money this way. Like, where did this idea come from?
SPEAKER_12: The answer is actually that in some ways, in the beginning, most bonds were perpetual bonds.
SPEAKER_05: And before there were even bonds, all borrowing, there was just a process through which you would rent money, you would rent capital.
SPEAKER_12: So this is Gert Ruhlhöst. He's a professor of finance at Yale. And Gert says that if you go back to the Middle Ages, you have to imagine an economy where actually kind of like today, renting is really popular, you might pay a small amount of money every month to rent a field or an oxen or a house.
SPEAKER_05: And just as you would rent a house for an unspecified amount of time, you would rent money for unspecified amounts of time. So in a private arrangements between two parties, it is always easy to say I'm going to rent it for some unspecified time and you call me or I call you. And that'll be the end of the loan.
SPEAKER_12: Right. So just the way that you rent an apartment and you give the apartment back when you're done renting it, you could do the same thing with money.
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so if you needed 50 gold coins, and I were your creditor, I'd basically say to you, look, I'll give you 50 gold coins now and you can keep them as long as you want, just as long as you promise to pay me at least two gold coins a month indefinitely until you give me the original 50 coins back. Exactly. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. So if that was the standard that the early type of loaning was perpetual loans, why aren't there more perpetual loans being paid out still to this day?
SPEAKER_12: Right. That's a good question. So there were a few problems with perpetual loans, but the biggest might simply be that when it came to bonds issued by governments and companies, these types of bonds carry a lot of risk with them because governments and companies collapse, like all the time, at which point not only do payments stop, but you're also not going to be getting your principal back, like ever. And Geert says this happened all the time. So there were bonds issued by France before the French Revolution and by Russia before the Russian Revolution. Right. And then it defaulted on its debt like three times. And so most perpetual bonds are now just lost to history.
SPEAKER_06: So is the South Sea China bubble from 1720, is that the oldest perpetual bond or are there even older ones out there?
SPEAKER_12: Actually there are older ones. And Geert, or rather Yale, owns one of them. Oh, cool. Yeah. So Geert is the deputy director of an academic research group at Yale called the Center for International Finance. And one of the things they do is engage in something called scripophily, which sounds like an ancient skin wasting disease. But all it means is that they collect and curate financial instruments from various places and times in history.
SPEAKER_05: And one of the most interesting contracts in our collection is a very old Dutch bond issued by a Dutch water authority in 1648, which pays interest as of today.
SPEAKER_06: So 1648. So this is a bond that's been actively paid back since 1648.
SPEAKER_12: Yes. And in fact, all of the oldest known perpetual bonds, I think there's fewer than like half a dozen of them, are from this single Dutch water board. And the reason is because this water board is basically this regional entity, which for hundreds of years has been in charge of maintaining all of the dams and levees and dikes in a given corner of the Netherlands. And that's a good business to be in. It's really stable.
SPEAKER_05: The Dutch water authorities, they never go to war and they have the power of taxation. So they have been good borrowers.
SPEAKER_12: Right. And also, there's a there's a strong incentive for those institutions just to survive because people need them in order to not drown. Basically, that's right.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Which, which will, which will become even more pertinent going forward.
SPEAKER_12: It's super cool. And I actually also have a photo of it. Would you like to see it? Absolutely. Okay. So if you pick up this book to your right, go to the flag page. This is a book Geert and a colleague edited called The Origin of Value, which is about various financial instruments throughout the ages. And there's a chapter all about this bond. And so you can see the front and the back of it here.
SPEAKER_06: Wow. Well, it's like, it's just a bunch of script. Like it doesn't look like designed the way I think of a bond looking with all the filigree and and cool stuff about a bond. It's really basic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_12: Although you what you will see at the center of the front page of the bond, there are like there is the small print, you know, it's laying out the terms. Okay. And in Dutch that even Geert says he has struggled reading this old Dutch, but basically it says and I'm going to botch all of these names. Johann von Hugenhoek, that's the representative of the water board acknowledges to have received from Mr. Nicholas de Major 1000 careless guilders of 20 stovers apiece. And does it say what those 100 careless guilders were for?
SPEAKER_06: Yes, actually does.
SPEAKER_12: It was for a new cribbing in the town of homes week. And a cribbing apparently was a kind of pier that was placed in the bend of a river. And the pylons appear would help prevent the bend in the river from shifting and meandering. Okay, so it just kind of keeps the river in place. Yeah. And don't get me started on meandering. That's my whole other obsession. As you know.
SPEAKER_06: And so and it's what is it?
SPEAKER_12: What are Stivers? I have absolutely no idea. But the bond also acknowledges that they owe an amount of 5% a year to Mr. de Major, his heirs or other rightful persons, which means this bond is transferable either as a gift or by sale to anyone else.
SPEAKER_06: Right. The other thing I noticed about this is that there's, there's all these notes and annotations all around the corners. I mean, it looks like it's been annotated, essentially, is this the sale and transfer? Is that what that's all about?
SPEAKER_12: Those notations are record of every single time someone has collected on the bond, and how much was paid out and when it was paid out. Okay, cool. So it really is a living document, which has been written on continuously throughout its 400 year history. It's like a blockchain. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like, even to the point where actually they know how much to pay out, because they see all the previous notations. So they know how much back interest they owe you. Wow. Right. And you can actually see they actually ran out of room. So if you go to the next page of the book, starting in the 1940s, they added this thing, which is called an alonge or sometimes a talon, which is basically like an extra bit of paper with the seal of the water board that continues this tradition of notating every payout.
SPEAKER_06: So I can see all the notations it goes across. It looks like it goes all the way to 2003 on here. It's really diligent. Oh, no.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. And one thing I love is that you can see the handwriting of the receiving clerk at the water board getting more and more modern and kind of less and less elegant as the world got more modern.
SPEAKER_06: So do we know these people who collected this bond? Like is that written down here on who bared this bond?
SPEAKER_12: No, we actually don't. But Geert says that's kind of the point. This is a bearer bond. Meaning if you're the person holding it, you're the person they have to pay. It doesn't matter who you are.
SPEAKER_05: That's a unique aspect of a bearer bond. There doesn't need to be a record of who owns it. The bond itself is the ID.
SPEAKER_06: So you actually have to take this piece of paper and go to Holland to collect the money for it. Yes, precisely.
SPEAKER_12: That is the catch. Anyone can present this bond and collect their money sort of no questions asked. Right? Almost like it is money. But you have to physically present it to the registrar at the water board office. So that's what all these notations are really notating, that someone showed up.
SPEAKER_04: To keep it alive, the bond itself needed to travel in person with a bearer, at least once in a generation. So this is Tim Young.
SPEAKER_12: He's the curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Yale Beinecke Library, which is where the bond currently lives. And he is the most recent bearer of the bond. He actually traveled all the way to Holland from New Haven to collect on it. He was the first person to do that since Geert acquired it. The way I picture this is that there's this old Dutch building from the 17th century just
SPEAKER_06: sitting there and an old man has been waiting for centuries for a person to bear the bond in a clerk's suit. I don't even know what. A scrivener. Exactly. Would be sitting there. It's lit by a candle. He has a quill pen and he makes a notation and he hands him some money from an old till or something and maybe it's in gold medallions or script that is also 400 years old. You nailed it. You nailed it. No, well, actually, like what you said, it's all kind of like half true.
SPEAKER_04: When I showed up at this waterboard bond, it was in a little town called Houghton. So my brother and I walked about half a mile down the street and found this very lovely building and knocked on the door and I said, hi, I have my waterboard bond. And they go, oh, yes, we're expecting you. And then we went to a conference table and they literally gave me a gigantic paper check like you see on TV. Why did they do that?
SPEAKER_05: Well, so full disclosure, they actually had a Dutch television crew waiting for him.
SPEAKER_12: We're doing this a little bit. I mean, this was obviously good PR for the waterboard and for Yale. They weren't going to let this moment go to waste.
SPEAKER_04: And then they gave me a check, a real check, small check to bring back to New Haven. But then they said, oh, let's actually go see the pier.
SPEAKER_06: So what is he talking about? The pier?
SPEAKER_12: So the public work that this bond funded is still there. It's still standing. Oh my goodness, okay. Yeah. And it's still regulating river flow, which just might be my favorite aspect of this whole story. Wow. This kind of actually real life human thing that was achieved by this bond. Yeah. And this kind of weird aspect of time travel where you are partially responsible for this thing that's nevertheless predates you. Right.
SPEAKER_04: And so in 2015, I got to stand on the pier, they called it. That had this connection between me, between Yale and people who are working for a company that is the descendant of something that was established four or five hundred years ago.
SPEAKER_06: I'm trying to wrap my head around just the value of this bond and the value of what they pay out. So Yale bought it for how much money?
SPEAKER_12: Obviously it's an incredibly rare item for any scripophilist, scripophile, I don't know. But Girt told me that they got it at auction for roughly twenty four thousand dollars. Okay.
SPEAKER_06: And so how much did Tim get on his both big and tiny check when he went there? Yeah, not as much.
SPEAKER_04: They did twelve disbursements for every year worth of interest that was being paid out and that was eleven euro thirty five.
SPEAKER_12: So with twelve years back interest, that came out to a whopping one hundred thirty six euros and change.
SPEAKER_06: This is the thing about perpetual bond is that inflation really eats the value of a bond like this. A careless gilder just isn't what it used to be.
SPEAKER_06: Guess not. Can't buy a pier with that anymore. No sir. Thanks so much. That's awesome Joe.
SPEAKER_06: Roman you're welcome. So I'm in the studio with Sean Real our composer and you always bring me a delightful music related mini story every year. Oh thanks Roman. And so what do you have for us this year?
SPEAKER_14: Okay so do you know what concert pitch is? I have no idea what concert pitch is. So it's what an orchestra will tune to and we basically have like a standard pitch right now of four hundred and forty hertz which is like if you think of a sine wave four hundred and forty hertz means that the sine wave is like hills and valleys. It'll go up and down four hundred and forty times in a second. Okay and so all the instruments are tuned to this pitch so that they all sound good
SPEAKER_06: together essentially. The A note that one instrument plays is the same A note that another instrument plays. Exactly and four hundred and forty hertz is concert A.
SPEAKER_06: Is this the standard for every orchestra all around the world or does it vary depending on where you are?
SPEAKER_14: If we're just talking about Western music which is mostly what I've researched for this like there are a lot of different tuning traditions but in Western music up to like a lot of pop music and stuff today it's like mostly four hundred and forty hertz.
SPEAKER_06: And how did they center on that as being the value that everyone tunes to?
SPEAKER_14: It's actually a very messy history how we got here. If you go back like a few hundred years if you go throughout like different countries in Europe you would be hearing wildly different things as far as like what the pitch was for different orchestras.
SPEAKER_06: But as long as all the instruments in the room are the same tuning does it really matter that between orchestras they have the same tuning or did anyone really care?
SPEAKER_14: There was a time where people didn't really care and music didn't really travel that much anyway but it's really fascinating to think about this time where like if you were traveling from country to country you know. Took in a lot of opera. And had good pitch you could like hear you'd be able to you could tell that like the orchestras were like some were tuned really low and some were tuned really high like some as low as like three hundred and seventy four hertz and some as high as five hundred and sixty seven hertz. Which just like for reference let me play you what that is. So first I'm going to play you four forty which is what we do today.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_14: And now here's three seventy four.
SPEAKER_06: Yes that's really different. I don't have very good pitch and that's very different. Yeah and those are both considered A. Wow okay.
SPEAKER_14: And then the highest one five sixty seven.
SPEAKER_14: And those are all supposed to be the exact same note. That's like the reference point for an entire piece of music. And so where these numbers come from is from this survey conducted by the French government in the eighteen hundreds of different pipe organs which were like centerpieces of a lot of orchestras which are just centered around the church pipe organ. And in order to tune a pipe organ like it's more like construction than it is like actual just like regular tuning so it's always made more sense to just tune to the pipe organ.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_06: I see I see I see. Whatever the A that the pipe organ says it is that is what the A is for that room because re-tuning a pipe organ it's not like twisting a little knob on a violin.
SPEAKER_14: No it's like getting in and sawing stuff and sanding.
SPEAKER_06: So all these sort of unstandard tunings get perpetuated in different rooms and concert halls because of the pipe organ that is there.
SPEAKER_14: And you know yeah so there was a time when the pipe organ was like the most central part of the orchestra but then stuff started to develop in Europe and as like concert music became more of a thing more of like an event to be attended concert halls started being built bigger and bigger. You know like you would have just like large large halls you could like put lots of people in it but they couldn't really account for how sound travels. And so if you were sitting like in the back of a concert hall you would mostly only hear the bass because bass notes just like travel farther than higher frequency notes. And so to compensate for this a lot of orchestra leaders would tune higher and so they would get everybody to just like move everything up. And there were just like stories that I was reading of like people being frustrated because like their strings were always breaking and because they were too tight and like singers were like having to go to the doctor from straining their voices and people were in uproar about this.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_06: So there's already the chaos of every pipe organ being different and then they introduce concert halls and then there's like this arms race for how to be higher so you can be heard better in concert halls and then it gets more chaotic and so every different concert hall is now pitched wildly different. It drifts even more.
SPEAKER_14: But mostly consistently getting higher and especially with violin strings and sort of like those kinds of stringed instruments being able to be tuned higher like string makers were like making strings stronger in order to keep up with like the pitch rising gradually. It came down to singers being like you have to stop. We have to stop this. We have to stop this. And it got to a point where the French government actually had to like decree that concert orchestras would tune at 435 hertz.
SPEAKER_06: And so you said 440 was the standard now. So 435 is set so obviously it's shifted. When did 435 become the standard?
SPEAKER_14: So 435 became the standard in France in 1859 but then a while while later in 1919 it was adopted by a bunch of other nations and that's because of the first Treaty of Versailles.
SPEAKER_06: So like the Treaty of Versailles that was the surrender of Germany during World War I. Yeah the treaty that ended World War I. That actually has a clause in it that talks about the tuning of orchestras. Yeah section 2 article 282.
SPEAKER_14: So they took this seriously. Wow okay. There's all this stuff about tariffs and like standardization things.
SPEAKER_06: Right and that makes some sense. You're trying to create a unified Europe you know so you'd want taxes to be fair and import and export but you wouldn't necessarily expect French tuning to be the thing that is the thing that is adopted in the Treaty of Versailles but there it is. And yet they did.
SPEAKER_14: And America at that point was tuning to 440. So we actually violated the Treaty of Versailles.
SPEAKER_06: Well we didn't sign it. We didn't sign it that's right.
SPEAKER_14: But actually one country that did violate the Treaty of Versailles in this particular instance at least was the United Kingdom. So the way that tuning is written in this like convention that's in the treaty is that you have to tune to 435 hertz based on a tuning fork at a room temperature of 15 degrees Celsius. Okay. Like I think it was the Royal Philharmonic in the UK were like well our concert halls are a bit warmer we're at about 20 degrees Celsius so it makes sense for us to tune a little higher because the temperature would actually bring us like down to 435 but actually they were ending up at like 439. With a bunch of like smaller instances and details that I didn't find super interesting. There was another convention like meeting of the minds about concert pitch and it was raised to 440. 440 after that point.
SPEAKER_06: But that's amazing that it was considered so important culturally for the harmonious existence of Europe that everything be tuned to the same frequency.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah it makes a lot of sense when you think about like instruments are built to like be optimal for a pitch of 440 hertz like a 440A. But I feel a little romantic about the idea of just going to the town over like the music's gonna sound a little different. Yeah yeah that's kind of nice like you haven't heard Handel's Messiah until you've heard
SPEAKER_06: it in Prague. Exactly. Oh that was another one of my favorite things was that Mozart actually like wrote everything
SPEAKER_14: at 421. I was wondering if in the movie about Mozart they had like actually done it at the right
SPEAKER_06: frequency or the contemporaneous frequency. They appeared to have not.
SPEAKER_14: So I've never really heard a Mozart song. That's true.
SPEAKER_06: Maybe none of us have. That's so cool. It would be kind of a fun exercise to have an orchestra digitally you know remaster the classics in their original tuning. You know like it would be so it'd be so interesting just to hear if there's a real difference. I don't know if I could my pitch isn't so good. Maybe you would enjoy that exercise quite a bit. I wonder I wonder if there are people that are already doing that.
SPEAKER_14: So if anybody is doing that please reach out to us and tell us about your work what you're doing. That's awesome. OK cool. All right well thanks John.
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to take a break.
SPEAKER_06: So I'm in the studio with senior producer Katie Mingle. Hey Roman. Hey it's been a while.
SPEAKER_08: I know. Yeah he has. So what's your story.
SPEAKER_08: Well I think we should start out by meeting someone named Irene Wurtzel. Hello. Hello. Is this Mrs. Irene Wurtzel?
SPEAKER_09: It is indeed.
SPEAKER_08: So Irene and her husband Alan live in an area in Washington D.C. called Calorama. I don't know what that is.
SPEAKER_08: It's a very fancy neighborhood. It's the neighborhood that Jeff Bezos lives in. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner live there or at least they did until very recently I'm not sure if they still do. A bunch of like ex presidents former presidents have lived there Woodrow Wilson FDR. The Obamas live there currently. So yeah when you think of this neighborhood think of motorcades and Secret Service retinues. There are definitely some standalone homes like with yards. But then there's also a lot of row houses like townhouses right next to each other. But like huge multi-floor you know. Fancy ones. We're not talking about like tenements. But I guess no matter how fancy a neighborhood is there's always going to be that neighbor who's just problematic. Yeah so Irene has this house right next to her. Here I'll actually let her describe it.
SPEAKER_09: Well it's just a very early 1900s house with very good lines nice windows and it has an elegant look from the outside. And no one has lived in it since we've been here.
SPEAKER_06: How long are we talking about?
SPEAKER_08: That's since 1993. Whoa. Okay. Yeah. Substantial. Yes like almost three decades I think. It's like I think that's. Yeah it's getting close. Yeah this is a 10,000 square foot five floor mansion. So it's a huge space to just sit empty for that long. And it's also connected to Irene and Alan's house. It's one of these row houses. And so I think what happens to that house can actually affect their place. Right.
SPEAKER_06: Because the property has rats or termites or a bug problem like it actually causes more problems to the neighbors than otherwise because they're connected. Right.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. And Irene says you know over the years there's been stuff like decaying pieces of concrete, bricks falling off, I guess a wooden window frame from that house dropped onto their patio somehow. And then there have been things like rats and other little visitors.
SPEAKER_09: They kept the windows open and among other things birds flew in and out of the house on the side of the house. The window was always open. And so I think birds were building nests in there.
SPEAKER_08: So yeah she said there was one brief period where this house next door was kind of a noisy rooming house of some sort. But mostly it's been empty since 1993.
SPEAKER_06: So it's not so much that she has like a problematic neighbor it's that she just has no neighbor at all and it's a problem. Right. Yeah. So why has it been so empty for so long?
SPEAKER_08: That is the question. That's it. That's what we're here for. Okay. And the answer is that this house falls into this special category of property in DC which is diplomatic property. It's a very it's like very DC problem. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: One of my favorite things to do in DC is to go to the embassy row and spot all the flags. That's like my favorite thing to do. So what country owns this? That's your favorite thing to do. It's fun. But what country owns this property?
SPEAKER_08: This house is actually owned by the government of Argentina. It's not the embassy per se. It's a building that the government owned. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe initially they would have people stay in this house when they came to town to do embassy business. I think it's possible that people who worked at the embassy may have lived there at some point. And DC has about 530 of these diplomatic properties like embassies and kind of additional houses. And they're not all falling apart like this but there's definitely several buildings that are in pretty rough shape. They're common enough that they're like YouTube videos that you can watch of people exploring them. So here let me put one of these on.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_15: All right guys so we're at an abandoned embassy. We already made it inside.
SPEAKER_08: First of all this guy should have a second career as like ASMR video guy.
SPEAKER_15: A lot of embassies and stuff came abandoned just due to financial issues and then relations between the countries and other stuff like that. This one's been abandoned for there's one part where they're in the bathroom and they're
SPEAKER_08: kind of like this is a day. This is what people in other countries used to wash their butts. Like these guys don't know a ton about other cultures necessarily like they're just they're just doing YouTube stuff trying to get some views. It's sort of not ideal to have all these empty mansions that only like law breaking YouTubers are using. But it's actually really complicated and difficult to get anyone to do anything about these buildings. They aren't actually considered to be foreign soil. There's sort of a misconception out there that they are foreign soil but they do have a bunch of special privileges. For example the police couldn't get a warrant to search for an embassy and they're exempt from I think most if not all taxes and they don't have to build by code like they're encouraged to but like they don't have to. And so there could be an illegal kitchen on the back of a totally yeah.
SPEAKER_08: A city council member for the Kalorama area was quoted saying like basically like if I have a vacant house that's becoming a problem I can call in the cops clean it up throw a fence around it if necessary seize it for unpaid taxes. He says I have a lot of tools in my toolbox but I don't have those tools available to me if it's a diplomatic property. One thing that makes these properties interesting and maybe also a little harder to address is how different each one is. If you think about your neighbors kind of having issues or your neighbors potentially having baggage behind each of these properties is basically the story of entire countries in political upheaval. So let's take Yugoslavia. What that's not even a country anymore?
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_06: Right. But they have a property? Exactly.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So they don't anymore actually. But they did and for quite a while they had this house in 2006 all their diplomatic properties were divided among the six succeeding countries. And this house that they owned in D.C. was turned over to Bosnia. You know the deed was like never transferred. And then in 2008 someone at the Bosnian embassy was quoted saying that they didn't even know who had the key. I guess they eventually found it because they did finally sell the house in 2015 for six hundred fifty thousand dollars. But it had been vacant for like three decades so it was in terrible shape. There was a tree growing through the garage. There was mold everywhere. And I think the owners basically gutted it and started over. So in response to a lot of different neighbors complaining about a lot of different properties the State Department issued a response saying like you know basically our hands are tied because of this Vienna convention. And the only recourse we really have is to remove diplomatic status from these properties in which case they become subject to the same like property taxes as everyone else. And sometimes that motivates them to sell.
SPEAKER_07:
SPEAKER_06: So why don't they do that? What's the problem with that?
SPEAKER_08: I think they do sometimes do that. But I think they're pretty hesitant to do it because they want to maintain good relations with these countries. And you know these properties I think are probably kind of low on their list of concerns overall. And actually in the case of the Argentinian place right next to Irene and Allen they actually did remove diplomatic status from that property and it didn't seem to make a big difference. Why not? I mean just politics again. Like I believe Argentina's ambassador told the Wurzels that the country would actually gladly be free of the property and the tax burden of it. But because of a loan that the country had defaulted on in 2001 they couldn't just like freely sell their assets. So I don't know if that's still the case for Argentina. I did not reach out to the country of Argentina for comment. But they still haven't sold it. And Irene told me that about six months ago they saw a for sale sign go up in the yard and they got really excited. But it came down a few days later and she thinks maybe they just changed their minds. That's too bad.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. That's so cool. I'd never thought about that at all before when I was looking at flags in Embassy Row. So another thing to consider.
SPEAKER_08: And thanks to a writer at The Washington Post named Jenna Portnoy who wrote the article where I first read about this. Also thanks to Abby Madden who works with us on the show and helped me with a lot of this research.
SPEAKER_10: Cool.
SPEAKER_06: Thanks everybody. We have one more story about secret nuclear families and how they were hidden from foreign spies and even the post office after this. 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. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. 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 superfoods, 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 can 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. Get 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% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices to their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Visit article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so I'm here with Delaney Hall. And so what is your mini story?
SPEAKER_01: So I'll start by telling you about these home movies that I recently came across on YouTube that have kind of been haunting me. They're from the 1940s, so they don't have any sound. I'll just have to describe them to you. They're an early color film, so the colors are kind of muted and washed out. And the films show footage of these young people in their 20s and 30s. They're riding horses through the mountains of New Mexico. They're skiing. They're playing tennis. There's one movie where it looks like they're having a party at a lake, so they're all in bathing suits and there's this one woman carrying a 12-pack of Coors on her shoulder. Another is doing that funny walk in flippers down to the edge of the water.
SPEAKER_06: That doesn't sound especially haunting because that sounds really pleasant.
SPEAKER_01: I know, I know. They are like, they're totally normal home movies, but they're haunting once you understand the context, which is these were movies filmed by a physicist named Hugh Bradner back in the 1940s at a place that was then known by a secret code name, Project Y or Site Y. Today it's Los Alamos. And so all of these seemingly carefree young people, they weren't just having a great time in beautiful northern New Mexico. They were helping to build the first atomic bomb.
SPEAKER_06: Right. Oh, that adds a lot of context. Heavy stuff is going on in the background of that.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And it's sort of the contrast of them having fun, hanging out, and then knowing what they were doing during their working lives. And they were helping to build this weapon of enormous power and destruction. It's going to completely transform the world, the geopolitics of the world. But they're also just young people living their lives.
SPEAKER_10: There were a lot of young people here. The average age was 29. The most common age was 27. So you had a lot of young single people here. There were a lot of young couples.
SPEAKER_01: So this is Alan Carr, and he is the senior historian at Los Alamos National Lab. And he says the fact that there were all these young people working together on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos actually presented some surprising security challenges. Because for one thing, some of them, it turns out, were like hooking up and getting married and having babies out there on this top secret military campus, which was not even supposed to be a place on the map.
SPEAKER_10: All of a sudden, you went from a locale in New Mexico, where no children were ever born, hardly, to all of a sudden, there's eight births a month. That looks awfully suspicious if you're doing the paperwork down in Santa Fe. Why are all these kids being born in Los Alamos? I don't even know what Los Alamos is.
SPEAKER_06: So now we think of Los Alamos as this place where the bomb was made. But at the time, was Los Alamos even a place that would have couples and babies?
SPEAKER_01: Right. No. Back then, it wouldn't have been. And that's an important point. And so to understand why this would have been suspicious, let's backtrack. And I'll explain how the government even chose Los Alamos as the site for bomb development and what it was like before it became Project Y. So what happened is in 1942, the military decides they need a central laboratory in an isolated place where they can design, build, and test nuclear weapons.
SPEAKER_10: Where do you put a place that does those types of things? This was arguably history's biggest super secret project.
SPEAKER_01: And so they decide there's some very important criteria for this place. It needs to be remote for safety reasons. You know, they want to keep the scientists who are working on the project away from other people. They do not want them accidentally blabbing about what they're doing. Yeah, that makes sense too.
SPEAKER_01: And they also want it to be near a rail hub so that they can ship all the stuff they need there, cyclotrons and whatnot. And then finally, they want it to be at least 200 miles from any international boundaries.
SPEAKER_10: You know, maybe they watch these old movies where a saboteur gets off a submarine and runs in and sabotages the factory, it blows up. Well, we want the saboteur to have to run a long, long way, right?
SPEAKER_06: That's a good point. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So at this point, and again, this is 1942, Robert Oppenheimer has been selected as the head of Project Y. And he had spent a lot of his time in his youth in northern New Mexico, which is remote and meets most of the other criteria. So they start looking around the area and pretty soon they settled on what's now known as Los Alamos, which is about 45 minutes northwest of Santa Fe.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So what was Los Alamos really like back then? How would people think of Los Alamos back then?
SPEAKER_01: Back then, it wasn't even a town. There was this rustic boys' school there called the Los Alamos Ranch School. And that was about it. So the government just bought the school. They went about setting up this state-of-the-art lab on the top of this very isolated remote mesa.
SPEAKER_06: Okay. That sounds hard. That sounds like logistically very difficult to do. And then especially in 1942. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: It was kind of a logistical nightmare. Like the whole location was served by this one little road that snaked up a huge cliff. And they were shipping in massive pieces of equipment, pipes for one thing, because Alan Carr told me there wasn't a reliable water supply. And there also wasn't any electricity.
SPEAKER_10: And so the original engineers who built the town acquired a large generator in Texas. They had it shipped to Santa Fe by train, put it on a truck, and drove it up the hill. And as they were, it fell off the truck. It broke. It cracked, and they welded it back together and managed to get it up the hill. So in those opening months of 1943, the real heroes were the construction workers.
SPEAKER_06: So like listening to all the things that they had to do, it doesn't sound like you could keep Los Alamos a secret for very long. Like if you're shipping gigantic generators and there's these trucks on the highway, how do you keep that all secret?
SPEAKER_01: Right. Yeah. So it's kind of mind-boggling. So for secrecy, the main thing they did is that the people who worked on the project weren't necessarily told what they were going to be doing until they agreed to join the project. So they'd be told something vague like, you know, you'll be doing important work for the war effort. It might help to bring the war to an end. But it was really only after you arrived in Los Alamos that you would learn the details. There was also a fence around the whole town so that people couldn't just wander in. And then there was the mail. So all the mail was censored, obviously, so that no one would accidentally write a friend and say what they were doing. Right. That totally makes sense.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, I'm surprised they even had mail. I mean, like how could you have mail trucks coming in and out of Los Alamos? I mean, that seems like, you know, like a huge security risk in and of itself.
SPEAKER_01: Right. It would have been. And so according to Allen, there were not mail trucks coming in and out of Los Alamos. All the mail was actually delivered to Santa Fe. And it was delivered to just two main PO boxes that served the entire Project Y. So there was PO Box 1663, which was for the civilians, because all the scientists were working on the project were civilians. And then there was PO Box 1539 for the military. So that meant that all the mail coming to the area just went to one place that was far from the actual town. And then it would likely have been trucked up by the military.
SPEAKER_06: So if there are two PO boxes for the entire community, is that like a people wrote to a thousand people per PO box, basically? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So the number of civilians working at Los Alamos was in the thousands.
SPEAKER_10: It would have been in the low thousands, I would guess, people receiving mail at PO Box 1663, probably somewhere between four and five thousand. So a lot of mail.
SPEAKER_01: And okay, the fascinating thing is that this whole PO box thing actually connects back to the Los Alamos baby boom that we were talking about at the beginning. Okay. How was that? Well, as Alan was saying, there were all these young people working in Los Alamos back in the 1940s. And the scientists and engineers who worked on the bomb, they were civilians, which meant the military could not boss them around as easily or control their behavior in the same way they could with people who were enlisted.
SPEAKER_10: It's easier to control people in uniform than civilians. If you've got a bunch of people in uniforms here working, one thing that they're not doing is getting married and having children.
SPEAKER_01: But the civilian scientists, that's exactly what they were doing. A lot of them were young. They're basically partying when they weren't working, as I've seen in those home movies they shot. And they were also having babies, which was a total headache for the military.
SPEAKER_10: Oppenheimer's boss was a general named General Leslie Groves. And he didn't like all these kids being born, you know, because, well, first of all, you have to try and keep it secret. You have to put a maternity ward in the hospital. You have to have a school district. All these things he didn't want to have to worry about. So he ordered Oppenheimer to tell the staff to stop having kids.
SPEAKER_06: I'm sure that went over well. Yeah, it did.
SPEAKER_01: It actually, as I'm sure you can imagine, did not go over well.
SPEAKER_10: Especially considering that the director's wife, Kitty, was pregnant at the time. So I don't think that that order was carried out.
SPEAKER_06: So how did they manage to keep all these new Los Alamos babies under wraps?
SPEAKER_01: So the main way was that they did not list the place of birth on the birth certificates. They couldn't put Los Alamos because Los Alamos didn't really exist in the official record. It was totally top secret. They couldn't put Project Y, because that would also be weird. And so even though these babies were born at the hospital in Los Alamos, their birth certificates just said, P.O. Box 1663.
SPEAKER_10: If it says P.O. Box 1663, that keeps that a lot more secret. Although it also seems like you'd be like, what are these babies born at a P.O.
SPEAKER_01: Box? What does that mean? That's right.
SPEAKER_10: But at least the P.O. Box doesn't give you a location. And that's what they were trying to keep secret.
SPEAKER_06: So any ideas like how many kids were actually born and have the P.O. Box listed as their place of birth?
SPEAKER_01: Alan guessed maybe 100 or 150 kids. He has actually seen some of the birth certificates before. What a weird side effect of history.
SPEAKER_06: Well, cool. Well, thank you so much, Delaney. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you. As of the beginning of 2020, 99% Invisible is Avery Truffleman, Katie Minkle, Kurt Kolstad,
SPEAKER_06: Delaney Hall, Sharif Yousif, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sean Riel, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lay, Sophia Klatsker, Chris Berube, 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 founding member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Discover, listen, and support them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show 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 and Reddit, too. The real 99PI HQ is our lovely, lovely website at 99PI.org. Radio Topia from PRX.
SPEAKER_11: 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? No, you'll have to find the elevators yourself.
SPEAKER_11: Or maybe the one with the extra stale Danish for breakfast. I think I broke a tooth. When you want a place you can always rely on wherever the road takes you, it matters where you stay. Welcome to Hampton by Hilton. Don't forget about our free hot breakfast. Hilton, for the stay.
SPEAKER_04: When the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says McDelivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. I participate in McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants.
SPEAKER_14: Delivery fees may apply.
SPEAKER_00: Nissan has a car for everyone. Every driver who wants more. Whatever your more is, more fun, more freedom, more action. From sports cars, sedans and EVs to pickups and crossovers. With Nissan's diverse lineup, anyone can find something to fit their more. Get more revs in their sports cars, more guts with all-wheel drive, and more than enough options to fit your driving style. Nissan can take you where you want to go. Learn more at NissanUSA.com.
