SPEAKER_02: 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. Hello, beautiful homebound nerds. If I sound a little different, it's because I'm recording this at home. You might even hear some cars passing by. I'm not sick. Hopefully, neither are you. But many of us are staying home so that we don't inadvertently become vectors to a virus whose impact we don't fully understand. This is the right thing to do. We are all part of one big ecosystem. And if any part of us gets sick, we all suffer. We are in this together. So my job in this world is to tell stories about all the thought that goes into the things most people don't think about. And since many of us are stuck at home, maybe alone, maybe lonely, I thought we'd spend some time exploring this place we call home together. Just you and me.
SPEAKER_02: Sound good? If you answer back out loud, I won't think you're weird. I am starting in my bedroom. I'm sitting on a Casper mattress. This is not an ad. We eat our own dog food in the podcast business, so I have a Casper mattress. But I digress. As I look around, I see I have five windows in this room. Now, if I were in England or France or Ireland or Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries, I would probably not want this many windows. That's because back then, the more windows you had, the more tax you paid. This was all variable from place to place and over time. But the principle was that a window tax was a good stand-in for a progressive income tax. The bigger the house, the more windows, the higher the tax you paid. When the window tax was instituted in 1696 in England and Wales, a home was taxed at a regular flat rate and then taxed an extra amount for each window over 10 windows that it had. Like I said, the number of windows and the amount of tax varied a lot over time. But the tax was pretty easy to assess by an outside observer. It was certainly considered easier to assess than an income tax. And so it persisted for quite some time in some places into the 20th century. This had a funny side effect on architecture that you can still see today in some buildings in the UK and in Europe. There are many instances of window spaces that are completely bricked up to avoid a tax from 100 years ago. If you passed one in your neighborhood, it means some tax cheat lived there a long time ago or, you know, an enterprising life hacker lived there, you know, depending on your perspective. On a chest of drawers next to my bed sits an oscillating fan that I've had for about 35 years. It still works really well. It's a wind mirror. I've done a little Googling and honestly, I cannot tell you if this company still exists. The fan mostly points away from the bed. I just use it for white noise when I sleep. If I were in Korea, running a fan in an enclosed bedroom might be discouraged by older generations. There is, by some accounts, still a widespread belief in Korea that fans cause death. No one seems to know how this myth started. Maybe fans are just an innocent bystander to too many heat related deaths, but nonetheless, the fear persists. I remember when I was a kid growing up in the Southern US, I was told that if you slept with a fan blowing on you in the summer, you'd catch a summer cold, which is just as unfounded. But still nowhere does fan equal death like Korea. Well, okay, I'm going to get up from the bed and let's go ahead and walk into the bathroom. Okay. All right. So there is the toilet. There is an extremely common misconception that the toilet was invented by a man named Thomas Crapper. Crapper, you know, was a sanitation engineer and entrepreneur in the UK in the late 19th century that held a few patents and he's credited with improving indoor plumbing for toilets. He was a good businessman and by all accounts, he installed and sold a lot of plumbing supplies with the name Crapper and company on them. No one is quite sure why he gets so much credit for the flushing toilet, but I think it's because his name was Crapper. Crap as a term for a bodily excrement was already in use for decades before he made toilet parts. So sometimes destiny just smiles upon you. While we're here in the bathroom, let's wash our hands. That's good COVID-19 protocol. Soap is one of those inventions that is so monumental. It's hard to even fathom. It's so ancient. No one knows who first discovered it. There was a very good explainer on soap recently in the New York Times by Ferris Jaber. Soap molecules look like little sperm with a head that loves water and a tail that hates water. So when you put soap and water on your hands, these little soap tails find things that aren't water and they dig their tails in to try to get away. This breaks up bacteria and virus cell membranes and surrounds any debris with soap molecules and makes them easy to rinse away when more water and friction are applied. For the sake of your own health and for everyone else's, wash your hands regularly for at least 20 seconds. That is longer than you think. So pick a song to keep you on task.
SPEAKER_02: Long before I had you in my dreams, you came and captured my imagination. Those some things are never what they seem. I never have to worry cause I know you are. Better than a Venus, a Milo, and a G-string. Better than the promise of a good one night thing. Better than a big book of Betty Page pictures, even if it comes with a used subscription. Better than a ticket to a Holyfield ringside. Better than a daughter for a Sultan for a bride. Better than a cherry on a whipped cream sundae. Better than a week that'll never have a Monday. Okay, that'll do.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, what's next? Let's walk down the stairs. And we are entering the hall. In his book At Home, Bill Bryson wrote that no room has fallen further in history than the hall. I always remember that line. I've been to Sterling Castle in Scotland a few times and I love it there, especially the Great Hall, which has been painted a shocking and delightful buttery yellow since its restoration in the 1990s. We did a story about it a few years ago. You should check it out. It seems impossible that a hall like the one in Sterling Castle and the hall in your house have a shared origin, but they do. The hall used to be everything. From the Middle Ages to about the 15th century, the hall was effectively the house with a central hearth that people used to warm themselves and cook over. All activity took place there, awake and asleep. As soon as a second room was added to homes, the hall has been on a downhill slide. Now it is this dumb thing, a non-room room, whose primary function is to connect other rooms. I pour one out for the hall. If I turn right, I enter the living room. I've got TV. I've got a bunch of article furniture. I have an all-in-one laser printer, scanner, or comp here and here. Printers are curious technology because they are amazing and everyone hates them. There are admittedly a lot of things they hate. The criminal price of ink is a big one and paper jams are another. According to an article in the New Yorker called Why Paper Jams Persist, desktop printers will probably always have paper jams. The problem isn't really the printer. It's the paper. Paper is an organic substance that has different properties of thickness and texture depending on what kind of tree it came from and how it's processed. Commercial printers like the ones you see in the movies at newspapers where someone gets to say, stop the presses, well they have these long stretches where the paper goes in a straight line and gets ink put on it. But a desktop printer has to do everything in a tiny box. So the paper is pulled off the tray and makes a tight turn, gets rolled onto an ink drum where the image gets put on, then it gets heated to almost 800 degrees Fahrenheit to fuse the ink to the page. And if you're printing double-sided paper, it stops and turns and gets turned again and gets rolled and heated and it gets spit out. It's like truly a marvel that it works at all. The first commercially available copier, the hulking Xerox 914, which everyone loved and made Xerox billions of dollars, caught fire so often that it shipped with a small fire extinguisher. So things could definitely be worse.
SPEAKER_02: Light bulbs. So we have a really good story that John Muellen wrote about the oldest continuously glowing light bulb that's been in a fire station in Livermore, California for over 100 years. I don't really remember the details, so you should just find that episode and listen. It's good. But I do remember this one light bulb joke. Okay. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One. But the light bulb has to want to change. All right. You can tell that one to the kids. I'm going to walk into the kitchen. Oh, I've got one here. This is good. Okay. I'm going to open up this drawer here that you might recognize the sound of. That is the silverware drawer. I have spoons, knives, and forks in here. Of these three common pieces of cutlery, the fork is by far the most recent addition to the tableware family by probably like thousands of years. Straight two pronged forks were used in cooking for carving and getting things off of a fire. But for a long time, they weren't on the dinner table itself. People use spoons, knives, and just their fingers instead. Forks were introduced a few times by fancy people and they were often ridiculed for it. But they only really took off when they evolved to have a little bit of curve in them and the extra tines so they could be more versatile for scooping and spearing small things on a plate. The curious thing about the evolution of the fork is how it changed the design of the knife. For millennia, table knives always had pointed ends for spearing food. But with the fork there, that function of the knife was redundant so it could be eliminated. In 1669, King Louis XIV of France decreed all pointed dinner table knives illegal, you know, to stop people from stabbing each other, which I guess was a problem then. So all new knives were made to have rounded tips and all existing table knives were to be rounded off to reduce their potential for violence. This style of knife spread across the world, which is why knives in your drawer, unless they're a specialty knife, probably have blunt ends. Okay, so I'm going to save some stuff for the kitchen for the next time we do this, if we need to do this. And we're going to end up back in the living room at the record player. 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. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. 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. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_02: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away 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.com slash invisible. One of the things I love about vinyl records is that you can see how they work. A needle reads the vibrations in a groove. That vibration moves a magnet that interacts with a couple of electromagnetic coils, and the signal that's generated is amplified a couple times and it's sent to the speakers. If my phone stops playing music, there is no hope of me getting it to work. But if everything in the world fails, I have this fantasy that I can put together a crappy record player if I had to. And that gives me some measure of comfort. So I want to play the song Exit Without Saving by the band Beauty Pill from their album. Beauty Pill describes things as they are, which is where I got the name for this episode. Chad Clark is the lead singer and songwriter of Beauty Pill. Over a decade ago, his heart got infected by a virus that nearly killed him. Every sickness he's had since then has been a risk to his life and often involved him being hospitalized for days or weeks at a time. He has been blunt in saying that the new coronavirus would kill him if he got it. So you know, I know it's hard to go through this quarantine and act in the collective good when the action that we're all taking is staying inside and minimizing contact and not, you know, like gathering 10 people to lift a car off someone. But taking care in this way is how we can do the most good. So you can help me lift a car off my friend Chad Clark, because I need him to stay in this world and keep making music. And what's amazing is at the same time, we're lifting a car off your 70-year-old mom and nurse working a 12-hour shift at the hospital. So here we go.
SPEAKER_04: That's good. A five ton mastan frozen mid-snarl in a ten ton cube of ice Says I don't know how I got in here but if I get out it ain't gonna happen twice The devil is just two kids in a cult that come to you at night We've established what you are now we're just haggling over the price Noise right, you recognize that this is noise right You recognize that this is noise right You recognize that this is noise right You still want it, noise right You recognize that this is noise right You recognize that this is noise right You recognize that this is noise right You still want it, can't you be drunk in a bottomless war A hybrid of scream and yawn Whatever always happens here will always happen After you're gone The care and feeding of a lost cause Can really sap you of your precious time Noise right, you recognize that this is noise right You recognize that this is noise right You recognize that this is noise right You still want it, noise right You recognize that this is noise right There's no one else right, you still want it You still want it You still want it You still want it You still want it My body's out of my step Frozen mid-soul In a ten ton cube of ice Says I don't know how I got it here
SPEAKER_02: But if I get it out, it ain't gonna happen twice There you go Special thanks to our supporters, Topher McCulloch, Steve Midgley That guy on a motorcycle Houston Fortney So loud Sarah Carrier And DJ Shanty We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX A fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting Find them all at RadioTopia.fm You can find this 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 If you're looking for more stuff to listen to, we have hundreds and hundreds of stories at 99pi.org Radio Topia
SPEAKER_04: From PRX
SPEAKER_02: As one of my favorite broadcasters, Mark Kermode, says Everything will be alright in the end And if it's not alright, it's not the end
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