Itsy Bitsy

every year, every season. Sometimes certain trends return, like the bell bottom craze of the nineteen nineties, and sometimes they rightly go away forever, like the polyester leisure suits of the seventies. But one clothing item has withstood the test of time, existing for thousands of years across a variety of cultures, even though it is widely considered to be a modern creation. It started in fifty sid b c. In the ancient city of catalhu Yuck, the ruins of

which can be found today in modern day Turkey. During this era, an image of the mother goddess of the native people was crafted. The image showed her wearing two strips of cloth, one covering her chest and the other covering her lower half, as she sat upon two leopards. A similar outfit was seen thousands of years later in fourteen hundred b c. It was depicted in Greek vases, urns, and artwork, and was often seen on women participating in

athletic activities throughout history. Evidence of this garment was also found in ancient Roman mosaics, Greek sculptures, and Latin literature. It is almost as old as time itself. However, even though this article of clothing was worn commonly and publicly, it became increasingly seen as immodest and vulgar by more conservative minded individuals as time war on. It was until one man decided to tackle it head on and drag it into the sunshine of the modern age. His name

was Louis Rayard, born in France in eighteen seven. He'd worked as an automotive engineer until his mother's death around nineteen forty. She had owned a clothing business, and Louis took it upon himself to step into her shoes. No pun intended running the company from that point on. Sometimes he would stroll the nearby beaches and he would note how the women couldn't get the kind of sun tan

they wanted. Their swimsuits covered too much of their bodies, so they would roll the fabric back to expose more of their skin. And this gave him an idea. What if they didn't have to roll up the fabric, What if they could wear a swimsuit that exposed their middrift for them instead. It took several years, due in part to the war effort and fabric shortages, but by ninety six Louis had come up with just the thing, and

so had someone else. Jacques Heim, also from France, had gotten his start working for his parents for Company Me. Just like Louis, Jacques took the reins and started running it himself some years later, eventually broadening its offerings beyond fur coats and stoles. The company's new Cotur line included dresses, and Jacques also started producing clothes for young girls. But aside from all of that, he made a bathing suit.

It was comprised of a ruffled bandeau and a pair of short bottoms with a thin strip of middrift exposed between them. He called it the Atom French four Adam and advertised it by pain sky writers to write out the phrase the World's smallest bathing suit in the sky over a popular resort but Jackaim didn't have Louis Royard's

marketing prowess. Louis knew what people wanted to see. He would use even less fabric than his competitor, a meager four small triangles tied together that amounted to no more than thirty square inches of material. It had to be seen to be believed. All he needed was a model. Unfortunately, no one wanted to wear it, as there wasn't much there to begin with. But he eventually found his model in a young nineteen year old dancer named Micheline Bernardini.

She worked at a local music hall and agreed to be photographed in louise new bathing suit. On July five, he took her to a public swimming pool in Paris and introduced her to the crowd. She made quite a splash. The bottoms of her new swimsuit stopped just below her navel and exposed more of her backside than any other suit on the market, and as promised, her middrift was fully exposed. Newspapers printed photos of her in the ensemble

too great acclaim, mostly from men. However, it was banned in several countries and even a few places in the United States. Over time, however, it gained in popularity among swimmers and beach goers, and despite Joaquim beating Louis Royard to market with his design, it was Louie's name for the product that ultimately stuck. He had named his swim suit after the location of a US atomic test site

near the later called Bikini a Toll. So with one word and a few pieces of fabric, two men brought a seventy year old garment into the twentieth century with the invention of the bikini, and Louis even managed to outdo his competition. A few weeks after Jacques had his slogan written across the Sky for the resort, Louis hired his own skywriters to do the same, except this time he had them write something better smaller, it said, than

the smallest bathing suit in the world. Comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks famously said, rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance. He understood that in order to rob evil people of their power, he had to make

them the butt of the joke. Perhaps no work of his exemplifies this more than the musical number Springtime for Hitler from Brooks's nineteen sixty seven film The Producers, the over the top Broadway performance in which Nazis sing and dance paying tribute to a giant poster of their leader as the Hitler character entered the scene, and its portrayed

as a laughable beateneck not a fearsome dictator. But what mel Brooks might not have known at the time was that he didn't have to make up stories to make the Nazis look like fools. One real life German U boat captain managed to do that all on his own. His name was Carl Adolph Schlitt, and he was in charge of German submarine U twelve O six. The U twelve oh six was a two D and twenty foot sub weighing as much as eight hundred and seventy one

tons when submerged. It was built later in the war and as a result had a few upgrades that separated it from its earliest counterparts. One such upgrade was its use of deep water, high pressured toilets, unlike British subs, which kept septic tanks. On board that could be emptied at a later time. The U twelve oh six fired human waste into the ocean with every flush. This new plumbing system allowed use of the restroom while the sub was at depth, no need to worry about a heavy

tank to add weight to the vessel. There was only one catch. Flushing the toilet was a lot more complicated. It even required training on how to do it properly without jeopardizing the integrity of the vessel and the lives of the people on board. A person had to turn a series of valves in just the right order to evacuate the toilet's contents without seawater coming back in. In April of the U twelve oh six was traveling two feet below the waters off the coast of Scotland when

Captain Schlitt got the urge. He might have had a large meal or one too many cups of coffee that day, but whatever it was, he had to go now. Being a submarine captain, a man in control of a massive vessel and his own destiny, there was no reason for him to think he couldn't handle something as simple as using a toilet. And yet he soon learned that flushing the U twelve O six is commode required more than

a jiggle of the handle. After he had done his business, Schlitz stood up and realized that, unlike the sub, he was out of his depth. He called in an engineer to a system. Now there were two Nazis in a small submarine bathroom with no idea how to flush the toilet. The engineer turned one valve and that's all it took for all hell to break loose. The room started to take on seawater, with Schlitz remnants swirling around with them. And to make matters worse, the bathroom was positioned over

the sub's battery. As the water breached the compartment, another kind of toxic gas, flooring gas, to be precise, filled the vessel. Schlitz and his crew had no choice but to surface, and at the worst possible time. The U twelve O six was almost immediately spotted by the British Royal Air Force and fired upon. With no other options, the fifty or so German crew abandoned the sub, which was then deliberately sunk to keep its secrets from the Allies.

Four Nazis died that day, while the others were captured in Schlitt's official report, he stated that he had been in the engine room when one of his engineers had tried to repair a vent at the front of the vessel. The ensuing on rush of sea water made the sub buoyant and they were forced to surface. He made no mention of his time in the bathroom nor the failed flush that had sealed the fates of him and his crew. Captain Schlitt was only twenty seven when he was handed

control of the U twelve O six. It was his first patrol. After spending several years in a p O W camp. He was released and lived to the ripe old age of ninety. But he had to live every day of that knowing that he got his men killed or captured because he didn't know how to flush a toilet. And that's a real Schlitz show, if you ask me. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet

of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.