Swimming Oil

little culture by making sour dough bread and kombucha. Others have taken up painting, guitar and even podcasting. One hobby, however, is one almost all of us have done. We might forget about it as we get older, but it has been a mainstay of rainy days and quiet afternoons seemingly forever, and it got its start back in the seventeen sixties. John Spillsbury was born in England in seventeen thirty nine. He had one younger brother and an older brother who

his father also named Jonathan. This strange, confusing choice got John mixed up with his brother quite often. Spillsbury took an apprenticeship with Thomas Jefferies, a cartographer who held the title of geographer to King George the third. Jeffreys maps were among the most celebrated and reliable of the time, including surveys of Virginia, New England, and the West Indies, and their maps were not only used to help sailors learn what resided on distant shores, but to educate children

as well. After all, the world was changing and it was important that every person, regardless of their age, understood how. In addition, maps were ideal propaganda tools. As England continued its imperial march across the globe, it erected new borders and altered how its people saw their country, not as a land unto itself, but as one that was superior to everyone else. Such a sense of nationalism was key to indoctrinating young children into believing in England's superiority. However,

there was a problem. Kids just weren't good at geography. Chuck it up to the ever changing borders or how complicated the maps were, the children had a hard time remembering where countries were located. Not to worry, though, that Spillsbury had an idea. He knew how to make geography more fun, and he turned it into a game. He took a map of Europe and glued it to a thin board of mahogany. Then he cut the map up using a tiny saw to divide the countries into separate pieces.

Marketry saws were capable of making small, precise ornamental cuts, and were often used to perform inlay work in furniture. Spillsbury's educational creations were expensive due to their premium materials and handcrafted nature. As a result, only the very wealthy could afford them. King Charles the Third, who had relied on Thomas Freeze maps, was now buying Spillsbury's dissected maps for his own kids. As time went on, though makers

branched out with their own designs. Beside maps, they still used wood for the backings, since wood was considered a much higher quality material than the ever increasingly popular and cheaper cardboard. Tools grew more advanced as well. Marketry saws gave way to fret saws, which featured a high arch and a thin blade perfect for carving delicate curves into

the wood. Throughout the eighteen hundreds and well into the early nineteen hundreds, cut up pictures and maps became popular ways for people to pass the time after the stock market crash of nineteen nine. People used them to keep busy, as they could be purchased once and reassembled over and over again, far less expensive than live entertainments or going to the movies. These activities also piqued the interest of adults, who enjoyed putting together more and more complicated dissections with

more pieces. The close of World War Two brought an end to the sale of wooden pieces, with cardboard proving more cost effective to both manufacture and purchase. Today, these brain training pastimes are done on dining room tables and playroom floors all over the world. They range in skill levels from just a few pieces all the way up

to five thousand and beyond. Some companies even make three D versions of them, and several medical publications have argued that doing them regularly can help stave off such neurological diseases like Alzheimer's. John Spillsbury probably had no idea his invention would catch on in such a fun way. All he wanted to do was teach kids geography. Instead, he designed a quiet, contemplative hobby to help people unwind. He created the jigsaw puzzle. All it took was a hammer,

a bucket, and a little patience. Frozen pieces were lumped together and smashed with the hammer, and then the mash was poured into a tub, and when the weather warmed up, oil pooled on the surface of the mash and was ready to be gathered and used. It was so easy that it earned a simple name, self running oil. Some people preferred seal oil in their lamps, mostly Greenland's Inuit communities, but when seal blubber wasn't around, self running oil was

a good substitute. In eighteen oh five, some green Landers started experimenting with this self running oil. They wanted to see if there was more they could do with it. After all, whale oil had been used to light lamps and make soap since the fifteen hundreds, so there was

some inspiration to see what else could be done. It was still decades before petroleum would land on the scene, but in Greenland they weren't short of ideas, and when people trying it, they found that with self running oil they had a light source that worked just as well as any whale oil. In fact, if they boiled the mash, they could produce two different kinds of oil, a light

machine oil and a second darker product as well. Yes, the darker ooze from the second boil had an offensive odor, but when it was treated with caustic soda, it came out a smooth, reddish brown color, and it burned clean. When it was lit, it barely gave off any smoke, even less than a wax taper. And the oil was so light that people using it in their lamps said that it just ran up the wick. So it was a perfect indoor light, even in small spaces. You might

say that nothing could hold a candle to it. But it wasn't just useful for fueling lamps. When it was processed, it could be used for other work as well, like tanning hides, and that's where it's more odorous qualities weren't all that much of a downside. Soon enough, self running oil was just too useful not to harvest and too valuable not to buy and sell. Plus there was a

lot of it off the coast of Greenland. When the experiments at the beginning of the eighteen hundreds turned out the first usable products, only a little harvesting was being done, but by the end of the century, a whole industry had grown up and the harvest had multiplied a thousandfold or more. One sailor said that he had spent thirty years hunting self running oil, and over the course of his career he had brought in eighteen thousand gallons of

the raw materials to be refined. Boats were going out from Greenland, Norway and Iceland to crisscross the cold waters of the Arctic, and in the winters, the solid ice around North Greenland allowed for the oil to be gathered without any boats at all. It just took a few people working together. A hole in the ice was enough, so with a hammer, a bucket, a few friends and some patients, anyone could get into the self running oil business.

But the experimenting didn't stop there. How about mixing the self running oil with seal oil or cod liver oil. Well, that worked like a charm too soon. Not only was self running oil the ordinary way of lighting homes in North Greenland, but it became a major export. As its reputation grew and spread, orders came in from tanneries and other businesses across Sweden and Germany. Self running oil was a hit. In fact, by the end of the century.

Most of the oil was sold overseas and a famous blend that came to be known as trek Kroner Tran or three crowns oil. It became one of the Royal Greenland trades finest products, and the innovation didn't stop there. Over the years, self running oil became an ingredient in all kinds of inventions, for better or for worse. It was used in the recipe for glycerin and nitroglycerin, yes, the nitro that's in dynamite and the machine. Oil was also used as an industrial lubricant, and there was no

shortage of demand for explosives during both World Wars. Eventually, synthetic oils would replace the self running oil harvested in the Arctic waters. Today, it's mostly used as a dietary supplement because somewhere along the line it was discovered that self running oil also had some vitamin A in it. But even into the nineteen fifties it was still tanning

hides and greasing machinery. People were buying the oil and huge amounts, and Norway especially stepped up to provide The Danish Navy even had one of their submarines named after the oil source have colin, but that makes sense if you've already guessed that the oil came from a predator.

Most of us would approach with fear, like a stick of dynamite about to blow up, because for more than a century, the self running oil was collected by intrepid sailors and fishermen who found a way to make a living by skimming the oil off a mash of the liver of the half collin, the Danish name for the Arctic greenland shark. 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 Come and until next time, stay curious. H