9 Head-spinning Facts about Hats

wish you a magician. No, she was this legendary con artist from the eighteenth century, and she managed to trick doctors into believing she'd given birth to sixteen live rabbits. Now why she wanted to trick them into thinking she'd given birth to sixteen rabbits, I'm not sure, but she managed to hold the doctors and even the royal family at the time. But part of the reason she was eventually discovered was that someone spotted her husband buying all

these baby rabbits just on the slide. Anyway, once it was established that she was a fraud, magicians started parroting her trick. In fact, in early renditions, they wouldn't just pull one rabbit out of a hat, but a bunch of them, which is so weird that magicians still do that rabbit and a hat trick right like it's a staple. I know. But that's actually just the first of nine hat facts that we've got for you today. So let's dig in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius.

I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend man guest Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass wearing a wide brimmed hat from the what is that the Hamburglar collection is impressive? That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. And of course we've got our pal and had researcher Gabe Bluesier on the line with us as well. How's it going Gabe? Hey, guys, thanks for having me on. It's going well well because I kicked off today's episode. How about I throw it

to you, Gabe for your first fact? Sure? All right? Uh So, a year before he was killed, President Lincoln had actually had another assassination attempt on his life, and this was in August of eighteen sixty four. He was out riding a horse who happened to be named Old Abe.

Also by the way, and uh he was three miles away from the White House when someone took a pot shot at him and the bullet just missed him, clipping his stovepipe hat off his head, and the two abes took off, and when soldiers found the hat later on, they discovered that the bullet had gone right through the crown, which, you know, it led everyone to believe that the lucky top hat had actually saved his life. Oh wow, all right, well that's a pretty crazy story. Okay, mango, what's your

first fact? Well, you know, since since Gabe had one about Lincoln, I actually have one of Lincoln's hat as well, and it's unfortunate that he wasn't wearing his lucky hat at the FOURD Theater and instead it was sitting by his feet during that performance. But that had actually has

its own story. So after the assassination Mary Todd, Lincoln sent the President's hat to the Smithsonian, where there were strict orders not to exhibit the hat under any circule stance, and apparently they thought viewing the hat might induce too much hysterian the public. So only a few people knew about it, and for thirty years it was just hidden away in the basement of the Smithsonian before it was rediscovered, and of course today it's considered one of the Smithsonian's

most prized possessions. Yeah, I'd love to do a tour one day of like the underground of the Smithsonian, not just because like what do you see in the movies, but there actually are just a ton of artistles. It's just amazing. I don't know where you came up with drawers full of birds. You haven't see that photo. It's amazing. It's like this massive hall and they're like a few curators who have just opened all the drawers and it's like, like I want to say, hundreds of thousands of birds,

like just stuffed in for this hopefully dead. Well, I did not know about that. We're going to have to do an episode. I just didn't expect that to be the response, Like all these things underground, you're like drawers full of birds. Yeah, alright, Well back to the hats. I've actually got a weird one here. So have you

guys ever heard of the straw hat riots? Well, apparently on September fifteen, that used to be a big day for the hating community, known as felt Hat Day, and it's when men switched over from wearing summer straw hats for winter ones, and actually if you wore a hat after that date, you were basically asking to get made

fun of. In fact, for a while, young hooligans in New York City would use sticks and nails at the end to fish these straw hats off, you know, passers by that had them on, and then they would stomp them flat, like really really nice kids. But in n this felt hat day, hooliganism got out of hand, and so many boys were out there stomping these hats that

the police were called in. There was a subhead in the New York Tribune that read, quote, many youthful marauders are arrested and seven are spanked by irate parents at station like that. They counted the number of them who were spanked. Anyway, I think it's safe to say that they learned their lesson from this event. Alright, mano, what do you got next? So? Uh, this is just something I found that I thought was funny. It's in honor

of George Orwell's a hundred tenth birthday. These two Dutch artists in the city of Utrecht decided to celebrate his legacy by putting little party hats on all the city's surveillance cameras, and uh, it's really funny. You should look these pictures up because all these sort of like Big Brother lenses around the town are all dressed up in these super festive party hats. And the whole thing made the cameras look ridiculous, but it actually drew attention and

it made people realize how much they're actually being constantly watched. Yeah, oh that's pretty cool, all right. Actually, you know what, there was another fact. I know we need to get back to gay for another fact, but I meant to mention this one after you talked about Lincoln's had I know we talked about Lincoln's lost hat, but apparently Jackie

Kennedy's iconic pillbox hat has also gone missing. So while her pink suit is an a vault in Maryland, it supposedly won't be shown for a hundred years, but her matching hat is nowhere to be found. Some hat conspiracy theorists think that Jackieo's personal secretary, Mary Gallagher, that she used to blame. She was the last one scene holding it, and they think she might have sold it in an online auction to you know, some fancy had collector or something. Yeah,

you just never know. But Mary has been spotted putting Kennedy memorabilia up for auction before. Actually, so this could actually be the case, but she's refused to discuss the matter. That's crazy, alright, gay, but I feel like Mango and I were hogging it for a minute. We want to come back to you got another hat fact for us? Yeah, here's a quick one, actually, um, and that's that Daniel Boone didn't actually wear a coon skin cap, so most of the time he wore a beaver hat. And in fact,

that's where the whole thing started. So when an artist named Chester Harding painted Boone, he painted him in an accurate beaver hat. But then when the princes of that painting were sold, they hired a Daniel Boone impersonator to hawk those prints. And unfortunately the impersonator you know, couldn't afford a beaver hat, or maybe he just couldn't find one, but either way, he showed up to sell in a lesser coon skin hat and for some reason. But three, you just do you feel like you could spot the

difference between a beaver hat and a coon skin head? Yeah? Yeah, okay, all right. Well, actually, I've got a cool fact about Carmen Miranda. You know, the Brazilian singer and dancer who was popular in the thirties and forties. Well, she was iconic partly because she wore that giant fruit hat on her head, which inspired the chiquita banana woman. But here's what's interesting, So she actually used to make these elaborate

hats herself. She had worked as a millner in her youth and a hat shop, and so she knew the art and she modeled those crazy fruit hats on the girls in Brazilian villages who used to carry the baskets of fruit on their heads to market. That's pretty cool, all right, Mago, what's your last fact? So you know, what's the opposite of making an iconic hat yourself is a shoplifting one. But that's what Slash, the bad boy guitarist of Guns and Roses, did. So this is well

before they had a record deal. Slash was looking for something fancy to wear at a thrift store and because he claims he didn't have the money at the time, I mean, this is how he justifies it. He found a top hat and then just walked out of the store with it, and he was lucky that no one chased him out. But of course that's not the only part of his outfit that he filched. Since the top hat looked too plain on its own, he actually stole

a belt that he used as a hat band. And so I mean, of course, the fact that he's so happy to talk about all this stealing without feeling any guilt kind of gives a little more credence to this amazing theory. I saw online that Guns and Roses ripped off their songs sweet Child of Mine from an Australian band called Australian Crawl. Yeah, the song was out like five years before, and apparently, I mean they say that Guns and Roses was listening to like Australian rock at

the time. It's kind of crazy if you listen to the suff to go back and listen to that right after I look at the birds in the drawers. Okay, gave you got one more fact for us. Yeah, so this is a slightly sweeter one than that. But uh, have you heard before that the hundred fleets on a French chef's hat that they represent all the different ways they know of how to prepare an egg? Familiar that. Yeah, well, it's an often repeated story, but it's actually hard to

find any evidence of this. I mean, French cooks like Jacques Pepin will tell you how much they love eggs and even used making perfect silky scrambled eggs as kind of this test of whether you can work in their kitchens. But Bon Appetite did some digging and they did find

a little bit of corroborating evidence for this. So apparently the French cook who elevated French cuisine and kind of put chefs in uniform, august Escoffe, he had one hundred and forty three recipes for mastering eggs and he documented them all in his legendary h three cookbook. I feel like I could come up with maybe four ways to love eggs, so that is impressive, and I want to

give you today's fact Off trophy. But I really feel like the whole birds and drawers came out of nowhere, and so I gave I don't know how you feel, but I feel like we have choice but to give mango the trophy today. What do you think you can get behind that? Okay with that mango? Yeah, definitely, I'm going to stuff d but listeners. We've loved hearing from you guys so many ideas for future nine Things episodes, so if you want to keep those coming, we would

love to hear from you. It's part time genius at how stuff Works dot com. You can also call seven Fact hot Line one eight four pt genius, or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. We'll be back with a full length episode tomorrow. Thanks so much for listening.