Who Built the First Swimming Pool?

You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.

Guess what Mango?

What's that? Will?

So I was looking through the National Register of Historic Places, and you know, I was doing this on a Saturday, because that's how I spend most of my saturdays these days. And I noticed that there's actually only one swimming pool on the list. One swimming pool in all the National Register of Historic Places.

Well, I love that, that's how you spend your Saturdays. But there's only one swimming pool.

On a very special swimming pool. This is the Venetian Pool, and it's located in Coral Gables, Florida, and it was built on this abandoned rock quarry. Now the pool is the largest freshwater pool in the entire country. And when it was first built, it was made to look like a Venetian grotto, so this really lush pool. It was equipped with places to dock your gondola. Of course, they actually used to have gondolas that would ride across it. I'm not kidding. You should look for the photos of this.

I don't even know what that sentence means, but I love it. And usually i'd say, let's dive in, but I don't think we're gonna be that elegant, so let's get into it with a great big belly flop.

Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm here with my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and somewhere behind the big booth, sitting in an inner tube in a kiddie pool with floaties on each of his arms. I saw these things sitting around the office all week. I had a feeling this is where he was going with it. That's our good friend Dylan Fagan.

You know what's amazing about it is like that's not even half the work he put into this. Like I don't know if you notice, but he has posters up everywhere of all these great movies from like Ferris Bueller, The Sand Loot, The Graduate Rushmore, National Lampoon's Vacation. And I didn't realize it, but.

You know, they all have a famous swimming pool. Scenes. Yeah, exactly, that's true. Good catch.

There is a genius.

He really is a genius.

So will I know you are a good swimmer. I'm a terrible swimmer. I grew up near a y, so like I went to lessons there, I was a polywog, and then a guppy, and then a minnow and a fish, and I was just like crushing these levels one after another. And then I just grew older and older and I never got promoted to flying fish and heartbreaking and eventually I quit. But in spite of all that resentment, I I still love swimming pool.

I'm the same way I love a swimming pool, but I sort of just like being in it, you know, like not working really hard. And I'm not swimmings. I'm not a great swimmer. But so anyway, why don't you kick this off and tell us about the first swimming pool, which I know you look the into.

Absolutely so. People have been swimming in lakes and rivers and other bodies of water for thousands and thousands of years. But to get to what is possibly the earliest evidence of a pool, we have to go to circa twenty five hundred BCE. And this takes us to the Indus Valley in modern day Pakistan. In the nineteen twenties, archaeologists were excavating Mohenjo Daro, which is one of two main Indus civilization settlements, and they came across this structure and

Ah, that's super interesting. But somehow I hadn't put it together that they'd be teaching soldiers to blow bubbles underwater and showing them like the elementary backstroke and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, and the idea of Roman soldiers doing aqua aerobics together and full regalia is pretty fun to think about it. But also you can credit the wealthy Roman diplomat patriot of the arts and leisure enthusiast Gaeus Macenus for likely having the first heated swimming pool, which he built in the first century BCE.

Wow, that's amazing that heated swimming pools go back that far.

Yeah, the first sense of Britannica about geis is pretty amazing. It reads quote gayas Messinas was a Roman diplomat, counselor to the Roman Emperor Augustus, and wealthy patron of such poets as Virgil and Horrus. He was criticized for his luxurious way of life.

I love that. It's right there in the opener. All right, so I'm digging this quick tour through the early swimming pools that actually is super interesting. But what's next.

So as the centuries go on, swimming in bats especially bats continue to be really popular, right, So you think about the onsen in Japan, the Hammams in Turkey, the Banyas in Russia. It just goes on around the world, and in Europe, the popularity of swimming really dips during the Middle Ages, possibly because people were worried that it spread infections. But by eighteen thirty seven, the very beginning of Victorian England, there were six indoor pools with diving

All Right, so when do pools, you know, finally take over America.

So there's this great book called Contested Water, a Social History of Swimming in America, and a lot of this research comes from there. But according to Jeff Wiltsey, the first public pool in the US was built in Boston, and this is around eighteen sixty eight, so just a few years after the Civil War had ended. For context, then it was an indoor pool called a Cabot Street Bath, and unlike those fancy pools with diving boards in London, this one was as the name suggests really supposed to

One of the things that I don't like thinking about is what the water must have looked like in pools like this. I mean for real, Yeah, I know, it.

Was so gross, and it was pre chlorine, so you have to imagine it's pretty disgusting. But you know, the attempt in the US to use chlorine to clean a pool wasn't until nineteen ten, so that was really a ways away. But Wilsee said he came across reports that knowed the water in these early public baths needed to be changed about once a week.

It also feels like way too long. I don't know, maybe I'm just being a clean freak here, but I feel like it would just abstain from public.

Baths, yeah, I mean, actually, our researcher MARSSA. Brown threw in this TLC joke here that we should just stick to the rivers and the lace that you used to.

That's actually the appropriate use. That's well done.

And the truth is that even though these public baths were popping up in the US, people were swimming in fresh water or freshish water. So like if you think about New York City, for example, there had been free public floating bats in the Hudson and the East River, and this was starting in eighteen seventy. They were almost one hundred feet long and the deepest they got was about four point five.

Feet, So people were actually bathing in the East River.

Yeah, for a while in the night eighteen twenties, the city finally realized the river water maybe wasn't the cleanest, and the floating baths eventually went away.

I mean, it's such a cool idea, and I know they have these floating pools and lakes and oceans in other parts of the world, but I guess if you're swimming in the East River, it was probably for the best.

Yeah, I know. It reminds me of that Seinfeld where Kramer starts swimming in the East River because he says the pool is too constrictive for his knees. It was so ridiculous. But back to pools. So the first public outdoor pool in the US that Jeff Wiltsey could find was in Philadelphia, and it opens in the summer of eighteen eighty three, and again it was meant to be used for body cleaning purposes.

And do you know why they kept building these pools for bathing in.

Yeah, I mean part of the reason was really kind of classiest, Like you have these working class boys, they jump into open water naked, like they're not genteel. So they're often splashing about in lakes and rivers and water near buildings, and they're having a good time and they're often being rampunctious. So part of the idea was, let's just get them swimming and playing and bathing in an enclosed area so the public doesn't have to see all all these people bathing in cities.

So it wasn't so much this public service or good, but more something to keep the supposed lower classes from being an eyesore I guess exactly.

And showers were only added later in sort of like the mid to late eighteen nineties. So this was around the time when the idea that water could actually transmit invisible diseases through microbes became more accepted. But this is when you start to see the real change. And after this, the pool started to become less of a bathhouse and

That is a lot of people, you know. One of the craziest facts I read was that in nineteen thirteen the Fairgrounds Park in Saint Louis opened and it was huge and circular. We're talking four hundred feet in diameter, and apparently one Sunday, pretty soon after it opened, fifty thousand people came to visit, and twenty five thousand to swim, another twenty five thousand to watch. That's another pool I'm not getting in.

Twenty five thousand people came just to spectate. That's insane, yes, but obviously it was a trend, right. So like during the nineteen twenties through the forties, cities around the entire country started building megapools, and some of them were bigger than football fields and had sandy beaches, some of them had grassy lawns, and some of them came with concrete

Wow?

Also, it was filled with seawater and it was heated to between sixty five and seven five degrees.

Okay, now that sounds delightful. Actually, we should make a visit.

I mean, unfortunately it's been closed since the nineteen seventies and now it is a parking lot for the San Francisco Zoo.

But okay, well, we should make a visit. I like parking lots.

In its original form, it's still considered the largest ever landlocked pool.

And so what was driving all this swimming pool madness? Like why were so many of these getting built at the time?

The New Deal is part of the reason. Like that became pretty instrumental in the public pool explosion. And more than seven hundred and fifty pools were built by the federal government between nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty eight, and they were really popular. In nineteen thirty three, the National Recreation Association surveyed what kind of leisure activities Americans did, and apparently as many people swam frequently as went to the movies frequently.

I mean, it is nice that so many of the pools at that time were open to the public, because pools were just way too expensive for most people to build on their own.

Yes, so just like Gaius Marcillus, you know, private pools were definitely a sign of decadence. And William Randolph Hurst actually had two pools at his castle. He had the outdoor Neptune pool, which was complete with sculptures and a colonnade, and then there's the indoor Roman pool, which was styled after the ancient Roman bats, and it's decorated floor to ceiling with blue and orange mosaic tiles. They're both really really beautiful.

Wow, just looking at this, Gayus would have been super proud. And you know, from my research, it seems like it wasn't until around the nineteen fifties that you start to see a bunch of these private backyard pools.

And I mean, I'm guessing that's just because America is wealthier post war.

That's partially it, but it's also because of new materials, Like there's something called gunnite, which is basically sprayed concrete, and so gunnite had been around since the early nineteen hundreds, and it was used to do things like line sewers and repair buildings and bridges. But in the nineteen forties and fifties, with increasing middle class salary and people living in suburban homes they have bigger yards, dun Night was a quicker and more affordable option for a personal pool.

Yeah? Definitely. I mean I'm not a swimmer, but like my kids definitely go with friends, they go to birthday parties. It's kind of the same way they take advantage of the city's roller rinks or ice skating rinks. Also two other things I'm not good at.

Gosh man manga, you're too hard on yourself. Well, part of the reason I was asking is have you ever heard of the aquasanes?

I have not what are the Aquisanes.

So the Aquasanes were a troop of boys that would go around pools and they would basically perform these like comedy and trick diving acts for people.

You just sent over this picture. It's ridiculous.

It is pretty amazing.

Is it kind of reminds me of the people on the subway who yell showtime and then start breaking rising on the poles.

Yeah, that's pretty that's that's pretty much it. So picture a group of very energetic teen boys, all dressed in what seemed to be swimming outfits inspired by these old timey jail uniforms, and it's pretty crazy. There's this one video of them where they're like ten boys on a huge diving platform, leaping and flipping all at once. And another trick is where the Aquaisanes lined up one behind the other on the board just before jumping over and on top of each other as they dive in and

I like that, Well, were they're perform planned? Like did they you know, did they have like this choreographed routine or did they just show up and cause havoc.

I mean, it seems like it was semi legit, I guess. And you know, their home base was Astoria. They had a coach actually, and in the nineteen forties and fifties the aqua Zanes were big. So for about a decade there was a yearly summer performance called the Aqua Show that was held in Queens. It seems like it was basically this vaudevillian, you know, type of variety show, and the acts included water ballet and a log rolling monkey named Herman. Of course his name was Herman. He was

I love this whole culture of like aqua shows. I had never heard of any of this.

Yeah, yeah, all right, So let's move out of New York City pools and travel to France, which also has some pretty interesting pool history. And unfortunately, the first part here starts with a tragedy. So we go back to the summer of nineteen sixty nine and there were two separate events in France where in total, thirty three kids drowned. So obviously super sad here.

Oh, that's terrible. So what happened all right?

Well, one of the incidents happened on the River Lore where a lot of kids were playing and some just got swept under. And one happened when a boat with twenty four kids on it capsized and fourteen of them drown, and it really accentuated this disparity in swimming ability across the classes. But those tragedies pushed the government to place a new emphasis on teaching kids to swim and making sure that French kids had access to more swimming pools.

That's just good branding. I love a project title that doesn't leave you guessing.

It's pretty clear what's going on there. So first they collected design ideas and ended up choosing one by the architect Bernard Shouler, and his original design was for a pool with his dome segment cover that would open up as the sun moved across the sky, which just sounds super cool. It was nicknamed Piecene Turnosil or sunflower pool because of the way sunflowers follow the sun. But when they actually looked into building it, they realized it was

Kind of like a lazy sunflower in this case.

It's exactly right. But people loved them. So the first went up in nineteen seventy two in a town outside of Paris, and eventually one hundred and eighty two more of these structures were built, but not a thousand. Now in total, the government actually built around six hundred swimming pools, which is still a lot of pools, and not all of them were of the sunflower variety. Other variations included

I mean, I know you send it across these photos and I've got to put them up for listeners to see. But they're really cool. It's like very Jetson's esque. But can you still swim in them.

Well, sadly most of them are now abandoned. They actually ended up being pretty expensive to maintain, and that plastic exterior didn't do well in the elements. But there's still some around and some that even still function as pools. There's actually an Instagram account called le fair tonasoul and that documents many of them, and it's actually pretty cool to look at.

I love that. So what's our next stop on this tour?

All right, well, sticking with France, Actually, have you heard about this controversy surrounding the twenty twenty four Olympic pool?

I mean, I do remember the drama of like people swimming in the sein and getting sick.

Well, fortunately this one involves no vomiting, but it does involve physics. So do you know what it takes to be considered an Olympic sized pool?

Mango? I mean kind of, but maybe you clarify it for me.

All right, Well, that's kind of sounds like when you're a kid and you're like, no, no, I totally know, but why don't you say it first?

I mean, it's like twice the size of a wide pool, Like that's what I remember.

Vertty much all right, Well, the pool must be fifty meters long, and each of the eight lanes must be two point five meters wide. And back in twenty seventeen, when the Olympics were awarded to Paris, the pool's depth had to be at least two meters deep or approximately six feet seven inches.

Okay, so I got it some real specifications there.

That's right, all right, So in twenty twenty four, the Paris Olympic pool did conform to size. It was two point one five meters deep or seven feet one inch. But two point one five meters is actually pretty shallow for an Olympic pool.

And why is that? Like, is it that like tall swimmers can bump to the floor when they're diving or what's going on there?

Actually, this is where the physics comes into play. So the issue is that the shallower the pool, the more turbulence is created by the swimmers, which potentially means a much slower pool.

Oh. I actually vaguely remember that at the Beijing Olympics the pool was like extra wide and deep, and I heard that's like why so many records were broken.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right, And I do want to get to that in a minute. But during the Paris Olympics, there was a lot of hubbub around the fact that after four days and fifteen events, no world records had been beaten, which is pretty unusual for an Olympics. So it led to a bunch of press about how slow the pool was. But in the end it was maybe all a bit premature because eventually four world records were set, but for context, in Tokyo six were set, and Rio there were actually eight.

So Paris, I guess was on the low side in this case.

That's right, and World Aquatics, which is the international governing body for swimming, certainly thinks the Shaaloness played a part in that. And now going four, the new minimum depth for an Olympic pool is two point five meters. But to what you were alluding to, the pool at the two thousand and eight Beijing Olympics was also noteworthy, so a whopping twenty five world records were set there.

Oh that's crazy. I had no idea it was that many.

Yeah, that's pretty wild. So everyone was trying to figure out why this was happening, and there was certainly speculation it was because of the incredible pool, which was also called the Watercube. Now, the water Cube was a full three meters deep, which, by the way, is actually considered

Oh, I love that named Rowdy. Is that his real name?

Actually? Yes, sort of. So Rowdy's full name is Ambrose Gains the four, but his father's that's actually true, but his father, Ambrose number three, was nicknamed Buddy anyway. Rowdy was an Olympic gold medalist back in nineteen eighty four, but he's probably best known for being a swimming commentator for NBC. And so back in two thousand and eight, NPR was interviewing him and he's just gushing about the

I thought like, twenty five world records was a lot. Now you're like uffing it to forty three. That's insane. Did they figure out what was causing all these world records?

Well, two thousand and eight was the year those high tech basically full body polyurethane based swimsuits were introduced into the Olympics. You remember when you started seeing these, Yeah.

And it was like a collaboration between NASA and they were like called sharkskin suits, right.

That's right though. So those suits were used in Beijing, and they were also used the next year in Rome, and all this record breaking was just too much for the World Aquatics Association, who banned the suits, saying they wanted to maintain the integrity of swimming. Today, there are restrictions on the materials that can be used for competition suits, as well as the length of those suits, so mens suits can only be from the waist to the knees

It also reminds me of when FIFA used a new ball at the World Cup and that caused all this extra spin, and I remember, like, the strikers loved it because it was like a super high goal scoring World Cup, but the goalies hated it because it's sort of embarrassing. But it's funny how like stitching on a soccer ball, or like a swimsuit or whatever can completely change the

Wow, that is so many more miles than I was expecting. That's amazing.

Yeah. So the record was set by a long distance swimmer named Spiro Sachrisycopolis, and this was between May ninth and May sixteenth in twenty twenty one, and so he essentially spent the entire week swimming. Like Spiro said, he'd stop every two to four kilometers to eat, and he would occasionally nap for an hour or two or use the restroom, but basically he swam for a week straight. And Spiro said his biggest issues were how sore and stiff his shoulders got, and he also said that his

God, that definitely sounds like a Nightmary just kept going, Yeah, but you know, the drive for world record fame is really strong, and Spiro said he'd always wanted to be in the Guinness Books since he was a kid.

Of the three hundred and fifty eight point two kilometers, he swam three hundred and fifty eight of it freestyle, and it was just the last two hundred meters that he did the backstroke, maybe because at that point he couldn't move his arms over his head anymore.

Ah, that's incredible. All right. Well, I do have a story that I want to share about my favorite pool sport. But before we get to that, let's take one more quick break.

Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about swimming pools and will I think you were just about to talk about your favorite swimming sport.

Absolutely so, Mango. When you were a kid, did you ever play that game when you toss the ring to the bottom of the pool and then you'd have to race your friends to see who could grab it first.

Yeah, I mean I'd mostly toss the ring and let them chase it.

But right, because, as we established, not a strong swimmer.

But I feel like, uh, you know, Marco Polo that chicken fighting game like which only lasted a few minutes until the lifeguard told you to stop, like there were only really a tru games at the pool to play.

That's that's very true, all right. But you toss the ring to the bottom of the pool, except you're part of a team. You're wearing a snorkel and flippers and clutching a little stick that kind of looks like a spatula, and instead of trying to grab a ring, you're trying to push this puck like object into a goal.

So it's kind of like swim hockey.

Yeah, it's sometimes called underwater hockey, but it's more often called called octopush.

Oh. You know, I love ridiculous sports. It's one of my favorite things.

You know.

I've been married to Lizzy for like fifteen years and she still hasn't taken me to play whirli ball in Chicago, which is like lacrosse in bumper cars idea. But tell me about octopush. How to get it start?

Well, as legend has it, octopush was invented in England in the nineteen fifties. There was this diver named Alan Blake who had started this diving club and during the summer there was lots to do out in the sea, but during the winner there really wasn't, and so he wanted to keep the club active, so he had some friends come up with a game that he could play and then indoor pool. There'd be eight players per team.

So is octopush still around? Definitely.

I mean it's perhaps not the most popular sport in England, but there is a league and there are competitions. Oxford even has an octopush club today. It's actually played with six players per team instead of eight, and they don't call the puck a squid anymore. So, like, if you're a real traditionalist octopush player, like this is upsetting. But anyway, it's tricky as the spectator sport because everything takes place

Man, I can't wait to watch. And here's hoping we'll see it in the twenty threey two Olympics.

All right, Well, while we're waiting on that to happen, why don't we waste a little time with a fact off, let's leap in.

Okay, So I got my first fact right here. Apparently the deepest swimming pool in the world is located in Dubai at almost two hundred feet and it was built for the Crown prints of the but it's open to the public mainly for people to go diving in. They've even built a fake abandoned sunken city at the bottom, so there is plenty to explore a.

Fake abandoned city. That does sound pretty fun, so not as fun as the pool in the Arizona Diamondbacks Ballpark. This fits thirty five people and you can actually rent it out during games.

That is incredible and it seems like a pretty great way to get people who are into baseball to go watch a game with you. Well, speaking of pools, I definitely want to visit The Golden Nugget Casino in Vegas has a pool that's next to a two hundred thousand gallon shark tank and it's got a water slide that

Wow, that does sound both exciting but also super scary. And you know, as fun as that sounds, for the excitement, I think I would rather swim in the Embassy Gardens pool in London. Now I'd have to know someone who lives there to invite me to visit. But after I do that, I could swim in their pool, which is suspended one hundred and fifteen feet in the air between two buildings. It's not the highest pool in the world that's at the Ritz Carlton, Hong Kong, but it might

That is amazing. Honestly, like that would be a really good place to watch a game of Octopush. You can watch from the ground and look up.

Yeah. Well, if the Oxford Octo Push Team plays the Embassy Gardens Apartment oct To Push Team, you and I let's agree, we're gonna go get tickets.

Yeah. I love it. So here's one less fact, and it's about the hidden swimming pool in the White House. So the pool was built for FDR and was apparently state of the art. It was tricked out with lights, it had all these gadgets in it, and he was wheelchair bound, but he loved to swim for exercise, and then Truman and JFK both used it as well. But President Nixon, much like ourselves, wasn't a swimmer, and as you might know, he famously put bowling alleys into the

Man, you saved it for the very last line. You worked in a trapdoor and a hidden staircase. So for that, I think I have to give you to Day's backtoc trophy.

I mean, it has been a while, so I'm glad I finally get to put one on the shelf.

I wasn't gonna say anything, but yeah, it's been a minute.

So that's it for today's episode. Special thanks to Marissa Brown, who gets the hat tip for researching and writing for this episode, but from Gabe, Dylan, Mary, Will and myself, thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and me Mongaishatikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang.