Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, I wanted to talk about burning hair. That might be a kind of unusually niche or weird thing to look into. But I was inspired to do this a couple of weeks ago, on the fourth of July actually, when I was making food for a big family get together. You know, I was out in the backyard grilling, and I did something I have done many times before, which is burn all the hair off part
of my arm. Oh no, yeah, turn and look. I mean like I wasn't like badly burned myself, like on my skin, but you know, at some point I looked down and realized, like, oh, what are all these weird little kind of pale curls. Oh I see? Okay.
Do you say you've done this before? Do you at least alternate arms or is it just always the same arm that it gets?
It's always my right arm because that's the arm I'm right handed doing that, you know, That's what I'm manipulating the food with. You know, sometimes it's more the hand, like the I don't know if it's gross to talk about your hand hair, like the hair on my knuckles, the hair on my back, the back of my hand that gets burned off. This time, it was mainly along
like my forearm and the outside of my wrist. I wonder if other grill operators have had similar experiences, because I never burn my hand or arm hair when I'm grilling a small amount of food, like a couple of portions of whatever. It's always when I'm grilling for a
big crowd. So I guess it has something to do with like trying to like fit a bunch of different individual items on the grill and then go down the line flipping them or moving them one at a time, and something about that means like I'm holding my arm directly over the hot part of the grill more or something.
Ah, well, that that would make sense, because I was thinking about this, was like, Okay, I don't know that I've ever done this myself, but I think look back on all on the grilling I have done over the years, and it is generally just grilling for probably just for my immediate family. So it's feeling just for like two or three people, it's probably just going to be veggies
that aren't on there very long. And yeah, for I guess a variety of reasons, and luck I have not like burnt a lot of arm hair on the grill, but I have to, so I have to ask like the follow up questions, like what you mentioned what it looked like, but that it was was that the primary way that you realize something had happened, or was there also like a skin level sensation And was there a smell?
Uh?
I mean, there's there's the feeling of heat obviously, which but that's just naturally the air because like I'm reaching over a hot fire, I think there is a smell normal, And in fact, I would say that the smell is probably the most characteristic and instantly recognizable sensory part of the burning hair experience. Right, I mean, almost anybody I think can immediately think of the smell of burning hair.
It seems to stick in people's minds, even if hair burning is like not something that happens very often to them. It's just sort of I don't know, do you know what I mean, Like it just sort of like sticks in your memory what that smells like?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'd be kind of wired, I guess, to recognize.
It specifically in the context of grilling, though, there are already a lot of volatiles in the air, there's a lot of smoke, a lot of particles and everything. It's an intense smell experience already, So I think the smell of the burning hair, especially if there's only a little bit of it, just kind of blends in more. You might not notice that first. In this case. Yeah, I remember just like looking down at my arm, the part that had been hot, and being like, oh, yeah, that happened again.
Okay that yeah, that would make sense. There are a lot of competing smells going on there. Yeah.
But anyway, this experience got me wondering about the science of burning hair. I started to wonder, you know, some questions about the basic science and chemistry involve like how flammable is human hair, and why does it smell that way? And so forth. I was looking around for good sources on the on the question of the sort of the underlying chemistry of the smell of burning hair, and basically the best sources I found pointed me to the presence
of sulfur. Of course, hair is mostly made of keratin, which is primarily protein, and of course those proteins, when they're burned, release their own sort of smells. There are characteristic protein burning smells that we might associate with the burning of other types of skin and even fingernails and things like that. But a big thing is the presence
of sulfur. According to a paper that I'm going to mention in a little bit, human hair is approximately five percent sulfur, and that sulfur content is largely responsible for or the characteristic smell. And this is interesting to me because it explains a similarity at least as far as I can remember. That burning hair, to me, smells a
little bit like lighting a match. Lighting a match produces the distinctive smell of sulfur dioxide or generally sulfur compounds, which happened because there is usually sulfur content in a matchhead. It's part of what burns to set the match alight. As a side note, apparently it is kind of known that you can temporarily mask other unpleasant smells. A commonly referenced one is the smell of feces by striking a match. Have you ever heard this before?
Rob? Oh? Yeah, yeah, of course, you know. I mean sometimes even see that in at least residential bathrooms, you know, there will be like some matches out by the bathroom facilities, that sort of thing.
Oh, that's interesting. I don't know if I ever made that connection, I would have assumed that if there were matches out, they're usually paired with a candle, and the idea is that you would use the matches to light like a pleasantly scented candle. And I always understood that as the ideas you would use a pleasantly scented candle to mask the smell of feces in a bathroom or something.
I guess often but not always, I guess. And then there is also like the kind of just a saying right like oh, there's a bad smell that may be associated with digestion. Someone will be like, ah, somebody light a match, you know.
Oh okay, Well, I may have misunderstood those sayings as well. I probably would interpret that as like, I don't know, what's the polite way of putting it, lighting a fart kind of comment.
Well, I don't Well, I'm not sure that that was the level of excitement, like it's a bad smell in here, let's see if it can busts. It's more like there's an unpleasant odor. Let us light a match so that the smell of that struck match might mask the stink that has enveloped us.
Yeah, okay, well, so now I'm understanding several things about the world differently than I did before this conversation. But anyway, so it makes me think about I see like a candle in the bathroom and some matches. Maybe I'm thinking about the mechanism differently. It's actually the lighting of the match more so than the candle that helps, sort of like calm your mind about the smells in there. But anyway, the idea is that the sulfur compounds released by striking
a match overpower other smells in our olfactory recognition. I have seen it written in a couple of places that the idea is when you strike a match like it burns up the bad gases responsible for causing the smell in the air. That does not seem to be true. It's more kind of like your nose and your brain are primed to just let the smell of the struck match. I think this will be primarily the smell of sulfur dioxide.
It just take over your smell sensing abilities. But it makes me wonder if the burning of hair also releases these sulfur compounds that are responsible for the characteristic smell, if you could likewise cover up the you know, these unpleasant bodies body aroma's, fecal smells and stuff by burning hair.
Well we're not advising that, no, no, but just from like a chemical standpoint, okay, perhaps so.
One of the most surprising and interesting things I discovered by looking into these questions about the science of burning hair was that some of the best research I could find on this came from studies about hair catching on fire in spaceships.
Yeah yeah, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of orion, right, yeah.
Yeah. So the main paper I was looking at is called the Flammability of Human Hair in Exploration Atmospheres from the year two thousand and nine in the SAE Journal International Journal of Aerospace by Sandra L. Olson, Devon W. Griffin, David L. L. Be, Gary A. Ruff, and Elizabeth A. Smith.
And so the authors here begin by referencing an older study that I'll mention in a second that says the flammability of both skin and hair has actually been a subject of major concern since the early stages of the US BASE program, and they refer back to an older paper, one from nineteen sixty eight by Robert L. Durfey called the Flammability of Skin and Hair in Oxygen enriched Atmospheres. This was published in the OR as part of a
USAF School of Aerospace Medicine technical report. This was from December nineteen sixty eight, and durfy begins this study from sixty eight by saying, quote, observations after recent fires involving human subjects in oxygen atmospheres indicate that the humans may have contributed to the spread of fires through combustion of
their skin and hair. So obviously that's quite morbid. But I was wondering what this refers to, and I figured that since this was published in nineteen sixty eight, I think it almost certainly must be referring, at least in part to the tragedy of the Apollo one fire, which killed three astronauts on January twenty seventh, nineteen sixty seven.
Those astronauts were Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffey, and they died during a launch test that was less than a month before the scheduled mission, so they weren't actually in space. It was a ground test on Earth before the launch of an orbital mission. And the tragedy was that a flash fire broke out inside the cabin
of the command module. The fire probably started with There could have been several ignition points, but it may have been an electrical arc from faulty wiring, maybe connected to some kind of chemical present like a volume of anti freeze fluid called glycol. But however it started, it spread very rapidly due to the enriched oxgen atmosphere pressurized inside the cabin. It was basically pure oxygen in there, and due to a variety of combustible materials spread throughout the
cabin interior. Now, remember, as we've talked about on the show before, fire needs three things to burn. It needs heat, it needs fuel, and it needs oxygen. Obviously, in this scenario, there could have been an initial heat source, some kind of ignition point. There would have been lots of oxygen because it was a pure oxygen atmosphere inside the command module.
And so the question is what was the fuel and what was the fuel roll of various substances including parts of human bodies inside the command module, and so this study was looking into human hair and skin, and so one thing it says that is that taken as a whole, even with enriched oxygen around, human skin is not especially flammable because it has a lot of water in it, right, So there is a major heat sink in human bodies where heat has to be continually applied from the outside
in order for it to burn. There's a lot of water. That water must be turned into water vapor, so it doesn't catch fire easily. However, there are sort of little layers on the outside of skin and also hair which can catch fire in enriched oxygen environments much more easily. This study from sixty eight found that a high concentration of inert helium in the air in an environment, in this case seventy five percent helium, would prevent hair from
burning at regular atmospheric pressure. And the study also tested various protective measures such as smearing the skin and hair with protective lotions and greases and covering it with flame repellent cloth.
Was just shaving off all the hair just not an option. Seems like if I got to choose between the two for my space mission. I would just say, well, can we just buzz it all off?
That is an option that is discussed in the two thousand and nine paper, which I'll come back to now. So yeah, So initially they cite the Derfy study and they say, as a general matter, there are several factors to consider that could increase the risk of fires within spacecraft or space exploration testing environments. And a big one they call out is the same thing we were just
talking about, elevated oxygen levels. So in some cases ambient within spacecraft, but also in cases where supplemental oxygen is being provided through a mask. Now, when would there be supplemental oxygen inside a spacecraft, You could say, possibly in a medical intervention for an ill or injured crew member. They might have extra oxygen supplied to them. This is common in hospitals on Earth as well, or possibly during emergencies such as the leak of toxic chemicals or in
fighting a pre existing fire. Now, the authors point out something interesting about the case of breathing pure oxygen through a mask. They say, quote, for every breath of pure oxygen breathed in, the exhaled breath still contains ninety five percent of the oxygen. This creates an environment of increased oxygen near the head and chest. Now I did not know that and don't think I would have thought about that before, but from what I looked up in other sources, yes,
this seems right. In breathing say normal air on Earth, which is roughly twenty one percent oxygen and the rest is mostly nitrogen. In rough terms, that air on Earth. You know, if you say twenty percent is oxygen, about fifteen percent of the air you breathe out is oxygen. So what happened to that missing five percent of the air, Well, about five percent of the air is oxygen that is
absorbed by the lungs. So when you breathe in, you absorb about five percent of the air, about a quarter of the total oxygen content of the air, and then that oxygen is replaced mostly with carbon dioxide when you breathe out. So that leaves you with what the author said. If you're breathing pure oxygen, say throw a mask in one of these scenarios, what you breathe out would be
roughly ninety five percent oxygen. So the area around your head as you're exhaling is going to have a lot more oxygen in it than it normally would now note with regard to ambient oxygen, the oxygen levels used in different space exploration and environments have varied. The International Space Station actually maintains roughly the Earth's atmosphere mixture of gases
in the air, so about twenty one percent oxygen. The rest is nitrogen, but the nitrogen has to be supplied through like bringing up tanks of nitrogen to make up that difference. So that and other considerations have led people to plan that in some other cases there might be higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere breathed within space exploration contexts in the future. The author's cite a few
other examples. They cite past examples as well. They say the Apollo missions and sky Lab used higher oxygen levels, and as of the time of this paper, there were plans for other missions that the authors say would have used higher oxygen concentrations. They cite the Orion Crew exploration vehicle.
They cite the Altai Lander, which would have been at the time this mission was planned, would have been a landing vehicle for a US mission returning to the Moon, and they also talk about higher oxygen concentrations in possible lunar surface habitats, So there would be numerous scenarios where you're in a space exploration context and you would have
increased oxygen levels. Either there's just ambiently increased oxygen in the particular mission or vehicle you're talking about, or you might be needing to give somebody oxygen for some reason, in which case there would be much increased oxygen around their head and chest. The authors also point out that certain medical interventions could provide ignition points, such as you could potentially start a fire during defibrillation, and this could happen even on Earth. Really, yes, I went and read
about this. It seems to put some fears at rest. It is very rare. This is not something that commonly happens, but there have been reported cases. For example, the following study. I was looking at a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology by Sanchez at All from the year twenty twenty three. It talks about a case where a seventy two year old male showed up
at the emergency room. He was suffering atrial fibrillation an erratic elevated heart rate, and there were several interventions, including the use of a defibrillator to stabilize the regular heartbeat. So they put the leads on your chest and they send a charge to try to synchronize the muscles of the heart. The report says, quote, the defibrillator pads ignited in flames after the defibrillation button was pressed. The betting and oxygen mask also caught fire. Now that's something you
don't usually think of happening. However, the author stressed that this is extremely rare. They say there are only two known cases in the medical literature that they could identify. And also fortunately the patient did not suffer actually suffer burn injuries. What was burned appeared to be the pads and the patient's body hair in some parts of the bedding. But they say to avoid this happening, there are several
steps you can do. Of course, the increased oxygen from supplemental oxygen probably contributed here, so they say you can remove or place oxygen masks or nasal canula further away from the patient's chest when you're doing a defibrillation charge. They say that you can prepare the pads better, make sure that they have complete attachment to the chest wall.
They say, chest hair should be trimmed ideally that that helps, and they also say avoid alcohol products during the preparation for the defib anyway, So that was sort of a tangent. But defibrillation is one of the scenarios the authors mentioned that could possibly provide an ignition point in space. But coming back to the burning hair in space study, the authors also mentioned cauterization as a medical procedure that could provide increased risk of fire in an oxygen enriched environment.
So you pair the oxygenerate atmosphere in some spacecraft and space exploration environments with various ignition scenarios, and you've got the heat and the oxygen. So the third ingredient is fuel, and here the authors point to the presence of potentially
flammable clothing and hair. Now in addition to the specific medical ignition scenarios mentioned above like defibrillation and cauterization, the authors note the conclusion of previous research, especially regarding Apollo one, that it should basically be considered impossible to eliminate all
ignition sources in a spacecraft environment. You're always going to have things that could generate sparks or electrical arcs or hot surfaces so way to limit the risk of fire is to control access of those ignition sources to fuel by removing combustible materials or making them less combustible.
You know, I've been watching enough alien movies recently to of course know that standard issue. If you're going on a space mission, you have a flamethrower on board, you have or at least a flamer unit. I don't think it's it's necessary. It's not nothing that's supposed to be like spitting jelly gasoline or anything like that, Like not a military flame thrower, but still a unit that shoots a big plume of fire at things.
Why do they have that, That's a good question. Is there an industrial use or do they make them? Maybe they make them now that.
I I think sometimes that's the case. But I don't know the best I could do putting this together, watching the films in the back of my mind, always thinking like flamer is probably not a great idea in an enclosed, sealed environment without even factoring in and all the stuff
we've been talking about here. But I'm guessing you could make a case for okay, if you are dealing with some sort of a life form situa biological threat, like some sort of a bug, not a full blown xenomorph, you know, but just kind of whatever is expected to occur. Then I guess you can make a case for a
flame unit. And then on top of that, if you're looking at some sort of a potential like boarding scenario, like a boarding action, like people coming on your ship, they aren't supposed to be there and you want to encourage them to leave or to back off, I guess a flame unit you could make some sort of a case that a flame unit is better than a gun that could potentially puncture the whole. But I don't know. Okay, once you factor all this in, though, is the risk of fire greater? I don't know.
I think we'll have to assume that, like the Nostromo and other alien environments, just to use, they're more like the ISS, like they supply the nitrogen. They have a more earth like atmosphere rather than the oxygen enriched atmospheres that would increase the risk of using flames.
Sure, Plus everything's a little bit wet than a stromo, so maybe that helps.
Now. The authors of this paper note that a lot of individual mission durations are short enough that astronauts don't need to cut their hair in space, but even that does happen. Sometimes the space haircuts are real. They include a photo from the ISS of a space haircut where Russian cosmonaut Valerie Corzun is doing a haircut for the American astronaut Peggy Whitson in the year two thousand and two. And you can see like he's got the scissors and a comb in his hands and she's holding a like
a hose up by her head. It's a vacuum cleaner hose, and I guess that's to suck in all the clippings right as their release, because man, oh, you think hair gets everywhere during a normal Earth haircut with regular gravity, you know, I feel like I get a haircut in days later, I'm still finding hair. It's like I'm not even wearing the same clothes. What's going on. But yeah, so in microgravity you could imagine it's a real headache.
Yeah, I feel like you got to make a strong case for that haircut and or be really good with that vacuum house.
But anyway, given all these considerations, it's important to know for planning future space missions in these abnormal atmospheric and gravity conditions and especially in more unique scenarios where you would need to supply somebody with supplemental oxygen. How flammable are the fuel sources you would find inside a spaceship, And in the case of this study, they looked into how flammable is human hair with these increased concentrations of oxygen.
So the authors did some experiments. They tried to simulate what it's like in various space exploration environments using an apparatus called a low speed flow tunnel, where you maintain a forced flow of a controlled gas mixture. In this case, it was mounted inside of a NASA Zero Gravity Research Facility drop rig, so that was to simulate different gravity conditions. They tried a few different lengths and styles of human hair.
They mounted them on a rack, and they said that basically the flame spread was pretty similar for the different hair styles tested different lengths. The spread was sort of quick at first over the sort of frizzy outer layer of the surface of a hair mass, and then would be followed, especially in the cases of longer hair where there's a lot of hair, followed by quote continued bulk burning.
And they found that, oh, yeah, it is absolutely right that increasing oxygen will increase the flame spread rate of hair significantly. They say it's by more than an order of magnitude, so it's major. And Rabbi included a couple of pictures for you to look at here of what the hair looked like after being exposed to fire in normal atmosphere versus in a thirty percent oxygen atmosphere, and
it's a major difference. The thirty percent oxygen one looks way more like a matted mass of keratin ash goo. Oh yeah, absolutely, Chris, So this is something that I don't think I ever would have thought of before, but the authors say, yes, their findings show that quote in the elevated oxygen concentration environments planned for future exploration missions,
hair flammability becomes an important consideration for crue safety. With the high flame spread rates reported here, an astronaut's entire head would be engulfed in flames in seconds, and serious injury could occur before the flames are extinguished. It is suggested that acceptable mitigation strategies such as hair coverings be adopted and shaving be encouraged. And they talk about a number of different interventions you could employ, so you could, yeah,
you could like cut hair. You could shave parts of the body, you could shave the head. You could cover the hair with flame retardant kind of hair coverings and materials. You can put flame resistant gels and jellies in the hair. They mentioned several of these that in some cases are used and have been used. So there are different interventions
you could do. But ultimately they say, if you have elevated oxygen levels and you are trying to prevent fires, you really do need to think about human hair.
Wow, you know, I can't help but think about like the sci fi ramifications. And on one level, I love the idea of like hairless shaved astronauts. You know that you have removed all their hair in order to prevent this from happening. But on the other hand, I kind of like the idea of a bunch of astronauts that are using some sort of especially made palmade. Yeah, and I'll have some sort of like a maybe slicked back greaser look going on with this special space space goop.
Yeah, everybody looks like John Travolta in Greece. I mean that they've all got the space pompadours that the Yeah, we're like flame flame retardant jelly in there.
Yeah, like the Misfits right where they have a hair all crafted. Now, I got to keep an eye out for it. Keep watching all these space movies, and I have not been paying enough attention to everyone's hairstyles. Which space movie has the has the most slicked back hair? Where is the most palmde employed in science fiction? I'm gonna have to be on the lookout for it now.
So anyway, this is one of these classic rabbit holes I love on our show that I would not have expected to go in this direction at all. I was initially just looking into, like what's going on with the chemistry of burning hair, and I ended up with the threats of hair catching on fire in space.
You know, we mentioned boarding actions earlier, and one of the first places that my mind went when we started looking into this was what about black Beard the Pirate? So black Beard the Pirate was, of course a real person that has been mythologized and fictionalized to varying degrees over time, But this was an actual pirate, Edward Teach, who reportedly lives sixteen eighty through seventeen eighteen. And yeah, there's a great deal of legend about this man, including
the idea that he would affix slow matches. Sometimes these are just called fuses, but slow matches were they would have a like coils of this stuff. They burn slow, as the name implies, they burn very hot, and they're used for igniting like the fuses for cannons, explosive materials, grenades, that sort of thing, but also of course could be used to like light pipes and so forth.
I think even at the time, well I don't know if exactly at this time, but they were used, and even handheld firearms at the time, like muskets and stuff would have like a they'd have like a powder pan with a slow match that ignited it.
Yeah, and so it would be common to have these on hand. But of course, part of the mystique of Blackbeard is that he wouldn't just have burning slow matches, say on his belt or whatnot. He would have them under his hat. And I think this sometimes gets conflated into being like woven into his hair or even in his beard anyway that you frame it. Slow matches in very close proc simity to what is generally described and
or depicted as wild hair and beard. You know, Like the idea here is that he would do this before a raid, before a boarding action to make himself look more fearsome with those smoking fuses, with like the little pinpoints of red ember sticking out on either side of his fearsome head.
So, of course I'm familiar with the story. I've heard it many times, but this is one of those things that has never made sense to me, because I think, like, how how do you actually do that and like operate like move around and stuff with things on fire tangled in your beard, And wouldn't it be producing some amount of smoke or fumes at least would that beginning in your face? I don't know.
I mean, I guess it's a very just fume intensive environment anyway, If their cannon's going off, muskets firing, and then you know folks are smoking as well, that's something
worth noting, I guess is I've never been a smoker. Smokers, of course, by practice, are going to have frequently have burning objects in close proximity to their hair and beard, and may have additional thoughts on all of this, like I don't know how often, how often, say just a smoker of cigarettes with a prominent beard would encounter some
sort of a beard burn scenario. But then again, again we have to remember that a slow match would have I believe burnt much hotter than your average cigarette or pipe or whatnot. Yeah, anyway, so yeah, I had questions about this too, liked, did he really do this? Was this safe? I'm I mean, I'm not particularly worried about Blackbeard's personal safety choices, but is this feasible? And so I was looking around at some serious texts about black Beard and pirates, and a number of them, number of
them didn't really do much deliberation on this point. They just kind of mention it, and there's you know, there's a lot of there's a lot more pressing history to discuss here, So not a slide at those sources at all. I also ran across at least a few more casual commentators who dismissed it as a myth because, as they said, well, this would have surely caught his hair on fire, so
it you know, he almost certainly didn't do it. But I did finally find discussion of it in Dinnerson Little's twenty sixteen book The Golden Age of Piracy, The Truth behind Pirate Myths, and so he attributes you know, a lot of this myth making to Captain Charles Johnson's seventeen twenty four book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most most Notorious Pirates that's spelled p y R A t e S.
Gotta love pirate with y.
Yeah. And we have to note that the actual identity of this author remains unknown. There is apparently no record of such a Captain Johnson, and some have even argued that the author here is actually Daniel Dafoe, Yeah, of Robinson Crusoe, Yeah, exactly. So we ultimately don't know for sure. I think historians kind of go back and forth with different theories, but it seems to be agreed upon that
whoever wrote this they had some talent for fiction. They also had a great love of facts and details, and the resulting work is kind of a mix of the two. So you have you do have some factual information that's very helpful to the historian, but you also have plenty of just blatant fiction mixed in as well.
Oh well, that kind of source is in a way great. I mean that makes it not as very frustrating as a historical source, but also an interesting problem for historians.
Right right now, on the slow match in or adjacent to the hair. In particular, the author little here adds the following quote. Still pirates, privateers, merchant seamen, and naval seamen tasked with throwing grenades in battle sometimes carried the burning slow match needed to light the grenade fuses in their hats, but it was more usual to tie it around a wrist or pin it to their clothing or
hat with a match case. Although one image of Jean Bart, the famous French privateer in the service of France, shows him with a length of lighted match hold in his teeth. Ugh and so He adds that Captain Johnson or whoever was behind that pseudonym, would have surely seen the image
in question. They would have been familiar with this idea, this image of Bart and so He and He also points out that the slow match again burns slow but very hot by design in order to light fuses that, despite what movies and Looney Tune cartoons portray, can be rather hard to light. That's why you need a slow fuse. You can't just you know, you couldn't just strike a match and so forth. You need something hot and more or less consistent. And then this is where he finally
gets to the part. This is where little gets to the part that I was wondering about. He adds, quote, slow matches could thus easily ignite hair, and a pirate's greasy, tarry, flaming beard would have been a hellish spectacle, and one probably never repeat it. So I guess that's as close to an answer as I could really find. Basically, like, yes, slow matches on the hat, in the hat and so forth, that's going to be expected to a degree, But there's
like a fine line. You wouldn't want to push it too far, and if someone did push it too far, it would be notable. You know, that pirate would ever would forever be remembered as the guy whose head went up in a ball of fire because he was trying to be a little bit too dramatic in the boarding action, and other pirates would decide, well, you know, I'll just keep it on the hat. Maybe I'll just tie it to the wrist.
I'm trying to think, Okay, so that's sort of a count against this story, I guess, of black Beard putting them in the beard. I wonder is it possible that along the lines of this, like NASA research we're looking at where you could put some kind of gels or jellies, you know, flame resistant gels or jellies in the hair. There's something that would have been available in the seventeenth
or eighteenth century. You could like wax your beard with a flame resistant material that would like prevent it from catching on fire. I'm just spitballing here, I guess.
So. I mean two things we have to consider about pirates without going into a deep dive on like the actual realities of pirates is that in some cases these were learned men or women. You know, that that might be pritvy to information like that that would be useful. Also that they could just be clever enough to figure out something that would work if they were that attached
to this dramatic flare they had in mind. But on the other hand, I feel like, you know, pirates are making bad life choices, so that can include, you know, risking your head going up in flames.
More thoughts about the beard, Okay, I can imagine the plausibility of it would be affected by I think how long the slow match you're putting in the beard is, Like, if it's significantly long and hanging out, that sort of gets it away from your face. But the longer the match you put in, the heavier it would be, in which case I would think, how do you get it to stay in the beard? Do you literally have to like tie it inside a braid in your beard or
something thing? So you know what I'm saying, Like, yeah, just sticking it in there. I don't know. I mean, beard hair can be kind of thick and tangly, so you can imagine sticking something in a beard that's not very heavy and it stays there. But I don't know, A significant length of something like rope or a slow match seems like that would start getting heavy enough to just fall out.
Yeah. Going back to some of these illustrations, these classic illustrations of black Beard, I guess the idea is that he would take a length of slow match, like place it over his head and then put the hat on top of it, and then you have either end of the slow match sticking out on each side. Still I think too close for comfort to the rest of his hair and his beard. But the way it's physician, maybe it has the burning tips of the matches, you know, sticking out to either side.
Ah, yeah, Okay, I guess that's more plausible because I was imagining it literally being just in the beard, tangled in the beard man.
I think it sometimes gets conflated to that, either storytelling and embellishment or just by looking at a picture like this, where like the famous illustration in question, it's like his beard is already in kind of like squidlike arms, like like dreads, and then the slow match also looks like a dread coming out on either side of his head that is then producing smoke.
Okay, but I see I was mentally personally supplying some of the more implausible elements myself there that it was like necessarily said to be in the beard. That's maybe a less common variation on the idea, but.
I think it's out there. Like I said, there's so much you know, myth making and an exaggeration in pirate mythology that I think it just inevitably goes there. All right. Well, on that note, I think we're going to go ahead and call this part one, but we will be back for a second episode. I think this is just going to be a two parter, but in the next episode we'll get a little bit into the idea of the quest for Flaming hair and flaming beards, and mythology and folklore.
We'll also get into some examples from antiquity, so I think, and probably some other angles as well that we haven't worked out just yet. But yeah, we thought this was going to be a one partner, but I think there's enough interesting stuff for two here. In the meantime, we'll remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Let's see, currently we are doing short form
episodes on Wednesdays. We're doing Weird House Cinema on Fridays. Now, you might notice that our Monday listener Mail episodes have ceased for the time being. We're experimenting with a slightly different format, going back to the old format of having listener Mail episodes occur, say every month or so, and instead running a Weird House Cinema rerun in that Monday slot. Again, we're just trying things out here, so if you have thoughts on this experiment right in, we would love to hear from you.
Right so, want to be super clear, listener Mail is not going away. Please keep the messages coming. We are still going to read them on the show, just on a less frequent basis. The plan is roughly every month, month and a half, more like we used to do before the weekly.
Yeah. So, if you have experiences with burning hair, some pirate thoughts to share, or certainly if you have thoughts about standard issue Flamer units on space missions and deep sea missions in science fiction, write in. We'd love to hear from you.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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