Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, kids, and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Polatin, I'm an editor and how stuff works dot Com. Sitting across from me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. The most merciful thing in the world, I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
You know, I'm just thinking about that that introduction. I've been saying that almost four times, four hundred times. Actually, technically you've said it more than four hundred times. Well, that's true because this is our four episode guys, who but explains the streamers in the balloon? Yeah? Yeah, Also, why do all the balloons have Josh's face on him? Well it was cheaper that way. We ordered way too many for south By Southwest, so I just grabbed a
whole bunch of them. Okay, they're my lard. They'll be up for hours anyway. So you guys who have been with us from the very beginning might be thinking, Wow, four hundred episodes. I can't believe it. And neither can we. But technically we've actually recorded more than four hundred episodes because back back back in the very earliest days of this podcast, we recorded several test episodes that never published. Yes, they're buried out back somewhere. Yeah, they And I know
what you're all thinking. You're thinking, Jonathan and Chris, are you telling me that there were some episodes from early early on that were even less polished than the ones that you actually published. And the answer to that is words can hurt. But yeah, those those episodes just really didn't work. And so for our four hundred episode, we're going to talk about stuff that doesn't work, like never mind. Um, so, hey,
I I worked hard this week. Don't look at me, all right, So let's I was going to make a familial joke, and since I don't actually have the relative who doesn't work, I won't, all right, So we're gonna talk about a whole bunch of different things. Some of these are going to be hoaxes, so they were never meant to work. They were just meant to either fool people for fun zies or for financial gain or some
other reason. Some of them aren't necessarily hoaxes. They were things that people have pursued but it just hasn't panned out. Some of them are things that might have technically worked but didn't actually work in the real world, Like you could make it work, but no one wanted it. So so but we're gonna start with one of the most famous things that just has never worked, which is perpetual
motion devices. Yeah, this is one of those that's easier to sell because people want a machine that can do what a perpetual motion machine would do if it actually could do it. So let's talk about what perpetual machines. And actually there's there's another device, type of device called an overunity performance device, which is related to perpetual motion. Uh.
There is a difference, however. So perpetual motion is some sort of device that, once set into motion, will continue perpetually without the need for external uh force to come into the system to keep it going. So like think of a wheel, and once the wheel starts spinning, it never ever stops. You never have to reach in and give it another push, It'll just keep going forever. Now, in that case, you're talking about a a system that
is generating just enough energy to keep going. So so you're not you're not getting excess energy out of that. So perpetual motion machine, if you were to be able to make one, would be mostly a curiosity. It would be interesting to look at, but it wouldn't be useful necessarily.
The overunity performance type of device that's different. That's talking about some sort of device that actually generates more energy than is required to put into it, so it's got an efficiency that's greater than because at a hundred percent efficiency it would just keep running right right, But if you had a hundred and then you would be generating more energy than you were required to to start that device.
This is this is the goal of lots of different people out there, some of whom are are pursuing it, uh sincerely, and others who are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes by saying they've got this essentially a free energy machine. Um, and you should always because there are a lot of different red flags to look out for, but free energy is definitely a big one, because as far as we can tell, it's not really possible.
It's that's not to say that it is impossible due to the laws of physics, it's just that by the by our knowledge, by our understanding of how the universe works, and based upon everything that we know about the way things behave within our universe, it does not appear to be possible. That doesn't mean that one day we don't figure it out. It just means that, based upon everything we know so far, it's a good bet to say not possible. Um. Well, you have to follow the laws
of physics even when you never studied law. Right, So you know, you put your wheel into motion, and you have to deal with you know, trifling little things like friction, friction and viscosity and things like that. Yeah, Dissipated forces is what that's called. These are forces that that end up taking some of that energy that goes into a system and converting it into other forms, which means you
have a loss of energy. Now, friction, for example, it will convert things into heat, energy and heat, So you lose energy through heat through a system. Well, unless it's generating that same amount of energy somehow through its operation. That means you have a net loss of energy and
eventually that device is going to slow down. Uh. And dissipated forces are include more than just friction and viscosity, but those are two that are very easily uh explained, So that tends to be the two that most people focus on. But there's more than just that. But there have been people throughout history who have been trying to tackle this, and even from just the perpetual motion machine side.
Uh The very first documented perpetual motion machine that I could find came from an uh an Indian author East India, not native American, named Boscara and eleven fifty nine, and his proposed device was a wheel. Many perpetual motion devices
come in the form of a wheel. It's wheel that was vertically aligned, so think of it like you know, a water wheel, you know, and it had a little containers at the end of the around the perimeter of the wheel, and these containers were going to contain mercury, so liquid mercury, and the idea was that you would turn the wheel and the liquid mercury, as it would reach a certain point on the trip around, the wheel would slide down to the end of its container, and
that that slide would cause a weight imbalance upon one side of the axle of this wheel, and that would continue to give it the force needed to turn. So the idea was that once it was started in motion, it should perpetually turn turns out not so much, uh. And there have been a lot of people who have tested this with many different variations on this weighted wheel concept, including Leonardo da Vinci, and he he had a great quote, he said, oh, ye, seekers, after perpetual motion, how many
vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists. That's that's not a high opinion. No, no, And it's funny that that he made that comparison because as we've been talking, I've been thinking about that very same thing. And of course, uh, the most stream prize of alchemy would be the ability to transmute lead into
gold um. And there were very many uh scientists who got their start in science trying to solve that problem because they realized as they did more experimentation that well, you know, it wasn't simply going to work. You can you can think of alchemy as sort of a proto science and that in that it really didn't follow the strict rules of science, but it was something that kind
of gradually gave way to fields like chemistry and and physics. Well, but but in of itself was more of a an accult type practice than a science, right right, Well, I do believe that the people who or or many of the people who were pursuing alchemy um were of scientific mind and and we're actually experimenting with the idea that they were going to create some greater good. And and that's how science was, you know, it's linked to sciences
is from that. And people like Leonardo da Vinci, you know, you would imagine that, uh, well, he's not out to defraud people, So he was pursuing this as a legitimate, uh scientifical experiment. He wanted to see if he could make it work. Da Vinci was was a bit of a busy body, and and he also would tend to gain and lose interest in things very very quickly, as a true polly math often does. And uh he uh you know, he he built a weighted wheel. In his version.
The weighted wheel actually had little uh on the perimeter of the wheel. The outside perimeter, there were these little uh levers essentially with a weight on the end, and they were on a hinge, so that as the wheel turned, the lever would move forward and the falling motion of the weight was supposed to try and you know, keep counteract the wheels tendency to stop. And again Leonardo realized.
He said, this just doesn't work. He said, as the attachment of the heavy body as far there from the center of the wheel, the revolving movement of the wheel around its pivot will become more difficult. Although the motive power may not vary. Essentially, he was saying, it don't work, y'all. And and and you know, despite that, we've had numerous people trying to create perpetual motion machines since then. Sometimes they focus on gravity as being the force that enacts
the perpetual motion. Others use magnetism, so they try and create something with magnets to make something spin and uh, and they'll they argue that it will spin indefinitely. Essentially, they'll it will continue spinning until someone stops it. But that's not that that has never proven to be true. It always will eventually come to a stop. It's just
that sometimes it takes longer than others. And you might think, well, if you can extend it so that it's it's a really long time, isn't that effectively the same as perpetual ocean? But I mean there is a fundamental difference there. So Yeah, it's the way the way we think about things in an ideal situation is that you would have a uh, an isolated system, and an isolated system is one that has no other forces acting upon it from the external sources.
And UH, even if you were to have a a demonstration of a perpetual motion machine, the problem is that any demonstration cannot be an isolated system because you can't have that in real life. It's a thought experiment, but you can't. There's no there's no way you can isolate a system from everything else, right, There's always going to
be something else that's enacting upon it and um. And so there are times where people have shown off devices that that to perhaps someone not schooled in this would think, oh, that is perpetual motion, but upon closer examination, it tends to fall apart. Actually it does fall apart, which is part of the reason why the pursuit has gone on even to the current day. I mean, there's still people trying to make that happen, but I think more and more of these days, UH, it's turned out to be
more of a hoax. Intentionally, you know, somebody wants to go down in history as being the inventor of the perpetual motion machine and get fame and fortune. Yeah, there's also there's also a common health belief that the patent offices won't accept patents for perpetual motion devices or over unity performance devices based upon the fact that our scientific
understanding suggests that these things are most likely impossible. That, uh, that's not entirely true, because just by changing the wording, I mean, there are a lot of people who write patents who avoid phrases that indicate that that's an overunity performance device, for example, That doesn't mean that they can't get a patent for it. They can if they word it the right way and the person reviewing the patent doesn't necessarily realize that that's what this is truly saying.
So there are a lot of patents out there for devices that supposedly have over a percent efficiency, even though no one has demonstrably proven that such a device is actually, uh, you know, a real thing. I mean, there's there have been a lot of overunity performance devices that have been unveiled in places like Australia, in Europe, even the United States as well, where uh they've invited people to come in and observe them and under casual observation, it looks
like they're doing the devices doing what was claimed. But it seems that whenever there is a legitimate, uh, skeptical approach to this, that it then just falls apart that you know, people the scientists will say, I can endorse this, it doesn't you know, it doesn't seem to work. Uh. And it's also it can be really tricky to determine from some of these devices, uh, where where power is coming from, where it's going to and you know, what,
where's the imbalance coming from? So, for example, if you have one that works on electro magnets, but you have to supply current to those electro magnets in order for them to work and uh. And so if you have brought a battery into the system, as soon as you've got the battery there, then you've got the question of, well, is this battery actually providing some of that power that's coming out of the system. Uh. And if so, then that may just mean that all we're doing is shifting
the power from the battery to the output. And it's not that the system itself is is super efficient. It's just that we've created a circuit and that's all we've done. UM, so yeah, this is this is one of those things that, uh, that continues to be attempting target for a lot of inventors out there and also a lot of hoaxers. In fact, you had a story about a perpetual motion machine that turned out to not be all that it appeared to be on first glance, right right, Well, this was something
that I uncovered during my research about UM. This person named Charles Redheffer who showed up in Philadelphia in eighteen twelve with this perpetual motion machine UM, and he managed to get an audience with the Philadelphia City commissioners and the idea was that he was going to show off how his machine worked. And he had this he claimed that it didn't really need any any sources of external power to run, that it would run on its own.
So uh and and what it all said another external device that it was powering it itself with that was using gears to make it work, except they weren't allowed to get too close to the machine. Yeah, that's always a strong indicator there when when the observation must be made at a distance. UM. They they actually they were skeptical because they could tell that it wasn't working the way it was supposed to. Um that something was off, but he wouldn't let them get close enough to really
determine what was going on. So they hired um an engineer that they knew to build a machine like it. Um and uh and as a matter of fact, apparently the Franklin Institution in Philadelphia still has that machine that the other engineer made to work like it. I've been to that institute. I don't remember seeing I'm going to have to go back now and check that out. Um he uh. Redheffer actually uh high tailed it out of
town when he realized that the jig was up. There was time to move on to more fertile grounds, so he headed to New York City, where they hadn't yet learned of this New York City get the rope um. So, as it turns out, a fairly smart guy, Robert Fulton. You may have heard of him, Yes, steamboat Robbie. Yeah. Um he uh he noticed he saw the machine and uh, he could tell that it was something was off. It wasn't it was wobbling, it wasn't. It wasn't operating at
a smooth pace. Yeah. Yeah, And he he had the feeling that somebody was making it work. Um, so he he challenged Red Halfer and said that he could uh uh, he could figure out how it was working, and if he broke the machine in an attempt, he would pay him for the damages. So uh Red Haffer made the
mistake of accepting that challenge. So he uh he started taking boards off the wall near the machine and found a a catgut cord that went upstairs to another room where they had a an old, old bearded guy sitting there cranking the machine with one hand and eating with the other. So that's why it was sort of irregular, was because he was cranking it irregularly. And uh uh, people got upset and busted up the machine and that was the end of Redheifer's attempt to prove that he
had the perpetual motion. Which is really tragic because as we all know, in the nineteen century, many of our technologies were powered by bearded old men. Yes, that's true. Um And incidentally, if you want to read more, that was from the Museum of Hoaxes dot com. Very entertaining read. Yeah, there's a there are a couple of interesting there are
other some other really famous hoaxes. And there's one that that Chris and I both looked at because we do our our independently on another, so when we get together to record a podcast, often the stuff we say will surprise each other because you know, we've pursued different paths. But one thing that we both looked at was the great chess automaton of veteran Wolfgang von Kimberlin. Yeah, a k A. The Mechanical Turk, yes, seventeen sixty nine. Alright,
so imagine this, guys and gals. You've got this, uh, this big wooden cabinet, and on the cabinet is a chessboard, and behind the cabinet stands a a wooden robot. Essentially is what it was that it appears to It looks like a turk, that Turkish dress costume, that kind of thing, And that was that was supposed to the mystique. Yes, yes,
it was that whole idea of adding Eastern mysticism. Right, So, uh, Baron Wolfgang had suggested or had actually claimed, that this was a mechanical toy that could play chess, and it was so good that it could defeat almost anybody in
a chess game. And people would go up to to play, and what Wolfgang would do is he would open up the box and show that they're all these gears inside the box, and then close it, and then the game would start and the human player would move a chess piece, and then after a moment, the automaton would start to move and pick up a chess piece and move that to a different spot, and they would play a game, and more often than not, the automaton one. It made a lot of people curious as to how it was
actually working. There were mani people who assumed that this was actually under human power, and that it was not truly working with gears, and that it was just being It was just a clever trick, and they were They actually were right. They just couldn't figure out how it was being done. Uh No. No, less of a illuminary than Benjamin Franklin himself played against this machine. Yes, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Yeah, there were quite a few famous folks.
One famous person who thought he had come up with the way that it worked was almost right, Edgar Allan Poe. Really, yeah, Edgar Allan Poe observed this device in in action and thought that perhaps there was a person hiding inside the turk itself and UM and working the the pieces, moving
the pieces, and that's not exactly how it worked. So what was going on was that the there was this there were there were panels inside the the cabinet that hid the human operator who was actually inside the cabinet itself. He was not inside the turk, but then he had he was wearing something that they were calling a pantograph, which was a device that would uh mimic his own movements.
So he was wearing a a kind of out a kind of some gear so that when he would move his arm a certain way, the automaton would also move its arm that way. So it was almost like puppetry. Yes, And the the pieces of the on the chessboard were had magnets in them which would allow him to use There was a magnet in the hand as well which would allow him to pick up a piece very carefully and move it. And he could also see magnets underneath the the board where he could track the movements of
the chess pieces on both sides. So he's looking at the chess game from underneath UM and to the what what what the baron did was he would actually hire. When it was traveling from place to place, he would hire local chess champions to be the guy inside the box so that the likelihood of losing was really low. And it was in fact a couple of these chess champions who later on wrote about their experience working within the box that kind of blew the whole thing out.
And I mean a lot of people had suspected what was going on, but no one had really proven it until there were these folks coming for and saying, okay, here's how it worked. Well, it took him quite a while. I mean, you know, more than fifty years. Yeah. Uh. And what's funny is that the device, according to my notes anyway, um continued to tour even after the secret was released. Um. I guess people wanted to see if
they could beat somebody hiding out in a box. It was, well, you know, it's a it's about playing though that way it's sort of reversed, yes, because you're looking from Underneathan.
It's it's It was a very clever It was a very clever ruse, and I think I think some people appreciate it just for the fact that it was so clever that it wasn't necessarily that you know, they still believed that it was actually an automaton that was doing this, but just the fact that someone had managed to build, I mean, the fact that they built this pantograph system is pretty impressive. You know. You sit there and you look at it, like, yeah, alright, so it's not an automaton.
It's not a it's not it's not an early version of a computer. But it's still a pretty impressive piece of machinery when you think about what it had to accomplish. That that's true, and it really it was really sort of a stagecraft. Yeah, yeah, so from a from a stage perspective, you can certainly appreciate it. And uh yeah, it's one of that that one I think is is pretty neat. There was another one, another hoax that was not his neat. This one actually is more like your
perpetual motion hoax that you mentioned. Um. But I was going to mention before before we move on too far from the mechanical Turk Um that it's still famous today inasmuch as Amazon dot com um still uses the name mechanical turk Turk. And you might say, well for what, well, Um, if you're unfamiliar with this this is their their human problem solving UM engine if you will. That basically people will get involved to solve problems for other people. And
uh so it's sort of like that. It is sort of a machine powered by people on the back end, but it is an opportunity for people to um sort of crowdsource problem solutions. I think it's kind of funny that Amazon decided to name its uh it's product after the famous chess playing machine. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. It's it's just obscure enough where where the average person may not know what it's referencing. Uh well, I was going
to talk about John WORL. Keiley from the who founded the Keiley Motor Company who lost it ye back in eighteen seventy five, he created the Keiley Motor Company Mr Literal and uh he he had created what was called a vibratory generator that used a court of water to generate power, and he claimed that it could create the same amount of power that would be necessary to pull a fully loaded train for more than an hour. And
uh he would actually show off this device. He would pour some water into this this engine looking thing, it would start running, and he would do this to people who he would court as investors. So he'd bring these investors in give him a demonstration of this device where water seemingly was all that was needed to create this massive amount of power. And it worked. I mean it worked in the sense that it got investors interested enough to pour money into his uh um, into his invention.
And the scientific community said, this doesn't sound too likely to us. But that didn't really matter so much because you know, this was an era where engineers were coming up with really interesting inventions and sometimes as inventions were working for reasons that the engineers couldn't really explain because O our scientific knowledge had not reached the point where we could really comprehend everything that was going on. Didn't mean that the inventions weren't working, or that they were
they were fake or whatever. It just meant that we didn't know why they worked. Well, that's what these investors were hoping for back in the seventy five. It really helped Keeley too, that he was a charismatic person that you like to use a um scientific sounding jargon to confuse those investors. And yeah, he sounded like he knew what he was doing, and he uh um, he had the stage presence to pull it off. You know, he
looked and sounded like he was the real deal. Well that's and and that's that's still that's still common today where you'll have some hoaxters out there who will use pseudo scientific terms in order to baffle their their audience into thinking that they know what's going on. Stop, I don't believe you. So then there's a well let me talk about what happened with this motor here. Um, So he was showing this engine, I should say, he's showing off this engine over and over and over again and
kept getting investors. Well, then Keiley keeled over and see what you did there? Yeah, he shuffled off the mortal coil, he joined the choir invisible, he rolled ran up the curtain.
This was an X, This was an ex Keily. And so when he died, some investigators started checking out his stuff because hey, you know, there's this engine that he had been working on for for more than a decade, for more than two decades, and it would still be a very valuable contribution if it actually worked, even though he just kept on getting investments and never really produced anything. Well, the investigators discovered that there was a secret to this
engine that in the basement of his house. He had a compressed air machine, and he had a hose going all the way up to the engine that was hidden. The hose itself was hidden from view. The engine, by the way, was two floors up from the basement, so it was a pretty long hose. But it turned out that the compressed air was what was making the engine run, not the water. The water had nothing to do with it.
So there was another external power source that was coming in doing work on this engine, making it move, and that the whole thing, the entire time, was a complete hoax. It was just a way of building money out of gullible investors, which at that point the scientific community uh managed heroically to resist the urge of saying, ha, ha told you so. Well, it's less satisfying than the person that you tell is dead. Yeah. Well the people and
the investors, yeah, they were probably poorer for it. But and you know, again, there a lot of other interesting kind of hoaxes out there. There was one that was really recent as of the recording of our four episode Spectacular by a fellow named Yarno Smeets sat Yeah. Smeets released a viral video that you guys may have seen. It got a lot of attention very early on, and
a lot of critical reception as well. I mean, I think every single discussion I saw had at least a few people specifically saying something's thinky here, well, how long have people been trying to do what Smeats in the video allegedly did when you know, he strapped a set of wings on himself, you know, flapped his arms and took off. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Want to do
that in the video? He had this in the video, he had this large set of wings that were that were a match to his back, and he had these um, these handles that he could hold, and when he pulled down the handles, the wings would flap and he would He ran down a field and seemingly took off from the field and started to fly around just by flapping his wings. And meanwhile all of his cohorts are whooping
and hollering and and celebrating down below. And a lot of people were, uh, let's say, skeptical for about this, and reasonably so. Well, you have to if you're going to do this, just remember well, first of all, don't try this at home. And second of all, don't fly too close to the sun because it will melt the wax that hold your feathers. Okay, lists, I'm okay, I'm going to I just want to. I want to point
out the thought process that the skeptics took. So in order to fly, you have to have enough lift to counteract your weight. Yes, the force of gravity pulling you down right, So the lift has to be equal to or greater than the force of gravity pulling you downward. And lift is generated by a couple of different things, uh, including the angle of attack for your wings, also the shape of the wing itself, different scenair pressure there. There
are multiple things that go into it. It's pretty complicated, actually, but you have to be able to counteract that gravity with these these other factors in order to fly. And uh, really, the the math just doesn't work out when it comes
to human powered flight like in this way. Um they figured one one estimation I saw was that the fellow weighed probably around eight hundred Newton's when Newton is a point to to five pounds it's often used in these sort of physics uh calculations, And that the the gear they estimated to be at another three hundred Newton's, which means they have uh, they would have even newtons of lift would need to be generated in order to take off,
and it just doesn't appear to be physically possible. So just based on that alone, the video was called into question, and Sweets, to his credit, did eventually say, yeah, it was you know, it was it was a it was all a ruse. It was a hoax. It was a joke. It was a video that we did. Ha ha ha ha. Yeah, he explained the whole thing. Yeah, um, which is, you know, slightly different approach than the ones are, the one taken by the he needs back when the balloon Boy episode
went up. Balloon Boy, we'll talk about him in a second. Yeah, it just reminded me of that. Yeah, we'll have to We'll have to talk about balloon Boy because that's a great hoax story, great especially because as no one at
the end of it was hurt physically. So yeah, yeah, So he he actually just came clean and said, you know, and and unashamedly so that this was you know, kind of a uh, this was kind of just a joke and um, and it was an effective one, effective enough so that some people I know we're posting this, and you could tell that they were kind of skeptical, but they were also really hoping it was real, which, you know,
you can't blame him. That whole idea of flight has always been something that humans have been interested in and and the thought of being able to fly under your own power is very, um is a very alluring idea. But uh, I don't know that I knew anyone who bought it hook line and sinker, but there were quite a few people who were obviously hoping it was true not true, and sadly balloom Boy was gladly not true. So ballooon Boy. If you do not remember balloon Boy,
I remember I was. That was when we were working here already, because I remember work in the office. Stopped to find out about more about this balloon Boy thing. Um. So there was this, uh, this family that had a a saucer shaped balloon. Some people might say UFO shaped balloon, but that doesn't make any sense unidentified flying objects shaped balloon balloon. By its definition, he's identified, so it can't. I'm just saying flying saucer. Yes, it was more like
a flying saucer with a little basket thing underneath. Yeah, and that um that the family said that they could not locate the youngest boy in the family and falcon, and they feared that falcon was flying and this balloon thus the balloon boy and it had broken loose from its tethers, and they thought that perhaps he wouldn't he might be aboard, and news helicopters took off because it was flying by itself, you know, just wandering as balloons are, right,
And so you had all these law enforcement agencies trying to figure out how were they going to try and bring the balloon down to in a way that would get that would most guarantee the boy's safety, because um, you know, it's you could shoot it down. Flooding plummeting from the sky is not the best way to preserve
a little boy's uh physical health. So there was a lot of discussion about what they needed to do, and at the same time, you had a lot of critical thinkers out there saying, hang on, this balloon isn't really behaving the way it would if there were a little boy aboard there. I mean, the little boy would have to weigh nothing for this balloon to be behaving the way it is which is true. The little boy wade nothing because there was no little boy inside the balloon.
It was not behaving as it would if it had a weight inside it, and uh, and so it still was a very dramatic, uh event. You know, people were really following it closely. And then the balloon did crash and people went there and looked, and there was no boy within the balloon. Then there was a worry for a while that perhaps the boy had fallen out of
the balloon sometime midflight. I remember the news reports showing the map of the area that it had traversed, and how they were discussing how they were going to uh conduct the search and things. Speaking of conducting searches. Uh, it turns out when the law enforcement authorities conducted a search of their home, they found the little boy upstairs,
hiding in the attic. And then they just they were all relieved because, oh, we thought you were on the They just they just had to lean on that little boy a little bit and he he cracked like a peanut. On National TV. He said, you guys said, we did this for the show. Apparently they were trying to get themselves a TV show, and um, they got themselves. Apparently they got themselves legal charges because they had expended a lot of manpower and fuel trying to figure out what
was going on with this balloon. It's not nice to full mother nature or law enforcement. Yes, yes, yeah, they they were. They did not get a deal out of that, not a good one anyway. Um, yeah, that was. That was one of the more famous hoaxes there. There's some other ones. Um, liquid mountaineering, you remember that, not really so.
There were these viral videos that came out a couple of years ago and they were called it was it was a new sport air quotes called liquid mountaineering, and the idea that was perpetuated in these videos was that if you were to generate enough speed in your run and come down towards a water surface at a weird angle. Usually you'd have to run down like the banks of a lake or a river u but not straight at
the water. You're coming in at from an angle that you could supposedly make it out three or four steps across the water before you fell through the idea somehow that you're moving fast enough where you are skipping across the water, you you don't break that surface tension of the water itself, which is ridiculous. It's just it absolutely, patently ridiculous. The first time I saw it, I thought, well, that's that's a clever hoax, and I knew exactly how it had to have been done, and it turned out
that is exactly how it was done. So in the videos it does look pretty convincing. You see these people running at a weird angle and they get like three or four steps out before they fall in. And the the idea that everyone was saying was that if you were able to keep up the speed, you could perhaps go indefinitely. That if you were really super fast, you could Remo Williams style run across the water. Service have you seen Remo Williams uh? Nor have I seen Jaws?
So I imagine that running across the water could get you eaten by a shark. Well, but Remo Williams is a is a fantastic documentary. You have to go watching h so anyway, Actually, fantastic documentary is probably going a bit far, but it's fun. It's kind of in the same It feels like it's in the same universe as Buck rubans Eye. Did you see Buck RUBANSI? But I read the comic book Oh No Palette, episode four hundred
and my illusions are all shattered. Um, well, we'll have a movie marathon of Jaws, Rema Williams and Bucka Rubansa. How about how a big trouble little China? Have you seen that? Can we get back on the top because that's also in that universe? Oh no, well, there's moving marathon's getting longer and longer anyway. So the running, well, the way this was actually accomplished was very simple, and
sometimes those simple ideas of the best. They had a clear platform that was under the surface of the water by you know, like half an inch, so clear platform under the water. You can't see it. It looks like there's nothing there. There are actual gimmicks out there for certain magic tricks that work on a similar idea, where you've got you actually have a divider within a container that when you've got the water in the container, you can't tell that there's a divider in there at all.
It just blends right in same sort of thing. This platform was under the surface of the water. You could not see it from the surface, especially at the angles they had picked, because you know, clearly didn't want to make sure that it looks as good as possible, And so when people were running across the water, they were actually running on a platform and when the platform ran out, they went through the water because it doesn't work. You
can't do that. And it turned out the whole thing where it was a sort of an advertisement campaign, that was this viral advertisement attempt and it worked. You know, it's hard to engineer a viral video, you know, it's it's one of those things that usually a viral video happens just on its own. Its not like if you try to push for a viral video often that fails.
In this case, it worked. But it was one that was funded by a company called High Tech Sports that made sport equipment, sport gearling shoes and things like that, and everyone in the video was wearing that kind of equipment and uh yeah, and so it turned out that it was really just sort of a clever viral ad and uh it did you know they that game worked for quite a while. It took a while before anyone really tackled it and uh and showed that it was impossible. Um,
have you heard of the Pogue carburetor? Is this one that was supposed to go like a hundred miles or something more than that two miles three miles on a gallon of gas, invented by a theoretically invented by a Canadian guy named Charles Nelson Pogue. You wanted me to say, Riley Uh Nelson really? Um who? Yes? Unbelievably, Charles Nelson Poe apparently never appeared on the match game. Um no, he he had. Again, this is the same kind of
thing kids. Um so yeah, Apparently if you uh operated this carburetor at a a certain temperature, and you added the fuel in a vapor state rather than a really a wet state where the part the droplets of water I mean sorry, droplets of gasoline were introduced into the carburetor, then you could get a much more efficient reaction. Uh, of course you This is one of those things that uh uh you can be skeptical of when you start to hear that he really didn't let people get a
close look at what he was doing. Um, he didn't. From what I've read, he didn't seem to uh try to capitalize on this too much. He it sort of faded. But uh, people started talking about some units that were smuggled out of the laboratory and you know that they could put in your car. Um. And this this is one of those things that I think sort of on its own, would have died out if not for the
rumors about it. And there's still some that that are out there that say that the uh that, um, the gasoline industry doesn't want people to know about this because it's a hidden technology that would make them obsolete. So they they're hushing it up um. And there are people promising that they could they could get it out there and uh um there that they can give this to you if you'll just you know, fork over some money,
will help you out with this. But the whole conspiracy angle is a very very popular one to play when you're running a hoax. Oh yeah, because all you have to do is is suggests that there are other people who do not want this to go out because it would ruin their businesses. And then you immediately give your own, your own efforts sort of credibility there, because you're saying, look, clearly, it's in their best interest to prevent this from ever coming out. Yeah, why would they be trying so hard
to defeat me if I weren't right? Right? Yeah? Yeah, that that plays into something else I'll talk about in a second. I was I just wanted to mention that no, cool, cool, No, No, I was going to talk about fusion and cold fusion. Now, now this is a little different, but it has some similarities to what you were just talking about. First of all, fusion is real, all right, we're not We're not saying
that fusion does not work. We talked about it in our nuclear weapons podcast about how the fusion bomb works, right right, Yeah, and how you take two atoms and put a tiny little drop of superglue in there so they gloom together. Yeah. That superglue is called a neutron anyway, So in a fusion reactor would be phenomenal if we could get one to work, because we fusion is what the Sun does. That's that's how the Sun generates energies
through fusion. It's fusing hydrogen into helium and a temperature millions of degrees do. But but yeah, the the energy released when when two atoms fused together like that is amazing. Yes, And but the problem is that in order to achieve fusion, from what we know right now, what is required is huge amounts of pressure and temperature. Actually Uh, if you had a temperature high enough, the pressure wouldn't be as important.
But pressure higher pressure means that the temperature requirement starts to drop. But you need an incredible amount of both in order to achieve fusion. And that's been one of those problems that scientists have been trying to tackle for more than a decade as they try to create a fusion reactor, because nuclear reactors work on fussion, not fusion,
but the right right. But there are a lot of different labs across the world they're working on trying to create fusion, and they're doing this through things like using high powered lasers to initiate that first reaction to create the conditions necessary to have fusion. But uh, there's a joke within nuclear physics that fusion reactors are thirty years away, and ten years from now they will be thirty years away, and twenty years from now they'll be thirty years away.
That's just gonna be a moving goalpost that that we never achieve. Now, that may not be true. We may tackle that and and and beat it. We may figure out how to create a fusion reactor that is reliable and does not require so much energy to initiate it. That it is that it is not impractical, right, because that's the other problem is that you know, you've got to have a practical reactor doesn't If it works, but it takes way too much energy to get it going,
then it's not really practical. So those are the two goals. Well, cold fusion is this idea that you are able to create fusion reactions and generate energy, but at a temperature much lower than a typical fusion reaction would require. So we're talking not necessarily room temperature, still telling in temperature in the hundreds of degrees, but not millions of degrees. Yeah.
Now I remember, of course the thing that you're about to talk about, uh, in just a moment here um, because I was in I think high school, um, and uh yeah, that was it was. It caused a sensation because, um, there were a couple of scientists who said, hey, we've managed to create fusion at room temperature. That would be
Ponds and Fleishman. Very famous, uh, famous for both the the hoopla surrounding the announcement and the fallout that followed because it was it was ugly, I mean in scientific circles,
it was about as ugly as it could get. So Ponds and Fleishman had done this experiment and they were they discovered that there was this this heat that was being generated in the experiment that they could not explain easily, and so they were trying to find the source of this anomalous eat and in part of their their experiments and then their observations, they determined that it must have been the result of fusion, that that the elements within
their experiment were fusing together, and that the heat was a byproduct of that, which was phenomenal because at those temperatures that was unheard of. Uh. There were other labs that tried to replicate their experiments, and some of the early attempts appeared to at least lend some credence, including one that happened at Georgia Tech. However, then there were later experiments done with really well calibrated equipment that showed no replicability this experiment. And by the way, in science,
that's really important. You have to if you have an experiment and you've come to a conclusion that experiment needs to be replicable, you need to be able to repeat it and have the same outcome each time. Otherwise it's not it's not worth anything scientifically because if you can't predicted and you can't replicate it, then there's nothing there.
So yeah, that's the way science works. So the future experiments seemed to negate Ponds and Flishman's um findings, and Ponds and Flishman both continued to work in the field and receive funding from various sources, including I think it was a university in Utah that was funding some research for quite some time, but then eventually they cut it off because after years and years of research, there was still no measurable impact. There was nothing that had really
come out of it. And uh. And so even to this day, there are plenty of scientists out there who are trying to find out if cold fusion really does, like if if it really can't exist, And there's there's nothing necessarily in physics that says it's impossible. It's just that based upon everything we've observed, it seems very improbable and that it would take extraordinary proof to counteract that.
I've actually read some very interesting thoughts from various physicists, including skeptics of cold fusion, who think that the scientific environment surrounding cold fusion is um counterproductive because what what cold fusion proponents would say is that the scientific community is biased against cold fusion, right, that that they they believe that that they're being dogmatic, that they believe without without reason, that cold fusion is impossible, and they dismiss
it out of hand, and they will refuse to publish papers, peer reviewed papers about cold fusion and peer reviewed journals. So they're essentially saying that we're being ostracized by the scientific community. Well, there's some people within the scientific community that, you know, the consensus, the people who actually say that cold fusion probably can't work, who say, you know what,
they've got something there. Because if we do not allow them to submit papers to peer reviewed journals and actually have peer review and undergo a strict scientific examination of their processes, all we're really doing is reinforcing their belief that they are right. So that maybe what the best thing to do is open up a little bit more.
Take in these proposals, take in these studies, really take a look at them, try and determine if there is in fact anything there before just dismissing it, because otherwise, all we're doing is creating this subculture that could very well. They might be onto something, or it might be that
they're chasing a pipe dream. And if we were able to say, look, we really did give this our full attention, we really did listen to you, and this is what we found, maybe those people would redirect their efforts into something else instead of chasing something that isn't working. In
either case, it's a win, right. If if they're right, If the if the cold fusion people are right, then we've suddenly got an avenue to amazing ways of generating energy that are potentially eco friendly, are totally renewable type of sources. It would be almost endless energy. So that's a great dream. Um. And if they're wrong, then we've got all these really smart people who are otherwise following
a fool's errand moving on to something else. So either way we win, right, And science is supposed to work that way too, And you're not supposed to make a decision on uh, the outcome until you've seen the results of the experiment. Um, So it should be that you know, people are getting a fair shake. Um, you know, once they actually see the results of the experiment, not before they've had an opportunity to try it out. Yeah, so I and I want to go on record about the
whole cold fusion thing. From my perspective, I am very skeptical that cold fusion works. But I don't dismiss it out of hand because first of all, my my knowledge of physics is limited, so and and chemistry as well. This chemistry really plays a huge part in cold fusion. In fact, that's what a lot of cold fusion uh proponents say is the problem is that it's physicists who are poo pooing cold fusion, and it should be chemists
who talk about it. Um. I admit that my knowledge on both of those subjects is limited, so uh so, I could you know it could very well work, but just based upon the information I've read from scientists whom I respect, I am, I am skeptical of it. Now. If it does turn out to work, that is awesome because it will be, and it will it would change the world unlike anything else, Like I can't imagine any
technology changing the world more than cold fusion would. Yeah, I agree with you there, I just don't think it's going to happen Unsunfortunately, uh so, we had some other kind of hoaxes that would be interesting to talk about like you had a certain certain certain autopsy. Yeah, yeah, I remember, yeah, yeah, I was watching an episode of X Files. I remember, um yeah it was in the ES when Fox here in the United States was showing these uh the special on uh an alien body that
had been discovered. UM and uh you know this was supposed to be uh footage video footage shot after the Roswell supposed alien landing in Roswell. There's problems New Mexico problem, no one. Those were those were spy balloons essentially um crashed in Roswell as it As it turns out, UM, they were actually using animal organs and raspberry jam inside these supposed alien bodies. And the the camera camera person, who was an Englishman named Ray Santilly, actually admitted to
it in two thousand and six. So the whole uh scientific alien uncovering apparently not too much scientific. Yeah. I remember seeing uh skeptics talk about that. I mean, obviously they're going to as soon as that video hit the airwaves and uh, and one of those skeptics was Rick Baker. Do you recognize that name? Hollywood? Uh special effects and makeup artists. He's He's done some amazing amazing work in Hollywood on various documentaries and uh, and so he had
to throw that one in there too. But uh, yeah, he said he just felt it was just a model puppet. That's all it was was. It was not anything truly organic in the sense of like this was not actually a creature. Also reminds me of do you remember here in Georgia we had the big foot bigfoot hoax? Yeah, there were. I wish I didn't pull this information up because I didn't think about it, so it doesn't really
fit with technology. But there was the hoax that a couple of guys had had managed to either I can't I guess they either killed the bigfoot or they came upon its corpse, one of the two, and that they had it preserved and they were going to show it off. And it turned out that all it was was a big foot costume and some meat that have been stuffed into a like an iglue ice chest or something, and it still managed to cause quite a stir before before
anyone said hey, so yeah, I remember that. Um, but uh, the I only have one other big um hoax that I was going to talk about. Is there anything else you wanted to chat about before we move into things that make Jonathan's head explode. See you didn't when you said that about the big foot. It reminded me of the chupacabra, the one that washed up on which turned
out to be a hairless wolf. Yeah. Now, there there's been There's been a few cases of animals that have probably suffered something like mange that their their bodies have washed up on the shores of various lakes. That always end up starting off some discussion about here too for undiscovered animal like a chupa cabra um, but not so much chupa thinging. It's got a nice ring to it. So did you have any other ones who want to talk about? All right, so we're gonna segue into the
one that that gets me insanely angry. Should I get the fire extinguisher you might want to, Okay? So, I mean I get angry when people pull hoaxes on on other folks for financial gain. If it's like a harmless joke type thing, where the whole purpose of it is just to say ha ha, I'm clever and and teach you a lesson about critical thinking. That that can irritate me. But I understand that and if it actually does serve a purpose in teaching people to think critically, that's that's
a positive outcome. In my book, people who are uh leveraging other folks vulnerability and pulling the wool over their eyes in order to make money and potentially harming countless people in the process get me so infuriated that it's hard for me to form complete sentences. One of those people for us, one of those people is Jim McCormick. Now, Jim McCormick created something called the a d E six
five one bomb Detector. Now, this bomb detector, what it looked like was that you had like a kind of a thing that would clip onto your belt and there would be a cable that would run from that to a handheld device that had this antenna looking thing that came out of it. And supposedly this device was capable of sniffing out a bomb as far away as a kilometer, so that you could actually detect bombs even if they were underground or flying overhead or whatever. You would be
able to detect these bombs. And McCormick ended up selling these at around forty dollars of pop to the Iraqi government after the the the United States got involved with with trying to deal with all that. So you had this very vulnerable population, and you had a very solid need for bomb detection equipment because there were a lot of improvised explosive devices i e. D s that people were worried about. You had folks who were willing to
be a suicide bomber. So there were a lot of reasons why you would want this, and it would help a lot with things like roadblocks and and you know, vehicle checks and all this kind of stuff that most of us, thankfully don't have to worry about, all right, but for the people who do have to worry about them, it is a very real concern. And so they had a true need and we're very vulnerable. And McCormick came up and said, here's this device. It can detect things
from up to a kilometer away. Um, it's completely reliable. You should buy them. And so the Iraqi government purchased for around eighty five million dollars worth of these things. M hmm. Here's the problem. They don't work. There's nothing in them. If you were to open up the the handset, you would just see that the antennas just screwed into a little plastic casing. It doesn't have anything in it.
The cable doesn't carry any information to it. You would have these little cards that would supposedly help you sniff out different types of bombs, that should slide into a slot. The cards did nothing. The slot did nothing. Inside the the the belt case was you know, useless stuff like you might find some wires and things, but they weren't connected to anything. It was just and it was really just a case and a bunch of unconnected wires. So there was no physical way this thing could work. There
was just nothing that would give it any sort of functionality. Um. And it turned out that apparently McCormick was also a believer in dowsing, which makes perfect sense because dowsing is again something has no evidence. There's no evidence at all
to support dowsing. Dowsing is more of a of a video was it called It's the it's the effect that you have where you cannot you know, you make small, tiny little emotions with your hands that you don't consciously detect, but you're making them, and as a result, things in your hands might move around a little bit, and you may think they're moving on their own accord or some other external forces acting on them. But really it's just you doing it. And I know our listeners probably know
the term for that. It just escaped my mind. So feel free to write in and let me know, because I'm sure that after about fifty of those, I'll never forget again and you'll be doing me a service. Um. But yeah, so McCormick had sold millions of dollars of these. He eventually was taken into custody and uh and and charged with fraud. Here's the other tragic part of this.
The Iraqi government acknowledge that some of the devices would not work, but did not discontinue using the as devices because well, I can't really say why, because because I don't know, right, I'm not probably the Iraqi government, I would suspect that part of the reason was that it was trying to save face, because to admit that they had spent eighty five million dollars on a fraud would have been deeply embarrassing, and so maybe they weighed that against like do we want to lose that much face
or do we want to just quietly keep using this knowing it doesn't work with the with the with the knowledge paired with that knowing that people could die as a result. If someone has given a piece of equipment and told that this is what it does, and he or she truly believes that that's the case, then you have just put that person at risk and they could
lose their lives in the process. And to me, that is just so reprehensible, both on the part of McCormick and on the part of the government that I knew that it was a fraud at that point but refused to get rid of it. It's unthinkable to me. I can't I can't imagine being so so uncaring as to be able to perpetuate that sort of crime on people. And this is where I get angry. I mean, I've done talks about critical thinking and technology a couple of times. This is always the piece that I end on and
the reason why I end on this pieces. I think it is so important to illustrate why critical thinking is fundamental in everything we do, not just technology. And I will be the first to admit that I have I
have had lapses in critical thinking myself. There are times where I will see something and I accept it, and then later on I see that I was wrong, and I think all the indicators were there, And if I had only paid attention and thought about this for more than a second rather than just accept it, then I could have I could have been free of being fooled
of it from the beginning. And it's good to have those moments and to realize that we're all fallible and we can all make these mistakes, and if we're just careful, then we will make fewer of those mistakes in the future. UM. But that's why I always end with this piece, because I think I think our listeners are the smart kind of people who know that if they're just if they're careful and they think about things, and they really say, based upon all the information that we have so far,
is this really likely? Or could this just be a scam or a trick or someone who has deluded themselves into believing that something that is impossible is possible. UM. I recommend everyone out there just follow that that sort of philosophy. You know, Skepticism doesn't mean that you are dismissing something out of hand, because to do that is to be dogmatic, and that's not what skepticism means. Skepticism means that you are examining things, you're looking for evidence.
You are looking for that causal relationship that is necessary to say that this one thing makes this other thing happen. You're using science. Science is a process. It's not a
philosophy necessarily. It's it's a process of observing our universe, drawing conclusions, and making predictions based on those conclusions that should come true based upon what we know, and if they don't come true, it means we have to re examine what we thought we knew and try and come up with new sets of rules and guidelines and so so, guys, Um, I think, I think everyone who listens to this show, everyone who has written into us, shows that they have
this capability, and I encourage you to continue to develop it.
And just know that even the smartest people out there can be fooled into these the stuff that doesn't work right right well, and there's there's just going to be more of it, um, whether it's you know, got good intentions behind it, like um, the scientists trying to create perpetual motion machines in the past, or uh, you know, the cold fusion experiments or which who knows, maybe they'll turn out yep, yep, well, it's it's worth investigating on
a scientific basis. Um. And uh, you know, then there are the others where people are intentionally trying to defraud others. You know, it's it's we're never going to be uh in a world where people don't try new things, whether it's for good or or still cash. Um, there are plenty of plenty of people out there who are ready and willing to prey upon those who are willing to believe. So maybe for our eight we'll tackle a whole new set of tech that doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, I think yeah,
that'll be our our four hundreds. Every every multiple of four hundred, we'll just do new stuff that doesn't work. All right, I'm okay with that. But by episode that might be us. So it's the guys, thanks so much for listening to our show. We don't say it often enough. We love you. Guys. Were so glad that you listen to us. We hope that you've been enjoying our show so far. We plan on doing this as long as
they led us to do it. We're not We're not going anywhere unless uh, well, you know, unless there's something that we just can't can't control. Because sometimes that we don't work either. Well, there was that one day when we came into record and we couldn't because the text just didn't work. That's true. There are those days actually happen. That does happen even to the best of us. But if you guys have any suggestions for future episode topics
you would like us to tackle, let us know. You can email us our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or you can send us a message via Facebook or Twitter or handle at both of those is text stuff h sw and Chris and I will talk to you again or hundred freaking times really soon. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House Stuff Works
I Fine app has arrived. Download it today on items brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you