Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast you’re not too upset about being played loudly beside you. Where you might learn something, but chances are you just laughed.

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me are...

I'm Steve and helping my wife set up her container garden on the back patio has reminded me that it’s so, so much cheaper to just buy vegetables, not to mention a lot less effort. “Hey dear, I have an idea, let’s spend $120 so we can grow $20 worth of tomatoes that we can’t eat until August.” I guess we make up for it with the time we spend together… or something.

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that your perception of step mothers is likely to be very skewed depending on your movie habits. For example, if you watch a lot of Disney she’s probably evil, but if you watch a lot of Brazzers she’s probably… not...

I'm Jenn, and this week I learned that the world’s tallest man (8’11 Robert Wadlow) was so tall that he had no feeling in his feet and lower legs. There was too much space for the nerves to travel to his brain’s pain sensors. It’s also why he died at the young age of 22; his specially made leg braces rubbed sores on his legs that became gangrenous, unbeknownst to him until too late.

Death of invention

This week the True Crew tests to see who knows the most about obscure inventions that killed their inventors.

We had a great inventor recently succumb to his crazy contraption, you will probably back in February, Mike Hughes, or Mad Mike to most, attempted to prove the Earth was flat in a homemade steam powered rocket. Obviously because I’m talking about him, he died in a horrible crash when his chute opened during launch rather than at the end of the flight. Following Hughes' death, Darren Shuster, his public relations representative, stated:

"We used flat Earth as a PR stunt... Flat Earth allowed us to get so much publicity that we kept going! I know he didn’t believe in flat Earth and it was a schtick."

I’m, however, a bit sceptical.

I have a few deadly inventions to test your dearth of knowledge on. Wrong answers will lose you points but correct answers will get you lots of them, bonus points awarded at my discretion because this game doesn't really matter and no one wins anything but our fans undying love and affection.

A tailor by profession, this French inventor, Franz Reichelt, used to devote all his free time in designing and developing his invention, inspired by the idea of airplanes as they were just emerging on the horizon. After the considerable amount of successful tests with various mannequins, he was emboldened to try it himself. By seeking permission from French authorities, this Flying tailor jumped off the Eiffel Tower wearing his invention. As you would assume with this quiz, he quickly fell 187 feet and was described by police as a shapeless mass. So, squadron, panel is so overrated, what was the Flying Tailor trying to invent?

The Parachute. Newspapers described the suit as “only a little more voluminous than ordinary clothing resembling a sort of cloak fitted with a vast hood of silk.

Thought to be potentially fictional, that’s never stopped me, Wan Hu, a Chinese official who lived around 2000 BC, became the first astronaut after he devised a plan to go to the moon. The plan was simple and after the smoke cleared, neither Wan Hu, or the invention were to be found. As much as I'd like to believe that he reached his destination, I'm guessing he didn't. This story is so legendary, they even named one of the actual craters on the far side of the moon after him, Wan-hoo crater! So, how did Wan Hu get to the moon? What did his spacecraft look like?

Wan Hu’s pioneering spacecraft was built around a sturdy chair, two kites and forty-seven of the largest gunpowder-filled ro...