pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna in 1874 to a wealthy Italian landowner and Annie Jameson, granddaughter of the founder of Jameson whiskey. Tutored at home and never at university, he set up a lab in 1894 in a family attic once used for silkworms, pairing a spark oscillator with Édouard Branly's coherer, a tube of metal dust that conducts when radio waves hit it. In December 1894 he rang a bell across the room without wires. In 1895 he raised his antenna and grounded both ends, producing ground waves that followed the land, and his brother fired a rifle to confirm a signal about two kilometers away. Italy's postal ministry never answered him, so in 1896 he went to London, where customs officers at Dover wrecked his equipment, and William Preece of the Post Office backed him.

His claimed transatlantic reception at Signal Hill, Newfoundland in December 1901 left no paper record and is doubted, but in February 1902 aboard the SS Philadelphia he printed messages on tape from over 1,500 miles away, signed by the captain. His company leased sets and operators, and Titanic's Jack Phillips and Harold Bride were Marconi employees whose calls brought the Carpathia to rescue more than 700 people; he himself had skipped the voyage and sailed on the Lusitania. He joined the National Fascist Party in 1923, led the National Research Council and the Royal Academy of Italy, and sat on the Fascist Grand Council. Historian Annalisa Capristo found he marked Jewish candidates' files with an E for ebreo, and none were admitted.

• He passed on free Titanic passage because he needed a public stenographer working on the Lusitania.
• The mercury iron coherer from the 1901 test is also claimed by Jagadish Chandra Bose and the Italian Navy.
• His company clung to spark transmitters long after continuous waves made voice broadcasting possible.
• He built Vatican Radio for Pope Pius XI in 1931 after converting to Catholicism and annulling his first marriage.
• Stations worldwide observed two minutes of radio silence when he died in 1937, and in 1943 the US Supreme Court struck down several of his patents.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Marshallese stick charts are open frameworks of coconut frond midribs tied with coconut fiber, with cowrie shells or knotted junctions marking islands. They do not map land. The sticks show ocean swells and how islands bend and cross them, creating choppy intersections that act as an island's invisible shadow miles out to sea. Each chart was personal, readable only by the navigator who made it, and it stayed on shore. At sea the pilot crouched or lay flat in the canoe hull to feel the pitch and roll of intersecting swells through his body. Navigators recognized four main swells: the rilib, or backbone swell, driven by the northeast trades and always treated as coming from the east; the fainter kaelib; the bungdockerik from the southwest; and the weak northern bundockeing.

Learning moved through three kinds of charts: the mattang, an abstract teaching model of wave refraction; the meddo, showing real islands in part of one chain and the distance at which their swell shadows could be felt; and the rebbelib, covering most or all of one or both chains. The knowledge was restricted to a few rulers and passed from father to son, and fleets of 15 or more canoes followed a single lead pilot. Outsiders learned of it late: a missionary's notice in 1862, then Captain Winkler of the German warship SMS Bussard, who studied the charts in 1896 and published a report in 1898. After World War II electronic navigation, motorboats, and US nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll and nearby islands broke the chain of teaching.

• The episode compares the sensing to riding blindfolded on a familiar road and knowing home by its bumps.
• A chart's curved sticks trace swells wrapping around an island the way a wave bends around a boulder.
• Individual charts varied so much in form that no standard visual language existed.
• Control of navigation meant control of trade, communication, and food distribution between islands.
• Winkler's documentation preserved the principles just before the living practice faded.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Lightships were vessels built never to sail, anchored as floating lighthouses over sandbanks and shoals where no tower could stand. The first modern one was placed in 1734 by Robert Hamblin off the Nore sandbank at the mouth of the Thames, run as a private venture with partner David Avery that charged passing merchants for the light. They added stations off Norfolk in 1736, the Owers in 1788, and the Goodwin Sands in 1793 before Trinity House took over the job. Early wooden ships with fluke anchors dragged in storms, until the converted fishing boat Pharos in Scotland carried a mushroom anchor in 1807. Iron chains followed in the 1820s, laid out at six feet of chain per foot of depth so the slack acted as a shock absorber.

Builders gave the hulls rounder, heavier shapes and packed salt between inner and outer planking to kill rot, which helped US Lightship 16 at the Sandy Hook and Ambrose stations last more than 80 years. Most had no propulsion until 1891, when Great Lakes lightships got steam engines to flee winter ice. Hulls were usually red with the station name in white, though the Huron lightship was black and Minots Ledge had a yellow hull. Fresnel lenses focused the beam, and Trinity House tested bells hung about 18 feet underwater that ships could hear up to 15 miles away. Their visibility made them targets: in 1934 the RMS Olympic, homing on the Nantucket lightship's radio beacon in fog, ran down LV-117 and killed seven of its 11 crew.

• The Great Lakes storm of 1913 sank LV-82 Buffalo on Lake Erie with all six hands and LV-61 on Lake Huron.
• Permanent hull numbers began in 1867 because ships renamed for each new station were impossible to track.
• Lightship 114 was painted New Bedford for a station that never existed, then sank at its mooring in 2006.
• The US Coast Guard retired its last lightship, Nantucket I, on March 29, 1985, and about 15 survive in the US.
• Germany still runs unmanned automated light vessels in the German Bight with isophase lights.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1854 Hosea Lewis became keeper of a lighthouse in Newport, Rhode Island, and in 1857 moved his family onto Lime Rock, a sliver of stone in the harbor. Within four months he suffered a paralyzing stroke, and his 15 year old daughter Ida took over the work: hauling fuel, filling the lamps at sundown and midnight, trimming wicks, and polishing soot from the reflectors. She also rowed her siblings to school and fetched groceries and medicine, becoming the best swimmer in Newport. She made her first rescue at 12, and on March 29, 1869, sick and without a coat or boots, she and her younger brother rowed into a snowstorm to pull two soldiers from the water after their boat to Fort Adams overturned and their 14 year old guide drowned.

A New York Tribune feature, then Harper's Weekly and Leslie's, made her a national sensation in a country hungry for heroes after the Civil War. Admirers gave her a mahogany rowboat with red velvet cushions and gold plated oarlocks, up to 100 visitors came in a day and 9,000 in one summer, and guests included Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. When her father died in 1873 the government appointed her mother keeper. Only in 1879, with help from Senator Ambrose Burnside, was Ida officially named keeper, at $750 a year, the highest keeper pay in the nation. In 1881 she became the first woman awarded the gold lifesaving medal, for saving two soldiers who fell through harbor ice.

• Answering critics who called rowing unladylike, she said in effect that she would not watch men drown to keep her dress dry.
• Her last recorded rescue came at 63, when she hauled a friend from the water.
• Official records credit her with 18 lives saved, and local accounts suggest as many as 25.
• When she died on October 24, 1911, every vessel bell in Newport Harbor rang and more than 1,400 people came to her viewing.
• Lime Rock was renamed Ida Lewis Rock in 1924, and in 2018 she became the first woman with a road named for her at Arlington National Cemetery.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

One four letter word, Fram, now names a crater on Mars, hardware on the International Space Station, a Romanian children's book, and a string of Norwegian sports clubs. It starts with the Norwegian Arctic exploration ship Fram, whose rounded hull let expanding pack ice squeeze it upward onto the ice instead of crushing it. The original vessel sits in the Fram Museum in Oslo, and the Hurtigruten Group sails an expedition ship named MS Fram. Explorers stamped the name on the map: Fram Strait in the Arctic Ocean, the Fram Formation rock strata on Ellesmere Island, and the Fram Islands and Fram Mesa in Antarctica. The Opportunity rover later explored a Martian crater named Fram, projecting a known story of survival onto an alien place.

The word also settled into homes. There is a town called Fram in Paraguay's Itapúa department, a settlement and stream in Slovenia's Rače-Fram municipality, and locals shorten both Framlingham in England and Framingham, Massachusetts to Fram. J.R.R. Tolkien gave the name to a dragon slaying character, Tony Harrison wrote a play called Fram, and Cezar Petrescu wrote Fram the Polar Bear. Then technical fields arrived at the same letters by accident: ferroelectric RAM, the ISS Flight Releasable Attachment Mechanism, the US Navy's Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization program for World War II destroyers, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, and Erik Hollnagel's Functional Resonance Analysis Method. The episode argues the short, sturdy sound makes it a natural acronym target.

• Clubs named Fram play in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the Åland Islands, and across Norway, including IF Fram in Larvik and its Framstadion.
• Sweden had a Fram bicycle manufacturer, and Framlingham Town FC is known to supporters as Fram.
• Ferroelectric RAM keeps data without power because atoms in a crystal layer physically shift to store a 1 or 0.
• In the 1980s the US Coast Guard ran its own FRAM overhaul for aging Hamilton class cutters.
• Fram is also an American brand of automotive oil filters.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Before containers, cargo moved as break bulk: sacks of coffee, crates of machinery, and barrels of liquid carried aboard piece by piece by longshoremen, wedged in with dunnage and dug out again at every port. Ships often spent more time at the dock than at sea, and theft was rampant. Early box ideas stayed local: James Brindley's starvationer boats on the Bridgewater Canal carried ten coal containers in 1766, Benjamin Outram slid coal boxes from wagons onto barges around 1795, Benjamin Franklin Fitch built demountable truck bodies in Cincinnati, and the Golden Arrow train used luggage boxes between London and Paris. War forced scale. The US Army's World War II transporter held 9,000 pounds and had lifting rings, the Korean War Connex box stacked three high, and by Vietnam hundreds of thousands of Connex boxes nearly halved overseas transit times.

In 1955 trucking owner Malcolm McLean decided shipping was really about moving cargo, not sailing ships. Engineer Keith Tantlinger designed his box and its twist lock, a conical pin that turns 90 degrees inside a corner casting like a deadbolt, letting cranes grab containers and lock stacks together. In April 1956 the converted tanker Ideal X carried 58 containers from Newark to Houston, and in 1963 Sea-Land released the twist lock patent royalty free. After a sizing war between Sea-Land's 35 foot boxes, Matson's 24 foot boxes, and European rail limits, the ISO settled on 20 and 40 foot lengths and the TEU. Waterfronts moved from Manhattan to Newark and from San Francisco to Oakland, and roughly 90% of non bulk cargo now travels in boxes.

• Only about 2 to 10% of arriving containers are physically inspected at some major European and West African ports.
• Smugglers have carved ivory into chocolate bar shapes and hidden drugs in perishable banana shipments.
• Estimates of containers lost overboard range from about 350 to 10,000 a year.
• In 2006 a spilled container washed thousands of bags of Doritos onto North Carolina beaches.
• Containers can carry invasive pests such as the khapra beetle, a destroyer of stored grain.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

For centuries sailors could find latitude from the noon sun or Polaris, but longitude required knowing the exact time at a reference point like London while at sea, and an error of just four seconds could put a ship more than a mile off course. Galileo proposed timing the eclipses of Jupiter's moons, which proved impossible from a rolling deck. In 1714 Britain's Longitude Act offered £20,000 for a solution. Pendulum clocks failed on ships, both from the motion and because gravity varies by about 0.2% with latitude, while spring clocks drifted as temperature changed their elasticity. The answer came from John Harrison, a working class Yorkshire carpenter who approached the Board of Longitude in 1730 and spent 31 years on his timekeepers, from lignum vitae wooden clocks to the counter oscillating sea clocks H1 and H2 and the bimetallic strip in H3.

In 1761 Harrison abandoned heavy mechanisms for H4, a five inch watch with a fast beating balance that performed brilliantly on a voyage to Jamaica and won him the prize. Pierre Le Roy, Thomas Earnshaw, and John Arnold then developed the detached spring detent escapement, which needed no oil, and Charles-Édouard Guillaume later won a Nobel Prize for elinvar, an alloy whose stiffness ignored temperature. Observatories rated each chronometer for 30 to 50 days so navigators could correct for its steady error. The Royal Navy made them standard by 1825. In World War II Hamilton mass produced its Model 21 and 22, while Wempe and A. Lange & Söhne built the Einheitschronometer with interchangeable parts, a design the Soviets copied in Moscow as the MX-6.

• Harrison invented caged roller bearings to cut friction in his metal clocks.
• Detent escapements used jewel bearings of sapphire, ruby, and diamond at the pivots.
• A time ball dropped daily at 1 p.m. at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich so ships on the Thames could set their chronometers.
• The 1815 wreck of the East Indiaman Arniston off South Africa killed 372 people after a longitude miscalculation.
• More than 58,000 of the unified German and Soviet design were built, the most produced mechanical marine chronometer in history.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The tavern legend of the king's shilling hidden in a tankard is a myth: press officers faced fines for trickery, and volunteers got a cooling off period. The real system was impressment. Between 1793 and 1812 the Royal Navy grew from about 135 ships and 36,000 men to 584 ships and 114,000 men. Conditions deterred volunteers: planners expected up to half a crew to die on major voyages, mostly from scurvy; inflation eroded navy pay while merchant wages could double in wartime; and the navy withheld six months to two years of pay to prevent desertion, which still averaged 25 percent a year. Press gangs targeted seafaring men aged 18 to 55, spotted by their rolling gait, tans, tar stains, and tattoos, and in a hot press they tore up protection papers.

Most pressing happened at sea, as warships stopped homebound merchant ships and took their best hands, so merchant captains built hidden compartments. Under the 1795 to 1815 quota system counties emptied their jails, spreading typhus through fleets. Local juries acquitted men who killed press gang members, and Americans resisted too. Britain's refusal to recognize naturalized American citizenship led it to take an estimated 6,500 sailors from American ships, a leading cause of the War of 1812. Mass impressment ended after Napoleon surrendered in 1814.

• The Dutch warship Staten Generaal lost 428 of its 550 men to desertion in 1795.
• At Easton on the Isle of Portland in 1803, a press gang fired on quarrymen and killed four people.
• Thomas Urquhart, seized on a London street in 1808, sued his attackers in the Court of King's Bench and won.
• In 1757 about 3,000 Royal Navy sailors swept New York City and hauled in 800 men.
• Continental Navy captain James Nicholson illegally pressed about 30 Baltimore citizens in 1777 until Maryland's governor intervened.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The hammock began as survival gear in two places at once. Spanish colonists took the word hamaca from the Taino and Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, and Columbus noted netted sleeping hammocks used for sleep and barter, first woven from tree bark and later from sisal. Raised above the forest floor, sleepers avoided snakes, ants, and damp rot. The episode rejects myths crediting Saxons or the Athenian Alcibiades, and follows a historian of technology who traces a separate English canvas hanging bed through an 11th century Old English Hexateuch illustration and the 1330s Luttrell Psalter. Sailors later gave that canvas bed the Caribbean name. In 1597 the Royal Navy ordered 300 bolts of canvas for hanging beds, because a hammock swings with the ship instead of pitching sleepers onto the deck.

Stowed hammocks lined the gunwales as protection from shrapnel and musket fire. In the 20th century, explorers and soldiers adopted Venezuelan jungle hammocks with bug netting, rainflies, and drip strings. The U.S. M1966 jungle hammock for Vietnam had a waterproof bottom that filled with rain, while North Vietnamese troops sewed hammocks from captured parachute cloth. From Apollo 12 through Apollo 17, hammocks kept astronauts off the cold floor of the lunar module.

• A V notched wooden spreader added in the 1590s raised canvas walls around naval sleepers against drafts.
• Marines on New Britain slung hammocks inside slit trenches to escape both insects and artillery.
• Spanish arrivals in El Salvador saw hammocks used to isolate sleepers from constant earthquakes.
• In Brazil's rural northeast, hammocks carry the dead to towns with cemeteries, a practice Candido Portinari painted in 1944.
• Spreader bar hammocks flip easily, while a hang at about 30 degrees and a diagonal lie keep the spine flat.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The Golden Hind was only 102 feet long and 20 feet wide, carrying 80 to 85 men and 22 guns at no more than about eight knots. Launched as the Pelican, a galleon modeled on the Nao Victoria, it left England in December 1577 with four other ships and 164 men on an expedition officially meant to find places meet to have traffic. In fact Queen Elizabeth I secretly backed Sir Francis Drake as a privateer against Spain. On August 20, 1578, before entering the Strait of Magellan, Drake renamed the ship for the golden hind on the crest of Sir Christopher Hatton, one of the voyage's principal investors. On March 1, 1579, off Ecuador, he took the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, then the largest treasure ever captured at sea: over 360,000 pesos, including 26 tons of silver and half a ton of gold, transferred over six days.

Drake returned to Plymouth on September 26, 1580 with 56 of the 80 men aboard when he entered the Pacific. Elizabeth's share of at least 160,000 pounds paid off England's government debt, with 40,000 pounds left to invest in the Levant Company, and investors earned 47 pounds per pound. At Deptford she had the French ambassador knight Drake aboard the ship, which stayed on display as the first museum ship until it rotted and was broken up around 1650.

• The crew threw provisions and lower value loot overboard to make room, and later added six tons of cloves.
• The treasure was unloaded secretly at Trematon Castle under the Queen's guards.
• In 1668 John Davies had timber from the hull made into the Drake chair, now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
• A 1963 replica built from a converted fishing boat for a TV series sank under tow in 1987.
• The 1973 Appledore replica has sailed more than 140,000 miles, appeared in Shogun, and has been moored at Bankside, London since 1996.