The BrainFood Show

What was the worst military aircraft of the Second World War? Given the sheer number of designs fielded by all sides throughout the conflict there is no shortage of candidates - many of which we have already covered on this channel. There was the Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet, a German rocket-powered fighter whose engine had a nasty habit of blowing up or dissolving the pilots alive. And the Messerschmitt Me-132 Gigant, a giant assault glider designed for an abortive German invasion of the British isles but pressed into service as a ponderously slow and horrendously vulnerable cargo transport. On the Allied side there was the Brewster F2A Buffalo and Douglas TBD Devastator, hopelessly outdated U.S. Naval aircraft that were brutally cut down by superior Japanese fighters the moment they first saw combat. And then there was the Fisher P-75 Eagle, a Frankenstein’s monster of a fighter cobbled together from parts of existing aircraft and deliberately designed to save its manufacturer from taking on more wartime production contracts. But when it comes to questionable design concepts, few aircraft can compete with the Boulton-Paul Defiant, a British fighter aircraft that sported a powered, four-gun turret like a bomber but no forward-firing armament. Designed around combat doctrines dating from the First World War, the Defiant enjoyed some early successes before suffering horrendous losses at the hands of more modern German fighters. As a result, it was swiftly withdrawn from day fighter duties, serving with greater success as a night fighter before being relegated to training and rescue duties and quietly retired. Yet while the flawed Defiant never earned the glory of its more illustrious stablemates, the Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane, it nonetheless played a small but important role in the war and deserves to be better remembered. This is the story of Britain’s strange and forgotten WWII “turret fighter.”

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At 10:30 AM on January 17, 1966, an enormous explosion shattered the silence over the small farming village Palomares in Spain. An enormous fireball erupted in the sky overhead, and pieces of flaming debris began raining down over the surrounding countryside. Two U.S. Air Force aircraft had collided during a routine aerial refuelling operation, killing all but four of the eleven men aboard. Within hours, the Spanish province of Almeria was crawling with U.S. military personnel. One of the two aircraft, a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber, had been carrying four hydrogen bombs with a yield of 1.1 million tons of TNT each. One of the bombs landed intact in a riverbed, while the conventional explosives aboard two others detonated on impact, contaminating large areas of Spanish countryside with toxic plutonium. The fourth bomb, however, was nowhere to be found. What followed was one of the largest peacetime naval operations in history as a fleet of U.S. Navy vessels scoured the deep waters of the Mediterranean for the missing bomb. This is the forgotten story of the 1966 Palomares Incident.

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There you are. Sitting on your couch, watching a movie, when suddenly you decide you want popcorn. So you get up and cross the room to the kitchen. But the moment you cross the threshold between the two rooms: bam! you suddenly stop in your tracks. You glance about the kitchen in confusion like Gandalf in the Mines of Moria, unable to remember why you came here in the first place. Your mind is blank, wiped clean. You return to the living room, resume your movie, and bam! it all comes back to you as if nothing happened. You get up again, and the whole cycle begins anew. If so, then don’t worry: you aren’t going crazy or suffering from early-onset dementia - or, I mean, if you are. Don’t worry about it. Soon you won’t remember you can’t remember anyway… But what is happening here? What is it about walking through a doorway that prompts our brains to suddenly erase our short-term memory? Well, sit back, keep your grey matter focussed, and let’s dive into the fascinating science behind the Doorway Effect.

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A speeding bullet ripping through an apple, a split second before the fruit disintegrates. A drop of milk splashing off a red plate, forming a perfect miniature coronet. An atomic bomb frozen just after detonation, the fireball like a giant, surreal jellyfish. The movement of a golfer captured at split-second intervals, revealing the practiced elegance of his stroke. You have probably seen these iconic images dozens of times, reproduced on postcards, in coffee table books and science textbooks, and even on art gallery walls. They are perhaps the best-known works of Doctor Harold Edgerton, an American inventor who pioneered ultra-high-speed photography and helped uncover the secret world hidden in the moments too brief for the eye to see. But Edgerton’s work went far beyond just making pretty pictures, his many inventions helping to revolutionize fields as diverse as manufacturing, biology, and ocean exploration. This is the forgotten and incredible story of ‘Doc’ Edgerton - AKA “Papa Flash” - the man who made time stand still.

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⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at a Christmas gift that resulted in one of the more celebrated books of all time. Moving on to the main content today we’re looking at a rather humorous Christmas riot at West Point and then another that had nothing to do with Christmas at Oxford. We follow this up with a myriad of rapid fire Christmas Bonus Facts.

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In the fall of 1778, things weren’t looking good for the traitors to King and country in the British American colonies. In the early going the American Revolutionary forces under George Washington had suffered defeat after resounding defeat, including Washington very nearly losing around half his army in the first major battle of the war, only saved by a providential fog and General William Howe deciding inexplicably not to press the attack when Washington’s forces were surrounded before this. This event occurred in New York in August of 1776 in what was then the largest known battle ever fought in North America, involving close to 40,000 troops including naval forces. Many losses for the Revolutionary forces later, Howe made a similar blunder in November and December of 1776. After yet another near catastrophic defeat for the rebels, when nearly 3,000 American troops were captured at Fort Washington, General Washington limped the 4,000 or so remnants of his army south to Delaware. Howe and his vastly larger, better equipped, and better trained army were nearby and could have crushed the Continental Army and either captured or killed Washington. But once again, for what reasons aren’t fully clear today, Howe chose not to press on, and instead began the process of setting up a winter camp with no further offensives planned until spring.

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⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at a couple rather bizarre Spanish Christmas traditions involving holiday defecating… Moving on to the main content today we’re looking at why we kiss under the mistletoe, the Demon of Christmas, and the constant battle to keep a giant goat from being burned down every year.

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On November 28, 1787, His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty set sail from England with 46 men aboard, bound for the island of Tahiti in the South Pacific. Commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh, her mission was to collect and deliver breadfruit plants to the West Indies, where they would serve as cheap food for slaves on British plantations. After a long and gruelling journey in which Bligh attempted unsuccessfully to round the storm-lashed Cape Horn at the tip of South America, Bounty finally arrived in Tahiti on 26 October, 1788. But the voyage - and the hedonistic temptations of this tropical paradise - soon began to take their toll, and over the five months Bounty spent in Tahiti morale and discipline among the crew steadily broke down. These tensions finally boiled over on April 28, 1789 when, three weeks after leaving Tahiti, the crew, led by acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, mutinied against Bligh, setting him him and eighteen loyalists adrift in an open boat. The mutiny on the Bounty has since become the stuff of legend, told and retold in dozens of books, plays, and films. It is history’s most famous mutiny, a classic tale of a beleaguered crew rising up against their tyrannical and abusive captain. But as with many such stories, the narrative has become progressively distorted with each retelling, such that the most common versions of the story differ significantly from the actual events. Popular retellings also tend to leave out what happened after the mutiny, which is in many ways an even more fascinating story - and one which had consequences which continue to resonate to the present day.

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⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at the rather humorous original name for the song Silver Bells.

Moving on to the main content today we’re looking at the truth about the origin of the song “The 12 Days of Christmas” and what’s the deal with the weird lyrics.

After that, we look at the truth about the origin of the Candy Cane and then a rather surprising fact about the song Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.

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When one pictures the first British settlers coming to what would become the United States, it’s generally of a group of religiously oppressed, rigidly pious individuals, such as the famed now named “Pilgrims” separatist group in their black and white clothing and top hats featuring giant buckles- a group who the Native Americans saved by sharing food and teaching them how to farm certain things in the region in their first year in Massachusetts, all culminating in the first Thanksgiving in America. But, in truth, the clothing style often depicted in paintings of the Pilgrims bore little resemblance to what the Pilgrims actually seemed to wear. For example, we know from ship manifests that the Pilgrim’s garb was extremely colorful, and buckles were both expensive and not yet fully in fashion as they would become later in the 17th century when paintings of the Pilgrims started to be made, leading us all astray on what they typically wore. Further, while the Pilgrims did receive a measure of aid in the early going from the native americans in the region, they did not celebrate the first Thanksgiving in America and the event today the modern holiday is supposedly based on wasn’t even the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving day in America, Nor did they initially think to invite the Native Americans to the event in question, though a group of them, probably attracted by all the noisy games like shooting contests, did ultimately join the party. Even popular perception of what they supposedly ate during said event is less based in history and more mostly thanks to Sarah Josepha Hale, author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and one of the most influential women in American history who, through her highly circulated editorials laid out a partially mythical and romanticized version of the events most know today and popularized it. She also is a huge reason Thanksgiving is a national holiday in the U.S. in the first place from her decades long efforts to make it so.

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