The BrainFood Show

According to the Aircraft Crashes Record Office in Geneva, between 1940 and 2008 there were 157 people who fell out of planes without a parachute during a crash and lived to tell about it. A full 42 of those falls occurred at heights over 10,000 feet (above 3,000 meters), such as the tale of 17 year old Juliane Koepcke who not only survived an approximately 10,000 foot free fall, but also a subsequent 10 day trek alone through the Peruvian rain forest with no real supplies other than a little bag of candy.

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It is one of the most iconic cinematic weapons in history, on par with James Bond’s Walther PPK, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, and Indiana Jones’s bullwhip. Strap it to your back, and you instantly become an unstoppable one-man army, a bullet hose spitting hot lead at 6,000 rounds per minute and turning dense jungle into leaf mulch, cars into twisted scrap metal, and your enemies into piles of hamburger meat. It is, of course, the M134 Minigun AKA “Old Painless”, the blisteringly fast rotary-barrel machine gun wielded by the likes of Jesse “The Body” Ventura in Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Unlike many other movie weapons, “Ol’ Painless” seems remarkably plausible, but does such a weapon really exist, and could you wield it the way it’s almost always shown in movies?

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In today's compilation episode, we're looking at the greatest naval espionage mission in history, that time the moon nearly started World War 3, WTF is up with embalming communists and many other fascinating cold war stories.

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Apologies for my audio quality in this one. Adobe kept crashing on me, so we had to use the audio Simon was receiving which isn’t ideal. Also a bit under the weather and lost my voice before recording, so maybe for the best that I wasn’t coming through in pristine quality. Next episode will sound much, much better!

In any event, in this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at the real story behind the song In the Air Tonight.

Moving on to the meat of today’s episode, we jump into the fascinating story of one Willie Francis, a young man convicted for murder, executed, then executed again about a year later, despite the fact that it would very much seem as if he was innocent the whole time.

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On September 15, 1916, German troops defending towns in France’s Somme Valley heard a strange new sound above the usual boom of artillery and crack of rifle and machine gun fire: a deep, throaty rumbling, accompanied by a high-pitched metallic squeaking. Peering over the parapets of their trenches, they gasped as they beheld a terrifying sight: a line of giant, armour-plated vehicles, rolling on caterpillar treads and bristling with guns, heading straight for them. The tank had arrived on the battlefield.

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Set it down and it flows like a liquid. Pull it slowly and it stretches like rubber. Hit it with a hammer and it shatters like glass. Throw it on the ground and it bounces higher than a rubber ball. It can help heal injuries, stabilize wobbly furniture, clean up dust and pet hair, and lift newsprint off the page, allowing comic-strip characters to be stretched into amusing shapes. It is on permanent display in the Smithsonian Museum and has even flown to the moon and back. It is, of course, that most classic and versatile of toys: the weird and wacky goo known as Silly Putty. For nearly eight decades, this strange rubbery substance in the plastic egg has enchanted children and adults the world over, finding a myriad of applications both amusing and practical. Yet like many other classic toys like the Slinky, Super Soaker, and Play-Doh, Silly Putty owes its existence and enduring popularity to an unlikely accident - and not a bit of clever marketing. This is the stretchy, bouncy, wacky history of one of the world’s favourite playthings.

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As most know, on January 27, 1967, the Apollo Program, the United States’ first effort to land a man on the moon, was rocked by a horrific tragedy. During a “plugs-out” ground test of the brand-new Block 1 Apollo spacecraft, an electrical fault sparked a fire in the capsule. Fuelled by the pure oxygen environment in the cabin, the blaze spread rapidly, taking the lives of crew members Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 1 fire halted the nascent lunar program dead in its tracks, forcing NASA to step back, reevaluate its equipment and procedures, and make hundreds of changes to the Apollo spacecraft, spacesuits, and other systems. It was not until October 11, 1968 - 21 months after the disaster - that Apollo 7, just 7, not 2, finally blasted off, carrying astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisle, and Walt Cunningham into low earth orbit. The mission was a success, proving the reliability of the redesigned Block II spacecraft and paving the way for more daring and historic missions: Apollo 8, the first to take men round the moon; Apollo 9, the first to test the Apollo Lunar Module in space; Apollo 10, a full dress rehearsal for the lunar landing; Apollo 11, the first to land men on the surface of the moon; and Apollos 12-17, which with one infamous exception all succeeded in landing men on the moon and exploring large areas of our closest celestial neighbour.

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In the episode today, we're going over a variety of reasons why the past was the worst and, while the world is far from perfect and MANY things to still improve upon, we are all lucky to be alive right now. And anyone who says otherwise should be smacked upside the head with a history book repeatedly until they see the error in their thinking. ;-)

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⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at how exactly Al Capone got the scars that got him the nickname “Scarface”.

Moving on to the meat of today’s episode, we jump into the rather interesting story behind one of the many so called “trial of the century” of the 20th century.  In this case involving a housewife and her lover and their plot to murder her husband. We also discuss the case of the first woman ever to be executed in an electric chair and one of the most iconic journalistic photos ever taken.

In the Bonus Facts today, we look at the first two women ever to be sentenced to death via the electric chair, what they did to get that sentence, and how they both got off.

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In October 1910, the city of Paris played host to a historic event: the Second International Aeronautical Exhibition, a grand showcase of the very latest in aviation technology. To the average visitor, the rickety canvas-and-wire flying machines lining the halls of the Grand Palais [“Grahn Pal-ay”] would have seemed exotic and cutting-edge. But one exhibit stood out among the rest. Set aside in a separate exhibition hall, the brick-red aircraft was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Its sleek wings lacked the drag-producing bracing wires that festooned most contemporary aircraft, while its tail featured unique x-shaped stabilizers. But strangest of all, the odd contraption lacked a seemingly vital component: a propeller. Instead, the aircraft was propelled by an unusual barrel-shaped device mounted to its nose which its creator, Romanian-born Henri Coanda, dubbed a “turbo-propulsor” - the ancestor of the modern jet engine. Later in life, Coanda would claim that his creation was the first jet-powered aircraft to take to the air - a title traditionally claimed by the German-built Heinkel He-178 on August 27, 1939. But is this true? Did the first jet aircraft actually fly all the way back in 1910, barely seven years after the Wright Brothers’ pioneering flight? The answer is a lot more complicated than you might think, and depends a great deal on how you define the term “jet aircraft.” This is the controversial story of the Coanda 1910, a forgotten aircraft decades ahead of its time.

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