Itsy Bitsy

Some people are inventive, while others can't seem to get it together. How their stories play out, though, can always be curious.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Fashion doesn't sit still. It's constantly changing every decade,
every year, every season. Sometimes certain trends return, like the
bell bottom craze of the nineteen nineties, and sometimes they

(00:48):
rightly go away forever, like the polyester leisure suits of
the seventies. But one clothing item has withstood the test
of time, existing for thousands of years across a variety
of cultures, even though it is widely considered to be
a modern creation. It started in fifty sid b c.
In the ancient city of catalhu Yuck, the ruins of

(01:09):
which can be found today in modern day Turkey. During
this era, an image of the mother goddess of the
native people was crafted. The image showed her wearing two
strips of cloth, one covering her chest and the other
covering her lower half, as she sat upon two leopards.
A similar outfit was seen thousands of years later in
fourteen hundred b c. It was depicted in Greek vases, urns,

(01:32):
and artwork, and was often seen on women participating in
athletic activities throughout history. Evidence of this garment was also
found in ancient Roman mosaics, Greek sculptures, and Latin literature.
It is almost as old as time itself. However, even
though this article of clothing was worn commonly and publicly,
it became increasingly seen as immodest and vulgar by more

(01:56):
conservative minded individuals as time war on. It was until
one man decided to tackle it head on and drag
it into the sunshine of the modern age. His name
was Louis Rayard, born in France in eighteen seven. He'd
worked as an automotive engineer until his mother's death around
nineteen forty. She had owned a clothing business, and Louis

(02:16):
took it upon himself to step into her shoes. No
pun intended running the company from that point on. Sometimes
he would stroll the nearby beaches and he would note
how the women couldn't get the kind of sun tan
they wanted. Their swimsuits covered too much of their bodies,
so they would roll the fabric back to expose more
of their skin. And this gave him an idea. What

(02:37):
if they didn't have to roll up the fabric, What
if they could wear a swimsuit that exposed their middrift
for them instead. It took several years, due in part
to the war effort and fabric shortages, but by ninety
six Louis had come up with just the thing, and
so had someone else. Jacques Heim, also from France, had
gotten his start working for his parents for Company Me.

(03:00):
Just like Louis, Jacques took the reins and started running
it himself some years later, eventually broadening its offerings beyond
fur coats and stoles. The company's new Cotur line included dresses,
and Jacques also started producing clothes for young girls. But
aside from all of that, he made a bathing suit.
It was comprised of a ruffled bandeau and a pair

(03:21):
of short bottoms with a thin strip of middrift exposed
between them. He called it the Atom French four Adam
and advertised it by pain sky writers to write out
the phrase the World's smallest bathing suit in the sky
over a popular resort but Jackaim didn't have Louis Royard's
marketing prowess. Louis knew what people wanted to see. He

(03:44):
would use even less fabric than his competitor, a meager
four small triangles tied together that amounted to no more
than thirty square inches of material. It had to be
seen to be believed. All he needed was a model. Unfortunately,
no one wanted to wear it, as there wasn't much
there to begin with. But he eventually found his model
in a young nineteen year old dancer named Micheline Bernardini.

(04:07):
She worked at a local music hall and agreed to
be photographed in louise new bathing suit. On July five,
he took her to a public swimming pool in Paris
and introduced her to the crowd. She made quite a splash.
The bottoms of her new swimsuit stopped just below her
navel and exposed more of her backside than any other
suit on the market, and as promised, her middrift was

(04:30):
fully exposed. Newspapers printed photos of her in the ensemble
too great acclaim, mostly from men. However, it was banned
in several countries and even a few places in the
United States. Over time, however, it gained in popularity among
swimmers and beach goers, and despite Joaquim beating Louis Royard
to market with his design, it was Louie's name for

(04:52):
the product that ultimately stuck. He had named his swim
suit after the location of a US atomic test site
near the later called Bikini a Toll. So with one
word and a few pieces of fabric, two men brought
a seventy year old garment into the twentieth century with
the invention of the bikini, and Louis even managed to

(05:14):
outdo his competition. A few weeks after Jacques had his
slogan written across the Sky for the resort, Louis hired
his own skywriters to do the same, except this time
he had them write something better smaller, it said, than
the smallest bathing suit in the world. Comedian and filmmaker

(05:46):
Mel Brooks famously said, rhetoric does not get you anywhere,
because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric.
But if you can bring these people down with comedy,
they stand no chance. He understood that in order to
rob evil people of their power, he had to make
them the butt of the joke. Perhaps no work of
his exemplifies this more than the musical number Springtime for

(06:08):
Hitler from Brooks's nineteen sixty seven film The Producers, the
over the top Broadway performance in which Nazis sing and
dance paying tribute to a giant poster of their leader
as the Hitler character entered the scene, and its portrayed
as a laughable beateneck not a fearsome dictator. But what
mel Brooks might not have known at the time was

(06:29):
that he didn't have to make up stories to make
the Nazis look like fools. One real life German U
boat captain managed to do that all on his own.
His name was Carl Adolph Schlitt, and he was in
charge of German submarine U twelve O six. The U
twelve oh six was a two D and twenty foot
sub weighing as much as eight hundred and seventy one

(06:49):
tons when submerged. It was built later in the war
and as a result had a few upgrades that separated
it from its earliest counterparts. One such upgrade was its
use of deep water, high pressured toilets, unlike British subs,
which kept septic tanks. On board that could be emptied
at a later time. The U twelve oh six fired
human waste into the ocean with every flush. This new

(07:12):
plumbing system allowed use of the restroom while the sub
was at depth, no need to worry about a heavy
tank to add weight to the vessel. There was only
one catch. Flushing the toilet was a lot more complicated.
It even required training on how to do it properly
without jeopardizing the integrity of the vessel and the lives
of the people on board. A person had to turn

(07:33):
a series of valves in just the right order to
evacuate the toilet's contents without seawater coming back in. In
April of the U twelve oh six was traveling two
feet below the waters off the coast of Scotland when
Captain Schlitt got the urge. He might have had a
large meal or one too many cups of coffee that day,

(07:54):
but whatever it was, he had to go now. Being
a submarine captain, a man in control of a massive
vessel and his own destiny, there was no reason for
him to think he couldn't handle something as simple as
using a toilet. And yet he soon learned that flushing
the U twelve O six is commode required more than
a jiggle of the handle. After he had done his business,

(08:15):
Schlitz stood up and realized that, unlike the sub, he
was out of his depth. He called in an engineer
to a system. Now there were two Nazis in a
small submarine bathroom with no idea how to flush the toilet.
The engineer turned one valve and that's all it took
for all hell to break loose. The room started to
take on seawater, with Schlitz remnants swirling around with them.

(08:38):
And to make matters worse, the bathroom was positioned over
the sub's battery. As the water breached the compartment, another
kind of toxic gas, flooring gas, to be precise, filled
the vessel. Schlitz and his crew had no choice but
to surface, and at the worst possible time. The U
twelve O six was almost immediately spotted by the British

(08:58):
Royal Air Force and fired upon. With no other options,
the fifty or so German crew abandoned the sub, which
was then deliberately sunk to keep its secrets from the Allies.
Four Nazis died that day, while the others were captured
in Schlitt's official report, he stated that he had been
in the engine room when one of his engineers had

(09:19):
tried to repair a vent at the front of the vessel.
The ensuing on rush of sea water made the sub
buoyant and they were forced to surface. He made no
mention of his time in the bathroom nor the failed
flush that had sealed the fates of him and his crew.
Captain Schlitt was only twenty seven when he was handed
control of the U twelve O six. It was his

(09:40):
first patrol. After spending several years in a p O
W camp. He was released and lived to the ripe
old age of ninety. But he had to live every
day of that knowing that he got his men killed
or captured because he didn't know how to flush a toilet.
And that's a real Schlitz show, if you ask me.

(10:03):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show,

(10:26):
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.