May 30, 2023 • 40 mins
Let's say you have a big dream: you're creating a new community, smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. Problem is, not a ton of people want to live in the middle of nowhere. When Robert McCulloch saw his newest venture wasn't going as planned, he came up with a thoroughly American scheme... in a ridiculous display of ambition and extravagance, McCullough purchased the London Bridge -- and shipped the entire thing to Arizona.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the
(00:27):
show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer, Max.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Williams Bally who indeed and your NOL.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I'm Ben, And it turns out that since the three
of us reside here in the United States, we love traveling,
but it can be a little bit expensive. You know,
you have to either go over the Pacific or over
the Atlantic. It's weird when you think of how so
many other countries are so much closer to each other.
(01:01):
Like you can wake up in Europe and you can
drive through you know, four countries. You can see the
world pretty easily. But today's episode, NOL, we're learning about
some folks who decided to take Europe to the States.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You see the world right here at home, you know,
I mean, we do. We have states that are different
enough culturally, I suppose, but usually you have to trek
quite a bit farther than you do in Europe to
see a real change in that culture in that landscape.
We live on the East Coast, and today we're talking
about the West Coast, which is basically kind of feels
(01:38):
in some ways like going to another country. Things are
very different. The land hits a little different, a little
rockier terrain. You got your deserts, you got your snow
capped mountains and all of that good stuff, and you
got your your lake cities as well. California is lousy
with variations in.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Terrain, and today's episode features a nursery rhyme that I
think is familiar to pretty much everybody in the English
speaking world. London Bridge is falling down. It's a bit
of an earworm. We don't have to sing it because
it'll get.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
To you, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down,
My Fair Lady. Not to be confused with the Rogers
and Hammerstein musical My Fair Lady, which is quite a
banger in and of itself, Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle
and all of that. Pretty sure, that's where the name
comes from, the old nursery rhyme of Yesteryear, which I
believe dates back to the Middle Ages. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, it's a little bit misleading too as a nursery rhyme,
because it seems to imply that there is only one
London Bridge that could not be further from the truth.
There has been some sort of bridge going across the
Thames for nearly two thousand years and we're getting that
actually from the Lake Havisty Area Chamber of Commerce. Yeah,
(03:04):
we'll just play at that seat.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
We'll get back to that far.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
The very first London bridge was built by Roman forces
way way back in forty three CE, and throughout the history,
thanks to our research associate mister Max Williams, there have
been multiple bridges again built across the Thames, and not
all of them stayed in London.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, I mean this is no shade on the Romans.
I mean the Romans kind of were first to market
with bridge tech, you know, with their arches and all
of that. They knew how to build themselves a bridge.
No better way to ford a river or a stream
or a lake than with a bridge, so you kind
of got to have them. But then over time, you know,
wear and tear sets in and then you got to
(03:51):
update some things, and sometimes the whole thing just kind
of comes tumbling and or falling down. So we'll get
to that eventually. But McGill University had this to say
on the history of the London bridges. London Bridge is
a bridge in London, England, over the Thames, between the
City of London and Southwark Southwark. I don't know, let's
(04:13):
have some some Brits right in and tell us how
we got that one wrong. I think it's it's got
to be Southwark. That seems right. Sure, yeah, close enough
for government work, right. But as you pointed up, in
multiple bridges throughout history have been referred to as the
titular London Bridge. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah, kind of like how multiple planes are Air Force
one if the president'saw on them. So let's talk about
this very first bridge again, according to the Lake Havistou
area Chambers, we'll get to it. The first the first bridge,
the one built by the Romans, was a pontoon bridge,
(04:50):
so they had a row of boats that were anchored
in the river and there were planks laid across the boats.
They may have used ferry boats as well. And the
the next record we have of a bridge in this
area in London is it's weird. It's a mention in
a very strange story in nine eight four CE, a
(05:13):
widowed woman and her son are caught driving quote pins
into the image of a man.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, did they draw the image. Did they scrawl it
into the dirt? Unclear, but there was a woman at
the time was thought to be a witch, right, definitely,
some dark forces potentially trying to be manipulated there, and
as you tend to do in these days with folks
suspected of witchcraft, they're killed, they're drowned. Well, the intent
(05:44):
was to drown the both of them. The woman unfortunately
perishes in the Thames, while her son is able to escape.
It always reminds me of that scene in Monty Python
The Holy Grail where they talk about how to figure
out if someone's a witch. You got it? What you know?
See if they're made of wood, and wood floats and
if they sink, then they're not made of wood and
(06:05):
therefore not a witch. But then they also drown anyway,
it's a good film.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
In ten fourteen, the Danish forces are holding London and
we've got some returning cameos from previous episodes. The Saxons
under King Ethel read the Unready, I love that name.
They teamed up with some Vikings who were led by
King Oloff from Norway. Together these forces sailed up the
Thames to attack the London Bridge and attempt to divide
(06:34):
the Danish forces. But these Danish forces protected their ships
with thatched roofs pulled from cottages that stood on or
around the bridge. These guys rode up under the bridge,
they put their cables around the piles that supported it,
you know, basically the post going into the river, and
then they rode off at full speed. They pulled a
(06:55):
bridge heist. London Bridge fell down.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I gotta say, though, I gotta take a second and
to talk about ethel Red the Unready. What a nickname
that is? What did he do to deserve that? I mean,
you know you've got your you know, Eric the Red,
and this guy is the Unready. I have the check.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
I'm not sure if he's the one that got shot
by a crossbow while on the toilet, but he might
have had.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
There's one.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
There's one of these guys in this in that family
line who died that way. It's a little too dark
for me to write about in a ridiculous thrill desk,
but what might be it?
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Now? The whole shot. No spoilers for for the Game
of Thrones TV series or the Song of Ice and Fire,
but there is a very important character in the series
that gets shot by a crossbow while I'm the toilet.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And some in the novels as well. Okay, so this
moment where these forces, these united forces pull down the bridge.
This leads to the London Bridge from the nursery rhyme.
You can go ahead and call that one the old
London Bridge. In eleven seven six, the first Stone Bridge
(08:03):
is built. It's kind of a ep you could say,
by a guy named Peter of Coal Church, and it
takes a while to build. It's not done until twelve
oh nine, and so we're looking at what thirty three
years to build, and it was a worthwhile investment. It
lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years afterwards.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Oh yeah, no big battle. Wolf's going to huff and
puff and blow that one down. Stone was king in
those days of construction. It had a road that was
twenty feet wide and three hundred yards long. Again, we're
back to sort of some construction details here. Gothic style
architecture involving twenty art shows that we now are very
(08:43):
good at bearing loads. There was also a drawbridge, it
wouldn't draw bridge that could allow kind of the way
it would disconnect in the middle. It could be let
out and then ships could pass under it, and it
also could be opened up to keep invaders from crossing.
This was a very important strategic militaristic use, but also
(09:03):
very practical just in terms of trade.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
And this bridge became part of the city, right. You
would have houses, you would have shops built on the
actual bridge, and it didn't take long for the whole
thing to be covered with buildings. It was functionally a
street across the river.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Also, to jump back in here, it was Edmund Ironside
who got shot on the toilet by crossbow who was
unready sun ah.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
There is there, it is love it.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
In twelve twelve a disaster occurred. A bunch of people
were on the bridge and they got caught between two fires.
The fire code as we understand it in the modern
world was not a thing back in the twelve hundreds.
There's a thing called the stone Gatehouse on the bridge
and it's roof these poles on it, and this feels
(10:03):
like a pretty brutal practice, but people would put the
heads of traders on these poles t R a I
t o rs. Not just traders, not just like you know,
avid collectors of coins or something. No, yeah, this is
like you know the old head on the pike routine
to deter others from crossing, you know those in Power
(10:26):
and Max. You've found this little twisted fact here that
they actually dug up the body of Oliver Cromwell and
decapitated his dead body and stuck that bad boy up
on one of these pikes. Yeah, it was a it
was a continuing practice. It was very it was a
very popular fad for quite some time, and luckily it's
(10:49):
not a fad that London is currently into. So back
to these fires, disaster is the right word. They could
absolutely spread very quickly through different buildings because of the
material used to construct them. Let us remember the bridge's stone,
but a lot of the buildings built on the bridge
are wood and they're very close together. Again, there's no
(11:09):
such thing as fire coat, so lots of people can
die very easily, and this happens repeatedly. If we fast
forward to sixteen twenty three, there is another fire on
the bridge. A maid servant leaves a pail of ashes
under some wooden stairs. Unfortunately, the environment is such that
this causes a fire on the stairs in the blink
(11:30):
of an eye, very quickly. Forty three houses are destroyed.
A lot of the shops are burned beyond repair, like
they're going to be teardowns, and people start moving away
from the bridge.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
It's kind of going downhill, you know. The ashes detail
made me think of another nursery rhyme, Ring around the
Rosy pocket full of posy ashes. Ashes. We all fall down,
as you know, as a reference to the plague. But
if you want to do a little mashup of these,
you could have the ashes as a detail in the
old my Fair Lady rhyme caused this one to fall
down as well.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
And it's funny that you mentioned that because according to Snopes,
Ring around the Rosie is not about the Black plague,
which was I thought that for such a such a
long time. But please check out the neat little article
on Snopes by David Michelson about Ring Around the Rosie
and maybe we do a nursery rhymes episode two.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
There's so many are interesting and quite dark. Yeah, no
doubt so. After the kind of tear down situation, the
bridge was actually widened possibly, I don't know what you
guys think, but maybe to give a little bit more
space in between these these these buildings. Some of the
fire wouldn't spread quite so quickly.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think also
they just needed to keep the bridge actually navigable for
you know, carriages and things like that, because as these
buildings got added on, the road just became.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Narrower and narrower, right right, right right. And they also
added another feature with a quite large center arch to
add a little bit more support. That version of the
bridge stood for quite some time until eighteen thirty one,
when another new London Bridge was unveiled.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Ah yes, so okay, the old London Bridge is gone.
We're now in the era of the New London Bridge.
This is still not the modern London Bridge. Lots of bridges,
so it's eighteen twenty one. Parliament gets a committee together
and they say, all right, let's look at this bridge.
The bridge is the worse for wear again. It's been
(13:36):
badly damaged during something called the Great Freeze. So they said, look,
it's gonna be worth the time to just build a
completely new bridge. It's going to have to be different
from the other bridges. We need something bigger, better, bolder.
In eighteen twenty four, the committee accepts the plans of
a guy named John Rennie and his bridge design is
(14:00):
erected about one hundred feet to the west of the
old bridge, because that's where the Thames gets pretty narrow.
The river is only about nine hundred feet across at
that point.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah, kind of tapers. So on June fifteenth, eighteen twenty five,
construction begins. It's sort of like a I guess a
ribbon cutting type situation with some luminaries and attendance the
Mayor of London at the time, John Garrett, the old
Duke of York, one of my favorite of the dukes.
And then six years on, William the Fourth and Queen
(14:34):
Adelaide unveil the new London Bridge and the old one
is demolished. So the old one is still standing while
they're building the new one. It's just like over further,
like you said, Ben, to that, you know, reposition, to
that point where the river taper is a bit more.
The old one is still standing. During construction, they knock
down the old one in a big show of you
(14:54):
know whatever, huzzah, and then they unveil the new one
and they go, now we've got new London Bridge.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
And it's instantly super duper busy. Uh, it just gets
busier as the railroad becomes a thing in London and
London Bridge Station opens just south of the bridge, and
pretty soon we see a whole new species of traffic
across the bridge as thousands of people are crossing it
(15:23):
every single day and it becomes a commonplace aspect.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Of the city. But again.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
It's taking a lot of punishment. It's taking a lot
of wear and tear, and the new London Bridge, which
is still not the modern London Bridge, had a bunch
of issues. In nineteen sixty two, the high muckyy MUCKs
and the boffins of London looked at the bridge and said, ah, man,
this thing is literally falling down like that nursery rhyme
(15:53):
we all love. It is sinking into the river because
there's too much traffic for it, literally too much.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, I mean, it's I sort of like the idea
of a foundation of a house can sort of start
to settle in like really negative ways if you're not careful,
and it can actually sink into into the earth.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And that was they didn't want to destroy it. They
wanted to do something with all that history.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
They did. It was at this point part of a
rich legacy for the city of London, So they decided
to uh sell it as some sort of interesting flex
like for like like, Okay, this is an artifact. This
represents all of this history of ingenuity of the good
people of London town. So let's sell it. Let's put
(16:35):
it up for auction and then use the proceeds of
the sale to build a new one. But I gotta wonder, man,
like who thinks this is gonna work? Like who who
is the audience for this? Like who are they trying
to sell this to? Very rich people who discovered oil
most likely guess very eccentric wealthy people maybe or Decay,
(16:58):
you know, Eastern European astocrat who's got an ax to
grind with Western Europe. There are some weird potential customers,
you know, if they if their auction for the whole
bridge didn't work, they can maybe do something where they
sell off pieces of it as memorabilia, like here is
a brick from the Berlin Bridge. Yeah, and that was
(17:19):
one of the people just grabbing it. You know, no
one I don't like sold break Breakston.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
I have pieces I have pieces of the of the
Berlin Wall, which is a weird thing to have. So
fast forward the current or modern London Bridge is constructed.
We're going to bracket the auction for a second.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
We'll get to that.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
But the modern London Bridge is constructed by a guy
named John Maulim and his team works on it from
nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy two. Queen Elizabeth the
Second officially opens the bridge on March seventeenth, nineteen seventy three.
That's the bridge here today.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
And if you're.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Thinking of that really cool iconic bridge that you see
in almost every picture of London, that's not the London Bridge.
That's the Tower Bridge, right.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
So again we will get back to the auction, and
now all of your questions about what kind of weirdo
buys a bridge will be answered. But it is sold
and the proceeds do go to creating this more modern construction,
which is made of concrete and it is nine hundred
and twenty eight feet long. It cost four million pounds,
(18:28):
which is kind of a steal. Seems like a pretty
good deal, and that comes from the City of London's
Bridge House Estates, which is I guess they're the ones
who kind of handled all this bridge, this bridge business.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
And for everyone who is unfamiliar with this very strange,
ridiculous situation. Yes, the City of London is different from
London London. The City of London is a city inside
of London called the City of London. And they've got
a bunch of really weird rules. We did some on
stuff they'll want you to know about it years and
(19:02):
years back.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
So the previous bridge is sort of disassembled, I guess
piece by piece.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, as there as they're it's almost like they're phasing
in one bridge and phasing out the other so that
people can still traverse the river. And we said this, Yes,
there was an auction for the other bridge. It is true, folks,
it was sold. We'll go to Evan Andrews writing for
history dot com. This bridge stood for over one hundred
(19:31):
and thirty years and it just wasn't worth renovating. So
the City of London, when they said we're going to
build a new bridge, we're gonna build a thing that
can deal with automobile traffic. They came up with the
idea of the auction because of a pretty pretty wily
city councilor, Ivan Luckin, who said, hey, you guys, Americans
(19:57):
will buy anything. And in nineteen six eight he went
across the Atlantic, and he started trying to sell a
bridge to strangers, which is the old school like stereotypical grift. Right,
someone says, hey, I'll sell you I own the Brooklyn
Bridge for fifty bucks. You can have it. They might
even give you a certificate or so on. So this
(20:17):
is one of the only real cases of somebody selling
a bridge in a way that was not a grift.
He knew it was gonna be tough, and he leaned
into the history aspect. He told he didn't emphasize the
use or the efficacy of the bridge. He emphasized the history.
You're not buying just a bridge, he said in a
(20:38):
press conference in New York. It is the air to
two thousand years of history, going back to the first
century AD to the time of the Roman Lindinium. And
most people politely declined except for one guy, a businessman
named Robert McCullough.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
That's right, Robert McCullough, indeed, a resident of Missouri, lifelong
resident Missouri, who was an industrialist who had created companies
that sold oil and I was just teased a little
bit earlier, sold oil motors and of course chainsaws. That's
what you do that's the golden triad right there, oil
(21:27):
motors and chainsaws. And he was, as you might imagine,
a bit of a kooky fellow. He was known for
spearheading some pretty out there business ideas which he stood
behind completely. In nineteen sixty three, he bought thousands of
acres of land near Lake Have A Sioux Have a
Sue Have a Sue in Arizona, which is a body
(21:51):
of water that was creative in the Colorado River was dammed,
not like you know, by hell fire, but like by
you know, a process of damming. McCullough then created or
founded a community around the lake called Lake Have a
Sioux City, and he intended to make it sort of
(22:12):
like a resort community, a bit of a you know,
tourist destination. Right. Yeah, but this is a problem.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
So the Lake have Asou community, Lake have Asoux City,
as it's called. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's Arizona,
it's kind of hot. They need something to jush it up.
They need a reason for people to visit in the
first place. And our buddy Robert says, I had this
(22:44):
ridiculous idea of bringing the London Bridge to the Arizona desert,
and he was joking with the folks at the Chicago
Tribune magazine and he said, I needed the bridge, but.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Even if I didn't, I might have bought it anyway.
So wacky. Yeah, he's there, real kooks to that guy.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah, And he talks about how he he talked about
how he essentially got hammered with the authorities from City
of London to try to get a good deal. He said,
we poured an awful lot of scotch try to loosen
them up enough to give us some idea of how
much they wanted. So what is the what is the
(23:26):
actual price he ended up paying.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
I thought you were originally going to go to like
he was getting hammered by the city with like regulations
and rules as to know, he in fact was getting
absolutely wasted with these folks pouring whiskeys and coming up
with crazy ideas and then you know, just you it's
a negotiating tactic, you know, the old social lubricant. He
again was telling the Chicago Tribune that he learned that
(23:49):
the cost of dismantling the bridge was one point two
million dollars American to the folks over in London. So
McCulloch and a busy associate of his who he had
partnered with a fellow named would figure that it would
be not too insulting of an offer if they just
doubled that, right, but also a pretty good deal, you know,
(24:11):
because they're covering the costs of the demolition. Again, it's
not really like I keep seeing them using the word
demolition feels like a little bit of a misnomer. It's
the demolition I think of as being like exploding something
into dust and debris and then you know, using a
glorified industrial broom and dust pant of just get that
stuff away out of there and like bury it or whatever.
(24:33):
But no, they had to dismantle it. So that actually,
once again in terms of like good deals, that seems
like a pretty low price, you know, but a real
demolition probably would have been cheaper.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Right, right, And so he wanted to again put a
personal spin on this. He said, I'll also just add
another sixty thousand US dollars there, one thousand dollars for
each year of my age when the bridge reopens here
in Arizona. So this all together brings the price to
(25:03):
two million, four hundred and sixty thousand dollars and boom.
Robert is officially, when you think about it, the owner
of the world's largest antique because it's you know, it's
the whole bridge. And again that comes from the excellent
article I mentioned earlier, Evan Andrews on history dot Com
how London Bridge ended up in Arizona. As you can see,
(25:25):
fella ridiculous. Historians couldn't give you the title right away.
We had to build up to it.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
How indeed, that is the question, and very carefully because
again we know that the process of you know, dismantling
this bridge was sort of an engineering feat in and
of itself. So now you got to put the thing
back together after, of course shipping it. I wonder if
the cost of shipping it was taken into account. It
seems like it was, since at least in terms of
the purchase price, so that would have been something that
(25:51):
McCullough would have been responsible for. So they had to
like package up each of these bricks, labeling them in
such a way as to make it clear which one
can to which one, so they could maintain the you know,
the structural integrity of the thing. You know, you can't
just these are arched pieces that have to connect, and
it's exactly the right order to create those load bearing
(26:13):
arch structures, right yeah, just so.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
And it sounds like a crazy endeavor, but again there's
a lot of money involved, and people are treating the
bridge and the pieces of the bridge with immense respect.
It is a incredibly meticulous, painstaking disassembly and assembly process.
(26:36):
They do something weird. They ship it, you know, through
the Panama Canal, so it arrives at Long Beach, California,
and there's a convoy of trucks, a fleet of trucks
carrying these crates across the desert, and construction crews are
already kind of figuring out how to modernize the bridge.
They build a hollow core of steel reinforced concrete, and
(27:00):
over that kind of skeleton they they lay these ten
thousand tons of that eighteen hundred's granted, it takes it
takes a while. And they also are getting into some
weird landscaping, like they make an artificial island essentially.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
It's really interesting. I mean, this does seem just just
screams like this is the idea of something of a
mad man. You know. It reminds me of the Erner
Herzog film starring Klauskinski called Fitzgeraldo, where the main character
name of the film, Fitzgeraldo, decides to move an entire
opera house into I believe, the Peruvian jungle. And in
(27:44):
the making of the actual film, there is a making
of it's called I Believe Something of dreams. But they
actually do it. They really do do it. They move
this opera house with cranes and lifts and pulleys and
all this stuff, and it is a thing to behold.
I believe this film was in the mid seventies, and
this is just the only way they would have been
(28:04):
able to do it, also to get it into this
densely populated jungle. So not only is it about a
eccentric person who was doing this, but also the actual
creators of the film were very eccentric in and of themselves.
You know, Herzog is a known interesting gentleman and creative
genius and has lots of really interesting hot takes on
(28:24):
culture and society, and he made that happen. So this
I can't not think about that when we're talking about
moving this bridge.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
And people did call it Rob's folly, mcculla's folly, just
like how they used to clown the guy who purchased
Alaska for the US for quite some time. What was
that Seward's folly? So all told, if you're looking at
the if they were to give him a receipt for
this strange adventure, the tab would run up to seven
(28:53):
million dollars, and that is seven times as much as
Rob had spent buying the land that made up Lake
Havasu City. It wasn't until October tenth, nineteen seventy one,
that London Bridge was ready for its debut in the
United States. He makes this such a big party, such
(29:13):
a big spectacle. You already know the guy. This is
classic Rob. He's got skydivers, fireworks, multiple marching bands, hot
air balloons. He's serving lobster and roast beef, like getting
the lobster to Arizona. Already spare no expense. This guy
is bawling and he serves the roast beef and lobster
(29:34):
because it's the same meal, according to legend, that was
served to King William the Fourth when the bridge originally
opened in eighteen thirty one. The Lord Mayor of London
shows up. He's got his whole shebang on. You know,
his black robes, he's got a sword bearer walking around.
Different celebrities of the day are there. And The New
(29:56):
York Times quoted one British reporter say, it's a super gimmick.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
It's all quite mad.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
It could only happen in America, only in American and
would think of investing that much in something as crazy
as this in a weird way, you guys, it's an
advertisement for the United States.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Oh, one hundred percent, and FastTrack for me really quickly. Fitzgradi.
He doesn't move an opera house. He moves a steamship.
A little more doable undertaking, but absolutely insane to behold
in the film, he wants to build an opera house
in the Peruvian jungle in the Andes. So yeah, this
is a very American undertaking. Ben, This is just kind
(30:35):
of like, you know, the idea of ingenuity despite you know, come, come,
what may you know we're gonna get this done. We're
gonna pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make this happen,
even if it seems like the stupidest idea ever. And
of course there were a lot of people who thought
this was entirely a crackpot game. The you know, like
(30:58):
I said earlier, the people were calling it McColo's folly.
A lot of folks predicted that he and his business
associates would rule the day that they bought this bridge,
and there was there was a funny statement in and
of itself.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah, there was a rumor. It's kind of like anti
anti McCullough propaganda. People would whisper this at dinner parties.
They would say, you know, the Americans didn't think about
what they were getting into. They bought the wrong bridge.
They wanted the Tower Bridge, but they got our old,
(31:33):
crappy London Bridge. And then these guys McCullough and crew
vehemently deny this. They say, no, we did our research,
we know the bridge we're buying. Why would we spend
this much money on the wrong bridge. So that would
be hilarious.
Speaker 4 (31:48):
Would be hilarious, but also kind of who cares at
the end of the day, Like it's it's more about
the the undertaking of doing it of you know, the
Tower Bridge would have been historical as well, not as
maybe quite as historical, but just the undertaking of moving
this thing and transporting it and rebuilding it in a
place that it had no business being nor served any
(32:10):
real function.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
That in and of itself was the whole kind of Uh.
I don't want to use the word grift because this
really wasn't. He's not ripping anybody off per se. He's
just you know, creating kind of a wow factor of like,
you know, a display of absolutely bold, you know, kind
of bravado in doing this thing. So which you ever
bridge it was, I think it probably would have had
(32:32):
roughly the same effect.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Yeah, agreed, And it's very smart too. Just because someone's
eccentric doesn't mean they're dumb. It is exactly what Lake
Havasu City needs. It saves the development because it was
sort of fizzling before, Like he wanted to create this
like resort community, this tourist attraction, it wasn't really working,
and this was Yeah, it's hot, it's arid, it's in
(32:55):
the middle of nowhere. It's tough to convince people to go.
There were only a few hundred flks living there in
the early nineteen sixties. By nineteen seventy four, there were
over ten thousand people there by nineteen seventy five. The
Chamber of Commerce, which has done a great job with
the you know, we're leaning on them as a source.
The Lake Havasu City Chamber of Commerce says this bridge
(33:16):
gets US two million visitors per year.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Wow, that's impressive. Great.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
It worked crazy like a fox, you guys, rob is
crazy like a fox, Wiley like coyote.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Robert McCullough, you know, as we mentioned, he was a
fan of these types of gambits, and he went on
to launch a few others that are kind of interesting.
Standing in nineteen seventy seven, he promoted something called gyro
planes as commuter vehicles. They're sort of like helicopter adjacents.
I don't know, have you seen these ben Do they
(33:51):
even exist or did it kind of not get off
the ground at all.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
They look like, oh, yeah, you know how an El
Camino looks like a car, then a truck that kind
of became a truck at the end. This this looks
like a plane that sort of fell into becoming a helicopter.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Yeah, it looks like the kind of like shuttley thing
you might ride in Tomorrowland at Disney World. It's like
it's definitely intended to be very futuristic in its design.
The autod at home, I can see that. Yeah, it's
it's sort of like a maybe a two or three
passenger vehicle maximum with Okay, yeah, it does seem so
because the body of the thing is not very large. Uh,
(34:31):
and it only has like it looks like, I mean,
don't helicopters have more than two blades? Or is it
just two blades? Is it the same exact orientation as
a helicopter prop.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah, it's the same concept, but helicopter blades can vary,
you know, anywhere from just two all the way up
to like eight, and this one is just two, like
straight across, you know, just a one line and then
it spins and and gives the thing lift. But dud
tape and confidence. That's a that's what a europlane is.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
It does seem like I love the idea of calling
them a europlane. It sounds delicious.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
So spoiler, the flying car or flying transport thing doesn't
work out, But that's how it is. When you're an
idea man, you got to understand that even if ninety
percent of your ideas don't work out, the one big
one can make your legacy, right, It can cement your
(35:28):
place in history. The London Bridge, the London Bridge gambit
works and we know just a little bit more about
the Old London Bridge. It wasn't lost completely to history.
According to Ben Johnson in Remains of the Old London
Bridge for Historic UK, there are lasting remnants of the
(35:51):
old bridge and you can see them built into other
pieces of London architecture. Specifically, Ben Johnson talks about the
tower Saint Magnus the Martyr's Church on the Lower Thames Street.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yes, and one of the foundational archways under the very
tower itself actually came from the old London Bridge that
was dismantled in eighteen thirty one. It was actually originally
the pedestrian entrance onto the bridge, So that piece in
and of itself has an insane amount of history. Just
(36:23):
think about all of the people on foot that would
have passed under that arch.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
That's one of the cool things about London. Last time
I was there, just walking around, I was in the
City of London. Actually I was walking toward this restaurant
that's run by one of my absolute favorite chefs in
the world, is called Saint John's. The chef's name is
Fergus Henderson. So I was walking in that direction and
(36:49):
it it just happened by these plaques about like things
that are ancient to me as an American. You know,
it's crazy how close you can be to history in London.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
And you can get.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Close to history too if you travel to Arizona. If
you say I don't want to spring for a ticket
for playing flight across the Atlantic, well not's worry, because
we have a little bit of London at home. You
can go to Lake Havasu today and you can see
Rob McCullough's folly. It's still there. It's super cool, and honestly,
(37:29):
I think we should go. It's right on the border
of California in Arizona. What do you think we get
accounting to pay for that accounting?
Speaker 2 (37:37):
We can just you know, it's better to ask for
forgiveness than permission. So I say, let's go for this
guy McCulloch man. He reminds I may have mentioned this
on the show before, but I used to work for
a fellow his name, I will not say, not a
particularly awesome guy. He's not a great dude to work with,
and sometimes eccentrics can be a little bit difficult as
human beings. But he had all of these kind of
(37:59):
little Piamusky kind of ideas, and he would talk about them.
He would, you know, create kind of like it was
a marketing company, so he would create kind of like
fake logos and marketing around them, and then they would fizzle.
He wouldn't actually do anything with them. But one of them,
I swear he had his finger on the pulse. Right
before this thing just really became real with no participation
from him, he said, what if we had I came
up with, what if we had this like additive for
(38:20):
water that was like a powder and it made it
flavored and gave it like extra minerals and electrolytes, and
we're gonna call it H two woe. And I was like, man,
that's kind of smart. And nothing happened with it, and
now that stuff is everywhere. So just goes to show
if you have what seemed like a pie in the
sky idea, sometimes you're just ahead of the curve, you know,
(38:42):
and definitely do your best to follow your dream. Just
don't like stomp people into the dirt in the process.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
And tell us what kind of bridges you would like
to sell. Kidding, kidding, but this is this is great.
This is a cool piece of truly ridiculous history. And
they gotta say, I've got a lot of respect for
Rob McCullough. I love people with big ideas and I
can't believe he pulled it off. Congratulations to you, sir,
and thanks as always to our super producer mister Max Williams.
(39:10):
Thanks to Alex Williams. Thanks to Jonathan Strickland. We should
try to sell Jonathan a bridge.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Oh yeah, for sure, I think he'd be here. You know,
he has this the kind of Anglo file that if
given the appropriate resources, he might well buy a bridge
or portion of a bridge that contained pieces of English history.
Also huge thanks to Christopher haciotis here in spirit, Eves,
Jeff Coates, and you've Ben and thanks to you Noel.
(39:39):
Thanks to you Max.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Let's head off to London or Arizona. What's the difference
really now?
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Yeah, when you think about it, you close your eyes.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where ever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the
(00:27):
show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer, Max.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Williams Bally who indeed and your NOL.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
I'm Ben, And it turns out that since the three
of us reside here in the United States, we love traveling,
but it can be a little bit expensive. You know,
you have to either go over the Pacific or over
the Atlantic. It's weird when you think of how so
many other countries are so much closer to each other.
(01:01):
Like you can wake up in Europe and you can
drive through you know, four countries. You can see the
world pretty easily. But today's episode, NOL, we're learning about
some folks who decided to take Europe to the States.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You see the world right here at home, you know,
I mean, we do. We have states that are different
enough culturally, I suppose, but usually you have to trek
quite a bit farther than you do in Europe to
see a real change in that culture in that landscape.
We live on the East Coast, and today we're talking
about the West Coast, which is basically kind of feels
(01:38):
in some ways like going to another country. Things are
very different. The land hits a little different, a little
rockier terrain. You got your deserts, you got your snow
capped mountains and all of that good stuff, and you
got your your lake cities as well. California is lousy
with variations in.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Terrain, and today's episode features a nursery rhyme that I
think is familiar to pretty much everybody in the English
speaking world. London Bridge is falling down. It's a bit
of an earworm. We don't have to sing it because
it'll get.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
To you, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down,
My Fair Lady. Not to be confused with the Rogers
and Hammerstein musical My Fair Lady, which is quite a
banger in and of itself, Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle
and all of that. Pretty sure, that's where the name
comes from, the old nursery rhyme of Yesteryear, which I
believe dates back to the Middle Ages. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, it's a little bit misleading too as a nursery rhyme,
because it seems to imply that there is only one
London Bridge that could not be further from the truth.
There has been some sort of bridge going across the
Thames for nearly two thousand years and we're getting that
actually from the Lake Havisty Area Chamber of Commerce. Yeah,
(03:04):
we'll just play at that seat.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
We'll get back to that far.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
The very first London bridge was built by Roman forces
way way back in forty three CE, and throughout the history,
thanks to our research associate mister Max Williams, there have
been multiple bridges again built across the Thames, and not
all of them stayed in London.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Yeah, I mean this is no shade on the Romans.
I mean the Romans kind of were first to market
with bridge tech, you know, with their arches and all
of that. They knew how to build themselves a bridge.
No better way to ford a river or a stream
or a lake than with a bridge, so you kind
of got to have them. But then over time, you know,
wear and tear sets in and then you got to
(03:51):
update some things, and sometimes the whole thing just kind
of comes tumbling and or falling down. So we'll get
to that eventually. But McGill University had this to say
on the history of the London bridges. London Bridge is
a bridge in London, England, over the Thames, between the
City of London and Southwark Southwark. I don't know, let's
(04:13):
have some some Brits right in and tell us how
we got that one wrong. I think it's it's got
to be Southwark. That seems right. Sure, yeah, close enough
for government work, right. But as you pointed up, in
multiple bridges throughout history have been referred to as the
titular London Bridge. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah, kind of like how multiple planes are Air Force
one if the president'saw on them. So let's talk about
this very first bridge again, according to the Lake Havistou
area Chambers, we'll get to it. The first the first bridge,
the one built by the Romans, was a pontoon bridge,
(04:50):
so they had a row of boats that were anchored
in the river and there were planks laid across the boats.
They may have used ferry boats as well. And the
the next record we have of a bridge in this
area in London is it's weird. It's a mention in
a very strange story in nine eight four CE, a
(05:13):
widowed woman and her son are caught driving quote pins
into the image of a man.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, did they draw the image. Did they scrawl it
into the dirt? Unclear, but there was a woman at
the time was thought to be a witch, right, definitely,
some dark forces potentially trying to be manipulated there, and
as you tend to do in these days with folks
suspected of witchcraft, they're killed, they're drowned. Well, the intent
(05:44):
was to drown the both of them. The woman unfortunately
perishes in the Thames, while her son is able to escape.
It always reminds me of that scene in Monty Python
The Holy Grail where they talk about how to figure
out if someone's a witch. You got it? What you know?
See if they're made of wood, and wood floats and
if they sink, then they're not made of wood and
(06:05):
therefore not a witch. But then they also drown anyway,
it's a good film.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
In ten fourteen, the Danish forces are holding London and
we've got some returning cameos from previous episodes. The Saxons
under King Ethel read the Unready, I love that name.
They teamed up with some Vikings who were led by
King Oloff from Norway. Together these forces sailed up the
Thames to attack the London Bridge and attempt to divide
(06:34):
the Danish forces. But these Danish forces protected their ships
with thatched roofs pulled from cottages that stood on or
around the bridge. These guys rode up under the bridge,
they put their cables around the piles that supported it,
you know, basically the post going into the river, and
then they rode off at full speed. They pulled a
(06:55):
bridge heist. London Bridge fell down.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I gotta say, though, I gotta take a second and
to talk about ethel Red the Unready. What a nickname
that is? What did he do to deserve that? I mean,
you know you've got your you know, Eric the Red,
and this guy is the Unready. I have the check.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
I'm not sure if he's the one that got shot
by a crossbow while on the toilet, but he might
have had.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
There's one.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
There's one of these guys in this in that family
line who died that way. It's a little too dark
for me to write about in a ridiculous thrill desk,
but what might be it?
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Now? The whole shot. No spoilers for for the Game
of Thrones TV series or the Song of Ice and Fire,
but there is a very important character in the series
that gets shot by a crossbow while I'm the toilet.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
And some in the novels as well. Okay, so this
moment where these forces, these united forces pull down the bridge.
This leads to the London Bridge from the nursery rhyme.
You can go ahead and call that one the old
London Bridge. In eleven seven six, the first Stone Bridge
(08:03):
is built. It's kind of a ep you could say,
by a guy named Peter of Coal Church, and it
takes a while to build. It's not done until twelve
oh nine, and so we're looking at what thirty three
years to build, and it was a worthwhile investment. It
lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years afterwards.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Oh yeah, no big battle. Wolf's going to huff and
puff and blow that one down. Stone was king in
those days of construction. It had a road that was
twenty feet wide and three hundred yards long. Again, we're
back to sort of some construction details here. Gothic style
architecture involving twenty art shows that we now are very
(08:43):
good at bearing loads. There was also a drawbridge, it
wouldn't draw bridge that could allow kind of the way
it would disconnect in the middle. It could be let
out and then ships could pass under it, and it
also could be opened up to keep invaders from crossing.
This was a very important strategic militaristic use, but also
(09:03):
very practical just in terms of trade.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
And this bridge became part of the city, right. You
would have houses, you would have shops built on the
actual bridge, and it didn't take long for the whole
thing to be covered with buildings. It was functionally a
street across the river.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
Also, to jump back in here, it was Edmund Ironside
who got shot on the toilet by crossbow who was
unready sun ah.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
There is there, it is love it.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
In twelve twelve a disaster occurred. A bunch of people
were on the bridge and they got caught between two fires.
The fire code as we understand it in the modern
world was not a thing back in the twelve hundreds.
There's a thing called the stone Gatehouse on the bridge
and it's roof these poles on it, and this feels
(10:03):
like a pretty brutal practice, but people would put the
heads of traders on these poles t R a I
t o rs. Not just traders, not just like you know,
avid collectors of coins or something. No, yeah, this is
like you know the old head on the pike routine
to deter others from crossing, you know those in Power
(10:26):
and Max. You've found this little twisted fact here that
they actually dug up the body of Oliver Cromwell and
decapitated his dead body and stuck that bad boy up
on one of these pikes. Yeah, it was a it
was a continuing practice. It was very it was a
very popular fad for quite some time, and luckily it's
(10:49):
not a fad that London is currently into. So back
to these fires, disaster is the right word. They could
absolutely spread very quickly through different buildings because of the
material used to construct them. Let us remember the bridge's stone,
but a lot of the buildings built on the bridge
are wood and they're very close together. Again, there's no
(11:09):
such thing as fire coat, so lots of people can
die very easily, and this happens repeatedly. If we fast
forward to sixteen twenty three, there is another fire on
the bridge. A maid servant leaves a pail of ashes
under some wooden stairs. Unfortunately, the environment is such that
this causes a fire on the stairs in the blink
(11:30):
of an eye, very quickly. Forty three houses are destroyed.
A lot of the shops are burned beyond repair, like
they're going to be teardowns, and people start moving away
from the bridge.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
It's kind of going downhill, you know. The ashes detail
made me think of another nursery rhyme, Ring around the
Rosy pocket full of posy ashes. Ashes. We all fall down,
as you know, as a reference to the plague. But
if you want to do a little mashup of these,
you could have the ashes as a detail in the
old my Fair Lady rhyme caused this one to fall
down as well.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
And it's funny that you mentioned that because according to Snopes,
Ring around the Rosie is not about the Black plague,
which was I thought that for such a such a
long time. But please check out the neat little article
on Snopes by David Michelson about Ring Around the Rosie
and maybe we do a nursery rhymes episode two.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
There's so many are interesting and quite dark. Yeah, no
doubt so. After the kind of tear down situation, the
bridge was actually widened possibly, I don't know what you
guys think, but maybe to give a little bit more
space in between these these these buildings. Some of the
fire wouldn't spread quite so quickly.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think also
they just needed to keep the bridge actually navigable for
you know, carriages and things like that, because as these
buildings got added on, the road just became.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Narrower and narrower, right right, right right. And they also
added another feature with a quite large center arch to
add a little bit more support. That version of the
bridge stood for quite some time until eighteen thirty one,
when another new London Bridge was unveiled.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Ah yes, so okay, the old London Bridge is gone.
We're now in the era of the New London Bridge.
This is still not the modern London Bridge. Lots of bridges,
so it's eighteen twenty one. Parliament gets a committee together
and they say, all right, let's look at this bridge.
The bridge is the worse for wear again. It's been
(13:36):
badly damaged during something called the Great Freeze. So they said, look,
it's gonna be worth the time to just build a
completely new bridge. It's going to have to be different
from the other bridges. We need something bigger, better, bolder.
In eighteen twenty four, the committee accepts the plans of
a guy named John Rennie and his bridge design is
(14:00):
erected about one hundred feet to the west of the
old bridge, because that's where the Thames gets pretty narrow.
The river is only about nine hundred feet across at
that point.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah, kind of tapers. So on June fifteenth, eighteen twenty five,
construction begins. It's sort of like a I guess a
ribbon cutting type situation with some luminaries and attendance the
Mayor of London at the time, John Garrett, the old
Duke of York, one of my favorite of the dukes.
And then six years on, William the Fourth and Queen
(14:34):
Adelaide unveil the new London Bridge and the old one
is demolished. So the old one is still standing while
they're building the new one. It's just like over further,
like you said, Ben, to that, you know, reposition, to
that point where the river taper is a bit more.
The old one is still standing. During construction, they knock
down the old one in a big show of you
(14:54):
know whatever, huzzah, and then they unveil the new one
and they go, now we've got new London Bridge.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
And it's instantly super duper busy. Uh, it just gets
busier as the railroad becomes a thing in London and
London Bridge Station opens just south of the bridge, and
pretty soon we see a whole new species of traffic
across the bridge as thousands of people are crossing it
(15:23):
every single day and it becomes a commonplace aspect.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Of the city. But again.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
It's taking a lot of punishment. It's taking a lot
of wear and tear, and the new London Bridge, which
is still not the modern London Bridge, had a bunch
of issues. In nineteen sixty two, the high muckyy MUCKs
and the boffins of London looked at the bridge and said, ah, man,
this thing is literally falling down like that nursery rhyme
(15:53):
we all love. It is sinking into the river because
there's too much traffic for it, literally too much.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, I mean, it's I sort of like the idea
of a foundation of a house can sort of start
to settle in like really negative ways if you're not careful,
and it can actually sink into into the earth.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And that was they didn't want to destroy it. They
wanted to do something with all that history.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
They did. It was at this point part of a
rich legacy for the city of London, So they decided
to uh sell it as some sort of interesting flex
like for like like, Okay, this is an artifact. This
represents all of this history of ingenuity of the good
people of London town. So let's sell it. Let's put
(16:35):
it up for auction and then use the proceeds of
the sale to build a new one. But I gotta wonder, man,
like who thinks this is gonna work? Like who who
is the audience for this? Like who are they trying
to sell this to? Very rich people who discovered oil
most likely guess very eccentric wealthy people maybe or Decay,
(16:58):
you know, Eastern European astocrat who's got an ax to
grind with Western Europe. There are some weird potential customers,
you know, if they if their auction for the whole
bridge didn't work, they can maybe do something where they
sell off pieces of it as memorabilia, like here is
a brick from the Berlin Bridge. Yeah, and that was
(17:19):
one of the people just grabbing it. You know, no
one I don't like sold break Breakston.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
I have pieces I have pieces of the of the
Berlin Wall, which is a weird thing to have. So
fast forward the current or modern London Bridge is constructed.
We're going to bracket the auction for a second.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
We'll get to that.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
But the modern London Bridge is constructed by a guy
named John Maulim and his team works on it from
nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy two. Queen Elizabeth the
Second officially opens the bridge on March seventeenth, nineteen seventy three.
That's the bridge here today.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
And if you're.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Thinking of that really cool iconic bridge that you see
in almost every picture of London, that's not the London Bridge.
That's the Tower Bridge, right.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
So again we will get back to the auction, and
now all of your questions about what kind of weirdo
buys a bridge will be answered. But it is sold
and the proceeds do go to creating this more modern construction,
which is made of concrete and it is nine hundred
and twenty eight feet long. It cost four million pounds,
(18:28):
which is kind of a steal. Seems like a pretty
good deal, and that comes from the City of London's
Bridge House Estates, which is I guess they're the ones
who kind of handled all this bridge, this bridge business.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
And for everyone who is unfamiliar with this very strange,
ridiculous situation. Yes, the City of London is different from
London London. The City of London is a city inside
of London called the City of London. And they've got
a bunch of really weird rules. We did some on
stuff they'll want you to know about it years and
(19:02):
years back.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
So the previous bridge is sort of disassembled, I guess
piece by piece.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, as there as they're it's almost like they're phasing
in one bridge and phasing out the other so that
people can still traverse the river. And we said this, Yes,
there was an auction for the other bridge. It is true, folks,
it was sold. We'll go to Evan Andrews writing for
history dot com. This bridge stood for over one hundred
(19:31):
and thirty years and it just wasn't worth renovating. So
the City of London, when they said we're going to
build a new bridge, we're gonna build a thing that
can deal with automobile traffic. They came up with the
idea of the auction because of a pretty pretty wily
city councilor, Ivan Luckin, who said, hey, you guys, Americans
(19:57):
will buy anything. And in nineteen six eight he went
across the Atlantic, and he started trying to sell a
bridge to strangers, which is the old school like stereotypical grift. Right,
someone says, hey, I'll sell you I own the Brooklyn
Bridge for fifty bucks. You can have it. They might
even give you a certificate or so on. So this
(20:17):
is one of the only real cases of somebody selling
a bridge in a way that was not a grift.
He knew it was gonna be tough, and he leaned
into the history aspect. He told he didn't emphasize the
use or the efficacy of the bridge. He emphasized the history.
You're not buying just a bridge, he said in a
(20:38):
press conference in New York. It is the air to
two thousand years of history, going back to the first
century AD to the time of the Roman Lindinium. And
most people politely declined except for one guy, a businessman
named Robert McCullough.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
That's right, Robert McCullough, indeed, a resident of Missouri, lifelong
resident Missouri, who was an industrialist who had created companies
that sold oil and I was just teased a little
bit earlier, sold oil motors and of course chainsaws. That's
what you do that's the golden triad right there, oil
(21:27):
motors and chainsaws. And he was, as you might imagine,
a bit of a kooky fellow. He was known for
spearheading some pretty out there business ideas which he stood
behind completely. In nineteen sixty three, he bought thousands of
acres of land near Lake Have A Sioux Have a
Sue Have a Sue in Arizona, which is a body
(21:51):
of water that was creative in the Colorado River was dammed,
not like you know, by hell fire, but like by
you know, a process of damming. McCullough then created or
founded a community around the lake called Lake Have a
Sioux City, and he intended to make it sort of
(22:12):
like a resort community, a bit of a you know,
tourist destination. Right. Yeah, but this is a problem.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
So the Lake have Asou community, Lake have Asoux City,
as it's called. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's Arizona,
it's kind of hot. They need something to jush it up.
They need a reason for people to visit in the
first place. And our buddy Robert says, I had this
(22:44):
ridiculous idea of bringing the London Bridge to the Arizona desert,
and he was joking with the folks at the Chicago
Tribune magazine and he said, I needed the bridge, but.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Even if I didn't, I might have bought it anyway.
So wacky. Yeah, he's there, real kooks to that guy.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah, And he talks about how he he talked about
how he essentially got hammered with the authorities from City
of London to try to get a good deal. He said,
we poured an awful lot of scotch try to loosen
them up enough to give us some idea of how
much they wanted. So what is the what is the
(23:26):
actual price he ended up paying.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
I thought you were originally going to go to like
he was getting hammered by the city with like regulations
and rules as to know, he in fact was getting
absolutely wasted with these folks pouring whiskeys and coming up
with crazy ideas and then you know, just you it's
a negotiating tactic, you know, the old social lubricant. He
again was telling the Chicago Tribune that he learned that
(23:49):
the cost of dismantling the bridge was one point two
million dollars American to the folks over in London. So
McCulloch and a busy associate of his who he had
partnered with a fellow named would figure that it would
be not too insulting of an offer if they just
doubled that, right, but also a pretty good deal, you know,
(24:11):
because they're covering the costs of the demolition. Again, it's
not really like I keep seeing them using the word
demolition feels like a little bit of a misnomer. It's
the demolition I think of as being like exploding something
into dust and debris and then you know, using a
glorified industrial broom and dust pant of just get that
stuff away out of there and like bury it or whatever.
(24:33):
But no, they had to dismantle it. So that actually,
once again in terms of like good deals, that seems
like a pretty low price, you know, but a real
demolition probably would have been cheaper.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Right, right, And so he wanted to again put a
personal spin on this. He said, I'll also just add
another sixty thousand US dollars there, one thousand dollars for
each year of my age when the bridge reopens here
in Arizona. So this all together brings the price to
(25:03):
two million, four hundred and sixty thousand dollars and boom.
Robert is officially, when you think about it, the owner
of the world's largest antique because it's you know, it's
the whole bridge. And again that comes from the excellent
article I mentioned earlier, Evan Andrews on history dot Com
how London Bridge ended up in Arizona. As you can see,
(25:25):
fella ridiculous. Historians couldn't give you the title right away.
We had to build up to it.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
How indeed, that is the question, and very carefully because
again we know that the process of you know, dismantling
this bridge was sort of an engineering feat in and
of itself. So now you got to put the thing
back together after, of course shipping it. I wonder if
the cost of shipping it was taken into account. It
seems like it was, since at least in terms of
the purchase price, so that would have been something that
(25:51):
McCullough would have been responsible for. So they had to
like package up each of these bricks, labeling them in
such a way as to make it clear which one
can to which one, so they could maintain the you know,
the structural integrity of the thing. You know, you can't
just these are arched pieces that have to connect, and
it's exactly the right order to create those load bearing
(26:13):
arch structures, right yeah, just so.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
And it sounds like a crazy endeavor, but again there's
a lot of money involved, and people are treating the
bridge and the pieces of the bridge with immense respect.
It is a incredibly meticulous, painstaking disassembly and assembly process.
(26:36):
They do something weird. They ship it, you know, through
the Panama Canal, so it arrives at Long Beach, California,
and there's a convoy of trucks, a fleet of trucks
carrying these crates across the desert, and construction crews are
already kind of figuring out how to modernize the bridge.
They build a hollow core of steel reinforced concrete, and
(27:00):
over that kind of skeleton they they lay these ten
thousand tons of that eighteen hundred's granted, it takes it
takes a while. And they also are getting into some
weird landscaping, like they make an artificial island essentially.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
It's really interesting. I mean, this does seem just just
screams like this is the idea of something of a
mad man. You know. It reminds me of the Erner
Herzog film starring Klauskinski called Fitzgeraldo, where the main character
name of the film, Fitzgeraldo, decides to move an entire
opera house into I believe, the Peruvian jungle. And in
(27:44):
the making of the actual film, there is a making
of it's called I Believe Something of dreams. But they
actually do it. They really do do it. They move
this opera house with cranes and lifts and pulleys and
all this stuff, and it is a thing to behold.
I believe this film was in the mid seventies, and
this is just the only way they would have been
(28:04):
able to do it, also to get it into this
densely populated jungle. So not only is it about a
eccentric person who was doing this, but also the actual
creators of the film were very eccentric in and of themselves.
You know, Herzog is a known interesting gentleman and creative
genius and has lots of really interesting hot takes on
(28:24):
culture and society, and he made that happen. So this
I can't not think about that when we're talking about
moving this bridge.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
And people did call it Rob's folly, mcculla's folly, just
like how they used to clown the guy who purchased
Alaska for the US for quite some time. What was
that Seward's folly? So all told, if you're looking at
the if they were to give him a receipt for
this strange adventure, the tab would run up to seven
(28:53):
million dollars, and that is seven times as much as
Rob had spent buying the land that made up Lake
Havasu City. It wasn't until October tenth, nineteen seventy one,
that London Bridge was ready for its debut in the
United States. He makes this such a big party, such
(29:13):
a big spectacle. You already know the guy. This is
classic Rob. He's got skydivers, fireworks, multiple marching bands, hot
air balloons. He's serving lobster and roast beef, like getting
the lobster to Arizona. Already spare no expense. This guy
is bawling and he serves the roast beef and lobster
(29:34):
because it's the same meal, according to legend, that was
served to King William the Fourth when the bridge originally
opened in eighteen thirty one. The Lord Mayor of London
shows up. He's got his whole shebang on. You know,
his black robes, he's got a sword bearer walking around.
Different celebrities of the day are there. And The New
(29:56):
York Times quoted one British reporter say, it's a super gimmick.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
It's all quite mad.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
It could only happen in America, only in American and
would think of investing that much in something as crazy
as this in a weird way, you guys, it's an
advertisement for the United States.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Oh, one hundred percent, and FastTrack for me really quickly. Fitzgradi.
He doesn't move an opera house. He moves a steamship.
A little more doable undertaking, but absolutely insane to behold
in the film, he wants to build an opera house
in the Peruvian jungle in the Andes. So yeah, this
is a very American undertaking. Ben, This is just kind
(30:35):
of like, you know, the idea of ingenuity despite you know, come, come,
what may you know we're gonna get this done. We're
gonna pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make this happen,
even if it seems like the stupidest idea ever. And
of course there were a lot of people who thought
this was entirely a crackpot game. The you know, like
(30:58):
I said earlier, the people were calling it McColo's folly.
A lot of folks predicted that he and his business
associates would rule the day that they bought this bridge,
and there was there was a funny statement in and
of itself.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Yeah, there was a rumor. It's kind of like anti
anti McCullough propaganda. People would whisper this at dinner parties.
They would say, you know, the Americans didn't think about
what they were getting into. They bought the wrong bridge.
They wanted the Tower Bridge, but they got our old,
(31:33):
crappy London Bridge. And then these guys McCullough and crew
vehemently deny this. They say, no, we did our research,
we know the bridge we're buying. Why would we spend
this much money on the wrong bridge. So that would
be hilarious.
Speaker 4 (31:48):
Would be hilarious, but also kind of who cares at
the end of the day, Like it's it's more about
the the undertaking of doing it of you know, the
Tower Bridge would have been historical as well, not as
maybe quite as historical, but just the undertaking of moving
this thing and transporting it and rebuilding it in a
place that it had no business being nor served any
(32:10):
real function.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
That in and of itself was the whole kind of Uh.
I don't want to use the word grift because this
really wasn't. He's not ripping anybody off per se. He's
just you know, creating kind of a wow factor of like,
you know, a display of absolutely bold, you know, kind
of bravado in doing this thing. So which you ever
bridge it was, I think it probably would have had
(32:32):
roughly the same effect.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Yeah, agreed, And it's very smart too. Just because someone's
eccentric doesn't mean they're dumb. It is exactly what Lake
Havasu City needs. It saves the development because it was
sort of fizzling before, Like he wanted to create this
like resort community, this tourist attraction, it wasn't really working,
and this was Yeah, it's hot, it's arid, it's in
(32:55):
the middle of nowhere. It's tough to convince people to go.
There were only a few hundred flks living there in
the early nineteen sixties. By nineteen seventy four, there were
over ten thousand people there by nineteen seventy five. The
Chamber of Commerce, which has done a great job with
the you know, we're leaning on them as a source.
The Lake Havasu City Chamber of Commerce says this bridge
(33:16):
gets US two million visitors per year.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Wow, that's impressive. Great.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
It worked crazy like a fox, you guys, rob is
crazy like a fox, Wiley like coyote.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Robert McCullough, you know, as we mentioned, he was a
fan of these types of gambits, and he went on
to launch a few others that are kind of interesting.
Standing in nineteen seventy seven, he promoted something called gyro
planes as commuter vehicles. They're sort of like helicopter adjacents.
I don't know, have you seen these ben Do they
(33:51):
even exist or did it kind of not get off
the ground at all.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
They look like, oh, yeah, you know how an El
Camino looks like a car, then a truck that kind
of became a truck at the end. This this looks
like a plane that sort of fell into becoming a helicopter.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Yeah, it looks like the kind of like shuttley thing
you might ride in Tomorrowland at Disney World. It's like
it's definitely intended to be very futuristic in its design.
The autod at home, I can see that. Yeah, it's
it's sort of like a maybe a two or three
passenger vehicle maximum with Okay, yeah, it does seem so
because the body of the thing is not very large. Uh,
(34:31):
and it only has like it looks like, I mean,
don't helicopters have more than two blades? Or is it
just two blades? Is it the same exact orientation as
a helicopter prop.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah, it's the same concept, but helicopter blades can vary,
you know, anywhere from just two all the way up
to like eight, and this one is just two, like
straight across, you know, just a one line and then
it spins and and gives the thing lift. But dud
tape and confidence. That's a that's what a europlane is.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
It does seem like I love the idea of calling
them a europlane. It sounds delicious.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
So spoiler, the flying car or flying transport thing doesn't
work out, But that's how it is. When you're an
idea man, you got to understand that even if ninety
percent of your ideas don't work out, the one big
one can make your legacy, right, It can cement your
(35:28):
place in history. The London Bridge, the London Bridge gambit
works and we know just a little bit more about
the Old London Bridge. It wasn't lost completely to history.
According to Ben Johnson in Remains of the Old London
Bridge for Historic UK, there are lasting remnants of the
(35:51):
old bridge and you can see them built into other
pieces of London architecture. Specifically, Ben Johnson talks about the
tower Saint Magnus the Martyr's Church on the Lower Thames Street.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yes, and one of the foundational archways under the very
tower itself actually came from the old London Bridge that
was dismantled in eighteen thirty one. It was actually originally
the pedestrian entrance onto the bridge, So that piece in
and of itself has an insane amount of history. Just
(36:23):
think about all of the people on foot that would
have passed under that arch.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
That's one of the cool things about London. Last time
I was there, just walking around, I was in the
City of London. Actually I was walking toward this restaurant
that's run by one of my absolute favorite chefs in
the world, is called Saint John's. The chef's name is
Fergus Henderson. So I was walking in that direction and
(36:49):
it it just happened by these plaques about like things
that are ancient to me as an American. You know,
it's crazy how close you can be to history in London.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
And you can get.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Close to history too if you travel to Arizona. If
you say I don't want to spring for a ticket
for playing flight across the Atlantic, well not's worry, because
we have a little bit of London at home. You
can go to Lake Havasu today and you can see
Rob McCullough's folly. It's still there. It's super cool, and honestly,
(37:29):
I think we should go. It's right on the border
of California in Arizona. What do you think we get
accounting to pay for that accounting?
Speaker 2 (37:37):
We can just you know, it's better to ask for
forgiveness than permission. So I say, let's go for this
guy McCulloch man. He reminds I may have mentioned this
on the show before, but I used to work for
a fellow his name, I will not say, not a
particularly awesome guy. He's not a great dude to work with,
and sometimes eccentrics can be a little bit difficult as
human beings. But he had all of these kind of
(37:59):
little Piamusky kind of ideas, and he would talk about them.
He would, you know, create kind of like it was
a marketing company, so he would create kind of like
fake logos and marketing around them, and then they would fizzle.
He wouldn't actually do anything with them. But one of them,
I swear he had his finger on the pulse. Right
before this thing just really became real with no participation
from him, he said, what if we had I came
up with, what if we had this like additive for
(38:20):
water that was like a powder and it made it
flavored and gave it like extra minerals and electrolytes, and
we're gonna call it H two woe. And I was like, man,
that's kind of smart. And nothing happened with it, and
now that stuff is everywhere. So just goes to show
if you have what seemed like a pie in the
sky idea, sometimes you're just ahead of the curve, you know,
(38:42):
and definitely do your best to follow your dream. Just
don't like stomp people into the dirt in the process.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
And tell us what kind of bridges you would like
to sell. Kidding, kidding, but this is this is great.
This is a cool piece of truly ridiculous history. And
they gotta say, I've got a lot of respect for
Rob McCullough. I love people with big ideas and I
can't believe he pulled it off. Congratulations to you, sir,
and thanks as always to our super producer mister Max Williams.
(39:10):
Thanks to Alex Williams. Thanks to Jonathan Strickland. We should
try to sell Jonathan a bridge.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Oh yeah, for sure, I think he'd be here. You know,
he has this the kind of Anglo file that if
given the appropriate resources, he might well buy a bridge
or portion of a bridge that contained pieces of English history.
Also huge thanks to Christopher haciotis here in spirit, Eves,
Jeff Coates, and you've Ben and thanks to you Noel.
(39:39):
Thanks to you Max.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Let's head off to London or Arizona. What's the difference
really now?
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Yeah, when you think about it, you close your eyes.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where ever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
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Noel Brown
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