Crab Bag, Part 3: The Crab is a Lonely Hunter

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe dig into a grab bag of crab-related science and culture topics…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
our crab Bag twenty twenty six series. This is a
kind of chef salad of all things crab.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Now.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
We were just out for a week in between when
we recorded the last couple of crab episodes, and this
one's a rob Did anything krabby happen to you in
the past week.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Well, let's see. Put me on the spot here. I
spent my time in Arizona, so I didn't really see
any actual crabs. But I did go to the Musical
Instrument Museum in Phoenix, and I did see some musical
instruments that were shaped like crabs, which makes sense for
a number of reasons. The big one that we're going
to keep coming back to in this series. It's just

(00:55):
that crabs are fascinating, just their basic body shape, their movements.
We can't get enough of them, and we want to
reproduce their bodies in our art and in our tools.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
This is interesting. I didn't know this would connect to
a major theme of today's episode, which is ye crab
inspired technology. So in the previous two episodes of this
series we talked about, first the sixteenth century legend of
the miracle crab, associated with the Catholic missionary figure Saint

(01:28):
Francis Xavier. This was a crab said to have carried
a lost crucifix out out of the ocean, aloft in
its claws and back to its original owner, the Saint
Francis Xavior I just mentioned. We talked a bit about
the loose connection between that story and a real species
known as the crucifix crab, getting a bit into the

(01:51):
question of it's what this crab's cross shaped markings are
probably four biologically speaking. This led in the second episode
we did into a broader discussion of object carrying behavior
in crabs, something that actually does happen quite a bit
in nature. Different forms of object carrying in different crab lineages,

(02:13):
none of them really matched what we find in the
miracle story. The crabs that carry things usually do so
on their backs or with their back legs, rather than
in their primary clause. The main exception to this generalization
is the boxer crab, which does carry things in its
main clause, but those things tend to be living anemonies,

(02:34):
which they use for feeding in defense, not inanimate objects.
We also talked about a type of burrowing crab lineage
known as the frog crabs. This includes the species Ranina ranina,
and these crabs have gone through an unusual evolutionary pattern
you might call decarsonization or uncrabification, becoming less like their

(02:56):
crab cousins and a bit more like their lobster shaped ands,
with a front to back elongated body. They don't regain
the long, muscular lobster swimming tail, but they do have
a longer body and a tendency to move forward and
backward rather than side to side and rob correct me
if I'm wrong. I think the idea was this is

(03:16):
this elongation front to back of the body is probably
related to the frog crabs tendency to be backwards burrowing species.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
That is the reason for it. Yeah. Yeah, It just
goes to show once more, with evolution the card is
always subject to change.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah yeah, yeah. And there really is no forward or
backward in evolution. There's just all different directions. It's like space,
there's no upper down. We also talked briefly about some
older reports of a very interesting crab shaped beast in
the sorcery traditions of the London people of Zambia. This
creature is known as the Nkala, which was described as

(03:54):
being a four foot wide crab with two heads, one
head front and one head back and some characteristics of
a hippopotamus. I think at least one of the heads
is said to be like that of a hippopotamus, and
this creature was said to attack a person by eating
their shadow. Very interesting. We also talked a bit about
the phenomenon of seeing faces in crab bodies, and of

(04:17):
course we talked about crab inspired wrestling acts.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, very briefly, very briefly.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
And so we're back today to talk crabs once again.
So Rob, if you don't mind, I'm going to kick
things off today by talking about a weird connection between
a type of crab, not necessarily a true crab, not
a bracky urine crab, but a crab by common convention
as an idea for biomimicry, a sort of steampunk crab machine.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Crab war machines. Right. I think this will be exciting
for a lot of our listeners because in some areas
areas of science fiction particularly sci fi warfare such as
your Warhammer forty thousands. You end up you end up
with a lot of crab based designs for big or
small stalking machines or some sort of mechs that end

(05:09):
up looking like crabs, because again, we just were so
fascinated with a design, and when we start imagining fantastic
machines of war, we think of the crab because it
looks like a little machine of war to optize.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
It looks dangerous, it looks like it means business, and
it's yeah, something that maybe one should be afraid of.
Something about arthropods generally, and I would say especially crabs,
especially you know, decapod crustaceans. It has more of a
kind of mechanical joint and piston kind of feeling about

(05:43):
it than say mammals or reptiles or birds do.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
Yeah. Yeah, the exoskeleton lends itself well to comparisons to
our armor technology, to our tool technology, and then much
later on to our automatons in our robots. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Okay, so we're gonna let slip the crabs of war
and go all the way back to the year eighteen
sixty four and talk about an obscure crab inspired proposal
for this great mechanism of belligerents called the King Crab Warship.
So the text that I want to talk about is
a letter appearing in the January thirtieth, eighteen sixty four

(06:22):
edition of thus Scientific Americans back when it had the
in the Scientific American. This is the ancestor to the
publication still called Scientific American today, though in the nineteenth
century it was a somewhat different publication. It was a
weekly newspaper at the time that was focused less on
pure science and more on technology, with a lot of

(06:45):
news about recent patents and design improvements for machines.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Some more industry centric.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
I guess yeah. And so this letter in Scientific American
comes from a correspondent called c DK, known by initials
CDKA in Frankfort, Pennsylvania. CDK begins this letter with a
long wind up about how all of the best architectural
and mechanical designs are actually prefigured by objects in the

(07:13):
natural world, writing quote, perfection is only to be found
amongst the numerous specimens of the handiwork of the Great Creator,
which he has placed so lavishly around us for our
use and instruction, and which we should make the proper
application of the lessons which are continually placed before us.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Oh so like a religious biomimicry.

Speaker 3 (07:33):
Okay, very much the tone of this letter, and also
something that we'll get more into this in a few minutes,
but kind of seem to be in the air at
the time. Other examples given by the author include the
architectural principle of the arch and how CDK claims this
can be observed in the bones of the human skeleton.

(07:55):
Also the roots of the oak tree, which CDK says
show us the best way to lay the foundations of
lighthouses and towers. And then also fossil shells, which show
us how to build impenetrable fortifications. A CDK says, quote,
and now, when the public mind and the minds of
inventors are run wild over the changed system of warfare

(08:18):
inaugurated with heavy guns and shot proof vessels, let us
see what nature will do for us. She furnishes a
model of an engine of war, which, if made of
suitable size, could destroy any vessel now afloat, in spite
of iron plates, big guns, and almost anything else. I
allude to the species of crab l Cyclops, the king

(08:41):
crab or horse hoof found on the coast of New Jersey.
Now I look this up to make sure I was
getting right what kind of animal he is talking about here.
I think this has to be a reference to the
Atlantic horseshoe crab, which is now known not as l
cyclops but by the scientific name Lemulus polyphemus. It was
previously known as Lemulus cyclops in some by some people

(09:05):
in the past. Of course, Polyphemus is the name of
the famous Cyclops from Greek mythology, appearing in the Odyssey.
So this is the proposal make a king crab warship
inspired by the flawless natural design of the Atlantic horseshoe crab.
So before we go on with the letter and the proposal,

(09:26):
I think maybe we should do a quick segment on
the horseshoe crab, or as CDK calls it, the horse hoof.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, yeah, the horseshoe crab. To be clear, it's certainly
fair game for this podcast series that we're calling it
a crab. But we do have to stress again the
horseshoe crabs they're not true crabs. They're not even crustaceans.
Their arthropod calliserates more closely related to iraqnts, but they're
famously weird. If you've had the chance to see one

(09:53):
in the wild, you know how bizarre they are, or
even if you've just seen the shell, it's phenomenal.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
We've done whole episodes on them in the past.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
Yeah, yeah, I think we've talked about their biomedical applications before,
which we'll allude to in passing here. But yeah, they're
also pretty famous because they're notable living fossils, having existed
in the world largely unchanged for at least two hundred
million years and existed for something like four hundred and
forty five million years. I've also seen three hundred million

(10:23):
years thrown out there. Only four living species remain today
any way you slice it. Yeah, they've been around for
hundreds of millions of years, and they are like a
snapshot of the past.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
My general understanding is that they're thought to go back
to the Ordovisian.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, so, horseshoe crabs have a pretty iconic appearance. They
have this broad front shell, this cephalo thorax shell, so
it's like the head thorax commind shell with wide spaced eyes.
You see them on either side little dimples, and it
ends up kind of giving you the look and feel

(11:00):
of a helm. You know, we can't help but to
compare it to our technology. This portion tapers back to
the posterior portion of the shell and then to a
spike like tail underneath the protection of their exoskeleton. The
exoskeleton is going to be sand colored in juveniles and
then this signature brownish green and most adults. Underneath this

(11:23):
shell they boast five pairs of jointed legs. And then
they spend most of their time rooting around through the
sediment for worms and moths. And they can survive outside
of the water for extended periods of time, even if
their gills stay moist, and they can swim upside down
in the water really cool. They do have to crawl

(11:43):
up on the sandy beaches to mate and to lay eggs,
and this is where most people are going to encounter.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
Them, and it makes sense, especially if we're talking about
the Atlantic horseshoe crab that CDK says, you will have
encountered these creatures on the shores of New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
That's right. We'll get back to their range in just
a second. But but yeah, that is, that is, that
is where you will find them. My wife's grandmother had
a story about encountering horseshoe crebs on the beaches of
the Great Outer Banks where according to this tale, and
I don't know to what extent this might have been
embellished a little bit over the years, as family stories

(12:20):
tend to, but she came across these horseshoe crabs on
the beach and she thought that they were stuck, that
they'd been like washed up, and so she tried to
help them out by throwing them all back in the water,
and then found out much later on that she'd unwittingly
disturbed their mating loops. Yep, but that spike like tail

(12:42):
I think is definitely part. Again, the front portion of
the horseshoe crab looks like an armored helm, and then
we have this what looks like a vicious looking spike
in the back. Yeah, this is the the telson, and
the telson takes different forms in different arthropods. If you've
ever shelled shrimp before, you've encountered a much shorter telson
spike amid the fantails. The stinger of a scorpion is

(13:05):
technically a telson. Now, the horseshoe crab does have a
fearsome looking telson, but this is not a weapon. It
is not something it uses to stab self defensively at
things messing with it and so forth. It is most
The most observable function of this for humans is that
it is a self riding tool. If they are flipped

(13:26):
on their backs on the beach, you know, exposing their
unprotected side, they can use it to flip back over
the way they want to be. They will get flipped
over in the surf as they're coming out or going
back in. It is also useful as a rudder for
swimming when in the water. And since the telson, like
other parts of their bodies, have photoreceptors on them, it

(13:48):
also wouldn't be out of line to think of this
as a sensory appendage.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Okay, but yeah, that is interesting because CDK, I think
is going to allude to the idea that the telson
is a weapon. I don't know we can It's kind
of hard to tell exactly what he's saying in some
parts of this, but I think he thinks it might
be a weapon. But yeah, interesting to think that it is.
Actually it is a lever primarily for riding the body,

(14:13):
and I think also maybe used for steering when swimming
in the water.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Correct, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like a rudder for swimming
in the water. Yeah. Now, one thing that it's coming
back to the range. It is interesting to note that
the four species of horseshoe crabs in the world today,
they do enjoy a wide range, but that range does
not include the Mediterranean. It's found along the North American

(14:37):
Atlantic coast and in Asia. So if you look at
ancient ridings, you won't find anything about them. And say,
plenty of the elder or related European and Mediterranean sources
out of antiquity Plenty, for instance, does discuss a horse
crab that is said to be quite fast, as fast
as a horse, But this is not a horseshoe crab.
I think sometimes people assume that it's the horseshoe crab,

(15:00):
but it's not. Obviously, horseshoe crabs were known to the
peoples of ancient Asia and the Americas, and they certainly
did observe them and had their own names for them.
So the Algonquin people of North America knew them as sikinox.
The Japanese referred to them as kabutagani or helmet crabs.

(15:20):
Coming back to that, you know, and there seemed to
be some Chinese traditions linking the horseshoe crabs or the
I think they're called the whole to marital fidelity, apparently
based on sightings of them mating, if I'm to understanding correctly,
there's this idea that it's like you would always see
them together. They're two together, and they're together always, which

(15:42):
of course isn't actually the case, but you know, it's
based on observations that people had, and therefore it becomes
the symbol of sticking together for the long term.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
Like nice to imagine that you're seeing the same ones
together over and over.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Yeah, yeah, you know, and it's you know, it's it's
essentially a made up story for us, but you know,
it's based on observations of the horseshoe crab. I also
found it kind of interesting to note that despite the
horseshoe crab being quite important in modern medicine for biomedical testing,
their blood contains an important clotting agent that reactsively to biotoxins.

(16:17):
I think this is something we talked about in an
old episode. But despite this, they apparently have little to
no presence in traditional Chinese medicine, So I found that
kind of kind of interesting. But yeah, coming back to
their design, you can if you look up pictures of
the horseshoe crab, they do look like weird little biotanks.
So I think it makes sense that someone might look

(16:39):
to nature and say, okay, who has the best battle armor?
What is the best sort of armored shell that could
exist over some sort of mechanism, And it makes sense
that you might consider the horseshoe crab an option.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
Yeah, And I think this highlights something interesting, which is
that biomimicry is a real principle in engineering and design,
but there's kind of sophisticated biomemicry and then superficial biomemicry.
And there is a tendency often to just go by
what like, something that looks fearsome would therefore be a

(17:14):
good war machine. But that's not always the case, because
something that is useful, say at a certain scale with
the chemistry and you know, the ecology of a small
animal might be very effective at that scale for that animal,
but does not scale up or you know, doesn't work
with the kinds of materials we would use to make
a warship or you know, or conflicts with ways that

(17:37):
we would need to control a vehicle or something.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yeah. Another area to highlight would be flight, where a
lot of you know, there are a lot of things
to learn about flight from looking at evolved biological methods
of flight in different animals, but there are also a
lot of just rough missteps and like, well, okay, these
look like wings, these feel like wings. Let's have a
run off the top of this barn and see.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
Or actually, I think a great comparison here is a
lot of inventors assuming that technological flight would involve the
flapping of wings like we see in basic basically every
flying organism in birds and insects and stuff. But then
we learned that actually flapping is not a very efficient
way to you know, degenerate thrust and to for a
machine to fly. It's better to have other methods of

(18:23):
generating forward thrust and having fixed wings.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Yeah. A lot of the best examples of biomimicry that
we've discussed on the show before they come down to
subtle interactions, things that are happening at like a material level,
or things that are happening, you know, specific aerodynamic problems
that occur and so forth, as opposed to like bigger
situations like all right, if you're if you're gonna be

(18:48):
tough in the animal world, let's translate that into being
tough on the battle.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
Thing, all right. So to come back to this letter,
CDK here says that an engine of war modeled on
the Horseshoe Crab could quote destroy any vessel now afloat.

(19:12):
How do they claim this is going to happen? Well,
the letter reads, quote this creature is provided with almost
everything requisite for a first class RAM ship. And to
this I would invite the attention of scientific men and
naval constructors. I will not enter into a scientific description
of the animal in detail, but I will simply state

(19:32):
its most prominent features for the purpose specified. And this
part did have me wondering for a second. Are they
saying that they won't give a detailed description for the
sake of brevity, or because like the enemy might be reading.
You know, if certain Crab facts reach the enemy, they
could make the King Crab warship. First, I think it's

(19:53):
the former, but I was tempted to think the latter.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Okay, well, I'm excited to find out how something shaped
like a large horseshoe crab is going to ram things.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
Well, let's read the rest of the letter. CDK goes
on quote in shape, it is like a turtle, covered
with a thick shell or armor, and armed with a
sharp stylet or prow. Now that's a little confusing because
maybe I don't know my naval terminology right, but I
would think prow usually goes at the front of a ship.

(20:26):
And the style it I think would be referring to
the telson, right, which is the tail.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's the sharp part of the
horseshoe crab. It's hard, and you know, I can't imagine
it ramming anything by going backwards. And I also can't
imagine it really being a ramming vessel if it's moving forward.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
Maybe we're not understanding something about this. Maybe something is
getting lost in the description here. But CDK goes on quote,
the back of it is brought down wedge shape, which
will enable it to have considerable speed through the wall.
Its propelling power is placed underneath so that its feet
or paddles are hid and are not liable to be injured.

(21:08):
It has apparatus to lower and raise itself in the
water around the bow, and it is armed with a
row of smaller spikes which would be sure to strike
anything met in its path through the water. A vessel
constructed to contain in itself the above mentioned principles, with
the addition of a telescopic smoke stack and pilot house,
and perhaps a revolving prow, would be really formidable. Manned

(21:32):
with a pilot engineer and fireman, it could attack any
vessel with impunity, being submerged when in action and showing
nothing but the smoke stack. It could approach a vessel
without being seen. With its great speed and weight. It
could strike a blow with the force of a dozen
swamp angels. A swamp angel here referring to a type

(21:53):
of heavy artillery that was used in the bombardment of Charleston.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Okay, I was imagining something entirely different, but yeah, thing, yeah, yeah,
we're kind of like, yeah, some swamp angels are just
like literal angels from the swamp covered and some sort
of Spanish moss.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
Mermaids or sirens of the swamp with some algae. Anyway,
CDK says, thus utterly demolishing its opponent. If attacked and
surrounded by boats, it could rise to the surface, spin around,
and scatter its assailants like chips. In fact, under almost
any circumstances, I can see in a monster king crab

(22:29):
admirable means for protection and defense. Signed CDK.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Frankford, Pa, Wow, Well, I love the kaiju sized day
dreaming involved in this scenario, and I don't know some
of it, I can, I can get. I mean, certainly
you can admit that if all of these things were
possible on a machine level, it could be effective. And
it is you know, he observes that. Okay, you know,

(22:54):
essentially the legs and underbelly the mechanisms propelling the horseshoe
crab are protected by the shell. True, And so I
guess you could you could make some sort of an
argument for some sort of a big shell like that
covering the machinery that propels a ship through the water.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Well, it kind of makes me wonder if CDK had
been reading a lot about ancient Mediterranean combat with the
try rems, which did function, and there were still ramming
attacks in naval tactics at the time of the Civil War.
We can talk about that in it. But you know,
the age of the Tryrem, you would have very much
a ramming focused naval combat where you know, a ship

(23:34):
is trying to build up speed to ram an opponent
ship broadside. But then another type of attack that you
would get with the Tryrem would be these ships trying
to come up against another ship and shear off its
ores to you know, make it to prevent it from moving.
So so yeah, maybe that makes me think maybe he's
got similar things in mind, like you got to protect

(23:56):
the oars or the legs he specifies can be either one.
The ship could have oars or legs. What how would
it have legs? I'm a little a little confused confused there,
maybe like you know, many poles sticking out the bottom
like a pole barge that goes along.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah. Now it is interesting to think though that if
he is invoking, you know, the ideas of the Trireem
and so forth, he would be reproducing a pattern we
see quite a lot in human thought, and that is
when we try to imagine the future of warfare, we
often extrapolate things off of the past warfare and not

(24:34):
really on the present nature of warfare. So he would
not be alone in making that air.

Speaker 3 (24:41):
So we'll come back to the specific naval details. But
I do want to, of course mention that despite the
compelling pitch, this was never built. The King Crab Warship
was never realized. I went looking to see if I
could find anything else about this letter, like any you know,
notice from historians or attempts to put it in context.
But I really couldn't find anything like that. So I

(25:03):
think the King Crab proposal remains a just weird, barely noticed,
obscure little curiosity. It's just a strange little letter hanging
out there in history that never really went anywhere.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Oh it's kind of a shame because you can really
catch cdk's excitement here, and you know, I would have
hoped he would at least found one other human out
there in the world that he could share this with.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
I really suspect CDK was talking about this a lot. Yeah,
I think it came up. I think it came up
at dinner. I think it came up at work.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
I think there was a lot of this talk.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, there was probably a significant other that was like,
you know, you should write to Scientific American about this
insteads just continuing to tell me about it. I think
someone there might be excited to hear from you.

Speaker 3 (25:46):
But this actually leads me to the broader context I
wanted to put this in. So I was reading, I
was trying to find context for this letter, and like
I said, didn't really find anything. But I did, through
that quest, end up reading about an interesting phenomenon taking
place during the Civil War, of which this seems to
be one example, which was a kind of frenzied period

(26:09):
of amateur inventors scrambling to talk to anyone who would
listen about their designs for stupendous machines that would win
the war. So one source that was really useful here
is a history book that I found online. You can
read the full text online called Lincoln and the Tools
of War, originally published in nineteen fifty six by University

(26:31):
of Illinois Press by the Pulitzer Prize winning American historian
Robert V. Bruce. Now I haven't read the whole book,
but I read a couple of chapters that discussed the
sort of patent fever that accompanied Lincoln's presidency and the
outbreak of the US Civil War, where many aspiring amateur
inventors did not seem to be aware of the proper

(26:55):
channels to get their designs noticed, such as contacting the
Army depart Department of Ordinance. So they would just try
to get in touch directly with the President. And the
strange thing is, in a lot of cases, Lincoln would
hear them out. Bruce writes, quote, scarcely had parade torches

(27:15):
gutted out, campaign songs died away, and votes been counted
in the election which made Abraham Lincoln sixteenth President of
the United States. When inventors began writing the successful candidate,
and he gives an example of one such early letter, quote,
it looks like war. I have invented a machine which
will fire five hundred bullets simultaneously. Write me if you

(27:38):
wish me to explain it to you. And then Bruce
adds that Lincoln jotted a note for his secretary, John
Nikolay across the top of this letter which just said,
need not answer this. But Bruce has a whole chapter
in this book called Patent Nonsense, which is focused on
the sheer volume of invention proposals, on what Bruce calls

(28:01):
cranks and dreamers that Lincoln waded through during and before
the war. I'll just mention a few examples. There was
a general craze at this time from multiple sources and
with different designs for steam powered guns as opposed to
gunpowder powdered guns. Sounds like an interesting idea, but the

(28:22):
problem was that they were usually not an improvement on
existing technology. I think it was a case of a
solution in search of a problem here, where like you know,
you had all this like great new innovations in steam
powered machinery, and people are thinking, we can make this
make a better gun. But from what I was reading,

(28:42):
the models that were actually built and tested were unreliable
and produced less muzzle velocity than gunpowder. So actually gunpowder
was already better. It was just people trying to, I think,
take one thing they knew and combine it with a
use case where it didn't actually work.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
Yeah, like we're real steampunk inner here though, Well, yes's
the supply steam to everything.

Speaker 3 (29:03):
Another thing that inventors were going wild for at the
time of the Civil War was the double cannon or
the fork This what Bruce calls it is the quote
forked cannon firing chain shot.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
Rob.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
I think this has somehow come up on the show before,
but I don't remember what episode that was.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Well, let's keep going and maybe it'll maybe I'll remember.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
This was an extremely popular suggestion, with seemingly dozens of
different inventors all writing to Lincoln about this fearful design,
imagining that they were each the first to think of it.
To summarize the basic idea, I'll read from Bruce here
quote from two diverging cannon joined at the breach were
to be fired two projectiles linked by a chain. As

(29:47):
the two shots spread apart, the chain between them was
supposed to snap taut and cut a terrible swathe through
the rebel ranks. One guy from Connecticut wrote Lincoln not once,
not twice, but five times about the double cannon idea.
But this is a great example of you know, when
everybody is having the same great idea and nobody's actually

(30:09):
using it, there's usually a good reason. And the reason
in this case is it had been tried multiple times
in the past. It did not usually work as intended,
in part because you couldn't in part because you couldn't
get the two cannons to fire at exactly the same
time or with the same initial velocity, so you know

(30:29):
it would go you would go off target or you
would get kind of malfunctions. The Confederates actually built one
of these and tested it in Athens, Georgia, and I've
read there are competing accounts of what happened here. Bruce
mentions this story that when they fired it, one of
the guns fired before the other one, and the chain
whipped back around the unfired barrel and killed most of

(30:51):
the artillery crew. From what I was reading that that
is a I think that is now the less subscribed
to account of what actually happened. A more subscribe to
account that I was reading instead says that both barrels fired,
but the contraption could not be aimed effectively and the
chain snapped, so both balls and chain flew off target,

(31:13):
accidentally smashing a chimney and killing a cow in a
nearby field.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
Hmm. Wow. It's certainly a brutal idea for a weapon,
and I cannot help but wonder how much of it
is thinking about what the technology can do to improve
the nature of warfare, and how much of it is
just kind of like almost a reflection on just how
nasty and brutal modern warfare had become, and just sort

(31:40):
of like turning that back on technology and maybe in
an almost subconscious way, thinking well, how could what else
can we do in the spirit of how awful warfare
is at this present moment.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
This one does feel to me less like the steam
powered gun idea. Feels like somebody is somewhat familiar with
steam technology and steam mechanisms and they're just trying to
apply it to a different domain. They're like, oh, now
there's a need for new war technology. Can we apply
steam to that? Yeah, this one, the double cannon, feels
more like the way people would dream up like horror

(32:13):
movie scripts, like you know, like you're writing, you know,
saw scripts, trying to think up new grizzly ideas of
things that could happen to people.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
One last example here from the dreamers category, Lincoln got
a bunch of letters from a machinist named Edward Tippett
who kept writing to him about designs for a mighty
battle balloon, which we laugh at, but that will come
back to that. That's actually not a bad idea in principle,
and Lincoln did use a form of balloons.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
But nobody ever called them battle balloons. No.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
The letters from this guy also contained a lot of
theological warnings and obscure references to the Bible. So just
some quotes from his letters. You must have my balloon
to put down all four and foes. I again warn
you against secret enemies. Watch well, and you will find
the golden wedge and the Achan too. Bruce thinks the

(33:07):
Achen here is a reference to a story in Joshua
chapter seven, where an Israelite named Achan is punished for
stealing spoils of war after the fall of Jericho. I
couldn't piece together all of the elements of this, but
finally later this letter says, I say, you cannot conquer
without my navigating balloon. That said. In this book, Bruce

(33:29):
describes how Lincoln had a real appetite for hearing from inventors.
Like it wasn't just like all these people are bombarding
him with ideas and annoying him. Even though a lot
of these ideas turned out to be useless or impractical,
some of them are just outright crankery. Lincoln kept hearing
inventors out, he would read their letters, he would invite

(33:50):
them to the White House to give demonstrations, and Bruce
gives several reasons for this. One is Lincoln's firm belief
that technological advantage could help win the war, so he
thought that new inventions would be critical for overall victory.
The second thing is Lincoln's personal interest in all things mechanical.

(34:12):
He was a bit of an engineering nerd, and in
fact was the only US president to actually have taken
out a patent himself. He patented a device that was
used to lift riverboats over shoals and sandbars, like had
these inflatable bellows on the side, so if your riverboat
runs in the shallows, you can inflate the bellows and
get over them. And then also there's something that kind

(34:37):
of comes through in this chapter, which is Lincoln having
a bit of a tolerance and sometimes even an affectionate
amusement at pitches that turned out to be dead end
fantasies I would say, like the King Crab, though there
is no evidence Lincoln ever encountered or considered the King
Crab warship idea. But I do want to emphasize that

(34:58):
Lincoln's tolerance dealing with nonsense from amateur inventors was not
just because he found it amusing. There's a bit of
amusement you can read between the lines here, But the
main thrust, at least according to Bruce, is that he
was desperate to win the war as fast as possible
and thought, to some degree correctly, that new inventions would
bring about that end, and there are some examples where

(35:21):
that proved correct. One commonly cited example is the Spencer
repeating rifle, which is a seven shot lever action rifle
that Lincoln tried out at the White House after meeting
its inventor, Christopher Spencer, in eighteen sixty three. Lincoln was
very impressed, and he advocated its use by the Union Army,
even overruling some initial resistance from the Department of Ordnance leadership,

(35:44):
and it is thought by some historians that this rifle
made a big difference. It significantly increased the firing rate
of the Union cavalry and gave them a distinct advantage
on the battlefield. Another example, I told you I'd come
back to balloons, despite the fact that Tippetts you cannot
conquer without my balloon. Pitch went nowhere. Lincoln actually did

(36:06):
personally push for the Union to use hot air balloons
for aerial reconnaissance, and this was after he was impressed
by a demonstration from an inventor and aeronaut named Thaddeus
Lowe in eighteen sixty one, during at least one of
these demonstrations. I don't know how many there were, There
might have just been one, but at one of these demonstrations,
Lowe famously sent Lincoln a telegraph via wire from hundreds

(36:30):
of feet up in the air describing what he could
see from above. You can easily imagine how that would
be incredibly important in gathering intelligence at the time.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, And of course airships and balloons would continue to
be very important in warfare, you know, over the decades
to come.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
Yeah. Absolutely, So how does this come back to the
King Crab and naval designs? Well, As I said, the
exact design of the King Crab warship was never used,
but the basic idea of a submersible or semi submersible
ship that would attack by ramming was actually used in
the US Civil War. Maybe a lot of people don't

(37:10):
know this, but there were several basically submarines or semi
submersible ships. Several of these were used by the Confederacy.
Though there ramming attack was not like the trirems of
the ancient Mediterranean, which would again those would ram each
other broadside with a kind with an you know, a
kind of thing sticking out of the front of the

(37:31):
ship I think usually called a ram. The ramming attacks
of Civil War submersibles involved hitting enemy vessels with a
mounted torpedo. So imagine it's just a big spike with
explosives on the end. I think this is sometimes called
a torpedo spar.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah. And also this is just this is the age
of the ironclad ships as well, so right, yeah, you
know very much. The idea of what if a ship
had an exoskeleton, how effective would that be?

Speaker 3 (37:57):
Yeah? Very I mean again, you can imagine to what
extent that was or was not inspired by crabs or
Arthur buds generally, I don't know, but yeah, plating putting
iron plating around a ship that that was also not
just submersibles, but you know, but top floating ships. That
was used in the Civil War as well. The Union

(38:17):
Army actually did develop some submersible technology, so they developed
a forty seven foot long iron submersible with an animal name.
Though it was not called the King Crab, it was
called the USS Alligator. Launched in eighteen sixty two, It
was based on an earlier design by a French inventor
named Brutus de Villeroi, and in its final form, the

(38:40):
Alligator was powered by a small propeller at the stern,
not by legs or ores like the King Crab describes.
But though actually an earlier version of the USS Alligator
design did have oars, it was powered by ores operated
by the crew from inside. But it turns out ores
don't worked very well for underwater vessels. I mean, they

(39:03):
can kind of work, but propellers are more efficient in
underwater vessels, so the propeller was added swapped out for
the oars. The propeller was rotated by a hand powered
crank operated by the crew inside. Air was supplied by
tubes that were attached to floats that went to the surface,
and there was an air pump, so these floats would

(39:24):
follow along with the ship at the surface and allow
gas exchange. Something about that feels tenuous and scary. I
guess all of this does, because it, you know, eighteen
sixty submersible. Apparently, light was provided by glass plates at
the top of the hull, and the Alligator was put
into service for a brief time, and the US Navy
had various plans for it, like they talked about potentially

(39:47):
using it to attack bridges or blockade runner ships. But
before it could do very much, it was lost at
sea off the coast of North Carolina during bad weather
in eighteen sixty three, So exactly a King Crab in design,
but sharing some characteristics with the proposal, though of course
this had already been built at the time this letter

(40:08):
came into Scientific American.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Yeah. Also just kind of an interesting snapshot of marine
warfare to come.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah. So I'll say final verdict from me, the King
Crab warship. Maybe not a practical design, but I admire
the spirit the actual Atlantic horseshoe crab. Very good design.
Thumbs up, thumbs up. Evolution.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
All right, Well, you know we mentioned how in one
of the previous episodes we did talk about crabs and
demonology to a certain extent. I want to come back
to that again, at least in a limited fashion, before
getting into another more prominent topic. But yeah, I was
looking around and I found a source from eighteen seventies,

(41:00):
so another older source here. This was titled The Folklore
of China by Nicholas Bellfield. I'm sorry, Nicholas Bellfield Denny's,
and it regarded this one little snippet, one little place
in the book concerned crabs and exorcisms among the people
in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujin. According to the author,

(41:23):
shortly before a child's birth, priests would attempt to scare
away demons that might harm the child during birth. So
I'm just going to read a snippet from this again,
again stressing that this isn't an older text, and I
couldn't find much. I couldn't find anything about this. It's
more contemporary. But according to this text quote, ten or

(41:43):
twenty pieces of a kind of grass, cut up about
an inch long, and several likenesses of the crab cut
out of common paper are put into censor and burned,
or sometimes several live crabs, after being used in this
ceremony are taken and turned into the street by way
of frightening or propitiating the spirits. The reason why crabs
are used is that the name of one of these

(42:05):
demons sounds like that of crab in the local dialect.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
Now wait a minute, I'm a little confused here. Based
on the description, are the crabs the thing that are
the things that are being exercised to protect the mother
and the child, or are the crabs doing the protecting.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
If I'm understanding this correctly, I think it's the idea
that there's just the idea of the crab is a
counter to the demon, because the demon's name sounds like crab. Okay, well,
it's almost like a mocking. I'm again I don't completely
understand it, but given that it's crab based exorcism, I
had to at least mention it.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
That's interesting. But so in one form you would burn
an effigy of the crab, but in another form you
would release the crabs too into the streets, swarm the
street in front of your house to provide protection, or
scare the spirits.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, I guess again. I couldn't find much in the
way of recent sources on this, outside of some some
crab statues being sold online as Finchwei exorcism animals, though
I believe that in general, within fin Schwei and elsewhere
in Chinese culture, crabs are primarily symbols of wealth and advancement,

(43:16):
and in fact, if you look around, they are sometimes
depicted as holding aloft a coin or another treasure in
a very similar fashion to what we discussed previously with
the crab holding up the crucifix or some sort of
a you know, a Buddhist treasure.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
Wow, so you've got an image in the outline here
of a crab holding up a coin. This, this is
a Chinese artifact here, Yes, okay, the posture is exactly
the same as that a seventeenth century or maybe it
was eighteenth century, I don't remember. The silver sculpture of
the crab holding the crucifix. I, you know, could just

(43:52):
be coincidence, But I wonder if one is inspired by
the other. Could the Catholic crab imagery have been inspired
by traditional China imagery.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
It seems possible or certainly that both of these images
are speaking to a longer tradition of having a crab
hold up some sort of a treasure. Yeah. And then
also more common within Chinese iconography is the image of
the crab setting upon a bed of coins, almost like
a dragon in its layer. I think one thing I

(44:23):
think we touched on this as well. But one thing
to keep in mind is that when we look at
a crab's there is the observation of what a crab
does with its body, certainly, but there We also can't
help but to imagine what would we do. What would
a human do with a crab's body if we could,
we would do things like hold coins, grab coins and
hold them aloft, that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
Yeah, the become an arthropods symbol of your own greed yep, cliff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
So for more answers on this, I was fortunate enough
to find a full paper from Frontiers and Marine Science
than twenty twenty five by Yan and Zang titled the
Connotation of Chinese Crab Culture a Comprehensive Review from the
perspectives of Literature, Art and diet. So this paper is

(45:11):
pretty fun. It's a great breakdown of crab culture. That's
the term they use in China across numerous dynasties, so
covering a huge stretch of time. And they stress that
of course you can't ignore the fact that crabs are delicious,
and then on top of them just being delicious, they
hold not only this practical value but also significant theoretical value. Again,

(45:36):
we can't help but look at the crab and imagine
things related to the crab. What would we do if
we were a crab? What does the crab say about us?
And so forth. So they quote numerous bits of old
Chinese poetry, and a lot of these are first and
foremost talking about how delicious crab meat is, but then

(45:56):
in doing so also talking about how novel the creature
are to look at. I'm gonna read this is a
This is a snippet from the paper that quote the quote.
The quotes a poem as well. They say, Zoo Way,
a famous writer and painter in the Ming dynasty, once
wrote a poem which reads as follows. In the village

(46:17):
alongside rivers, the crabs are plump. When the rice is ripe,
the two kilipet of the crabs stand up like a
halbard in the green mud of the paddy field. If
you turn them over, you see a round and bulging
navel like dong Zou's belly button. And that's the end
of the poem. But then the authors continue while praising
the fatness of crab meat. This poem also uses metaphor

(46:39):
to satirize Dongzhou, a tyrannical trader. Naturally, this kind of
direct metaphor with the appearance characteristics of crab is slightly shallow.
But they go on to decite other poems as well,
where there is like the main point tends to be
man crab meat is so delicious, or there's more than
one where it's like crab meat and wine. What a

(47:01):
great comba.

Speaker 3 (47:04):
This makes me think about how the I mean this
might be obvious, but about how the connotations of comparing
a person to a particular animal or not culturally universal,
So like comparing a person to a dog or a
pig in one culture might have very different connotations than
in another culture. And I have basically no cultural context

(47:24):
for comparing a person to a crab? What does that
mean at all?

Speaker 2 (47:29):
Yeah, I mean I have yet. This would be a
great opportunity for listeners out there, but I can't think
of any examples where that I've ever heard where a
person is directly compared to a crab in a favorable way. Now, again,
we are discussing, and we'll be discussing a prime example
of a crab as a positive totem, as a as

(47:49):
a as an icon of good luck. And that's one thing.
But in terms of saying, hey, you're being a crab,
or you are like a crab, or that person is
like a crab, I don't know if I've ever heard
it with a real with a with a strong positive
framing to it.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
Yeah, so I don't know how to take the crab's
navel is like this tyrannical trader's belly button.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Yeah, I mean it sounds like they're mocking a someone
who's considered a batty in an enemy. Yeah. But they
they also cite a legend. The authors here side a
legend regarding the first consumption of crab. There's talk about
how well crabs are fearsome, So the first people to
eat the crab meat, they had to have been warriors.
They had have been mighty, because who would think to

(48:32):
do this? Who would think to rise up against the crabs?
But they cited a legend regarding the originator of eating crabs,
and they say that it was said to have been
a flood manager named Baja working for the legendary engineer
you the Great, who we've talked about on the show before,
very much a cultural hero, you know, someone who steals

(48:55):
the or acquires the supernatural soil to aid in flood management.
And then one of his essentially underlings is the first
to boil a crab, smell the aroma and say this
just seems pretty good. And then eat it and then
pass that wisdom on to people as well. So I
guess maybe the idea here is that, like, you know,

(49:17):
realizing you can eat crabs is almost kind of like
a great cultural achievement on par with flood management.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
This just reminds me. I'm having a hazy memory of
another Chinese folk character we've talked about on the show
before who is famous for figuring out what foods are
good to eat.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Oh yeah, you're thinking of Shinong the Oh yeah, yeah.
The legend goes, you know, tried every orb, basically tried
all these different poisons, even in order to determine what
is good and what is usable and so forth.

Speaker 3 (49:48):
Okay, but here we have the seafood focused version of that,
or at least not trying all of them, but at
least trying the crab.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:56):
It looks a little scary at first, but it is good.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Yeah. Yeah. And apparently there's a there's a park in
Kunshan City in China that is that is named for
this figure, and it has a number of different statues
of crabs. This is mentioned in the article, and they
include some photographs which I reproduce for you here. Joe
in our notes. Uh, and you can see there's one
that has a child, either a large child or well,

(50:20):
either a small child or a large crab. But there
is a it is a large statue of a crab
with a child on its back.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
Adorable.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
And then there here is another giant heap of coins
and a crab is on top of that pile of coins,
again like a like a Western dragon.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
Yeah. So uh the crab has this recurring association with
with riches and abundance.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yes, yeah, And so I dug into that a little
bit to term to determine like where does that come from?
And uh, Basically the crab wealth connection comes down to
some of the crab's symbolic characteristics and also another classic
Chinese homophone, you know, words that sound the same but
have unrelated meanings. So the shell of a crab is ja,

(51:07):
which also means if it would mean if I was
one hundred percent pronouncing it correctly, and I am probably not,
But it means number one with or you know, top performing,
but with special connotations regarding the old Imperial examination ranking system.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
Oh okay, number one, best of the best.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
Right right, So the crab shell and also you know,
ranking number one in something. These ideas are closely ranked
symbolically linked via language, and then you have some other
things in play too. So the crab has an auspicious
number of legs eight and it's there also is this
idea that it's sideways walking has business success connotations concerning

(51:49):
easy money or side fortunes.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
This is that like making money on the side or.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Yeah, it's like hinkai, I think, And I think sometimes
that has very negative connotations, like you're running a scam
or it's ill gotten gains. But I think depending on
how it's used, it can also mean things that are
that are certainly legal and above board, but are also
kind of like a matter of luck, you know, coming
down to good fortune in business, things outside of your control.

(52:21):
And I guess lateral movement. And then yeah, and then
the big one too is that this comes back to
what we were saying earlier. Just crab claws look like things
that could hold onto coins. They could grab coins and
then hold on to them. And also coming down to
just the nature of the crab, knowing that you know,
a crab can be a little fighty if cornered the

(52:41):
flighty or fighty there, they can be a little intimidating.
They can appear to stand their ground, so we can
imagine them saying, no, that's my coin and I'm not
going to let it go.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
Yeah, I can see all of that. And I don't know,
this might have gone past me. But if we didn't clarify,
why is it that, in addition to having the tequila
or that the two claws, it has eight legs? Why
would eight be auspicious that generally the number eight is
thought of as lucky in Chinese culture? Correct?

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Yeah, yeah, So it's like all these things kind of
coming together with the crab, and I think again also
just the huge factor that crabs are amusing to look at.
If the crab wasn't so entertaining in and out itself,
we wouldn't heap on all of these ideas.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
Well, Rob, I think we need to wrap up part
three of the crab Bag there, but this has been
yet another enjoyable and enlightening episode. So, folks at home,
I hope you will join us for crab Bag number
four on Thursday.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Yeah, and in the meantime, go ahead and write in.
We'd love to hear. I'd love to hear from anyone
out there who can speak more to the crab as
a symbol of business, luck and good fortune in Chinese cultures. Yeah,
if you have some personal examples or observations of that
right in, send your photos. We would love to hear

(53:56):
from you.

Speaker 3 (53:57):
Also, if there is some really significant way that crabs
feature in your culture, something interesting about crabs where you
live that we haven't talked about yet, send it on
our way let us know.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Yeah, and what is your favorite sci fi crab based
war machine? Also fair game and I know some of
you will write in about that for sure. Just a
reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your
Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core
episodes in Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays
and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on weird House Cinema.

(54:28):
Stuff to blil Your Mind has been around for years
and years. At this point, we are new to Netflix, however,
so there are only so many episodes that you'll find
in a visual form on Netflix. The rest are going
to be in audio form wherever you get your audio podcasts,
and you can find pretty extensive archive there.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
That's right, and it's the same show. By the way,
just in case people are wondering, the version that we're
putting out on Netflix is just the video version of
the audio podcast that we release at the same time
in audio feed. So yeah, if you have a found
us in one on one platform and you want to
check us out on the other, go for it. Absolutely huge,
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.

(55:10):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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