August 14, 2026 • 19 mins
Tracy talks about papers about history written by economists. Holy talks about linoleum having a bad reputation because of the designs of the 1970s and '80s.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy Vue Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about the Swing Riots
this week.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Oh, we sure did. A very long time ago.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
We used to have a website, and our website had
the ability to tag related episodes into categories. Yeah, not
something that our website can currently do. And I made
a tag that was just called smashing things, and it
included things like the luod Heites. It included what was
her name, the prohibition prohibitionists that smashed up bars, Carrie Nation,
(00:48):
Carrie Nation. I don't know why I couldn't bring her
name into my mind, but Carrie Nation was on the tag.
I just particularly enjoy the stories that involved smashing things.
A kind of weird thing about the research for this
is that I kept finding papers that were about it,
but they were not by historians. They were by economists,
(01:09):
and the work of an economist has a very different
focus than the work of historians. Yeah, and I often
will just go and sort of bookmark everything that I'm
planning to come back to, or I'll save all of
the papers that I want to go back to, and
I kept opening them and being like another economist, why
(01:30):
didn't I notice this?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Why didn't I notice this?
Speaker 1 (01:35):
When I was.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Working on it.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
A book about the Swing Riots was written in nineteen
sixty nine and it was called Captain Swing, A Social
History of the Great Agricultural Uprising of eighteen thirty It
for a long time was seen as like the standard
work on the Swing Riots, and I did not read it,
because over the last decade or two, there's been a
(02:01):
lot of work kind of not as full length book treatments,
but individual papers and other research that has kind of
looked back at that work that was the standard work
for so long and started to just raise some questions
about it.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
This is normal.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
This is not like a criticism of this earlier work.
Like it's very normal for the field of history to
revisit things in light of new information. Oh yeah, new
ability to search things, new ability to access archives, that
kind of thing. And so there's just been a lot
of like, well, there were actually a lot more of
(02:37):
these demonstrations than was described in this book. The fact
that it did not just stop in eighteen thirty one,
Like this book sort of characterized the uprising as being
put down in eighteen thirty one and that was the
end of it.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
But a number of.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
People have said, okay, there's just there's actually a lot
more that continued after this, And so that was a
reason why I did not go try to get a
copy of that book, which was seen as the authoritative
text for so long. I also wanted to talk about
the remains of Thomas Pain.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Me too, because I did.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Not find out about him bringing the remains of Thomas
Paine back to England until I was very late in
the whole process. It just sort of came up as
I was fact checking something. I think the episode was
already written. I already felt like it was a touch
on the longer side, and I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait,
(03:37):
wait wait. He brought Thomas Paine's remains back with him,
and it initially blew my mind because I was like,
but he hated Thomas Pain. It had not fully occurred
to me that maybe as his views evolved on things
like democratic reforms and freedom, that he might have reassessed
his opinions of Thomas Pain. So here is how I
(04:00):
understand this happened. Thomas Paine died. His request had been
to be buried in a Quaker burial ground. Then the
Quakers said no, and so he was instead buried under
a tree on his farm. And William Cobbitt learned about
this and was like, this is no fitting resting place
(04:23):
for someone of such great stature, and so his plan
was to exhume the remains, take them back to England,
and then both rebury them in England, give him sort
of a hero's burial, and then also make a monument
that he thought maybe would inspire the spirit of democracy
in England. Some years had passed between Thomas Paine's death
(04:46):
and when this happened, so I think by that point
it was like his remains were mostly skeletal. I think,
at least I hope so. And at this point the
story gets really ghoulish. I mean, the whole idea is
kind of grulish to me. It's true that Thomas pain
had not been buried according to his wishes because the
(05:06):
Quaker burial ground said no, but he had been buried
on his farm.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
So digging him up.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Just because for reasons unrelated to what his wishes were
that already is like a little ghoulish. But then the
like there are rumors that some of his bones were
made into buttons. Yeah, the number of buttons rumored to
have been made from Thomas pain bones is apparently more
(05:36):
than is possible based on physiology. Like, there are also
various bones that have alleged to be in different places
around Europe. The whole thing is just kind of very creepy.
I love it, but I didn't want to just leave
that out once I realized that had happened, because going
(05:58):
from just being a vehement critic of Thomas Paine and
writing insulting things about him to being like, I have
got to rebury him and in a place that's more fitting.
Spoke to me in an additional layer of how Cobbit's
(06:19):
views evolved over his life. Yeah, I mean it almost
seems like someone who is trying so hard to make
amends for their prior statements. No, sure, Yeah, it's a
very selfish thing that they even do the most cockam
me and perhaps not really wise.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
For lack of a better term.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yes, things to prove how sorry they are, how willing
they are to make amends.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
But yeah, it's a little Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
I don't know if we will have a full episode
on him at some point, because I did find him
really interesting, and as I was researching and fact checking,
I kept finding quotes from things that he had written
that I was like, yeah, right on, that's amazing. But
(07:12):
then there were also things that were more like, wow,
that is really offensive, Like he definitely he eventually voted
to abolished slavery. Prior to doing that, he wrote he
was one of the people that wrote about slavery as
though it were the best thing for Africans because Africans
(07:33):
weren't capable of looking after themselves, Like he had that
kind of attitude. To my knowledge, the antisemitic thread of
his opinions, I don't know that that ever really changed,
and that had to do with the antisemitic tropes of
involving like greed and money lending and secretly controlling financial
(07:57):
decisions like all of which is again a damaging antisemitic trope,
and like if he eventually evolved away from that, I
did not find reference to it. So the parts of
me that find him really interesting are sort of at
war with the parts that are like, man, you had
(08:19):
some bad opinions.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
You were a problem. Yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
I think there will probably be folks who are like, yes,
but he was of his time, so were a lot
of other people who did not have those opinions. Yeah,
I mean there's that whenever that phrase comes up, and
I mean it does, and there are some you know,
I understand it, there is some validity to it, except
(08:45):
it misses all of the nuance, right, Like, yeah, yes,
people in that time may have thought that way at
a greater proportion than we would hope today. Yeah, but
almost every time there is a really bad opinion or
like that, if you look at it in context of
the time, there were already people going that's not cool. Yeah,
(09:07):
that's not cool, don't do that. That's not how we're
going to do this. So it's always a little yeah tricky.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Do you know what this whole story makes me think
of what one of my favorite history topics, what is it?
Queen Victoria? Oh yeah, because this all happened right before
her rain started, it did, so it puts in context
a little bit more a lot of the work, particularly
that her husband Albert did, in terms of like trying
(09:37):
to better the lives of the working poor. You know,
it's one of those things where like, yes, he probably
had altruistic tendencies and wanted to actually create better lives
for people. But there is also the secondary part that
you have to recognize, which is like, he's also trying
(09:59):
to make his his wife's reign as stable and smooth
and safe as possible. We're going there's a lot of
really angry poor people right now. There's something we could
do to fix that. Yeah, I would like to not
have things set on fire, thank you. Yeah, no, less smatching, how.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Can we perform? Just interesting to think about.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, we talked about linoleum this week, yep, which I
have a weird I have a love.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Hate with linoleum, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
I grew up in the seventies and eighties. There was
some real ugly linoleum in our house may and that
was ugly. However, I will say this, and I was
gonna talk about this at the end of the episode,
and I was like, we're gonna get pretty far afield
if we start doing this, which is that the linoleum
that you buy today that's called linoleum is not the
linoleum the Walton made today. It's polyvinyl chloride, yeah, or PVC.
(11:04):
But it's pretty lovely.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
When my parents put down new floors in their house,
which I think I would have been in middle or
high high school. People were calling it linoleum, but they
were calling the actual product just vinyl. Yeah, so I
don't know if the format of the vinyl has evolved
in the decade since then, but yeah, not actual linoleum,
(11:30):
I think too. It's one of those things where kind
of the way carpet and rug get usedful interchangeably sometimes. Sure,
linoleum is not a trademark thing. It doesn't have the
same meaning as other words might. It gets used kind
of loosey ucy so yeah, which could cause issues because
(11:50):
the method for cleaning a linoleum floor and cleaning a
vinyl floor not the same. Yeah, you will destroy vinyl
floor if you do the linoleum cleaning. There was a
quote I found in one of the write ups. It's
from that write up that was translated from German to English.
(12:11):
That's so a bulliant about the linoleum factory. But I
really love this quote. It has nothing to do I mean,
it did in context have to do with the process,
but it just said nature works grottess, but she takes
her own time. And I was like, that's the best.
And it was just about how long it takes for
these things to cure. But I was like, that's the
(12:31):
truest and best sentiment. I'm obsessed with it. Something that
jumped out to me about that right up was I
think it mentioned museum says the place where one might
encounter a linoleum floor, and I don't find that to
be true, because I find museum floors to be the
notoriously hardest surface ever put into use. Every time I
(12:56):
go to a museum, I wind up with museum because
standing looking at art on the hardest floor imaginable, no
matter what shoes I have on. Always by the end
of the day, I'm like, I need a foot massage.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yeah, it is what it is. Yeah, they got it.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
They I mean they need to hold up to being
walked and stood on by people continually forever. Well in
a lot of times, a lot of museums are historic
buildings that have been sure restored or are being carefully
retained with their original stuff, which was often sometimes marble floors. Sometimes, yeah,
(13:37):
other surfaces that are not not made for coziness. There
is a cool example and this again I almost mentioned
it in the episode, and I was like, were of
how like one company's innovation can propel an entire industry forward,
because you know, we talked about how when it came
(13:58):
to mosaic inlaid lit, only nobody else could do it.
So he just started selling the machines and that became
its own business. But in terms of linoleum being installed,
like it went from being used almost like a rug
to then being kind of tacked down with like staples
or small nails. And then finally Armstrong Flooring was the
(14:23):
one that was like, you know, what we should do
is make this like a permanent thing and you can
actually glue it down and then it will be like
a more sturdy thing. And that really drove up usage
of linoleum in like new home building and stuff. And
then of course, you know it's like the rising tide
lifts all boats. All of the companies that were operating
(14:45):
got a lift out of that because everybody started to
use it more, builders embraced it more and more. I
just find that interesting. Here's the other thing I didn't
touch on. If anybody's listening who knows me, who knows
the show, and they're like, why didn't you mention this?
Speaker 2 (15:00):
And that's linoleum art.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Oh yeah, Like you know, lino prints are really cool.
That was invented in nineteen eleven by I believe, a
Polish artist who's on my short list, and that's why
I we talk about it, okay, so that you know,
maybe another in the linking chain I've been doing lately
of things that are vaguely related to me. Maybe where
(15:22):
we land anyway, Linoleum I have no. I have no
linoleum or vinyl in my house. We don't either, Yeah,
I don't, although now part of me is like, would
it be interesting to get like a linoleum scrap and
use it like edge it and use it as a rug,
like somewhere for utility purposes, or like where I know
(15:44):
we're gonna drop stuff like paint now I'm thinking about it.
I don't know if you have really good vinyl or
linoleum flooring at home that you love, because some of
them made today are beautiful, Like, yeah, the ones we
grew up with have a bad rap. Because there was
a lot of very intense design choice going on in
the seventies and.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Eighties, which some people love and I don't want to
denigrate their taste. It's not my jam.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
That color palette, the orange gold avocado color palette is
not for me. But if you love it, rock on.
I hope your whole house is that and that it
makes you joyous every day. But if you have a
really good floor, so those pictures because I listen, I
just like to look at people's home to core choices.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I won't judge. I'll just celebrate.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
It might not be my jam, but I'm always glad
when people are doing things that they love.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
If you have.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Linoleum, and I'm using the loose version of that term
with chickens on it, send us that just fascinated. I'm
sure it's out there right, everything is. I mean, I'm
the dufist that made the decision when we bought our
house to oil paint the tile in our kitchen and
seal it. And that lasted for a good long while.
And then one of our cats used to have that
(17:00):
weird habit that cats sometimes have of scratching around the
water dish before he would use it. I never understood
what that was, and that started eventually the thing, and
now we just have the trashiest looking floor on the planet.
It needs to get replaced at some point, but yeah,
not today. Our kitchen floors are wood, which was also
(17:25):
the case in the apartment that we lived in before
we bought this house. And I have just found it
to be a weird flooring choice for the kitchen. I
find it harder to keep clean than tile or vinyl, yeah,
would be in the kitchen specifically. Yeah, I'm presuming it's sealed. Yeah,
(17:51):
but still still I'm just thinking, like it's the kind
of thing that has to be resealed because that's a
high traffic area.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Yeah, I love listen, I love home deck.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Our other kitcheny area in the canteena was easy because
when we built that room, it took great effort to
convince the contractor and the workers to not clean up
any of their mess. We were like, leave all the drips,
We're gonna polly those right in. It's a dive bar
on tattooine, which they did. So we just pollyed that
and like that's easy to manage because it's supposed to
(18:25):
look a little funky monkey and if anything drips, it
just blends right in. Yeah. I do mop it periodically,
but it's not a place that we have to worry about.
And it's very easy care at that point because you
can just throw down more, Polly. If you really need
to pick me up anyway, send us your pictures of
(18:45):
your home deck stuff. If this is your weekend coming up,
I hope that you get to relax in a home
that is decorated exactly the way you want, and that
it brings you joy and feels like a cozy, safe nest.
If it's not your weekend, I still hope when you
go home from whatever your obligations are, that similarly your
home feels like a cozy safenst and like exactly the
(19:07):
place you want to be. I hope that everybody is
kind to one another, and that whatever obligations you have,
and if you have to work, that everyone is kind
to you at work, and that no weird surprises come
up at work, because that's the worst.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
We will be back.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
On Monday with a brand new episode. We will also
be back here tomorrow with a classic Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy Vue Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about the Swing Riots
this week.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Oh, we sure did. A very long time ago.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
We used to have a website, and our website had
the ability to tag related episodes into categories. Yeah, not
something that our website can currently do. And I made
a tag that was just called smashing things, and it
included things like the luod Heites. It included what was
her name, the prohibition prohibitionists that smashed up bars, Carrie Nation,
(00:48):
Carrie Nation. I don't know why I couldn't bring her
name into my mind, but Carrie Nation was on the tag.
I just particularly enjoy the stories that involved smashing things.
A kind of weird thing about the research for this
is that I kept finding papers that were about it,
but they were not by historians. They were by economists,
(01:09):
and the work of an economist has a very different
focus than the work of historians. Yeah, and I often
will just go and sort of bookmark everything that I'm
planning to come back to, or I'll save all of
the papers that I want to go back to, and
I kept opening them and being like another economist, why
(01:30):
didn't I notice this?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Why didn't I notice this?
Speaker 1 (01:35):
When I was.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Working on it.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
A book about the Swing Riots was written in nineteen
sixty nine and it was called Captain Swing, A Social
History of the Great Agricultural Uprising of eighteen thirty It
for a long time was seen as like the standard
work on the Swing Riots, and I did not read it,
because over the last decade or two, there's been a
(02:01):
lot of work kind of not as full length book treatments,
but individual papers and other research that has kind of
looked back at that work that was the standard work
for so long and started to just raise some questions
about it.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
This is normal.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
This is not like a criticism of this earlier work.
Like it's very normal for the field of history to
revisit things in light of new information. Oh yeah, new
ability to search things, new ability to access archives, that
kind of thing. And so there's just been a lot
of like, well, there were actually a lot more of
(02:37):
these demonstrations than was described in this book. The fact
that it did not just stop in eighteen thirty one,
Like this book sort of characterized the uprising as being
put down in eighteen thirty one and that was the
end of it.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
But a number of.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
People have said, okay, there's just there's actually a lot
more that continued after this, And so that was a
reason why I did not go try to get a
copy of that book, which was seen as the authoritative
text for so long. I also wanted to talk about
the remains of Thomas Pain.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Me too, because I did.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Not find out about him bringing the remains of Thomas
Paine back to England until I was very late in
the whole process. It just sort of came up as
I was fact checking something. I think the episode was
already written. I already felt like it was a touch
on the longer side, and I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait,
(03:37):
wait wait. He brought Thomas Paine's remains back with him,
and it initially blew my mind because I was like,
but he hated Thomas Pain. It had not fully occurred
to me that maybe as his views evolved on things
like democratic reforms and freedom, that he might have reassessed
his opinions of Thomas Pain. So here is how I
(04:00):
understand this happened. Thomas Paine died. His request had been
to be buried in a Quaker burial ground. Then the
Quakers said no, and so he was instead buried under
a tree on his farm. And William Cobbitt learned about
this and was like, this is no fitting resting place
(04:23):
for someone of such great stature, and so his plan
was to exhume the remains, take them back to England,
and then both rebury them in England, give him sort
of a hero's burial, and then also make a monument
that he thought maybe would inspire the spirit of democracy
in England. Some years had passed between Thomas Paine's death
(04:46):
and when this happened, so I think by that point
it was like his remains were mostly skeletal. I think,
at least I hope so. And at this point the
story gets really ghoulish. I mean, the whole idea is
kind of grulish to me. It's true that Thomas pain
had not been buried according to his wishes because the
(05:06):
Quaker burial ground said no, but he had been buried
on his farm.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
So digging him up.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Just because for reasons unrelated to what his wishes were
that already is like a little ghoulish. But then the
like there are rumors that some of his bones were
made into buttons. Yeah, the number of buttons rumored to
have been made from Thomas pain bones is apparently more
(05:36):
than is possible based on physiology. Like, there are also
various bones that have alleged to be in different places
around Europe. The whole thing is just kind of very creepy.
I love it, but I didn't want to just leave
that out once I realized that had happened, because going
(05:58):
from just being a vehement critic of Thomas Paine and
writing insulting things about him to being like, I have
got to rebury him and in a place that's more fitting.
Spoke to me in an additional layer of how Cobbit's
(06:19):
views evolved over his life. Yeah, I mean it almost
seems like someone who is trying so hard to make
amends for their prior statements. No, sure, Yeah, it's a
very selfish thing that they even do the most cockam
me and perhaps not really wise.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
For lack of a better term.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yes, things to prove how sorry they are, how willing
they are to make amends.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
But yeah, it's a little Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
I don't know if we will have a full episode
on him at some point, because I did find him
really interesting, and as I was researching and fact checking,
I kept finding quotes from things that he had written
that I was like, yeah, right on, that's amazing. But
(07:12):
then there were also things that were more like, wow,
that is really offensive, Like he definitely he eventually voted
to abolished slavery. Prior to doing that, he wrote he
was one of the people that wrote about slavery as
though it were the best thing for Africans because Africans
(07:33):
weren't capable of looking after themselves, Like he had that
kind of attitude. To my knowledge, the antisemitic thread of
his opinions, I don't know that that ever really changed,
and that had to do with the antisemitic tropes of
involving like greed and money lending and secretly controlling financial
(07:57):
decisions like all of which is again a damaging antisemitic trope,
and like if he eventually evolved away from that, I
did not find reference to it. So the parts of
me that find him really interesting are sort of at
war with the parts that are like, man, you had
(08:19):
some bad opinions.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
You were a problem. Yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
I think there will probably be folks who are like, yes,
but he was of his time, so were a lot
of other people who did not have those opinions. Yeah,
I mean there's that whenever that phrase comes up, and
I mean it does, and there are some you know,
I understand it, there is some validity to it, except
(08:45):
it misses all of the nuance, right, Like, yeah, yes,
people in that time may have thought that way at
a greater proportion than we would hope today. Yeah, but
almost every time there is a really bad opinion or
like that, if you look at it in context of
the time, there were already people going that's not cool. Yeah,
(09:07):
that's not cool, don't do that. That's not how we're
going to do this. So it's always a little yeah tricky.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Do you know what this whole story makes me think
of what one of my favorite history topics, what is it?
Queen Victoria? Oh yeah, because this all happened right before
her rain started, it did, so it puts in context
a little bit more a lot of the work, particularly
that her husband Albert did, in terms of like trying
(09:37):
to better the lives of the working poor. You know,
it's one of those things where like, yes, he probably
had altruistic tendencies and wanted to actually create better lives
for people. But there is also the secondary part that
you have to recognize, which is like, he's also trying
(09:59):
to make his his wife's reign as stable and smooth
and safe as possible. We're going there's a lot of
really angry poor people right now. There's something we could
do to fix that. Yeah, I would like to not
have things set on fire, thank you. Yeah, no, less smatching, how.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Can we perform? Just interesting to think about.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, we talked about linoleum this week, yep, which I
have a weird I have a love.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Hate with linoleum, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
I grew up in the seventies and eighties. There was
some real ugly linoleum in our house may and that
was ugly. However, I will say this, and I was
gonna talk about this at the end of the episode,
and I was like, we're gonna get pretty far afield
if we start doing this, which is that the linoleum
that you buy today that's called linoleum is not the
linoleum the Walton made today. It's polyvinyl chloride, yeah, or PVC.
(11:04):
But it's pretty lovely.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
When my parents put down new floors in their house,
which I think I would have been in middle or
high high school. People were calling it linoleum, but they
were calling the actual product just vinyl. Yeah, so I
don't know if the format of the vinyl has evolved
in the decade since then, but yeah, not actual linoleum,
(11:30):
I think too. It's one of those things where kind
of the way carpet and rug get usedful interchangeably sometimes. Sure,
linoleum is not a trademark thing. It doesn't have the
same meaning as other words might. It gets used kind
of loosey ucy so yeah, which could cause issues because
(11:50):
the method for cleaning a linoleum floor and cleaning a
vinyl floor not the same. Yeah, you will destroy vinyl
floor if you do the linoleum cleaning. There was a
quote I found in one of the write ups. It's
from that write up that was translated from German to English.
(12:11):
That's so a bulliant about the linoleum factory. But I
really love this quote. It has nothing to do I mean,
it did in context have to do with the process,
but it just said nature works grottess, but she takes
her own time. And I was like, that's the best.
And it was just about how long it takes for
these things to cure. But I was like, that's the
(12:31):
truest and best sentiment. I'm obsessed with it. Something that
jumped out to me about that right up was I
think it mentioned museum says the place where one might
encounter a linoleum floor, and I don't find that to
be true, because I find museum floors to be the
notoriously hardest surface ever put into use. Every time I
(12:56):
go to a museum, I wind up with museum because
standing looking at art on the hardest floor imaginable, no
matter what shoes I have on. Always by the end
of the day, I'm like, I need a foot massage.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yeah, it is what it is. Yeah, they got it.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
They I mean they need to hold up to being
walked and stood on by people continually forever. Well in
a lot of times, a lot of museums are historic
buildings that have been sure restored or are being carefully
retained with their original stuff, which was often sometimes marble floors. Sometimes, yeah,
(13:37):
other surfaces that are not not made for coziness. There
is a cool example and this again I almost mentioned
it in the episode, and I was like, were of
how like one company's innovation can propel an entire industry forward,
because you know, we talked about how when it came
(13:58):
to mosaic inlaid lit, only nobody else could do it.
So he just started selling the machines and that became
its own business. But in terms of linoleum being installed,
like it went from being used almost like a rug
to then being kind of tacked down with like staples
or small nails. And then finally Armstrong Flooring was the
(14:23):
one that was like, you know, what we should do
is make this like a permanent thing and you can
actually glue it down and then it will be like
a more sturdy thing. And that really drove up usage
of linoleum in like new home building and stuff. And
then of course, you know it's like the rising tide
lifts all boats. All of the companies that were operating
(14:45):
got a lift out of that because everybody started to
use it more, builders embraced it more and more. I
just find that interesting. Here's the other thing I didn't
touch on. If anybody's listening who knows me, who knows
the show, and they're like, why didn't you mention this?
Speaker 2 (15:00):
And that's linoleum art.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Oh yeah, Like you know, lino prints are really cool.
That was invented in nineteen eleven by I believe, a
Polish artist who's on my short list, and that's why
I we talk about it, okay, so that you know,
maybe another in the linking chain I've been doing lately
of things that are vaguely related to me. Maybe where
(15:22):
we land anyway, Linoleum I have no. I have no
linoleum or vinyl in my house. We don't either, Yeah,
I don't, although now part of me is like, would
it be interesting to get like a linoleum scrap and
use it like edge it and use it as a rug,
like somewhere for utility purposes, or like where I know
(15:44):
we're gonna drop stuff like paint now I'm thinking about it.
I don't know if you have really good vinyl or
linoleum flooring at home that you love, because some of
them made today are beautiful, Like, yeah, the ones we
grew up with have a bad rap. Because there was
a lot of very intense design choice going on in
the seventies and.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Eighties, which some people love and I don't want to
denigrate their taste. It's not my jam.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
That color palette, the orange gold avocado color palette is
not for me. But if you love it, rock on.
I hope your whole house is that and that it
makes you joyous every day. But if you have a
really good floor, so those pictures because I listen, I
just like to look at people's home to core choices.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I won't judge. I'll just celebrate.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
It might not be my jam, but I'm always glad
when people are doing things that they love.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
If you have.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Linoleum, and I'm using the loose version of that term
with chickens on it, send us that just fascinated. I'm
sure it's out there right, everything is. I mean, I'm
the dufist that made the decision when we bought our
house to oil paint the tile in our kitchen and
seal it. And that lasted for a good long while.
And then one of our cats used to have that
(17:00):
weird habit that cats sometimes have of scratching around the
water dish before he would use it. I never understood
what that was, and that started eventually the thing, and
now we just have the trashiest looking floor on the planet.
It needs to get replaced at some point, but yeah,
not today. Our kitchen floors are wood, which was also
(17:25):
the case in the apartment that we lived in before
we bought this house. And I have just found it
to be a weird flooring choice for the kitchen. I
find it harder to keep clean than tile or vinyl, yeah,
would be in the kitchen specifically. Yeah, I'm presuming it's sealed. Yeah,
(17:51):
but still still I'm just thinking, like it's the kind
of thing that has to be resealed because that's a
high traffic area.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Yeah, I love listen, I love home deck.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Our other kitcheny area in the canteena was easy because
when we built that room, it took great effort to
convince the contractor and the workers to not clean up
any of their mess. We were like, leave all the drips,
We're gonna polly those right in. It's a dive bar
on tattooine, which they did. So we just pollyed that
and like that's easy to manage because it's supposed to
(18:25):
look a little funky monkey and if anything drips, it
just blends right in. Yeah. I do mop it periodically,
but it's not a place that we have to worry about.
And it's very easy care at that point because you
can just throw down more, Polly. If you really need
to pick me up anyway, send us your pictures of
(18:45):
your home deck stuff. If this is your weekend coming up,
I hope that you get to relax in a home
that is decorated exactly the way you want, and that
it brings you joy and feels like a cozy, safe nest.
If it's not your weekend, I still hope when you
go home from whatever your obligations are, that similarly your
home feels like a cozy safenst and like exactly the
(19:07):
place you want to be. I hope that everybody is
kind to one another, and that whatever obligations you have,
and if you have to work, that everyone is kind
to you at work, and that no weird surprises come
up at work, because that's the worst.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
We will be back.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
On Monday with a brand new episode. We will also
be back here tomorrow with a classic Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
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