The Wind Cries Typhoid Mary

In the 19th century, typhoid was considered a disease of the lower classes. When an outbreak occurred in wealthy Oyster Bay, New York, a mystery was afoot. Tune in to learn how this event began an ongoing debate over public safety versus civil rights.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Greeny Boy, Chuck and Bryant and Jerry
back in the his house. Now more guest producing. No,

(00:22):
that was a rough week she was, but she's back. Hey, Jerry,
did you hear that? Everybody? Probably not? Chuck? Yes, Jerry.
Have you guys ever heard how much manure a horse
produces in a day? I'm glad you went with this.

(00:43):
I was never really occurred to me. Go ahead, pounds
twenty five pounds of manure. Did you do the math?
Because I did? Right? Will you come with that in
a second? Okay? So, um, just go back with me
a little bit, Chuck to the time when Daniel day
Lewis was walking around New York with meat Cleaver overacting
a little bit in my opinion. Um, And it's the

(01:05):
the late nineteenth century, and the horse is the u
is the preferred mode of transportation for everything from the
the most humble delivery cart to the greatest ambulance to
you know, people who like to ride horses. Three musketeers,
that kind of thing. Everybody had a horse to the

(01:26):
limit to the airport wherever. So there were about two
hundred thousand horses in New York City in use in right, Yeah,
multiply that times twenty five pounds of poop a day
and what do you get chucked? Well? I did two

(01:46):
thousand because I thought that was the number. Okay, so
that's fine, We'll go with that. More than six point
two million pounds of horse poop per day deposited on
the streets of New York. Okay, Now, um, let's say
that's okay, Um, there's that many horses. There's six point
two million pounds of horsepoop every day. It's a lot

(02:08):
of poop. But not only that, there was no one
cleaning it up. It was not enough people cleaning it up.
Let's say that for sure. It was just left there
basically in a lot of cases, um to basically be
ground into the cobble stone. And you know, it makes
you think, like, I'll bet there's a substantial layer of
horse manure under the streets of New York that make

(02:30):
up like that initial stratum of of of Earth, the
Poopa sphere. I think, oh wait, that would be an
outer space. No, no, because the lithosphere is yes, so
you were dead on. Thank you the popa sphere Um,
things change a little bit. The New York Institute's a

(02:50):
department of health and a group of basically an army
of cleaning guys, very much like the the garbage man
that Homer Simpson envisions in the in the It's the
Garbage Commissioner episode. I can't remember which one it is. Uh, oh,
the Loveday episode is what it is? Okay. Um, These guys,

(03:14):
they're called white Wings. They are deployed to clean up
the streets of New York and they do a heck
of a job. And possibly the fact of the the episode,
if I may take it please, this is where the
term cleanliness is next to godliness is coined. Pretty cool
the New York Department of Health slogan in downtown New York,
Josh at the turn of the century. Back then was

(03:37):
a disgusting, filthy place. And yet I love New York.
I love the history of New York. We watched we
both watched the same Nova video on Typhoid Mary today
and they had photos of mountains of manure pushed to
the sidewalks, and uh, sort of like if you've ever
been in New York on garbage day. Imagine all those
garbage bags is poop, Yeah, but not pooping bags, just

(04:01):
mound poop. And they were dead animal carcasses. Did you
see that. Probably it was like these boys playing in
the street with just a dead horse right in the
middle of their little stickball miamond I guess he was
on base or something. And it was just a foul, disgusting, unclean,
unsanitary place, which, like you said, led to the formation
of the Department of Sanitation, Right, So the Department, the

(04:24):
Department of Sanitation um was imbued with a lot of
clout from the get Yeah. And as you said that,
the Nova documentary on Typhoid Mary, it's called like the
Most Dangerous Woman in America, but it's also on YouTube
under Typhoid Mary Nova. That's good. It was um, but

(04:47):
they had a lot of cloud. They could forcibly inoculate
you with these new fangled inoculations. They could forcibly remove
you to a quarantine island, and New York had a
bunch of them. Yeah, that was popular at the time.
But basically, your civil liberties could be entirely suspended without
any sort of due process of law. Um. And you

(05:08):
if you were considered sick. And a lot of this
was based on this new understanding of science of germ
theory thanks to our buddy Louis past year bacteriology yep. Um.
So the problem was science reporting hadn't been established yet.
So all of the people who were in charge understood

(05:28):
what was going on. They understood germ theory, they understood innoculations,
they understood force quarantine, but no one had explained it
to the public fully right, So it's a recipe for disaster.
So there's this thing called typhus or typhoid, I'm sorry,
And apparently they were one and the same until the
nineteenth centuries. About this time, typhus and typhoid typhoid fever

(05:50):
were separated. But typhoid fever fever, which is the star
of this co star of this episode. Um. It's particularly asked,
isn't it it is? Josh, we're talking not just ordinary diarrhea,
but doubled over cramping, painful diarrhea. I think you'd call
that violent diarrhea, violent diarrhea, high fever, red rashes, sleeplessness,

(06:15):
death if you don't treat it. A lot of people
through history have been stricken with it, including Mary Todd Lincoln,
Georgia O'Keefe, Rabbi Shankar I really uh, Frank McCourt author,
and Wilbur Wright actually of the Wright Brothers fame died
from typhoid fever. Wow, pretty sad And that was I mean,

(06:37):
that's a scant uh sampling from a long, long list
of famous people that have Those are the people who
count who had typhois. I think Lincoln's son actually died
from it as well, but I don't think Mary Todd
Lincoln died from it. Yeah, but you can know she
died of um or something like that is what they
would have called abraham hysterics, right, okay, nice. Um. So,

(07:00):
before we started to get a handle on typhoid fever,
it's by the way, it's a um it's caused by
the bacterium Salmonella TYPEE. It's a type of Salmonella UM.
And before we got a handle on it with antibiotics,
apparently twelve percent of people died from typhoid. So it
was a big public health problem. Yeah, New York especially

(07:21):
there were four thousand new cases per year and killed
one in ten people at the time or one And
remember that that nationwide. Uh yeah, as I understand it
before antibiotic, so um, let's even just say tem percent.

(07:42):
That's a big public health problem. And because it's spread
by the bacterium salmonella. Did that come out weird because
it did in my head slightly a little bit of
the lazy tongue there, because because of because it's spread
through salmonella, or because it's a result of salmonella, it's
very very easily spread from handling your own poop e g.

(08:04):
Using the bathroom, not washing your hands, and then handling food,
uncooked food specifically. Yeah, it was normally considered to be
like a disease of the lower classes. Yeah, until nineteen
oh six. Was it chuck the summer of nineteen oh
six in a in a wealthy quarter of the United

(08:25):
States on Long Island called Oyster Bay. Billy Joels film,
I believe it's neither here nor there. Still, that's one
extra fact you just gave everybody. That's true. Uh yeah.
When it when it happened in Oyster Bay, it was
a much bigger deal because it was more closely associated
with let's say, the Lower east Side tenement housing the

(08:48):
filth of Lower Manhattan at the time they've cleaned all
that up. Now, um, it's expense. What you get though,
when you're in Oyster Bay is you get wealthy families
who can spend a little money, and that's what you had.
In the case of the Thompson family, they were afraid
that they would not be able to rent out the
house that they were living in because uh, people were
getting sick in that house over and over and over

(09:10):
and they couldn't figure it out. They decided to hire
an investigator who turned out to be a very prominent
figure in this case name Dr George Soper, a sanitation
engineer and UH epidemiologists, one of the first epidemiologists really
looking to make his career well, he already had out
he had a reputation um of of you know, being

(09:35):
able to track any illness back to his source. So
this family, the Thompson family, is that the one who
owned the house or the one who's who got sick.
They owned the house, and I believe some family members
had also gotten sick. Okay, so but there was a
family that rented it originally that's where the typhoid outbreak
first happened. So maybe maybe they were just the homeowners.
The Thompson family hired Soaper I believe, yeah yeah, and said, hey,

(09:59):
we can't this house anymore because people are dying from typhoid. Concerned, right, yeah.
So Soaper gets on the case, starts some finds the
family where the typhoid outbreak occurred, and starts interviewing the
heck out of him, and he's stumped. He can't figure
it out, like, where did this thing come from? There?
These are clearly patient zeros right here, like nobody else

(10:23):
on know Weyster Bay had it before then they didn't
bring it with them from the city. There's somebody missing,
there's something missing. And he finally says, have I talked
to everybody who was in this house in the summer
of nineteen o six and they said you should talk
to typhoid Mary, I don't know. I didn't think of that.
He goes what you know, what he did was he

(10:45):
interviewed kitchen staff and it turns out that there was
a former employee that was no longer there, Mary Mallon,
and he said, wait a minute, you know, maybe I
should check this lady out. Turns out she loved to
serve this ice cream and fresh peaches. Which is uncooked.
That was her, I guess her. She was noted for
that dessert, right, But even more incriminating than the dessert

(11:08):
is the idea that when he looked into her history,
she'd worked for eight families in ten years, and six
of those families said had typhoid outbreaks. So he began

(11:39):
to think that there was something special about Mary mallon
and and that she was what's called a healthy carrier
meaning um and and I'm just gonna paraphrase this awesome
way that Nova doc put it right. When you get
typhoid fever, there's almost always a clear winner. If the
bacteria wins, you doe, and if you if you win,

(12:02):
if your immune system wins, the bacteria dies. But there's
sometimes where there's a stalemate where your immune system continues
to function and you live, and the bacteria continues to
live in your system, which means you're healthy, but you're
also extremely contagious. And that's what Soaper came to believe
Mary Mallen was. So she was technically she actually had
typhoid fever, but her immune system was able to suppress

(12:26):
all of it except the killing of all the bacteria part.
So pretty cool, souper cool but interesting because this is
brand new. Yeah, and as guy's on the cutting edge
of this kind of thinking. Yeah, and he knew like,
potentially she could be the face of bacteriology. The first
bacteriology lab had just set up in New York City

(12:48):
and it was a burgeoning, uh not industry but science.
So he was like, man, this is really gonna put
me on the map if I can probably prove this
at least. So he he didn't have any training in
science reporting either, though, did he He didn't have training
in people skills studently either. He goes to her and
he's like, I finally found you. I believe you're infected
with typhoid. So I need samples of your stool, your

(13:11):
urine and your blood. By the way, my name is
George Soper. Good to me And she's like, oh, no,
you're not. Yeah. So it's about this time that that
Mary Mallen. We should describe who she is at least,
go ahead. Mary Mallen was Irish. She or Irish, came
over as a teenager by herself. She was born in
the poorest town county in Ireland, and Ireland at that time,

(13:35):
especially in the poorest County not a great place to
be no, also dirty, also lots of death and dying
in filth and disease. And she was born in eighteen
sixty nine, so I think that's on the heels of
the Potato famine, if not still in the middle of it.
So she comes over as a teenager, lives with her
aunt and her uncle who passed away, and then is
basically on her own in New York. And by all accounts,

(13:58):
as a result of how she grew up in Thanto
being on her in New York, she was very, very tough,
in fiery and independent and resourceful. Like had it been
anyone else, this might not have gone down like this.
They picked, literally not picked. But as it turns out,
it sounds like she was the toughest, most obstinate, stubborn,
fiery woman in New York City, right. And but she

(14:20):
was also good at what she did. She worked her
way up in the domestic servant classes to the pinnacle
of it. A cook in that era in the domestic
in domestic service, and sort of manager of the kitchen staff. Well,
not just that, almost the whole house, basically the all
of the servants. The cook was pretty much at the top,
maybe tied with the butler, depending on the house. But um,

(14:42):
she was a cook for all these these families, and
not just you know, families that could afford a cook,
but like very wealthy families. Um, really well at her
at her job. But she took no guff from any man.
And when Soaper came and told her that he wanted
her feces, she chased him off with a carving fork. Supposedly,

(15:04):
that's how Super reported it. Yeah, and you know, we'll
get into her specifics later, and she got a real
bad rap, but at the time there was, like you said,
there was no understanding on the public's behalf of this.
This whole zero I'm sorry, healthy carrier is not even
proven yet. So I mean, what is she supposed to do?

(15:26):
Just say, like, sure, I'll go with you stranger, take
my poop and and put me in a quarantine. Yeah,
So she fought it like she probably had every right
to right most initial though wouldn't normally, you know, brain
to a fork, a carving fork on somebody. But again
it's lost to history whether she really did do that
or not. It's a good story. So Super takes off

(15:48):
and he's not one to let his career just kind
of slip through his fingers, and he goes to the
New York Commissioner of Health, Herman Biggs. So Biggs was
he was the one. He was the first one, and
he was the one who was like, oh, by the way,
we can come into your house and forcibly inoculate you
and your children if we want, and we will do

(16:09):
that too if we if we think that it's in
the interests of the public health. So Biggs was very
sympathetic to Soaper's description of the story of this crazy
Irish woman who was just patient zero and more than
one outbreak um and basically needed to be dealt with.
So he ordered a one of his case workers, a

(16:31):
few a few cops in an ambulance out to where
Mary lived a tenement. Yeah, Josephine Baker was the inspector
and not the dancer. No, but she apparently was pretty
tough lady as well. She started her own rainbow family.
Oh really yeah. Oh, and you know, we should also
point out one of the reasons that Mallon was so
upset initially was that she got the feeling that were

(16:55):
essentially calling her dirty an unsanit here because he explained
to her, like, oh, you go poop and then you
get poop in your hands and you handle peaches that
you feed people, and so she was very uh, she
was upset that they felt like she they were picking
on her cleanliness, like just a dirty Irish and mcgrinners exactly.
They were, you know, dirty drunks and causing problems and

(17:17):
that was just the stereotype at the time and she
wasn't like that, she said, right, so, um, soaper goes
to Biggs. Biggs orders some people out. They used their
power and grab Mary. Well, she hides out in the
house for a while though okay, like it took three
hours to find her. Well when they finally did, apparently

(17:38):
it took all either three or four cops to drag
her to the ambulance and then the the female case
workers sat on her for the whole ride to this hospital,
this quarantine hospital, where she was kept for a while.
And like you said, it's it just happened to work
out that the person who was who was tie Foyd

(18:00):
Mary was this very stubborn, obstinate, self assertive woman from Ireland,
and she came about at a time where there's a
big question about public health, like you know, where do
an individual, civil rights and public the greater public good begin.
That's still going on, it still is. But she forced this,

(18:23):
this conversation into the national spotlight starting about now. So
they keep her. They test her. They they're like, you
need to poop into this bag right now, and she
did um and they tested it and they said, well,
thing's lousy with typhoid. They called her stool a factory
for typhoid. Yeah. And what they did was they said,

(18:44):
here's a deal. Give up cooking because that's how you're
transmitting this, and we'll let you go. And so did
they say that immediately from the article, but not necessarily
from the document. I think they initially offered her that
deal that she refused stwhich was one reason why she
was you know, lambasted in the in the public later
on in newspapers. But again, at the time, she had

(19:08):
managed to climb up out of the uh, you know,
poor conditions that she was living in an Ireland and
get a really good job and one that she was
good at and she didn't want to have to learn
something new and start over again. So at the time,
you know, like later on I can doll out some
of the blame on her, but early on she still

(19:28):
feels well, It's like, I'm not sick. This doesn't make
any sense. What does this healthy carrier thing? Yes, yeah,
she was not buying it at all, and she basically
came to believe that the public Health department had a
vendetta against her personally and felt quite persecuted. Um So
when she said no, she wasn't going to stop cooking,
they said, okay, well we're gonna take you to a

(19:49):
nice little island called North Brother Island. It's not a
nice island. Seven. They took her there in quarantine her.
Their North Brother Island is a or it was a
tuberculosis hospital, old quarantine quarantine hospital, i should say. And
she didn't have tuberculosis, and she wasn't even sick, she
didn't have any symptoms, and yet she was being kept

(20:09):
here against her will on North Brother Island, which you
sent a killer urban exploration photo spread that I want
everybody to go check out. It's creepy. It's on Gothamist
dot com and the g O T H A M
I S T. And it's titled a Trip to the
Abandoned North Brother Island. It is so cool. Yeah. Located

(20:31):
there was a Riverside hospital and initially there was nothing
there and they said, hey, the idea of island quarantines
was pretty popular at the time, so we should build
a hospital there so we can treat these people. But UM,
North Brother Island sort of gained a reputation over the
years because one it was I mean, it was much
more than tuberculosis. It was like later on it was

(20:53):
like heroin junkies were treated their syphilis like any kind
of nasty disease or addiction. They would dump you on
at Riverside Hospital. It was an asylum basically was it
was sort of like, uh, what's the DiCaprio, Shutter Island,
shutter Rock Island, um. But they had a hard time
staffing it with real doctors for a while because doctors
understandably didn't want to work there, so they had nurses

(21:15):
only for a time. Eventually there was a public campaign
to clean it up and to build better buildings and
change his rep which sort of worked, sort of didn't.
But UM in New York City at the time, especially
on the Lowery Side and where poor people lived, it
had a very bad reputation as you don't want to
go there, because you go there and you don't come back.

(21:37):
People were afraid of it. So that's where they send
this Mary Malin off to so and when she gets there, Um,
she starts trying to get out. She hired a escaping
right now, using legal channels, she um. She she hired
a lab, a private lab, and started sending them samples

(21:58):
of her stool and they were testing it and they
were not getting the same result. Her boyfriend would sneak
her poop to the lab and they weren't getting the
same results that the Public Health Department said that they
were getting. UM. As far as her being a factory
for typhoid, which could have been a false negative, right,
it could have been because they said that you don't
always find it in the testing, and that what they

(22:19):
said in the documentary. I believe so. But there was
a discrepancy and it was enough for her to get
her day in court New York Supreme Court. So she
makes her way. She's allowed to um to leave the
island to go for her court date. And basically the
Public Health Department was like, look, she's a she's a
healthy carrier, and she's a public health and Mary's like

(22:42):
these people are holding me against my will, and the
New York Supreme Court said you're a public health threat.
Go back to North Brother Island. Yeah. And around the
same time it started getting newspaper coverage courtesy of William
Randolph Hurst, who may have financed her um law. That's crazy,
her legal expenses. Imagine it was. It was great for papers.
So yeah, I could see him throwing a little money

(23:02):
towards it. But that's where she was dubbed typhoid Mary,
and that's where the public cement really swung, because she
was painted as someone who was willingly giving people typhoid fever. Well, no,
she was. She was called typhoid Mary because they were
protecting her um her identity as well. That didn't work
too well. No, So Mary Um goes back to North

(23:24):
Brother Island and is there um for another Well, she
was there for three years total, I believe, and on
in the third year, New York City got a new
health commissioner and he was not about basically squashing people's
civil rights letterly so he not. He not only freed her,

(23:46):
he got her job. Yeah, and a lot of people
while she was incarcerated, and it wasn't incarceration I guess
um there were a lot of people that did cry
out for her release at times, um public officials even,
but the Department of Health, basically it was such a
unique case they wanted to experiment on her and said,
now we're gonna test do some tests on her and

(24:07):
not let her out. Well, they did do some tests
on or They thought that perhaps the gall block her
gallbladder was the culprit. So they were like, we're gonna
take your gallbladder out, and she's like, nobody's touching me.
She's afraid they're gonna kill her, but it could have to.
They did forcibly um medicate her. They tried some stuff out,
and she said that she wrote in a diary that

(24:28):
she if they keep this up for much longer, she'll
surely die because it's just such a side effects were
so horrid. So it wasn't just like, hey, stay in
this cottage, there's a nice view of the water. It
was it was rough for her. In addition to the
civil liberties being squashed exactly. And so, as you pointed out,
the new commission comes in letterly of public health and

(24:51):
a bit more sympathetic, Like he said, he found her
a job and laundry, which apparently was the bottom of
the barrel for for a woman a woman's career aspirations
and in domestic servant like no money, like the lowest pay,
the worst work. And she was like this sucks. I
don't want to do this, right, I don't want to

(25:11):
work in the laundry. Did you know that Atlanta has
one of the taxi drivers in Atlanta? Um is a
Ghanese king? Now? Why, that's what I thought of when
I UM, when I when I was reading about that.
When when she got a job in the laundry, It's
like she worked her way past that. She's way past that.
Is he? Really there's a Ghanese king coming to America

(25:32):
who operates a cab here in Atlanta. Ain't none but
ltraperm Yeah, that was a good movie. I could quote
it from heart, I think in full. Let's start, okay,
barking like a dog. Oh alright, So back to Mary.

(26:11):
Where are we here? She's just been released or he
offered her the job, right, yeah, and she's out and
she's yeah, but she's making contact with the health department there,
like we need to be able to keep up with
you and make sure we know what you're doing and everything,
and then they're they're like, we know where she is,
we know what she's doing. We talked to her every day,

(26:32):
and Okay, we lost her. Yeah, we don't know where
she is anymore. Yeah, it's pretty cool at the time.
You could disappear and if you don't leave afarding address
or it's like oh no Google searching going on there,
you could disappear into the folds of Daniel day Lewis
is overacting. So a few years after this, Josh, after
they had lost her, Uh, Dr Soapers brought in again

(26:54):
to investigate another typhoid outbreak at the upscale hospital, Sloane Hospital,
and I think it was a baby birth in hospital
at the time, maternity hospital. And uh what they discovered
was Mary was cooking in the kitchen at the hospital. Yeah,

(27:16):
under an assumed name. Doctors and nurses were sick, and
I believe two of them died and they said, you know, um,
you're in big trouble this time. Yeah. But not only
did they discover it was Soaper himself was called into
the case. This is like Lama's rob and he exactly,
it is very much like that, Um, and he comes

(27:37):
to the hospital and he recognizes Mary by sight as
one of the cooking staffs, Like you were kidding me.
She's whipping up her ice cream and beaches and just
stops like amid stroke, like um, her hands awkward. So um.
This time she goes willingly. She knows that that it's
it's over, it's done. She still doesn't believe that she

(28:00):
is the um this a carrier or the problem, but
she knows that they think she is, and that she's
broken some sort of horrendous loss. It was kind of
sad at that point from the way it was described
in the documentary. She was just sort of like, I mean,
all the fight of this fiery woman was gone, and
she's just like, I just can't fight this anymore. Take me.

(28:21):
And part of it, also, I imagine, was public opinion
turned against her. Like you said, the first time she
was incarcerated at UM North Brother Island, there was a
lot of public outcry. This time there's a lot of
public outcry, but it was against her because she had
willfully and knowingly gone back into cooking UM and had
gotten more people sick. Yeah, and I think fifty something

(28:45):
cases were attributed to her in three deaths. Yeah, I
think fifty two is what I read. Um, And you know,
we gotta say, like, I'm defending her in a lot
of ways. But she they gave her a few pretty
good deals along the way that she did not take,
which was a to give up cooking be um. I
think at one point they said, why don't you just
move to Connecticut with your sister? And she was like,

(29:07):
I don't have a sister, and they're like, sure you do, Jane,
She's like, wait, are you having a stroke? Exactly? So
she didn't take him up on that offer, and um,
soaper promised her of the profits of a book that
he would write about her and about the situation, and
she was like, no, no, no, it wasn't that weird.

(29:29):
Anthony Bourdain is one of the experts in that Nova
documentary A little odd. Yeah, I guess he knows it's
typhoid Mary. He lives on Oyster Bay. I guess with
Billy Joel. So the legacy um of typhoid Mary is
this great debate over how much civil liberty, how many

(29:49):
how many civil rights does a person get to keep
when they pose some sort of public health threat. And
I guess the answer to that is contagion yes, have
you seen it? I have not. You did the other night, right,
it was good? Frightening? No, it was definitely like I
don't my back was tense the whole time. It wasn't frightening,

(30:11):
but it was. Kid. That was a really good editorial
piece too that I read I sent you. Um, we're
basically this could have gone down in so many different ways.
It was sort of like the perfect storm of headstrong woman, uh,
healthy guy that didn't have a lot of people skills.
They said, if that or his opinion was, if that
initial meeting had have gone down differently, the whole history

(30:33):
might be rewritten. But it went down as them butting
heads and just got worse from there. Pretty interesting. So
typhoid Mary, was she a bad person? Josh, I can't.
I reserved judgment on historical figures. Okay, I don't. I
don't know enough about him. Yeah, I think you can
only judge your contemporaries. Really, all right, what about me?

(30:58):
I reserved judgment on on podcasters? Yeah. So, Um, if
you want to know more about typeoid Mary, you can
watch Nova's excellent documentary The Most Dangerous Woman in America. Um,
if you want to know the origin of the word quarantine.
You should go back and listen to our Black Death episode.
But if you haven't heard it before and you've read,

(31:22):
don't bother emailing in. I know already, I know, I know,
I'm sorry. You can also look up the how stuff
works article who was typhoid mary T Y P H
O I D space M A R Y question mark?
You want to type that into the search bar at
how stuff works dot com And that means it's time
for a listener mail. They should do a good movie

(31:50):
about that. I can't believe they haven't. Yeah, this is
like great. At the very least, there has to be
a book on Soper, Like this is the kind of
thing that the public eating up right now, you know,
thanks of this um Stars, thanks to this economic collapse.
You know the Stars Guard Stars Guard. Did you ever
see that doing that live skit? It was during the
Stars outbreak and Uh Stars Guard. The actor what's his name, Peter,

(32:14):
he was on their pitching. It was like a little
infomercial and he's pitching the Stars Guard Stars cards. Awesome. Alrighty, Josh,
I'm gonna call this, uh Moon smack down, the Nicest Moon,
the Nicest Moons back down, we got all right, because
we got a lot of and this guy was actually
really really over behind about it. Guys love the podcast.

(32:35):
I listened as I ride my bike to and from
work past the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on
my way to the Moon. Learning interesting facts makes my
day a little better. However, I had to send a
note about a couple of mistakes in the Moon podcast.
You got the current theories about the formation of the
moon and how it affects Earth's precession right as far
as I know, and those are really the hardest things
to understand. So well done. Yeah, but you did perpetuate

(32:58):
a few mints. Number one, the Moon doesn't rotate and
is dragged along by the Earth. Well sort of. The
Moon is held in place by the Earth's gravity, but
it does rotate. The reason it doesn't appear to rotate,
which is what we were trying to say, uh, is
because its period of rotation is exactly the same as
its period of revolution around the Earth about twenty nine days.

(33:19):
It's tidally locked, which brings me to point number two.
The moon has a quote dark side that is never illuminated.
Not true. I don't remember saying that, did we say
that we must have because everyone said that we did.
Maybe we didn't say this. Okay, we've just let people
believe that we don't know it, all right. The Moon
has one face we never see from Earth, but is

(33:40):
not permanently in darkness. That's known as the far side
of the Moon. So it's Gary Larson, not dark Vader.
Huh uh. Number three, we have tides because the moon
quote pulls up on the water on the Earth and
pulls up on the Earth underneath as well. Definitely not true.
While the Moon's gravity does pull the Earth and its water,

(34:01):
the effect is minuscule compared to the Earth's one gravity.
It's the horizontal differential in the Moon's gravity across the
Earth that causes the water to slide towards and away
the direction of the Moon. So the water slide sideways,
not up. Wow, that's pretty cool. And that is from
Chris By and he he was very cool about it.
Um and he says, ps, I'm a little worried about

(34:22):
going back and listening to the Sun podcast because the
Sun is way more complicated than the Moon than Chris.
Don't do it. Don't do it, just skip it, brother, Yeah,
go listen to cannonball run. Yeah, that's a good one,
no mistakes. That's a great, great one. Or Twinkies that
was pretty good too. Yeah, muppets, Yeah, anything but the sun,
anything but that. Um. I guess if you have a correction,

(34:46):
we want to hear it. Um. We we have. We've
been reading him again now lately. I think that's a
good chuck. I forgot all about him, I forgot about
being wrong. Well, we were right for a good stretch.
Well we weren't doing ones like on the moon or whatever. Yeah,
these tough ones are hard, Yes they are. If you
have a correction, you can tweet it to us at
s Y s K podcast. You can um see us

(35:09):
on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash stuff you should Know,
and you can send us a plain old fashion email
at Stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com For
more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
how stuff works dot com