Invention Playlist 4: The Turnspit Dog

Robert and Joe continue the month’s journey through human CULINARY techno-history -- this time with the story of the turnspit dog. This now-extinct breed of dog turned the meat in many a European kitchen, before it was replaced by machines.

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Episode Transcript

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Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast,
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Listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the

(01:25):
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get
your podcasts. Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Land, and I'm
Joe McCormick. And today we're continuing our trek through a

(01:47):
human techno history, and we're going to begin with The
flint Stones. Okay, if you ever watched The flint Stones,
the old in nineteen sixties American cartoon, you're probably familiar
with her over the cartoon world in which you know,
you have, you have these cavemen, but they're also it's
also like a commentary to a limited extent on nineteen

(02:08):
sixties American culture, and they live alongside dinosaurs and they
utilize them to power pretty much every aspect of their
Society's the satirical element there. If I've only seen The
flint Stones Viva Rock Vegas, probably yeah, I think so,
because they if I remember correctly, those live action adaptations
did put a lot of emphasis on the dinosaur and

(02:30):
prehistoric creature based technology. Oh yeah, clearly that's the big
draw of the series is the curiosity what kind of
dinosaur is going to be playing the role of a
toilet today? Yeah, because well, they didn't use dinoas to
power everything. For instance, they did insist on footing their
own ridiculous stone cars around town. I love that they
had a typewriter that was a mere stone machine, kind

(02:52):
of like a cross between a typewriter and a stone
xylophone or something. But they also used, of course, that
would be what is it a lithophone? Actually it's not
a there is a name for a stone xylophone. But
but it was of course more complicated, ridiculously complicated, uh,
in the flint Stones. But then they also used, just
to name a few inventions, the following uh. And let's

(03:15):
go back and forth on these jokes. A sauropod powered
construction crane device, a stegosaur based fire truck, therapod based
mobile stairs like the airport. Yeah, okay, a small dinosaur
that they used as a can opener. Yeah, this one's
really famous. And I know they used this one in
the live action film. A garbage disposal dinosaur that just

(03:37):
lives underneath the counter. I remember this. Actually they were
like the garbage disposals acting up and he opens up
the cabinets and like yells at it. But they've also
got a record player that's a turtle and hummingbird. Yeah,
it's like the hummingbird is the needle, of course, and
the turtle was somehow spinning the record. Wait a minute,
where they're hummingbirds? And wait a minute, because there it's

(04:00):
definitely not humans coexisting with dinosaurs. Uh. They had a
mammoth based uh system of running water, didn't They also
have a tiny mammoth that was like the vacuum cleaner.
They used it because the hose or maybe it's young.
I don't know how this worked. There was also a
I'm not sure it was a bird or terra saar
based camera, so like you hold up the camera to

(04:20):
take the picture and the small winged creature uses its
beak to then a chisel the image into a piece
of stone. That's funny that it's some kind of bird.
As a dishwasher, it was like a pelican. Yeah, it
looked a lot like a pelican. And then of course,
if you need a kitchen knife, what are you gonna do?
Use a sawfish? Why not a rock? Why not a

(04:40):
like a flint stone. It's it's there in the name
the flint himarious if it is an actual sword fish,
I guess, But that defeats the purpose. I mean, why
you would use an animal in place of a machine
is that an animal is complex and has moving parts
and can generate motive power. If you just need a
knife or something, it seems like yeld stone age technology

(05:01):
would work just as well. Oh absolutely, um. And then
of course there's the added fact that they have a
pet dinosaur named Dino, who is just there for companionship. Now,
all of this is ridiculous, and even today we watch
it and we laugh at it because it's a ridiculous
exaggeration of animal labor. Each dinosaur prehistar creature is highly specialized.

(05:23):
So you know, either the humans of the flint Stones
just found the right animals to perform these very specific functions,
or like us real life humans, they bred them to
encourage certain traits, traits who would make them ideal for
highly specific specialized tasks such as living under your sink
and eating all of your scraps. That's right, And to

(05:45):
explore this concept further today we're going to look at
a real historical example. Uh, certainly not the only example
of an animal bred for a certain job within the
house of providing some kind of motive power. Of course,
we know farm animals, draft animals, animals have been doing
this kind of thing for millennia. But today we're gonna
be looking at a very strange specific case from history.

(06:06):
The turnspit dog, a breed of domestic dog that is
bred to run around a small wheel to power e rotisserie. Yes,
then this is this is this is amazing. I was
I had not heard of this before, So this was
like suddenly It's like suddenly realizing the flint stones were
real to a certain extent. But but this is gonna

(06:27):
be a great episode as well, because it's not just
going to be about this dog. It's going to be
about sort of two or three additional technologies that factor
in to this period in time in which dog labor
was used to help cook big chunks of meat. Right,
So I guess first we always asked the question here
what came before this invention? So obviously we should look

(06:49):
at the dog itself, and the dog in a way,
if you sort of, if you sort of squint, it
is sort of a human invention. I mean, obviously it's
a product of nature, so we we didn't create you know,
canines generally, but the domestic dog and the domestic dog
breeds that exist have in many ways been guided by
human hands to greater and lesser extents. Yeah, I mean,

(07:11):
it's not you know, it's not necessarily a situation where
a prehistoric h you know, member of human society said
that is a good wolf creature out there. I have
a few pointers for what we might change in it,
but that is essentially the process that ends up taking place.
So yes, before you can have a dog powered meat
spinning grill machine, you have to have a domestic dog.

(07:33):
And in brief, the domestic dog dates back an estimated
twelve thousand years to the Near East, before the cat,
before the sheep, before the goat, and before the horse.
The dog maybe man's best friend, and it is certainly
one of his oldest non human friends. It is the
oldest recognizably domestic animal. And we know they were used

(07:57):
some eleven thousand years ago in most glacial Europe by
hunter gatherers, and they were almost certainly used in hunting.
Interestingly enough, it's sometimes questioned why humans didn't actually domesticate
the dogs sooner than this. And one idea is that
there was even more incentive to domesticate these you know,
the wild wolf like creatures into the domesticated dog in

(08:20):
the post glacial world because you increasingly then had to
track wounded animals that you've wounded during the you know,
the the hunt through wooded regions, increasingly wooded regions is
the forest return and a dog's superior sense of smell
could make a huge difference in that task. So the
dog was a pre farming domestic species, and that's something

(08:41):
that's really essential to note. Because the cat, I think
we've touched on this before, if not an invention then
unstuffed to blow your mind. You know, the cat comes
about as an investicated species in the post farming world
because of the post farming surplus of food. Right. So
in the in the post farming world, you might have
say stores of grain or other foods in the settled
location that you're not moving around from, and those might

(09:03):
attract to say rats or something like that that would
get into your grain, and then the cat can follow
the rats. Right. And then these areas other species, many
of them of course our food species that we domesticated
so so as to uh control them and not have
to hunt them anymore. They live with us, and we
kill them when we desire to kill them. But of course,

(09:24):
as great as dogs can be and continue to be
and in the in aiding the hunt, we know that
they can be bred to specialize in a number of
key tasks. And I have a short list here that
I thought we might go back and forth on again,
much like we did with the dinosaurs of the flint Stones.
So you can of course breed a dog over many

(09:44):
generations to fetch felled foul. That's kind of a tongue twister,
but yeah, you can see. Maybe you shoot down a bird,
you don't know exactly where it went, but the dog
can find it. Essentially, the dog is still aiding in
the hunt, but it's a more specialized version of aiding
in the hunt. Now, the other thing would be playing
more of a role you think of with cats these days,
are ridding the home area or the food storage areas

(10:06):
of rats and other vermin. Right. Another one is to
aid in fishing specifically, and this is one of the
breeds you see this with is the Newfoundland dog, which
is a you know, a kin to the Labrador retriever.
The Labrador retriever fetches felled foul, but the traditionally but
the Newfoundland dog is there to retrieve floats and ropes
from dangerous icy waters. Now, of course we see lots

(10:29):
of shepherd ng dogs in world traditions that they can
help control the movements and direction of flocks. Right, Um,
a big scary dog with a loud bark has long
been used and uh and and is still used to
as as protection, either to protect an individual or to
protect property. Yeah, and I guess this would be part
of a bigger thing. Is just sort of like using

(10:50):
dogs for violence or the threat of violence. So dogs
used in war or fighting or in in in combat dogs. Unfortunately,
sometimes dogs you used to fight each other purely for sport,
which is terrible, or in other equally egregious kinds of
bear baiting. Like Yeah. Another area, though that is not

(11:12):
dark or not not intrinsically dark, is tracking because dogs
mad dogs could be used to track somebody or something
for nefarious reasons, certainly, but dogs can be used to
track people to say, to find uh say, fine individuals
who have been buried in an avalanche. That sort of thing, right,
And then of course you've got the final version, the
version that many of us today probably know the best,

(11:33):
which is just pure companionship. Dogs are a good friend,
They're a good buddy, and this is where we get
the final form of the dog, the pug. Right. But
while we often think of other animals like horses, donkeys,
cattle and stuff like this clearly as draft animals animals
that are used to pull loads, or as pack animals
animals that are used to carry loads. Uh, animals that

(11:56):
are there to provide motive power. We don't often think
of the dog this way. And yet, nevertheless, the dog
has been used for these purposes in many ways around
the world all throughout history. And one of those ways
is what we're going to talk about today, pairing dogs
for motive power with a specific type of cooking technology,

(12:16):
which is the turnspit, the practice of using a dog
to turn a wheel like a hamster wheel to turn
a rotisserie in a kitchen. Right. I mean, but before
we really started researching this, the only example that would
have come to mind would be sled dogs, where the
dog is used for locomotion to pull a sled across snow. Yeah,
I mean there there are plenty of examples of people

(12:37):
using dogs to uh to pull carts and things like that.
Uh and there carry a pack. Yes, yes, exactly. But
later in the episode we'll also talk about other types
of more treadmill based motive power that comes from dogs.
Another important thing to note when we're talking about all
these different things that dogs have been bred floor and
and this is kind of this is one of those

(12:58):
sort of overstatements of the obvious. But the role changes
the form of the dog. So like when we're talking
about these dogs that are that were bred to you know,
to catch rats and to chase vermin, we're often dealing
with dogs that are that are small in stature they
can chase the rat into its hiding places. Likewise, the

(13:19):
dogs that are used for tracking and in many cases
involving the hunt as well, are often some of the
absolute best smellers and are just you know, ideal for
tracking and and in all of this too, we get
into the problem of the modern world sometimes where someone
will have a pure bred dog, a dog that has
been whose evolution has been hijacked too, you know, for

(13:42):
the specific function, and then it finds itself as a
pet without a without necessarily having an avenue for that
special power that it has been given through selective breeding.
So I mean a lot of times it's funny that
people will have a dog for a pet and they
don't even realize what the that dog breed that their
pet is was was originally bred for. And so they

(14:03):
may notice behavioral characteristics of the dogs that come through
without knowing why that dog is like so attuned to
chasing after my certain little moving objects, or why that
dog has to sniff everything. Yeah, I've I've heard though
of specific cases where especially urban dogs um have you know,

(14:24):
their owners will make an effort to find outlets, like
find a place where they can herd a single sheep
around and use that energy, or these groups that will
go through. I think it's New York. I heard a
radio I think it's an NPR story about this where
people with traditionally vermin hunting dogs will get together and
basically go on a big rat chase the streets, you know,

(14:46):
because that's that's what the dog wants. Right. So we've
bred plenty of breeds for different tasks, but I guess
we should turn to the other half of the equation here,
leading to the turnspit dog, which is the rotisserie, Yes,
the rotissory. So have you've been to the supermarket? I
think you know the basic idea here because you've probably
seen rotisserie chickens, right, but this this, uh, it's a

(15:07):
chicken on a spit, and usually they're like multiple spits
creating this whole carousel of rotisserie chickens, and they're moving
under some sort of heat source, you know, being a
lamp or some sort of actual you know, heating element.
But you've probably also seen it if you've ever seen
like the spit for donor kebab or for euros. These

(15:29):
are traditionally done where there's a heat element on one
side and there's a bunch of you know, seasoned meat
that's on a spit that constantly rotates. And the idea
what the constant rotation is to provide even heat. Right,
meat is skewered and then placed over or adjacent to
a heat source. But then what happens if you don't
turn it. You're gonna get one side of the meat

(15:50):
that's hideously burned and one side of the meat that
is perhaps undercooked. Even you but that's not what you want.
You want uniform heating a round the meat and within
the meat. And this method actually still works, you know.
One of the their and Robert, do you ever encounter
steak world, You know, this whole world world wisdom and

(16:11):
false wisdom about what you're supposed to do or not
do with steaks. It can be it can be a
treacherous passage. So used to when I, uh, when I
still ate beef and I would grill sometimes I had
I had, I would look in a grill book and
it would be a lot of wisdom there about how
to do it. And then you go on the line
and there would be, you know, wisdom that set the opposite. Yeah, exactly.
There's also a lot of like, you know, dad wisdom

(16:32):
kind of stuff that about this. One of the one
of the steak myths that people often say is you
should only turn your steak once. You know, you put
it on the grill one side, let it go halfway
on that side, flip it once and let it go
halfway on that side. Uh. That is not good wisdom.
You can turn a steak as many times as you
want if you're grilling it, and that actually helps the
steak cook more evenly. Um, you know, by constantly turning it,

(16:55):
you are not letting the heat build up too much
on one side and overcook that side. Okay, Well, like
a similar thing I do when I do grow I
tend to do veggie grilling, and so I'll do like
a grill basket, and I'll just make sure I I
stir it up. And the same principles actually, I think
would apply pretty well to vegetables. Probably the more you
stir them, the more evenly cooked they're going to be.
But in this case, we're continuing to talk about big

(17:16):
hunks of meat. The bigger the better on a spit turning, uh,
so as to have that uniform cooking. But here's the thing.
You've got to turn that spit and the most basic
way to do that is to turn it by hand. Now,
of course, later it's no spoiler to say that eventually
machines are going to come into play and do it,
because again, you've been to the grocery store, you've seen

(17:37):
machines turning rotisserie chickens. You know that that is coming. Um. However,
the rotisserie, you know, was very much in vogue in
the medieval world, and we see plenty of illustrations of
their use both both in you know, their terrestrial setting
depictions of everyday medieval humans engaging in rotisserie cooking, but

(17:58):
then you also see lots of imagined realms of hell,
to where if you see a big elaborate depiction of
eternal damnation, there's almost certainly going to be some individual
spitted on a on a long skewer and then turned
over a fire. Right, the culinary traditions of the time
come through in our imaginations of torment, and now the

(18:19):
word rotisserie. The rotisserie concept itself, of course is not
too complicated, but the word comes goes back to France
in around fourteen fifty years so, which is ironic because
while there were versions of of turnspit roasting or rotisserie
all over Europe from the medieval period and probably some
earlier than that, but especially beginning in the medieval period,

(18:41):
I've read that it is most common in Great Britain,
that is where spit roasting was an extremely popular form
of cooking. That like in the European continent and elsewhere
in the world, people would be more likely to use
like ovens enclosures to cook inside if they were going
to do a roast of meat at all or anything
like that. Apparently, for some reason, English culture was just

(19:02):
not into the ovens for roasting. They liked the open
flame and the constantly turning spit. Yeah, yeah, absolutely both.
I think the main sources we turn to in this, yeah,
they center almost exclusively on England. Uh, that's where we
look at the documentation of the of the spit and
all of these additional details about how the practice changes. Well,

(19:23):
I think that's for two reasons. Number one, spit roasting
in general seems a more popular form of cooking in
Great Britain. And then beyond that, where spit roasting is done,
it seems like the dog was a more popular way
of doing it in Great Britain than it was elsewhere. Now,
one of the sources that I I used in in
my research here is an excellent book by one B.

(19:46):
Wilson called Consider the Fork, a History of How We
Eat and uh. And you know, one thing that's important
is even though we have this cartoony and perhaps even
flint Stonian idea of meat spitted above a fire and
roast in earned, I think this is how the Ewoks
were attempting to to to consume the heroes in Star Wars,

(20:07):
right maybe, I mean they've got them hanging from a stick.
It would be kind of awkward actually spitted. I guess
they weren't spitted. There would be a lot of like
tumbling and falling around the ropes they were hanging from.
So I'm not sure how well that would work for somebody.
I thought they were going to eat somebody. I thought
that they were going to eat them. Yeah, I just
don't know if they would have turned to them. I
think they probably would have just burned them on one
side and then they do all right. Well, well, one

(20:29):
thing that that B. Wilson points out is that the
spit was typically located next to a fire and not
over it for most of the cooking. You would only
position it more over the fire towards the end to
toast it, sort of like in another and now you
might you know, you might bake something and then broil
it to the last you know, a few minutes to

(20:49):
get it a little crispy on top. Right, then that
makes sense putting it next to the fire. I think
you could get gentler, more even heat throughout right, And
a lot of times in England we're talking about open
hearth cooking too, So that just makes more sense. Right,
the fire is in the fireplace, and then your eu
rotisserie is positioned in front of the fireplace. But for
open hearth cooking, you have to understand that this means

(21:11):
the kitchen, especially near the fireplace, is going to be
a sweltering environment and somebody's got to turn that spit.
And according to B. Wilson, before we put the spit
dogs to work turning the spit, we used turn spit boys. Yes,
it's it's, it's, it's it's it's it's hilarious and at
the same time it is so disturbing. So only only

(21:34):
during the sixteenth and seventeen centuries did the dogs take
over the work really, uh, and they took over the
work from human children. She includes a quote from biography
John Aubrey who said, quote in olden times, the poor
boys did turn the spits and licked the dripping pans.
Oh boy, the drippings. Yeah, and be describes this as

(21:55):
perhaps the worst of the many quotes soul destroying jobs
in the rich medieval kitchen. Here's a passage from their book,
quote by the reign of Henry the Eighth, the King's
household had whole battalions of turnspits, charring their faces and
tiring their arms to satisfy the royal appetite for roast
capin's and ducks, venison, and beef crammed in cubby holes

(22:20):
to the side of the fireplace. The boys must have
been near roasted themselves as they labored to roast the meats.
Until the year fifteen thirty, the kitchen staff at Hampton
Court worked either naked or in scanty, grimy garments. Henry
the eighth addressed the situation not by relieving the turnspits
of their duties, but by providing the master cooks with

(22:41):
a clothing allowance with which to keep the junior staff
decently clothed and therefore even hotter. That's horrible. I mean this,
this lines up with everything I've read that the turnspit
role was essentially the lowest rank in the kitchen. It
was the last job you'd want to have, because it's like,
it's not only sweltering hot, hard work, it's also incredibly

(23:04):
dull and repetitive. You know, you're not getting much variety.
You're just standing there by a really hot fire, turning
a crank at a steady pace for hours and hours
at a time. It's kind of it's like Conan the barbarian,
you know, running the mill. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because it's
very important that the crank had to be turned at
a steady rate. You couldn't have the person turning the

(23:26):
crank take a break for a few minutes and go
do something else, because then the meat would burn on
that side. So you had to keep it turning. Yeah,
So it's yeah, it's it's grueling, just monotonous manual labor here.
And uh and even though it's not even just the
big Kingley houses, even lesser houses used them and they

(23:47):
were they were actually seen as acceptable well into the
eighteenth century in England. And and uh also in Scotland.
B rights that Scottish highlander John McDonald born seventy forty one.
He was an orphan and at the age of five
he worked the spit in a household. Yeah, And I
think this comes through in common expressions within the English

(24:10):
language of the period, Like there was the expression turn
spit to like refer insulting lee to someone. It was
essentially you would call somebody a turnspit to suggest they
were like lowly and not worth your time. That they
were wretched in some way. But around the tutor area,
which was roughly like the sixteenth century, you know, late

(24:30):
fourteen hundreds through the end of the fifteen hundreds. Uh,
technology changed the picture somewhat. For this is when kitchens
in in England started using the rotisserie spit powered by
belt and dog wheel. So maybe we should take a
quick break and then when we come back we can
discuss more about the Turnspit dog. Today's episode is brought

(24:56):
to you by Slack. Before there was podcast, there was RADI.
Before that the stage and before that. You get the idea.
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(26:52):
m Eastern seventh Central on b E T. Alright, so
here's where we're gonna look at the turnspit dog and
the wheel itself. So I guess I should mention a
couple of sources that I used for this. One is
a book by Jan Bondison called Amazing Dogs, A Cabinet
of Canine Curiosities from Amberley Publishing, two thousand eleven. And

(27:14):
another is a book by Brian D. Cummins, who is
a cultural anthropologist who's focused on the relationships between humans
and dogs, and this book is called Our Debt to
the Dog, How the Domestic Dog Helped Shape Human Societies
from Carolina Academic Press. So, according to Cummins, the first
published mention of turnspit dogs in history comes from a

(27:36):
treatise published in fifteen seventy six written by an author
named Johannes or John Caius, who was quote Doctor of
physic a in the University of Cambridge, and this is
sometimes claimed to be the first English book written about dogs.
I think he actually wrote it in Latin, but it
was quickly translated by an assistant into English. Um and

(27:56):
Cummins points out that right from the beginning, Kaius identified
is the turnspit dog or what he spells the turns
pete dog as a breed which Commons thinks is probably incorrect,
and we'll come back to that more later whether the
turnspit dog was a distinct breed of dog or not.
But John Kaias appears to have gotten a lot of
things wrong about dogs in his book about dogs. He

(28:19):
apparently didn't know much about dogs. But he's like, I'll
write a book another um. But this this being the
first mentioned in literary history, I guess we should take
a look at what he says. And so the text
reads of the dog called turnspeet in Latin varuver sater,
there is comprehended, under the curs of the coarsest kind,

(28:40):
a certain dog in kitchen service, excellent for when any
meat is to be roasted, they go into a wheel,
which they turning round about with the weight of their bodies,
so diligently looked to their business that no drudge nor
scullion can do the feat more cunningly, whom the popular
sort here upon call turnspeeds. Now, that is that is interesting,

(29:03):
even if there is we'll discuss there maybe problems with it,
because it does imply that this is not just you
didn't just grab a random animal and throw it in
and just see what it did in the wheel. Now
that the dog seems to have been trained to to
to proceed on the wheel at a regular pace so
as to properly cook the meat, right, KaiA says that

(29:25):
it's not just that the dog can turn the wheels.
The dog turns the wheel and the spit at a
better rate than the human cooks in the kitchen do
which I think a lot of people can probably relate
to the idea of a dog being more reliable than
a human um. But but the premise here, I think,
is that a dog runs inside a wheel like a
hamster wheel, in order to turn a belt that turns

(29:47):
a spit to ensure the even cooking on all sides
of the roast. So beginning a few centuries later in
the seventeen hundreds, more records of turnspit dogs show up
in the literature, including a formal breed categorization by Carl Linnaeus,
the Swedish scholar who established a lot of important conventions
of taxonomy and nomenclature in zoology and botany. And so again,

(30:10):
I think Linnaeus here is identifying the turnspit dog is
a distinct breed of dog. Bondison points out that Linnaeus's
name for the breed is Canus vertigious or dizzy dog.
A name used in several English sources is the verna
pat cur So here's bondison on on Linnaeus's description here

(30:30):
quote small, long bodied, and bandy legged. Most had drooping ears,
but some had ear standing up. Some turnspit dogs had
gray and white fur, often with a white blaze down
the face. Others were black or reddish brown. There may
as well have been several other colors. Brian Cummin says
that the most common characteristics of the dog identified as

(30:52):
a breed are small size, short legs, muscular, especially for
their size and weight estimates are kind of all over
the place. They ranged from like fourteen to thirty five pounds,
good cardiovascular conditioning for obvious reasons, and generally being terrier like.
And that makes sense because a terrier would already be
a breed that is, uh would be we're talking with

(31:15):
breeds that are are small in stature. Why you utilize
mainly as vermin um uh chasers, I don't actually know,
but that sounds right. I know, there's like the rat terrier, yeah,
uh so. Charles Darwin even made reference to the turnspit
dog in On the Origin of Species. I had forgotten
about this, but so, of course one of Darwin's main
arguments for his theory of evolution by natural selection was

(31:37):
the artificial breeding of animals such as cattle and dogs.
Showing the descent with modification was possible by the guidance
of human breeders, and thus it could also be possible
by the guidance of the natural environment. That was the
point of comparison he was trying to make, And so
Darwin writes that in domesticated strains of animals we constantly
see examples of adaptation quote not indeed to the animals

(32:00):
or plants own good, but to man's use or fancy.
Some variations useful to him have probably arisen suddenly or
by one step. So it has probably been with the
turnspit dog. So we know that in the middle of
the eighteen hundreds, when Darwin's writing about this, it would
have been a common enough, like a well known enough
phenomenon to have a turnspit dog working in a kitchen

(32:23):
that he could just make casual reference to it and
people would know what he was talking about. Oh, yes,
that dog that is so well adapted to turning a
wheel in kitchens. So, but the question kind of becomes
is the turnspit dog like a dog? Are these dogs
bred for this work or are you merely selecting dogs
to fulfill the role of the turnspit dog? Right? And
I think it's possible that it's some combination of the two. Right,

(32:45):
that dogs with initial bits of characteristics were selected for
the job early on, and then maybe they were bred
to bring out certain characteristics that made them especially good
wheel turners. Right. And this would be the same process
that you would get, say, a good rat chasing dog.
You can imagine, like early on, people saying I need
some dogs who go catch those rats. Give me some

(33:07):
short legged dogs. And then you know, the breeding commences
and you get increasingly breeds of short legged dogs that
have a real tenacity for chasing rats. Right. If you've
got a batch of them, maybe the two that catch
the most rats, you breed them together and that makes
the next generation. At the time, an author named J. G.
Wood mentions the turnspit dog in his Illustrated Natural History

(33:29):
in eighteen fifty three, but he writes that by his
time the dog had become rare, and while it had
previously been very common. It then existed only in isolated regions,
but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, turnspit dogs were
extremely common in Great Britain. Bondison writes that they were
especially common in the west of England and particularly in

(33:51):
the city of Bristol, and in Wales, especially South Wales.
Bondison writes, quote in sixteen thirty nine, when the cornishman
Peter and visited Bristol, he was amazed that there was
quote scarce a house that hath not a dog to
turn the spit in a little wooden wheel. So he's
not just talking about palaces or like ends with big

(34:11):
kitchens there. He's saying scarcely a house. So that's where
it was apparently most common, but there was less common.
There are still records that there were turnspit dogs outside
of Great Britain, in places like France, where they were
shin torn a brochures, or in Switzerland and Germany and Holland,
and in North America. There even references to turnspit dogs
in Ben Franklin's own Pennsylvania Gazette. But I mean we

(34:35):
should recognize that something so Cummins characterizes the turnspit. Dog's
work as often quite wretched for the dog, so they'd
be having to power a wheel by walking essentially inside
the wheel for hours at a time. These roasts take
a long time to cook, uh, And they were near
the heat of the fire, which meant that their work

(34:56):
was sweltering, and they were often dehydrated. And they can't
take breaks because the wheel has to keep going. Well,
they can in some cases. I'll get to that in
a second. Generally the dog wheel was hung suspended from
the ceiling next to the fireplace. Yeah. I believe there
would cuts the kind of show this as well, Like
it almost looks like something you would see on a
cracker barrel wall, right, you know exactly, Yeah, except it

(35:19):
has a living dog in it turning a crank um. Yeah.
This is one of the things that's so interesting about
this is all these other categories we've looked at, or
at least you know, disgusting in passing, in which we
have bred a dog to to fulfill a specific task.
Those tasks are exclusively i think in the wild, though,
you know, like it's some version of the thing they

(35:40):
would do, be it hunting a rat or fetching a bird,
that's been shot out of the sky with with bow
or or buckshot, you know, or or even swimming after
fishing lures, or or even pulling a sled. At least
it is it is out in an environment. It is
running across the countryside in this kind of artificially uh

(36:03):
constructed pack structure. Well yeah, you know, I would say
even for more indoor dogs, like companion dogs that sit
on your lap and cuddle with you, I mean, that
does seem more analogous to some kind of natural behaviors,
you know, like din snuggling behaviors. Uh, this sort of
like being trapped in a kitchen in a wheel turning
the wheel does seem more estranged from the natural habitat

(36:26):
and behaviors of a dog in the wild than any
of these other uses I can think of. It is
at best almost animal cruelty and probably just animal cruelty.
Oh yeah, I mean in many cases surely. I mean
it's hard to know because on one hand, like a
lot of dogs do seem to kind of like enjoy
having a task to do, But this seems like it's
really hard work that is sustained for a long time.

(36:49):
That like, there are lots of stories of the dogs
not wanting to do it, like they would try to
flee like they would because dogs are intelligent, and so
one of the details I was reading is that you
would have the turnspit dog that I get. You know,
it's not in the wheel all the time. One presumes
that it's just sort of either hanging out in the
kitchen or around the house. And then if the dog
begins to observe the telltale signs of a roast being prepared, uh,

(37:12):
if we'll run off and hide because there's no it
knows what's coming. Yeah, and there are explicit tales of
cruelty in some cases, at least, like where authors at
the time right that some cruel cooks if a dog
didn't keep the wheel turning at a satisfactory rate, that
mean cook would put a hot coal into the wheel
with the dog, so the dog would be made to
run to escape the coal, which continually tumbled in the

(37:34):
wheel after it was Obviously it's horrible. On the other hand,
it doesn't seem like it was always equally bad everywhere,
Like some luckier dogs worked in pairs, trading off in
shift so that one could rest while the other worked.
Maybe maybe they would have a rest today while the
other worked for a day, or they could trade off,
you know, and I don't know by the hour or
something like that. Right, So there's there, there is the

(37:57):
possibility for a less cruel model lot of and at
the same time, as we discussed later, there there were
individuals who who who specifically pointed out the practice as cruelty, yes,
and as as one rare piece of good news in
this story. In the seventeen fifty six Sinographia, Carl Linnaeus,
again the Swedish scholar, wrote the when he was writing

(38:17):
about turnspit dogs that as a reward for their hard work,
turnspit dogs would often get to eat a piece of
the steaks. You know, I guess well, I doubt that
the cook who's putting the hot coal in there with
them is also giving them a taste of the roast.
But I imagine kitchen to kitchen, it would vary. To
give a bit of flavor about what this was like
to see in person from from people who were there

(38:39):
witnessing it firsthand. I want to read one often cited
passage that comes from a work called Anecdotes of Dogs
by Edward Jesse from the nineteenth century. So here's what
Jesse writes, how well do I recollect in the days
of my youth watching the operations of a turnspit at
the house of a worthy old Welsh clergyman in Worcestershire.

(39:00):
As he had several borders as well as day scholars,
his two turnspits had plenty to do. They were long bodied,
crooked legged, and ugly dogs, with a suspicious, unhappy look
about them, as if they were weary of the task
they had to do, and expected every moment to be
seized upon to perform it. Cooks in those days were
very cross, and if the poor animal, wearied with having

(39:22):
a larger joint than usual to turn, stopped for a moment,
the voice of the cook might be heard rating him
in no very gentle terms. When we consider that a large,
solid piece of beef would take at least three hours
before it was properly roasted, we may form some idea
of the task a dog has to perform in turning
a wheel. During that time, a pointer has pleasure in

(39:43):
finding game. The terrier worries rats with considerable glee, the
greyhound pursues hairs with eagerness and delight, and the bulldog
even attacks bulls with the greatest of energy, while the
poor turnspit performs his task by compulsion like a culprit
on a treadwheel, subject a scolding or beating. If he
stops a moment to rest his weary limbs and then

(40:04):
kicked about the kitchen when his task is over, that
that's some stark condemnation. And and of course, and it
totally it does. It does bring to mind all of
the popular chef TV reality shows in which the chef
is is just nasty to humans. Uh, you know, one
can imagine how nasty chef could be. Uh, this stereotypical

(40:24):
TV chef could be to the poor the four spit dog.
I wonder why is that such a common stereotype of
the angry, yelling chef who's meaned all the cooks working
for them? Is that is that just an accident a
cultural contingency? Or does is does that grow naturally out
of the kind of work that happens in kitchens with

(40:46):
the heat and the rapid pace of work and everything.
I don't know. It'd be interesting to hear from people,
because I know it, and I've heard shows where people
are talking about like regional differences. Um, goodness me. I'm
terrible remembering what podcast I've listened to before, what what
radio shows, But I specifically remember listening to a show. No,
it was a documentary, it was it was visual about

(41:09):
I believe it was a British couple that had moved
to Thailand to open a Thai restaurant and they're using
Thai chefs, and I believe it was the wife was
was Thai and the husband was was British and so
he was used to the more British kitchen culture. And
when they when they were setting up a shop in Thailand,

(41:30):
like she advised him, Look, you can't yell at the
staff like you you did back in Britain. It's a
different culture here. If you yell at them, they just
won't come back to work the next day. So that
anecdote in that show would lead me to believe that
it does gonna. It is gonna vary greatly from culture
to culture, and maybe what we see on TV is
largely a product of sort of the you know, the

(41:52):
big city high cuisine and um, you know, major metropolitan
parts of Europe and the United States, or maybe even
something specifically about like angry British food cuisine culture, because
almost all the angry chefs I can think of are
like British guys. Yeah, I want to see one of
the gentle chef, but maybe it just takes forever for
the for the food to come out. Well, I mean,

(42:14):
you never really know what they were like actually in
their work. But I mean, as far as TV personas
come along, there were some gentle chefs. I think of
Paul Prudog, you know, he always seemed like such a lovely,
gentle soul. But I I wanted to turn back to
Turnspit Dogs for a second here. Uh So there's a
fact about them that cited in multiple sources that I
thought was interesting, which is that apparently it was a

(42:35):
well known custom on Sundays to take turnspit dogs out
of the kitchen and bring them to church with you. Uh,
not just to have his companions at church, but specifically
to be used quote as foot warmers. Footwarmers, I guess,
so you put your feet on the dog and the
dog is warm. Maybe I assume it's cold in church

(42:55):
and that I don't know lessons the pain of going
to church somewhat, I guess, And it sounds like a
step up for the dog, but not that that's saying
much though. This actually led to a number of popular
church jokes at the expense of the poor turnspit dogs.
Bondison notes a couple of these. I'll read a quote
from from jam Bondiston quote. According to an eighteenth century joke,

(43:18):
the Bishop of Gloucester once preached to a church in Bath,
uttering the line it was then that Ezekiel saw the wheels.
This is the passage from the prophet Ezekiel sees the
wheels coming in the sky and uh. And Boniston continues
at the mention of this dreaded word, all the turnspit
dogs ran for the door, their tails between their legs.

(43:39):
And then Bondison mentions that another version of the story
has the bishop talking about the horrors of hell, where
there's like roasting and turning on a spit, and again
the mention of these words sends all the foot warmer
dogs running to escape. And it's it's a clever joke,
but it does get back to the idea that the dogs.
Dogs are intelligent, and dogs would pick up on the cues.

(44:00):
They might well pick up on the particular words like this,
But but even on I think even the smaller signs,
like they're just just little clues that everyone is preparing
for a feast right now. Robert, I think you turned
up some examples of other animals that were used in
a similar fashion. Yeah. Yeah, So this is something that
b brings up in their book because, like we've been

(44:24):
touching on, the dog was awfully smart, perhaps too smart
for the work, and could run and hide. Uh. So
there were some who said that the turnspit goose was
the preferred method, uh that you would get you would
get a goose in there, and it would perform better
and longer, uh and would be less prone to outthink
the chefs. So we have thus far we have turnspit children,

(44:48):
turnspit dogs, and the turnspit goose. But of course there
was like there was an arc of the turnspit dog.
The turnspit dog is a convention came and went. Jan
Bondison writes that in sevent fifty, uh, turnspit dogs would
be found all over the place in Great Britain, extremely common.
By eighteen fifty, people still knew about them. It was

(45:08):
like a thing you could make reference to and and
people knew what it was. But they'd become more scarce
at that point, and by nineteen hundred they had almost
completely vanished. There there were just a few here and
there left. Uh. And of course the main reason is
the increasing availability of mechanical alternatives like clock jacks, which

(45:29):
we will talk about more in a bit. But there
was also an accompanying shift in social norms. I think,
not just against animal cruelty, which was a thing that
changed somewhat in social conventions over time, but by the
middle of the nineteenth century, when turnspit dogs were increasingly
rare to be seen, with a turnspit dog in your

(45:49):
kitchen came to be interpreted as a sign of poverty,
of sort of backwardness, or old fashioned nous, or just
of eccentricity. It was the kind of thing you might have,
like your said ing at the at the cracker barrel wall,
you know, people putting up weird stuff and having a
strange attraction at their inn or restaurant. Uh, you could
have a turnspit dog. Would be like, isn't that quaint?

(46:11):
The old school turnspit dog? Like this would be even
like today, of course, even more so, like this would
be a moment in a horror film. Yeah, yeah, you
know the cup young cuckball. There a car breaks down
and they're invited into the you know the warm uh,
you know, a living room of this eccentric individual, and
they're on the wall is a turnspit dog running in

(46:31):
its wheel uh to operate the rotissery. Right, it's a
sign you should turn around and go back. Now we'll
come back to the question of whether the turnspit dog
was actually a breed of dog or not. But Bondison
argues that the disuse of the wheel turned spits over time,
and you know again, by the beginning of the twentieth
century that almost completely vanished. The disuse of this technology

(46:55):
led to the extinction of the breed of dog known
as the turnspit dog, since the looks and the temperament
of the dog made them mostly unattractive as pets. In fact,
one of the extremely few records of turnspit dogs being
kept as pets after the decline of their role in
the kitchens is that Queen Victoria herself kept three quote

(47:15):
turnspit tykes as personal pets at winds Or Castle. So
whatever you think of Queen Victoria, otherwise, she she took
in some turnspit tykes. Well, yeah, that was pretty decent.
And you know what it also speaks We touched on
the cleverness that would still be innate in the turn
spit dog, but also like it also shows that the
dogs other longstanding ability uh could not be bred out

(47:38):
of it its ability to bond with humans, to you know,
to look up at humans with those uh, those eyes
that seem you know, almost you know, watery with devotion
and emotion and and and enabling this bond form and
and indeed, a bond to form with the most powerful
individual insaid country, the bond between them and the lowest

(48:01):
domesticated animal. Well, you know, you you could identify many
of the great powers of the dog as a species.
You know, they have an amazing sense of smell. You
can you can see their determination and dedication and hard
work in many cases to the tasks they set to.
But I think it could easily be argued that the
ultimate superpower of the dog is their ability to form

(48:22):
emotional connections with humans more so than any other. After all,
they've they've lived alongside us so long, longer again than
any of the domesticated animals. All right, On that note,
We're going to take another break, and when we come back,
we're going to get into the legacy of the turnspit Dog.

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(51:20):
Listen to Leave the Lit on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back,
all right. I think we should talk a bit about
the legacy of the turnspit dog in English literature, because
references to them show up in English literature roughly from
like the fifteen hundreds, when the turnspit dog first became popular, uh,

(51:41):
roughly to the eighteen hundreds. It kind of cuts off
after in the twentieth century. And it makes sense, right
because if especially in in in Britain, if this was
something that was to be found in pretty much every
household or in a lot of households anyway, it would
be a common frame. There would be a common frame
of reference. It would be a common even in perhaps
a metaphor or for expressing something about the human condition.

(52:02):
And so it might not surprise you that, since it
goes back to the hundreds, it shows up in Shakespeare
in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Dromeo of Syracuse says, I
amazed ran from her as a witch. And I think,
if my breast had not been made of faith in
my heart of steel, she had transformed me into a
curtail dog and made me turn in the wheel. So

(52:25):
curtail dog there refers I think to the docking of
the tail and curtailed like cut off, and and that
seems to have something to do with the social class
or status or value of the dogs like the uh.
The more valuable breeds that would would have belonged to
rich people, I think were more likely to have the
full tail, whereas the tail was curtailed and breeds that

(52:49):
were maybe for working like in the kitchen. That's where
we get the word curtail. Yes, oh my goodness, all right,
all I'm all sorts of discoveries are taking place with
this topic. Well, actually, I want to go back. I'm
not sure that's where we get the word curtail. I
mean I think that means cut short, but like, yeah,
but let's just say that is where we get but
by Brian Cummins account, Usually a curtail dog in Shakespearean

(53:11):
references is a reference to a turnspit dog. There's another
quote in The Merry Wives of Windsor quote Hope is
a kurtil dog in some affairs, and Cummins links this
to the futility of hope in some cases, like to
the futility of the work in the turnspit wheel, that
it just goes on and on. Another one is that
some authors have even alleged that the saying every dog

(53:31):
has its day comes from the turnspit dog tradition. I
think this has not proven. I can't find strong evidence
linking the saying to the roasting spit. But the the
idea is that since many kitchens would have two dogs
in some cases, they would trade off every other day,
so you'd have a day where you work in the
wheel and then you'd have a day of rest. And

(53:52):
from what I can tell, this English expression does probably
show up during the Tudor period in the fift hundreds,
which is also the time in turnspit dog wheels became
common in England, but again I can't prove that's where
the phrase comes from. Interesting, yeah, and it's like there's
this handy example of of of of cruelty in every household,

(54:14):
and of course it makes its way into language or
in this case potentially Yeah. Unfortunately, it's like every reference
to it in English literature is to the fact that
it is wretched work, that it's something you don't want
to have to do, that it's hard, that it can
be cruel. In fact, even not just not just hard
work and cruel, but Sisyphean literally because Bondison also quotes

(54:36):
a quote a rare collection of poems entitled Norfolk Drollery.
And here's the quote. This, I confess he goes around
around a hundred times and never touches ground, and in
the middle circle of the air he draws a circle
like a conjurer with eagerness. He still does forward tend
like Sisyphus, whose journey has no end. Of course, is

(54:59):
the what the item that is punished by having to
push the rock up the hill and then it rolls
back down. Yeah, I don't know if it's Titan was that.
You're probably right about that. Yeah, but in Greek mythology,
having to push the boulder up the hill only to
have it roll back down again every time. He's somebody
who ticked off a guy. But that's interesting because then
why a mythology is usually the handy metaphor to turn to.

(55:21):
It's like, for this period of time, you had to
replace Sisiphus. You'd replaced Smith because you had the real
life Sysiphus installed in your home. That's the epic struggle
that everybody can relate to because they've seen one of
these in the kitchen. Uh. And it turns out we
mentioned this earlier, but there were other similar dog powered
machines in human history. For some reason, always especially in whales.

(55:43):
I don't know why, but whales in western England seemed
like the epicenter for dog powered machines. So you had
dog powered butter turns, dog powered fruit presses, dog powered
grain wheels, even water wheels to draw water up from
a well. And then later I was reading about how
in England and in the United States there were a
few examples of dog powered printing presses. Wow, Like, I mean,

(56:06):
it really sounds like we're almost getting into the realm
of dog punk. I think, yeah, well, that could be
a great like whole family plus dog Halloween costume and
some kind of dog punk outfit. Actually, and that's someone
should do this. You could have a scenario where it's
like a dog punk world, but of course the dogs
are our heroes, and they of course escape and rebel,

(56:27):
so sort of like dog punk meets Rats of nim
basically rights itself. Yeah. Uh so. We we talked before
about the question of whether the turnspit dog was actually
a breed of dog. There's been a lot of speculation
about which dog breeds most resemble or are most closely
related to the turnspit dog. According to Bondison, the docks

(56:48):
In and the Bassett Hound have been proposed, but Boniston
thinks these are bad candidates. Maybe better candidates for relations
are the glen of imaal terrier, which greatly resemble historical
reports of the turnspit dogs, though has a more terrier
like head. And this was but this was also a
dog that was definitely used to hunt vermin. Yes, so

(57:09):
we're getting into that area to where perhaps this is
a dog that had a dual role, like we have
these rat catcher dogs. I need something to turn this wheel.
Go grab one of those rat catcher dogs and throw
in the wheel. Yeah. I think that's highly plausible, especially
early on, you know, and maybe they were bred more
for wheel duties as time went on. Another bit better
candidate also is apparently the Welsh corgy, which is ironic

(57:31):
because of the famous Welsh corgy Corgis, who are royal
companions at the castles of the British Monarchy, which might
sort of fit with the story of the nineteenth century
Queen Victoria taking in turnspit dogs as pets. I mean,
because it perhaps you end up with another selective breeding situation.
The cutest of the turnspit dogs are taken in by
the Queen, and you get you get Corgis. I can

(57:53):
see it, though I don't know how far back corgyes
go corps might That may not actually match up with
the core lineage, and perhaps we'll hear from quirky breeders
in that right. So Commons ultimately argues that, given all
of the disparate reports about size, appearance, coat, and so forth,
that the turnspit dog, in his mind, probably was not

(58:14):
a distinct breed of dog, but rather was any small
dog that could be trained to turn the wheel, though
he believes they were mostly derived from terrier breeds. So
we've got these different I think it's not fully settled
whether the turnspit dog was a breed of dog or
was in any large part maybe sort of a breed
of dog or just was was a class of types

(58:35):
of dogs. Yeah, like we might be in that area
where it was on its way in some regions towards
becoming a breed. But ultimately, and thankfully, the practice does
go away. There is one known taxidermy turnspit dog at
the Abergavenny Museum in Wales. It's a named Whiskey. I've
included a picture for you to look at here, Robert.

(58:56):
I mean it's a small dog with short kind of
bent or crooked legs, and it is a cute dog.
I could see a dog like this, uh, you know,
earning its way out of the wheel and into the
hearts of a queen. Now, b rights that turnspit dogs
were used in America into the nineteenth century, and uh,
and that you had an early animal rights advocate by

(59:16):
the name of Henry Berg who lobbied against their use,
and he ultimately succeeded in bringing some shame to the practice,
but with limited consequences. Yeah, there were there were at
least some cases where he like identified turnspit dogs that
were being used in some cities as like as where
there was obvious cruelty, and he like took the people
who were who owned the dogs to court. Yeah, and

(59:39):
he would make surprise visits and kitchens to catch the dogs,
and they were use and reportedly be rights. In some
cases he found that the dogs had been replaced by
young black children. It's horrible. It commins rights about that too,
that in some cases when the dogs were removed, uh
that human children were used in the role, especially black children,

(59:59):
and that Berg tried to to advocate on behalf of
the children who were put through this cruelty too in
some cases, arguing that like, will children not be given
the same rights as an animal? Thankfully, However, you know,
even though we started with children and then dogs into
the picture than geese into the picture, thankfully, going back
to children is not the change that ultimately brought the

(01:00:21):
end of the turnspit dog. Right, just as dogs replaced
some human turnspits early on, automotive power ultimately replaced the
majority of dogs. And and it started not the majority,
but it started somewhat as early as the sixteenth century
and would just go on to replace dogs more and
more for spit turning as time went on. So Bondison

(01:00:43):
writes that Leonardo da Vinci, of course, invented an automatic
spit turning device that was called a smoke jack, and
it worked sort of on the principle of a windmill,
except inside a chimney. So smoke and hot air rising
from the fireplace up into the chimney would rotate to
turbine with several blades, and then the turbine, driven by
the smoke and the rising gases, would generate rotational energy

(01:01:07):
that could be transferred by belt or chain to the
roasting spit. Yeah, it's a clever, clever invention. It would
later see some use. One of the drawbacks to it,
of course, is that you do have to, uh, you
have to feed a lot of fuel to the fire.
You have to keep the fire up. You have to
keep that updraft powerful enough to turn the machinery. Yeah,
there were several problems with the smoke jack model. Uh.

(01:01:28):
It was improved upon incrementally in later decades after da
Vinci's invention of it. Bondison notes that records indicate smoke
jack's were in use in England during the time of
Samuel Peeps, who was an English naval administrator and prolific
diarists who whose journals give us a window into much
about what English life was like at the time, which
was like sixteen thirty three to seventeen oh three. But

(01:01:50):
even these later improved models of smoke jack's were still dirty,
they were unreliable, and yeah, they required a very hot
fire and a lot of you know, putting off, so
a lot of fuel essentially to get them spinning at
the right rate. But even with those limitations they could
do the work of a lot of dogs. Bondison Wrights
quote in the early nineteenth century, Lowther Castle near Penrith

(01:02:12):
had a particularly advanced smoke jack drive, driving eight horizontal
and four vertical spits, saving the labor of not less
than twelve turnspit dogs. But another automated solution, and I
think the one that ultimately really replaced turnspit dogs was
also in existence by the sixteenth century, and this was
the clock jack, sometimes called the meat jack, had other

(01:02:36):
names as well. Yeah, the clock jack's used a suspended
weight or a spring that you would wind up at
the beginning of the cooking process to store potential energy
that would slowly be released with a steady rotation mechanism,
and it worked much better than any of the other
known methods. Yeah, basically consisted of a weight suspended from
a cord and wound around a cylinder. The weight slowly descended,

(01:02:58):
the power transferred through a series of cogs and pulleys
and powered one or even multiple spits. Uh Sometimes there
was even a bell included which would ring when it
stopped when the food was done. Even uh so, some
commentators have likened it to a modern microwave in that respect.
Oh that's interesting, But did it have a popcorn function? No?

(01:03:19):
I didn't, I bet not. Uh So you might be
asking the question and wait a second. If clock jacks
existed since the sixteenth century, as long as smoke jacks
and almost as long as the turnspit dogs, like why
were inferior turnspit engines such as dogs or smoke jacks
or whatever used at all? And the main answer here

(01:03:40):
has cost. You know, clock jacks, especially early on, were expensive.
They these were mechanisms that had intricate you know, clockwork
issue designs which were too expensive for standard homes and ends.
But I think as time went on, as they became
cheaper to produce or mass produce, you could get them
cheaper and more people would replace their turnspit dogs with

(01:04:00):
an automatic system like a clock jack. And indeed Be
points out that by around seventy eight and then the
meat jack was just highly praised as as a method
to keep the meat turning. Uh. And you actually would
find them in nearly half of English households. Uh. And
that's of all households, not just the rich ones, but

(01:04:21):
they just all English households. Uh. You know, these culinary robots,
as Be calls them, Uh, they did the job. They
didn't invoke even a tinge of shame. Uh. And it
wouldn't run off and hide like a turns fit dog.
And we know this. We know that it was in
in pretty much half of all households based on probate
inventories of the deceased, so this would be where you

(01:04:44):
know they go. They had records of what were in
the households of people who had died, and so they
knew like this house had had a head a clockjack,
this house had a clockjack, and ultimately we can say
like half of England had a clock jack in their house,
thus driving away the necessity of the turnspit dog. So
you would hope that that what would have happened historically

(01:05:04):
is that there was a great awakening of people, you know,
turning away from animal cruelty and human cruelty for these
these biologically powered spits and saying hey, there's a better way.
But no, it sounds like probably it was more like
technology and economics that played the main role in replacing
dogs and humans to turn spits. Yeah, and so you
you had you know a number of these gadgets came

(01:05:26):
into play, not only the clockwork jack but also the
smoke jack, which whom entered earlier had become the designs
had become better. Uh. Still there were certain design problems
with it, but you saw them implemented. Other English inventors
experimented with steam water clockwere various, like even more elaborate
clockwork wonders. Uh. Spit roasting meat was just such a

(01:05:46):
central part of the English way of life that it
attracted the sort of endless innovation that we see now.
And things like coffee preparation. Yeah, like everybody's gotta have
their coffee, and so you see so many in the
list varieties of ways to make a cup of coffee,
and still continue to see new innovations in coffee percolation design, right. Uh.

(01:06:08):
And then of course, once electricity came along, I think
that was a huge game changer, right, because now rotisseries
pretty much all of them are going to be electrically powered, right.
And the other big factor that B points out is that,
you know, with with with all these jacks, we had
an increasingly high tech invention based around rather old cooking methodology,

(01:06:29):
the like open hearth cooking, cooking something in front of
that big open fireplace. But then this went out of
style during the mid nineteenth century, and so did the
meat jack and its related meat turning robots. Tho, of
course is just spit roasting itself, of course did not
go away. Spit roasting itself lives on, as to do
various mechanical rotisseries. You can you can buy them for

(01:06:53):
your backyard grill. You can buy you can you know,
certainly you can see them at the grocery store, the
butcher shopper anywhere. Uh. Chickens or other meats are are,
you know, turning about and cooking in their own juices.
But thankfully you will not find dogs turning tiny wheels
to power them. I gotta say this one was interesting,
but it tugged on my heart strings. Yeah, I mean

(01:07:15):
and they certainly. I mean in a way it's this
is human techno history, right, you have you have to
consider the light in the dark. Yeah, But I mean
also just seeing the way changes in technology and culture
are constantly interacting with each other as time goes on,
the way the technology influences what's culturally appropriate and acceptable
and that, and then then cultural values affecting what kind

(01:07:38):
of technology is in demand. Yeah. And then also I'm
so interested in the fact that you had, uh, some
very old technologies that were remaining the same, but this
one aspect of the process kept getting altered, you know,
like the cauldron and the spit itself. Uh, there's nothing
modern about that. The heart itself did not change so long,

(01:08:00):
but there was like a one pivot in the process
that was where you saw all this innovation and then
ultimately everything else changes as well. Fortunately, now in the
twenty one century, we can cook all of our food
in the microwave. Yes, and hopefully I think the plan
is so this November, of course, we are doing a
lot of food based episodes that you know, we'll do

(01:08:23):
food based episodes the rest of the year as well
as well. We have already, but we wanted to really
focus in on food given that this is a period
of feast uh traditionally and especially in America. So hopefully
we're gonna get to the microwave this month as well.
It'll melt your brain in the best way, all right. Uh, well,

(01:08:43):
I'm sure everybody has some thoughts on this. Uh you know,
whether you're a fan of spitted turning meat or a
fan of dogs, or like you know all of us,
you know someone who is, you know, starkly offended by
the prospect of putting children to work, five year olds
to work in a in a kitchen performing manual labor. Uh.
We would love to hear from you. You can reach

(01:09:04):
out to us a number of different ways. You can
also find the podcast at invention pod dot com. That's
where they all are, but you can also find the
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Just make sure you subscribe and check out the episodes,
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us a nice review that really helps us out. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

(01:09:28):
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 invention pod dot com.
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