November 17, 2023 • 28 mins
Cautionary Conversation: Just before Christmas 1799, President George Washington was riding around his country estate, Mount Vernon, when it began to snow. When he arrived home, guests were waiting for him. Known for his punctuality, he hurried to entertain them - still clad in his damp clothes.
The next morning, Washington had a sore throat and a chesty cough. His family decided to take a fateful step: they summoned a doctor.
Tim Harford is joined by comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds, hosts of the hugely popular history podcast The Dollop. They discuss the parade of doctors that tended to the ailing Washington, and the various remedies they prescribed - from lamb's blood to a collar of beetles. Tim, Dave and Gareth also look at what happened when cars first hit the streets in the early twentieth century: why did so many cars "turn turtle"? Who were the first jaywalkers? And which British inventor rode around in a giant white stiletto?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
A couple of weeks before Christmas seventeen ninety nine, George Washington,
the first and perhaps the greatest president of the United States,
was enjoying retirement at his country estate, Mount Vernon.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Had ridden around his farms and.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Come home late, cold and in wet clothes, but guests
had come for dinner, and he hurried to entertain them
without changing into something dry. The next day, he had
a sore throat and a chesty cough. The day after that,
his throat was so badly inflamed that he had trouble breathing.
His family decided to take a fateful step. They summoned
(01:00):
a doctor. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.
(01:29):
This is one of our cautionary conversations and today I'm well,
I'm out numbered. My guests are Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds,
the host of the hugely popular comedy history podcast The
Doll Up. Hello, gentlemen, how are you hello?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Hello?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Two Americans? No less So it's it's gonna be what
that's just gonna.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
It's gonna be.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
It's gonna be different. It's gonna be different. For caution Tales,
listeners anyway. So we are going to be talking about
a couple of stories that you covered on the Dollup,
and one of those is the death of George Washington,
and we'll talk about whatever else comes up. So thanks
for joining me. And it's easy to see why they
don't up is such a successful format, because what could
be more hilarious than the painful and pointless death of
(02:14):
the father of the nation.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
I agreed you'd be shocked at think. I think this
all the time about how I'll like take a step
back and be like, we're laughing about a murder like
on our show, and I'll just be like, for the
for forty five minutes straight, we've just been making jokes.
But I'm like, two people are dead. But there are
just so many absurd moments, and this one among them.
(02:41):
Nobody knows how he died.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
We're not taught it, and it really is the most
American thing of all that we.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Like, why wouldn't you be taught this?
Speaker 5 (02:49):
We killed them, Like.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
If you were teaching this in class, I would not
be like leaving school to go smoke cigarettes. I'd be like,
I'll do it at lunch. I want to see how
this ends. This is exciting, it is extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I was listening to the episode, episode one oh one,
and I was just crying with laughter. I should have
been crying because a great man is dying me listening,
but there was just crying because.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
It was it was very funny.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
It was so we should probably run through what happens
when the doctors show up. So I think it's it's
doctor's yeah, doctor Dick, Dr Brown, Dr Crack.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
I mean it's not great.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I mean it's just again. There are many times where
I'm like, you done it, this is low hanging fruit,
don't do it. But it's like, come on, this is
I feel like Dave made those up. I feel like,
if we look back, that's not the names of it.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Of course, the first thing they do is they start
taking blood from him, quite a lot of blood, right.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
Yeah, every guy that came in, every doctor that came in,
his first thing was well, we got to get blood
out of this guy.
Speaker 5 (03:49):
And so each one trained over a pint.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I was trying to figure out did they did they
talk to each other about that? Or is that they
all had to have their fingerprints on it.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (03:57):
I don't think they were talking to each other. I
think they were just like, Okay, well now I'm here.
These other guys aren't doing a good job. I'm going
to take care of this. And then they train his blood, which.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Is also amazing to be like that, three independent opinions
of doctors when he was dying was we should get
blood out of him, like if your engine won't turn over,
and the mechanics like let's get the oil out.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
So in the Washington's lifetime before he dies, there is
I think a Dutch doctor or maybe a Belgian doctor,
a young Baptist van Helmont. I think it's kind of
a bet with another doctor. He basically says, look, you
will take a hundred people with the plague or whatever
it is, and you treat them your way, and I'll
take another hundred people with a plague and I'll treat
(04:40):
them my way, and we'll see, we'll see who has
the most funerals, which is like it's a pretty simple idea.
But it turns out it doesn't catch on. He never
does it. None of these guys do it. Otherwise they
would have figured out that maybe draining I think it's
half of his blood in the end, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Yeah, it was most of Washington's blood. Yeah, I also
like that bet. I think that's fun for people be like,
why are you cutting his throat? Like I'm trying to
win a bet? I'm really I'm behind, so I need
to swing for the fences a little bit.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
But yeah, simply like they didn't catch home.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
It sounds it sounds like he just had a really
bad story throat. Yeah, he went out of the rain
and cold, and yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
He got my aunt. My aunt had COVID, so we
just drained her. She didn't make it.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Later, this other guy comes along and says, oh, you idiots,
he was too old. If if thirty, then yeah, sure
take six punts of blood.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
But that's the old guy.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
That was a mistake.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Yeah, well oops, what are we gonna do? Well, that's
the end of him. He had a good run. Well,
then there's the beetle guy too, right, tell me about
the beetle dog. Yeah, we're not talking about Brian Epstein,
go ahead, Dave.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
A guy came in I think it was the third doctor,
and he was like, you know what he needs is uh,
he needs a nice thick bed of beetles on his neck.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
So and then he and then he whoops his pants
so he's got no blood, a beard of beetles, and
he's pooping his pants, and everyone's like, I think he's
gonna make it. We should probably drain a little more
blood just to be safe. It's so undignified.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
I think they took blood four times, right, I think
it was four blood and they were taken like the
third time was like thirty two ounces, Like they were
really taking a lot of blood out of the sky.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Oh, I'm sure, Like yeah, like peas coming out. They're like, why,
I think he's out of blood.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Somebody proposed to tracheotomy, which it sounds like that might
actually have worked, Like if the guy can't breathe, yeah,
that would be that would work.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
It's certainly the only procedure that made it to today. Yeah,
so there's maybe something to it.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
True.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
So I was looking into this, these strange kind of
lotions and vegetable compounds, and someone that women used to
take in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for period
pains and pre menstrual stress and all this kind of stuff,
and the doctors used to think that these things were
completely ridiculous. And one of the things that the marketers
of these compounds said was basically, at least we won't
(07:15):
kill you. The doctors will kill you, and we won't
kill you. So the weird thing is they did notice
that the patients kept dying, and this was a selling
point for the alternative therapies, like non fatal.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
That's all I need. I just need to know it
won't kill me, and I'll take it. That's the only
thing I worry about.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Well, it was also one thing we've we've talked, we
have a lot of fun with is the simplicity of
becoming a doctor was also you know, it was like
you just needed to have a sign and then you're
like open for business, you know, like a barber. But
even they needed a license. You could just simply just
say you're a doctor, and then you could just get
blood out of George Washington.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
You needed a license to be a barber, but not
to be a doctor.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Yeah, like you manifested in the moment like I'm a doctor,
and that was that.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
And then even when they made it, when they made licenses,
they would set up a medical school and you go
to the medical school and they just go, okay, you're
a doctor.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
Like there was no yeah, no.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
One was watching the medical school, So it was just
for ages. It was just you just said it and
that's what you were.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Presumably they needed to teach people how to drain a
couple of pints of blood though.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, yeah, that was probably like one of the things
they're like, look, in case of an emergency, drain the blood.
Get the blood. The blood is something the body doesn't want.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
I mean that was for a long time.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
That was very common, and each doctor had his own
blood letting device that he would bring with him to
see a patient.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I think they favored something called the heroic style of medicine,
and I think part of the problem was that doctors
charged you a lot of money. So the idea is,
if you're going to show up and you're going to
charge somebody a lot of money, you better do something,
you know, go bigger, get home, right, Don't just get
a little bit of medicine or an aspirin or take
my temperature and say call me in the morning.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
You've got to do something big.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
And if bed rest was not but you didn't pay
for bed rest, you're like bullshit.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
Right, And if the doctor comes diggs blood, you're like, oh,
I feel different, I feel a little.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Woozy, something's happening.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
That was part of the attraction of the of the
vegetable compound as well, because they had booze in or
some of them had opium, some had booze, some had chili,
some had all of them.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
And so you know, if it's if it's basically as
strong as sherry, you know, you will feel different and
maybe different is better, and certainly it's better than having
losing a pint of blood.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, but he could have done himself a lot of
favors by changing his clothes. But had they just simply
let him be, he had a much higher chance of survival.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, but he was dead two days after, you know,
going out and getting his clothes wet and then having
dinner and wet clothes.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
I mean, that's that's.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Pretty quick to die of a cold, right, Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I mean, let's let's just flat out and say he
didn't die of a cold.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
He died because he got a cold.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
What do you think got him? And then do you
think got him?
Speaker 4 (10:05):
And then a bunch of guys came in and took
the stuff that was supposed to be inside his body
out of his body, and then.
Speaker 5 (10:12):
That well, that pretty much killed me.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yeah, you know you're a bad doctor when you're the
beatlebeard guy and you history smiles upon you greatest.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
I remember, these are the guys treating Washington. So these
are the top doctors.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
The best of the best, the best of the best.
The guys are.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
There was well, note they did they did turn away
right like the one guy who had actually have an
idea and they went, oh, no, that you've gone too far.
The guy who thought maybe will resurrect him, Yeah, that
was the thing.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
There's a guy who thought maybe we could do George
Washington thriller.
Speaker 5 (10:53):
Yeah, of course, of course. There's there's three guys that
kill him. And then there's the guy that came in
and was.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
Like, let's let's do let's have a do over, let's
bring him back.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
Yeah, you get a little fire on that guy, he'll
come right.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Back and his first words are going to be what
were you doing? That was crazy? When those guys got
rid of all my blood.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I couldn't believe the guy who wanted to bring him
back from the dead actually made more sense than the
than the first three, because he's like, we'll add some blood.
We've got a lamb and said, lamb's blood, pump up
his lungs, you know, give him the kiss of life,
warm him up, let you go.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
Yeah, I mean yeah, they're right, burser warmer, and they're.
Speaker 5 (11:38):
Like, get out of here alone.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah. Well, I wonder what they did with his blood,
because it would have been really helpful if like the
blood was nearby. But if that guy's pitching Lamb blood,
it must they must have just been like, all right,
pour that in the garden.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
I'm at that at that time. It just went on
the floor.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I would take and just tell me they didn't cook
with it, That's all I want to know.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
And then they made a blood everyone liking the Ravioli.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
We're really channeling the spirit of the doll up here.
I've got no idea what caution details listeners are making
of all this, But the simple imposition of modern standards
this on the seventeen hundreds is just very funny.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
We have learned so much over that time that, I mean,
the thoughts in their head are just absolutely bananas. So
from our perspective, it's just everything they do is completely insane,
Like you cannot believe what's happening.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Most of what they think is just crazy and wrong.
But then we do that with things that happened today too.
I mean we always are going like you know, this
is we are living in a doll up with this
or that.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Yeah, look, we had a president he tells people to
drink bleach when they got COVID.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
So that's the.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Part of me injected, part of me, sir injected. Yeah,
first of all, I will not have you mock the
greatest presidents in George lash still mind. You should go
the same way in my opinion, and not a lot
of people know. If you drained Trump, Nacho Cheese comes
out of his veins.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
I was gonna ask, what was the moment in history
when people stop being completely ridiculous?
Speaker 5 (13:23):
But yeah, it hasn't started.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
You can't wait to find it.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
I can't wait to find it.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Won't be in our lifetimes.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Caution, Detales is going to be back in a moment,
and when we get back, we will answer the question
if you get run over and killed by a car,
can the driver sue you.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
We're back.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
I'm talking to the creators of the dollop, namely the
historic comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. We've talked about
Dollup one oh one, which is an episode, not a
freshman course. Now let's talk about Dollop one nine three,
which is all about what happened when people had the
temerity to use this sets for driving cars, which was
(14:11):
kind of a radical move, right, the idea that oh,
these streets, we could just drive cars on them.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
This was I mean it was a ballsy move.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
At first, the streets were for horses and carriages and
mostly hanging out and for kids to play kids, yeah,
pigs and for kids to play in That was what
streets were for. So all of a sudden there's things
on them and people are like, no, that's not what
goes here.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Like in New York, you couldn't have the kids playing
in Central Park, right because Central Park is for you know,
it is for people of quality. You can't have the
neighborhood kids coming and playing in the park. So they
play on the street. Obviously, they play on the street.
That's where that's what you do with kids. I mean,
the early cars it didn't really matter because they do
about four miles an hour. But then along comes the
Model T and that does forty five, and that's that's
(14:57):
going to sting if it just plows through your game
of baseball or whatever.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, that's not great. This episode, I think more than most,
really did blow my mind because you are just when
you live in the world today, you just automatically go, yeah,
well you walk here and you you know, you wait
for the car and all that. But it would be
(15:22):
like if we were to just like have to incorporate
UFOs into our society, there would be a tremendous amount
of growing pains and killing. And that's what there was.
I mean, it is, it is chaos.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Two thirds of the deaths in major cities would just
in New York times, cars just running over kids.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Yeah, and for like it was like fifteen years, no
one was like slow down. It just it just went
like you just drove as fast as you could wherever
you could your car.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
Cars rolled over all the time. It is called turtling.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, I mean, people just didn't they didn't know what
to do about cars. They didn't know how to drive cars.
I've got this driver training bulletin Sportsmanlike Driving, which is
a great title for like how to drive sportsman Like Driving,
which aims to explain to drivers why if they if
they go round a corner, it really fast, they're gonna
flip and it may would may not be a good
(16:22):
idea and they just didn't know.
Speaker 5 (16:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
I think we even get into it in the episode
of like, well how did they not know that too
fast was and turning? Like they had other things like
but they couldn't process that connection. Surely they'd seen a
carriage overturn or or other things flip, but or even
(16:46):
a person. But to them, they were like, no, no,
that should be fine, but you can't. You really can't
put yourself in their headspace before turning was something you
had to really pay attention.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And I guess you don't have You don't have this
whole infrastructure like driving licenses and driving instructors, and you
just bought a car and you're rich because you must
speak because you've got a car, and you go for it.
You find out the hard way, or more likely just
like eleven Street urchins find out the hard way, whereas
you just drive through.
Speaker 5 (17:15):
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
You go home at the end of your driving, you
just you hose off the children's blood and put your
car in the garage.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
It always comes down to blood. It's all about blood.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah, Well, I mean there's quite a lot of that
in cautionary tales as well, I have to say. But
this turn though, this moment where society is trying to
wrestle with this, and it's partly just an argument over well,
who deserves to be in the streets, Like who do
the streets belong to? And whose fault is it? If
a car drives into a kid or into any pedestrian
(17:53):
for a while, it's obviously the driver's fault. And then
there's this kind of amazing piece of public relations jiu
jitsu that the auto lobby managed to achieve and manage
to make it seem like, oh no, no, it's actually it's
you get hit by a car, that's your fault.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
The car is not to blame.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Yeah, yeah, well there's no It turns out it turns
out there's no profit in having children play in the street,
but there is profit in selling cars and tires and gas.
And so they did it really fast. They like this
battle year. I mean this battle was going on for years.
Speaker 5 (18:29):
Years.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
I mean like twenty years or something or more. I
can't remember exactly how many, but it's like twenty years
of kids getting killed and people getting killed in the
streets and they're having parades of like, you know, women
with a little star on their shirt walking on the
street that signified their child that died.
Speaker 5 (18:47):
And and they're.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
They're in the street, in the street, yes.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
And they're they're they're they're they're towing cars that have
been in car accidents. Like so they're just showing all
this stuff. It's going on for years, this publicity, and
then the car companies and the tire companies, gas companies
get together and they immediately just flip the narrative. And
I believe correct the biggest thing that flipped it was walking.
They came up with the term jaywalking because jay meant
(19:14):
like you country bumpkin, you you dumb hick. And so
they started calling people who walked in the street jaywalkers,
and it was highly offensive and they started basically.
Speaker 5 (19:27):
Shaming people who were in the street.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
It's an incredible move. So it's like only somebody who'd
never seen a car before would Only somebody from a
really rural area only used to horses. Only an idiot
like that would get themselves killed by a car. And
if you get killed by a car, you should just
be embarrassed.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, all those all those little kiddie bumpkins. Just this
five year old. There's five year old hay seed.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
It's it's amazing. It is amazing.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Also, there's that phase where jaywalkers. Then that then the
people just went with like jay drivers and they were
trying to call people jay drivers for a while, and
that was just sort of like, yeah, it wasn't as good.
You know, people are like that, come on, come up
with something better. They're like a day driver. Come on, everybody,
he's a jay driver.
Speaker 5 (20:20):
Get out here.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
My family's been killed.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
To me, this is the greatest example of any dollar
we've done about how stubborn we are. Kids getting mowed
down for twenty years in the street. Like after two years,
you should have been like, Okay, let's just get off
the street. It's not working, but I.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Need to do something about the demanding thing.
Speaker 5 (20:39):
But no, yeah, yeah, they just demanded to be on
the street.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
And you know, at some point you go, this is
that we're losing this battle because there those are cars
and we're people, so we should get off the street.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
But they just hung in there for years getting killed.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
I was really.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Struck by a recent episode of the podcast ninety nine
Percent Invisible about traffic. In Japan, you're not allowed to
drive your children to school, and oh, I mean I
think this maybe just is in Tokyo, but you can't
drive your children to school. And it's like, well, why
can't you drive your children to school? And the answer is, well,
because lots of children are walking to school and if
(21:16):
you drive your children to school, that's a hazard. And
it's just a oh, yeah, that makes sense. But it's
just a totally different way of looking at things. When
you look back at the United States in the early
nineteen hundreds, you realize, oh, it could have gone this way,
but it didn't.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
I mean, we built our entire society around cars essentially
starting at that point, which I don't know how many
other countries have done to the extent that we have
the urban sprawl and the highway system.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
And all that. So we definitely did that.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
The other thing that I think goes to your point
of how much things could have gone differently is Ford
was building electric cars.
Speaker 5 (21:54):
Yeah, but he was in business with Edison.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Edison was kind of bad at inventions, and he was
craking out really crappy batteries, So all the batteries he
sent to Ford were terrible and didn't work, and so Ford,
instead of trying to find new battery companies he was
he was in business, Edison said, okay, we won't do
the electric cars.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Batteries were bad then, or it was specifically Edison's batteries.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Specifically Edison's batteries were bad, and so that's why.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
He called them batteries.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
The fact that there could have been electric cars, well,
that there were electric cars one hundred and twenty years ago,
and that that maybe that whole thing could have taken
a different turn, is I think mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
One of our most popular episodes of cautioning tales was
called The False Dawn of the Electric Car, and it
was about this guy called Clive Sinclair, who was a
British very successful inventor, slightly odd guy, having made a
load of money in calculators and then a load of
money in personal computers in the nineteen eighties. He then
(23:08):
lost my most of his money trying to make this
electric car. But his vision for the electric car is
I won't start with a car, I'll start with something smaller.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
So he made this thing.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It was kind of like it was like riding around
in a giant white stiletto. That's the kind of vibe
it had, and it did about.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Fifties like that.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
He later became a professional poker player and married a stripper.
So I mean, was it a call down to another stripper?
I don't want to get it wrong, but he was
a you know, he was an interesting guy. He was
not a conventional geek. When I looked at this, I
couldn't help but think did he just get the timing wrong?
Because Elon Musk tweeted after he died about how much
(23:51):
he loved Clive Sinclair's first computer and how like Elon
Musk had grown up using this computer that Clive Sinclair
had had created. And you think, what Elon Musk is
like one of the richest guys on the planet. Because
of his investment in Tesla, the electric car company, Clives
and Clai lost all his money trying to make this
electric car. Did he just get the timing wrong? Or
(24:14):
was it something else?
Speaker 5 (24:15):
Could it?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Could it have worked if only he had kind of
made something that didn't look like a goofy shoe.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (24:20):
Well, the I think the biggest problem for the electric
car in Edison's and Ford's time, and probably Saint Clair's
time is the infrastructure of not being able to plug
in everywhere and charge your car. That's always the biggest
thing holding it back. I think if Ford had wanted to,
if Ford had gone into the electric car and kept
(24:43):
going with it, even you know, moving away from Edison's batteries,
he would have been the guy, because of his power
and wealth, who would have created a system of you know,
stations to plug in your car, because that's what Musk
did immediately. He knew immediately, well there needs to be
infrastructure out there to plug in your car. That always
(25:04):
seemed to me to be the big thing holding it back.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
And you still think Edison was it was particularly about inventions.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
I mean, you know, if you if you put Tesla
against Edison, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
Edison was a real bad dude. He was.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
He was more about you know, crushing other people and
you know, taking what they had than.
Speaker 5 (25:27):
Anything else.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
He'd thrive today.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Send your Tesla Edison fanboy mail to.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
No No, just Dave.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
I didn't say anything, guys, it's been an absolute pleasure
having you be part of Caution Tales. Thank you so much.
Where can people find the doll up? As if they
haven't already found the Dollup.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Yeah, you can listen to the doll Up. We're on
All Things Comedy Network or really, like we always say,
wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
So in the DALP feed we have started a new
podcast which you were on, called The Pastimes, which is
similar to The doll Up, in which we I pick
a newspaper and we just read through it with a
guest from any time, from like the sixteen hundred up
to now, old.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Newspapers of material and subject matter. I discovered it's super
weird every time. Somehow they're very weird.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Gareth Dave, thank you very much, Thank.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
You, Thank you, Tim a pleasure and now Viva George Washington.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
If Only, If Only Cautionary Tales is written by me,
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original
music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited
(26:49):
the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe,
Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jamma Saunders, and Rufus Wright.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
The show also.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohne, Betel Mollard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler,
Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios in London
by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember
(27:21):
to share, rate and review, tell your friends and if
you want to hear the show ad free. Sign up
for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
A couple of weeks before Christmas seventeen ninety nine, George Washington,
the first and perhaps the greatest president of the United States,
was enjoying retirement at his country estate, Mount Vernon.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Had ridden around his farms and.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Come home late, cold and in wet clothes, but guests
had come for dinner, and he hurried to entertain them
without changing into something dry. The next day, he had
a sore throat and a chesty cough. The day after that,
his throat was so badly inflamed that he had trouble breathing.
His family decided to take a fateful step. They summoned
(01:00):
a doctor. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.
(01:29):
This is one of our cautionary conversations and today I'm well,
I'm out numbered. My guests are Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds,
the host of the hugely popular comedy history podcast The
Doll Up. Hello, gentlemen, how are you hello?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Hello?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Two Americans? No less So it's it's gonna be what
that's just gonna.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
It's gonna be.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
It's gonna be different. It's gonna be different. For caution Tales,
listeners anyway. So we are going to be talking about
a couple of stories that you covered on the Dollup,
and one of those is the death of George Washington,
and we'll talk about whatever else comes up. So thanks
for joining me. And it's easy to see why they
don't up is such a successful format, because what could
be more hilarious than the painful and pointless death of
(02:14):
the father of the nation.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
I agreed you'd be shocked at think. I think this
all the time about how I'll like take a step
back and be like, we're laughing about a murder like
on our show, and I'll just be like, for the
for forty five minutes straight, we've just been making jokes.
But I'm like, two people are dead. But there are
just so many absurd moments, and this one among them.
(02:41):
Nobody knows how he died.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
We're not taught it, and it really is the most
American thing of all that we.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Like, why wouldn't you be taught this?
Speaker 5 (02:49):
We killed them, Like.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
If you were teaching this in class, I would not
be like leaving school to go smoke cigarettes. I'd be like,
I'll do it at lunch. I want to see how
this ends. This is exciting, it is extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I was listening to the episode, episode one oh one,
and I was just crying with laughter. I should have
been crying because a great man is dying me listening,
but there was just crying because.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
It was it was very funny.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
It was so we should probably run through what happens
when the doctors show up. So I think it's it's
doctor's yeah, doctor Dick, Dr Brown, Dr Crack.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
I mean it's not great.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I mean it's just again. There are many times where
I'm like, you done it, this is low hanging fruit,
don't do it. But it's like, come on, this is
I feel like Dave made those up. I feel like,
if we look back, that's not the names of it.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Of course, the first thing they do is they start
taking blood from him, quite a lot of blood, right.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
Yeah, every guy that came in, every doctor that came in,
his first thing was well, we got to get blood
out of this guy.
Speaker 5 (03:49):
And so each one trained over a pint.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
I was trying to figure out did they did they
talk to each other about that? Or is that they
all had to have their fingerprints on it.
Speaker 5 (03:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (03:57):
I don't think they were talking to each other. I
think they were just like, Okay, well now I'm here.
These other guys aren't doing a good job. I'm going
to take care of this. And then they train his blood, which.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
Is also amazing to be like that, three independent opinions
of doctors when he was dying was we should get
blood out of him, like if your engine won't turn over,
and the mechanics like let's get the oil out.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
So in the Washington's lifetime before he dies, there is
I think a Dutch doctor or maybe a Belgian doctor,
a young Baptist van Helmont. I think it's kind of
a bet with another doctor. He basically says, look, you
will take a hundred people with the plague or whatever
it is, and you treat them your way, and I'll
take another hundred people with a plague and I'll treat
(04:40):
them my way, and we'll see, we'll see who has
the most funerals, which is like it's a pretty simple idea.
But it turns out it doesn't catch on. He never
does it. None of these guys do it. Otherwise they
would have figured out that maybe draining I think it's
half of his blood in the end, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Yeah, it was most of Washington's blood. Yeah, I also
like that bet. I think that's fun for people be like,
why are you cutting his throat? Like I'm trying to
win a bet? I'm really I'm behind, so I need
to swing for the fences a little bit.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
But yeah, simply like they didn't catch home.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
It sounds it sounds like he just had a really
bad story throat. Yeah, he went out of the rain
and cold, and yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
He got my aunt. My aunt had COVID, so we
just drained her. She didn't make it.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Later, this other guy comes along and says, oh, you idiots,
he was too old. If if thirty, then yeah, sure
take six punts of blood.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
But that's the old guy.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
That was a mistake.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Yeah, well oops, what are we gonna do? Well, that's
the end of him. He had a good run. Well,
then there's the beetle guy too, right, tell me about
the beetle dog. Yeah, we're not talking about Brian Epstein,
go ahead, Dave.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
A guy came in I think it was the third doctor,
and he was like, you know what he needs is uh,
he needs a nice thick bed of beetles on his neck.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
So and then he and then he whoops his pants
so he's got no blood, a beard of beetles, and
he's pooping his pants, and everyone's like, I think he's
gonna make it. We should probably drain a little more
blood just to be safe. It's so undignified.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
I think they took blood four times, right, I think
it was four blood and they were taken like the
third time was like thirty two ounces, Like they were
really taking a lot of blood out of the sky.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Oh, I'm sure, Like yeah, like peas coming out. They're like, why,
I think he's out of blood.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Somebody proposed to tracheotomy, which it sounds like that might
actually have worked, Like if the guy can't breathe, yeah,
that would be that would work.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
It's certainly the only procedure that made it to today. Yeah,
so there's maybe something to it.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
True.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
So I was looking into this, these strange kind of
lotions and vegetable compounds, and someone that women used to
take in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for period
pains and pre menstrual stress and all this kind of stuff,
and the doctors used to think that these things were
completely ridiculous. And one of the things that the marketers
of these compounds said was basically, at least we won't
(07:15):
kill you. The doctors will kill you, and we won't
kill you. So the weird thing is they did notice
that the patients kept dying, and this was a selling
point for the alternative therapies, like non fatal.
Speaker 5 (07:27):
That's all I need. I just need to know it
won't kill me, and I'll take it. That's the only
thing I worry about.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
Well, it was also one thing we've we've talked, we
have a lot of fun with is the simplicity of
becoming a doctor was also you know, it was like
you just needed to have a sign and then you're
like open for business, you know, like a barber. But
even they needed a license. You could just simply just
say you're a doctor, and then you could just get
blood out of George Washington.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
You needed a license to be a barber, but not
to be a doctor.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Yeah, like you manifested in the moment like I'm a doctor,
and that was that.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
And then even when they made it, when they made licenses,
they would set up a medical school and you go
to the medical school and they just go, okay, you're
a doctor.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
Like there was no yeah, no.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
One was watching the medical school, So it was just
for ages. It was just you just said it and
that's what you were.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Presumably they needed to teach people how to drain a
couple of pints of blood though.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, yeah, that was probably like one of the things
they're like, look, in case of an emergency, drain the blood.
Get the blood. The blood is something the body doesn't want.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
I mean that was for a long time.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
That was very common, and each doctor had his own
blood letting device that he would bring with him to
see a patient.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I think they favored something called the heroic style of medicine,
and I think part of the problem was that doctors
charged you a lot of money. So the idea is,
if you're going to show up and you're going to
charge somebody a lot of money, you better do something,
you know, go bigger, get home, right, Don't just get
a little bit of medicine or an aspirin or take
my temperature and say call me in the morning.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
You've got to do something big.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
And if bed rest was not but you didn't pay
for bed rest, you're like bullshit.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
Right, And if the doctor comes diggs blood, you're like, oh,
I feel different, I feel a little.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
Woozy, something's happening.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
That was part of the attraction of the of the
vegetable compound as well, because they had booze in or
some of them had opium, some had booze, some had chili,
some had all of them.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Ah.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
And so you know, if it's if it's basically as
strong as sherry, you know, you will feel different and
maybe different is better, and certainly it's better than having
losing a pint of blood.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, but he could have done himself a lot of
favors by changing his clothes. But had they just simply
let him be, he had a much higher chance of survival.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
Yeah, but he was dead two days after, you know,
going out and getting his clothes wet and then having
dinner and wet clothes.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
I mean, that's that's.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Pretty quick to die of a cold, right, Yeah, yeah, definitely.
I mean, let's let's just flat out and say he
didn't die of a cold.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
He died because he got a cold.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
What do you think got him? And then do you
think got him?
Speaker 4 (10:05):
And then a bunch of guys came in and took
the stuff that was supposed to be inside his body
out of his body, and then.
Speaker 5 (10:12):
That well, that pretty much killed me.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Yeah, you know you're a bad doctor when you're the
beatlebeard guy and you history smiles upon you greatest.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
I remember, these are the guys treating Washington. So these
are the top doctors.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
The best of the best, the best of the best.
The guys are.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
There was well, note they did they did turn away
right like the one guy who had actually have an
idea and they went, oh, no, that you've gone too far.
The guy who thought maybe will resurrect him, Yeah, that
was the thing.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
There's a guy who thought maybe we could do George
Washington thriller.
Speaker 5 (10:53):
Yeah, of course, of course. There's there's three guys that
kill him. And then there's the guy that came in
and was.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
Like, let's let's do let's have a do over, let's
bring him back.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
Yeah, you get a little fire on that guy, he'll
come right.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Back and his first words are going to be what
were you doing? That was crazy? When those guys got
rid of all my blood.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
I couldn't believe the guy who wanted to bring him
back from the dead actually made more sense than the
than the first three, because he's like, we'll add some blood.
We've got a lamb and said, lamb's blood, pump up
his lungs, you know, give him the kiss of life,
warm him up, let you go.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
Yeah, I mean yeah, they're right, burser warmer, and they're.
Speaker 5 (11:38):
Like, get out of here alone.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah. Well, I wonder what they did with his blood,
because it would have been really helpful if like the
blood was nearby. But if that guy's pitching Lamb blood,
it must they must have just been like, all right,
pour that in the garden.
Speaker 5 (11:55):
I'm at that at that time. It just went on
the floor.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I would take and just tell me they didn't cook
with it, That's all I want to know.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
And then they made a blood everyone liking the Ravioli.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
We're really channeling the spirit of the doll up here.
I've got no idea what caution details listeners are making
of all this, But the simple imposition of modern standards
this on the seventeen hundreds is just very funny.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
We have learned so much over that time that, I mean,
the thoughts in their head are just absolutely bananas. So
from our perspective, it's just everything they do is completely insane,
Like you cannot believe what's happening.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Most of what they think is just crazy and wrong.
But then we do that with things that happened today too.
I mean we always are going like you know, this
is we are living in a doll up with this
or that.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Yeah, look, we had a president he tells people to
drink bleach when they got COVID.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
So that's the.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Part of me injected, part of me, sir injected. Yeah,
first of all, I will not have you mock the
greatest presidents in George lash still mind. You should go
the same way in my opinion, and not a lot
of people know. If you drained Trump, Nacho Cheese comes
out of his veins.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
I was gonna ask, what was the moment in history
when people stop being completely ridiculous?
Speaker 5 (13:23):
But yeah, it hasn't started.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
You can't wait to find it.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
I can't wait to find it.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Won't be in our lifetimes.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Caution, Detales is going to be back in a moment,
and when we get back, we will answer the question
if you get run over and killed by a car,
can the driver sue you.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
We're back.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
I'm talking to the creators of the dollop, namely the
historic comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. We've talked about
Dollup one oh one, which is an episode, not a
freshman course. Now let's talk about Dollop one nine three,
which is all about what happened when people had the
temerity to use this sets for driving cars, which was
(14:11):
kind of a radical move, right, the idea that oh,
these streets, we could just drive cars on them.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
This was I mean it was a ballsy move.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
At first, the streets were for horses and carriages and
mostly hanging out and for kids to play kids, yeah,
pigs and for kids to play in That was what
streets were for. So all of a sudden there's things
on them and people are like, no, that's not what
goes here.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Like in New York, you couldn't have the kids playing
in Central Park, right because Central Park is for you know,
it is for people of quality. You can't have the
neighborhood kids coming and playing in the park. So they
play on the street. Obviously, they play on the street.
That's where that's what you do with kids. I mean,
the early cars it didn't really matter because they do
about four miles an hour. But then along comes the
Model T and that does forty five, and that's that's
(14:57):
going to sting if it just plows through your game
of baseball or whatever.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, that's not great. This episode, I think more than most,
really did blow my mind because you are just when
you live in the world today, you just automatically go, yeah,
well you walk here and you you know, you wait
for the car and all that. But it would be
(15:22):
like if we were to just like have to incorporate
UFOs into our society, there would be a tremendous amount
of growing pains and killing. And that's what there was.
I mean, it is, it is chaos.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Two thirds of the deaths in major cities would just
in New York times, cars just running over kids.
Speaker 4 (15:45):
Yeah, and for like it was like fifteen years, no
one was like slow down. It just it just went
like you just drove as fast as you could wherever
you could your car.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
Cars rolled over all the time. It is called turtling.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yeah, I mean, people just didn't they didn't know what
to do about cars. They didn't know how to drive cars.
I've got this driver training bulletin Sportsmanlike Driving, which is
a great title for like how to drive sportsman Like Driving,
which aims to explain to drivers why if they if
they go round a corner, it really fast, they're gonna
flip and it may would may not be a good
(16:22):
idea and they just didn't know.
Speaker 5 (16:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
I think we even get into it in the episode
of like, well how did they not know that too
fast was and turning? Like they had other things like
but they couldn't process that connection. Surely they'd seen a
carriage overturn or or other things flip, but or even
(16:46):
a person. But to them, they were like, no, no,
that should be fine, but you can't. You really can't
put yourself in their headspace before turning was something you
had to really pay attention.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
And I guess you don't have You don't have this
whole infrastructure like driving licenses and driving instructors, and you
just bought a car and you're rich because you must
speak because you've got a car, and you go for it.
You find out the hard way, or more likely just
like eleven Street urchins find out the hard way, whereas
you just drive through.
Speaker 5 (17:15):
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
You go home at the end of your driving, you
just you hose off the children's blood and put your
car in the garage.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
It always comes down to blood. It's all about blood.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah, Well, I mean there's quite a lot of that
in cautionary tales as well, I have to say. But
this turn though, this moment where society is trying to
wrestle with this, and it's partly just an argument over well,
who deserves to be in the streets, Like who do
the streets belong to? And whose fault is it? If
a car drives into a kid or into any pedestrian
(17:53):
for a while, it's obviously the driver's fault. And then
there's this kind of amazing piece of public relations jiu
jitsu that the auto lobby managed to achieve and manage
to make it seem like, oh no, no, it's actually it's
you get hit by a car, that's your fault.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
The car is not to blame.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Yeah, yeah, well there's no It turns out it turns
out there's no profit in having children play in the street,
but there is profit in selling cars and tires and gas.
And so they did it really fast. They like this
battle year. I mean this battle was going on for years.
Speaker 5 (18:29):
Years.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
I mean like twenty years or something or more. I
can't remember exactly how many, but it's like twenty years
of kids getting killed and people getting killed in the
streets and they're having parades of like, you know, women
with a little star on their shirt walking on the
street that signified their child that died.
Speaker 5 (18:47):
And and they're.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
They're in the street, in the street, yes.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
And they're they're they're they're they're towing cars that have
been in car accidents. Like so they're just showing all
this stuff. It's going on for years, this publicity, and
then the car companies and the tire companies, gas companies
get together and they immediately just flip the narrative. And
I believe correct the biggest thing that flipped it was walking.
They came up with the term jaywalking because jay meant
(19:14):
like you country bumpkin, you you dumb hick. And so
they started calling people who walked in the street jaywalkers,
and it was highly offensive and they started basically.
Speaker 5 (19:27):
Shaming people who were in the street.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
It's an incredible move. So it's like only somebody who'd
never seen a car before would Only somebody from a
really rural area only used to horses. Only an idiot
like that would get themselves killed by a car. And
if you get killed by a car, you should just
be embarrassed.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, all those all those little kiddie bumpkins. Just this
five year old. There's five year old hay seed.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
It's it's amazing. It is amazing.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Also, there's that phase where jaywalkers. Then that then the
people just went with like jay drivers and they were
trying to call people jay drivers for a while, and
that was just sort of like, yeah, it wasn't as good.
You know, people are like that, come on, come up
with something better. They're like a day driver. Come on, everybody,
he's a jay driver.
Speaker 5 (20:20):
Get out here.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
My family's been killed.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
To me, this is the greatest example of any dollar
we've done about how stubborn we are. Kids getting mowed
down for twenty years in the street. Like after two years,
you should have been like, Okay, let's just get off
the street. It's not working, but I.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Need to do something about the demanding thing.
Speaker 5 (20:39):
But no, yeah, yeah, they just demanded to be on
the street.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
And you know, at some point you go, this is
that we're losing this battle because there those are cars
and we're people, so we should get off the street.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
But they just hung in there for years getting killed.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
I was really.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Struck by a recent episode of the podcast ninety nine
Percent Invisible about traffic. In Japan, you're not allowed to
drive your children to school, and oh, I mean I
think this maybe just is in Tokyo, but you can't
drive your children to school. And it's like, well, why
can't you drive your children to school? And the answer is, well,
because lots of children are walking to school and if
(21:16):
you drive your children to school, that's a hazard. And
it's just a oh, yeah, that makes sense. But it's
just a totally different way of looking at things. When
you look back at the United States in the early
nineteen hundreds, you realize, oh, it could have gone this way,
but it didn't.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
I mean, we built our entire society around cars essentially
starting at that point, which I don't know how many
other countries have done to the extent that we have
the urban sprawl and the highway system.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
And all that. So we definitely did that.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
The other thing that I think goes to your point
of how much things could have gone differently is Ford
was building electric cars.
Speaker 5 (21:54):
Yeah, but he was in business with Edison.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Edison was kind of bad at inventions, and he was
craking out really crappy batteries, So all the batteries he
sent to Ford were terrible and didn't work, and so Ford,
instead of trying to find new battery companies he was
he was in business, Edison said, okay, we won't do
the electric cars.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Batteries were bad then, or it was specifically Edison's batteries.
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Specifically Edison's batteries were bad, and so that's why.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
He called them batteries.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
The fact that there could have been electric cars, well,
that there were electric cars one hundred and twenty years ago,
and that that maybe that whole thing could have taken
a different turn, is I think mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
One of our most popular episodes of cautioning tales was
called The False Dawn of the Electric Car, and it
was about this guy called Clive Sinclair, who was a
British very successful inventor, slightly odd guy, having made a
load of money in calculators and then a load of
money in personal computers in the nineteen eighties. He then
(23:08):
lost my most of his money trying to make this
electric car. But his vision for the electric car is
I won't start with a car, I'll start with something smaller.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
So he made this thing.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It was kind of like it was like riding around
in a giant white stiletto. That's the kind of vibe
it had, and it did about.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Fifties like that.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
He later became a professional poker player and married a stripper.
So I mean, was it a call down to another stripper?
I don't want to get it wrong, but he was
a you know, he was an interesting guy. He was
not a conventional geek. When I looked at this, I
couldn't help but think did he just get the timing wrong?
Because Elon Musk tweeted after he died about how much
(23:51):
he loved Clive Sinclair's first computer and how like Elon
Musk had grown up using this computer that Clive Sinclair
had had created. And you think, what Elon Musk is
like one of the richest guys on the planet. Because
of his investment in Tesla, the electric car company, Clives
and Clai lost all his money trying to make this
electric car. Did he just get the timing wrong? Or
(24:14):
was it something else?
Speaker 5 (24:15):
Could it?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Could it have worked if only he had kind of
made something that didn't look like a goofy shoe.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (24:20):
Well, the I think the biggest problem for the electric
car in Edison's and Ford's time, and probably Saint Clair's
time is the infrastructure of not being able to plug
in everywhere and charge your car. That's always the biggest
thing holding it back. I think if Ford had wanted to,
if Ford had gone into the electric car and kept
(24:43):
going with it, even you know, moving away from Edison's batteries,
he would have been the guy, because of his power
and wealth, who would have created a system of you know,
stations to plug in your car, because that's what Musk
did immediately. He knew immediately, well there needs to be
infrastructure out there to plug in your car. That always
(25:04):
seemed to me to be the big thing holding it back.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
And you still think Edison was it was particularly about inventions.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
I mean, you know, if you if you put Tesla
against Edison, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
Edison was a real bad dude. He was.
Speaker 4 (25:20):
He was more about you know, crushing other people and
you know, taking what they had than.
Speaker 5 (25:27):
Anything else.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
He'd thrive today.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Send your Tesla Edison fanboy mail to.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
No No, just Dave.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
I didn't say anything, guys, it's been an absolute pleasure
having you be part of Caution Tales. Thank you so much.
Where can people find the doll up? As if they
haven't already found the Dollup.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Yeah, you can listen to the doll Up. We're on
All Things Comedy Network or really, like we always say,
wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
So in the DALP feed we have started a new
podcast which you were on, called The Pastimes, which is
similar to The doll Up, in which we I pick
a newspaper and we just read through it with a
guest from any time, from like the sixteen hundred up
to now, old.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Newspapers of material and subject matter. I discovered it's super
weird every time. Somehow they're very weird.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Gareth Dave, thank you very much, Thank.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
You, Thank you, Tim a pleasure and now Viva George Washington.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
If Only, If Only Cautionary Tales is written by me,
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original
music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited
(26:49):
the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe,
Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jamma Saunders, and Rufus Wright.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
The show also.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohne, Betel Mollard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler,
Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios in London
by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember
(27:21):
to share, rate and review, tell your friends and if
you want to hear the show ad free. Sign up
for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus
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