January 31, 2011 • 34 mins
From Marlon Brando to Harry Houdini, it's common knowledge that performers are uniquely gifted -- but several have also gained reputations as gifted inventors. Tune in to learn more about five of history's most unlikely inventors.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm fair a Dowdy and I'm depleted Chuck reboarding and
if you're caught up with your history podcasts, this topic
(00:20):
may seem kind of familiar to you. We did a
recent episode about Hetty Lamar, who was a Hollywood actress
once known as the most beautiful girl in the world,
and she didn't really have any special technology degrees or
engineering degrees of any sort. She was basically an artsy type.
She had studied the arts from an early age, but
with the help of composer and pianist George aunt Hile,
(00:42):
she somehow managed to invent and receive a patent for
a frequency hopping device, which she called Secret Communication System,
and the concept behind this would become a component of
modern mobile phone technology. So that was sort of a
recap of the recent podcast, but it made us really
curious to find out more about other celebrity inventors throughout history,
(01:02):
past entertainers who invented products or technology that maybe we
still use today. So we wanted to do a little
research on that. Yeah, and it turned out that there
were a lot more of these celebrity inventors out there
than you might expect, and some of them had acting background,
like Hetty Lamar. Marlon Brando was one example, of course.
You know, he's known for his superb acting ability, his
(01:25):
good looks that laced up earlier in life, definitely his charisma,
and um you know, of course his starring roles in
a street car named Desire on the waterfront. Godfather. Probably
don't need to give you too much of a background
on Marlon Brando, um, but you may not have known
that he was also passionate about bongo drumming and Latin music.
(01:46):
And you can even find some videos of him performing
on the drums, which is, um pretty interesting. We were
chatting about it earlier. He's he's so proper, Yeah, he's
really serious about this drumming. Yeah, he's this kind of shy,
a soft spoken young man. And then he goes and
takes the reporter down to the basement and breaks out
the bongo drums or conga drums, I should say. Um,
(02:08):
he owned a few of those conga drums and one
of them was actually auctioned off recently at Christie's after
his death in two thousand four, but in two thousand two,
so so much later in Marlon Brando's life, he received
a patent for what he called the Drumhead Tensioning Device
and Method. You're going to notice that a lot of
(02:29):
these patents have bizarre, sort of long rambling names. But
this device that Marlon Brando cooked up was basically an
auto tune or for drums, and drums are apparently difficult
to tune, so it was a useful invention. Yeah. And
there were other celebrity inventors that we found too, in
other fields, not just actors, some authors, musicians, comedians. So
(02:52):
we just want to take a look at five of them.
There were a lot, especially in recent years, but we
kind of went back to the petty Lamar period and
that sort of range. Yeah, on a few and tried
to pick ones that really were quite surprising, either because
of their careers or because of their inventions, which just
seemed nothing like what they were known for. Right, So,
(03:13):
without further ado, we'll dive right in with Zeppo Marks.
First of all, he was born Herbert Manfred Marks, and
he's often remembered as the weak link in the Marks brothers.
The Marks brothers, of course, being one of the most
celebrated American comedy teams of all time, and a lot
of people though, think that Zeppo was probably just underappreciated
(03:35):
in this group, that he actually did have talent that
just wasn't really recognized for it because they were already
so well established by the time he got there. I mean,
he was much younger than his four brothers. Gummo, who
was the nearest to Zeppo and age, was actually nine
years older than him. Express Yeah, definitely. So Zeppo was
kind of forced into show business when Gummo was drafted
(03:55):
into the army during World War One, so it wasn't
necessarily a choice of his, but he did it anyway.
He performed with them in vaudeville, on Broadway and in
five films, but especially in the films, he really didn't
have much of a role there. His character was basically
superfluous and a lot of these Yeah, and this is
kind of sad yet funny side note, but Zeppo became
(04:17):
somewhat of a derogatory term to describe somebody who was
to perfluouss like a cut down for an extra. Essentially, yeah,
the useless person in the group. I mean, it's not
in web Mariam Webster anything like that. But some people
use it that way. For example, if you are a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan um, which I know many
of you probably are, even if you don't admit it,
(04:38):
there's an episode called a Zeppo and it basically refers
to the Buffy characters Ander and how he's useless to
that so good trivia. Yeah, I think I'm gonna start
using that one too. Um But you know, Zepco, even
though he maybe wasn't the most important member of the
Marx Brothers, he ended up proving his worth in different ways.
After leaving the group in the early along with Gummo,
(05:02):
he became a talent agent and quite a successful one.
But he also made a foray into the engineering world,
and that's sort of where this invention is going to
take off from. Yeah, he now, Zeppo. We shouldn't backtrack
a little bit. He was always sort of mechanically inclined.
It said that he's the one who used to keep
the family car and working order. But he took this
(05:24):
interest beyond just a hobby after meeting a Douglas Aircraft
executive at the racetrack and this executive told him, okay,
we're short of machine shops and machinists right now. So
Zeppo ends up machining airplane parts from his garage and
he forms a company from that called Marmon Products. And
later after an inventor approaches him with an idea that
(05:46):
he has, he ends up marketing something called the Marmon clamp,
and clamps inspired by these Marmon clamps end up being
used all over the aviation industry, even an aerospace engineering.
So this is all just to kind of of you
a little background and to say he was more than
just a comedian to start out with. Yeah, his inventions
didn't come out of thin air. He had this engineering background. Um.
(06:08):
But Zeppo had three patents of his own that he
collaborated on because you know, of course the clamp was
somebody else's invention, he just marketed it. Two of his
patents were related, and they came out around the same
time in nineteen sixty seven. One is the cardiac pulse
rate monitor and the other is the method and watch
(06:29):
mechanism for actuation by a cardiac pulse. Again very detailed,
long detailed, long titles. Um. These two inventions were meant
to be used together and Basically, they would alert people
with heart problems to in a regular heartbeat. So, um,
the watch part had two dials. One was driven by
(06:49):
the wearer's pulse and the other operated at um at
a rate that corresponded to what a normal heartbeat should be.
And so it's the pulse driven part, which was run
by this ectric powered magnet. Started to go too fast
or too slow, it would trigger an audible alarm. This
kind of reminds me of loss. If we're gonna be
talking about TV show, when Sawyer gets the little heartbeat
(07:13):
thing implanted in him, he can't get too excited. Um,
so you know this is obviously Um, we can see
how this basic idea was adopted later and adapted. Yeah,
in the exercise industry. I don't know if you've ever
been in a spinning class or something and seeing people
with the heart rate monitors on trying to see if
they're getting their heart rate up enough, but they look
(07:33):
like giant watches. Yeah, you can kind of see the
influence there. Um. He also had another invention. He invented
the heating pad, And basically he invented this because he
saw that people were having to heat up towels. And
hospitals like wet towels and put hot water bottles and
that sort of thing. Yeah, so he just seemed to
look for where there was a lack a need for
(07:54):
something and work to fill it. And that's going to
be a common theme for a lot of our enters
later in the list, for sure. So our next entry
is the author Roll Doll. And of course he's best
known as writing children's books, but um, that's not something
he got into until middle age. He had a very
interesting career before that. He was born in nineteen sixteen
(08:18):
in South Wales to Norwegian parents, as I'm sure you
know if you've ever read a Role Doll book, and
he was sent to a boarding school managed by this
trunch bowl like matron who hated little boys. That he
had an adventurous childhood. His prep school wasn't really that
much better, but fortunately for him and for the other boys,
there was a Cadbury plant nearby. Um again, if you've
(08:41):
read any Role Doll, all of this seems to fit
in perfectly. Yeah. And when he graduated he didn't go
straight to university. He had a pretty adventurous life after that.
At eighteen, he went on an expedition to Newfoundland. After
that he was a salesman for Shell and after that,
at the start of World War Two, he joined the
Royal Air Force and trained as a fighter pilot, so
(09:04):
pretty diverse career. He fought in Libya, Greece and Syria.
Crash landed in the Libyan desert, fractured his skull, smashed
his hip and injured his spine, and so he after
that he needed a hip replacement in two spinal operations.
So a little bit of tragedy mixed in there. Yeah, well,
another another interesting trivia note for you. Um, he was
(09:27):
a little macabre with these artificial parts he had, because
you know, sometimes those type of things you have to
get them replaced a few times throughout your lifetime. In
his little writing hut, he kept I think the top
of his femur one of his hip replacements. Little momento
Maury's I guess, while he was writing fantastically funny children's books.
(09:49):
But um, after nineteen two he transferred to Washington d
C M because you know, of his health problems and
all of that, he needed something besides being a fighter pilot. Um.
And in d C he worked as an air attache,
which was basically a British spy who was working to
rally American support for the war cause and for the
(10:12):
Royal Air Force. And while he was in the States
he met the writer CS Forrester, and Forrester suggested to
Doll that he write about his experience being shot down
in the desert. It would make a great story for
a weekly or monthly magazine. So it only takes about
a week for Doll to write this story, sell it
(10:35):
to the Saturday Evening Post for nine hundred dollars, and
basically make a name for himself. It attracted the attention
of Walt Disney of Eleanor Roosevelt Um and he decides
that writing adult fiction might be a pretty good gig
for him. He seems to be doing all right at
it to start out with. Then, in nineteen fifty three,
(10:55):
Doll Mary's Oscar winning actress, patrician Neal. That was, of course,
before she won the Oscar, though, and he started writing
stories for their kids around nineteen sixty. His first attempt
was a huge success, James and the Giant Peach and
other hits followed The BFG, Matilda, The Witches, the Twits.
So the list goes on. I think most people have
(11:17):
heard of a lot of these, is not all of them.
The BFG is my favorite. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm a
fan of James and the Giant Peach and they're a
pretty They're all pretty good. Um. But even though he
you know, was having success with his adult fiction career
and then later with his children's books, I mean huge
success with that, he also had some really tragic elements
(11:39):
in his life, and not just that. Earlier wrec We
mentioned his eldest daughter died at age seven from encephalitis,
which was brought on by measles. His wife had a
brain aneurysm followed by a series of strokes and for
a time lost the use of one side of her body,
and Dahl was really instrumental in rihab illitating her. Some
(12:01):
people thought that the level of rehabilitation he started with
too much, it was almost cruel, but she regained much
of her function and actually went on to win her
oscar after this aneurysm and stroke, so she she recovered.
But it's one tragedy in particular that spurred this invention
(12:21):
we're going to be talking about. When he was only
four months old, Doll's son, THEO was hit in his
tram by a New York City taxi and slammed into
the side of a bus, and he was severely injured.
He developed hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain, and
um Doll was suddenly faced with trying to update existing
(12:44):
technology to better help his son. Yeah, and there was
already a brain shunt in existence at that time. It
was called the Holter shunt, and THEO did have that installed.
The doctors installed that in him, but it was kind
of dangerous because this particular shunt would jam and this
could cause pain, blindness, or even brain damage. So Doll
(13:05):
decided to do something about it. He recruited too specialists
to help him out. One was hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade,
who shared Doll's hobby of building model airplanes, so that's
kind of how he knew him. And the other one
was neurosurgeon Kenneth Till, who figured out that the clogging
that made the Holter shunt so dangerous was actually caused
by degree that built up in the hydrocephalic ventricles, something
(13:28):
that's actually pretty common when there's bleeding on the brain,
which is what THEO had, leaving on the brain so
the three of them get together, with all of their
diverse skills, they make a new device. And UM, because
my conception of engineering is a little vague, this doesn't
quite compute with me. But I'm gonna still describe it
(13:49):
and see if you can if you can get it.
I was. I was almost thinking of it as like
a series of locks, but that might be entirely wrong. Um.
It's two metal disks and each of them have their
own housing, and there at the end of a silicon
rubber tube. And so when fluid is moving under pressure
from below, it pushes the disks against the tube to
(14:10):
keep anything from flowing back, because you're obviously trying to
drain the brain of fluid, not have water come back
onto it. UM. Meanwhile, pressure from above would move each
disk into an open position, so I'm guessing the fluid
could flow out. UM. Anyways, they call this the wade
doll till valve and UM. Interestingly, fortunately, I guess THEO
(14:33):
was better before this valve was finished and perfected and tested. UM.
But a lot of other kids got to use this technology,
this life saving technology until UM the shunt technology advanced
even further. And another interesting thing. The three men promised
to never make a penny off of this valve, just
(14:55):
they wanted to make it to help people totally selfless
move And the next person on our list is one
that Katie and Sarah talked about previously. It's Harry Houdini.
Many of you have probably heard his name was born
Eric Whites, the son of a rabbi in Budapest and
raised in Appleton, Wisconsin. And his name is almost synonymous
(15:15):
with magic. But what he's really known for is this
amazing escape acts. He was known as the handcuff King
and the prison breaker and the self liberator, and he
just had this really uncanny ability to pick locks, get
out of handcuffs, shackles, and worm his way out of ropes.
Just any tight situation you could put him in he
would be able to get out of. Yeah, he was
(15:37):
really much more of an escapist than a magician, despite
his overall reputation. Um but yeah, Katie and I, as
he mentioned, detailed a few of his notable escapes. Um
like his straight jacket escape where he would get strapped
into this real straight jacket and then would be suspended
by the ankles from a building our crane and have
(15:57):
to wheedle his way out of it in front of
the crowd. Of course, Another the Chinese water torture cell,
where his feet were bound and he was lowered upside
down into a water filled tank. Um. And I mean
most of you probably know other famous Houdini escapes. Um,
so it's probably not too surprising that his invention actually
(16:19):
has to do with escapes exactly. He used this knowledge
of getting out of sticky situations and his knowledge of
escape bology and put it into an invention. In he
received a patent for a diver suit, which he created.
The main purpose of the suit was to make it
easier for divers to get out of the suit quickly
and without help from another person if they found themselves
(16:41):
in a sticky situation while underwater. So imagine this. It's
a suit, and it's it consists basically of two separate pieces,
and upper and a lower piece, and they're connected by
this lever operated metallic belt. So I think basically the
idea here was that you could pull the lever and
the twos would come apart. You could step out of
(17:02):
the bottom that would kind of fall down and easily
pull the top over your head. So this was an
advantage just so you could get out of it yourself,
but you could also get into it yourself a lot
easier than other diving us at the time bench of
assistance putting it on. And it could also helped protect
a submerged diver from being crushed by the pressure of
(17:22):
the surrounding water in case his air supply should give
out for any reason at all. So I'm not sure.
I did a lot of research on this. I'm not
sure if it was ever actually used UM in itself,
but from what I've seen on diving sites and things
like that, it seems like it was an improvement over
suits that were available at the time. Yeah, and that's
going to be another theme. Aoras you've probably already noticed.
(17:44):
Another theme to a lot of these it's it's not
necessarily an invention that comes out of thin air. It's
some little tweak or improvement UM or maybe the prototype
for a future invention that's better known. Right, And we
should also mention you can look a lot of these
patents up. I don't know if you ever have, but
Google has a great patents database. You can just um,
(18:07):
you know, put in whatever you're looking for, maybe the
name of the inventor if you know it in their
pictures and the notes of the original proposal they've submitted,
and um, the inventor's signatures too, so you'll see there
you know. Well, I don't I don't want to give
any of the future ones away on the rest of
our list. That's kind of cool too. And also, um,
we were we were talking about how one source that
(18:29):
we both used with um, the Atlantic, they have a
whole series on a lot of these celebrity inventors, which
is pretty fun. I mean, that's where you can find
Marlon Brando playing the congo drums and m also illustrations
of a lot of these Yeah, their illustrations pull from
these original patents that I just mentioned you can find
You can probably find them on the U S patent
(18:49):
side too, don't you think probably? And um, the diving
suit in particulars are really funny. It looks almost like
a space suit. Um, more Jules Verne than then Houdini exactly. Um,
and you can see the lover mechanism and and how
it comes apart, and I don't know, to me, it
seems like a great way almost to pant someone underwater
(19:11):
if you are prankster sort. It's really funny if you
see Julie newmars Um support hosiery, if we're going to
put that in a in a nice way funny illustrations. Okay, well,
anyways we digress, yes, and move on to our next entry,
which is Paul Winschell. So a lot of you might
(19:33):
not know the name Paul Winchell. Um. Maybe if you
are a big fan of classic children's television, or you're
in your fifties or sixties, you know who he is. Um.
But even if you don't recognize his name, I think
that most of you would probably recognize his voice, even
if you're like eight years old, because for many years
(19:54):
he was the voice of Tigger on Winnie the pooh Um.
He didn't get his start on that kind of voiceover TV, though.
He got his start on vaudeville with a ventriloquist act,
which is kind of interestingly enough, play into this invention.
Yeah you wouldn't think it, but it does a little
(20:14):
backtrack just to give you a little background on him.
He was born Paul Wilchon on December twenty one and
raised near Coney Island, but he had a really difficult childhood.
He had polio, which caused his legs to atrophy, and
so he had to work out a lot to regain
his muscle strength. But he also had a stutter, which
seems like a really unusual sort of thing to overcome
(20:38):
and you're going to go on to become a ventriloquist.
And he was beaten by his mother and he kind
of took refuge from all of that in radio comedy,
so that's where the interest started. His mother, however, refused
him a dime for a book on ventriloquism, so his
sister's boyfriend bought it for him instead, and he started practicing,
and he imitated the ventriloquist dummy team of Edgar Bergen
(21:00):
and Charlie McCarthy, So that was kind of his idol. Yeah,
and he got pretty good at it, but it was
still sort of his personal secret um. And in school
he was allowed to build a dummy as an art project.
So he's working on this dummy, getting it all together.
It takes a really long time. It's finally ready and
he comes out and impresses all of his classmates who
(21:22):
have no idea that he's secretly a really good ventriloquist
with his amazing act, so he's suddenly quite popular at school.
He's really really good at it, and his principle actually
helped him get on a radio talent show where he
was billed as Paul Winchell, which might be a little
easier to say, and he was no longer from Coney
(21:43):
Island either. Um. He does really well on this talent show.
In fact, he wins and that sort of sets off
his ventriloquist career from there. And he worked on the
vode bill circuit, worked on radio and TV, and he
had two dummies to miss dummies who he's associated with.
One is Jerry Mahoney and the other is a knucklehead Smith.
(22:06):
And he's probably most famous aside from Ticker, maybe most
famous for the Paul Winchell Jerry Mahoney Show, which appeared
on NBC from nineteen fifty to nineteen UM. An interesting
side note, Carol Burnett played Mahoney's girlfriend, so she played
the dummies girl. Yeah. I want to look up some
(22:26):
of these. I wonder if you can find him. You
can actually find some clips on YouTube of these acts,
and I mean it's pretty it's pretty amazing. I saw
one where he's putting Jerry Mahoney to bed um and
sort of arguing with him about finally getting to sleep
and then realizing that Jerry Mahoney skipped school and played hockey,
(22:47):
and uh, it's it's funny. Well, I know what I'll
be doing this afternoon. But it didn't just stop there.
Ed Sullivan also featured him often, and he appeared on
shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, The Lucy Show, The Brady Bunch,
So he was all over the place, and when kids
shows switched more to cartoons, he also switched and started
to do voice work for a. Hanna Barbera and Disney.
(23:10):
And in addition to being the voice of Tigger, he
was also Boomer in The Fox and the Hound and
the Siamese Cat and the Aristo Hats. So lots of
really recognizable characters. Yeah, but all you know, during this
whole thing, all these dummies who he's working with, all
this voice over, he's also studying and tinkering. And in
the nineteen the mid nineteen fifties, he goes back to
(23:32):
school and he said, quote, it wasn't until I was
thirty five that it dawned on me that I missed
my education. So he doesn't just go to school though,
to to study something that maybe played into his current
successful career, like business or communications or something like that. No,
he does pre med at Columbia and then goes on
(23:55):
to study acupuncture and medical hypnotism. So he clearly has
this whole other course of interest that is very much
apart from ventriloquism, or so it would seem. Um. But
with all of these medical inclinations, he eventually gets to
work in nineteen sixty three with surgeons at the University
(24:15):
of Utah and Henry J. Heimlich. Who is that Heimlich?
Another familiar name, Another familiar name. I know. I was
thinking of famous namesakes we've talked about lately, like guillotine
and um. They just keep popping up. Um. Anyways, so
Winschell gets to work with this team to develop an
artificial heart. So I bet you didn't see that one coming,
(24:38):
not at all. In this heart, it's essentially an electric
motor outside of the body with a drive shaft that
extends into the body and it's connected to a non
toxic bag that would pump like a heart. So this
never itself really took off, but it's considered the prototype
for the Robert K. Jarvic heart, which was implanted in
a person in two so um sort of formed the
(25:00):
basis for that. Yeah, they're apparently very very similar. According
to Henry Heimlich, Um, so inventing a heart sounds really complicated,
even if you had studied premedic Columbia and you were
working with surgeons and all of that. But Winchell didn't
think that it was really that complicated, he said in
(25:22):
an autobiography quote, Odd as it may seem, the heart
wasn't that different from building a dummy. The valves and
chambers were not unlike the moving eyes and closing mouth
of a puppet. I think that is so fascinating that, um,
somebody could have that kind of mind that would compare these. Yeah,
(25:42):
relate something like a puppet and a heart, but pretty awesome. Um.
Winchell kept up with the patenting too, as many of
these people do. He ultimately developed thirty different patterns, including
battery heated gloves and invisible garter belt, a flameless cigarette lighter,
and a fountain pen with a retractable tip, among many others.
(26:06):
Pretty interesting guy. Definitely. The last person on our list
is really one that needs no introduction, But of course
We'll give you one anyway, because we always do. It's
Mark Twain, who was born Samuel Clemens, and he was
an American writer. As most of us know, I'm a humorist,
a lecturer. He's famous for his books about boyhood high jinks,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
(26:27):
which if you grew up in the US, you probably
couldn't get out of high school without reading at least
one or both of those. And he really grew to
become one of America's most love writers. Yeah, and Katie
I actually did a podcast on him quite some time
to go to to fill in a little more details
if you're if you're dying for more Mark Twain, and
you haven't gotten the first part of that giant best
(26:49):
selling autobiography yet. Um. But one thing that probably not
as many people know about this famous humorous was that
he was also quite an inventor. He actually had three patents,
including eight seventy one patent for a quote garment strap,
which was essentially this adjustable strap that could tighten your
(27:11):
shirts at the waist and it would attach to the
back of a shirt and fasten with buttons. Um. To
keep it in place and um, and make it so
you could still remove it easily, cinch it up, and
it could be used for underpants and women's corsets as
well as shirts. And his whole goal with inventing this
was to do away with suspenders, and he was not
(27:34):
a fan of suspenders. He thought they were uncomfortable and
would rather where this strap. I guess, yeah, so once
again sees a problem, looks to solve it. I like
it very enterprising. He also, though, got a patent for
something that I think would be useful to us. It's
a history trivia game. In eight he came up with
his patent and it was a game which he proposed
(27:55):
playing with cards and a cribbage board. So I didn't
really find any rules to the scame out there curious
too curious about this game. It's I guess if it
was the history trivia might be a little difficult point,
Like you know when you get a trivial pursuit that's
about twenty years old and it's really hard. Oh yeah,
(28:16):
the the original trivial pursuit. It might be that like
compounded but um, the only one of these inventions that
Mark Twain cooked up that really took off, that really
had any kind of financial success was his quote self
pasting scrap book. Um, so here's another weird, little known
(28:37):
fact about Mark Twain. But he was a lifelong creator
of scrap books. He was really into it. Yeah, he
took them everywhere, filled them up with souvenirs, pictures and
articles about his books and performances, so really serious about it.
But he got tired of having a glue stuff all
the time, just like wearing suspender send day out. So
he came up with this idea of printing thin strips
(29:00):
of glue on the pages to make the whole process easier.
So picture it is being like a stamp. You look
it and then you look the part that you want
to stick something to, and then it becomes sticky. And
he patented this in eighteen seventy two. Yeah, and by
nineteen and one there were fifty seven different types of
these albums available. And according to five St. Louis Post
(29:22):
Dispatch article, twain scrap Book made him fifty thousand dollars
compared to two thousand dollars from all of his other
books combined, which I mean, good for him, but that's
kind of sad. Too. Yeah, I guess it depends on
how you look at it. I see the moral of
the story is being I need to go work on
(29:44):
a patent. This we immediately you know, it seems like
a good a good way to make some money unless
you have really high moral principles, like the way Donald
Hill valve. You don't want to make any money off
of It's but I mean it's scrap book. Nobody's going
to judge. Yeah, I wouldn't well, and I think scrap
books appropriately enough bring us to listener mail. This one
(30:10):
is not actually mail. It is a blog comment from
the stuffumist in history class blog at how stuff works
dot com. Um. But I thought I would mention it
just because it disturbed me a little. I was worried,
um suddenly, that lots of people might think this. It's
from d C. Deb and she wrote quote, It's one
(30:32):
thing to have an AD at the beginning or end
of a podcast, the one that is recognized as an AD,
but it is entirely another thing to show a product
in the course of the actual program. This is exactly
what occurred in the Hetty Lamar podcast after referring to
a biography by Stephen Shearer, which quote came out last
year along with quote another biography. Dublina went on to
(30:56):
definitely recommend picking up the Shearer book if we are
interested in her life, while the other reference book was
never identified or recommended. Um, total plug and UM. She
went on to say that she was always trying to
differentiate the shill from the podcasts, and she had sent unsubscribed,
(31:17):
so I guess she's not going to catch this one.
But we just wanted to say that we do not
get paid to promote books like at all A lot
out UM, when we talk about a book, not when
something is mentioned in the bumper or in an interview,
but when we're actually talking about a book. UM, it's
for one of these three reasons. And I responded to
d C dev on the blog with these three reasons too,
(31:39):
but I thought i'd share them with the wider audience
of the podcast. One reason why we sometimes share the
name of a book is because it was a major
source for information. It feels right to to give credit
where credits due. Another is that we think it will
be a useful source for listeners who are interested in
doing more research. And UM, I actually get a lot
(32:01):
of requests for book recommendations. People are pretty into that. Um,
so you know, sometimes we think, if you're interested in
doing a little more research, this is a good place
to start. And then the third reason is we read it.
We really liked it because I mean, we're we're interested
in history obviously, so we're reading history books that come
(32:23):
out and we get so immersed in these topics every
week when we're researching that sometimes we just get a
little excited and want to share what we're reading about. Yeah.
So I just I just wanted to make sure that
everybody realized that that we're not getting paid to to
promote books. Um. No, Mark Twain and Rol dal did
not contribute to Yeah, I know the state of Mark
(32:43):
Twain paid me to mention that new autobiography. Just kidding. Um,
But anyways, I hope that clears things up for everybody.
And um, if you ever have questions like that and
you want to ask us, feel free to. I mean
I would much rather clear something up like that then
then leave everybody wondering. Um. But you can find us
(33:04):
on Twitter at Miston History. We're also on Facebook. You
can post on the blog as DC dab did, and
you can also send us an email at history podcast
at how staff works dot com. Um, so yeah, send
us your your questions and queries and we'll see what
we can do about sorting it out and answering. And
(33:24):
if like us, all this talk about inventions and they're
various inventors has gotten you more interested in the subject,
We have a bunch of new inventor content coming out
on our website. You can look it up. Um, I
think we have stories on African American inventors, women inventors
and their inventions. We already have some Edison content. Um.
(33:47):
I think that there's a great article ten Inventions by
Edison that you may have never heard of. So um
check it out by visiting our homepage typing in either
the person you're interested in specifically, or inventor at www
dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this
(34:08):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The
how Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it
today on iTunes, m
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm fair a Dowdy and I'm depleted Chuck reboarding and
if you're caught up with your history podcasts, this topic
(00:20):
may seem kind of familiar to you. We did a
recent episode about Hetty Lamar, who was a Hollywood actress
once known as the most beautiful girl in the world,
and she didn't really have any special technology degrees or
engineering degrees of any sort. She was basically an artsy type.
She had studied the arts from an early age, but
with the help of composer and pianist George aunt Hile,
(00:42):
she somehow managed to invent and receive a patent for
a frequency hopping device, which she called Secret Communication System,
and the concept behind this would become a component of
modern mobile phone technology. So that was sort of a
recap of the recent podcast, but it made us really
curious to find out more about other celebrity inventors throughout history,
(01:02):
past entertainers who invented products or technology that maybe we
still use today. So we wanted to do a little
research on that. Yeah, and it turned out that there
were a lot more of these celebrity inventors out there
than you might expect, and some of them had acting background,
like Hetty Lamar. Marlon Brando was one example, of course.
You know, he's known for his superb acting ability, his
(01:25):
good looks that laced up earlier in life, definitely his charisma,
and um you know, of course his starring roles in
a street car named Desire on the waterfront. Godfather. Probably
don't need to give you too much of a background
on Marlon Brando, um, but you may not have known
that he was also passionate about bongo drumming and Latin music.
(01:46):
And you can even find some videos of him performing
on the drums, which is, um pretty interesting. We were
chatting about it earlier. He's he's so proper, Yeah, he's
really serious about this drumming. Yeah, he's this kind of shy,
a soft spoken young man. And then he goes and
takes the reporter down to the basement and breaks out
the bongo drums or conga drums, I should say. Um,
(02:08):
he owned a few of those conga drums and one
of them was actually auctioned off recently at Christie's after
his death in two thousand four, but in two thousand two,
so so much later in Marlon Brando's life, he received
a patent for what he called the Drumhead Tensioning Device
and Method. You're going to notice that a lot of
(02:29):
these patents have bizarre, sort of long rambling names. But
this device that Marlon Brando cooked up was basically an
auto tune or for drums, and drums are apparently difficult
to tune, so it was a useful invention. Yeah. And
there were other celebrity inventors that we found too, in
other fields, not just actors, some authors, musicians, comedians. So
(02:52):
we just want to take a look at five of them.
There were a lot, especially in recent years, but we
kind of went back to the petty Lamar period and
that sort of range. Yeah, on a few and tried
to pick ones that really were quite surprising, either because
of their careers or because of their inventions, which just
seemed nothing like what they were known for. Right, So,
(03:13):
without further ado, we'll dive right in with Zeppo Marks.
First of all, he was born Herbert Manfred Marks, and
he's often remembered as the weak link in the Marks brothers.
The Marks brothers, of course, being one of the most
celebrated American comedy teams of all time, and a lot
of people though, think that Zeppo was probably just underappreciated
(03:35):
in this group, that he actually did have talent that
just wasn't really recognized for it because they were already
so well established by the time he got there. I mean,
he was much younger than his four brothers. Gummo, who
was the nearest to Zeppo and age, was actually nine
years older than him. Express Yeah, definitely. So Zeppo was
kind of forced into show business when Gummo was drafted
(03:55):
into the army during World War One, so it wasn't
necessarily a choice of his, but he did it anyway.
He performed with them in vaudeville, on Broadway and in
five films, but especially in the films, he really didn't
have much of a role there. His character was basically
superfluous and a lot of these Yeah, and this is
kind of sad yet funny side note, but Zeppo became
(04:17):
somewhat of a derogatory term to describe somebody who was
to perfluouss like a cut down for an extra. Essentially, yeah,
the useless person in the group. I mean, it's not
in web Mariam Webster anything like that. But some people
use it that way. For example, if you are a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan um, which I know many
of you probably are, even if you don't admit it,
(04:38):
there's an episode called a Zeppo and it basically refers
to the Buffy characters Ander and how he's useless to
that so good trivia. Yeah, I think I'm gonna start
using that one too. Um But you know, Zepco, even
though he maybe wasn't the most important member of the
Marx Brothers, he ended up proving his worth in different ways.
After leaving the group in the early along with Gummo,
(05:02):
he became a talent agent and quite a successful one.
But he also made a foray into the engineering world,
and that's sort of where this invention is going to
take off from. Yeah, he now, Zeppo. We shouldn't backtrack
a little bit. He was always sort of mechanically inclined.
It said that he's the one who used to keep
the family car and working order. But he took this
(05:24):
interest beyond just a hobby after meeting a Douglas Aircraft
executive at the racetrack and this executive told him, okay,
we're short of machine shops and machinists right now. So
Zeppo ends up machining airplane parts from his garage and
he forms a company from that called Marmon Products. And
later after an inventor approaches him with an idea that
(05:46):
he has, he ends up marketing something called the Marmon clamp,
and clamps inspired by these Marmon clamps end up being
used all over the aviation industry, even an aerospace engineering.
So this is all just to kind of of you
a little background and to say he was more than
just a comedian to start out with. Yeah, his inventions
didn't come out of thin air. He had this engineering background. Um.
(06:08):
But Zeppo had three patents of his own that he
collaborated on because you know, of course the clamp was
somebody else's invention, he just marketed it. Two of his
patents were related, and they came out around the same
time in nineteen sixty seven. One is the cardiac pulse
rate monitor and the other is the method and watch
(06:29):
mechanism for actuation by a cardiac pulse. Again very detailed,
long detailed, long titles. Um. These two inventions were meant
to be used together and Basically, they would alert people
with heart problems to in a regular heartbeat. So, um,
the watch part had two dials. One was driven by
(06:49):
the wearer's pulse and the other operated at um at
a rate that corresponded to what a normal heartbeat should be.
And so it's the pulse driven part, which was run
by this ectric powered magnet. Started to go too fast
or too slow, it would trigger an audible alarm. This
kind of reminds me of loss. If we're gonna be
talking about TV show, when Sawyer gets the little heartbeat
(07:13):
thing implanted in him, he can't get too excited. Um,
so you know this is obviously Um, we can see
how this basic idea was adopted later and adapted. Yeah,
in the exercise industry. I don't know if you've ever
been in a spinning class or something and seeing people
with the heart rate monitors on trying to see if
they're getting their heart rate up enough, but they look
(07:33):
like giant watches. Yeah, you can kind of see the
influence there. Um. He also had another invention. He invented
the heating pad, And basically he invented this because he
saw that people were having to heat up towels. And
hospitals like wet towels and put hot water bottles and
that sort of thing. Yeah, so he just seemed to
look for where there was a lack a need for
(07:54):
something and work to fill it. And that's going to
be a common theme for a lot of our enters
later in the list, for sure. So our next entry
is the author Roll Doll. And of course he's best
known as writing children's books, but um, that's not something
he got into until middle age. He had a very
interesting career before that. He was born in nineteen sixteen
(08:18):
in South Wales to Norwegian parents, as I'm sure you
know if you've ever read a Role Doll book, and
he was sent to a boarding school managed by this
trunch bowl like matron who hated little boys. That he
had an adventurous childhood. His prep school wasn't really that
much better, but fortunately for him and for the other boys,
there was a Cadbury plant nearby. Um again, if you've
(08:41):
read any Role Doll, all of this seems to fit
in perfectly. Yeah. And when he graduated he didn't go
straight to university. He had a pretty adventurous life after that.
At eighteen, he went on an expedition to Newfoundland. After
that he was a salesman for Shell and after that,
at the start of World War Two, he joined the
Royal Air Force and trained as a fighter pilot, so
(09:04):
pretty diverse career. He fought in Libya, Greece and Syria.
Crash landed in the Libyan desert, fractured his skull, smashed
his hip and injured his spine, and so he after
that he needed a hip replacement in two spinal operations.
So a little bit of tragedy mixed in there. Yeah, well,
another another interesting trivia note for you. Um, he was
(09:27):
a little macabre with these artificial parts he had, because
you know, sometimes those type of things you have to
get them replaced a few times throughout your lifetime. In
his little writing hut, he kept I think the top
of his femur one of his hip replacements. Little momento
Maury's I guess, while he was writing fantastically funny children's books.
(09:49):
But um, after nineteen two he transferred to Washington d
C M because you know, of his health problems and
all of that, he needed something besides being a fighter pilot. Um.
And in d C he worked as an air attache,
which was basically a British spy who was working to
rally American support for the war cause and for the
(10:12):
Royal Air Force. And while he was in the States
he met the writer CS Forrester, and Forrester suggested to
Doll that he write about his experience being shot down
in the desert. It would make a great story for
a weekly or monthly magazine. So it only takes about
a week for Doll to write this story, sell it
(10:35):
to the Saturday Evening Post for nine hundred dollars, and
basically make a name for himself. It attracted the attention
of Walt Disney of Eleanor Roosevelt Um and he decides
that writing adult fiction might be a pretty good gig
for him. He seems to be doing all right at
it to start out with. Then, in nineteen fifty three,
(10:55):
Doll Mary's Oscar winning actress, patrician Neal. That was, of course,
before she won the Oscar, though, and he started writing
stories for their kids around nineteen sixty. His first attempt
was a huge success, James and the Giant Peach and
other hits followed The BFG, Matilda, The Witches, the Twits.
So the list goes on. I think most people have
(11:17):
heard of a lot of these, is not all of them.
The BFG is my favorite. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm a
fan of James and the Giant Peach and they're a
pretty They're all pretty good. Um. But even though he
you know, was having success with his adult fiction career
and then later with his children's books, I mean huge
success with that, he also had some really tragic elements
(11:39):
in his life, and not just that. Earlier wrec We
mentioned his eldest daughter died at age seven from encephalitis,
which was brought on by measles. His wife had a
brain aneurysm followed by a series of strokes and for
a time lost the use of one side of her body,
and Dahl was really instrumental in rihab illitating her. Some
(12:01):
people thought that the level of rehabilitation he started with
too much, it was almost cruel, but she regained much
of her function and actually went on to win her
oscar after this aneurysm and stroke, so she she recovered.
But it's one tragedy in particular that spurred this invention
(12:21):
we're going to be talking about. When he was only
four months old, Doll's son, THEO was hit in his
tram by a New York City taxi and slammed into
the side of a bus, and he was severely injured.
He developed hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain, and
um Doll was suddenly faced with trying to update existing
(12:44):
technology to better help his son. Yeah, and there was
already a brain shunt in existence at that time. It
was called the Holter shunt, and THEO did have that installed.
The doctors installed that in him, but it was kind
of dangerous because this particular shunt would jam and this
could cause pain, blindness, or even brain damage. So Doll
(13:05):
decided to do something about it. He recruited too specialists
to help him out. One was hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade,
who shared Doll's hobby of building model airplanes, so that's
kind of how he knew him. And the other one
was neurosurgeon Kenneth Till, who figured out that the clogging
that made the Holter shunt so dangerous was actually caused
by degree that built up in the hydrocephalic ventricles, something
(13:28):
that's actually pretty common when there's bleeding on the brain,
which is what THEO had, leaving on the brain so
the three of them get together, with all of their
diverse skills, they make a new device. And UM, because
my conception of engineering is a little vague, this doesn't
quite compute with me. But I'm gonna still describe it
(13:49):
and see if you can if you can get it.
I was. I was almost thinking of it as like
a series of locks, but that might be entirely wrong. Um.
It's two metal disks and each of them have their
own housing, and there at the end of a silicon
rubber tube. And so when fluid is moving under pressure
from below, it pushes the disks against the tube to
(14:10):
keep anything from flowing back, because you're obviously trying to
drain the brain of fluid, not have water come back
onto it. UM. Meanwhile, pressure from above would move each
disk into an open position, so I'm guessing the fluid
could flow out. UM. Anyways, they call this the wade
doll till valve and UM. Interestingly, fortunately, I guess THEO
(14:33):
was better before this valve was finished and perfected and tested. UM.
But a lot of other kids got to use this technology,
this life saving technology until UM the shunt technology advanced
even further. And another interesting thing. The three men promised
to never make a penny off of this valve, just
(14:55):
they wanted to make it to help people totally selfless
move And the next person on our list is one
that Katie and Sarah talked about previously. It's Harry Houdini.
Many of you have probably heard his name was born
Eric Whites, the son of a rabbi in Budapest and
raised in Appleton, Wisconsin. And his name is almost synonymous
(15:15):
with magic. But what he's really known for is this
amazing escape acts. He was known as the handcuff King
and the prison breaker and the self liberator, and he
just had this really uncanny ability to pick locks, get
out of handcuffs, shackles, and worm his way out of ropes.
Just any tight situation you could put him in he
would be able to get out of. Yeah, he was
(15:37):
really much more of an escapist than a magician, despite
his overall reputation. Um but yeah, Katie and I, as
he mentioned, detailed a few of his notable escapes. Um
like his straight jacket escape where he would get strapped
into this real straight jacket and then would be suspended
by the ankles from a building our crane and have
(15:57):
to wheedle his way out of it in front of
the crowd. Of course, Another the Chinese water torture cell,
where his feet were bound and he was lowered upside
down into a water filled tank. Um. And I mean
most of you probably know other famous Houdini escapes. Um,
so it's probably not too surprising that his invention actually
(16:19):
has to do with escapes exactly. He used this knowledge
of getting out of sticky situations and his knowledge of
escape bology and put it into an invention. In he
received a patent for a diver suit, which he created.
The main purpose of the suit was to make it
easier for divers to get out of the suit quickly
and without help from another person if they found themselves
(16:41):
in a sticky situation while underwater. So imagine this. It's
a suit, and it's it consists basically of two separate pieces,
and upper and a lower piece, and they're connected by
this lever operated metallic belt. So I think basically the
idea here was that you could pull the lever and
the twos would come apart. You could step out of
(17:02):
the bottom that would kind of fall down and easily
pull the top over your head. So this was an
advantage just so you could get out of it yourself,
but you could also get into it yourself a lot
easier than other diving us at the time bench of
assistance putting it on. And it could also helped protect
a submerged diver from being crushed by the pressure of
(17:22):
the surrounding water in case his air supply should give
out for any reason at all. So I'm not sure.
I did a lot of research on this. I'm not
sure if it was ever actually used UM in itself,
but from what I've seen on diving sites and things
like that, it seems like it was an improvement over
suits that were available at the time. Yeah, and that's
going to be another theme. Aoras you've probably already noticed.
(17:44):
Another theme to a lot of these it's it's not
necessarily an invention that comes out of thin air. It's
some little tweak or improvement UM or maybe the prototype
for a future invention that's better known. Right, And we
should also mention you can look a lot of these
patents up. I don't know if you ever have, but
Google has a great patents database. You can just um,
(18:07):
you know, put in whatever you're looking for, maybe the
name of the inventor if you know it in their
pictures and the notes of the original proposal they've submitted,
and um, the inventor's signatures too, so you'll see there
you know. Well, I don't I don't want to give
any of the future ones away on the rest of
our list. That's kind of cool too. And also, um,
we were we were talking about how one source that
(18:29):
we both used with um, the Atlantic, they have a
whole series on a lot of these celebrity inventors, which
is pretty fun. I mean, that's where you can find
Marlon Brando playing the congo drums and m also illustrations
of a lot of these Yeah, their illustrations pull from
these original patents that I just mentioned you can find
You can probably find them on the U S patent
(18:49):
side too, don't you think probably? And um, the diving
suit in particulars are really funny. It looks almost like
a space suit. Um, more Jules Verne than then Houdini exactly. Um,
and you can see the lover mechanism and and how
it comes apart, and I don't know, to me, it
seems like a great way almost to pant someone underwater
(19:11):
if you are prankster sort. It's really funny if you
see Julie newmars Um support hosiery, if we're going to
put that in a in a nice way funny illustrations. Okay, well,
anyways we digress, yes, and move on to our next entry,
which is Paul Winschell. So a lot of you might
(19:33):
not know the name Paul Winchell. Um. Maybe if you
are a big fan of classic children's television, or you're
in your fifties or sixties, you know who he is. Um.
But even if you don't recognize his name, I think
that most of you would probably recognize his voice, even
if you're like eight years old, because for many years
(19:54):
he was the voice of Tigger on Winnie the pooh Um.
He didn't get his start on that kind of voiceover TV, though.
He got his start on vaudeville with a ventriloquist act,
which is kind of interestingly enough, play into this invention.
Yeah you wouldn't think it, but it does a little
(20:14):
backtrack just to give you a little background on him.
He was born Paul Wilchon on December twenty one and
raised near Coney Island, but he had a really difficult childhood.
He had polio, which caused his legs to atrophy, and
so he had to work out a lot to regain
his muscle strength. But he also had a stutter, which
seems like a really unusual sort of thing to overcome
(20:38):
and you're going to go on to become a ventriloquist.
And he was beaten by his mother and he kind
of took refuge from all of that in radio comedy,
so that's where the interest started. His mother, however, refused
him a dime for a book on ventriloquism, so his
sister's boyfriend bought it for him instead, and he started practicing,
and he imitated the ventriloquist dummy team of Edgar Bergen
(21:00):
and Charlie McCarthy, So that was kind of his idol. Yeah,
and he got pretty good at it, but it was
still sort of his personal secret um. And in school
he was allowed to build a dummy as an art project.
So he's working on this dummy, getting it all together.
It takes a really long time. It's finally ready and
he comes out and impresses all of his classmates who
(21:22):
have no idea that he's secretly a really good ventriloquist
with his amazing act, so he's suddenly quite popular at school.
He's really really good at it, and his principle actually
helped him get on a radio talent show where he
was billed as Paul Winchell, which might be a little
easier to say, and he was no longer from Coney
(21:43):
Island either. Um. He does really well on this talent show.
In fact, he wins and that sort of sets off
his ventriloquist career from there. And he worked on the
vode bill circuit, worked on radio and TV, and he
had two dummies to miss dummies who he's associated with.
One is Jerry Mahoney and the other is a knucklehead Smith.
(22:06):
And he's probably most famous aside from Ticker, maybe most
famous for the Paul Winchell Jerry Mahoney Show, which appeared
on NBC from nineteen fifty to nineteen UM. An interesting
side note, Carol Burnett played Mahoney's girlfriend, so she played
the dummies girl. Yeah. I want to look up some
(22:26):
of these. I wonder if you can find him. You
can actually find some clips on YouTube of these acts,
and I mean it's pretty it's pretty amazing. I saw
one where he's putting Jerry Mahoney to bed um and
sort of arguing with him about finally getting to sleep
and then realizing that Jerry Mahoney skipped school and played hockey,
(22:47):
and uh, it's it's funny. Well, I know what I'll
be doing this afternoon. But it didn't just stop there.
Ed Sullivan also featured him often, and he appeared on
shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, The Lucy Show, The Brady Bunch,
So he was all over the place, and when kids
shows switched more to cartoons, he also switched and started
to do voice work for a. Hanna Barbera and Disney.
(23:10):
And in addition to being the voice of Tigger, he
was also Boomer in The Fox and the Hound and
the Siamese Cat and the Aristo Hats. So lots of
really recognizable characters. Yeah, but all you know, during this
whole thing, all these dummies who he's working with, all
this voice over, he's also studying and tinkering. And in
the nineteen the mid nineteen fifties, he goes back to
(23:32):
school and he said, quote, it wasn't until I was
thirty five that it dawned on me that I missed
my education. So he doesn't just go to school though,
to to study something that maybe played into his current
successful career, like business or communications or something like that. No,
he does pre med at Columbia and then goes on
(23:55):
to study acupuncture and medical hypnotism. So he clearly has
this whole other course of interest that is very much
apart from ventriloquism, or so it would seem. Um. But
with all of these medical inclinations, he eventually gets to
work in nineteen sixty three with surgeons at the University
(24:15):
of Utah and Henry J. Heimlich. Who is that Heimlich?
Another familiar name, Another familiar name. I know. I was
thinking of famous namesakes we've talked about lately, like guillotine
and um. They just keep popping up. Um. Anyways, so
Winschell gets to work with this team to develop an
artificial heart. So I bet you didn't see that one coming,
(24:38):
not at all. In this heart, it's essentially an electric
motor outside of the body with a drive shaft that
extends into the body and it's connected to a non
toxic bag that would pump like a heart. So this
never itself really took off, but it's considered the prototype
for the Robert K. Jarvic heart, which was implanted in
a person in two so um sort of formed the
(25:00):
basis for that. Yeah, they're apparently very very similar. According
to Henry Heimlich, Um, so inventing a heart sounds really complicated,
even if you had studied premedic Columbia and you were
working with surgeons and all of that. But Winchell didn't
think that it was really that complicated, he said in
(25:22):
an autobiography quote, Odd as it may seem, the heart
wasn't that different from building a dummy. The valves and
chambers were not unlike the moving eyes and closing mouth
of a puppet. I think that is so fascinating that, um,
somebody could have that kind of mind that would compare these. Yeah,
(25:42):
relate something like a puppet and a heart, but pretty awesome. Um.
Winchell kept up with the patenting too, as many of
these people do. He ultimately developed thirty different patterns, including
battery heated gloves and invisible garter belt, a flameless cigarette lighter,
and a fountain pen with a retractable tip, among many others.
(26:06):
Pretty interesting guy. Definitely. The last person on our list
is really one that needs no introduction, But of course
We'll give you one anyway, because we always do. It's
Mark Twain, who was born Samuel Clemens, and he was
an American writer. As most of us know, I'm a humorist,
a lecturer. He's famous for his books about boyhood high jinks,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
(26:27):
which if you grew up in the US, you probably
couldn't get out of high school without reading at least
one or both of those. And he really grew to
become one of America's most love writers. Yeah, and Katie
I actually did a podcast on him quite some time
to go to to fill in a little more details
if you're if you're dying for more Mark Twain, and
you haven't gotten the first part of that giant best
(26:49):
selling autobiography yet. Um. But one thing that probably not
as many people know about this famous humorous was that
he was also quite an inventor. He actually had three patents,
including eight seventy one patent for a quote garment strap,
which was essentially this adjustable strap that could tighten your
(27:11):
shirts at the waist and it would attach to the
back of a shirt and fasten with buttons. Um. To
keep it in place and um, and make it so
you could still remove it easily, cinch it up, and
it could be used for underpants and women's corsets as
well as shirts. And his whole goal with inventing this
was to do away with suspenders, and he was not
(27:34):
a fan of suspenders. He thought they were uncomfortable and
would rather where this strap. I guess, yeah, so once
again sees a problem, looks to solve it. I like
it very enterprising. He also, though, got a patent for
something that I think would be useful to us. It's
a history trivia game. In eight he came up with
his patent and it was a game which he proposed
(27:55):
playing with cards and a cribbage board. So I didn't
really find any rules to the scame out there curious
too curious about this game. It's I guess if it
was the history trivia might be a little difficult point,
Like you know when you get a trivial pursuit that's
about twenty years old and it's really hard. Oh yeah,
(28:16):
the the original trivial pursuit. It might be that like
compounded but um, the only one of these inventions that
Mark Twain cooked up that really took off, that really
had any kind of financial success was his quote self
pasting scrap book. Um, so here's another weird, little known
(28:37):
fact about Mark Twain. But he was a lifelong creator
of scrap books. He was really into it. Yeah, he
took them everywhere, filled them up with souvenirs, pictures and
articles about his books and performances, so really serious about it.
But he got tired of having a glue stuff all
the time, just like wearing suspender send day out. So
he came up with this idea of printing thin strips
(29:00):
of glue on the pages to make the whole process easier.
So picture it is being like a stamp. You look
it and then you look the part that you want
to stick something to, and then it becomes sticky. And
he patented this in eighteen seventy two. Yeah, and by
nineteen and one there were fifty seven different types of
these albums available. And according to five St. Louis Post
(29:22):
Dispatch article, twain scrap Book made him fifty thousand dollars
compared to two thousand dollars from all of his other
books combined, which I mean, good for him, but that's
kind of sad. Too. Yeah, I guess it depends on
how you look at it. I see the moral of
the story is being I need to go work on
(29:44):
a patent. This we immediately you know, it seems like
a good a good way to make some money unless
you have really high moral principles, like the way Donald
Hill valve. You don't want to make any money off
of It's but I mean it's scrap book. Nobody's going
to judge. Yeah, I wouldn't well, and I think scrap
books appropriately enough bring us to listener mail. This one
(30:10):
is not actually mail. It is a blog comment from
the stuffumist in history class blog at how stuff works
dot com. Um. But I thought I would mention it
just because it disturbed me a little. I was worried,
um suddenly, that lots of people might think this. It's
from d C. Deb and she wrote quote, It's one
(30:32):
thing to have an AD at the beginning or end
of a podcast, the one that is recognized as an AD,
but it is entirely another thing to show a product
in the course of the actual program. This is exactly
what occurred in the Hetty Lamar podcast after referring to
a biography by Stephen Shearer, which quote came out last
year along with quote another biography. Dublina went on to
(30:56):
definitely recommend picking up the Shearer book if we are
interested in her life, while the other reference book was
never identified or recommended. Um, total plug and UM. She
went on to say that she was always trying to
differentiate the shill from the podcasts, and she had sent unsubscribed,
(31:17):
so I guess she's not going to catch this one.
But we just wanted to say that we do not
get paid to promote books like at all A lot
out UM, when we talk about a book, not when
something is mentioned in the bumper or in an interview,
but when we're actually talking about a book. UM, it's
for one of these three reasons. And I responded to
d C dev on the blog with these three reasons too,
(31:39):
but I thought i'd share them with the wider audience
of the podcast. One reason why we sometimes share the
name of a book is because it was a major
source for information. It feels right to to give credit
where credits due. Another is that we think it will
be a useful source for listeners who are interested in
doing more research. And UM, I actually get a lot
(32:01):
of requests for book recommendations. People are pretty into that. Um,
so you know, sometimes we think, if you're interested in
doing a little more research, this is a good place
to start. And then the third reason is we read it.
We really liked it because I mean, we're we're interested
in history obviously, so we're reading history books that come
(32:23):
out and we get so immersed in these topics every
week when we're researching that sometimes we just get a
little excited and want to share what we're reading about. Yeah.
So I just I just wanted to make sure that
everybody realized that that we're not getting paid to to
promote books. Um. No, Mark Twain and Rol dal did
not contribute to Yeah, I know the state of Mark
(32:43):
Twain paid me to mention that new autobiography. Just kidding. Um,
But anyways, I hope that clears things up for everybody.
And um, if you ever have questions like that and
you want to ask us, feel free to. I mean
I would much rather clear something up like that then
then leave everybody wondering. Um. But you can find us
(33:04):
on Twitter at Miston History. We're also on Facebook. You
can post on the blog as DC dab did, and
you can also send us an email at history podcast
at how staff works dot com. Um, so yeah, send
us your your questions and queries and we'll see what
we can do about sorting it out and answering. And
(33:24):
if like us, all this talk about inventions and they're
various inventors has gotten you more interested in the subject,
We have a bunch of new inventor content coming out
on our website. You can look it up. Um, I
think we have stories on African American inventors, women inventors
and their inventions. We already have some Edison content. Um.
(33:47):
I think that there's a great article ten Inventions by
Edison that you may have never heard of. So um
check it out by visiting our homepage typing in either
the person you're interested in specifically, or inventor at www
dot how stuff works dot com. For more on this
(34:08):
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The
how Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it
today on iTunes, m
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