June 10, 2022 • 19 mins
Holly and Tracy talk about Alexis Soyer's legendary charm, Emma Jones, and famine soup. They also talk about the globes and maps they grew up with.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Move over, Charles Adams.
I have a new history crush, and it's Alexei say Hey.
(00:25):
I love everything about him, everything about him. I love
that he woke up with no pants on and became
save us for it listen. He seems like he was
very fun. Yeah. I love that he, whether this is
really where it starts or not, that he set up
a lot of the early chef tropes right like you have. Um.
(00:46):
I mean, he could have written Kitchen Confidential, but it
would have probably been less edgy and just more fun.
I was thinking that as I was reading it. Maybe
not that exact thing, but I was like these seven
or eight things that I've that like, this all sounds
like the stories we hear of kitchens and a particular
variety of chef today. I love that he, if the
story is true, was so ridiculously charming that with people
(01:11):
brandishing guns at him, he not only got out of it,
but they were all in love with him. But I
also want to talk about his wife though, because Emma,
while they were only married for five years. It sounds
like she was really his perfect match and was herself
very funny. She at one point, there's a story that
(01:34):
she went to visit him at the Reform Club and
waited in his office and he was busy in the kitchen,
and she waited for an hour, and then she had
had it and she left. But on her way out,
she told one of the members of the staff, like, oh,
I left my calling card in his office. And what
she had actually done was taken out her crayons and
drawn a portrait of herself in the office on the wall.
(01:57):
Alexie loved it so much that he just put glass
over it in a frame and like kept it there
for the remainder of his time at the club, which
I think is so charming. Um. She also is really interesting.
There's not a ton of information about her enough to
make an episode, but she, even when she was very
very young, was already doing abolitionist paintings UM, and was
(02:19):
one of those people that was doing portraiture of enslaved
people to try to convey their humanity to white people
that did not get it. UM. So she was just
in and of herself a fascinating person, and the fact
that that was his choice of like, this is the
one for me kind of cements him as great in
my book. Um, that tulip story. I love the tulip story.
(02:41):
I was just thinking about the tulip story. That is
some cute business. That's very cute. It's so sweet, and
I think also is a good insight into their like
ridiculous cuteness. Yeah, he was known throughout his life as
a practical joker, which I think is why she thought
it would be funny, and he did too, to draw
(03:02):
on his office walls. Um. There was a story I
didn't include in this episode about when he was in
Crimea and he was traveling with a colleague and they
were at a Russian camp that had been abandoned, and
they decided, kind of on a dare, that they would
(03:22):
try some of the bread that they found their left over.
And they had each taken a bite and Alexei said, oh, no,
it's poison, and his colleague freaked out at Alexei was
laughing because it was not poison. He was just being
a jerk, but he was a hardcore practical joker. Is
(03:45):
really funny. One of the books that I used for research,
which is that when we referenced by Ruth Brandon called
The People's Chef. She does a really interesting approach to
his biography where she includes, like each of the chapters
is themed to a course of a meal, and she
includes at least one recipe of his as part of it,
(04:08):
and like an entree into talking about like that phase
of his life. And she apparently made the Famine soup
and she did not love it because sounds tasty to me.
I mean that sounds like a good, solid soup recipe, right,
It doesn't sound fancy, but I could see that being
super yummy. Um, apparently she didn't find it. Mummy. Yeah,
(04:29):
It's got a lot of things in it that I
feel like would work well together. And um, I do
love a barley soup. I have a I haven't made
it in a long time because as I've gotten older,
it's ingredients don't and just agree with my digestion so
much anymore. But like a mushroom and barley soup that
has like a really hearty flavor to it. It reminded
(04:51):
me a bit of that, even though it was based
on drippings and cut beef. I mean, I will send
you the recipe and you can alter it and try
it if you want. There's an interesting side road to
go down here that isn't Again, it's not something that
got explored a lot, but in his writings about his
time in Ireland, it seems clear that he felt like
(05:14):
things were a little upside down there, not maybe in
the ways you're thinking, Like he was like, why are
these people using fish a protein source just as fertilizer
for potatoes when they could eat the fish and have
better nutrition, Like why won't they let me teach them
how to prep even what they think are mediocre fish
(05:34):
to actually be tasty and good. Like he was definitely
having some struggles around how that was all working. But
of course there's that bigger issue of like people being
trapped in the cycle of needing to produce potatoes to
be shipped away to other countries or they would lose everything,
Like there are there are bigger things in play than
what he could necessarily see. Yeah, yeah, there was a
(05:56):
lot of it's been so long since we did those
episodes that I haven't really listened to them to see
how they hold up. But we have a two part
on the famine, and there was so much stuff that
was going on. It was like people were sustaining themselves
on potatoes because that was what gave them enough time
to grow the other crops that were required for exports.
And then during the famine, even though people were starving
(06:16):
to death, were not permitted to keep any of those
crops for themselves. Right, So yeah, there's a whole much
bigger social and political and economic layer to that. Then
why are they using the fish as spartalizer? Yeah? I
also love that he was super inventive. There was another
story that I read about him very late in his
(06:38):
life which kind of made me adore him all the
more where he was just he was so no nonsense,
Like apparently he had been riding a horse to visit
a friend and he got sort of throne, but his
foot was still stuck in the stirrup and he got
dragged for a while, and like he wasn't old. He
(06:58):
was in his fifth ease at that point. But when
the horse stopped and he got free, he wasn't like, oh,
I just got dragged by a horse. I'm going home.
He was like, let me just straighten my suit because
I still have a lunch appointment. Went Okay, I I
have an affinity for him now because one time some
(07:21):
years ago I was going to some kind of like
continuing education training workshop kind of thing that I don't
even remember what the topic was of now, because I
was walking from the Marta station to where the class
is happening in Atlanta, which is a place that is
often not pedestrian friendly, and there was no sidewalk where
I was. I was walking on the shoulder of the
road of a big road to a road that by
(07:44):
all rights should have more sidewalks, fewer car lanes. Um.
And I stepped into a hole in full view of
this line of cars and just fell and all of
my stuff went flying. Um. And I picked myself up
and brushed myself off and continued walking the rest of
(08:06):
the way to my workshop and like tidied myself up
in the bathroom when I got there, and like went on,
it became clear I was seriously injured, not the correct
course of actions that have done. Um. Yeah, I was
not that seriously injured. It was all fine. I was
fine eventually. But yeah, I love him so much. I
(08:33):
loved researching him. There are also we didn't it didn't
come up in the episode because it's it's weird and
it's hard to know what's going on. There was a
thing that happened very late in his life, and some
accounts suggests that his illness had made him not entirely himself,
like he was doing some uncharacteristic things and engaging in
(08:57):
some behaviors that didn't always make sense. But he apparently
wrote Florence Nightingale not exactly a love letter, but very
much a very flowery admiration letter that could be interpreted
that way after he had gotten back. And there are
people that are like, was he in love with Florence Nightingale? Maybe?
(09:20):
I mean they went through a lot together, truthfully, like
they were in some dire situations, but um unclear. He
really was all for all for Emma his whole life,
even though he was pretty infatuated with Fanny Crito. I
think yeah, I mean, it was Emma for him, for
him forever, Tulips and his The most famous portraits you
(09:44):
will see of him are ones that that his wife made,
and they're beautiful. She really was like an extraordinary portraitist.
Um So I love the idea that, even though I
hate that she died so young, I love the idea
that for five years they were like the cool it
couple of you know, she with her French chef husband
and he with his cool art wife. Like who wouldn't
(10:06):
want to hang out with them? I do, I do
build the time machine. I'm ready for a visit. He
talked about Marcater projections on the show this week. We
sure did. I am guessing that you grew up like
(10:27):
I did seeing Mercater projection maps hanging on the wall
in school with a gigantic greenland. We didn't specifically say
this in the podcast, but like, the most accurate way
to see what the world looks like is a globe,
A well made globe, A well made, accurate globe, because
the globe is roughly spherical in the Earth is roughly spherical,
(10:50):
and that's going to be the most accurate way to
do it. When I was a child, our public library
had a gigantic globe. It was like I remember it
being bigger than like taller than we were, like we
had to reach way up. And then it also had
some relief elements to it, so like the Himalayas were
(11:12):
on there that you could just physically touch, and man,
we loved that global lot. I love a good globe. Surely,
surely they do not have that same globe forty years later.
It would be wildly out of date in terms of countries.
Now many things are very different since then. But man,
(11:32):
I love that globe. But yeah, if I try to
call up a flat map image of the world in
my head, I definitely see a Mercator projection. I remember
as a child, I had a particularly good in um
like middle school or what some people would call junior high,
like the low end of that early middle school. I
(11:55):
had a particularly good social studies teacher, and she was
very clear, like, this map has messed up, you guys,
but it's what we have. And she would try to
show us other maps and how they had worked. But
I was a staunch defender of Mercater for the stupidest reason.
Oh tell me why, which is that even as a child,
(12:16):
I was like, yes, but when I look at those
other maps, there's dead space, and this is more aesthetically pleasing,
although I did not know the word aesthetically yet. I
was just like, I don't want a map where there's
circles and weirdness and left out parts that aren't printed.
What a dangling reason to be obsessed with the map.
But maybe one day I will have mercater printed on
(12:38):
fabric and I will make a skirt out of it
that will be wrong, wrong, wrong, That would be fun. Yeah,
we had a similar I feel like this is probably
closer to high school, uh, sort of the lesson about
different map projections and sort of comparing the pros and
cons of different ones. And there was one that we
did not talk about, but it was one that had
(13:00):
sort of like cutouts, so like if you like blow
up a balloon of the earth and then cut pieces
so it will lay flatter. We had some like did
you have to do the craft where you cut those
out and taped it together to make a little globe.
I don't think we did that, but we did do
drawing on the balloon and then stretching out the balloon
in different ways. Oh, we did a little little papercraft.
(13:23):
It was I also remember um a television show, probably
something like Mr. Wizard's World that was very similarly maps
versus globes and mercater projection versus other stuff and stretching
out balloons. One of the explanations I found in doing
research of like here's how to visualize with the Mercater
(13:44):
projection was like was like, take a cylinder, blow up
a balloon and draw the world on it, and then
put that balloon inside the cylinder and keep inflating it
until it has totally filled the inside of the cylinder.
And like that's approximately a cylindrical projection of the world's
Like that sounds like a fun craft time to do
(14:05):
with somebody's children. Uh, do you ever have that moment
when you're we're working on one of these episodes and
your brain clicks together pieces of history that you didn't
realize had lined up so closely. Sometimes so in this case,
it actually is about a person you referenced in your research,
which is Thomas Harriet. Like I was thinking about how
(14:28):
Mercator did his work in the sixteenth century, I in
my head would have put that later because we were
If I weren't, like, you know, looking it up, I
would have just intuited it that it happened more like
seventeenth century, because I remember that, you know, Thomas Harriet
and Galileo were first looking through a telescope at the
(14:51):
moon in the early sixteen teens, and so to me
that had to have come first like the world of
astronomy and how it might impact maps. Seems like it
must be different, particularly considering that we're still using that
map or we were into the century when you and
I were in school, and that just it's one of
(15:11):
those weird things where I was like, that is not
what I thought what was going on concurrently, and it
makes me think about Thomas Harriet's work. As you recall,
I have a map that he drew tattooed on my person,
which is his first map of the Moon, and knowing
that he was also sorting this stuff out but then
was drawing very flat maps of you know, the Moon
(15:34):
because it only looked like a disk to him at
that point, like he knew it was it was spherical,
but all he could see through a telescope was like
the flat image. And so I wonder if he took
any of that into consideration when he was sketching out
his first maps of the Moon, and I good question.
I don't know. I don't think we'll ever know. We've
talked about so many things on the podcast over the
(15:56):
last many years that when his name came up in
the research, I think I told you this story, like
I just had like a disconnect where my brain was
not recalling who that was, and so I was like, Hi, this,
why does this name ring a bell? I keep wanting
to think he's the person who like was the a veterinarian.
That's not right at all. Oh yeah, Like then it
(16:17):
all came together. This has been on It had been
on my on my list of things to do for
an episode for a while because it had come up
in some previous research, and I was like, I'm gonna
get back to that at some point. Um. And there
is a web comic called x K c D that
occasionally has a bad map projections as the topic, and
(16:38):
there was recently a it was I think a Mercater projection,
but with the focus being somewhere else on the map,
and I was like, oh, yeah, a Mercater projection. I
should circle back around to that. And then I researched
and wrote most of it before we went to Italy
and picked back up after we got back from Italy,
and I was like, wow, I don't remember any of
this because I've been gone for almost two weeks. Maps.
(17:05):
It also made me it drew my attention to various
maps that we saw while in Italy, like there were
some fascinating maps we saw in the Vatican City museums.
And then also while I was on the plane, and
you know, sometimes on the plane there's a screen where
you can pull up a map of where you are.
I kept looking at it and being like, is this
(17:26):
a mericater projection? Because Greenland looks really big, but not
as big as I expected to on a ricater projection. Yeah.
I mean that's the thing we didn't really talk about.
It's inherently understood, but like if you're trying to put
what's going on on a globe on a flat map,
Like I said, we didn't explicitly state this, but we
(17:48):
we certainly talked about it. You have to give in
some area and be like, well, this isn't gonna be right,
but it's which is why it gets to that thing
of like, yes, but which is closest and what are
your criteria for closeness? You know, which wrong thing is
acceptable to you? In this context, more incorrect ocean versus
more incorrect land mask, there's a concession has to be made,
(18:11):
at least one often more so. It's tricky. This is
how it works when you're trying to make something that
is roughly spherical into something flat. So yeah, I saw
a number of very angry forum threads and whatnot about
people fiercely defending their Mercator projection because all maps are distorted,
and I was like, yes, but there are better options
(18:35):
for teaching children with the world looks like, most of
which are in use now, but we're not when Holly
and I were children. Well, and I think there's a
weird thing. And I don't know why this is, Like
people get attached to a thing and they think if
you say yes, but that's not as accurate as it
(18:57):
could be, Like you're somehow trying to in the map
maker or the map and like he did great for
the information he had at the time. I'm just saying,
if you want an accurate thing, that's not the best. Still,
it was a useful map for a particular reason, and
that reason was just not hanging on the wall in
(19:19):
a third grade classroom. So anyway, maybe we'll have some
other map something at some point in the future. Whatever
is on your your plate this weekend, I hope it
goes well. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow
and then some brand new episodes next week. Stuff you
(19:45):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Move over, Charles Adams.
I have a new history crush, and it's Alexei say Hey.
(00:25):
I love everything about him, everything about him. I love
that he woke up with no pants on and became
save us for it listen. He seems like he was
very fun. Yeah. I love that he, whether this is
really where it starts or not, that he set up
a lot of the early chef tropes right like you have. Um.
(00:46):
I mean, he could have written Kitchen Confidential, but it
would have probably been less edgy and just more fun.
I was thinking that as I was reading it. Maybe
not that exact thing, but I was like these seven
or eight things that I've that like, this all sounds
like the stories we hear of kitchens and a particular
variety of chef today. I love that he, if the
story is true, was so ridiculously charming that with people
(01:11):
brandishing guns at him, he not only got out of it,
but they were all in love with him. But I
also want to talk about his wife though, because Emma,
while they were only married for five years. It sounds
like she was really his perfect match and was herself
very funny. She at one point, there's a story that
(01:34):
she went to visit him at the Reform Club and
waited in his office and he was busy in the kitchen,
and she waited for an hour, and then she had
had it and she left. But on her way out,
she told one of the members of the staff, like, oh,
I left my calling card in his office. And what
she had actually done was taken out her crayons and
drawn a portrait of herself in the office on the wall.
(01:57):
Alexie loved it so much that he just put glass
over it in a frame and like kept it there
for the remainder of his time at the club, which
I think is so charming. Um. She also is really interesting.
There's not a ton of information about her enough to
make an episode, but she, even when she was very
very young, was already doing abolitionist paintings UM, and was
(02:19):
one of those people that was doing portraiture of enslaved
people to try to convey their humanity to white people
that did not get it. UM. So she was just
in and of herself a fascinating person, and the fact
that that was his choice of like, this is the
one for me kind of cements him as great in
my book. Um, that tulip story. I love the tulip story.
(02:41):
I was just thinking about the tulip story. That is
some cute business. That's very cute. It's so sweet, and
I think also is a good insight into their like
ridiculous cuteness. Yeah, he was known throughout his life as
a practical joker, which I think is why she thought
it would be funny, and he did too, to draw
(03:02):
on his office walls. Um. There was a story I
didn't include in this episode about when he was in
Crimea and he was traveling with a colleague and they
were at a Russian camp that had been abandoned, and
they decided, kind of on a dare, that they would
(03:22):
try some of the bread that they found their left over.
And they had each taken a bite and Alexei said, oh, no,
it's poison, and his colleague freaked out at Alexei was
laughing because it was not poison. He was just being
a jerk, but he was a hardcore practical joker. Is
(03:45):
really funny. One of the books that I used for research,
which is that when we referenced by Ruth Brandon called
The People's Chef. She does a really interesting approach to
his biography where she includes, like each of the chapters
is themed to a course of a meal, and she
includes at least one recipe of his as part of it,
(04:08):
and like an entree into talking about like that phase
of his life. And she apparently made the Famine soup
and she did not love it because sounds tasty to me.
I mean that sounds like a good, solid soup recipe, right,
It doesn't sound fancy, but I could see that being
super yummy. Um, apparently she didn't find it. Mummy. Yeah,
(04:29):
It's got a lot of things in it that I
feel like would work well together. And um, I do
love a barley soup. I have a I haven't made
it in a long time because as I've gotten older,
it's ingredients don't and just agree with my digestion so
much anymore. But like a mushroom and barley soup that
has like a really hearty flavor to it. It reminded
(04:51):
me a bit of that, even though it was based
on drippings and cut beef. I mean, I will send
you the recipe and you can alter it and try
it if you want. There's an interesting side road to
go down here that isn't Again, it's not something that
got explored a lot, but in his writings about his
time in Ireland, it seems clear that he felt like
(05:14):
things were a little upside down there, not maybe in
the ways you're thinking, Like he was like, why are
these people using fish a protein source just as fertilizer
for potatoes when they could eat the fish and have
better nutrition, Like why won't they let me teach them
how to prep even what they think are mediocre fish
(05:34):
to actually be tasty and good. Like he was definitely
having some struggles around how that was all working. But
of course there's that bigger issue of like people being
trapped in the cycle of needing to produce potatoes to
be shipped away to other countries or they would lose everything,
Like there are there are bigger things in play than
what he could necessarily see. Yeah, yeah, there was a
(05:56):
lot of it's been so long since we did those
episodes that I haven't really listened to them to see
how they hold up. But we have a two part
on the famine, and there was so much stuff that
was going on. It was like people were sustaining themselves
on potatoes because that was what gave them enough time
to grow the other crops that were required for exports.
And then during the famine, even though people were starving
(06:16):
to death, were not permitted to keep any of those
crops for themselves. Right, So yeah, there's a whole much
bigger social and political and economic layer to that. Then
why are they using the fish as spartalizer? Yeah? I
also love that he was super inventive. There was another
story that I read about him very late in his
(06:38):
life which kind of made me adore him all the
more where he was just he was so no nonsense,
Like apparently he had been riding a horse to visit
a friend and he got sort of throne, but his
foot was still stuck in the stirrup and he got
dragged for a while, and like he wasn't old. He
(06:58):
was in his fifth ease at that point. But when
the horse stopped and he got free, he wasn't like, oh,
I just got dragged by a horse. I'm going home.
He was like, let me just straighten my suit because
I still have a lunch appointment. Went Okay, I I
have an affinity for him now because one time some
(07:21):
years ago I was going to some kind of like
continuing education training workshop kind of thing that I don't
even remember what the topic was of now, because I
was walking from the Marta station to where the class
is happening in Atlanta, which is a place that is
often not pedestrian friendly, and there was no sidewalk where
I was. I was walking on the shoulder of the
road of a big road to a road that by
(07:44):
all rights should have more sidewalks, fewer car lanes. Um.
And I stepped into a hole in full view of
this line of cars and just fell and all of
my stuff went flying. Um. And I picked myself up
and brushed myself off and continued walking the rest of
(08:06):
the way to my workshop and like tidied myself up
in the bathroom when I got there, and like went on,
it became clear I was seriously injured, not the correct
course of actions that have done. Um. Yeah, I was
not that seriously injured. It was all fine. I was
fine eventually. But yeah, I love him so much. I
(08:33):
loved researching him. There are also we didn't it didn't
come up in the episode because it's it's weird and
it's hard to know what's going on. There was a
thing that happened very late in his life, and some
accounts suggests that his illness had made him not entirely himself,
like he was doing some uncharacteristic things and engaging in
(08:57):
some behaviors that didn't always make sense. But he apparently
wrote Florence Nightingale not exactly a love letter, but very
much a very flowery admiration letter that could be interpreted
that way after he had gotten back. And there are
people that are like, was he in love with Florence Nightingale? Maybe?
(09:20):
I mean they went through a lot together, truthfully, like
they were in some dire situations, but um unclear. He
really was all for all for Emma his whole life,
even though he was pretty infatuated with Fanny Crito. I
think yeah, I mean, it was Emma for him, for
him forever, Tulips and his The most famous portraits you
(09:44):
will see of him are ones that that his wife made,
and they're beautiful. She really was like an extraordinary portraitist.
Um So I love the idea that, even though I
hate that she died so young, I love the idea
that for five years they were like the cool it
couple of you know, she with her French chef husband
and he with his cool art wife. Like who wouldn't
(10:06):
want to hang out with them? I do, I do
build the time machine. I'm ready for a visit. He
talked about Marcater projections on the show this week. We
sure did. I am guessing that you grew up like
(10:27):
I did seeing Mercater projection maps hanging on the wall
in school with a gigantic greenland. We didn't specifically say
this in the podcast, but like, the most accurate way
to see what the world looks like is a globe,
A well made globe, A well made, accurate globe, because
the globe is roughly spherical in the Earth is roughly spherical,
(10:50):
and that's going to be the most accurate way to
do it. When I was a child, our public library
had a gigantic globe. It was like I remember it
being bigger than like taller than we were, like we
had to reach way up. And then it also had
some relief elements to it, so like the Himalayas were
(11:12):
on there that you could just physically touch, and man,
we loved that global lot. I love a good globe. Surely,
surely they do not have that same globe forty years later.
It would be wildly out of date in terms of countries.
Now many things are very different since then. But man,
(11:32):
I love that globe. But yeah, if I try to
call up a flat map image of the world in
my head, I definitely see a Mercator projection. I remember
as a child, I had a particularly good in um
like middle school or what some people would call junior high,
like the low end of that early middle school. I
(11:55):
had a particularly good social studies teacher, and she was
very clear, like, this map has messed up, you guys,
but it's what we have. And she would try to
show us other maps and how they had worked. But
I was a staunch defender of Mercater for the stupidest reason.
Oh tell me why, which is that even as a child,
(12:16):
I was like, yes, but when I look at those
other maps, there's dead space, and this is more aesthetically pleasing,
although I did not know the word aesthetically yet. I
was just like, I don't want a map where there's
circles and weirdness and left out parts that aren't printed.
What a dangling reason to be obsessed with the map.
But maybe one day I will have mercater printed on
(12:38):
fabric and I will make a skirt out of it
that will be wrong, wrong, wrong, That would be fun. Yeah,
we had a similar I feel like this is probably
closer to high school, uh, sort of the lesson about
different map projections and sort of comparing the pros and
cons of different ones. And there was one that we
did not talk about, but it was one that had
(13:00):
sort of like cutouts, so like if you like blow
up a balloon of the earth and then cut pieces
so it will lay flatter. We had some like did
you have to do the craft where you cut those
out and taped it together to make a little globe.
I don't think we did that, but we did do
drawing on the balloon and then stretching out the balloon
in different ways. Oh, we did a little little papercraft.
(13:23):
It was I also remember um a television show, probably
something like Mr. Wizard's World that was very similarly maps
versus globes and mercater projection versus other stuff and stretching
out balloons. One of the explanations I found in doing
research of like here's how to visualize with the Mercater
(13:44):
projection was like was like, take a cylinder, blow up
a balloon and draw the world on it, and then
put that balloon inside the cylinder and keep inflating it
until it has totally filled the inside of the cylinder.
And like that's approximately a cylindrical projection of the world's
Like that sounds like a fun craft time to do
(14:05):
with somebody's children. Uh, do you ever have that moment
when you're we're working on one of these episodes and
your brain clicks together pieces of history that you didn't
realize had lined up so closely. Sometimes so in this case,
it actually is about a person you referenced in your research,
which is Thomas Harriet. Like I was thinking about how
(14:28):
Mercator did his work in the sixteenth century, I in
my head would have put that later because we were
If I weren't, like, you know, looking it up, I
would have just intuited it that it happened more like
seventeenth century, because I remember that, you know, Thomas Harriet
and Galileo were first looking through a telescope at the
(14:51):
moon in the early sixteen teens, and so to me
that had to have come first like the world of
astronomy and how it might impact maps. Seems like it
must be different, particularly considering that we're still using that
map or we were into the century when you and
I were in school, and that just it's one of
(15:11):
those weird things where I was like, that is not
what I thought what was going on concurrently, and it
makes me think about Thomas Harriet's work. As you recall,
I have a map that he drew tattooed on my person,
which is his first map of the Moon, and knowing
that he was also sorting this stuff out but then
was drawing very flat maps of you know, the Moon
(15:34):
because it only looked like a disk to him at
that point, like he knew it was it was spherical,
but all he could see through a telescope was like
the flat image. And so I wonder if he took
any of that into consideration when he was sketching out
his first maps of the Moon, and I good question.
I don't know. I don't think we'll ever know. We've
talked about so many things on the podcast over the
(15:56):
last many years that when his name came up in
the research, I think I told you this story, like
I just had like a disconnect where my brain was
not recalling who that was, and so I was like, Hi, this,
why does this name ring a bell? I keep wanting
to think he's the person who like was the a veterinarian.
That's not right at all. Oh yeah, Like then it
(16:17):
all came together. This has been on It had been
on my on my list of things to do for
an episode for a while because it had come up
in some previous research, and I was like, I'm gonna
get back to that at some point. Um. And there
is a web comic called x K c D that
occasionally has a bad map projections as the topic, and
(16:38):
there was recently a it was I think a Mercater projection,
but with the focus being somewhere else on the map,
and I was like, oh, yeah, a Mercater projection. I
should circle back around to that. And then I researched
and wrote most of it before we went to Italy
and picked back up after we got back from Italy,
and I was like, wow, I don't remember any of
this because I've been gone for almost two weeks. Maps.
(17:05):
It also made me it drew my attention to various
maps that we saw while in Italy, like there were
some fascinating maps we saw in the Vatican City museums.
And then also while I was on the plane, and
you know, sometimes on the plane there's a screen where
you can pull up a map of where you are.
I kept looking at it and being like, is this
(17:26):
a mericater projection? Because Greenland looks really big, but not
as big as I expected to on a ricater projection. Yeah.
I mean that's the thing we didn't really talk about.
It's inherently understood, but like if you're trying to put
what's going on on a globe on a flat map,
Like I said, we didn't explicitly state this, but we
(17:48):
we certainly talked about it. You have to give in
some area and be like, well, this isn't gonna be right,
but it's which is why it gets to that thing
of like, yes, but which is closest and what are
your criteria for closeness? You know, which wrong thing is
acceptable to you? In this context, more incorrect ocean versus
more incorrect land mask, there's a concession has to be made,
(18:11):
at least one often more so. It's tricky. This is
how it works when you're trying to make something that
is roughly spherical into something flat. So yeah, I saw
a number of very angry forum threads and whatnot about
people fiercely defending their Mercator projection because all maps are distorted,
and I was like, yes, but there are better options
(18:35):
for teaching children with the world looks like, most of
which are in use now, but we're not when Holly
and I were children. Well, and I think there's a
weird thing. And I don't know why this is, Like
people get attached to a thing and they think if
you say yes, but that's not as accurate as it
(18:57):
could be, Like you're somehow trying to in the map
maker or the map and like he did great for
the information he had at the time. I'm just saying,
if you want an accurate thing, that's not the best. Still,
it was a useful map for a particular reason, and
that reason was just not hanging on the wall in
(19:19):
a third grade classroom. So anyway, maybe we'll have some
other map something at some point in the future. Whatever
is on your your plate this weekend, I hope it
goes well. We'll be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow
and then some brand new episodes next week. Stuff you
(19:45):
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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