Citation Needed - JBS Haldane and the X-Craft

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS (/ˈhɔːldeɪn/; 5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964[1][2]), nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS",[3] was a British-Indian scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. With innovative use of statistics in biology, he was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. Despite his lack of an academic degree in the field,[1] he taught biology at the University of Cambridge, the Royal Institution, and University College London.[4] Renouncing his British citizenship, he became an Indian citizen in 1961 and worked at the Indian Statistical Institute for the rest of his life.

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnik and I'll be boosting the jets tonight, but I'll need some guys in sunglasses to wave the little hand things. Feels like that's a bad system for planes, right? Anyways, first up! The first man who remembered when the need for speed ended in

I'm so excited, I'm so excited, I'm so scared. I'm so scared! Keith Enright! Wow, get my own intro? I mean, look, nobody else on the show loves Save by the Bell like you do, so I felt like it was all yours. That's true. And also joining us tonight, three guys who didn't see that show

because they were too poor, treated too poorly, and poorly too treated, Cecil, Tom, and Noah. Is that the one with Horshack? I... I didn't see that show because the monkey bit whenever anyone turned off Curious George. George. George. Yeah, that makes sense.

I... Surprising. I appreciate you just making up new word combinations rather than just saying too old. Too old! Oh man. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Patrons to our podcast get before show shenanigans, bonus episodes where we read things like My Immortal, The Banana Man, and articles from Black Belt Magazine.

But most importantly, they get Kiyot! Our love. If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us Tom, what person place thing, concept, phenomenon or event will we be talking about today? We'll be talking about JBS Haldane and the X-Craft.

And Noah, you seem to be running out of spaceships and having to settle for the lower atmospheres. Do you think the space nerds in our audience will ever forgive you? Well, I feel like as long as I avoid breathable environments, they'll be okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. So who is JBS Haldane and what is the X-Craft? And why can't you just pick one title for your fucking podcast? All right. So with this one, I actually I debated with myself whether I should make

it an essay about JBS, holiday and just spend a lot of time talking about the X-Craft or if I should make it about the X-Craft and just spend a lot of time talking about JBS holiday. But for the chronology of the essay to work, I kind of have to make it about both right from the beginning. So the X-Craft was a class of midget submarine used by the allies in World War II. And JBS Haldane was the mad scientist whose work was pivotal in the creation of the X-Craft. Or more accurately, he led the team of mad scientists that helped create the X-Craft. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Midget submarine. Are there other vehicles that let you say words you're not supposed to anymore? Cause I will change careers right now.

If I can. Yeah, not yet Eli, but the new Tesla concept car is just a swastika on wheels. So we're getting very close. It's called Twitter. Well, it's called X. Yeah, well, right, right. So diving bells go back to antiquity,

but these early forms of submersibles relied on a tube going back to the surface for air, right? So if you want to use a submarine to antiquity, but these early forms of submersibles relied on a tube going back to the surface for air. So if you want to use a submarine to sneak around as the Allies did, you need a self-contained atmosphere, but back then we didn't really know how to do that. We didn't know how much carbon dioxide could build up in the atmosphere before it drove you crazy. We didn't know how long you could breathe pure oxygen before it made you sick. We didn't know how long a human being could remain conscious under extreme pressures. So JBS Haldane and his team of mad scientists figured that shit out by getting in hyperbaric chambers,

locking them up, and then writing down when they went crazy, got sick, and lost consciousness. I just sucked one year of your life away. This is for posterity, so be honest. How do you feel? Actually, I'm feeling great. So the other guys, they they passed out. They wrote nothing. I wrote, apparently, the sequel to Jabberwocky.

Yeah, I think it's pretty good. Let's fire this up again. A lot of that. So as near as I can tell, there's no consensus on when the first real submarine was built. And for our purposes, we're going to call a real submarine a vehicle that can move under the water, under its own power, without an umbilical feeding atmosphere into it from the surface. There are feasible plans for a submarine that start popping up all the way back into the 1500s, like the late 1500s, but the 1500s nonetheless. And some

people claim to have made working ones, but there's a lot of doubt about those early claims. Oh, hey, hey guys. I know everything we have is made mostly out of stone, disease and burnt up witches, but let's try building ourselves a submarine, huh? What could go wrong? Guys, I think Dave's a witch again.

You're a witch. For saying that. Witch. Okay. We're at an imp witch again. You're a witch for saying that. Witch. We're at an impasse again. This keeps happening. So by the mid 18th century, there were at least a few examples of working submarines, though they were a very limited use. As opposed to the modern submarines you and I use every day, Podcat.

They could use for a lot of stuff. So by the year 1800, the French Navy had a submarine called the Nautilus, of course, which was human powered, very likely through hand cranks. And while you did my hand, the very earliest submarines apparently had little hand cranks that they would like with little. Had they not invented the bicycle yet to use bigger muscle groups? I don't know. I think honestly, it was just a thing where they were like well you know rowing and everyone was like yeah rowing. It's actually powered by

doing steam pumps. It's supposed to look like this. Tom's in the back I want to kick it. Relax man relax. We're all gonna die in like six minutes anyways. Yeah right yeah honestly. It just makes you want to kick it more Now this nautilus though It did prove capable of planting mines on enemy ships But it wasn't practical enough to maintain and the French government abandoned the project in 1804 But the idea was out there and over the course of the century Incremental advances would interest ever closer to a militarily viable submarine by the the time of the US Civil War, in fact, both size Jews submarines

and the Confederate sub, the Hunley, would become the first submarine to successfully attack and sink an opposing warship. Oh yeah, sure, but if you're in the submarine, you're already sunk, so it just feels unfair. Guys, I don't know what we do. I think we have to float this guy to win. Ah, we got sunk.

We got, ah, something. We got something. Ah, shit. All right, we're just tied though. We're just tied. You raised my battleship. That's weird. No, of course, at this point, submarines were just barely going underwater. Just the tip.

Yeah, just to see how it feels. They'd submerged just enough to be hidden and they wouldn't stay underwater for long. As regular listeners will remember from episode 259 about the Brooklyn Bridge, we wouldn't figure out the nature of decompression sickness until the 1870s after the Civil War ended. And as for the atmosphere, they just they didn't stay submerged for very long. So they'd lock it up, they'd go underwater, they'd do their thing and they'd pop up before all of the ill effects of re-breathing the same air could kill anybody. Or at least that was the plan.

I like it. One point in history, submarines stayed underwater as long as a ninja with a cut reed. Yeah, for a long time. Well, when they went under the puff of ninja smoke added a nice touch. Yeah. Stop yelling smoke bomb. It's just us here. We yell smoke bomb every time. No. So this was approximately the state of submarine technology Stop yelling smoke bomb. It's just us here. We yell smoke bomb every time.

So this was approximately the state of submarine technology that John Burden Sanderson Haldane emerged into. He was born into an aristocratic British family in 1892. His father, John Scott Haldane, was a scientist back when that just meant rich ass Nepo baby who could afford to spend all his time measuring leaves. But little JBS, who is nicknamed Jack as a kid, soaked up every bit of science he could in a famous family story. At age four, he was being treated by a physician for a head wound. And he asked the doctor if his blood was oxyhemoglobin or carboxyhemoglobin. The doctor from the turn of the century is like, shut up, kid, and drink this radium. Does anyone know how we go back to when spoiled rich people

were making society better with their hobbies instead of just, you know, destroying our democracy and losing Twitter fights to Mr. Sulu? Voting, it's voting. Yeah. We get to vote for them? So his dad encouraged his interest in science and not just in the healthy ways that you might imagine.

Instead, John Senior made a habit of using little JBS as a human guinea pig for experiments on things like, just as one example, poison gases. Yeah, I guess this is slightly less horrifying in that his dad also used himself as a human guinea pig too, but only slightly. But this, this penchant for self experimentation is something that JBS would carry with him for the rest of his life. And it's the reason I'm talking about him now, actually. I know I don't pretend to know much about poison gases, but I feel like you have to be really fucking confident that you're actually terrible at making them to try them on yourself. Yeah, yourself and your kid. Right. So at age eight, his dad took JBS to a lecture about

Mendelian genetics, which was some cutting edge shit at the time, I guess. This is of course the P experiments that left middle schoolers drawing P fucking charts for centuries ever after. But after that lecture, JBS took up a lifelong interest in genetics. And as tempting as it is to say that that was a defense mechanism since growing peas was less dangerous than experimenting with poison gas, the way the rest of this story shakes out

doesn't really line up with the he didn't want to get hurt argument. You can mix those two things, pee and poison gas, by just eating asparagus. Dude, such a weird smell. I kind of like it. It makes me want to just eating asparagus. Such a weird smell. I kind of like it. It makes me want to pee on asparagus plants to see what happens.

It's interesting. If you water them with urine. It's the circle of life. Right, exactly. It just feels symmetrical or something. Now, JBS would go on to do incredibly important work in genetics. He's a fucking legend in the field of biology.

Exactly. No, he is that JBS. Fuck yeah. Yeah, I let him sign my test. He was the first to establish gene maps for hemophilia and color blindness. He has a rule and a dilemma named after him. Same girl, same. In a good way. This is in a good way. He was the first to suggest a central idea behind in vitro fertilization. He was the first to propose the primordial soup theory of abiogenesis.

He coined the term cloning. He was also an ardent socialist, an outspoken atheist and a secular humanist. And no less than Arthur C. Clark called him, quote, Perhaps the most brilliant science popularizer of his generation, end quote. But we're going to have to sidestep pretty much all of that shit for the sake of this episode and just focus on the work that he did in diving. Research. If only someone would do the same thing with Richard Dawkins, right? Right. Sink him to the bottom of the ocean.

Me too. Yes, that's what I was thinking. Thank you. I. Sink him to the bottom of the ocean? Me too. Yes, that's what I was thinking. Thank you. I wanna punch him in the face with my Y chromosomes. Okay. You had your chance. You had your chance. You did, you did.

My selfish gene at work. Yeah. Yeah. So like his interest in genetics, his diving research started at a very early age. In 1906, his dad was studying the effects of decompression sickness in humans, and you guessed it, he needed a test subject. So they stick this 13 year old kid in a diving suit, I think 20,000 leagues under the sea diving suit, right? And he's not the only test subject, he's just the youngest, which means

that the suit is designed for way bigger people. But no matter, they stick him inside and they dump him off the deck of this ship called the HMS Spanker. Excuse me? Freezing cold waters off of Scotland, yes. When you board the HMS Spanker, you better board with everyone knowing your safe word. Right? Yes, spoilers actually. My dad is a mad scientist and I'm being kidnapped. That's my safe word. Right. Yes. Spoilers, actually. So my dad is a mad scientist and I'm being kidnapped.

That's my safe word, everybody. I'm blinking. Right. So now, lest you think like he was going to be fine or anything, I got to point out that the wrists on this suit started leaking pretty much immediately, possibly because his arms weren't long enough to reach the fucking gloves. And it's adorable. I think you It's adorable. This would look adorable. It probably looks really fucking cute, but the water's freezing fucking cold. Now, he did have a safe word, right? He had the ability to signal to people above and say,

hey, this is an emergency. You have to pull me up. And my diving suit is filling up with freezing cold water. It's definitely an emergency. But this is a 13 year old kid who's curious about science and he's getting a chance to see the underwater world in a way that almost nobody else ever has at any point in history. So he does. And eventually they pull him up. He recovers from his hypothermia and the fucking decompression sickness that they were intentionally inflicting on him and somehow yearns for more. Once more with feeling in my fingers, am I right?

Yeah, right. Yeah. Bet his dad loved him though. I bet he loved the flash like just right. He's tough. Yeah, right. Exactly. So, so he goes to college at Oxford.

He gets a degree in mathematics. He publishes his first scientific paper in 1913 at the age of 20. It was about hemoglobin. And speaking of hemoglobin, a year later, his scientific career would be put on hold when England joins the First World War. He volunteers, he ends up doing like nothing whatsoever to do with submarines or pea plants for that matter. Instead, he's given a job firing mortars at enemy trenches. And it turns out that he actually quite likes killing people. He would later recall that he quote, "'enjoyed the opportunity of killing people

and regarded it as a respectable relic of primitive man'." End quote. And while I'm sure that kind of sentiment would get you fired at like Tom's job, this was the army. So he got promoted first to lieutenant, then to captain. Alternatively, he could have been the CEO of Boeing. That would work. Yeah, exactly.

Ah, the good old days when indulging your blood lust with some casual indifference to human suffering was a youthful indiscretion and not official border control policy. Yeah. Yeah. I was just kidding about the Boeing thing. Please don't kill me. Please don't murder me. I don't want to die.

Please don't murder me. I'm just kidding. I was just that's a joke. You're next. So so Haldane was injured multiple times in battle, and his commanding officer described him as quote, the bravest and dirtiest officer in my army and quote, which I certainly contains a compliment. It seems weird to fault the guy for being dirty in the midst of World War One, but whatever. He served with distinction and when the war was over, he went back to being a brilliant

scientist. And when his country found itself embroiled in war again, he'd be way too old to be thrown back into battle. But it would turn out that this time around, his country needed brilliant scientists way more than it needed sociopathic artillery officers. All right. Well, we have a psychotic obsessed with blood and the sea. So if we don't end up with an underwater Dracula, I will be severely disappointed. Um...

So while I brace myself for that, we'll take a quick break for some Apropos of Nothing. All right now, Henry, you're gonna fit as many fire ants in your butt as you can, okay? Yeah. Alright, you can begin. Hey. Uh, one- Ow, motherfucker! Two- Ow! Say Dr. Gerard? Yes, Dr. Smiggins? I was thinking... Three!

Oh! Fuck! That burns! What were you thinking? Well, you know how it's old timey times and science is just doing stuff to people and then writing it down? Of course, absolutely. Can I stop, please?

No, Henry, you have to keep going. Sorry, you were saying. Ah! Well, I was thinking, what if we thought of stuff before we did things to people? Before we did things to people? What do you mean? Motherfuckfuckfuckfuck!

Henry, you're only angering them with your screaming. Sorry. Sorry. Ugh! Like, what if we posited, I think Henry can fit 34 fire ants in his butt, and then we talked about, you know, butts, or we thought about butts before we actually put them in Henry's butt? Before you say.

Three! No, Henry, you already said three, that's four. But what if you're wrong? Well, we could maybe figure out we were wrong before we put fire ants in Henry's butt, for example. Hmm, sounds like an awful lot of work to me. Yeah... ...yeah, I suppose so. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ Sorry. And we're back.

When we left off, a rich psychopath was about to inappropriately name something the X. More things change. What happened next? Yeah. So, even as a genetics researcher and professor, Haldane managed to make himself a pretty controversial figure. He temporarily lost his position teaching at Cambridge when he married a divorcee, which would have been at least a little scandalous to begin with by the standards of the time. But in order for her to secure a divorce, she had to be able to prove that there was adultery in her relationship. So she and Haldane like publicly adultered.

OK, morning announcements at the P.A. at Cambridge got more fun. Right. So that was enough to lose him his job. But ultimately, a number of other prominent professors, including GK Chesterton and Bertrand Russell, came to his defense, and a year later the ouster was revoked. Okay, but I feel like watching your genetics professor plow some lady on a park bench so he can marry her is going to ruin your semester no matter what, right? Eli, you went to college in

New York. If two people fucking on a park bench bother you you'd never have graduated a degree in pretending To have read Proust That is what his degrees in JBS this judge is a real stickler we got to do some pegging on the bench So but far more controversial than his sex life were his political views. At this time in his life, he was an ardent and outspoken communist in the interwar years. And that got you on just as many lists in England as it did back then as it did in America. The British government was keeping a close eye on him throughout his career in a way that disturbs the shit out of his supporters, but delights the hell out of his biographers.

But controversy or no, he was one of the world's leading experts on the science of diving. So when the British government lost a whole submarine full of people, he was the one they turned to to figure out why. So the submarine in question was the HMS Thetis, which sank during sea trials in 1939, killing 99 of the 103 sailors aboard. And the question wasn't why it sank, but rather why so few men survived. So the ship had what amounted to escape pods. These were like early versions of scuba gear. And given how slowly that they knew the ship filled with water, there should have been

plenty of time for at least most of the sailors to put on their shit and escape, but they didn't. Okay. Just to be clear, the best case scenario was most of you can escape with the flippers and the mask. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lot of rock, paper, scissors go at like really fast. How many escape pod things should we have?

Should it be one? I just put some in. Put some in. They had enough. They had enough for everybody, but they knew that some people would be trapped in parts of the ship where they wouldn't be able to get out in time, even if the ship was like going slowly. That's not as funny as what I said, though. Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. Sorry. So speaking, speaking of not so funny, when they eventually raised the ship,

they found that almost nobody had even tried to put these things on. Instead, the bodies were just twisted into horrifying inhuman positions and scattered all over the boat. Yeah, Inspector pulls a twister mat off the floor. My God. Yes, sir. So... Left hand blue, my friend. Left.

Oh, the hands are blue now, yeah. So... So how they went to work investigating, and what he ultimately found was that the culprit was carbon dioxide poisoning. So the ship was designed to carry 59 men, but it was chock full of observers and all of this shit for its inaugural dive. And with that many people breathing in the confined space, carbon dioxide built up too fast for anybody to even react when the ship started sinking.

They really needed was one of those maximum occupancy signs on board. Yes, they did. OK, it says more than 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd carbon dioxide per mole is not ideal. What does that even mean? I don't know what to do with that. So now this led to an interesting question, or at least an interesting question for a

morbid fuck like- Three chemistry gas nerds are like, that's got a lot going on. That's nice. Avogadro. Classic. But this led to an interesting question, or at least interesting to a morbid fuck like JBS Haldane, and that is how much carbon dioxide could a person withstand before it caused them to twist into an exorcism movie pose and die.

And of course his method of figuring this out was breathing more and more CO2 and then writing down how sick he got. Cool, kind of like normal breathing now in 2020. Now of course because proper science requires multiple data points he also roped in some other volunteers to poison as well. Hey Craig. It's me JBS I'm doing a poison experiment again, and I was wondering if you'd like to hello Town are just awful So at first this was just one of those weird obsessions that Haldane followed It was kind of his thing to have a bunch of them But as the 1930s rolled on and war with Germany loomed, it took on a whole new urgency.

Submarines had played an important role in the First World War, but everybody could see that they were going to be much more important the second time around. So pretty early on, the British government started pumping money and supplies into Haldane's research. Yeah. And at this point, I'm amazed he didn't see how much money he could eat before he threw up. We don't know that he did, Tom, right? So now, what the British government wanted to know specifically was how deep could a submarine go and how long could they stay there?

So JBS and his team of merry guinea pigs set out to answer those questions the hard way by repeatedly subjecting themselves to dangerous levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen, often while under dangerous amounts of pressure. And then they just write down what happened to them. Or what happened to each other in the instances where the things that happened, i.e. passed out, became incoherent for hours, seized uncontrollably, render them unable to write for themselves. Nowadays, it sounds like a pricey week at Burning Man.

Now, now, Cecil, that sounds way more fun than Burning Man. Don't be silly. Now, I don't want to present these other volunteers as just passive participants that got suckered into this by a sadist. They were that kind of kind of but like these people basically saw what they were doing as their part in the war effort. At least a couple of them were fighting age men whose draft was deferred so that they could continue to do this work and several of them were German-born Jews who had escaped before

the war broke out and were at least as motivated as anybody else to bring this war to a swift close. All right. Go fight in a world war or sit in a tube till I vomit. Yeah, I guess tube till I vomit. Sure. Yeah. Whenever is helpful. I'm not going to remotely be able to do justice to all the crazy shit that these guys did to test the limits of human endurance underwater. If you want that though, I would highly recommend the book that inspired this essay. It's called Chamber Divers by non-Brisonian author Rachel Lance.

Bill Bryson and Drake? Totally Bill Bryson and Drake. She's not Bill Bryson and Drake, she's an expert on explosions. But suffice to say, they fucked themselves up with this, right? Haldane crushed a vertebrae during a violent seizure at one point and perforated his eardrum during a pressure experiment. One of his collaborators collapsed a lung during their research. A PhD student by the name of Helen Spurway had such violent seizures at one point that she broke her fucking back. What? Yeah, some guy with a clipboard watches the seizure, takes out a pencil. Too much. Have we learned something here today, boys? Yeah, I'm sure it'll be worth her pain for the rest of her waking life. Yeah. So we can just do a check mark for that. We don't need to write out too much. I feel like it's just

we're doing that every time, right? We'll make a column. We'll just make a start over. Should I just stack the stretchers in the corner? Is that how you go? Yeah. Now, once it became clear that Haldane's research was going to be pivotal in the war effort, some self aggrandizing military asshole stepped in and tried to take all the credit for it. Or actually, I'm sorry, did take all the credit for it actually for years and years until a bunch of new shit got declassified and he was showed to be a posthumous douchebag. And apparently, Haldane was such a pain in the ass to work with that the military ultimately pushed him out of his own research altogether. But because he was smarter

than any of them and they still might have questions for him, they did it in a very like everybody be quiet and pretend not to be home kind of way. So instead of telling him somebody else would be heading up the project that he'd already given a vertebrae and an eardrum to, they just said it was over and they had all the information they needed. Why are we taking all the stuff from your office? We just want to remember you and you have fun stories about how much you love murder. Oh man, I'm going to miss you. What? My eardrum doesn't work.

Yeah, right. But it was thanks to the encyclopedia of information that Haldane had provided about, you know, how to keep an atmosphere safe at depth for days on end that the British military was able to finally realize the goal that I teased in the title, the X-Craft, which was basically just a tiny version of the submarines that we already had. So the idea of the midget submarine. Okay, this really cannot be the preferred nomenclature, Noah.

As long as you apply it to people is when it's bad. So but the idea had been around for a long time. Regular submarines can't get in close to anything on shore or in a harbor and scuba wouldn't be around until after the war. So what the militaries of the world wanted at that time was a miniaturized submarine that could sneak into an enemy harbor, plant bombs on the underside of the ship and sneak away. Torpedoes could do that, of course, but everybody learned real quick to put up torpedo netting. So to actually get in, you needed a human guided vehicle, along with a diver who could pop out long enough to cut through those nets Good news boys. We've made it to the enemy harbor now Frank. We're just gonna need you to nip out for a bit

What yeah while we're under the water Feels feels like a bad idea. You'll be underwater too. Okay, okay You have bone spurs you say? to. Okay. Okay. What do you have? You have bone spurs? You say? Yeah, it's like a thing with the spine or heel or it doesn't matter. I can't use righty scissors anyway. No, of course, if you want to make a tiny submarine, you have to know an awful lot about how to keep a very small atmosphere survivable for a long time. Well, if you want the people in it to survive, that is the Japanese actually made midget submarines

that they used during the attack on Pearl Harbor, but they didn't know about the carbon dioxide poisoning thing, so almost everybody just died along the way. The few that got there were completely useless. One crew famously tried to commit suicide when they realized that they'd failed at their mission, but the carbon dioxide had them so fucking loopy that they couldn't even manage to do

that and they became the first American prisoners of war. Captain, this guy's trying to commit sepulchre with a steering wheel. What do I do here? But the British version would prove- You could do that with a different Model X. But the British version would prove far more effective. That is far more effective than a complete and total failure. And not by a hell of a lot, at least not at first. So they ended up making six of these guys. They were 15 meters long, six meters tall and five and a half meters wide. So about the size of a school bus. And they actually like they had bus engines in them. The diesel

engines that they ran on were the same ones that powered London's double decker buses at the time. And in case you're wondering, yes, a bus engine running in an enclosed space, the size of a school bus generates an enormous amount of heat. They were incredibly fucking hot. And given all the equipment and shit that kept the ocean out,

they had nowhere near as much interior space as a school bus. So the average guy could just barely stand up in one. And with a crew of five you basically had to take turns stretching. Yeah, especially since also like a school bus, they had to be driven by a recovering meth addict older than your dad. So they encounter an enemy you bow about to get overtaken. The British guy just puts out the stop arm It's time to pull it. Yeah, nobody can pass. Yeah. I can't go Either this is bullshit. It's fine. So

So the British Navy gets half a dozen of these motherfuckers and they sent them out against the biggest baddest ship in the Nazi Navy Which happened to be in port in Norway at the time the x-craft are slow as all fuck So they actually have to be towed in close before they can take off under their own power. And apparently, towing shit underwater is really tricky. Or at least it was tricky enough that they lost one of the X-Craft on the way, crew and all. Total Line just snapped and then there were five. Kyle, stop saying we! This is serious, okay? So a second craft had to turn back pretty much right away due to a mechanical failure.

A third disappeared and nobody knows what the fuck happened to it. Jean-Béné France. Only two of them actually made it into the harbor, past the torpedo nets and planted their explosives. And even then, neither of them could actually like plant the explosives on the ship as planned. And instead they had to just settle for dropping them

on the sea floor right below it. they had to just settle for dropping them on the seafloor right below it. Both of those craft managed to get themselves captured afterwards. The crews broke under interrogation pretty much immediately. They told the Admiral about the explosives, but it was too late. He tried to maneuver the ship out of the way. The explosion still managed to rip a substantial hole in the motherfucker. They didn't quite sink it, but it was out of commission for six months. Only one X craft made it back. That was the one with for six months. Only one X-Craft made it back. That was the one with the mechanical issues, and its tow line snapped on the way back. So ultimately all six of them were lost in the attack. Helen rolls over to the pier in her wheelchair.

This feels less worth it now, huh? So, well, okay. So it seems to us like it's a huge failure, but when you consider how much firepower, how many lost lives and how much artillery it normally took to put a battleship out of commission for six months, this was considered a huge success. OK, they still they call this the monkeys jumping on the bed strategy of war. Doesn't mean it isn't effective. So but the British Navy quickly built half a dozen more of these things.

And they were actually used to much greater effect Scouting beaches for D-Day and serving as visible guideposts during those landings Do you guys think it's really useful to catapult these things onto beaches or I don't stop saying we Serious so just a quick postscript on how Dane before we wrap up So eventually he divorced the D fors say wife and he married the PhD Student who's back he broke with his experiments just goes to show you what a lady will do if you blow her back out of my right That was Eli trying to back away from his joke as he was saying No control over when that character appears on our show, much like senior pants. Okay.

So, apparently Haldane and Spurway were the fucking worst. At one point, just to give you an idea, they lived in a roommate situation with another couple and when Haldane got a telegram that was addressed to the other dude, he didn't tell him about it for weeks, even though it was a telegram about his brother having died. And when the dude confronted him about it, Haldane is supposed to have said, what does it matter? He's dead. I don't like telegrams. You can't keep track of it. They're just sent to you all the time. They're peblers with holograms. So after the war, his wife, who was apparently a raging alcoholic at this point, she's heading

home from a bar all shit-faced and deliberately and maliciously stomps on the tail of a police dog. She's arrested. She tells the judge that she did it so that the police would know how hated they are. So she's convicted and she's fined, but she refuses to pay the fine. So she's thrown in jail. Eventually, Haldane bails her out and the two leave to go to India in their words, quote, in search of a free country, end quote. Takes a lot to put me on the side of both cops and state violence, but they did it. Hey, right?

Yeah, I know. Yeah. So Haldane would die at the age of 72 of colorectal cancer. His wife would survive him by a dozen years or so and would largely take up his scientific mantle, finishing a lot of his research and taking over a lot of his regular publications. In the book that I was talking about,

the author says that she was unable to find any living person with any single positive thing to say about the dog-stomping wife Helen Spurway. She died in 1978 from an infection that she got after being bitten by her pet jaguar. Yeah, that tracks. That tracks. And if you had to somewhere... Wait, that can't be the whole story. You got to do that. What the pet jaguar? You can't in like that, Noah. Jaguar you can't unlike that no one Forgot to get neo spore in That was it meow spore in

All right, so no if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be I Turns out I've been doing glaucoma research this whole time. And are you ready for the quiz? Well, I've done a lot of research, yeah. All right, no. Which of the following is the best number from the musical about JBS Haldane and the X-Craft? A. Blunder the Sea, obviously. B. Sink Time for Hitler. C. B, sync time for Hitler. C, Das Booty and the Beast. B, bends in low places.

B, anything you both can do. I can bet you that. Ooh, we love it. All right, it has to be C. There's so much going on with C, Das Booty and the Beast. It has to be C. There's so much going on with C. Doss Bully and the Beasts. Yeah, it's a fucking chef's kiss. Chef's kiss.

All right, Noah, what racist underwater diving discovery did the Confederates make? A, stars and atmospheric bars. B, submarine comp or C, the diving bell curve. I'm going to risk that once again, Submarine comp or C the diving bell curve. I'm going to risk that once again, it is C the diving bell. Correct. Correct.

Amazing. All right, Noah, we can't keep calling them midget submarines. That's a, I know it has a perfectly ordinary and inoffensive definition B. It just means something small see but still The we can't right Secret answer F. It's only offensive when you like to assume that it's would be a reference to a human Context we're introducing context now? It's... What did that happen?

Guys, guys, Tom wins, because he said midget the most times in the episode, and that was the bet we made before we started recording. All right, that means I'm picking Heath. Heath, you do the next one. All right, well, for Tom, Heath, Noah, and Cecil, I'm Eli Bosnik. Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week. And by then, he will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to like a thousand other episodes of our other podcasts. Like if you're kind of old and this is your first time listening to the show, you can listen to our shows till you're fucking dead. And if you'd like to help keep this show going,

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Excellent Henry, thank you. Hey what is this experiment for anyway? Oh, uh, I don't know. No you bet me 20 bucks remember? Right that was it Henry, I bet him 20 bucks. Got it.