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 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, 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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