Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Gibson joined today as always Buy Stuff writer Joshua m Clark. I am joining you, Candice, whether you like it or not. Yes, we are one team Fourth Factory Fiction. Yeah, or Team Jaundice as you like to call it. I do. That is my name for us, Team Jaundice, because we are not only UM partners and podcasting, we're partners and writing and editing. That is true. That is true. So, Candice, I know you don't know this, but there's this really cool webcam. Uh it's called Alcatraz Live or something like that, I think. And you go on and I think it's on this default setting. It's just showing San Francisco, but you can turn the camera whichever way you want and one of the selections is Alcatraz and basically you can just sit there and watch Alcatraz in real time. There's not a happening. That's that's really the one the one thing. I mean, every once in a while you might see like a tour boat go by or something like that. Not the hotbed of activity today that it once was, but it once was a pretty cool place. Right. Have you ever seen Escape from Alcatraz? No? But I have seen so I married an axe murderer. And there's a scene in which Mike Meyers and Anthony Lapallia go to Alcatraz on the tour Have you ever been? I've never been. I've never been. Now I hear good things though, I hear it's kind of cool. You're good things about a former federal peditentiary about a tour of the yes, right, yeah, No, not too many good things about Alcatraz, um, although there have been some cool movies made. Murder in the first Escape from Alcatraz, Like I said, Birdman of Alcatraz, that is a great movie, very heartening. And I was actually surprised to see an actual picture of Robert Strap the Birdman of Alcatraz, because I thought he looked exactly like Burt Lancaster in the movie. Apparently not, but clearly the best, the best Alcatraz movie ever was Escaped from Alcatraz, starring Mr Clint east Twin you haven't seen it, so he plays this guy. And here's my question. This is this is what the question is based on. So listen carefully Okay, he plays this guy named Frank Morris who is supposedly an inmate, uh and Alcatraz and like the early sixties or something like that, and along with two brothers, Clarence and John Anglin, he Um basically digs his way out of Alcatraz with a spoon and makes off into this horribly chilly, shark infested bay um on a life raft made of raincoats. So my question is this just like Hollywood? WHOI or is that fact? Is that fiction? Answer? It's actually fact. So this really did happen, like escape from Alcatraz? Really happy? Yeah, it really happened. Okay, how how does one make a rink or how a life raft out of raincoat? Now that I can't tell you. I'm now Martha's steward of of great prison escape accouterments, But I'm sure you could probably find a how to somewhere on the lab. It's a good thing. Um Alcatraz, Like you said, I just want to fill everybody in this in case you haven't been watching the webcam. Alcatraz is this incredibly isolated place. It's essentially a mountaintop. It's all rock. There are barely any plans that will grow there. It's incredibly isolated, and like you said, the water around it is so so cold. I think on a good day it might be sixty degrees fahrenheit. And there are great whites that are constantly patrolling the water. So anyone perfect. Oh, it is definitely And it's been reinforced, or it had been reinforced a couple of times. It was first built. I know this, I know this. You're ready. So the Alcatraz, the island was actually first officially surveyed in eighteen forty seven and they realized, hey, you could really protect San Francisco from this location, right, So it became an outpost during the Civil War and uh that it was basically meant to stave off any Confederate invasion, which never came. And actually the guns on Alcatraz were fired a few times, but it was always a case of mistaken identity. But the thing is you had the citadel, this outpost, um and Alcatraz evolved into a prison almost um. Naturally, people started putting, you know, war deserters and things in the basement of the citadel, and over time more and more people were being kept there, and then finally the the the army I think was the one who who ran it said wait, we're not really you know, in the business of running prisons. Jaeger Hoover, who was running the FBI at the time, said, well, I am, and I'm actually looking for a perfect place to become like this horrible hole that the symbol of what happens to you if you're a gangster crook in America, because I'm going to catch you. And thus Alcatraz is porn. Nineteen thirty four. Uh, it opened its doors for the first time, accepting its first prisoners and began it's um. It's declined into its image ofty. Yes, and you know it's funny because even though it it declined into notoriety, it was incredibly high tech as far as US prisons went. It was especially for Yeah, I was top of the line. And when it was a military prison, I had iron bars. But nineteen thirty four they replaced it all with steel and everything was reinforced with concrete, and it was serious business. And it actually cost more to replace all the bars with steel than it did to build a prison from scratch. Yeah. For in the nineteen twelve version, right, yeah, because I actually did make it a military prison. I forgot to mention this in nineteen twelve, but then it went It went down after a few years to how did it go down? They just left it alone. Oh, even like it fell to ruin. It was decommissioned as another way to put it, and it was revived. It had its renaissance under under Hoover. There you go. And there were a lot of famous prisoners who trapes in an ad and the cells were pretty lonely places to be, but they weren't too bad. And that was a strange thing about Acatraz is that even though we may have this Hollywood perception of it as a very scary place, it wasn't too different from other prisons. It was fairly clean, well capped, and the prisoners, you know, they had their individual cells with a bed and a toilet, and they were riding five ft wide by nine ft deep. I was saying, they're trying to imagine that today. That is almost precisely the dimensions of a couple of our cupicles put together. Yeah, it really doesn't sound that terrible. They even had shelves for their personal effects. Yeah, yeah, which is strange because you wouldn't think of, you know, prisoners in Alcatraz having personal effects. I was wondering that too, but I guess people sent them things. Yeah, you know thought the first time. The first warden actually, as I understand, didn't allow speaking like the the prisoners couldn't speak, including during meals, and like that kind of rigid strictness, the argument goes um, actually made Alcatraz a safer place for prisoners than most other prisoners. And they're most other prisons in the country. You you weren't very likely to get shipped. You know, you can't even talk, so how can you offend somebody? And if you can't offend somebody, you're not gonna end up with a sharpened toothbrush in your stomach. And you're right about that. James Johnston was the name of the first warden, and he ran a really really tight ship. And eventually the prisoners all figured out, well, anyone who talks gets sent to confinement, but if we all talk, they can't send us anywhere because there's too many of us. So they all started talking at once, really really loud, that no one could do a darned thing, and thus ended the day long silence. Essentially, just be awful. I think you and I would both go out of our mind and saying if we couldn't talk, especially you. I'm sorry I didn't say that. But it was funny about these prisoners too, is that they weren't all gangsters. There were some who, you know, had committed smaller crimes, you know, sort of a Jean Valjean stealing a lift of bread thing, and they were all lumped in there together, so somewhere a little bit more gentlemanly and the um. When the silence was lifted, I think that the prisoners became a little bit more cooperative and easier to manage, you know, like any other prison. They had their library time, their exercise time there, you know, lending a helping hand time, and Alcatraz itself it was almost like its own little community because it was an isolated island. The wardens and their families lived there. Yeah, yeah, I heard this. Just really weird. You would you live on Alcatraz with your kids because there were kids on the island because they had a policy that children weren't allowed to have toy guns, so to protect those toy guns ending up in the hands of a prisoner who could use it to bluff his way out of the prison rightly, and the kids it was a very strange lifestyle for them because they had to get boted over to the mainland for school. And I was like, you know, I mean, we have jokes today about you know, kids getting picked up and ratty looking cars and staff outside of their elementary schools. What if you were the kid who came over from the Alcatraz boat. I just I feel really sorry for them. Yes, so apparently life on Alcatraz sucked for everybody. It did. But to answer your question, which I realized, yeah, I was out taking a very round about way circuitus indeed. Um. But to answer your question, which you asked me about five minutes ago, I know, did brothers really escaped using nothing but spoons, cardboard and rain coats? Fact, yes, this is in the Annals of Murky and Mysterious Alcatraz History. Uh. Clarence and John England and their friend Frank Morris essentially had a very long and grueling plan during which they used parents to ship away it rotted concrete around these vents in their cells, and they used painted cardboard to mimic the appearance of the vents as they were, so that it would look as though no damage had been done to the infrastructure of their cells. And then once the holes got big enough, Um, this is all very Shawshank redemption. You know, they had they hit it with painted cardboard instead of a big poster Hayworth, but the principle was the same. At that point they could crawl into the hole and then there was a tunnel through which they they worked their way in and they used this as sort of their workshop for constructing this raft and life vests out of the raincoat material. Don't ask me how it stayed a float, especially if they were shark infested waters. But supposedly they made it out and no one ever recovered anybody's They did find a plastic bag floating around with some of their effects on it. But supposedly they made off and there was a ship waiting for them and they escaped. So they were never found, not one of them, never found, no complete break from Alcatraz. So this is one of those cases where Hollywood it is actually pretty accurate. Huh. There you have it, And I'm really really proud of that Shallshan predemption analogy, because as you guys know, I never see any movies but that one. That one I did. Yeah, good going. Thanks. So I actually have one more fun fact about acatre. You may be wondering, how did the England Brothers and their friend Frank Morrish make off without the guards noticing. Answer. They made paper mache heads and put them in their beds and cover them up with sheets, so it looked like they were actually people sleeping, and they weren't discovered until they've made it off. That's the same thing that happened in the movie. Ar't ientertaining life with lots of versa militude? Yes, well, everyone's looking not at You can also check out our site how stuff works dot com for the article how Alcatraz work. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Gibson joined today as always Buy Stuff writer Joshua m Clark. I am joining you, Candice, whether you like it or not. Yes, we are one team Fourth Factory Fiction. Yeah, or Team Jaundice as you like to call it. I do. That is my name for us, Team Jaundice, because we are not only UM partners and podcasting, we're partners and writing and editing. That is true. That is true. So, Candice, I know you don't know this, but there's this really cool webcam. Uh it's called Alcatraz Live or something like that, I think. And you go on and I think it's on this default setting. It's just showing San Francisco, but you can turn the camera whichever way you want and one of the selections is Alcatraz and basically you can just sit there and watch Alcatraz in real time. There's not a happening. That's that's really the one the one thing. I mean, every once in a while you might see like a tour boat go by or something like that. Not the hotbed of activity today that it once was, but it once was a pretty cool place. Right. Have you ever seen Escape from Alcatraz? No? But I have seen so I married an axe murderer. And there's a scene in which Mike Meyers and Anthony Lapallia go to Alcatraz on the tour Have you ever been? I've never been. I've never been. Now I hear good things though, I hear it's kind of cool. You're good things about a former federal peditentiary about a tour of the yes, right, yeah, No, not too many good things about Alcatraz, um, although there have been some cool movies made. Murder in the first Escape from Alcatraz, Like I said, Birdman of Alcatraz, that is a great movie, very heartening. And I was actually surprised to see an actual picture of Robert Strap the Birdman of Alcatraz, because I thought he looked exactly like Burt Lancaster in the movie. Apparently not, but clearly the best, the best Alcatraz movie ever was Escaped from Alcatraz, starring Mr Clint east Twin you haven't seen it, so he plays this guy. And here's my question. This is this is what the question is based on. So listen carefully Okay, he plays this guy named Frank Morris who is supposedly an inmate, uh and Alcatraz and like the early sixties or something like that, and along with two brothers, Clarence and John Anglin, he Um basically digs his way out of Alcatraz with a spoon and makes off into this horribly chilly, shark infested bay um on a life raft made of raincoats. So my question is this just like Hollywood? WHOI or is that fact? Is that fiction? Answer? It's actually fact. So this really did happen, like escape from Alcatraz? Really happy? Yeah, it really happened. Okay, how how does one make a rink or how a life raft out of raincoat? Now that I can't tell you. I'm now Martha's steward of of great prison escape accouterments, But I'm sure you could probably find a how to somewhere on the lab. It's a good thing. Um Alcatraz, Like you said, I just want to fill everybody in this in case you haven't been watching the webcam. Alcatraz is this incredibly isolated place. It's essentially a mountaintop. It's all rock. There are barely any plans that will grow there. It's incredibly isolated, and like you said, the water around it is so so cold. I think on a good day it might be sixty degrees fahrenheit. And there are great whites that are constantly patrolling the water. So anyone perfect. Oh, it is definitely And it's been reinforced, or it had been reinforced a couple of times. It was first built. I know this, I know this. You're ready. So the Alcatraz, the island was actually first officially surveyed in eighteen forty seven and they realized, hey, you could really protect San Francisco from this location, right, So it became an outpost during the Civil War and uh that it was basically meant to stave off any Confederate invasion, which never came. And actually the guns on Alcatraz were fired a few times, but it was always a case of mistaken identity. But the thing is you had the citadel, this outpost, um and Alcatraz evolved into a prison almost um. Naturally, people started putting, you know, war deserters and things in the basement of the citadel, and over time more and more people were being kept there, and then finally the the the army I think was the one who who ran it said wait, we're not really you know, in the business of running prisons. Jaeger Hoover, who was running the FBI at the time, said, well, I am, and I'm actually looking for a perfect place to become like this horrible hole that the symbol of what happens to you if you're a gangster crook in America, because I'm going to catch you. And thus Alcatraz is porn. Nineteen thirty four. Uh, it opened its doors for the first time, accepting its first prisoners and began it's um. It's declined into its image ofty. Yes, and you know it's funny because even though it it declined into notoriety, it was incredibly high tech as far as US prisons went. It was especially for Yeah, I was top of the line. And when it was a military prison, I had iron bars. But nineteen thirty four they replaced it all with steel and everything was reinforced with concrete, and it was serious business. And it actually cost more to replace all the bars with steel than it did to build a prison from scratch. Yeah. For in the nineteen twelve version, right, yeah, because I actually did make it a military prison. I forgot to mention this in nineteen twelve, but then it went It went down after a few years to how did it go down? They just left it alone. Oh, even like it fell to ruin. It was decommissioned as another way to put it, and it was revived. It had its renaissance under under Hoover. There you go. And there were a lot of famous prisoners who trapes in an ad and the cells were pretty lonely places to be, but they weren't too bad. And that was a strange thing about Acatraz is that even though we may have this Hollywood perception of it as a very scary place, it wasn't too different from other prisons. It was fairly clean, well capped, and the prisoners, you know, they had their individual cells with a bed and a toilet, and they were riding five ft wide by nine ft deep. I was saying, they're trying to imagine that today. That is almost precisely the dimensions of a couple of our cupicles put together. Yeah, it really doesn't sound that terrible. They even had shelves for their personal effects. Yeah, yeah, which is strange because you wouldn't think of, you know, prisoners in Alcatraz having personal effects. I was wondering that too, but I guess people sent them things. Yeah, you know thought the first time. The first warden actually, as I understand, didn't allow speaking like the the prisoners couldn't speak, including during meals, and like that kind of rigid strictness, the argument goes um, actually made Alcatraz a safer place for prisoners than most other prisoners. And they're most other prisons in the country. You you weren't very likely to get shipped. You know, you can't even talk, so how can you offend somebody? And if you can't offend somebody, you're not gonna end up with a sharpened toothbrush in your stomach. And you're right about that. James Johnston was the name of the first warden, and he ran a really really tight ship. And eventually the prisoners all figured out, well, anyone who talks gets sent to confinement, but if we all talk, they can't send us anywhere because there's too many of us. So they all started talking at once, really really loud, that no one could do a darned thing, and thus ended the day long silence. Essentially, just be awful. I think you and I would both go out of our mind and saying if we couldn't talk, especially you. I'm sorry I didn't say that. But it was funny about these prisoners too, is that they weren't all gangsters. There were some who, you know, had committed smaller crimes, you know, sort of a Jean Valjean stealing a lift of bread thing, and they were all lumped in there together, so somewhere a little bit more gentlemanly and the um. When the silence was lifted, I think that the prisoners became a little bit more cooperative and easier to manage, you know, like any other prison. They had their library time, their exercise time there, you know, lending a helping hand time, and Alcatraz itself it was almost like its own little community because it was an isolated island. The wardens and their families lived there. Yeah, yeah, I heard this. Just really weird. You would you live on Alcatraz with your kids because there were kids on the island because they had a policy that children weren't allowed to have toy guns, so to protect those toy guns ending up in the hands of a prisoner who could use it to bluff his way out of the prison rightly, and the kids it was a very strange lifestyle for them because they had to get boted over to the mainland for school. And I was like, you know, I mean, we have jokes today about you know, kids getting picked up and ratty looking cars and staff outside of their elementary schools. What if you were the kid who came over from the Alcatraz boat. I just I feel really sorry for them. Yes, so apparently life on Alcatraz sucked for everybody. It did. But to answer your question, which I realized, yeah, I was out taking a very round about way circuitus indeed. Um. But to answer your question, which you asked me about five minutes ago, I know, did brothers really escaped using nothing but spoons, cardboard and rain coats? Fact, yes, this is in the Annals of Murky and Mysterious Alcatraz History. Uh. Clarence and John England and their friend Frank Morris essentially had a very long and grueling plan during which they used parents to ship away it rotted concrete around these vents in their cells, and they used painted cardboard to mimic the appearance of the vents as they were, so that it would look as though no damage had been done to the infrastructure of their cells. And then once the holes got big enough, Um, this is all very Shawshank redemption. You know, they had they hit it with painted cardboard instead of a big poster Hayworth, but the principle was the same. At that point they could crawl into the hole and then there was a tunnel through which they they worked their way in and they used this as sort of their workshop for constructing this raft and life vests out of the raincoat material. Don't ask me how it stayed a float, especially if they were shark infested waters. But supposedly they made it out and no one ever recovered anybody's They did find a plastic bag floating around with some of their effects on it. But supposedly they made off and there was a ship waiting for them and they escaped. So they were never found, not one of them, never found, no complete break from Alcatraz. So this is one of those cases where Hollywood it is actually pretty accurate. Huh. There you have it, And I'm really really proud of that Shallshan predemption analogy, because as you guys know, I never see any movies but that one. That one I did. Yeah, good going. Thanks. So I actually have one more fun fact about acatre. You may be wondering, how did the England Brothers and their friend Frank Morrish make off without the guards noticing. Answer. They made paper mache heads and put them in their beds and cover them up with sheets, so it looked like they were actually people sleeping, and they weren't discovered until they've made it off. That's the same thing that happened in the movie. Ar't ientertaining life with lots of versa militude? Yes, well, everyone's looking not at You can also check out our site how stuff works dot com for the article how Alcatraz work. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.