Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray Pybe Wilson and I'm Holly frying Back. In about February of last year, we tackled six topics in one episode, and they were all things that people had asked us to talk about, but for one reason or another, we couldn't really make a whole standalone episode out of each of them. People seem to really like that one. We called it six Impossible Episodes. So about six months later we did six more impossible episodes, which were similarly things people had asked us to talk about that we couldn't really do a whole show on. And both of those times, the biggest culprit was just a lack of information. Either there's not a lot actually known about what was being requested, or not a lot of information available to us, or in some cases just not quite enough to make a whole thirty minute story out of. Uh So, people seem to like that one too, And if we follow that basic six months or so pattern, we're basically a little bit overdue for another six impossible episodes. So we're doing Wednesday and today's has a little bit of a different theme. These are all subjects people have asked us to talk about, and they are impossible, not just for an overall lack of information, although that is sometimes true, but also because the events and the people themselves, or the reason that has people have asked us to talk about it I might not ever have actually happened. So this is like possible apocrypha. We're using the more casual meaning of apocrypha, they're not the religious meaning of apocrypha. Yeah, in some of these cases, there's lots of information, but none of it is corroborated, right, And in some cases we are going to talk about one thing that actually really did for sure happen, but the reason that people asked us to talk about it did not happen. First up, we're going to talk about the Battle of Curancbes. We don't know if we are accurate on that pronunciation, but that is uh the way it was heard in research. So this shows up on a lot of lists of weird military history or most absurd battles ever. Thought shows up in books about military blenders, you know, things like that, And it's the kind of story people pull out to try to illustrate purported military incompetence. Yeah, if somebody wants to basically make the military the butt of a joke. This is one of the stories that people will trot out, and the basic gist of it is that in Austria and Russia were both at war with the Ottoman Empire and that fall. According to the story, the Austrian army fell victim to an enormous friendly fire incident in which ten thousand troops were killed, and that is what is known as the Battle of curan SPEs. And here is how the history of the eighteenth century and of the nineteenth till the overthrow of the French Empire, with particular reference to mental cultivation and progress, which was a piece printed in eighteen forty five, describes this situation. According to that text, the Austrian army was en route to take up a new position near the town of Curancives. Then quote on the march thither, the army was seized with the most unaccountable panic. Believed themselves to be threatened by the enemy, fell into disorder and mistook their own troops from the Sclavonian frontier for enemies. The regiments fired upon one another looked everywhere for an enemy, where in reality there was none, and all attempts on the part of the emperor in person to stop the firing and put an end to the confusion were in vain. So the emperor in question who appeared in person was Holy Roman Emperor Joseph the Second, and according to this story, he had gotten separated from the rest of the fighting force, and he sort of came upon us melee with only one attendant with him. Sometimes, in some retellings of this story and the whole kerfuffle, he was knocked off of his horse into a river. And in some versions of the story, the cause of this chaos in which the army attacked itself was a peddler or perhaps a camp of roma selling schnops or some of their alcohol. Some scouts on patrol bought and consumed a great deal of the schnops, and then apparently on a lark, built some fortifications for themselves, and they're imbibing, and when another group of Austrian infantry approached, the inebriated scouts thought they were the enemy. Shots were exchanged and things escalated from there. The Ottoman Empire's army purportedly stumbled onto the scene of the incident a couple of days later, and then they found the bodies of about ten thousand men, and with the bulk of this fighting force out of the way, the Ottoman Empire captured the city of Kranzes with basically no resistance. There are just so many reasons to question this incident. Number One, information about it is incredibly sparse, which seems kind of unlikely if ten thousand people were actually killed by their own side. Number Two, the written record on it doesn't seem to start until more than fifty years after this event supposedly took place, and this is particularly weird considering that the emperor, who lived until February was purportedly there. That source we read from earlier points back to Austrian Military magazine of eighteen thirty one, which is an incredibly vague citation. A lot of the more modern retellings of the story, like lists on the Internet that people pass around about military ridiculousness, really seemed to be drawn from an old version of the current Wikipedia article, So that would have been the version that existed back when these lists and things were written, and that version presents it as a completely factual event that definitely happened. It also cites no sources. Uh ustrates one of the difficulties of citing Wikipedia as a source. Yeah, it's one of the reasons we do not ever use it. Uh. You know, it's it is a fun tool of the Internet, but for us, it is not really verifiable enough source. Yes, there are definitely good reasons, like they're great things about Wikipedia, but we we do not use it as a as a source for our shows. Yeah. And the most likely scenario is that there was some kind of confusing and chaotic friendly fire incident, but the odds are that it was not nearly at the scale that is reported in these various fantastical versions of the story. Yeah, and I think probably something did happen, but not not the thing that people like to use to prove a point that maybe doesn't even need to be proven. It really is one of the stories of people tried out to be like and this is how the military waste your money, and I'm like, this is not You're not supporting your argument with this story that like number one, even if it were true, was hundreds of years ago and not in the nation whose military you're talking about anyway. Uh, So the next possibly an apocryphal person is somebody a lot of people have asked us to talk about, and that is Tomoy goes In, And she's really one of our most requested figures in Japanese history, and for good reason. She's described as this twelfth century Japanese warrior woman. She was described as beautiful and fearless and an expert with both a sword and a bow, really highly skilled on horseback and uh and and a little bit of a departure from what might be expected of her gender. She led men into battle. She's described in the epic The Tale of Haka as quote prepared to confront both demons and gods, a warrior equal to a thousand men. So she's really got a lot in common with a lot of other historical warrior women who we've talked about on the show, like Budhica and Zenobia and the Amazons of Dahomey. Goes In is a title meaning young lady or young one, and there's enough historical information to suggest that there probably was a young woman named to Moe involved in the gen Pay War near the end of the Hayon period in Japan, and we've talked about the hay On period in our previous episode on say Shanagon, it was what was happening in Japan at roughly the same time as the medieval period in Europe. The gen Pay War was between the Ta and the Minamoto clans, so the Minamoto clans victory led it to establish the show Gunate that would rule Japan from eleven ninety two to thirteen thirty three. So Moee served in the army of General Kiso no Yoshinaka, who was part of the Minamoto Clan, between eleven eighty one and eleven eighty four. She seems to have been present at at least three battles, getting the better of seven mounts and warriors in the first one, commanding a thousand warriors in the second, and beating a parterior a particularly fearsome opponent known as owned A no Ha Chiro moroshij in the third. A number of accounts suggests that she survived the war because Kiso no Yoshinaka, outnumbered and preparing to fight to the death or possibly mortally wounded himself, ordered to Moi to go, perhaps because it would have been considered shameful for him to die beside a woman. Or perhaps because the outlook was so grim that her gender, which apparently had not been an issue before, suddenly was Otherwise, There really no very little about her. We don't know who her parents were, Juan or where she was born, whether she was married or had children, or what happened to her after the war was over. Different accounts of her life give wildly different information about all of this, including different ages at the time of the war, as well as different family connections, both as related to her parents or siblings who she may or may not have been married to. All all of that stuff is kind of a fog of contradictions, and we don't even know in what capacity she wound up on the battlefield in the first place. There are some accounts that describe her as a female warrior or a female general, but others call her a servant, even a nun or someone's mistress, among other descriptions. A lot of the sources that describe all these details are from later on in Japanese history, and many of them are definitely fictitious or at least embellished versions of the truth, And a lot of the sources that write about her draw directly from the tale of the Tale of the Hicca, which really spent some time circulating as an oral history before it was ever written down. Some people draw comparisons between this epic and like the Iliad and how the Iliad is. I mean, the Iliad has probable historical roots that like, we don't really read it as the history of what actually happened, so there are some comparisons between that and this epic or Tamoi goes In was mentioned for the first time. Tamoi goes and also became a character and many, many, many stories both inside and out of Japan that have gone on in all of the centuries since since she was first mentioned in this poem. And Kristen and Caroline from our sister podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You actually dealed into this question a little bit in their August episode entitled Samurai Women. It's a really interesting episode that I recommend you listen to if you want to learn more about this topic in general. H as is the case with a lot of the things that we're talking about today, I have a feeling that there probably was a young woman known as Tomoe who was involved in some way, but the the almost godlike stature that that she has been given in later retailings, probably embellishment. We're going to talk about some more things after a sponsor break that sounds great, including including a really creepy thing that people ask us about every Halloween that I love. Yes, so we get a lot of requests to talk about the terrifying cannibal Sanny Bean, especially around Halloween. I was sure the people in Scotland would probably say that differently, but then I watched videos of Scottish people talking about it and they all said sanny Bean. So sanny Bean was. Sanny Bean is a really famous figure in Scotland, and according to the lore, sanny Bean more properly known as Alexander Bean, and his wife abandoned their home in East Lothian. They wound up living in a cave on the coast of Scotland, and there they turned to a life of cannibalism. They murdered traveler travelers on a nearby road, then took them back to the cave, cooked them and ate them and in a maneuver that sounds like something out of that super wonderful but also terrifying X Files episode with the Peacock family, uh, Sawny Bean and his wife Black Agnes Douglas had children, and their children intermarried among one another, forming an incestuous cannibal clan that terrorized the neighboring region for at least twenty five years. Supposedly, this all played out sometime in the fifteenth century, and when the king heard that people were going missing thanks to somebody who actually escaped sawny Bean's clutches, he sent soldiers to capture the whole group of them. The women and the children were put to death first by being burned at the stake while the men were forced to watch, and then the men were themselves hanged. And this story is really entrenched in Scottish folklore, especially in the southwestern part of the country around Ayrshire, where it allegedly all took place, and there are even tours to sawnny Bean's supposed cave for tourists and the fans of the Grizzly. But there's no evidence that any of this ever happened. There's no archaeological evidence of a family living in a cave and cooking and eating other people there. There are no no royal records of a man hunt followed by a man a mass execution. There are no records of survivors saying their families had fallen victims to cannibals on the road in that part of Scotland, and even though it all supposedly happened around the fifteenth century, the first mention of it in writing didn't come along until seventeen thirty four, in a book called quote the Lives and Actions of the most Famous highwawand Highwaymen, which was printed in London under a pseudonym. Not really sure who originally wrote it. There are a few undated chat books that may have come out before seventeen thirty four, but they definitely do not date all the way back to the fifth, fifteenth, or even sixteenth centuries by any stretch. They are a lot more recent than that. It's certainly possible that there was a cannibalistic murderer in southeastern Scotland sometime around the fifteenth century, and that this became the basis for the Sawny being legend. But given how many of the first written and accounts of it were penned and published in England, it is actually a lot more likely that somebody made it up to portray Scotland is a dangerous inbred place just loaded with depraved killers. Uh. This may not have even been intentional. This extremely maccab's story may have just captured the imaginations of writers who already thought that Scotland was not really a good place to visit. This all kind of makes the fact that Sawny Bean has become a source of tourism dollars in Scotland today kind of a cool turnabout. It's like it was originally mentioned either to implicitly or explicitly paint Scotland is a dangerous place. Uh, not so much anymore. Even if there wasn't a Sawny Bean or someone sort of like him living in Scotland in the fifteenth century. This story has been around at least since the eighteenth century, so it does have kind of a history of its own. And now we're going to get to a topic that I personally love and wish we could do a real episode on because we had a ton of request about Lan. You tried multiple time. It is like I will try to kind of like do some research and see where any like actual heart evidence is and it just never quite like I pull the thread and it just pulls off and is a tiny fragment of something, it's never anything substantial enough to really be a standalone episode, and it becomes also very difficult to figure out which parts of the story are true and which parts are mythology and which parts. As we've talked about in many episodes throughout our years on this podcast, there are some where the mythology and the truth really kind of getting meshed in a way that it is impossible to figure out what degree which of them is driving the bus. So the first written reference to Mulan is in the Ballad of Mulan also known as Ode of Mulan, which is a Chinese poem from the fifth or sixth century. This poem follows the pattern of folk songs that were popular at the time, so it's definitely conceivable that there were some folk songs about this character before the poem itself was composed. And the poem begins with Mulan weaving it a loom, and she's worried because the con has called for troops, and on the list of men who are required to report for duty is Mulan's father. But her father is old and she has no older brothers, and so she wants to buy a saddle and a horse and serve in her father's place. In the poem, she does this, she buys the horse in the saddle, as well as a bridle and a whip, and she reports for duty dress as a boy. She serves nobly for ten years, but when it's time for the con to recognize her for her achievements and offers her promotion, she says she only wants a fast horse to take her back home. As with Tomoi goes in. Mulan's story became incredibly popular in China in the centuries after this ballad was first composed, a whole collection of stories, song and tales have talked about Lulan who dressed as a boy to serve in the army in place of her father. But there's really just not a lot of detail about who that original fifth century woman might have been, or even if she was real. We have no idea now and I wished, I wish there were more detail, because, as we've talked about before, the ladies that that dress up as men to go to war like those tend to be some of my favorite stories. They are, and it's a great Disney movie. And now we're going to take another quick sponsor break. Before we get our last to our last two impossible episodes on our an ultimate Impossible episode. At around three o'clock in the morning on March fourteenth, nine year old Katherine Genevies, who was known as Kitty, was murdered on her way home from work at a bar in queen Is, New York. And this is not apocryphal at all. That definitely really happened. She fought back against her assailant for about forty minutes, during which time she was stabbed repeatedly, and she was eventually raped. This attack ended in the vestibule, the vestibule of her own building. We've had a huge uptick in request for this one lately, and I think it's because it appeared in an episode of Girls as Like a Play. Also, as I discovered as I was researching this, the perpetrator died recently. Yeah, it's kind of been one of those things that's hovering on the edges of social conscience lately. Uh. And allegedly the and the reason why people ask us to tell this story is it thirty seven or thirty eight other people stood by and did nothing while Kitty Genevies fought four and then of course lost her life. As reported in the New York Times on March seven, nineteen sixty four, quote, for more than half an hour, thirty eight respectable law abiding citizens in Queens watched a killers stock and stab a woman in three separate attacks in kew gardens. And according to the New York Times, the reason for three separate attacks was that twice someone hearing a commotion outside turned on a light, which scared the perpetrator away. And according to that same New York Times article, it was only when the ambulance came that people actually came out of their homes. Winston Moseley, he was captured a few days later during a burglary, confessed to the crime, as well as the murders and sexual assaults of two other women in New York. He was ultimately tried only for his crimes against Genevese, for which he was convicted after a second trial. The first one actually ended up in a hung jury. As we noted a moment ago, he spent almost fifty two years in prison, and he died in April of sixteen at the age of eighty one. Back in the nineteen sixties, this murder led to a lot of research and discussion about whether ordinary citizens are morally or legally obligated to report crimes, and it also led to a lot of research into the bystander effect. So this is the idea that people are less likely to help when there are other people around. Basically they think that one of those other people has already taken care of the situation. And the bystander effect, also known as the diffusion of responsibility, is also a real thing, just as this murder was a very real thing. Yeah, I know, I personally have been, say, driving down a busy highway and I see someone trying to change a car by the side of the road, Like, people are a lot less likely to stop if there are lots of people on the highway, then if it's fairly deserted and you're thinking that person might not get help from someone else, Like, this is a real phenomenon that definitely exists. The case also spawned a number of places to start adopting Good Samaritan laws, and it was one of the factors that led to the adoption of nine one one is an emergency number. However, this number of thirty seven or thirty eight people, which is included with just about every single mention of Kitty Genevise and is the thing that people remember most about this case was actually greatly exaggerated. It apparently came from a casual conversation between the police commissioner and a journalist, and it was meant to simply be an estimate of how many witnesses the police had interviewed, not an estimate of how many people had failed to act. The actual number of interviewees seems to be uh forty nine, not thirty seven or thirty eight, but that would have included people who had absolutely no information to share because they weren't at home or they didn't wake up from the noise. And the words of researchers who thoroughly reviewed all of the evidence and then published their findings in the journal American Psychologists in two thousand seven quote. Using archive material, the authors show that there is no evidence for the presence of thirty eight witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive. Some of those people who were interviewed also thought that what they were hearing was a domestic dispute and that it just simply wasn't their business. Others didn't think there was much of a point in calling the police, since in those pre nine one one years there really wasn't a central dispatch or a way of handling emergency calls, so police response was not super consistent. The sixties was also an era, particularly I think in Queens, New York, of people simply not trusting the police as a general rule. Yeah, there was a lot of tension between police and citizenry at that time, um. And there were definitely people who were interviewed who were like, well, I saw something that was happening, but I didn't want to get involved. But they were also the person who eventually was there when Katie Geneviez actually died, was somebody who left her apartment to go to help, not even knowing if the killer was still there. So the whole way that it's framed as the entirety of Queens literally did not care like that is a huge exaggeration and not actually true. Um, but it's definitely the reason that people asked to talk about her and the reason that the case is still remembered today. Our last impossible thing is actually one that makes me a little bit sad to debunk. Um. It's been a while since we've gotten a request for this one, although I was surprised that we didn't get a new wave of them after our recent episode on knitting. Although we did get some request to talk about quilting in general. And that's the idea that quilts were used as codes by the underground rail Road. Yeah, that idea was actually popularized in the book Hidden in Plain View, A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard, which came out, and since then the idea of quilt codes made its way into lots of children's books. It's in quilting books, uh, and even in interpretive displays in museums and in craft centers. It shows up on government websites, just lots of places. Yeah, it's presented as absolute fact in many places that you would think of as a reputable place for facts, like museums. So we want to make something really clear, I mean enormously clear right up front. Quilting was definitely a really important craft among enslaved women, and a lot of quilting history has really ignored the contributions of black of black women, both free and enslaved. Pre Civil War white women sometimes get the credit for beautiful quilts that were actually pieced and stitched by enslaved women for them. Scholarly examinations of African motifs and symbols and African American quilts are actually quite recent, considering the greater history of quilting as a whole, which for a long time was really focused on white quilters and not Black quilters. I was actually at a museum exhibition about quilts and there was literally a quilt, one one quilt in the whole thing by an African American person, and the sign at that quilt it infuriated me because it basically was like black people made quilts to quilts too, they were a lot like the quilts of white people, and that like was all that they had to say about that, and that was the only representation of uh like, African influence on quilting or African mult American quiltures in the entire thing. I found it enormously frustrating. Yeah, uh So, the idea though that the quilts were codes for the underground rail road unfortunately hasn't really held up to scholarly scrutiny. Uh Do Bart and Tobin source was Ozella McDaniel Williams, who was a quilter and a descendant of enslaved women, who related the story of how her ancestors would use quilts to plan and coordinate escapes, and according to williams description, a woman would make a sampler that would include all ten patterns used in the code, which the other enslaved people on the plantation could use to memorize those codes. The next step after making this sampler was to make ten full sized quilts, one for each of the ten patterns. When the full sized quilt was hung up uh for people to see it, it was time to take whatever step was encoded in its pattern. The next step in this whole process was to make ten full sized quilts, one full quilt for each of the patterns that was used in this sampler. When the full sized quote would be hung up, it was time to take whatever step was represented by that pattern. Some of these were actions to be taken before escaping the plantation. Like a monkey wrench pattern was meant to gather up your tools. There was a basket pattern which was meant to gather enough supplies for a long journey. There was also a wagon wheel, which either meant to load the wagon or actually prepare to leave, depending on who who you talked to. You others in these patterns were information to be followed along the way, like a north star pattern meant to follow the north Star, and a sail boat meant to take a boat across the Great Lakes. It's such a cool concept, but there are just so many unanswered questions about this whole idea. Ozella McDaniel Williams has passed away in the years since that book was published, and there aren't any other oral history testimonies that survived to confirm her account. There are no written records or references to coded quilts and slave narratives or in interviews conducted with people who had previously been enslaved, and there are also none in the remembrances or documents of people who worked along the underground railroad. There are also no actual quilts surviving today, at least none that anyone has found. Yeah, they're definitely quotes that used these patterns, but not that not ones that they all the way back to before the Civil War. The book's authors and other people who have written in support of this idea. You point out that a lot of the people making and using these quilts wouldn't have been literate, and that the quilts themselves would have been used as bed coverings until the end of their useful life, which explains both the lack of written records and the lack of quilts as physical artifacts. But there are a lot of practical questions as well. The late historian Giles are right pointed out a number of ways in which the instructions purportedly outlined in the quilts were completely different from established scholarship on the underground railroad, including that enslaved people in South Carolina who escaped via the underground railroad generally went northeast, not toward Cleveland, as would have been directed in the quilt blocks. Yeah, these these blocks, uh purportedly originated from a South Carolina plantation, And in addition to that, it takes a long time to make a full sized quilt, and this system purportedly required ten full sized quilts plus the sampler, which really would have would have been a huge and i'm consuming undertaking. Even if a plantation's enslaved women essentially held quilting bees after their other work was done, this really seems like an extraordinary and kind of convoluted and counterproductive amount of time and effort to put toward documenting very simple instructions like gather your tools and load up the wagons. In a two thousand seven Time magazine article, Tobin said, quote, it's frustrating to be attacked and not allowed to celebrate this amazing oral story of one family's experience. Whether or not it's completely valid, I have no idea, but it makes sense with the amount of research we did. My personal feeling on the matter is that Ozella McDaniel Williams ancestors probably really were making quilts, and they were probably using patterns and blocks that contained motifs that were related to freedom and escape, but that these family stories kind of morphed over the years to become that they were literally codes for the underground railroad, and that that part probably didn't happen it. Really, it wouldn't surprise me at all though, if her ancestors were making quilts that were sort of imbued with imagery that symbolized freedom as a form of resistance, even if they were not literally being used as tools of escape. Yeah, it's one of those things where probably the details have morphed a little over time and gotten a little a little fuzzy and taken on different meetings than their original. Yeah, it sort of ties to the idea that like most of the enslaved people and possibly all of the enslaved people on the plantation would not have known how to read, which is why visual symbols were used. But that is like, I cannot think of a visual symbol that would have taken longer to make before displaying to people, right, Like, uh, but yeah, it's it's not not at all to try to erase the importance the culture and cultural importance of quilt saying among enslaved women and then later on among African American cultures who have been so long overlooked in history. But that underground railroad railroad part of it is not not really something that can be substantiated. And it also a lot of folks have very romanticized ideas about the underground railroad, and the idea that very pretty things like quilts and songs were a big parts specifically of the underground railroad sort of ties to that uh, feel good aspect of the underground railroad when it's a great into Yeah, it's like singing and quilting both very culturally important, but a lot of the songs that people have said we're used by the under underground railroad to to spread codes are are much more recent than that time also, so it sort of gives this um the shine to the underground railroad. That makes the whole story, like the more palatable aspect of slavery, which I think it's important to have stories that are accessible to children, but the a lot of adults also, I think that the underground Railroad was sort of a a dangerous but ultimately happy experience right well. And my thing with any of those, whether it's related to something like the underground Railroad or anything, is that when because there are people who will be like, why do you why do you want to attack that? It's a great story, but when you give credence to things that didn't happen, you're robbing the actual story of its place in history. Yeah. I read a really interesting paper while I was researching this that was about children's literature that that has drawn from this whole quilte idea and how this this literature for children. Uh, what's good about it is how it ties to the idea of like make king an identity for yourself and and making a world for yourself that uh that you can be a part of, and not so much about um factual information about the underground railroad for kids. Now that we've covered lots of things that may or may not have happened or didn't happen the way that people have always been told they did. Do you have some listener mail that really am for true happened? It really did? It really is what you happened. Um. It is about an episode that you did the research for, but about a comment that I made during the episode, and it's from Orla uh and it is response to the fact that when we were talking about carbon fiber knitting needles, which I think was actually in a listener mail about our knitting episode, I was like, why would you need that? That seems a little excessive, And so Orla rights to say, I was listening to your listener mail segment and you were wondering about the reason for carbon fiber and knitting needles. There are four main materials for knitting needles these days, would often bamboo for the list expensive versions, metal acrylic, which is just becoming popular over the last few years, and carbon fiber depending on what you are working, knitting needles can get very small. For example, zero zero zero zero needles are one point zero millimeters, and according to Wikipedia, the smallest size is zero zero zero zero zero zero, which is zero point seven millimeters. If you're using wood or acrylic needles, they can easily break from someone holding the needles too tightly, or even just carrying them in your bag between knitting sessions. But metal needles are sometimes unpleasant to work with. They're my least favorite kind of needle because as I formed the stitches, my needles rub against each other and I don't like the sound. Also, different needle materials of knitting needles work better with different types of yarn. Acrylic yarn tends to stick to acrylic needles. For example, carbon fiber has the advantage of being very tough to break, even in the smallest sizes. It also isn't as sticky with acrylic yarns. However, they tend to be more expense of and either have very sharp points in the end or have a metal tip, which can sometimes cause a bump where the carbon and metal join. And then she writes to say that basically a lot of this boils down to personal preference. She has met a lot of people that have had a lot of different preferences in terms of their needle type. So thank you so much or love for answering that question. I did definitely is that when I learned that people were making the knitting needles out of carbon fiber, was like, that seems like a little bit of overkill for a knitting needle material. So I am glad to have more information about that. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, where History podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in history. Are tumbler is at miss in history dot tumbler dot com, or also on Pinterest at pentterest dot com slash miss in history. Our instagram is missed in History. If you want to come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com, you'll find all kinds of information about all kinds of fascinating stuff. And if you want to come to our website, which is isst in history dot com, that is where you will find show notes for all of the episodes we have ever done. We've had a couple of people right recently to say that they were not able to find them. You can also find them by googling the stuff you missed in history class show notes. You can also find a lot of other random stuff that we put up from time to time on our website. So that's at how stuff works dot com or missed in history dot com for more illness, and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray Pybe Wilson and I'm Holly frying Back. In about February of last year, we tackled six topics in one episode, and they were all things that people had asked us to talk about, but for one reason or another, we couldn't really make a whole standalone episode out of each of them. People seem to really like that one. We called it six Impossible Episodes. So about six months later we did six more impossible episodes, which were similarly things people had asked us to talk about that we couldn't really do a whole show on. And both of those times, the biggest culprit was just a lack of information. Either there's not a lot actually known about what was being requested, or not a lot of information available to us, or in some cases just not quite enough to make a whole thirty minute story out of. Uh So, people seem to like that one too, And if we follow that basic six months or so pattern, we're basically a little bit overdue for another six impossible episodes. So we're doing Wednesday and today's has a little bit of a different theme. These are all subjects people have asked us to talk about, and they are impossible, not just for an overall lack of information, although that is sometimes true, but also because the events and the people themselves, or the reason that has people have asked us to talk about it I might not ever have actually happened. So this is like possible apocrypha. We're using the more casual meaning of apocrypha, they're not the religious meaning of apocrypha. Yeah, in some of these cases, there's lots of information, but none of it is corroborated, right, And in some cases we are going to talk about one thing that actually really did for sure happen, but the reason that people asked us to talk about it did not happen. First up, we're going to talk about the Battle of Curancbes. We don't know if we are accurate on that pronunciation, but that is uh the way it was heard in research. So this shows up on a lot of lists of weird military history or most absurd battles ever. Thought shows up in books about military blenders, you know, things like that, And it's the kind of story people pull out to try to illustrate purported military incompetence. Yeah, if somebody wants to basically make the military the butt of a joke. This is one of the stories that people will trot out, and the basic gist of it is that in Austria and Russia were both at war with the Ottoman Empire and that fall. According to the story, the Austrian army fell victim to an enormous friendly fire incident in which ten thousand troops were killed, and that is what is known as the Battle of curan SPEs. And here is how the history of the eighteenth century and of the nineteenth till the overthrow of the French Empire, with particular reference to mental cultivation and progress, which was a piece printed in eighteen forty five, describes this situation. According to that text, the Austrian army was en route to take up a new position near the town of Curancives. Then quote on the march thither, the army was seized with the most unaccountable panic. Believed themselves to be threatened by the enemy, fell into disorder and mistook their own troops from the Sclavonian frontier for enemies. The regiments fired upon one another looked everywhere for an enemy, where in reality there was none, and all attempts on the part of the emperor in person to stop the firing and put an end to the confusion were in vain. So the emperor in question who appeared in person was Holy Roman Emperor Joseph the Second, and according to this story, he had gotten separated from the rest of the fighting force, and he sort of came upon us melee with only one attendant with him. Sometimes, in some retellings of this story and the whole kerfuffle, he was knocked off of his horse into a river. And in some versions of the story, the cause of this chaos in which the army attacked itself was a peddler or perhaps a camp of roma selling schnops or some of their alcohol. Some scouts on patrol bought and consumed a great deal of the schnops, and then apparently on a lark, built some fortifications for themselves, and they're imbibing, and when another group of Austrian infantry approached, the inebriated scouts thought they were the enemy. Shots were exchanged and things escalated from there. The Ottoman Empire's army purportedly stumbled onto the scene of the incident a couple of days later, and then they found the bodies of about ten thousand men, and with the bulk of this fighting force out of the way, the Ottoman Empire captured the city of Kranzes with basically no resistance. There are just so many reasons to question this incident. Number One, information about it is incredibly sparse, which seems kind of unlikely if ten thousand people were actually killed by their own side. Number Two, the written record on it doesn't seem to start until more than fifty years after this event supposedly took place, and this is particularly weird considering that the emperor, who lived until February was purportedly there. That source we read from earlier points back to Austrian Military magazine of eighteen thirty one, which is an incredibly vague citation. A lot of the more modern retellings of the story, like lists on the Internet that people pass around about military ridiculousness, really seemed to be drawn from an old version of the current Wikipedia article, So that would have been the version that existed back when these lists and things were written, and that version presents it as a completely factual event that definitely happened. It also cites no sources. Uh ustrates one of the difficulties of citing Wikipedia as a source. Yeah, it's one of the reasons we do not ever use it. Uh. You know, it's it is a fun tool of the Internet, but for us, it is not really verifiable enough source. Yes, there are definitely good reasons, like they're great things about Wikipedia, but we we do not use it as a as a source for our shows. Yeah. And the most likely scenario is that there was some kind of confusing and chaotic friendly fire incident, but the odds are that it was not nearly at the scale that is reported in these various fantastical versions of the story. Yeah, and I think probably something did happen, but not not the thing that people like to use to prove a point that maybe doesn't even need to be proven. It really is one of the stories of people tried out to be like and this is how the military waste your money, and I'm like, this is not You're not supporting your argument with this story that like number one, even if it were true, was hundreds of years ago and not in the nation whose military you're talking about anyway. Uh, So the next possibly an apocryphal person is somebody a lot of people have asked us to talk about, and that is Tomoy goes In, And she's really one of our most requested figures in Japanese history, and for good reason. She's described as this twelfth century Japanese warrior woman. She was described as beautiful and fearless and an expert with both a sword and a bow, really highly skilled on horseback and uh and and a little bit of a departure from what might be expected of her gender. She led men into battle. She's described in the epic The Tale of Haka as quote prepared to confront both demons and gods, a warrior equal to a thousand men. So she's really got a lot in common with a lot of other historical warrior women who we've talked about on the show, like Budhica and Zenobia and the Amazons of Dahomey. Goes In is a title meaning young lady or young one, and there's enough historical information to suggest that there probably was a young woman named to Moe involved in the gen Pay War near the end of the Hayon period in Japan, and we've talked about the hay On period in our previous episode on say Shanagon, it was what was happening in Japan at roughly the same time as the medieval period in Europe. The gen Pay War was between the Ta and the Minamoto clans, so the Minamoto clans victory led it to establish the show Gunate that would rule Japan from eleven ninety two to thirteen thirty three. So Moee served in the army of General Kiso no Yoshinaka, who was part of the Minamoto Clan, between eleven eighty one and eleven eighty four. She seems to have been present at at least three battles, getting the better of seven mounts and warriors in the first one, commanding a thousand warriors in the second, and beating a parterior a particularly fearsome opponent known as owned A no Ha Chiro moroshij in the third. A number of accounts suggests that she survived the war because Kiso no Yoshinaka, outnumbered and preparing to fight to the death or possibly mortally wounded himself, ordered to Moi to go, perhaps because it would have been considered shameful for him to die beside a woman. Or perhaps because the outlook was so grim that her gender, which apparently had not been an issue before, suddenly was Otherwise, There really no very little about her. We don't know who her parents were, Juan or where she was born, whether she was married or had children, or what happened to her after the war was over. Different accounts of her life give wildly different information about all of this, including different ages at the time of the war, as well as different family connections, both as related to her parents or siblings who she may or may not have been married to. All all of that stuff is kind of a fog of contradictions, and we don't even know in what capacity she wound up on the battlefield in the first place. There are some accounts that describe her as a female warrior or a female general, but others call her a servant, even a nun or someone's mistress, among other descriptions. A lot of the sources that describe all these details are from later on in Japanese history, and many of them are definitely fictitious or at least embellished versions of the truth, And a lot of the sources that write about her draw directly from the tale of the Tale of the Hicca, which really spent some time circulating as an oral history before it was ever written down. Some people draw comparisons between this epic and like the Iliad and how the Iliad is. I mean, the Iliad has probable historical roots that like, we don't really read it as the history of what actually happened, so there are some comparisons between that and this epic or Tamoi goes In was mentioned for the first time. Tamoi goes and also became a character and many, many, many stories both inside and out of Japan that have gone on in all of the centuries since since she was first mentioned in this poem. And Kristen and Caroline from our sister podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You actually dealed into this question a little bit in their August episode entitled Samurai Women. It's a really interesting episode that I recommend you listen to if you want to learn more about this topic in general. H as is the case with a lot of the things that we're talking about today, I have a feeling that there probably was a young woman known as Tomoe who was involved in some way, but the the almost godlike stature that that she has been given in later retailings, probably embellishment. We're going to talk about some more things after a sponsor break that sounds great, including including a really creepy thing that people ask us about every Halloween that I love. Yes, so we get a lot of requests to talk about the terrifying cannibal Sanny Bean, especially around Halloween. I was sure the people in Scotland would probably say that differently, but then I watched videos of Scottish people talking about it and they all said sanny Bean. So sanny Bean was. Sanny Bean is a really famous figure in Scotland, and according to the lore, sanny Bean more properly known as Alexander Bean, and his wife abandoned their home in East Lothian. They wound up living in a cave on the coast of Scotland, and there they turned to a life of cannibalism. They murdered traveler travelers on a nearby road, then took them back to the cave, cooked them and ate them and in a maneuver that sounds like something out of that super wonderful but also terrifying X Files episode with the Peacock family, uh, Sawny Bean and his wife Black Agnes Douglas had children, and their children intermarried among one another, forming an incestuous cannibal clan that terrorized the neighboring region for at least twenty five years. Supposedly, this all played out sometime in the fifteenth century, and when the king heard that people were going missing thanks to somebody who actually escaped sawny Bean's clutches, he sent soldiers to capture the whole group of them. The women and the children were put to death first by being burned at the stake while the men were forced to watch, and then the men were themselves hanged. And this story is really entrenched in Scottish folklore, especially in the southwestern part of the country around Ayrshire, where it allegedly all took place, and there are even tours to sawnny Bean's supposed cave for tourists and the fans of the Grizzly. But there's no evidence that any of this ever happened. There's no archaeological evidence of a family living in a cave and cooking and eating other people there. There are no no royal records of a man hunt followed by a man a mass execution. There are no records of survivors saying their families had fallen victims to cannibals on the road in that part of Scotland, and even though it all supposedly happened around the fifteenth century, the first mention of it in writing didn't come along until seventeen thirty four, in a book called quote the Lives and Actions of the most Famous highwawand Highwaymen, which was printed in London under a pseudonym. Not really sure who originally wrote it. There are a few undated chat books that may have come out before seventeen thirty four, but they definitely do not date all the way back to the fifth, fifteenth, or even sixteenth centuries by any stretch. They are a lot more recent than that. It's certainly possible that there was a cannibalistic murderer in southeastern Scotland sometime around the fifteenth century, and that this became the basis for the Sawny being legend. But given how many of the first written and accounts of it were penned and published in England, it is actually a lot more likely that somebody made it up to portray Scotland is a dangerous inbred place just loaded with depraved killers. Uh. This may not have even been intentional. This extremely maccab's story may have just captured the imaginations of writers who already thought that Scotland was not really a good place to visit. This all kind of makes the fact that Sawny Bean has become a source of tourism dollars in Scotland today kind of a cool turnabout. It's like it was originally mentioned either to implicitly or explicitly paint Scotland is a dangerous place. Uh, not so much anymore. Even if there wasn't a Sawny Bean or someone sort of like him living in Scotland in the fifteenth century. This story has been around at least since the eighteenth century, so it does have kind of a history of its own. And now we're going to get to a topic that I personally love and wish we could do a real episode on because we had a ton of request about Lan. You tried multiple time. It is like I will try to kind of like do some research and see where any like actual heart evidence is and it just never quite like I pull the thread and it just pulls off and is a tiny fragment of something, it's never anything substantial enough to really be a standalone episode, and it becomes also very difficult to figure out which parts of the story are true and which parts are mythology and which parts. As we've talked about in many episodes throughout our years on this podcast, there are some where the mythology and the truth really kind of getting meshed in a way that it is impossible to figure out what degree which of them is driving the bus. So the first written reference to Mulan is in the Ballad of Mulan also known as Ode of Mulan, which is a Chinese poem from the fifth or sixth century. This poem follows the pattern of folk songs that were popular at the time, so it's definitely conceivable that there were some folk songs about this character before the poem itself was composed. And the poem begins with Mulan weaving it a loom, and she's worried because the con has called for troops, and on the list of men who are required to report for duty is Mulan's father. But her father is old and she has no older brothers, and so she wants to buy a saddle and a horse and serve in her father's place. In the poem, she does this, she buys the horse in the saddle, as well as a bridle and a whip, and she reports for duty dress as a boy. She serves nobly for ten years, but when it's time for the con to recognize her for her achievements and offers her promotion, she says she only wants a fast horse to take her back home. As with Tomoi goes in. Mulan's story became incredibly popular in China in the centuries after this ballad was first composed, a whole collection of stories, song and tales have talked about Lulan who dressed as a boy to serve in the army in place of her father. But there's really just not a lot of detail about who that original fifth century woman might have been, or even if she was real. We have no idea now and I wished, I wish there were more detail, because, as we've talked about before, the ladies that that dress up as men to go to war like those tend to be some of my favorite stories. They are, and it's a great Disney movie. And now we're going to take another quick sponsor break. Before we get our last to our last two impossible episodes on our an ultimate Impossible episode. At around three o'clock in the morning on March fourteenth, nine year old Katherine Genevies, who was known as Kitty, was murdered on her way home from work at a bar in queen Is, New York. And this is not apocryphal at all. That definitely really happened. She fought back against her assailant for about forty minutes, during which time she was stabbed repeatedly, and she was eventually raped. This attack ended in the vestibule, the vestibule of her own building. We've had a huge uptick in request for this one lately, and I think it's because it appeared in an episode of Girls as Like a Play. Also, as I discovered as I was researching this, the perpetrator died recently. Yeah, it's kind of been one of those things that's hovering on the edges of social conscience lately. Uh. And allegedly the and the reason why people ask us to tell this story is it thirty seven or thirty eight other people stood by and did nothing while Kitty Genevies fought four and then of course lost her life. As reported in the New York Times on March seven, nineteen sixty four, quote, for more than half an hour, thirty eight respectable law abiding citizens in Queens watched a killers stock and stab a woman in three separate attacks in kew gardens. And according to the New York Times, the reason for three separate attacks was that twice someone hearing a commotion outside turned on a light, which scared the perpetrator away. And according to that same New York Times article, it was only when the ambulance came that people actually came out of their homes. Winston Moseley, he was captured a few days later during a burglary, confessed to the crime, as well as the murders and sexual assaults of two other women in New York. He was ultimately tried only for his crimes against Genevese, for which he was convicted after a second trial. The first one actually ended up in a hung jury. As we noted a moment ago, he spent almost fifty two years in prison, and he died in April of sixteen at the age of eighty one. Back in the nineteen sixties, this murder led to a lot of research and discussion about whether ordinary citizens are morally or legally obligated to report crimes, and it also led to a lot of research into the bystander effect. So this is the idea that people are less likely to help when there are other people around. Basically they think that one of those other people has already taken care of the situation. And the bystander effect, also known as the diffusion of responsibility, is also a real thing, just as this murder was a very real thing. Yeah, I know, I personally have been, say, driving down a busy highway and I see someone trying to change a car by the side of the road, Like, people are a lot less likely to stop if there are lots of people on the highway, then if it's fairly deserted and you're thinking that person might not get help from someone else, Like, this is a real phenomenon that definitely exists. The case also spawned a number of places to start adopting Good Samaritan laws, and it was one of the factors that led to the adoption of nine one one is an emergency number. However, this number of thirty seven or thirty eight people, which is included with just about every single mention of Kitty Genevise and is the thing that people remember most about this case was actually greatly exaggerated. It apparently came from a casual conversation between the police commissioner and a journalist, and it was meant to simply be an estimate of how many witnesses the police had interviewed, not an estimate of how many people had failed to act. The actual number of interviewees seems to be uh forty nine, not thirty seven or thirty eight, but that would have included people who had absolutely no information to share because they weren't at home or they didn't wake up from the noise. And the words of researchers who thoroughly reviewed all of the evidence and then published their findings in the journal American Psychologists in two thousand seven quote. Using archive material, the authors show that there is no evidence for the presence of thirty eight witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive. Some of those people who were interviewed also thought that what they were hearing was a domestic dispute and that it just simply wasn't their business. Others didn't think there was much of a point in calling the police, since in those pre nine one one years there really wasn't a central dispatch or a way of handling emergency calls, so police response was not super consistent. The sixties was also an era, particularly I think in Queens, New York, of people simply not trusting the police as a general rule. Yeah, there was a lot of tension between police and citizenry at that time, um. And there were definitely people who were interviewed who were like, well, I saw something that was happening, but I didn't want to get involved. But they were also the person who eventually was there when Katie Geneviez actually died, was somebody who left her apartment to go to help, not even knowing if the killer was still there. So the whole way that it's framed as the entirety of Queens literally did not care like that is a huge exaggeration and not actually true. Um, but it's definitely the reason that people asked to talk about her and the reason that the case is still remembered today. Our last impossible thing is actually one that makes me a little bit sad to debunk. Um. It's been a while since we've gotten a request for this one, although I was surprised that we didn't get a new wave of them after our recent episode on knitting. Although we did get some request to talk about quilting in general. And that's the idea that quilts were used as codes by the underground rail Road. Yeah, that idea was actually popularized in the book Hidden in Plain View, A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard, which came out, and since then the idea of quilt codes made its way into lots of children's books. It's in quilting books, uh, and even in interpretive displays in museums and in craft centers. It shows up on government websites, just lots of places. Yeah, it's presented as absolute fact in many places that you would think of as a reputable place for facts, like museums. So we want to make something really clear, I mean enormously clear right up front. Quilting was definitely a really important craft among enslaved women, and a lot of quilting history has really ignored the contributions of black of black women, both free and enslaved. Pre Civil War white women sometimes get the credit for beautiful quilts that were actually pieced and stitched by enslaved women for them. Scholarly examinations of African motifs and symbols and African American quilts are actually quite recent, considering the greater history of quilting as a whole, which for a long time was really focused on white quilters and not Black quilters. I was actually at a museum exhibition about quilts and there was literally a quilt, one one quilt in the whole thing by an African American person, and the sign at that quilt it infuriated me because it basically was like black people made quilts to quilts too, they were a lot like the quilts of white people, and that like was all that they had to say about that, and that was the only representation of uh like, African influence on quilting or African mult American quiltures in the entire thing. I found it enormously frustrating. Yeah, uh So, the idea though that the quilts were codes for the underground rail road unfortunately hasn't really held up to scholarly scrutiny. Uh Do Bart and Tobin source was Ozella McDaniel Williams, who was a quilter and a descendant of enslaved women, who related the story of how her ancestors would use quilts to plan and coordinate escapes, and according to williams description, a woman would make a sampler that would include all ten patterns used in the code, which the other enslaved people on the plantation could use to memorize those codes. The next step after making this sampler was to make ten full sized quilts, one for each of the ten patterns. When the full sized quilt was hung up uh for people to see it, it was time to take whatever step was encoded in its pattern. The next step in this whole process was to make ten full sized quilts, one full quilt for each of the patterns that was used in this sampler. When the full sized quote would be hung up, it was time to take whatever step was represented by that pattern. Some of these were actions to be taken before escaping the plantation. Like a monkey wrench pattern was meant to gather up your tools. There was a basket pattern which was meant to gather enough supplies for a long journey. There was also a wagon wheel, which either meant to load the wagon or actually prepare to leave, depending on who who you talked to. You others in these patterns were information to be followed along the way, like a north star pattern meant to follow the north Star, and a sail boat meant to take a boat across the Great Lakes. It's such a cool concept, but there are just so many unanswered questions about this whole idea. Ozella McDaniel Williams has passed away in the years since that book was published, and there aren't any other oral history testimonies that survived to confirm her account. There are no written records or references to coded quilts and slave narratives or in interviews conducted with people who had previously been enslaved, and there are also none in the remembrances or documents of people who worked along the underground railroad. There are also no actual quilts surviving today, at least none that anyone has found. Yeah, they're definitely quotes that used these patterns, but not that not ones that they all the way back to before the Civil War. The book's authors and other people who have written in support of this idea. You point out that a lot of the people making and using these quilts wouldn't have been literate, and that the quilts themselves would have been used as bed coverings until the end of their useful life, which explains both the lack of written records and the lack of quilts as physical artifacts. But there are a lot of practical questions as well. The late historian Giles are right pointed out a number of ways in which the instructions purportedly outlined in the quilts were completely different from established scholarship on the underground railroad, including that enslaved people in South Carolina who escaped via the underground railroad generally went northeast, not toward Cleveland, as would have been directed in the quilt blocks. Yeah, these these blocks, uh purportedly originated from a South Carolina plantation, And in addition to that, it takes a long time to make a full sized quilt, and this system purportedly required ten full sized quilts plus the sampler, which really would have would have been a huge and i'm consuming undertaking. Even if a plantation's enslaved women essentially held quilting bees after their other work was done, this really seems like an extraordinary and kind of convoluted and counterproductive amount of time and effort to put toward documenting very simple instructions like gather your tools and load up the wagons. In a two thousand seven Time magazine article, Tobin said, quote, it's frustrating to be attacked and not allowed to celebrate this amazing oral story of one family's experience. Whether or not it's completely valid, I have no idea, but it makes sense with the amount of research we did. My personal feeling on the matter is that Ozella McDaniel Williams ancestors probably really were making quilts, and they were probably using patterns and blocks that contained motifs that were related to freedom and escape, but that these family stories kind of morphed over the years to become that they were literally codes for the underground railroad, and that that part probably didn't happen it. Really, it wouldn't surprise me at all though, if her ancestors were making quilts that were sort of imbued with imagery that symbolized freedom as a form of resistance, even if they were not literally being used as tools of escape. Yeah, it's one of those things where probably the details have morphed a little over time and gotten a little a little fuzzy and taken on different meetings than their original. Yeah, it sort of ties to the idea that like most of the enslaved people and possibly all of the enslaved people on the plantation would not have known how to read, which is why visual symbols were used. But that is like, I cannot think of a visual symbol that would have taken longer to make before displaying to people, right, Like, uh, but yeah, it's it's not not at all to try to erase the importance the culture and cultural importance of quilt saying among enslaved women and then later on among African American cultures who have been so long overlooked in history. But that underground railroad railroad part of it is not not really something that can be substantiated. And it also a lot of folks have very romanticized ideas about the underground railroad, and the idea that very pretty things like quilts and songs were a big parts specifically of the underground railroad sort of ties to that uh, feel good aspect of the underground railroad when it's a great into Yeah, it's like singing and quilting both very culturally important, but a lot of the songs that people have said we're used by the under underground railroad to to spread codes are are much more recent than that time also, so it sort of gives this um the shine to the underground railroad. That makes the whole story, like the more palatable aspect of slavery, which I think it's important to have stories that are accessible to children, but the a lot of adults also, I think that the underground Railroad was sort of a a dangerous but ultimately happy experience right well. And my thing with any of those, whether it's related to something like the underground Railroad or anything, is that when because there are people who will be like, why do you why do you want to attack that? It's a great story, but when you give credence to things that didn't happen, you're robbing the actual story of its place in history. Yeah. I read a really interesting paper while I was researching this that was about children's literature that that has drawn from this whole quilte idea and how this this literature for children. Uh, what's good about it is how it ties to the idea of like make king an identity for yourself and and making a world for yourself that uh that you can be a part of, and not so much about um factual information about the underground railroad for kids. Now that we've covered lots of things that may or may not have happened or didn't happen the way that people have always been told they did. Do you have some listener mail that really am for true happened? It really did? It really is what you happened. Um. It is about an episode that you did the research for, but about a comment that I made during the episode, and it's from Orla uh and it is response to the fact that when we were talking about carbon fiber knitting needles, which I think was actually in a listener mail about our knitting episode, I was like, why would you need that? That seems a little excessive, And so Orla rights to say, I was listening to your listener mail segment and you were wondering about the reason for carbon fiber and knitting needles. There are four main materials for knitting needles these days, would often bamboo for the list expensive versions, metal acrylic, which is just becoming popular over the last few years, and carbon fiber depending on what you are working, knitting needles can get very small. For example, zero zero zero zero needles are one point zero millimeters, and according to Wikipedia, the smallest size is zero zero zero zero zero zero, which is zero point seven millimeters. If you're using wood or acrylic needles, they can easily break from someone holding the needles too tightly, or even just carrying them in your bag between knitting sessions. But metal needles are sometimes unpleasant to work with. They're my least favorite kind of needle because as I formed the stitches, my needles rub against each other and I don't like the sound. Also, different needle materials of knitting needles work better with different types of yarn. Acrylic yarn tends to stick to acrylic needles. For example, carbon fiber has the advantage of being very tough to break, even in the smallest sizes. It also isn't as sticky with acrylic yarns. However, they tend to be more expense of and either have very sharp points in the end or have a metal tip, which can sometimes cause a bump where the carbon and metal join. And then she writes to say that basically a lot of this boils down to personal preference. She has met a lot of people that have had a lot of different preferences in terms of their needle type. So thank you so much or love for answering that question. I did definitely is that when I learned that people were making the knitting needles out of carbon fiber, was like, that seems like a little bit of overkill for a knitting needle material. So I am glad to have more information about that. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, where History podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in history. Are tumbler is at miss in history dot tumbler dot com, or also on Pinterest at pentterest dot com slash miss in history. Our instagram is missed in History. If you want to come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com, you'll find all kinds of information about all kinds of fascinating stuff. And if you want to come to our website, which is isst in history dot com, that is where you will find show notes for all of the episodes we have ever done. We've had a couple of people right recently to say that they were not able to find them. You can also find them by googling the stuff you missed in history class show notes. You can also find a lot of other random stuff that we put up from time to time on our website. So that's at how stuff works dot com or missed in history dot com for more illness, and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com