Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
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Sam Evans-Brown: Hello, friends.
Many voices: [Saying hello all at once and laughing]
Sam Evans-Brown: So today here in the studio are all of my colleagues, Justin Paradis.,
Justine Paradis: Greetings,
Sam Evans-Brown: Taylor Quimby
Taylor Quimby: Helloo
Sam Evans-Brown: Erica, Janik
Erika Janik: Hi!
Sam Evans-Brown: and the newest addition to the team, Sara Ernst.
Sara Ernst: Yo.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yo! I'm curious to know, Sara, how you feel about being roped into our shenanigans.
Sara Ernst: A little nervous. I've never done it before.
Erika Janik: You're a natural.
Sam Evans-Brown: Okay. I have a story for you all.
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: This story begins with…
David Green: ...the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 that that specified fuel economy standards...
Sam Evans-Brown: Woof!
David Green: ...that specified the famous CAFE Standards for motor vehicles.
Erika Janik: Woof!
Justine Paradis: Are you familiar with this? You sounded like Woof! Like you really know what that was!
Sam Evans-Brown: I am familiar with the CAFE standards. The CAFE standards we’re actually still fighting about today, that’s basically the law that says… cars need to be X efficient by X year.
Justine Paradis: Nothing to do with lattes…
Sam Evans-Brown: Nothing to do with cafes. That by the way is David Green who is formerly of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but has since retired from government science and is just a research fellow at the University of Tennessee. And when I emailed him asking about this story his response was… “this isn’t very interesting.”
Erika Janik: What a great set up to an episode of Outside/In.
Sam Evans-Brown: Just wait.
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: So back when they had first enacted these fuel efficiency standards, there was a clause in the law that said not only are we going to test these cars to make sure that you're that you're hitting your goal posts for efficiency. But we're also going to make that testing data public.
David Green: It was a printed guide that dealers were required to have available and on display in their showrooms, and they hated it.
Sam Evans-Brown: You know those stickers on the sides of car windows that have the mileage on them. They didn't have to have the mileage on it until 2007. So all the way from ‘75 until 2007, if you want to know the mileage of your car, you had to find this poster that was mandated by law to be somewhere in the showroom. But…
Sam Evans-Brown: So the when you say that the dealers hated it, what would that mean? This means that, like, they put it up in the showroom, but then there'd be like a bunch of balloons in front of it, kind of thing?
David Green: Well, that's not that's not off base. The compliance was spotty. You know, maybe 50 percent less, something like that.
Taylor Quimby: Is it just because, like, people don't want to know? I mean, like I want to know what the you know, how efficient my car is.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah but you're not selling cars, Taylor.
Erika Janik: Is this is like calorie counts on menus.
Sam Evans-Brown: Exactly.
Taylor Quimby: Oh, right.
Sam Evans-Brown: If like your car comes out really badly on the test, then want to be like our car —
Erika Janik: Want to spend a million dollars on gas? Get this one!
Taylor Quimby: 12 miles per gallon!
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: So in the late 90s, David and his colleagues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory were like, well, there's this thing coming up... called the Internet. Maybe we could just like put it up, put them up online, you know?
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: How’s the story doing so far, by the way, government... government bureaucrats discover the Internet… build a Web site?
Justine Paradis: Like, I got this crazy idea.
Taylor Quimby: I'm feeling the build up.
Sam Evans-Brown: And it's actually not a bad website. So it's fuel economy, dot gov.
Justine Paradis: [typing] fuel economy dot gov.
Sara Ernst: That's catchy.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah. And and it's you know —
Justine Paradis: it looks like a health care Web site.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah!
Justine Paradis:
Sam Evans-Brown: And like right there you can find and compare cars and click that and you can you can like look up the —
Justine Paradis: Shall we Look up my car.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah.
Justine Paradis: 2013. Prius!
TQ: Oh… [laughter]
Justine Paradis: I mean should I look up somehting else?
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: Well, ok so the point is it's like a very functional, like not terrible website built by by sort of like, you know, good government folks.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah.
Sam Evans-Brown: That that cost, by the way, like a couple hundred thousand dollars. Which, you know, maybe sounds a lot like a lot of money. But in terms of the federal government budget is... it is a minuscule amount. So they threw up this website and they decide that they want to evaluate how good a job is at doing, how much gas are they saving by putting this information up there? So they crunch the numbers and it was like a billion gallons of gas…
Justine Paradis: Is that a lot?
Taylor Quimby: It’s like a huge pool of gas!
Justine Paradis: I just don’t know like relatively speaking how much is it?
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah, so to put them in context, it's like around 200 million a year, which is about the same as taking every gas burning vehicle in the United States off the road for almost an entire day just by putting up a website.
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: The point of this story is that is that... I just love how how simple and small and elegant it is and obviously in order for this to work like there's this whole infrastructure that has to exist beforehand. You have to pass a law that like mandates more efficient cars The manufacturers have to step up and actually make the more fuel efficient cars. But if you never do this last step, it's just like it's like you're just leaving that on the table. That billion gallons of gas that people would have ostensibly burned because they just wouldn't have known.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah.
Justine Paradis: Yeah.
Sam Evans-Brown: So my challenge for you all. Should you choose to accept it, is to find other instances of this in which a small act, the more insignificant the better, had some sort of profound impact that that one would be surprised to hear about on a podcast.
Taylor Quimby: Can mine be fictional? [laughs] Too far?
[Outside/In Theme Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In. And today on the show, a battle of tiny proportions. We're calling these nudges... a nod to the famous nudge division of the British government. A series of small events, inventions or happenstance that had outsized impacts... on the environment… maybe… maybe not. Stick around because there will be pirates!
[More Outside/In Theme Music continues]
Sam Evans-Brown: We've gone off, we've called people. We found the stories. I assume I have actually no idea what's going on. [laughter]
Justine Paradis: It's been several weeks.
Erika Janik: Yes. Time has passed.
Justine Paradis: People have emailed…
Sam Evans-Brown: And I take it Taylor’s going first because he's in the other room and has has put a bunch of props in front of us.
Taylor Quimby: Quite right. And that’s because I want to start my nudge presentation with a very basic lesson in physics… You ready?
Sam Evans-Brown: Phsyics!
Erika Janik: Maybe.
Taylor Quimby: So in front of you is a heavy book… and tied to that heavy book is a string. Now I want you to pull that book across the table, using the string.
Sam Evans-Brown: It moved. But it took — but like the elastic string that you've got in here stretched quite a lot. Like, I'd pull it almost all the way to my body before the book would slide.
Taylor Quimby: Now you'll see it in front of you. There is a jar of batteries. They're all dead batteries from our field recording kit. Would you take like four of them? Put it underneath the book.
Sam Evans-Brown: OK. OK, ok. OK. Got the batteries.
Taylor Quimby: Tell me how smoothly that rolls.
Sam Evans-Brown: [Audience says ooooo] That was dramatic.
Taylor Quimby: Right!
Sam Evans-Brown: Oh, and they’re all falling off!
Taylor Quimby: So the thing I’m trying to illustrate here is one that’s pretty obvious… and that is, rolling… is more efficient than sliding.
Sam Evans-Brown: This is what Outside/In is here for folks.
Justine Paradis: Learned that when I was like, five-years-old.
[Music]
Taylor Quimby: Fair fair. This after all, is why the wheel is considered one of the most foundational and important inventions in all of human civilization… but we don’t always put wheels on things and push them around… Sometimes we fix wheels into place, and use them to move other things more efficiently. So for example… the Ancient Egyptians. They’re trying to move huge blocks of limestone to build the pyramids, right? They don’t put wheels on the blocks, they put logs under the blocks and roll them across. Now this is a basic concept that humans have utilized for literally thousands of years. Rolling reduces friction, makes things more efficient, makes life easier. But it wasn’t until 1794, that somebody patents a small invention that allows humans to perfect the wheel… and really making “rolling” the way of the future. Anybody want to guess what the invention is?
Justine Paradis: Rolling as the way of the future?
Erika Janik: I know… that’s so portentous!
Sam Evans-Brown: A grassy hill in a meadow.
Taylor Quimby: And if you can all put your eyes this way…
[Sound of fidget spinner]
Sara Ernst: No way!
Sam Evans-Brown and Erika Janik: Fidget spinners?
Taylor Quimby: OK. So my thing is, it is not actually a fidget spinner. It's the thing that allows fidget spinners to spin. It is the ball bearing.
[Music]
Taylor Quimby: So to help make my case, here’s Bill Farr - divisional training manager at New Hampshire Ball Bearing.
Bill Farr: It really allowed them to make machines that turn at high speeds, automobiles and planes and helicopters, That kind of thing. So without bearings, none of that would exist. One of the big things that you watch World War II movies is that they bomb bearing manufacturers, because if you don't have bearings, you get planes flying.
Erika Janik: Are ball bearings really a machine?
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah! Simple machines. A lever is a machine...
Taylor Quimby: So ball bearings are simple machines that allow us to do incredible things. And they’re entirely based on the same idea that helped the Egyptians move blocks of limestone. But instead of logs, you use little metal balls.... And instead of putting them on the ground, you put them into circular tracks, called raceways because they actually look like a little round race track… And then you fit them between two things that you want to rotate smoothly, with as little friction as possible. And bang… that’s your got a ball bearing.
Bill Farr: So if you have a wheel that turns on a bike or a skateboard or rollerblade. The bearings inside of that wheel, that helps it turn smoother.
Sam Evans-Brown: Boom. Bang. Swish.
Erika Janik: Bingo bango!
Taylor Quimby: But like I said — bingo bango? [laughter} But like I said these things are so important to our mechanical lives, it’s not just for rollerblades and skateboards I had to sign an NDA just to visit the ball bearing factory—
Sam Evans-Brown: A non-disclosure agreement? Like you and Stormy Daniels?
Taylor Quimby: And I was like, why? Isn’t this machine like incredibly basic? Why would I have to sign an NDA and it’s because it goes into all of these very complex, often military applications like planes and helicopters and the size, the custom sized fit would matter into the designs of those machines and so they don’t want me selling information to China or Russia.
Justine Paradis: This is like a matter of national security… going into the ball bearing factory?
Taylor Quimby: I also had to watch a training… safety video.
Sam Evans-Brown: Really? What did it say?
Taylor Quimby: Oh you know it was like wear eye protection.
Justine Paradis: LIke don’t stick your hand into the machine.
Taylor Quimby: Right.
Bill Farr: There's a stone in there that rotates. Let's zoom back out. They'll keep cycling for eight or nine hours.
Taylor Quimby: But what’s totally nuts is if you think about… what do these do, they make machines more efficient… they have to be perfectly sized in order to do this, because they have to bear weight incredibly evenly. And so in order to smooth them down to the levels they need to smooth them down to put them in something like an airplane
So inside the factory, there’s all these machines that make the balls… and Bill told me they basically smooth them over the same way you make a meatball… by rolling it over and over again in your hands.
Bill Farr: The ones that we manufacture here are the same size within ten millionths of an inch.
Taylor Quimby: That sounds like a lot
Bill Farr: That’s a lot… that’s pretty tight.
Taylor Quimby: And some of these are so small that the whole ball bearing, not just like the balls inside of it… are like a little bit bigger than poppy seed.
Sam Evans-Brown: WHAT?!
Erika Janik: Wow.
Bill Farr: That would go into stuff like dental drills, that kind of thing.
Taylor Quimby, they also get finished, like the part where they get put together, is in a clean room, the same way that you’d see a clean room for the building of a satellite. Everybody’s in all white, they have to wear hair caps, they have to like, go through some sort of process to go in there because even a hair, inside the race track of this ball-bearing, could throw off it’s smoothness and efficiency and that’s the whole point of what it does.
[Music]
Taylor Quimby: But, you know, I mean the pointing is the ball bearings. It's like. It is neither good or bad, but is increased the power of the good and bad things in the world. So in one way the ball bearing is tied to all the forces that have led to a climate crisis. You know, automobiles and industrialization. But it's also a part of the thing that might help us get out. So if you look at this fidget spinner vertically… does this look like anything?
Erika Janik: [Laughing] A wind mill?
Taylor Quimby: Yeah! A wind turbine.
Sam Evans-Brown: The funny thing to me about that, that like your takeaway, Taylor, is that there's this economic idea called Jevon’s Paradox that states that doing things more efficiency just enables more consumption… which that’s not necessarily bad consumption can be like a proxy for well-being… but it also maybe not that’s something we need to think really hard about.
Taylor Quimby: Right. I'll tell you what. I'm going to I'm going to wrap up, just really stamp my case with a quick list of things that could not exist without the ball bearing
Taylor Quimby: Just like the longest list, you can give me every single product that you can think of…
Bill Farr: Ok, so you've got things like planes...
Taylor Quimby: Wouldn’t exist
Bill Farr: ...helicopters...
Taylor Quimby: Wouldn’t exist.
Bill Farr: ...automobiles...
Taylor Quimby: Wouldn’t exist
Bill Farr: ...the arms on robots ...
Taylor Quimby: Wouldn’t exist
Bill Farr: ...motors. Any type of fan that goes into a computer or a projector...
Taylor Quimby: Wouldn’t exist
Bill Farr: we had bearings that went into the space shuttle toilet...
Taylor Quimby: Wouldn’t exist
Bill Farr: ...any type of tape recorder would have bearings in it...
Taylor Quimby: You wouldn't have a job .
Bill Farr: ...fidget spinners, heart pumps...
Taylor Quimby: Wouldn’t exist
Bill Farr: One of the big ones that people don't think about is when you go to the dentist and you're getting a cavity filled, that drill is has bearings on it that we manufacture.
Justine Paradis: So what's your point?
[Laughter]
Taylor Quimby: I'm just saying the ball bearing... it gives us all the stuff.
[Music]
Justine Paradis: Taylor Quimby!
Sam Evans-Brown: Taylor Quimby ladies and gentlemen. [Applause] Who’s next?
Justine Paradis: Sarah's next.
Sam Evans-Brown:Sarah's next!
Sara Ernst: Okay. So no surprise anybody who works around here. But I've been thinking a lot about sex lately. [Laughter] True? Not true?
Justine Paradis: And Why is that? For those who don't work here.
Sara Ernst: It's because a fellow producer, Jimmy Guttierez, who's not here, sad… we're working on a episode about sex ed for our other NHPR podcast, The Second Greatest Show on Earth. Yes. Shameless plug. And I found myself steeped in just 50 open tabs… researching the condom.
Sam Evans-Brown: Is this the kind of research you'd prefer to do, not at the office?
Sara Ernst: Oh, it's safe for work.
Justine Paradis: That's the point.
Taylor Quimby: Well, not... well… [laughter]
Justine Paradis: Let’s Continue.
Sara Ernst: And I'm talking specifically about how the latex condom was an unexpected, inexpensive, depending how you slice it. And really important piece to the technology of the age old condom. Okay. I'm gonna hit you with a couple of facts about condoms before the notorious latex rubber. And I got most of this information from Aine Collier's book, The Humble Little Condom: A History.
Justine Paradis: The Little Condom That Could. [Laughter]
Sara Ernst: So the first condom is thousands of years old. And for most of its history, condoms are made from the intestines of sheep. They were made to be reusable. People washed them out hopefully thoroughly and used them again. Now we're just gonna skip a couple thousand years. [Laughter] So in the 1850s, that's when the rubber condom finally hit the market. But this iteration, it was tough and uncomfortable and generally unpopular. The main appeal was that they were durable, they just weren’t going to break… and the technique they used was something called Vulcanization, was just an insane manufacturing process. It was essentially treating crude rubber with sulfur and intense heat. And that made the rubber more malleable and durable. But you can imagine just the terrible side effects for these poor workers dealing with sulfur, just eyes burning, dizziness, convulsions, back pains... and these rubbers they were just never as popular as a skin variety.
Sam Evans-Brown: Is this why they were called rubbers?
Sara Ernst: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Next stop on the condom train. We meet Julius Schmidt, who innovated this. He was living in New York at the turn of the 20th century. He discovered this dipping method in the 1910s that made rubber condoms stronger and thinner, more sensitive, and they could last up to five years. But these rubbers were also manufactured in a crazy way. The dipping technique required gasoline or benzene to be added to the liquid rubber, and that would make the process just really dangerous. It's just a big old fire hazard. I also want to mention my favorite facts about Julius Schmidt, which is that he fell into condom manufacturing—
Justine Paradis: I thought you gonna say he fell into a condom manufacturing… like a pit.
Taylor Quimby: [Laughter] Died by falling —
Sara Ernst: He fell into condom manufacturing by way of the sausage casing business.
Justine Paradis: Nooooo! Really?
Sara Ernst: I know it sounds absolutely fake, but the two industries are actually related.
Sam Evans-Brown: Inextricably linked
Justine Paradis: Oh, my God.
Taylor Quimby: Like, the same machines they like… make the casing? It would be like an easy transition.
Sara Ernst: It's mostly the materials. OK. It probably won't make it in, but another crazy fact, which just people... there'd be recipes going around like bootleg recipes. And people would go to their butcher and they would just ask for like some raw materials. But they'd just be like, oh, I’m making sausages at home. And they would go home and make their own condoms out of sausage casings.
Justine Paradis: Oh, my God. That has to make it in!
Taylor Quimby: Wow. That's kind of awesome because people were like trying to have birth control. You know, they were like they're like, screw this. I want to have sex and I don't wanna have a baby. And I'm not going to let the lack of a condom stop me…
Justine Paradis: ...from making my own.
Sara Ernst: Yeah, totally, totally. But skin condoms were still number one… that's until latex came onto the scene. And now in 1920, the latex condom was invented. Latex is rubber dispersed in water. And it's the kind of kind of we're more familiar with today and has the biggest market share in the condom industry. Latex can stretch thin. It's durable. It's mass manufacturable and does not cause factory fires.
Justine Paradis: I'm realizing that I just did not know what latex was.
Erika Janik: Me too! That’s what I was thinking.
Sara Ernst: So I spoke with Linda Gordon, professor at NYU, and she once wrote a book on the history of birth control politics in the U.S.
Sara Ernst: The shift to rubber or the shift to latex? How important was that to the history of the condom?
Linda Gordon: It was hugely important…
[Music]
Linda Gordon: ...to them because it took a condom from being a very clumsy, very scarcely used method of contraception to a massive one. You know, one of the reasons that men didn't want to use condoms is that it interferes with their pleasure. So the fact that you could get something very thin but also not easily ripped, those two things were just enormously important.
[Music]
Sara Ernst: And so now we get to Sam's challenge. Something small and expensive or unexpected... so here's my case. It was inexpensive in some ways. So latex helped companies save on productions in terms of insurance costs. But I must admit that latex was more expensive than other previous rubber methods. But comparing latex condoms to skin condoms, which compose most of most of the condom’s history... and other forms of contraception. It was a cheaper material.
Linda Gordon: As you can imagine it was probably very hard to find a decent skin condom and expensive. Furthermore, diaphragms for women were expensive not because of the manufacture of them, but because they required a visit to a physician, whereas condoms were really mass produce.And I can't give you figures, but the cost of them was trivial compared to the cost of other forms of birth control or the cost of not having birth control.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, or the cost of not having birth control
Sara Ernst: Totally.
Taylor Quimby: The costliest cost of all.
Erika Janik: Of course, the thing for men is widely available and cheaper.
Justine Paradis: And she has to go to the doctor and be like ‘I'm having sex’ and have him like stare at her…
Erika Janik: ...condemn her.
Sara Ernst: So the thing that’s crazy about this whole story is that throughout this whole period condoms — actually, all forms of contraception — were deemed illegal by the Comstock Act of 1873. So all of these advancements we're talking about, they happened on the black market.
Justine Paradis: Oh, wow. Wow.
Sara Ernst: So if you remember Julius Schmidt, the sausage casing condom guy, he started making condoms in his home like many other people. And in 1890, his house was raided and he was arrested for making condoms.
Justine Paradis: What?
Sara Ernst: This happened!
Justine Paradis: Oh, my God.
Taylor Quimby: This sounds like.... how is this not been made into a great movie yet? You know what I mean? [Laughter]
Sara Ernst: The Condom King
Justine Paradis: You know, actually, I happen to have this book with me, All the Single Ladies… Rebecca Traister. There's a book… Rebecca Traister wrote… this journalist about how basically being single, the ability for women to live unmarried in the United States. And she point to that this ability for women to live unmarried has not only given rise to independence and freedom and happiness, but also sort of saved marriage as something you can do happily, but the reason that marriage has become something that is not necessarily like an economic and social necessity for women is access to birth control.
Sam Evans-Brown: Well, and also that’s how demographic transition happened… like in the United States. Where as you know, like today, our birth rate is below the death rate… which… we have talked about how population discourse is really toxic and tricky, but when population levels stabilize because we’re giving women economic freedom it seems like a pretty good win/win
Sara Ernst: Yeah, so basically my argument: The black market latex condom paved the way for American freedom and saved the institution of marriage.
Erika Janik: Totally agree.
Justine Paradis: Love freedom.
Erika Janik: Love it. Love economic freedom.
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: I thought we would just come back in cold.
Taylor Quimby: I think you should say welcome back.
Sam Evans-Brown: WELCOME BACK.
Erika Janik: Thank you for welcoming me, Sam. I feel very welcome here.
Taylor Quimby: You’re welcoming the audience. You’re welcoming the listeners!
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<Break>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Erika Janik: So I have a very different story than the rest of you.
Sam Evans-Brown: [Laughter] Variety’s the spice of life!
Erika Janik: So I have a story for you that’s about pirates and the metric system. [Laughter] Specifically, why we do not use the metric system in the United States, though. Actually, we do. And I will get back to that in a second.
Sara Ernst: Thank God. Thank you, Erika.
Erika Janik: So when the United States gained its independence from England in the 18th century and became its own nation, one of the very first orders of business for the new government was to adopt some kind of system of weights and measures, because how can you develop an economy and trade ties without some kind of standardization? So we actually had to make a conscious choice about this, because we really had, as you might imagine, inherited a real mishmash of metric units.
Keith Martin: Different states are using different standards. There are Dutch standards, certain parts of the country. We're using Spanish standards. There are English standards. Even states using what they considered the British standards were actually different from state to state. So it was a pound or a gallon and one state could actually be different from another state.
Sara Ernst: Sounds like a mess.
Erika Janik: It is a huge mess.
Sam Evans-Brown: Boooo America.
Erika Janik: I was actually reading that some of the traders in New York, they were buying fabric, using one measurement and selling it for a different but calling it the same thing.
Justine Paradis: That sounds deliberate.
Sam Evans-Brown: Kinda brilliant.
Erika Janik: So the man you just heard there, that's Keith Martin. He's a research librarian at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, which is a government agency charged with ensuring and promoting measurement standards. Now you can see why it was very easy to get this guy on the phone. We’ll cut cut that part out, but I just want to say!
Sam Evans-Brown: Do we have to cut that?
Justine Paradis: He sounds great.
Erika Janik: He's such a nice man. Weights and measures were actually so important that it's actually in the Constitution. Article 1 gives the government the power to set weights and measures in George Washington in a speech to Congress in 1790, he lays out what he sees as really the most important issues facing the new country: the first is defense, the second is the economy, and the third is weights and measures. So something needs to be done. And France thinks it has the answer.
Keith Martin: So they sent an emissary, Joseph Dombey. He was a French botanist and a physician to the United States to meet with the secretary of state at that time, who was Thomas Jefferson. And, Dombey they had two goals of meeting Jefferson. One: he was there to negotiate for agricultural trade between the two countries. And secondly, he was bringing with him to new standards of weights and measures from France. A meter bar for less than a kilogram for weight or mass. And he was going to present those to to Jefferson.
Sam Evans-Brown: This was basically the very birth of the metric system, and this guy was going to convince Jefferson that it was a good idea, and get him to lobby congress for it, right?
Erika Janik: Right, and Jefferson loved France and French culture , so he probably would have gone for it. Not to mention that the system came out of the French enlightenment, which is basically music to Jefferson’s science-loving ears.
Sam Evans-Brown: Those ever-lovin’ science ears.
Keith Martin: Jefferson would have been very receptive to this. Jefferson himself was a francophile.
Erika Janik: So, Dombey, he gets on a ship. He's on his way to Philadelphia.
Sam Evans-Brown: Does he have bodyguards? I like the idea that he's accompanied by bodyguards, to get this meter bar...
Justine Paradis: In a gold box or something?
Erika Janik: Completely surrounded by security. Unfortunately, even if he was surrounded by security, he could not they could not protect him from the weather. A storm blew in and it blew them way, way, way off course. Actually, all the way down to the Caribbean. And who's down in the Caribbean? Pirates! And in particular, these were British privateers who had the approval of London to harass other countries’ shipping.
Sara Ernst: They had a harassment permit? [Laughter]
Erika Janik: They did.
Keith Martin: They captured Dombey’s ship. They discovered that Dombey was a French aristocrat and a member of his government of some value to them. So they took Dombey prisoner on the island of Montserrat with the intention of holding him for ransom from the French government.
Erika Janik: Now, unfortunately for the pirates, and the metric system, Dombey died in prison. So the meter bar and kilogram never made it to the United States. And it would be another century before we officially went metric.
[Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: Wait woah woah, last sentence there!
Erika Janik: Just wait. So the U.S. really starts to move toward metric in the mid 19th century for the export market. But we actually went officially… went metric — this was surprising to me, too — in 1893, because British standards that had kind of been more commonly used were very poorly made and they were not based on science. An inch was defined as three barleycorns lined up end to end. [laughter]
Justine Paradis: Wait… barleycorns?
Taylor Quimby: You know, that's how Subway determines their six inch sandwiches. They just measure up the barleycorns, and then they cut the sandwich. [laughter]
Justine Paradis: One by one.
Erika Janik: 18 barley corns. a mile was a thousand paces of a Roman legion.
Sam Evans-Brown: How do you find a Roman legion to pace off your mile?
Erika Janik: That's exactly it. You can't measure a mile these days without a Roman legion around. So the U.S. in the 1890s, the U.S. decides it really wants a physical standard. And the French standards were stable and scientific, unlike those British ones. And so we do actually use the metric system here, even though we use the word foot. Keith actually told me the standard of measure for it is actually based off of a meter.
[Music]
Erika Janik: But if Dombey’s ship had not been blown off course and he had not been captured by pirates, we would have been an early adopter of the metric system. So this I submit to you as an as an event, a small thing that has had an enormous influence on our weights and measures.
SE: His small, small death.
Justine Paradis: A nudge of wind.
Sam Evans-Brown: We should all in our daily lives just do our little part to convert more things to the metric system.
Sara Ernst: Well, just like this topic. Progress is small.
Justine Paradis: Well, is it? I don’t know! I don't have a topic for this because... I know that the judges are audience. But I tried to find a nudge like I thought about, you know, the weather on D-Day and how they thought like one group thought it was going to rain and another didn't. And that's why the allied invasion worked. And the fact that Hitler was asleep on the morning of D-Day and he was the one who could release like some of the Panzer divisions and they couldn't wake him up because everyone was terrified of Hitler. It was like, well, that like that... that's only like D-Day... there were all these other facts... you can't isolate one thing that would make D-Day work. And then I even thought of the birth control thing. That's why I had this book with me. But then I was like, well, the whole conversation around birth control and like, you have the industrialization that's a whole element. You can't isolate any of these things. And the ball bearing. I bet that someone else would have invented something else or... like you can't isolate it from like the thrust of the industrial revolution in general. Also, maybe Jefferson wouldn't have been able to convince like the rest of the whole group of — was Jefferson like that popular anyway? I don't know. I just I really feel that this is stupid. I hate this premise. So I just I didn't do it.
Sam Evans-Brown: I would like to point out to our audience members who are not in the studio that Justine has a stack of literature in front of her.
Justine Paradis: I looked through all these books, but then I was like well… like… no story that comes from one small event... it all is connected to the rest of the world. You can't this is like a TED talk of a prompt.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, yeah.
Justine Paradis: That's an insult, by the way.
[Laughter. Music]
Sam Evans-Brown: No, I mean, Justine's right. I don't think Justine is wrong. But but... but I had fun.
Erika Janik: That's what matters most.
Justine Paradis: The tiny thing that changed the world is like the premise of like a million and 1 books. And again, TED talks. And I just I usually just find it ...
Taylor Quimby: … reductive.
Justine Paradis: I find it reductive. Yeah. But also I'm being like a podcast Grinch right now.
Taylor Quimby: Well well, I think that this should be a legitimate option for people who are choosing between the ball bearing, the latex condom, though wind — pirate...
Erika Janik: The Metric system! The U.S. use of the metric system.
Taylor Quimby: And the fourth option, which is this is stupid and reducing things to a single event is dumb.
Sam Evans-Brown: I'm down with that.
REAX
Sam Evans-Brown: And I would like mine… can mine be there too?
Taylor Quimby and Erika Janik: No!
Sam Evans-Brown: The website that saved a billion gallons of gas.
Taylor Quimby: That was the anecdote.
Justine Paradis: I’d be down with that, we could put that on. Throw him a bone.
Taylor Quimby: Agree to disagree.
[Outside/In theme music]
Sam Evans-Brown: You can vote on which of these small things that had a large impact with your favorite at our Web site outside in radio dot org. You can also vote on Twitter where we will pin a poll to the top of our feed. And if you're on Facebook, you can join our Facebook group and not only cast your vote there, but also join the discussion about which nudge was the best or which nudge we should have discussed. And yes, that means it is possible to vote more than once. But frankly, the stakes are pretty low. This is not the first in the nation primary. So vote early, vote often. And thanks for listening.
Erika Janik: A small thing.
Justine Paradis: Like you take… like size small.
Taylor Quimby: Yes. Ball bearings are literally… I was… yeah, I was going literally small.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah, yeah. No, it's not... there are no rules. There are no rules. There's also no rules as the how this is judged.
Justine Paradis: There are rules...