Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski,
Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go.
Starting with you, Anna.
My fact this week is that the world's first electricity power station was built to power an artificial rainbow.
1870s, late 1870s, 1877, 78 and we're in Bavaria and it was built for this king,
King Ludwig II known as the fairy tale king for reasons that will become obvious during this section.
He used to be a frog, didn't he?
He did, yeah.
And he wanted to make himself this grotto,
he wanted to recreate these things called blue grottos which are natural sea caves where the sunlight makes the water glow in all rainbow colors and so he decided I've heard about this new invention electricity and I think I'm going to use it and so there was a little power station set up which used a steam steam basically which powered a dynamo and that generated electricity so spun some coils around magnets,
generated electricity, you've got a full-on rainbow inside his personal cave.
It is cool but you would think that they'd find something better to do with their electricity, wouldn't they?
I can't think of anybody.
But it's amazing what he did install
because that grotto is full of not only the first artificial rainbow to be powered by this station but also the first
like I've been to those pools where they create artificial waves and you see people going surfing on them indoors.
The prototype basically of that was a wave pool.
The wave pool, yeah.