Hi guys,
just before we start this show I wanted to say hope you're all doing okay in this bizarre situation that we've all found ourselves in.
And I hope you're staying safe and washing your hands a billion times a minute and not going near anyone else.
And there's really nothing
that we can tell you about this virus that you can't already learn from the news and the medical advice and all of that jazz.
But what we can do is we can still share with you our four favorite facts from the last seven days and fill your head with distracting nonsense facts which hopefully will distract you from the fact you're stuck in a house with your spouse or your kids or your mates and you now all want to kill each other and will distract you even from the slightly more disconcerting global event.
So as long as you guys continue to listen we I'm afraid are going to continue to podcast every week starting now.
Okay on with the show.
Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Culverant Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber.
I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray,
Anna Chazinski and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.
Starting with my fact this week my fact is computer pioneer Charles Babbage once cooked himself in an oven for four minutes at 265 degrees just to see what would happen.
What was he trying to make at the time?
Cooked Babbage.
Babbage cabbage confusion.
So this was as a result of an artistic friend of him called Sir Francis Chantry who was a sculptor and he made big bronze statues and he was doing a particularly big one so they had to build this giant oven for him to build it to cook it in and so Babbage heard about this and he was really intrigued and he went to see it and
while he was there he was sort of talking to them and they said why don't you go inside be interesting right and Babbage said yeah that would be interesting so he went along with another guy called Captain Cater and his description which he wrote in his memoirs say the iron folding doors of the small room or oven were opened Captain Cater and myself entered and they were closed upon us then the further corner of the room which was paved with square stones was visibly a dull red heat the thermometer marked
if I recollect rightly 265 degrees he talks about his pulse quickening he talks about the perspiration and he says it was fine he says it was absolutely fine what why is only there for how long four minutes four or five minutes six minutes he wasn't sure the heat sort of made him a bit dozy probably there's one other thing he said someone didn't go in with them he says Sir Thomas Lawrence who was suffering from in this position did not think it prudent to join our party in fact he died on the second or third day after our experiment wow Thomas Lawrence never got to go it wouldn't have mattered