Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent 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 round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order,
here we go, starting with you, Andy.
My fact is that the first ever ball pit was inspired by a jar of pickled onions.
Yeah,
it was a guy who had a massive jar of pickled onions and his son fell into it one day and
while they were fishing him out,
they noticed, oh he's having a great time.
So, no, it's not that.
It's a guy called Eric McMillan who invented it,
it was called a ball crawl back in the good old days and he was the subject of a Guardian long read recently,
they do these great long essays and it's all about playgrounds and how playgrounds were developed and the original playgrounds and who first thought of doing all this weird stuff for children to play in
because it had to be invented and he was this kind of visionary who invented all these different methods of playing and one of the things he was working on was a place called SeaWorld's Captain Kids in San Diego in 1976 and he and his colleague were looking at a jar of pickled onions and they thought,
I think that could work.
So, he's seen as the father of soft play because this wasn't the only thing that he created.
Soft play, I go to a lot these days with my son and they're amazing gymnasiums of balls and big,
we are lots of those gymnasiums, seeing those in Soho, I don't know if he's retaking himself.
Yeah, he invented so many things.