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podcast.

1:09

Liz Stephenson grew up in a suburb outside

1:12

of Boston, and at her elementary school, you

1:14

always did this one thing come

1:16

third grade. You

1:17

always learned the recorder.

1:19

You know, this recorder. I

1:29

learned to play the recorder in fourth grade,

1:31

and learning to do so is a common elementary

1:33

school experience, even

1:36

if it is not always a mellifluous

1:38

one.

1:39

Instead of going to the regular music classroom,

1:41

we would do this in what was called the multipurpose

1:44

room, this big open room

1:46

where they would put in, like, risers. I do

1:48

remember thinking we sound bad.

1:50

If you played the recorder or know someone who did,

1:52

you can probably imagine the sounds emanating

1:55

from the multipurpose room.

2:00

All I remember learning is hot cross buns and

2:02

like, camp-tone races. I

2:07

think the only one that I mastered was hot cross

2:09

buns. I think it's fair to say

2:11

that Liz's childhood experience did not

2:13

leave her with any lasting knowledge

2:15

of the recorder as a musical instrument.

2:18

I don't even remember how many holes

2:20

there are. But it did leave her

2:22

with questions. What's the history

2:25

of the recorder? Like, when was it invented?

2:27

Who invented it? Why?

2:29

How was it used in the past? And

2:31

then also, did it become popular

2:33

at a certain era? And then also,

2:36

are there any people who are talented

2:39

at the recorder, who play the recorder and

2:41

show off how good they are at the recorder? So

2:44

I'm going to tell you this

2:45

one thing, which is

2:47

that Vivaldi and Bach

2:49

and Handel all wrote

2:51

recorder music. Oh, wow. This

3:01

is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. We

3:04

get a lot of fantastic emails

3:06

from our listeners suggesting ideas

3:07

for the show. We feel extremely

3:11

grateful for each and every

3:13

one. And in this episode, we're going to dive

3:15

into five of them. First, we're

3:18

going to continue with the history

3:19

of the recorder,

3:20

which surprisingly involves Henry

3:22

the Ace and the Nazis. We'll

3:25

also be looking at the rise and fall of

3:27

the stretch limo, the incredible

3:29

versatility of the word like, the

3:31

meaning of the baby on board sign, and

3:34

why on earth it took so long to develop

3:36

luggage with wheels. So today

3:39

on Decoder Ring, we're rifling through

3:41

our mailbags.

3:41

Thanks to you.

3:54

Thank you.

4:02

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4:03

credit card created by Apple. You

4:06

earn 3% daily cash back up front

4:08

when you use it to buy a new iPhone 15,

4:10

AirPods, or any products at Apple.

4:13

And you can automatically grow your daily cash

4:15

at 4.15% annual

4:17

percentage yield when you open a high-yield

4:19

savings account.

4:20

Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app

4:22

on iPhone. Apple Card is subject

4:24

to credit approval. Savings

4:26

is available to Apple Card owners subject

4:28

to eligibility. Savings accounts

4:31

by Goldman Sachs Bank USA

4:33

Member FDIC.

4:39

So we're going to pick up where we left off with Elizabeth's

4:42

questions about the recorder. And

4:44

to answer them, I reached out to Robert

4:46

Ehrlich.

4:47

I am a professional recorder player. So

4:49

right off the bat, that's one answer. There

4:51

are professional recorder players.

4:54

Robert

4:54

also teaches at the Leipzig Conservatory

4:56

in Germany and is the co-author of a

4:59

definitive

4:59

history of the recorder. He was

5:01

first introduced to the instrument himself when

5:04

he was in elementary school in Belfast.

5:06

I think we all know what that sounds like. And

5:10

that wasn't the reason that I got into playing the recorder.

5:13

Instead, he re-encounted the instrument as

5:15

a teen.

5:15

My dad

5:18

gave me an album by

5:20

Franz Brigan. Brigan was a

5:22

Dutch recorder player. Just

5:25

masterly playing. It was a Vivaldi

5:28

concerto. And it's just so exciting

5:30

to hear this instrument played in a way that

5:32

I'd never imagined it could be.

5:34

The recorder actually seemed kind of rebellious

5:37

to Robert. It wasn't an instrument that

5:39

people took that seriously. It wasn't the

5:41

violin

5:41

or the piano or the bassoon.

5:43

And he liked

5:44

that about it. It was like

5:46

an underdog. So he learned

5:48

how to play it. Like,

5:50

really play it.

5:59

And learning how to play, he also became very

6:01

interested in its history.

6:04

It turns out that for most of

6:05

its existence, the recorder was not

6:07

for children.

6:08

So the golden age of the recorder was

6:12

really the 16th century. So

6:15

if you think of King Henry VIII of England, and

6:18

that was the guy with all of the wives, quite

6:20

early in his reign, he employed

6:23

a professional recorder

6:25

ensemble.

6:26

Henry VIII liked the instrument so

6:28

much, he wrote a recorder song himself.

6:30

At

6:33

the time, the instrument was still fairly

6:36

simple. So we're talking about a very

6:38

plain tube of wood. It's cylindrical.

6:41

It basically looks like an extended toilet

6:43

roll with holes down the end. But

6:45

it was prestigious, and it looks eventually

6:48

caught up with it. We're talking about a high-stasis

6:51

instrument. It was certainly an extremely

6:53

expensive instrument. And then in

6:55

the Baroque era, so now we're talking

6:58

the 17th, 18th centuries, it

7:01

develops into a much more ornamental

7:04

instrument. It starts looking very fancy,

7:07

starts being made of ivory and with gold

7:09

mounts and carved. It's

7:11

a much more complicated inner bore,

7:14

and that means the range gets extended

7:17

to two and a half to three octaves. And

7:19

that's the instrument that composers like Bach

7:21

and Handel wrote their music for in Fervaldi.

7:26

But something was

7:28

happening at the same time that

7:30

was going to undo

7:31

the recorder. The musical

7:33

world is getting professionalized, and

7:36

we start having the phenomenon

7:38

that music moves out of the home, the court,

7:40

the chapel, into the concert hall.

7:43

And

7:44

the rooms just get bigger. And in those big

7:46

rooms for 2,000 people, you could not

7:49

hear a number of their two-four esteemed

7:51

instruments, including the lute, the

7:54

harpsichord, the violetta de gamba,

7:56

and yes,

7:56

the recorder.

7:58

Replacing them were the violin, and the piano

8:00

and the trumpet and all the instruments we still

8:03

associate with symphony

8:04

orchestras.

8:05

By 1750, recorders had

8:07

gone so out of fashion that

8:10

people would forget how to

8:12

make them.

8:13

It wasn't until the early 20th century amid

8:15

a growing interest in early music,

8:18

music from the medieval Renaissance and Baroque periods,

8:20

that anyone tried again. A string

8:22

instrument maker in Britain figured out how to make

8:25

a recorder by looking

8:26

at old, surviving examples. Still,

8:29

the recorder

8:30

might be like the lute or the violetta

8:32

de gamba if a German businessman named

8:34

Peter Harlan hadn't noticed the redeveloped

8:37

recorder and sensed an opportunity.

8:40

Harlan had a wonderful commercial idea,

8:43

which was, if

8:45

I could make these really cheaply,

8:48

I could sell

8:49

godzillions of these things. This

8:51

was during the Weimar era after World War

8:53

I, when Germany was extremely poor.

8:56

And so you heard of the Volkswagen,

8:58

right? And so Peter

9:01

Harlan had this great idea of the Fox Blocflurter,

9:04

which just means people's recorder. And

9:07

they were dirt cheap.

9:09

They weren't good to look at, and they sounded

9:12

terrible. But if you had no

9:14

money to buy any other kind of instrument, it was kind

9:16

of like a ticket back to musical experience.

9:20

And so 250 years

9:22

after it had disappeared,

9:23

the recorder caught on again.

9:25

Unfortunately, at the time, a lot of other things

9:28

were catching on. The Nazis rose

9:30

to power,

9:31

and the Hitler Youth Movement

9:34

kind of adopted the recorder as

9:36

its instrument.

9:37

It had been forgotten for so long, the Nazis

9:40

saw it as an instrument with no past,

9:42

one they could use for their own purposes.

9:46

Right the way through its history, from 1500, 1600, 1700, it

9:48

was essentially a male-gendered, luxury

9:54

instrument for people

9:56

of high society.

9:59

It became regendered as

10:03

a female instrument to

10:05

be played by groups of girls and

10:08

essentially to be used for propaganda purposes.

10:11

So when we get up to the opening of the Berlin

10:13

Olympic Games in 1936, there was a recorder orchestra

10:18

at the opening ceremony in the

10:20

Olympic stadium, microphones, loudspeakers,

10:24

and there they were playing unspeakable

10:27

Nazi drivel.

10:33

You'd think this might have been it for

10:35

the recorder.

10:36

So what happened after

10:38

the war was that a lot of things

10:40

that had essentially been Nazi inventions

10:43

like

10:44

the Autobahn, the freeway, and

10:47

the Volkswagen, the Beetle, became

10:50

ubiquitous in the developed world.

10:52

Germans who had learned the recorder before

10:55

and during the rise of the Nazis, including

10:57

many German Jews, began spreading it to places

11:00

like America, Israel, and Britain. It

11:02

really is a useful teaching instrument

11:04

because it's cheap and indestructible, and

11:07

though it's hard to make it sound good,

11:09

it's simple to make it sound

11:12

at all.

11:13

So the recorder got taken over

11:15

all over the place. For

11:19

professional players such as myself,

11:22

that's our greatest

11:24

curse and our greatest

11:26

privilege. Everybody knows that instrument.

11:29

Many people have had personal experience of it, so

11:31

it's kind of accessible. The

11:33

problem is it's become a low-stasis

11:35

instrument. If you think, what's

11:37

the first thing you think of if you see a violin?

11:40

Or you think, oh, high-stasis classical

11:42

music with the recorder, you don't have those associations

11:46

until you've had somebody playing it well.

11:49

And then it starts growing. We'll

11:58

be right back.

12:08

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13:30

Our next question comes from Whitney Alexander,

13:32

who grew up in Houston, but now lives in Brooklyn.

13:35

I was curious why there

13:37

seemed to be so many stretch limos

13:40

in New York City in the 80s and

13:44

90s, at least according to many

13:46

of the films

13:47

that I watched as a child. Wow.

13:51

Is this your car?

13:52

Whitney's talking about movies like

13:53

Wall Street, Working Girl, Arthur

13:56

and Big. What company is this?

14:00

This is the coolest thing I've ever seen.

14:03

All of these movies made it

14:05

appear as though the streets of New York City were flooded

14:08

with limousines. Was that really

14:11

the case? And

14:14

what happened to them all? Because I actually

14:16

tried to rent a stretch limo about two

14:18

years ago for a party and

14:20

there were none to be found. I'd just

14:22

like to understand a little bit

14:24

more about the limo boom of

14:27

the 80s and 90s. Was it fact

14:29

fiction? I mean,

14:30

at one point we were up to like 20, 25 stretch limousines.

14:33

Robert Alexander, no relation

14:35

to Whitney, is the president of the National

14:37

Limousine Association and the CEO

14:39

of RMA Worldwide, a

14:42

corporate transportation company

14:43

he founded in the late 1980s

14:46

when the limo boom was definitely

14:48

a fact.

14:50

And it was great because we were doing, you know,

14:52

funerals and weddings during the day and then

14:54

we would do nights on the town or we would

14:56

do executives going to and from the airport

14:59

or to meetings.

15:00

If you think of a limo as a chauffeured vehicle

15:02

that gives its passengers privacy, you

15:04

can trace it back centuries

15:06

to say the stagecoach.

15:08

But the first stretched out automobile

15:10

appeared in the late 1920s. By

15:13

the 1940s, companies like Lincoln

15:15

and Cadillac were making stretches.

15:18

But it was in the 70s and really

15:20

in the 80s that they hit their peak popularity

15:24

and usage. Thanks to

15:26

the famous ethos of that era.

15:29

Green, for lack

15:31

of a better word, is good.

15:34

That's Michael Douglas playing the business mogul

15:36

Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall

15:38

Street. And as Whitney noticed

15:40

when she was a kid, in that movie, Gordon

15:42

Gekko goes everywhere in a stretched

15:45

limo. He wants everyone

15:47

to see him in this big flashy

15:50

car. And that's because even

15:52

more than the limo, what was in in

15:55

the 1980s was ostentatiously swanting

15:59

on the

19:59

in any clear

20:02

way a function to, they

20:04

just assume that they're meaningless and you

20:06

can throw them in wherever you like and they also

20:08

assume

20:08

that they're all the same. And they're

20:11

not, they're

20:13

not any of those things.

20:15

What does the narrative people

20:16

think about where like comes from?

20:18

The story is that like

20:20

came from the Valley Girls and that's why it has such

20:23

a bad rap. I know but we've been going together

20:25

so long now like beginning

20:27

to think of a piece of furniture set like and

20:29

oh dear. And I believed that

20:32

narrative

20:34

for some time myself and

20:36

then you start looking

20:39

at

20:40

historical records and you realize

20:43

this had nothing to do with the

20:45

Valley Girls in terms of origin. There

20:48

are court records from London

20:51

England

20:52

from the 18th century that

20:54

has like in it, the like

20:57

that we don't like.

20:58

So it has become more frequent

21:00

since then but

21:02

that's what language changes

21:03

do anyway right? Like when something

21:05

new is happening, it moves really really

21:07

really slow for the longest time and

21:09

then it starts to take off and when it takes off

21:12

it takes off fast and that's when we start

21:14

to notice it

21:16

and we never like it.

21:17

Okay so tell me about the likes we

21:19

don't like. There's

21:20

a like that goes

21:22

between sentences so you could say

21:24

something along the lines of I'd never

21:26

known anybody who had died.

21:28

I had no experience with death like the first

21:31

person I knew was my grandma.

21:33

People don't like that one but that is 300 years

21:36

old.

21:36

It's an overt marker

21:39

that says

21:40

these two things are connected

21:42

in some way.

21:43

So I think of those ones as road

21:46

signs. There are these friendly cooperative

21:48

tools that say like okay I'm going

21:51

this way now.

21:52

What is another example of a like we don't

21:54

like? There's the like that

21:56

shows up inside sentences.

21:59

up and down

22:01

or she's like really nice.

22:04

So

22:04

it too has a job but what it's

22:07

doing is it's saying things like

22:09

this is what I need

22:10

you to pay attention to. So they

22:12

were jumping up and down is one thing. They were like jumping

22:14

up and down is quite another. It's

22:17

relevant that they were jumping up and down. You're supposed to feel

22:19

it. Are there any other likes that

22:21

we don't like?

22:22

Those are the main baddies but

22:24

there's also the like that shows up in

22:27

direct quotations. So when we're recreating

22:31

speech or thought or action

22:33

or gesture and so you

22:34

know I can say oh and I was like this is super

22:36

fun.

22:37

Where I'm quoting my own thought process.

22:40

We don't like that one either and yet

22:42

really it is the best thing to have happened

22:44

to English speakers in terms of storytelling.

22:47

I mean why is it so good for storytelling?

22:50

Oh it's amazing for storytelling because if you

22:52

go back a hundred years it was mostly

22:55

say. Say can only

22:57

do speech and once in a

22:59

while you can make it do thought if you say

23:01

I said to myself. Right?

23:04

So it's very very constrained. People

23:07

rarely rarely up until those

23:10

you know born in the 1950s rarely

23:12

told stories that encapsulated

23:15

an inner thought process

23:17

in the same way. So two things

23:19

have happened right? The first thing is

23:21

that we started changing the

23:23

way that we report stories when

23:26

we're talking to our friends. You

23:29

see that there's this increase from hardly

23:32

ever reporting interstate

23:34

to interstate reporting becoming

23:37

more and more frequent. We actually needed

23:39

something really versatile. So

23:41

like as a verb of quotation itself just

23:44

emerges in response to this

23:46

gap. Now when you listen

23:48

to stories

23:50

we're telling all kinds of stuff. We're repeating

23:54

gesture. We're repeating sound effects.

23:56

We're creating a hypothetical situation. Right?

23:59

So

23:59

I have recordings of stories that

24:02

in the real world happen

24:04

in the blink of an eye. So

24:06

externally there was

24:08

no story. But the

24:10

speaker has this whole narrative

24:13

about what happened, right? So I

24:15

saw him come in and I was like, oh my god,

24:17

I know that guy. And

24:19

I looked at him again, I was like, wait, is he? And

24:21

then I was like, oh my god, I was like, oh my

24:24

god. I was like, that's someone's

24:26

ex-boyfriend. I was like, oh my god, I hope he doesn't see me. And

24:31

it's a fantastic story, but it

24:33

could not have been told that way

24:37

until you had this form. So

24:41

it's actually this incredible

24:43

resource that has in a sense kind

24:45

of exploded the possibilities for

24:47

us in terms of

24:49

the types of stories that we can tell and

24:51

the way in which we can tell them. I

24:54

also noticed when you're talking, it's funny, like it

24:56

seems as if you have thought about places

24:58

you can't use like for clarity.

25:00

Like you did it a couple times. I was

25:02

like, oh, she's not using like because it would

25:04

be confusing. I'm an Uberliker.

25:07

I love like, it's so useful.

25:09

It's so

25:09

helpful. When I'm being

25:12

very informal, I'm likeful,

25:15

like this everywhere. But

25:17

when I lecture or do

25:19

something like this, I try to use it less

25:21

because I understand

25:23

that there's an audience

25:25

that doesn't like it.

25:28

And it's important to me that the message come

25:30

across in a way that

25:32

people are able to

25:35

hear what I'm saying and not be

25:38

distracted by me using the thing

25:40

that they don't like and don't respect and therefore

25:43

will be predisposed to not like what

25:45

I'm saying. You

25:48

know, I have students all the time. So my dad

25:50

banned it. My mom banned it. My nanabans

25:53

it. Like my response is always

25:55

you go back and you tell them that

25:58

every time you use a like You are

26:00

saying

26:02

in your heart, I love you,

26:04

I trust you, I am comfortable in this space.

26:11

Our next question comes from Debbie Byrne

26:13

in Oakland, California. I'm

26:16

wondering about the baby on board

26:18

placards that are in the rear windows of many people's

26:20

cars. I kind of remember when those

26:22

first started appearing and I always wondered,

26:25

what was the thought behind those signs? Like,

26:27

of course, no one wants to crash into a car

26:30

with a baby riding in it, but I also

26:32

don't want to crash into a car with a six-year-old

26:34

riding in it or a 16-year-old riding

26:36

in it or even a 60-year-old riding in it.

26:39

Who thought that up? Why are they so

26:41

popular? And

26:43

how come they're still around in 2023? To

26:45

answer Debbie's question, I spoke with Caitlin Gibson,

26:48

a feature writer for The Washington Post. She'd

26:51

been noticing the baby on board signs for years, but

26:53

she only wrote an article about them after

26:55

a big life change. We had

26:58

our first daughter in 2018

27:00

and experienced firsthand

27:03

what it was like to put a completely

27:05

fragile little newborn in the backseat of the car

27:08

and drive her in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan

27:11

area around the drivers who were here and

27:14

started thinking a little bit more about what the sign actually

27:17

might mean. The

27:18

signs were co-created by a man

27:20

who had a similar experience. In

27:23

the early 1980s, Michael Lerner had to drive

27:25

his 18-month-old nephew home from

27:27

a family gathering in Boston. It was very stressful

27:29

for him. He felt like

27:31

people were driving really erratically, and

27:34

he was just very aware of this little kid

27:36

in the backseat.

27:37

About a week after the experience, a business

27:39

associate got in touch with Lerner. He

27:42

knew about these two sisters who had

27:44

an idea they wanted to sell.

27:46

And their idea was this triangular little

27:48

safety sticker that said, Baby, Abort.

27:51

The

27:51

pitch resonated with him because of his recent

27:54

experience with his nephew. So he

27:56

bought the idea, finessed the words,

27:58

and launched a company

27:59

called Safety. be first.

28:01

And so by 1984, they

28:03

were starting to produce these stickers. And he

28:05

was saying that, you know, September of that year, they

28:07

sold like 10,000 of them. And by

28:09

the following June, they were getting orders for

28:11

half a million a month. And as the 80s

28:14

wore on,

28:14

they kept selling, becoming

28:16

completely ubiquitous. And

28:19

let's not forget the three most

28:21

puke-inducing words that

28:24

man has yet thought of, Baby

28:27

on Board. They drew the

28:29

ire of the comedian George Carlin. You

28:32

know what these morons are actually telling us, don't you? I know you

28:34

figured this out. They're actually saying to us, we

28:36

know you're a shitty driver most of the time, but because

28:38

our child is nearby, we expect you to straighten up for

28:40

a little while. And

28:42

Homer Simpson and his barbershop quartet

28:44

sang about them on The Simpsons.

28:47

Baby on board,

28:50

now I'm a gourd,

28:53

that's fine on

28:56

my car's window bed.

28:58

Michael Lerner would go on to sell the company,

29:00

but there has remained a consistent, if less

29:02

feverish demand for his product.

29:04

You can still see them on people's cars and

29:07

in other countries and other languages.

29:09

And you can also see ones riffing

29:11

on the original. I guess the new ones

29:14

that are like just in the last couple of years are like the baby

29:16

up in this bitch or like burrito

29:19

on board, golden retriever on board. But

29:21

even more than their longevity, the thing Caitlin

29:24

found most fascinating about the Baby on

29:26

Board signs was just how many different opinions

29:28

they engendered. She started every interview

29:31

she did for her piece by asking the subjects

29:33

what they made of these signs when they saw

29:36

them on the road. And she got so

29:38

many divergent, even contradictory

29:41

responses. There's just no universal

29:43

interpretation of it. There were

29:45

the people who thought it was basically like a status

29:47

update. You know, like it was just people kind of announcing

29:50

that they had reproduced. Others

29:52

who thought it was a courtesy to let people know they

29:54

might be driving cautiously.

29:55

Almost kind of like an apology or

29:57

an explanation.

29:59

you know not done it if there's like

30:02

a brief opening in traffic but others

30:04

still thought it meant the driver might be

30:06

reckless they felt like it was a warning

30:09

like i might be really distracted and do

30:11

something completely nuts because there's a shrieking

30:13

baby in the back so that really

30:15

struck me i'm like wow those are opposite

30:17

messages like oh there

30:19

we the people who wanted it to alert first responders

30:23

and others who would get annoyed when they realize

30:25

there wasn't actually

30:26

a baby on board and

30:28

then it was also kind of funny hearing from kids

30:30

who are older for like whoa

30:33

i'm eleven can you drive

30:35

safely around me to do i not count anymore

30:38

that i'm eleven this

30:40

is what seems

30:41

so weird about the baby on board signed

30:43

to our listener

30:43

debbie and also to george carlin

30:46

the people would burrito on board signs

30:48

and frankly me to a

30:50

baby is not more precious than an

30:52

eleven year old or a sixteen year old or

30:54

a six year old and caitlin

30:56

agrees with she thinks it's notable

30:59

that the sign seems to especially resonate

31:01

with brand spanking new parents

31:03

people driving home from the hospital who

31:06

are not in the most logical frame of

31:08

mind and who have just been made personally

31:10

responsible not for any

31:12

other human life was just one

31:15

baby in particular

31:17

a guy that i thought to for the story he

31:19

never really felt like he understood them and sell he

31:21

had his first kid and he was driving this

31:23

they be home from the hospital when

31:25

he had his baby he

31:28

suddenly started seeing them as as these messages

31:30

have to fear like these are

31:32

just stared at parents who

31:35

has suddenly realized in the way that you do

31:37

when you bring new life into are incredibly

31:39

turbulent and unpredictable and uncontrollable

31:41

world that you have very little control

31:44

over what you do what happens to

31:46

them

31:47

and that is really frightening

31:49

basically they're hail mary's physical

31:51

eyes tokens of magical thinking

31:54

amulets talismans people

31:56

like put like a patron saint

31:58

of travel on their dash

31:59

or this is not really that different

32:02

do

32:02

not communicating anything except

32:04

you know a desire to control

32:06

your panic and some

32:08

people really want you to know that they ran a marathon

32:10

and some people really want you to know that they love

32:12

vacationing in the outer banks and some people

32:14

want you know that they're to ceiling kind of freaked out

32:17

and that's what i think when i see it now

32:19

that died as a driver who seals frightened

32:22

or vulnerable or worse

32:32

more questions in we return

32:37

apple card is the credit card created by

32:39

apple you are in three percent daily cash

32:41

back up front when to use it to buy a new

32:44

i phone says teen air pods are any

32:46

products at apple and you can automatically

32:48

grow your daily cash at four point

32:50

one five percent annual percentage shield

32:53

when you open a high yield savings account

32:55

apply for apple cart in the wallet app on

32:57

ice on apple hard subject to

32:59

credit approval savings is available

33:01

to apple cart owners subject to eligibility

33:04

savings account a goldman sachs

33:06

bank usa member as the i

33:09

see terms apply

33:13

our final question comes from our know

33:15

who lives in northern california

33:17

so couple decades ago i

33:20

started noticing and airports

33:22

that all luggage suitcases

33:25

carry ons all legs is suddenly

33:27

had full wheels and

33:30

it got me wondering what

33:32

happened what while was in this a

33:34

saying long

33:36

before it seems like

33:39

such a simple device

33:42

that of patents expire and

33:45

you know how did it become the obvious

33:47

standard

33:49

so as early as the nineteen forties

33:51

you could find advertisements for products

33:53

that combine the wheel and the suitcase

33:55

they're called portable porters and they were we'll

33:57

devices that can be strapped on to lug

33:59

But as the British comedian

34:02

Jim Jeffries explains, it would be

34:04

another 25 years before

34:06

somebody sought to put wheels on a suitcase

34:09

permanently.

34:10

1971 was the first

34:12

time the patent office got a patent for

34:15

a suitcase with wheels on it. 1971 was

34:19

the first time anyone on this planet

34:22

thought to put

34:24

wheels on a suitcase.

34:28

To put that in context, we

34:31

went to the moon in the 60s. The

34:35

breakthrough is widely credited to Bernard

34:37

Zadow, who supposedly was

34:39

going through an airport on a family vacation

34:42

and spotted an airport worker wheeling

34:44

around a piece of heavy machinery and

34:47

thought it might work on the bags he was

34:49

lugging around himself. When he got

34:51

home, he slapped four wheels from another

34:53

piece of furniture on his luggage, attached

34:56

a strap, and the first, very

34:58

wobbly iteration of the rolling

35:00

suitcase was born. But

35:03

not everyone was moved by the idea. Part

35:05

of the reason for this was that carrying a suitcase

35:07

was seen as manly. Men were supposed

35:09

to carry

35:09

their own

35:10

luggage, and it was assumed that most

35:12

women were traveling with men, who

35:14

would carry their luggage too. It

35:16

wasn't until the mid-1980s that another

35:19

man, who had to constantly schlep his own

35:21

luggage through airport terminals, revisited

35:23

the idea. An airline pilot

35:25

named Robert Plath turned his suitcase

35:28

upright, gave it a handle, and wheels.

35:31

He called his new design the

35:32

Rollerboard and started a company called

35:34

TravelPro to sell them.

35:37

This time, the idea caught on.

35:40

Rolling luggage now makes up a large part of the $152

35:42

billion American luggage market, and

35:47

the bags are the preferred luggage of

35:49

people like George Clooney's constantly

35:51

traveling character and up in the air, who

35:54

just want to save some time.

37:59

and i got some dirty looks

38:02

and i don't care to

38:04

see people being stressed out about their

38:07

yes oh my gosh it fast

38:09

to be directly over there row

38:12

protip for your listeners don't put

38:14

it over your extreme row

38:16

put it

38:17

a set of view on the opposite side

38:20

so you can see it

38:21

like so much about modern life the role

38:24

a bag is a convenience that solved a

38:26

lot of problems

38:28

while creating a few new ones there's

38:30

a ripple effect to every

38:32

innovation even ones

38:34

come on

38:35

as obvious as putting wheels

38:37

on a suitcase

38:39

it's entirely dumb and we didn't

38:41

have rawlings

38:49

this is the code during i'm will have hoskin

38:51

if you have any cultural mysteries you want

38:53

us to decode please email us at decoder

38:55

ring at slate dot com i

38:58

just want to reiterate what i said at the top we

39:00

are so appreciative and grateful for

39:02

every suggesting that we get we

39:05

see them all even if we don't always

39:07

respond please also don't

39:09

feel slighted a we haven't taken your suggestion

39:11

on some topics are just too big

39:14

to dive into in one segment thank

39:16

you so much for listening and

39:18

for thinking about the south

39:20

i want to thank lol i are a code blue and i

39:23

also want to mention to books that were helpful with

39:25

our segment about luggage roberts

39:27

a seller's the new financial order

39:30

and tattered marshalls mother of invention

39:32

decoder ring is produced by will a posse and

39:34

and katie shepherd this episode was also

39:37

produced by rosemary bell since we

39:39

had editing help from joe meyer derek

39:41

dawn is slates executive producer

39:43

of narrative podcasts magic

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