100 Objects #4: Lowe's Gas Bag

From east to west, our nation is the biggest it has ever been, and yet construction of

“the Transcontinental Railroad won't even begin for another two years.”

On a whistle-stop trip to take the oath of office, it had taken the newly elected Abraham Lincoln 11 whole days to travel from Cincinnati to Washington DC by train, only a genius or a madman would think it was possible to cut that trip down to just one night. Fabius, soby Eski, cool and court low, that was his full name, his parents gave him names they pulled out of obscure novels.

This is author and journalist, Jack Hitt. Fabius Lowe was one of these sort of huckster promoters, not quite a con man, part carnival barker, part inventor, part scientist. And that is Lowe, war those eccentricities for everyone to see. He had long-flowing hair, and that sort of moustacheio, that was popular, and that time

he also had what was then called a chin-pop. He had that sort of wizardy look, right? The look of a great eccentric man of science of that time. It was this chin-puffed man of science who had come up with a new scheme that involved traveling from Cincinnati to Washington DC in a single night, carried in the basket of a

gas bag. We call it a hot air balloon, but at the time it was also known as a gas bag. Gas bags had been around for a while at this point, a lot of them just going up and coming back down, tethered to the ground. That was how the first balloon flight had happened in your Paris, almost 80 years earlier.

But in the decades that followed, no one had really discovered what to do with the gas bag.

“I think every new technology enters that sort of liminal period where it's either a novel”

to gimmick, it's going to become silly, or it's going to become the computer. Right? And the balloon at this time was sort of in that strange sort of twilight space. It was seen as both, like, sort of magical, mystical.

It mean, we have always wanted to escape Earth's clutches.

And the balloon was the first actual real practical way that we could do it. But it was also seen as incredibly dangerous. And people did float away on these things, and they nobody ever heard from them like, "They weren't incredibly dangerous." They already seem dangerous to me now, like I would never go in one.

And remember, this is hydrogen gas. This is the engine burn. Okay.

“So, you know, we have this really clean, lovely floating image of a hot air balloon.”

And one reason, maybe, why we should build in gas bags is because these were really debate models of the modern hot air balloon. You know, the very balloon smelled like it came out of the, you know, the pits of hell. Gas bags were so dangerous, in fact, that King Louis XVI suggested that it balloons were going to go up untethered, then convicted criminals should be the ones to pilot them.

Yet despite the gas bags considerable flaws, people were searching for its ultimate purpose. But that is low. New what the real purpose would be. He wanted to invent an overnight male carrier service, sort of the Fed X of 1861. And he believed, as did others, that up in the upper atmosphere, there was supposed to be

this consistent west-to-east wind. This is not necessarily even close to true, but it was the theory at the top. And if he was right about the wind, then all Thadias needed to achieve his dream was money. And so, on April 19th, 1861, he set up an evening of fundraising in what was then known as the ballooning capital of America, Cincinnati.

Cincinnati became sort of the balloon beginning center. I mean, a lot of balloonists would come there and try out their balloons.

The Cincinnati Gazette actually had hired a Mr. J.C. Bellman as their first official

quote, "Beloon editor." That's a golden age of journalism right there, you have a balloon editor on staff. You know, when they fired the balloon editor, Roman, that's when the decline of print journalism began. And it was in this boom of balloon journalism that Thadias low wanted to demonstrate

to investors that his gas bag, an aircraft he named the Enterprise, would take him from Cincinnati to Washington, D.C. in a single night.

there were parties, and so on, but finally, this big night comes.

“He shows up in classics, sort of American style.”

He's in a stove, pipe, hat, the kind of Lincoln wore. He's in a broad cloth coat, which is we would recognize it as like Tuxedo Tales. And late toward the end of the evening, his assistants come in and say the winds are moving east. That's time to go.

So he gets in there with like, you know, bottles of water and food and brand new wet, inky copies of the Cincinnati paper, so that when he arrives, he can prove that he was in Cincinnati that morning. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

He cuts loose, and then poof, he just disappears into the night.

Just like that, that is vanished. He wouldn't be seen or heard from again until the next morning, by which point he hoped to have landed on the mall in Washington, D.C. In reality, that is, wouldn't see the sunrise behind the unfinished Washington monument. In fact, he wouldn't even get particularly close.

But, thatiest lows flight from Cincinnati would prove to be a defining moment in his life. Instead of taking him to the nation's capital, his foul smelling balloon would instead lead him to a series of new discoveries, discoveries that continue to shape America to this very day. From 99% invisible and BBC studios, this is a history of the United States in a hundred

objects. I'm Roman Mars, and today, the enterprise gas pack, and the birth of the American obsession with pushing higher and higher. It's 4 a.m., and Daddy's low is now alone in the wicker basket of his gas pack, somewhere far above Cincinnati, Ohio.

But he isn't exactly sure where. See even sort of a mystery to him is to what he would find when he, you know, went up this high at night.

“Of course, remember, this is before the invention of the electric bulb.”

So when night fell, it was a night. So he could look down a mile or two or three, and, of course, he saw nothing and up above him. He just saw stars and some moon, right? But while he's up there, he's doing his tests and measurements in this little basket beneath

this hydrogen gas field balloon. And out here at the edge of the then known universe for humans, he discovered the oddities of being there.

He is just humming along at these amazing speeds that no one had ever, you know, reached

at this time. But he's stunned to discover that, you know, inside his little basket, he's not moving at all. He says everything around me was perfectly quiet and still. So still that I could have carried a lighted candle without any protection.

And I let loose sheets of paper without fear of them being disturbed. The reason for this may not be quite clear to my readers, but I was floating with, as well as in the undisturbed atmosphere that was not the slightest sense of motion whatsoever.

“So low sort of discovers that he's not only in the wind, he is the wind, right?”

Heading, who knows where? Thaddeus had embarked on a kind of journey that nobody had ever been on before. He was suspended in the inky black sky, all on his own. And in that darkness, Thaddeus had no way to orient himself. He wouldn't know where he was until the sun came up.

The next morning, he comes down and sees an open field and there's a man at a plow. And he lets off some gas and comes down low enough that he can shout out, "What state is this?" And the man, he looks laughed, he looks right, far off into the woods, but it doesn't make any sense that the sun would come from the woods.

And does it see anybody? And he keeps looking around, low shouts it again. What state is this? And he just keeps looking, and low later realize, of course, the man didn't look up, because no one had ever looked up before.

Why would you look up? Down didn't come from up, up hadn't been invented yet. But the guy does shout, he just shaps towards the woods, because he wants to answer. And he says, "Virginia!" And then low things, well I don't want to stop here.

looks up. And then when he sees what's above him, he goes running off into the woods to hide. The man runs for his life, but low decides to keep going, figuring he must still be close to DC. In reality, he was much further south.

So he travels on a little bit further, and he finally does come down into a field in

Unionville, South Carolina. Now, remember, I mentioned to you, April 19th, 1861, that date might ring a little bit familiar in your head, because April 12th, one week before, is the firing on Fort Sumter. Faddy has had found himself in the deep south, only one week after the first shot of the Civil War.

“Did Faddy know that the Civil War had started a week before he left on this trip?”

They did, but of course, and this is something he's going to find out in the next 24 hours. So the shot had been fired, but no life had been lost. So yes, the Civil War had started, but the Civil War hadn't started, right? It was kind of like a, you know, maybe this will just go away.

And I think most people sort of believe that, but as Faddy says about to learn, that's that was increasingly not the case, despite not really believing in the war yet, the people of South Carolina were still deeply suspicious about Faddy as in his intentions. And then about him just didn't seem quite right. Once he landed, and all these men with guns showed up, he tried to convince them that

he was, you know, a human, because he wrote at one point he says, many of them thought that I was the inhabitant of some ethereal or infernal region who had floated to Earth to do them damage and injury. Yeah. But it was just Cincinnati.

That he has to take some crackers and butter rolls out of his basket thinking, they might show that he's human.

And finally he pulls out a few rubber hot water bottles.

He cut one open. They'd frozen. Right. Yeah. They had a very, very cold.

Cut one open to show them that, you know, this is just ice inside.

“But of course, you later that realized that was the worst thing you could have done, because”

one of them immediately said, how could anyone but a devil put so large of a piece of ice through so small a place as that nozzle, it's an excellent point. You got to give it to him. He was not convincing anybody that he was a normal human. Despite this, Thaddeus does somehow manage to persuade them, but that only creates more problems.

So of course, they all thought he was some kind of Yankees spy. So this one he's been arrested by these clanters, and these foremen out in the field, and he's being taken in the union to go to jail, because he's a spy. And when he gets there, they can't put him in it, because it's already packed with, quote, abolitionists.

Okay. Wow. Okay. So they take him to the hotel, where they're going to put him in a room under arm guard. Now, they do recognize, because he's on a top-at, and tails, that he might be a man of

some means, or a someone of importance.

“But somebody does finally find some like local sort of everyday person who has heard of Thaddeus”

low. As we vouch this way, I mean, keeps him out of jail for the day. But word his spread, and there's like a lynch mob there, and they're out to get it. And so he is, his balloon is put on a train, and then he separately has to go back

to first Kentucky, and then Cincinnati, and then back east.

And he sort of describes like, you know, these trains are packed, and it's full of people escaping this out. I mean, the war, and he realizes the war is on. Soldiers are going both ways. Yeah.

Everyone is getting ready, because suddenly, Thaddeus realized, it was war. Yeah. Heading home on that train, Thaddeus knew his scheme had failed. His balloon had come down nearly 400 miles south west of his intended destination. In fact, he was almost exactly as far away from Washington as where he began.

So the FedEx idea was dead. And on top of that, the world had changed overnight. The war had started. And so if he was ever going to see his erinotic ambitions come true, Thaddeus low needed to go back to the drawing board.

So how does Thaddeus pivot? Pivot's beautiful. He just needs a new stunt, and he comes up with it. And it's only a few weeks later. So that was April.

As June 18th, he has come to DC with his gas bag. And he's inflated it right outside the White House, and nailed it to the ground. But this time, he puts a telegraph system in the basket and runs a wire straight down to the ground where he has a little messenger boy.

in the air. June 18th, 1861, to his Excellency Abraham Lincoln president of the United States. This balloon is right outside his window. And so he taps out a telegraph message.

The first part of it reads, "I can see nearly 50 miles in diameter, the city with its

girdle of encampments presents a superb scene." So he gets a little poetic, but he is a conman too. I mean, he's a carnival barker too.

“He adds in a little LinkedIn sort of gibberish, right?”

So it goes on to say, "And acknowledging indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in the service of this country. I am your excellencies, obedient servant." So that message goes into the White House and believe it or not, Lincoln invites him to dinner because Lincoln, it turns out, is a early adopter.

He's really into new tech. Yeah. And so he goes into the White House and he says they talked late into the night.

But he explains, like, "We should use them for spying capability."

This would be a novel purpose for the gas back. One that made the whole going up and coming back down thing actually useful. So that is lays out his sales pitch to Lincoln. And he explains, I think we can get up there and we can see things that no one has ever seen before.

“And understand in those days, Intel was gathered by putting a 1 or 2 or 3 people on individual”

horses and just sending them off into the woods to sort of scout. And Lincoln got it. He gave Thaddeus a letter of introduction to Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, who was at that time the headman of the war. So he has this letter of introduction.

He goes over there to Winfield Scott's tent. And his assistant, the orderly, says, "Well, the General's busy right now." So, low comes back a couple hours later and says, "He's still busy." Yeah. He comes back a few hours later and says, "He's at lunch."

He goes back a little while later and says, "The General's now sleeping." So he realizes, "Okay, I'm being blown off." Yeah. Yeah.

“And here's one thing you need to know about General Winfield Scott.”

When the war broke out, he was 75 years old. That's in 1861, as there were some road miles on 70. Yeah, right. He was a veteran of the war of 1812. His nickname, just so you know that he wasn't an early adopter, was old fuss and feathers.

I don't know my goodness. So low goes back to the White House. He says, "He tells him that General Scott could not be seen on official business, even at the President's suggestion." Lincoln looked at me a moment, laughed.

He rose, seized his tall silk hat, and bade me, "Come on." And so they walked out of the White House and they walked over to the General's headquarters. This time the General's guard turned and announced the President of the United States. Everybody's suddenly saluting. And this is low-quoting Lincoln.

Well, this is my friend, Professor Low, who is organizing an aeronautic corps for the Army, and is to be its chief. I wish you would facilitate his work in every way and give him all the necessary things to equip his branch of the service on land and on water. And with that, he leaks.

And suddenly, fattiest low is the chief aeronaut of the United States Balloon Corps in service to the Federal Army. Fattiest gets to work right away. He oversees the building of seven hydrogen balloons specifically for the Army, and he personally

takes the first balloon, aptly named Union, through extensive testing.

By the fall of 1861, the King's have been worked out in everything is in place. Fattiest and his balloon corps are ready to launch on the battlefield. How did the soldiers perceive these balloons? Well, they were terrifying when the Confederates realized what these things were that these were observatory balloons.

They would shoot at them. In fact, at first, it was like, you know, ignorant Romans perceiving Hannibal's elephants. You know, they were like, "Oh my God, what are these?" And they just, "It's just unleash your health." Just a lot of fire on these balloons, but of course, their guns couldn't even mile up.

They couldn't reach anywhere close. And in fact, low sort of took the light in the fact that the Confederates were just, you know, using up all their ammo on these balloons.

And if you can believe it, as chief of the first aeronaut of the U.S. military, he was

going to have a direct impact on the war. In fact, Fattiest was regularly breaking new ground. First, there was the time Thattiest and his men attached one of the balloons to an old coal barge. And they moved it up and down the Potomac River, so they could move their balloon and

to place up and down in different battles along the edge of this river. That barge is still referred to by some historians as the first aircraft carrier. Then, one day, when Thattiest was doing his regular reconnaissance, he rose into the air and from his vantage point saw a group of men on horseback behind Confederate lines.

“What that typically meant was somebody important, right, officers from the horseback.”

And so he sent word down the line, aim your cannons over here. There's a bunch of officers over here, bombard here. And they do, they come close, but miss. And those guys scatter. And years afterwards, in a century war book, General James Longstreet wrote a little passage

about how, at one point, they were amazed because President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, General James Longstreet, probably Stonewell Jackson, too, were all there with their staff at this one moment. And then he writes, it was impossible for the enemy to see us as we sat on a horses. In this little field surrounded by tall, heavy timber and thick undergrowth.

And yet, a battery by chance had our range in our exact distance and port upon us a terrifying fire. But it was not by chance. So not by chance.

“And if those shots had connected, the war would have ended.”

Oh my God. In fact, the gas bag was so successful that the South tried to copy it. The South had to respond, you know, there was an arms race of sorts, right. Now, of course, they didn't have, you know, trade with the South. There was no more foreign trade, right.

So they couldn't, they couldn't get materials easily. And so rather scandalously, they appropriated or was donated all of the petty coat material by the ladies of the South. So all the foundation garments and other bits would have to be sacrificed for the greater good.

So they didn't have, they didn't have any silk. And so therefore, they made their underwear below. It was, it was the underwear, but then that, you know, those others, the others claim

“I mean, they got angry about this by the way, later.”

Not a single Southern bell was asked to give up or send it best for the cause, said one. And of course, these were bolts of, you know, draft material before they were made into

a regular clothes, but this petty coat balloon finally gets launched.

The arms races on, they bring the balloon up to Richmond in 1862, and they put it in action and loaves balloon was also in that fight. So they had two observation balloons at the same time. Your official military historians will say, this is the first air to air combat. The Union eventually captured the balloon and gave it to Thatties.

And they cut them up into little squares and every congressman in the north was given one of these little squares of the petty coat, you know, is another stunt to sort of like increase the funding for the balloon core. Despite the failure of the petty coat balloon, Thatties is core, remained incredibly successful. No Union balloon was ever shot down and no balloon core, arrow knot was ever killed.

But strangely, you know, and this is true of all new sort of inventions. There's a set of people that just simply don't care how good it is. They like the old way and strangely, despite all of its successes, it just kind of faded from use by 1863 and kind of disappeared. Like still in the war is faded from use.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, by the end of '62, it was pretty much out of business. After all that, Thatties' balloons were grounded, but he carried on doing what he did best using his failures as a launching pad to the next big thing. At this point, you know, the war ends, and Thatties does what you do in peacetime, which

is to see decides to make money. Some people decided to make money during wartime too, but they did that's true. That's true. Very famously, there are those. Thatties took everything he learned from his balloonous days and turned them into two huge

money-making opportunities.

First Thatties took what he learned about heating up gas on the fly for the battlefield and

turned that into what would become the first home gas heaters.

the low's gas works made of fortune.

Then Thatties turned his sights from heating to cooling.

“Remember that Cincinnati balloon ride in the strange world of the upper atmosphere, Thatties”

observed a phenomenon up there that he couldn't explain. At night, the balloon would grown and sort of almost breathe, and occasionally when it did sort of a bushel of ice would come crashing down on his head. He later discovered that the balloon would go up and down moisture would freeze on the inside of the balloon attached, so just like a glass of ice tea out on a summer porch.

A moisture inside the balloon would stick to the balloon and then when it got a little closer to the earth or warmed up in some way, all of that would loosen and come charred down on Thatties' lows head. So that gave him the idea that maybe you could make ice on land, you know?

And so he starts the Citizens Ice Company, and I think it's the first public ice company.

And of course that makes a fortune, oh my god, he became so fabulously rich. He started the Citizens Bank of Los Angeles, needless to say he'd moved to the west. Where everybody goes, once they make their money, or want to make even more money. In California, he uses that money in a distinctly fattiest way, not to buy a house or a boat, but to take over an entire mountain, oak mountain, just north of Los Angeles, which

even becomes known as Mount Low. Seriously, look at him out there, it's still called that today. His plan was to create something that would bring the sky high experience to the masses, a resort on the top of the world. What's really cool about the Mount Low resort is getting to the top of a mountain, was

not something most people ever did. Yeah.

“I think Katia's wanted to share that balloon experience, right, being at the edge of the”

world, right, the outer edge. And so he created this large, vernacular train, you know, the kind that goes up the steep slope. And that's seeing pictures of this vernacular, you know, I feel perfectly safe for some reason in a vernacular. But this trolley car, oh my god, I mean, Dr. Suez could not have drawn it more rickety.

I would never even get anywhere close to this trolley car, but it would take you to Mount

Low's alpine tavern hotel, and there was a casino there, there was a zoo there at night. There was this massive search light that they had appropriated from a world's fair, that they could shine, and you could see downtown Los Angeles, you know, daytime, you could see the Pacific Ocean from up there, and he sort of demicrotized the entire sort of experience of what he had done in that balloon.

But building a mountain top resort isn't cheap, no matter what you've invented. And before long, thadies' relentless ambition had once again gotten the better of him. He went bankrupt, sort of right around the turn of the 20th century lost all of his money. You know, he longed to be buried at Arlington for his service in the war, and they said, you know, that's only friend listed soldiers, and you were just some made-up dude called

an error not to know. And so he's kind of fading at the turn of the century, but his image is to who he was, this icon of invention and kind of eccentricity was very much in the air. And, you know, you won't find this in any history book, but I'll put this to you, okay. So 1900 is the year that El Frank Baum wrote his book, the Wizard of Oz.

So the titular character is in the beginning of the book, you know, he is this old man and white hair with insane moustaches, sort of half scientists, half crackpot, con man. I then in the dream world of that book, you know, he becomes the showman who invents this whole world and then in the end, you know, jumps in this balloon and flies off and his last words are, "I don't know how to stay on the same thing. I can see it. You can see it, right?"

Absolutely, I can see it. That he slows legacy is hard to pin down, despite his mountain, his many inventions or even

“his apparent influence on classic literature, most of us have never heard his name, but I think”

you can make the argument that his gas back, his dream, planted the seed for every future attempt to fly higher from the airplane to the space shuttle. So stay with me here. When we think of air flight, we think about the Wright brothers, but when the Wright brothers thought of air flight,

the Wright brothers were hosting the first major air show in the US and they specifically invite

“Thaddeus Lowe to come. You know, because he's the grand old man of air flight,”

right, and he had sort of institutionalized this longing to get out to the farthest, the longest, the fastest. He is the grand Franklin of the air and you know, they want him to come and honor him. And so he goes. And he has a grand daughter named Florence Leontine, she is eight years old. And in one of the exhibits, there is this sort of cartoon like display with like movable airplanes and, you know, they knew that Thaddeus Lowe was going to bring his

grand daughter, so they had a cartoon cut out of Florence in the airplane, as the pilot. Yeah, nice. Before long, Florence would pick up where her grandfather left off, and it's due Florence that I'm going to let Jack just trace the long tail of Thaddeus's legacy, though, by her adulthood, she wasn't called Florence anymore. She was called Pancho Barnes. She dressed as a man, smokes the guards, and she gets her pilot's license in 1928.

And at that time, a lot of air experimentation was done by women, as much as men. It's not just a million air heart whom we've all heard of. In fact, Pancho, we'll now call her,

became the first female stunt pilot in Hollywood. My goodness. She broke a million air

heart speed record. She clocked 196.19 miles per hour. That's amazing. And after breaking that record, Pancho turned a patch of land in the desert into the destination for Hollywood starlets, test pilots, and anybody else who wanted to land their plane somewhere where they would be guaranteed a good time. The resort quickly became a notorious party destination that Pancho named the happy bottom riding club. It became the hangout after

World War II. And people would come out there and go horseback riding, but there would also be these wild parties at night. And, you know, anyone who broke a record got a free stick dinner in the restaurant, you know, that kind of thinks of everybody hung out there. Chuck Yager was one of the big attendees there. Chuck Yager, the first pilot in history to break the sound barrier.

“Either a great little story that I think he tells years later, but the night before he broke the sound”

barrier. He went for a midnight ride with Pancho on some others at the happy bottom riding club. And someone had closed a gate, and they couldn't see it on the way back. So the horse hit it and he flew off and broke a couple of his ribs. And so when he did his famous test flight that the next day, he had several broken ribs. If he had told anybody, he would not have been hurt with his life scrubbed. Yeah. And when he got into the cockpit, I think somebody noticed that he closed the

thing with his left hand because he couldn't use his right hand. Despite the ground breaking achievement, Yager wouldn't become an astronaut like the other test pilots, largely because he didn't have a college degree. But he did train them. In fact, he trained one of the ones that went to the moon. When I was little, everybody, of course, we all loved Neil Armstrong. He was handsome and tall and brave. And Buzz Aldrin, he was talkative and cocky.

He's a whole buzz. Yeah. He was go buzz. But it wasn't Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin that Yager trained. It was Jack Hitz personal favorite. The one, almost everyone forgets. There's a third guy in my college. Yeah. The other guy. Yeah. And that's interesting that all of his life, he explained that there was only one question that he ever got asked. And that was what it was like to be as far away from Earth as anyone has ever been. Because that was his achievement.

Right. That was his day. As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left to walk on the moon, Mike Collins was the one who had to stay behind on the spacecraft. And in the module, he would orbit the moon, traveling the farthest from Earth that anyone ever had. And he did so alone.

“Because remember, when he turns to the corner, when he goes round to the dark side of the moon,”

he's out of radio contact. And there's no light. Right. There is nothing. You can see nothing. He's in this tin camp and he originally answered the question outside my window. I can see stars and that is all. Where I know the moon will be, there is simply a black void. The moon's presence is defined solely by the absence of the stars. I am alone now. Truly alone. And absolutely isolated

from any known life, I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be 3 billion plus two over

on the other side of the moon. And one plus God knows what on this side. Collins was alone,

is very much the scene of that is low taking off an un-electrified world for his flight.

“Absolutely. Low's description of the sky and the sensation of being out there, you know,”

three and a half four miles above the earth. It seems so very close to what my Collins is describing, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles above the earth. Collins was weightless in his gravity

free capsule, floating like that is his balloon all those years earlier. Despite being separated

by more than a century, these two men were experiencing the same thing, one in a wicker basket over Cincinnati and the other in a tin can on the dark side of the moon. And it was the exact same instinct that had led both the aeronaut and the astronaut to take to the skies. It seems

like specifically a very American obsession to try to push their way to the outer edge of

something that whole frontier mentality that has kind of been with us from the beginning. This is great, Jacket. Thank you so much for talking with me. I decided to lightful time. Great. Me too. Jacket is an author and contributing editor of Harper's The New York Times magazine

“and this American life. If you like this story about Thaddeus low, you should check out Jack's book,”

bunch of amateurs, which is an inside look at the inventor's tinklers and other eccentric's whose creations have made America what it is today. A history of the United States in a hundred objects is a production of 99% invisible and BBC studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Isaac Fisher. Or the producers are Ellie Lightfoot, Brenna Dol Dorf, and Priscilla Alabe. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell,

mixing by Charlie Brandon King, fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% invisible, our executive producer is Kathy too. From BBC studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelle and the production manager is Mabel Fennigan Wright, artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% of visible is part of the serious XM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC

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