January 15, 2013 • 31 mins
One of the earliest civilizations we've detected, the Myceneans, kicked off the habit of creating a mask of a deceased person's face in deathly repose. What began as an ancient rite has only recently fallen out of practice around the world. Learn about this dignified but ghoulish custom with Josh and Chuck.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camry.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. This is a very plaster
(00:21):
horrific episode of Stuff You Should Know. Did you ever
work a plaster when you were a kid art class?
That's a no, I did work. I had one of
those little uh pottery wheels. Oh yeah, like the the
toy ish version of it. Oh cool? And uh there's
(00:43):
something like clay wet clay in your hands is really
a neat feeling. Hey, just tell them any more of that?
Yeah you know, Yeah, I made for one sexy scene.
Male nipples made an appearance in that scene. Swayzy shirtless. Yeah, okay,
I believe so he was always shirtless? Yeah I think
(01:04):
he was. He was shirtless for most of his career.
Have you ever seen that Dirty Dancing You know at
the end of that movie when like they do the
whole dance showdown things that somebody put iron Man in
over Patrick No, over, um, Jennifer Gray, So like it's
the whole scene, but it's Iron Man dancing with Patrick
(01:27):
so ezy and it's really neat and hilarious. For the song,
iron Man is used instead of Nope, iron Man the
cartoon superhero, the comic book hero is dancing with Patrick's
wazy at the for some reason. At the end of this,
I gotta see that now. You know what that looks like.
You should check it out. I cannot visualize it well,
(01:48):
visualize this pal. July twenty Chicago's hot, real hot. Thirty
something people, thirty two people, maybe thirty three died from
the heat that day. That's how hot it was in Chicago.
We should we should say Chuck and I. Um. Because
(02:11):
of our work schedules. Um, we are frequently sequestered away
from everybody else while they do fun things like hilarious
book exchanges is a good current example. Yeah, if you
hear people laughing in the deep background, which is something
you've never heard before on our show, that that's because
our departments having a party without us. It's really sad,
(02:31):
all right, So back to it, back to July twenty,
there was a heat. Yeah, there was a movie, a
Clark Gable movie that a guy named John Dillinger wanted
to go see. Famous gangster John Dillinger. He was a
famous bank robber. He uh. He was an Indiana man
and over the course of a year he robbed a
(02:51):
ton of banks. He apparently robbed a police station or two,
killed at least one cop. And on his birthday, a
couple of months prior, I think it may he had
been made Public Enemy number one by Jager Hoover's FBI.
On this night July, he would be betrayed by a
woman in Red Madam as a matter of fact, and
(03:15):
a sage and a sage that's right. Uh. And he
went with his girlfriend and Anna's age, who was his
girlfriend's landlady, to see this movie. And after they came out,
the FBI was waiting for him. He takes off running,
pulls out his gun, really does, and they just kill
him with a hail of bullets. One of them gets
him in the back of the neck and it goes
out his eye. And that did it for John Dillinger,
(03:36):
a k public Enemy number one and sold out by
Anna's age as it turns out, who was then deported
back to Romania, I think for her troubles. Yeah, thanks
for the help. Now here's your one way ticket on
this disease. Ridden ship exactly. Uh so he uh, he dies,
but that's not the end of the story. He was
(03:57):
basically put on public display. Either he was put on
public display or the public said, uh, we're gonna need
to see this guy. Yeah, that was sort of a
thing though, Like I remember when I remember when Jesse
James was killed, same deal though. Uh, Like these notorious
UM criminals sometimes when they were caught, it would be
like a big thing, like in like back back in
(04:19):
the old day. They would put him like out in
the town squear, like in the pine box, come by
and look at him. This was I mean Chicago in
the thirties was not that far removed from that. You know,
wild West, I get your picture taken next to the
body of Jesse James. So that's kind of what they
do with Dillinger UM. And at least two different groups
actually three, but only one was authorized made casts of
(04:44):
his face after he was dead, and we call those
death masks. What those guys were doing was carrying on
a centuries old tradition, millennia old. Really, if you want
to get technical of basically making a negative image of
a dead person and his face so you can make um,
I guess masks from it later on, yeah, or you know,
(05:07):
a full statute head um bust if you will, or
bust or full statue if you really want to go
all the way. But um, curiously, and I find this
to be one of the facts of the show. They
did make a positive of Dillinger's face, and j Edgar
Hoover had one in his office as I guess, uh,
sort of a trophy of swords he did. I thought
(05:29):
that was pretty cool. I never knew that, Yeah, that
would be cool. And not only have a death mask
of John Dillinger, but the one that was in Jedger
Hoover's office, that's just specific. Um. So I said that
this is a very old thing and it goes back
at least to the Egyptians. But they're the first ones
(05:50):
who we know made some sort of funerary mask of
the deceased. They had a very good reason, and there's
was that if the soul, if you didn't make a
mask of the deceased, the soul couldn't find the body
any longer. It wouldn't have a face in the afterlife. Yeah,
because as you learned in our mummification cast, you the
(06:11):
face is wrapped up right, so there is no face
any longer. So there you have it. You got like
a King Tut and it's not like the regular death mass.
It didn't look like them, right or Nate. Uh, Yeah,
I think King Tuts was actually like that's his face. Yeah,
that they went to that level of trouble. I mean,
I knew they tried to make it look like him,
(06:33):
but was it actually a mold of it? Yeah. The
Egyptians weren't the only ancient group to uh to do
this either, Chuck. The Mycenaeans, who were whose civilization was
discovered by Heinrich Schliemer. Yeah. Um, he found some death
masks and they're really rough and weird looking, but they are.
(06:56):
They took gold sheets that were pliable enough so that
they laid over a people's faces and they made like
a again, a funerary mask. Yeah. So if you didn't have, um,
if you weren't super famous or nobleman or um have
a lot of money, you could still get the old
death mask. It was probably made of linen and painted
gold or papyrus maybe, um, but you you could still
(07:19):
get your death mask even if you weren't king died. Sure. Um.
The Romans did a lot of this too, and the
Romans actually had I thought I knew everything about ancient
Rome but um, it turns out that they made death masks,
and there at the funeral, a person who kind of
looked like the deceased would wear their death mask, and
(07:41):
then other people would wear that person's ancestors their dead
relatives death masks, and basically you just have like a
dead family reunion at the person's funeral. Then after the
funeral that that recently deceased person's death mask was put
together with all of his relatives or her relatives just
wait for the next person that and then he would
come out with everybody else to bring the new person
(08:04):
into the circle, which is kind of neat. I didn't
realize that they did that. It's very odd, but and
I wonder if they would do impressions of them like, oh,
I'm uncle Slaviast, look at me, I love wine, Come
here and sit on my lap. Yeah. Uh so, um,
you mentioned the ancient Romans. Um Caesar Julius Caesar actually
(08:25):
had a full wax cast of his entire body after
his death, stab wounds and everything. And Mark Anthony was
I guess dumb enough to go show it off to
a crowd, and they rioted and burned down the Senate building.
So I don't know what reaction he was looking for.
That probably wasn't it. And they're like, we love your records,
(08:46):
not that Mark Anthony. So um, I guess with the
Romans too, with the Gypsians. Basically throughout history, if you
weren't wealthy, you, um probably weren't going to have a
death mask made of you. If you weren't wealthier, you
weren't like the king. Yeah. And one reason is because
(09:07):
a lot of times these were artists before photography, artists
and painters and sculptors. As soon as someone died of note,
they would get their death mask made so they could
then paint them and sculpt them and have a reference
for what they look like. Yeah, and the same thing.
I mean, artists didn't paint nobody's you know what I'm saying,
So you didn't need to have a death mask made
(09:28):
of you. Um. And this is this is pretty much
the way it was for Europe, in Europe for most
of history except in Italy. Italy pretty early on said
if you if you, if you achieve something notable, probably
make a death mask of you. So if you see yeah,
(09:48):
early inventors and artists and those kind of like poets.
If you're in Italy, you probably have a death mask made.
If you're a notable personality like Da Vinci, sure he's
probably a death mask. Um. But elsewhere England, France, all that,
it wasn't until late modern history that um, he started
to see death masks of non noble people coming out.
(10:12):
And as a matter of fact, it was Madame Tussoed,
the lady behind the wax museums, who who kind of
brought um death masks to the masses during the French Revolution.
She and her uncle, uh Philippe Courteous, They were just
masters of wax and they worked a lot. Um. There
(10:33):
was one of Louis the sixteenth Mistresses, was went underwent
the guillotine, and um, she apparently had a terrible grimace
on her face when she died. People could have seen
you also curled up your hand for some reason. Yeah,
I don't think she didn't too, um and uh so
her Philippe Curtis, uh he basically pinched her face back
(10:57):
into pinch the decapitated heads face back into a nice
position and then rolled her in some whacks that he
laid out next to the grave. Wow, yeah, that's that's
they They were operating on this higher death mask level
like no one ever has. But the Madam two sold
Wax museum that you enjoyed today grew out of a
death mask operation. Interesting and it seems like a very
(11:19):
macab thing to do. But um, if you it's different
now these days we like to remember our deceased ones
as living and look at photographs of them doing things
where they're alive and lively and go die over there
where we don't have to think about the close casket funeral.
(11:39):
But um, it wasn't the same back then. They would
have they would royal and wealthy families would display these
death mask of their relatives in like you know, the
parlor room or the drawing room or here in the
main hallway, and it was you know, it was the
point of pride. It wasn't like macawbre weird or And
then eventually it became pseudo scientific with the advent of phrenology. Phrenology,
(12:04):
we I wish we had a good article on that.
We don't. I haven't seen one. It's pretty interesting, like
the early days of that stuff. Maybe we'll pulling together.
It's like when people were just starting to figure out
the brain and not really having any idea what they
were doing, really missing the mark a lot of times. Yeah. Yeah.
So phrenology basically was the idea that you could predict
a person's personality behavior, whether someone was a criminal or not, um,
(12:29):
how intelligent they would grow up to be by like
the shape of their face, the shape of their skull,
the bumps on their skull, um. And so phrenologists, as
as this field grew in the nineteenth century, kind of
increased the demand for um death masks because they wanted
to compare people side by side. So you've gotten some
(12:49):
pretty cool death masks of say like um, John Joseph Merrick,
Oh really yeah, um or uh, he's I think there's
like full body asks of him, um or you know,
a criminal or a genius or whatever, and these phrenologist
would keep him side by side and try to compare
and figure out. It's God, there's got to be a
(13:12):
key there somewhere, and they have themselves convinced, but they
were all wrong. Was there something There had to be
something to some of that research, right, I think there
was a lot of consensus among scientists, and they're all wrong.
Let's disappointing. Um. One cool thing is that later on,
in today's world, you can look back at some of
(13:33):
these death masks and gain a little bit of insight diagnostically,
speaking on how someone might have died. UM. In this
article they mentioned Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott. They think
now he died of a stroke because his death mask
he has the telltale signs of, like the droopy face
on one side. And Abraham Lincoln they think might have
(13:54):
had a wasting disease because he had life masks made,
which is the same thing except alive. Before he died,
had a couple of them made, and that they look
at these now and say, you know what Abraham Lincoln
might have been dying of, like tuberculosis or something? Maybe? Right?
Is that what they just said, a wasting disease. I
didn't even know what. I think that's a disease. Yeah,
(14:14):
that makes sense, consumption. But then, of course Booth took
care of that in a more hasty manner. Yes, I
don't want to give a spoiler away for the movie,
but I'm pretty surely can get shot. Um. There was
a speaking of Booth. His brother Edwin had a UM.
He was like one of the most famous actors at
least in the country, if not the world when he
was working, and he had a death mask made and
(14:37):
it was collected by a man named Lawrence of Arabia. No,
his name was Lawrence Hutton, and Lawrence Hutton was a
literary um editor for Harper's Magazine, which is still around today.
Very good UM. And he was in a junk store
(14:58):
in New York one time and ran across the death
mask and it just was immediately smitten with the idea
of collecting these things. So he spent the rest of
his life traveling the world finding death masks, buying him
having am made of people. In some cases he had
one of Edwin Booth. And he amassed this incredibly large collection,
the world's largest individual collection of death masks UM. And
(15:23):
when he died, he bequeathed it to Yale. No, Princeton,
I'm sorry. So Princeton has this museum of death masks
now and see that. Well, lucky for you, buddy, they
digitized it. Yep. They have like this really nice website, UM,
the Lawrence Hutton death Mask Museum website and it's got
(15:45):
all of them on there. It's really really interesting. Some
are very very old and like poorly done. There's one
of Lincoln that it's just like looking at Lincoln's face
because he's so recognizable, but to see the details. Daniel
dey lewis right there all right, and you can't hear
his weird voice, but you can almost you can almost
(16:05):
hear it's just looking at it. But the it's it's
the details. That's the thing about death masks that are
so I think um alluring to some people is it's
it's not only the detail of like you know, they're
the age and face and what life did to them,
but it's also the detail of the absence of life,
(16:25):
like that it's a death mask, you know, like the
hollow eyes or in the case of Dillinger, the bullet hole. Um.
Apparently that his death mask was so detailed. They did
such a good job with it that you could see
the abrasions on his face from where he hit the
pavement when he fell down dead. You're looking at some
of these up close, like the details remarkable, it's pretty eerie. Um.
So if you can't make it the Princeton, you can
(16:46):
check out the Lawrence Hutton. Just type in Lawrence Hutton
Princeton and we'll bring that up. It's pretty cool little
website you can spend some time on. Yeah, and if
you do go to Princeton. They got a great little
brup pub. You should go to see the death mask,
go have some beer. What a pub? Yeah, I mean
I can't remember. I mean I assume it's still there.
It opened new when I was living there in the
mid nineties. Um, I bet it's still there, but it
(17:09):
was kind of a new at the time. It was
like with brew pub. Yeah, this is crazy. It's crazy, alright,
So let's talk about how you do this, shall we Yes,
you need to do it really soon after the person dies,
because you don't want the bloat to set in. Um,
you can distort the face and they want like the
death face after right, exactly, So they would apply grease
(17:34):
to the face, especially on facial hair because, uh, it
made it easier to take the bandages off and they
didn't want to like rip out your eyebrows. Yeah, because
you still had a funeral of the hold exactly. Uh,
do you want to look like Sergeant Mauser from police Academy?
Do you remember? Yeah, he got his eyebrows blowing off.
That is. Have you ever seen anyone with no eyebrows?
I saw Mouser. It's just weird because sometimes you can't
(17:57):
pinpoint why they look so freaky. I remember guy in
high school shaved his eyebrows. One of the you know,
one of the bad kids, came in one day with this.
That's how he was rebelling. I don't know, he was
just one of those bad kids. Like I didn't associate
with him because I was a good boy. But he
came in one day in my industrial large class. He
has eyebrows shaved, and it freaked me out. Oh yeah,
(18:18):
Like I definitely didn't have anything to do it after that.
It was really strange looking he saved his eyebrows. Yeah,
I think it was probably a pink floid thing. So, um,
then you applied the plaster bandages. Um you. It's interesting
is the first layers where you get all your detail,
that's really what the death mask is, and then all
the other layers just reinforced that first layer. Right. It
(18:40):
telegraphs that anybody who's ever hung dry wall knows that
if you don't get that thing smooth when you tape it,
it just it's broadcast throughout the whole the whole wall.
It's that it's just ruined. Yeah, I just set the
high I was just putting the house down. My guest bedroom. Yeah,
that's just very bad job in there. Uh. And it's
(19:01):
funny when contractors have come by since then, they've gone
in that room and I've been like, yeah, boy, I
don't know who did this. It sucks. Um. All right,
So the plaster sets Back in the day, it took
about an hour. These days, um, it'll set in just
a few minutes, and then you carefully remove the mold.
You've got your negative, and then it's up to you.
(19:22):
You can do a wax positive, you can do bronze,
um what else. However, but you want to charge people, Yeah,
I guess so marble. There's one in Napoleon that they
made out of marble. Really Yeah. Yeah, he's not very
intimidating when you see his death mask, but I mean
they broke his spirit pretty good. Yeah. Sure, exile to
(19:44):
an island. It's just you and some other jerks. It
might have been nice. Yeah, I don't think he liked it.
He was too bent on taking over the world. The
stick came on an island was like the greatest insult
is what you control now, Napoleon and this little tiny space.
Um you said that, Uh that these days plaster drives
in a few minutes. Um. And actually there were death masks.
(20:09):
I'm sure somebody somewhere still making a death mask here there,
but um, George Bernard Shaw had one made when he
died in the nineteen fifties, so it's still some something
of a modern event. Um, I'm totally gonna get one made,
are you Yeah? Why not? All right? Uh? Nicola Tesla
had one made. Yeah, his is Have you ever seen his?
Is interesting because I've only seen the one picture that one. Yeah,
(20:32):
as a younger man, so he got older. He's just
I don't know, you know, the ears are huge, and
his nose was really large. It doesn't look that large
in this picture, and I guess I've never seen it
at profile. But yeah, he looks sort of like David Bowie. No,
it was a guy, the old old guy who took
all the drugs Walter Math, not Burrows, but Timothy Learry
(20:56):
sort of looked like a Timothy Larry before he died,
like just old virt Timothy Leary died on webcam, right,
didn't he like live stream his death? Like even before
anyone knew how to live stream, he figured it out somewhere.
I had no idea. I believe you did. That's sad.
I'm sure it's up on the web all right. Shall
we tell her awesome kind of fact of the podcast
(21:19):
story of the Unknown Woman of the Scene a k a.
The Lincoln You list scene, nineteenth century Paris, Josh, here's
the story. An anonymous woman, UH moved to Paris from
the country, falls in love with a young man and
gets her heart broke in two by this French jerk.
(21:43):
She is distraught. She cast herself into the river and
uh the river scene? Is it scene? I believe and
sin and nobody claimed the body ever, and the mortician
was was taken her beauty and the he said, oh,
this dead lady is so hot. Maybe, but um he
(22:06):
was taken with her beauty and her calm, almost peaceful
expression on her face. No one ever claimed her. He
did a death mask and said, now she is known
as the unknown Women of the Scene or the sink
the Lincoln. And they a lot of people ended up
having uh copies of this death mask in their house
(22:27):
as I guess art or something. Yeah, this is kind
of weird. Yeah, but I mean this is this is
before collector's plates had come along, maybe and it was
like spoons from St. Louis or this lady's death mask. Right. Um,
so the the author of this article poke some holes
in that story. Yeah. The truth is that the this
death mask was in wide circulation, right, but the it
(22:50):
probably wasn't from a woman who drowned, because her features
would have become bloated and distorted by the time she
started to float to the surface. Um. And she also
looks kind of peaceful. Yeah, so they think that's probably
a life mask posed for by a live model, but
they never recorded who it was. But the mystery around it,
(23:12):
I think probably helped sell some of the death masks,
so they kept it going. And then that's the end
of the story. You think, here's where it gets really
good me. Yeah. Uh. Nineteen sixty Peter Safar, an Austrian doctor,
is developing this really radical new thing called trying to
save someone who's having a heart attack. Rather than just
(23:34):
being like, oh well yeah, which is something I could do?
There is something you could do. It's called CPR, and
he championed it and got in touch with a Norwegian
toymaker named asmund uh Laird. All that sounds so made up,
it does and arm intens arian and um said, you
(23:54):
know what, I need a way to teach this. I
need some sort of like plastic dummy to teach people
how to do this new thing old CPR. And I
got this. I got just the thing. This will use
this face of this woman of the scene and throw
it on a dummy bust. And that is who recessa
Annie was. And as I was reading this the whole time,
(24:15):
I was like, no way, is that recessa Annie? Is
that recessa Annie? And it was on the following page
was the sentence that became recessa Annie. And I literally
felt like, I don't know, it felt like exalted. Yeah, man,
I used to like put my mouth on that thing
on the nineteenth century death mask. Yeah yeah, every summer
for lifeguarding. My mom used to teach CPR classes and
(24:38):
she had a recessa Annie and the kid too, who
had like that snappy little track suit, like dark blue tracks,
like you had these in your house. Yeah, it was
a little off, but yeah, eventually I was like it's neat. Yeah,
I can't believe. I'm still a little blown away that
that's who they ended up using. Yeah, very neat. And
(25:00):
when you looked and I looked up the death mask,
and then I looked up Pricessa Annie, and I was like, Yeah,
that's her. That's cool, Except she's got nostrils in a
mouth hole, right, which is very important if you're going
to practice CPR, right, or if you're gonna make a
life mask, you want to make sure that the person
has a way to breathe, and that's usually threw straws
into the nostrils. Josh, if you live in Michigan Midland
(25:21):
County Historical Museum, there they have Jesse James and Butch Cassidy. Sweet.
You can go by and check that out. You know.
If you go to the Maker's Mark Distillery there little tour,
they have Frank James Gunn. One of the owner's grandfathers
was the guy who Frank James surrendered to and he
handed his pistol over. It's pretty neat. Have you ever
been there? Did you dip your own bottle? They let
(25:45):
you do that, they do, Yeah, I know, why didn't
you do that? Man? How can you go to the
maker's mark and not dip your own bottle. If you
dip your own bottle, then it becomes a memento and
it seems like a waste of bourbon. Oh you wouldn't
drink it all right? Uh where else? There's this very
cool thing and uh called the Black Museum. I look
(26:07):
this up in Scotland Yard. Oh yeah, I want to
go there. Well you can't. I know. I want to
meet Scotland Yard detective who can get me in? Well
you can't, you're not at Scotland Yard Detective yourself. I
will then go to Scotland Yard Detective School so I
can get into this thing. This thing has been around
since eighteen seventy four and then moved and refurbished in
(26:28):
the nineteen eighties to New Scotland Yard. And it was
originally called the Black Museum. Now it's called the Crime Museum.
And do they have like letters from Jack the Ripper
in there? They have nooses that hung famous people, They
have weapons from famous murder cases and a bunch of
death masks. Apparently, why would you not let the public
(26:48):
in that? I think any British police officer can go
if they like, make a reservation like you don't have
to be a Scotland yard dick, but uh yeah, pretty
cool at the Ripper Letters, that's awesome. Yeah, there's gotta
be some movie plot based around the Black Museum that
you could come up with that seems like a just
the name itself, like everything comes alive maybe at night. Yeah,
(27:12):
there you go. There's your movie and poor Ben Stiller
gets in trouble and that's where it goes self. Um,
if you want to learn more about death masks and
you want to see some cool pictures of death masks,
you can type the words death masks into the search
bar how stuff works dot com. And since I said
search bar, it's time for what, well, a couple of
(27:34):
quick pieces of business and then listen to mail. Okay,
so what's the first order of business, Chuck, Well, we
got a TV show coming out on Science Channel January nineteenth,
which is right around the corner, uh ten pm, aaring
two episodes on the first night, premiere night after Idiot
Abroad's premiere, which is a very good leading for us.
(27:55):
We're super excited about that. And what more do you
need to know? Nothing? You need to know that you
should be there watching. Yeah, such a little DVR and uh,
you know, give us some love, make some noise at
the Science channel Facebook page that will help us out.
And Twitter, Yeah, we appreciate it. What about listening now? Okay, Josh,
I'm gonna call this Martha. Martha's got a few corrections
(28:18):
for us on our and we haven't done corrections in
a while. But on our topic of peak oil. She's
in the business. Uh, she knows a lot about it. Uh.
First of all, she affirms me, which I like. Chuckle's right. Guys, dinosaurs,
in no way, shape or form make up oil or
gas deposits. Most of the source material comes from things
(28:39):
like algae and phytoplankton that has died and sunk to
the bottom of its lake, ocean or seat um number two.
The things you said about proved reserves being unreliable, it's
partially true, guys. In some countries, like the U S
and Canada, UK the members of the Eurozone, proved reserves
are actually audited by regulatory bodies. In the US it's
(29:00):
the sec U. This is because an investor would most
likely consider the amount of proved reserves a company has
access to, since that tends to be a good indicator
of the health of the firm, whether or not it's
a sound investment. If you misrepresent your reserves to the public,
sec will come after you and the penalties can be severe.
So in some countries the proved reserves is very conservative,
actually heavily audited and is probably pretty reliable. But she
(29:24):
did point out that other countries, um where they might
not want to be as forthcoming. You can get some
hinky numbers, right, So I feel like we said that
I can't remember. Uh. And then number three she takes
its t task a little bit. On fracking. She said,
I know it's a contentious subject and we just should
do a podcast on this. It's in the in my ideas.
(29:46):
Cute is it? Um? You guys refer to fracking as
causing an environmental disaster every time someone does it. You
may call me a shill, but even Lisa Jackson of
the e p A, who was not a friend of
the oil industry, has said that there are no proven
cases of wracking resulting in underground freshwater contamination, and fracking
has been conducted in the U s. It's some id forties.
(30:06):
It's far more likely that poor, well designed and bad
cement jobs would be the culprit. However, there is a
big study being conducted right now by the e p A,
so all this may change if they find something, but
as of now, the science doesn't support the position of
most anti fracking groups. So I definitely want to do
a podcast on this now. I feel like she's challenged.
I feel like she's using psychology on us right now.
(30:28):
She is. I love your show. I find it fascinating,
but I'm weird like that, keep up the great work.
Can't wait to your TV show in January. And that
is from Martha. Martha. That was a perfect letter from
an expert, somebody in the field, taking us the task,
being nice about it, yeah, and letting us tell everybody
else that maybe we got it wrong, maybe didn't you know,
(30:48):
and then mentioning our TV show exactly. So thank you
for the perfect letter. Yes. Uh. If you want to
send us a perfect tweet, you can tweet to us
at s y s K podcast. You can send us
the for perfect Facebook posting at Facebook dot com, slash
stuff you Should Know, and you can send us a
perfect email to Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com. For
(31:15):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
Stuff works dot com m brought to you by the
two thousand twelve Toyota Camera
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camry.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. This is a very plaster
(00:21):
horrific episode of Stuff You Should Know. Did you ever
work a plaster when you were a kid art class?
That's a no, I did work. I had one of
those little uh pottery wheels. Oh yeah, like the the
toy ish version of it. Oh cool? And uh there's
(00:43):
something like clay wet clay in your hands is really
a neat feeling. Hey, just tell them any more of that?
Yeah you know, Yeah, I made for one sexy scene.
Male nipples made an appearance in that scene. Swayzy shirtless. Yeah, okay,
I believe so he was always shirtless? Yeah I think
(01:04):
he was. He was shirtless for most of his career.
Have you ever seen that Dirty Dancing You know at
the end of that movie when like they do the
whole dance showdown things that somebody put iron Man in
over Patrick No, over, um, Jennifer Gray, So like it's
the whole scene, but it's Iron Man dancing with Patrick
(01:27):
so ezy and it's really neat and hilarious. For the song,
iron Man is used instead of Nope, iron Man the
cartoon superhero, the comic book hero is dancing with Patrick's
wazy at the for some reason. At the end of this,
I gotta see that now. You know what that looks like.
You should check it out. I cannot visualize it well,
(01:48):
visualize this pal. July twenty Chicago's hot, real hot. Thirty
something people, thirty two people, maybe thirty three died from
the heat that day. That's how hot it was in Chicago.
We should we should say Chuck and I. Um. Because
(02:11):
of our work schedules. Um, we are frequently sequestered away
from everybody else while they do fun things like hilarious
book exchanges is a good current example. Yeah, if you
hear people laughing in the deep background, which is something
you've never heard before on our show, that that's because
our departments having a party without us. It's really sad,
(02:31):
all right, So back to it, back to July twenty,
there was a heat. Yeah, there was a movie, a
Clark Gable movie that a guy named John Dillinger wanted
to go see. Famous gangster John Dillinger. He was a
famous bank robber. He uh. He was an Indiana man
and over the course of a year he robbed a
(02:51):
ton of banks. He apparently robbed a police station or two,
killed at least one cop. And on his birthday, a
couple of months prior, I think it may he had
been made Public Enemy number one by Jager Hoover's FBI.
On this night July, he would be betrayed by a
woman in Red Madam as a matter of fact, and
(03:15):
a sage and a sage that's right. Uh. And he
went with his girlfriend and Anna's age, who was his
girlfriend's landlady, to see this movie. And after they came out,
the FBI was waiting for him. He takes off running,
pulls out his gun, really does, and they just kill
him with a hail of bullets. One of them gets
him in the back of the neck and it goes
out his eye. And that did it for John Dillinger,
(03:36):
a k public Enemy number one and sold out by
Anna's age as it turns out, who was then deported
back to Romania, I think for her troubles. Yeah, thanks
for the help. Now here's your one way ticket on
this disease. Ridden ship exactly. Uh so he uh, he dies,
but that's not the end of the story. He was
(03:57):
basically put on public display. Either he was put on
public display or the public said, uh, we're gonna need
to see this guy. Yeah, that was sort of a
thing though, Like I remember when I remember when Jesse
James was killed, same deal though. Uh, Like these notorious
UM criminals sometimes when they were caught, it would be
like a big thing, like in like back back in
(04:19):
the old day. They would put him like out in
the town squear, like in the pine box, come by
and look at him. This was I mean Chicago in
the thirties was not that far removed from that. You know,
wild West, I get your picture taken next to the
body of Jesse James. So that's kind of what they
do with Dillinger UM. And at least two different groups
actually three, but only one was authorized made casts of
(04:44):
his face after he was dead, and we call those
death masks. What those guys were doing was carrying on
a centuries old tradition, millennia old. Really, if you want
to get technical of basically making a negative image of
a dead person and his face so you can make um,
I guess masks from it later on, yeah, or you know,
(05:07):
a full statute head um bust if you will, or
bust or full statue if you really want to go
all the way. But um, curiously, and I find this
to be one of the facts of the show. They
did make a positive of Dillinger's face, and j Edgar
Hoover had one in his office as I guess, uh,
sort of a trophy of swords he did. I thought
(05:29):
that was pretty cool. I never knew that, Yeah, that
would be cool. And not only have a death mask
of John Dillinger, but the one that was in Jedger
Hoover's office, that's just specific. Um. So I said that
this is a very old thing and it goes back
at least to the Egyptians. But they're the first ones
(05:50):
who we know made some sort of funerary mask of
the deceased. They had a very good reason, and there's
was that if the soul, if you didn't make a
mask of the deceased, the soul couldn't find the body
any longer. It wouldn't have a face in the afterlife. Yeah,
because as you learned in our mummification cast, you the
(06:11):
face is wrapped up right, so there is no face
any longer. So there you have it. You got like
a King Tut and it's not like the regular death mass.
It didn't look like them, right or Nate. Uh, Yeah,
I think King Tuts was actually like that's his face. Yeah,
that they went to that level of trouble. I mean,
I knew they tried to make it look like him,
(06:33):
but was it actually a mold of it? Yeah. The
Egyptians weren't the only ancient group to uh to do
this either, Chuck. The Mycenaeans, who were whose civilization was
discovered by Heinrich Schliemer. Yeah. Um, he found some death
masks and they're really rough and weird looking, but they are.
(06:56):
They took gold sheets that were pliable enough so that
they laid over a people's faces and they made like
a again, a funerary mask. Yeah. So if you didn't have, um,
if you weren't super famous or nobleman or um have
a lot of money, you could still get the old
death mask. It was probably made of linen and painted
gold or papyrus maybe, um, but you you could still
(07:19):
get your death mask even if you weren't king died. Sure. Um.
The Romans did a lot of this too, and the
Romans actually had I thought I knew everything about ancient
Rome but um, it turns out that they made death masks,
and there at the funeral, a person who kind of
looked like the deceased would wear their death mask, and
(07:41):
then other people would wear that person's ancestors their dead
relatives death masks, and basically you just have like a
dead family reunion at the person's funeral. Then after the
funeral that that recently deceased person's death mask was put
together with all of his relatives or her relatives just
wait for the next person that and then he would
come out with everybody else to bring the new person
(08:04):
into the circle, which is kind of neat. I didn't
realize that they did that. It's very odd, but and
I wonder if they would do impressions of them like, oh,
I'm uncle Slaviast, look at me, I love wine, Come
here and sit on my lap. Yeah. Uh so, um,
you mentioned the ancient Romans. Um Caesar Julius Caesar actually
(08:25):
had a full wax cast of his entire body after
his death, stab wounds and everything. And Mark Anthony was
I guess dumb enough to go show it off to
a crowd, and they rioted and burned down the Senate building.
So I don't know what reaction he was looking for.
That probably wasn't it. And they're like, we love your records,
(08:46):
not that Mark Anthony. So um, I guess with the
Romans too, with the Gypsians. Basically throughout history, if you
weren't wealthy, you, um probably weren't going to have a
death mask made of you. If you weren't wealthier, you
weren't like the king. Yeah. And one reason is because
(09:07):
a lot of times these were artists before photography, artists
and painters and sculptors. As soon as someone died of note,
they would get their death mask made so they could
then paint them and sculpt them and have a reference
for what they look like. Yeah, and the same thing.
I mean, artists didn't paint nobody's you know what I'm saying,
So you didn't need to have a death mask made
(09:28):
of you. Um. And this is this is pretty much
the way it was for Europe, in Europe for most
of history except in Italy. Italy pretty early on said
if you if you, if you achieve something notable, probably
make a death mask of you. So if you see yeah,
(09:48):
early inventors and artists and those kind of like poets.
If you're in Italy, you probably have a death mask made.
If you're a notable personality like Da Vinci, sure he's
probably a death mask. Um. But elsewhere England, France, all that,
it wasn't until late modern history that um, he started
to see death masks of non noble people coming out.
(10:12):
And as a matter of fact, it was Madame Tussoed,
the lady behind the wax museums, who who kind of
brought um death masks to the masses during the French Revolution.
She and her uncle, uh Philippe Courteous, They were just
masters of wax and they worked a lot. Um. There
(10:33):
was one of Louis the sixteenth Mistresses, was went underwent
the guillotine, and um, she apparently had a terrible grimace
on her face when she died. People could have seen
you also curled up your hand for some reason. Yeah,
I don't think she didn't too, um and uh so
her Philippe Curtis, uh he basically pinched her face back
(10:57):
into pinch the decapitated heads face back into a nice
position and then rolled her in some whacks that he
laid out next to the grave. Wow, yeah, that's that's
they They were operating on this higher death mask level
like no one ever has. But the Madam two sold
Wax museum that you enjoyed today grew out of a
death mask operation. Interesting and it seems like a very
(11:19):
macab thing to do. But um, if you it's different
now these days we like to remember our deceased ones
as living and look at photographs of them doing things
where they're alive and lively and go die over there
where we don't have to think about the close casket funeral.
(11:39):
But um, it wasn't the same back then. They would
have they would royal and wealthy families would display these
death mask of their relatives in like you know, the
parlor room or the drawing room or here in the
main hallway, and it was you know, it was the
point of pride. It wasn't like macawbre weird or And
then eventually it became pseudo scientific with the advent of phrenology. Phrenology,
(12:04):
we I wish we had a good article on that.
We don't. I haven't seen one. It's pretty interesting, like
the early days of that stuff. Maybe we'll pulling together.
It's like when people were just starting to figure out
the brain and not really having any idea what they
were doing, really missing the mark a lot of times. Yeah. Yeah.
So phrenology basically was the idea that you could predict
a person's personality behavior, whether someone was a criminal or not, um,
(12:29):
how intelligent they would grow up to be by like
the shape of their face, the shape of their skull,
the bumps on their skull, um. And so phrenologists, as
as this field grew in the nineteenth century, kind of
increased the demand for um death masks because they wanted
to compare people side by side. So you've gotten some
(12:49):
pretty cool death masks of say like um, John Joseph Merrick,
Oh really yeah, um or uh, he's I think there's
like full body asks of him, um or you know,
a criminal or a genius or whatever, and these phrenologist
would keep him side by side and try to compare
and figure out. It's God, there's got to be a
(13:12):
key there somewhere, and they have themselves convinced, but they
were all wrong. Was there something There had to be
something to some of that research, right, I think there
was a lot of consensus among scientists, and they're all wrong.
Let's disappointing. Um. One cool thing is that later on,
in today's world, you can look back at some of
(13:33):
these death masks and gain a little bit of insight diagnostically,
speaking on how someone might have died. UM. In this
article they mentioned Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott. They think
now he died of a stroke because his death mask
he has the telltale signs of, like the droopy face
on one side. And Abraham Lincoln they think might have
(13:54):
had a wasting disease because he had life masks made,
which is the same thing except alive. Before he died,
had a couple of them made, and that they look
at these now and say, you know what Abraham Lincoln
might have been dying of, like tuberculosis or something? Maybe? Right?
Is that what they just said, a wasting disease. I
didn't even know what. I think that's a disease. Yeah,
(14:14):
that makes sense, consumption. But then, of course Booth took
care of that in a more hasty manner. Yes, I
don't want to give a spoiler away for the movie,
but I'm pretty surely can get shot. Um. There was
a speaking of Booth. His brother Edwin had a UM.
He was like one of the most famous actors at
least in the country, if not the world when he
was working, and he had a death mask made and
(14:37):
it was collected by a man named Lawrence of Arabia. No,
his name was Lawrence Hutton, and Lawrence Hutton was a
literary um editor for Harper's Magazine, which is still around today.
Very good UM. And he was in a junk store
(14:58):
in New York one time and ran across the death
mask and it just was immediately smitten with the idea
of collecting these things. So he spent the rest of
his life traveling the world finding death masks, buying him
having am made of people. In some cases he had
one of Edwin Booth. And he amassed this incredibly large collection,
the world's largest individual collection of death masks UM. And
(15:23):
when he died, he bequeathed it to Yale. No, Princeton,
I'm sorry. So Princeton has this museum of death masks
now and see that. Well, lucky for you, buddy, they
digitized it. Yep. They have like this really nice website, UM,
the Lawrence Hutton death Mask Museum website and it's got
(15:45):
all of them on there. It's really really interesting. Some
are very very old and like poorly done. There's one
of Lincoln that it's just like looking at Lincoln's face
because he's so recognizable, but to see the details. Daniel
dey lewis right there all right, and you can't hear
his weird voice, but you can almost you can almost
(16:05):
hear it's just looking at it. But the it's it's
the details. That's the thing about death masks that are
so I think um alluring to some people is it's
it's not only the detail of like you know, they're
the age and face and what life did to them,
but it's also the detail of the absence of life,
(16:25):
like that it's a death mask, you know, like the
hollow eyes or in the case of Dillinger, the bullet hole. Um.
Apparently that his death mask was so detailed. They did
such a good job with it that you could see
the abrasions on his face from where he hit the
pavement when he fell down dead. You're looking at some
of these up close, like the details remarkable, it's pretty eerie. Um.
So if you can't make it the Princeton, you can
(16:46):
check out the Lawrence Hutton. Just type in Lawrence Hutton
Princeton and we'll bring that up. It's pretty cool little
website you can spend some time on. Yeah, and if
you do go to Princeton. They got a great little
brup pub. You should go to see the death mask,
go have some beer. What a pub? Yeah, I mean
I can't remember. I mean I assume it's still there.
It opened new when I was living there in the
mid nineties. Um, I bet it's still there, but it
(17:09):
was kind of a new at the time. It was
like with brew pub. Yeah, this is crazy. It's crazy, alright,
So let's talk about how you do this, shall we Yes,
you need to do it really soon after the person dies,
because you don't want the bloat to set in. Um,
you can distort the face and they want like the
death face after right, exactly, So they would apply grease
(17:34):
to the face, especially on facial hair because, uh, it
made it easier to take the bandages off and they
didn't want to like rip out your eyebrows. Yeah, because
you still had a funeral of the hold exactly. Uh,
do you want to look like Sergeant Mauser from police Academy?
Do you remember? Yeah, he got his eyebrows blowing off.
That is. Have you ever seen anyone with no eyebrows?
I saw Mouser. It's just weird because sometimes you can't
(17:57):
pinpoint why they look so freaky. I remember guy in
high school shaved his eyebrows. One of the you know,
one of the bad kids, came in one day with this.
That's how he was rebelling. I don't know, he was
just one of those bad kids. Like I didn't associate
with him because I was a good boy. But he
came in one day in my industrial large class. He
has eyebrows shaved, and it freaked me out. Oh yeah,
(18:18):
Like I definitely didn't have anything to do it after that.
It was really strange looking he saved his eyebrows. Yeah,
I think it was probably a pink floid thing. So, um,
then you applied the plaster bandages. Um you. It's interesting
is the first layers where you get all your detail,
that's really what the death mask is, and then all
the other layers just reinforced that first layer. Right. It
(18:40):
telegraphs that anybody who's ever hung dry wall knows that
if you don't get that thing smooth when you tape it,
it just it's broadcast throughout the whole the whole wall.
It's that it's just ruined. Yeah, I just set the
high I was just putting the house down. My guest bedroom. Yeah,
that's just very bad job in there. Uh. And it's
(19:01):
funny when contractors have come by since then, they've gone
in that room and I've been like, yeah, boy, I
don't know who did this. It sucks. Um. All right,
So the plaster sets Back in the day, it took
about an hour. These days, um, it'll set in just
a few minutes, and then you carefully remove the mold.
You've got your negative, and then it's up to you.
(19:22):
You can do a wax positive, you can do bronze,
um what else. However, but you want to charge people, Yeah,
I guess so marble. There's one in Napoleon that they
made out of marble. Really Yeah. Yeah, he's not very
intimidating when you see his death mask, but I mean
they broke his spirit pretty good. Yeah. Sure, exile to
(19:44):
an island. It's just you and some other jerks. It
might have been nice. Yeah, I don't think he liked it.
He was too bent on taking over the world. The
stick came on an island was like the greatest insult
is what you control now, Napoleon and this little tiny space.
Um you said that, Uh that these days plaster drives
in a few minutes. Um. And actually there were death masks.
(20:09):
I'm sure somebody somewhere still making a death mask here there,
but um, George Bernard Shaw had one made when he
died in the nineteen fifties, so it's still some something
of a modern event. Um, I'm totally gonna get one made,
are you Yeah? Why not? All right? Uh? Nicola Tesla
had one made. Yeah, his is Have you ever seen his?
Is interesting because I've only seen the one picture that one. Yeah,
(20:32):
as a younger man, so he got older. He's just
I don't know, you know, the ears are huge, and
his nose was really large. It doesn't look that large
in this picture, and I guess I've never seen it
at profile. But yeah, he looks sort of like David Bowie. No,
it was a guy, the old old guy who took
all the drugs Walter Math, not Burrows, but Timothy Learry
(20:56):
sort of looked like a Timothy Larry before he died,
like just old virt Timothy Leary died on webcam, right,
didn't he like live stream his death? Like even before
anyone knew how to live stream, he figured it out somewhere.
I had no idea. I believe you did. That's sad.
I'm sure it's up on the web all right. Shall
we tell her awesome kind of fact of the podcast
(21:19):
story of the Unknown Woman of the Scene a k a.
The Lincoln You list scene, nineteenth century Paris, Josh, here's
the story. An anonymous woman, UH moved to Paris from
the country, falls in love with a young man and
gets her heart broke in two by this French jerk.
(21:43):
She is distraught. She cast herself into the river and
uh the river scene? Is it scene? I believe and
sin and nobody claimed the body ever, and the mortician
was was taken her beauty and the he said, oh,
this dead lady is so hot. Maybe, but um he
(22:06):
was taken with her beauty and her calm, almost peaceful
expression on her face. No one ever claimed her. He
did a death mask and said, now she is known
as the unknown Women of the Scene or the sink
the Lincoln. And they a lot of people ended up
having uh copies of this death mask in their house
(22:27):
as I guess art or something. Yeah, this is kind
of weird. Yeah, but I mean this is this is
before collector's plates had come along, maybe and it was
like spoons from St. Louis or this lady's death mask. Right. Um,
so the the author of this article poke some holes
in that story. Yeah. The truth is that the this
death mask was in wide circulation, right, but the it
(22:50):
probably wasn't from a woman who drowned, because her features
would have become bloated and distorted by the time she
started to float to the surface. Um. And she also
looks kind of peaceful. Yeah, so they think that's probably
a life mask posed for by a live model, but
they never recorded who it was. But the mystery around it,
(23:12):
I think probably helped sell some of the death masks,
so they kept it going. And then that's the end
of the story. You think, here's where it gets really
good me. Yeah. Uh. Nineteen sixty Peter Safar, an Austrian doctor,
is developing this really radical new thing called trying to
save someone who's having a heart attack. Rather than just
(23:34):
being like, oh well yeah, which is something I could do?
There is something you could do. It's called CPR, and
he championed it and got in touch with a Norwegian
toymaker named asmund uh Laird. All that sounds so made up,
it does and arm intens arian and um said, you
(23:54):
know what, I need a way to teach this. I
need some sort of like plastic dummy to teach people
how to do this new thing old CPR. And I
got this. I got just the thing. This will use
this face of this woman of the scene and throw
it on a dummy bust. And that is who recessa
Annie was. And as I was reading this the whole time,
(24:15):
I was like, no way, is that recessa Annie? Is
that recessa Annie? And it was on the following page
was the sentence that became recessa Annie. And I literally
felt like, I don't know, it felt like exalted. Yeah, man,
I used to like put my mouth on that thing
on the nineteenth century death mask. Yeah yeah, every summer
for lifeguarding. My mom used to teach CPR classes and
(24:38):
she had a recessa Annie and the kid too, who
had like that snappy little track suit, like dark blue tracks,
like you had these in your house. Yeah, it was
a little off, but yeah, eventually I was like it's neat. Yeah,
I can't believe. I'm still a little blown away that
that's who they ended up using. Yeah, very neat. And
(25:00):
when you looked and I looked up the death mask,
and then I looked up Pricessa Annie, and I was like, Yeah,
that's her. That's cool, Except she's got nostrils in a
mouth hole, right, which is very important if you're going
to practice CPR, right, or if you're gonna make a
life mask, you want to make sure that the person
has a way to breathe, and that's usually threw straws
into the nostrils. Josh, if you live in Michigan Midland
(25:21):
County Historical Museum, there they have Jesse James and Butch Cassidy. Sweet.
You can go by and check that out. You know.
If you go to the Maker's Mark Distillery there little tour,
they have Frank James Gunn. One of the owner's grandfathers
was the guy who Frank James surrendered to and he
handed his pistol over. It's pretty neat. Have you ever
been there? Did you dip your own bottle? They let
(25:45):
you do that, they do, Yeah, I know, why didn't
you do that? Man? How can you go to the
maker's mark and not dip your own bottle. If you
dip your own bottle, then it becomes a memento and
it seems like a waste of bourbon. Oh you wouldn't
drink it all right? Uh where else? There's this very
cool thing and uh called the Black Museum. I look
(26:07):
this up in Scotland Yard. Oh yeah, I want to
go there. Well you can't. I know. I want to
meet Scotland Yard detective who can get me in? Well
you can't, you're not at Scotland Yard Detective yourself. I
will then go to Scotland Yard Detective School so I
can get into this thing. This thing has been around
since eighteen seventy four and then moved and refurbished in
(26:28):
the nineteen eighties to New Scotland Yard. And it was
originally called the Black Museum. Now it's called the Crime Museum.
And do they have like letters from Jack the Ripper
in there? They have nooses that hung famous people, They
have weapons from famous murder cases and a bunch of
death masks. Apparently, why would you not let the public
(26:48):
in that? I think any British police officer can go
if they like, make a reservation like you don't have
to be a Scotland yard dick, but uh yeah, pretty
cool at the Ripper Letters, that's awesome. Yeah, there's gotta
be some movie plot based around the Black Museum that
you could come up with that seems like a just
the name itself, like everything comes alive maybe at night. Yeah,
(27:12):
there you go. There's your movie and poor Ben Stiller
gets in trouble and that's where it goes self. Um,
if you want to learn more about death masks and
you want to see some cool pictures of death masks,
you can type the words death masks into the search
bar how stuff works dot com. And since I said
search bar, it's time for what, well, a couple of
(27:34):
quick pieces of business and then listen to mail. Okay,
so what's the first order of business, Chuck, Well, we
got a TV show coming out on Science Channel January nineteenth,
which is right around the corner, uh ten pm, aaring
two episodes on the first night, premiere night after Idiot
Abroad's premiere, which is a very good leading for us.
(27:55):
We're super excited about that. And what more do you
need to know? Nothing? You need to know that you
should be there watching. Yeah, such a little DVR and uh,
you know, give us some love, make some noise at
the Science channel Facebook page that will help us out.
And Twitter, Yeah, we appreciate it. What about listening now? Okay, Josh,
I'm gonna call this Martha. Martha's got a few corrections
(28:18):
for us on our and we haven't done corrections in
a while. But on our topic of peak oil. She's
in the business. Uh, she knows a lot about it. Uh.
First of all, she affirms me, which I like. Chuckle's right. Guys, dinosaurs,
in no way, shape or form make up oil or
gas deposits. Most of the source material comes from things
(28:39):
like algae and phytoplankton that has died and sunk to
the bottom of its lake, ocean or seat um number two.
The things you said about proved reserves being unreliable, it's
partially true, guys. In some countries, like the U S
and Canada, UK the members of the Eurozone, proved reserves
are actually audited by regulatory bodies. In the US it's
(29:00):
the sec U. This is because an investor would most
likely consider the amount of proved reserves a company has
access to, since that tends to be a good indicator
of the health of the firm, whether or not it's
a sound investment. If you misrepresent your reserves to the public,
sec will come after you and the penalties can be severe.
So in some countries the proved reserves is very conservative,
actually heavily audited and is probably pretty reliable. But she
(29:24):
did point out that other countries, um where they might
not want to be as forthcoming. You can get some
hinky numbers, right, So I feel like we said that
I can't remember. Uh. And then number three she takes
its t task a little bit. On fracking. She said,
I know it's a contentious subject and we just should
do a podcast on this. It's in the in my ideas.
(29:46):
Cute is it? Um? You guys refer to fracking as
causing an environmental disaster every time someone does it. You
may call me a shill, but even Lisa Jackson of
the e p A, who was not a friend of
the oil industry, has said that there are no proven
cases of wracking resulting in underground freshwater contamination, and fracking
has been conducted in the U s. It's some id forties.
(30:06):
It's far more likely that poor, well designed and bad
cement jobs would be the culprit. However, there is a
big study being conducted right now by the e p A,
so all this may change if they find something, but
as of now, the science doesn't support the position of
most anti fracking groups. So I definitely want to do
a podcast on this now. I feel like she's challenged.
I feel like she's using psychology on us right now.
(30:28):
She is. I love your show. I find it fascinating,
but I'm weird like that, keep up the great work.
Can't wait to your TV show in January. And that
is from Martha. Martha. That was a perfect letter from
an expert, somebody in the field, taking us the task,
being nice about it, yeah, and letting us tell everybody
else that maybe we got it wrong, maybe didn't you know,
(30:48):
and then mentioning our TV show exactly. So thank you
for the perfect letter. Yes. Uh. If you want to
send us a perfect tweet, you can tweet to us
at s y s K podcast. You can send us
the for perfect Facebook posting at Facebook dot com, slash
stuff you Should Know, and you can send us a
perfect email to Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com. For
(31:15):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
Stuff works dot com m brought to you by the
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