We Still Don’t Know How Bicycles Work

“It’s as easy as riding a bicycle” – so the old saying goes. And indeed in the wide world of transportation few vehicles are as mechanically elegant as the humble bicycle, which at its most basic consists of little more than a tubular frame, two wheels, a steerable fork, a seat, pedals, and a chain drive. This basic configuration has remained essentially unchanged for more than 130 years, so it’s safe to assume that scientists and engineers know everything there is to know about bicycle design, right? Well, no, actually, for beneath the bicycle’s supposedly simple exterior lies a profound scientific mystery. It’s a phenomenon many of us have witnessed firsthand: let a riderless bicycle coast and it will remain upright, resisting all efforts to topple it until it finally slows down and falls over. Yet incredibly, despite more than a century of research, we still don’t 100% understand why.

The first bicycle as we would recognize it today appeared in 1820 in the form of German inventor Karl Drais’s “dandy horse” or “Draisine.” Unlike a modern bicycle, the Draisine had no pedals and had to be propelled by kicking one’s feet rather like a modern scooter. Over the next 70 years the bicycle would evolve into a multitude of weird and wonderful forms, including the popular “penny farthing” of the 1870s and 1880s with its gigantic front wheel. But it was not until the 1890s that the modern “safety” bicycle, with wheels of equal size and a chain drive, finally emerged. This design would take the world by storm, bringing affordable transport to the masses and spawning a global industry worth nearly $50 billion today. And aside from relatively minor improvements in shape, materials, and gear technology, the basic design of the common bicycle has remained more or less unchanged for over a century, making it one of the all-time design classics.

Yet despite the mechanical elegance and success of the safety bicycle, very little science or mathematics went into its design, the configuration having been arrived at through trial and error. It was not until the turn of the century that mathematicians began to seriously investigate the mysterious physics behind the bicycle’s remarkable stability. The most comprehensive early analyses were conducted in 1899 by English mathematician Francis Whipple and in 1910 by German mathematicians Felix Klein and Fritz Noether, who, using rigid-body mechanics, determined that a bicycle’s stability was mostly due to gyroscopic precession. This is the tendency of rotating objects to remain rigidly fixed in space and resist changes in orientation, and is responsible, for example, for keeping spinning tops upright. Thus, according to Whipple, Klein, and Noether, the wheels on a bicycle act as large gyroscopes, their rotation keeping the vehicle upright.

This remained the accepted explanation for bicycle stability for nearly 6 decades, until in 1970 British science writer David Jones examined Klein and Noether’s analysis and discovered a number of mathematical errors that effectively cancelled out the effects of gyroscopic precession. Furthermore, the parameters of the analysis assumed that the bicycle was stationary, even though a stationary bike is demonstrably not stable. To prove his point, Jones built a bicycle with extra counter-rotating wheels that cancelled out the gyroscopic effects of the main wheels, and found that it was just as stable as a regular bicycle. Something else had to be responsible for the bicycle’s remarkable self-righting ability. Back in the 1860s, Scottish engineer William Rankine had observed that when a coasting bicycle begins to topple over, the front wheel automatically steers into the fall, righting the bicycle once more. Indeed, if a bicycle’s handlebars are tied off so that the fork can no longer steer, it immediately becomes unstable. Based on this counter-steering phenomenon, Jones proposed a new model for bicycle steering which he called “caster theory.”

Casters, such as those found on shopping carts, are wheels where the steering axis  and the ground contact point are not aligned, the distance between the two being known as the “trail.” This offset causes the caster to automatically align itself with the direction of travel, allowing all four wheels on a shopping cart to steer at once. Examining common bicycle designs, Jones realized that the standard 72-degree angle of the front fork placed the steering axis – the imaginary line extending along the fork into the ground – ahead of the wheel’s ground contact point, effectively turning it into a giant caster. From this Jones concluded that only bicycles with a positive trail could be stable, and that the caster effect was the sole mechanism responsible for the bicycle’s self-righting ability. And there he left the matter, even boasting in his memoir 30 years later that: “I am now hailed as the father of modern bicycle theory.”

But Jones was a little too quick to rest on his laurels, for soon another researcher would arrive and blow the mystery of bicycle stability wide open. In 1975, American engineer Jim Papadopoulos, working at Cornell University, began reviewing nearly a century’s worth of academic papers on bicycle theory, and was unimpressed by what he found. Like the original Klein and Noether analysis, the papers either made overly simplistic assumptions or mathematical errors, and very few referenced each other or built upon previous studies. After a year of work, Papadopoulos managed to combine all these disparate analyses into a single, unified set of equations, which immediately revealed that Jones was wrong: it was in fact possible to build a stable bicycle with a negative trail, provided the weight distribution was moved far forward. Together with fellow engineer Andy Ruina, Papadopoulos launched the Cornell Bicycle Research Project, with the goal of better understanding bicycle dynamics and passing on that understanding to industry so that better, more efficient bicycles could be produced.

Based on Papadopoulos’ calculations, the team built an experimental device that barely resembled a bicycle, with small wheels and counter-rotating wheels to cancel out the gyroscopic effect, a negative trail to counter the caster effect, and a long weighted boom extending ahead of the front wheels. Amazingly, this strange contraption proved perfectly stable, demonstrating that neither gyroscopic precession nor the caster effect were solely responsible for the counter-steering phenomenon. Further research with a model featuring a small front and large rear wheel suggested a possible alternate explanation: when the bicycle begins to fall, the front end, being shorter, falls over faster than the rear end. However, as the two ends are rigidly connected, the front end pulls the rear with it, causing the fork to immediately steer into the fall and right the vehicle.

Despite this great leap forward, the Cornell Bicycle Research Project was short-lived. Not only had it failed to attract sponsorship from more than a handful of small bicycle companies, but Papadoupolos was slow to publish their findings, later admitting:

“I find much more joy discovering the new and working out the details and, of course, it’s boring to write it up.” (A sentiment that we here at TodayIFoundOut completely concur with :-))

In any event, with few published papers to show for their work, the project dissolved and Papadopoulos drifted away from bicycle research, moving to Illinois where he ended  up as an engineer for a toilet paper manufacturing company.

In 2001 David Wilson, an engineer at MIT and the inventor of the recumbent bicycle, invited Papadopoulos to co-author the third edition of the book Bicycling Science. But beset by a divorce, large debts, and other personal responsibilities, Papadopoulos took a full two years longer than anticipated to complete the work – much to Wilson’s frustration.

Meanwhile Andy Ruina continued to carry the torch of bicycle research, teaming up with fellow scientist Arend Schwab in 2001 to establish a bicycle research centre in – where else? – the Netherlands. In 2003 Papadopoulos joined the team, and together with J.D.G. Kooijman and J.P. Maijaard from the University of Delft, he, Ruina, and Schwab confirmed their results from the 1970s while carrying their research forward into a new, more high-tech domain – for example by building a cycling robot that could keep a bicycle upright through steering alone, without any weight shifting or stabilizing gyroscopes. This research culminated in a groundbreaking 2011 paper titled Bicycles Can Be Self-Stable Without Gyroscopic or Castor Effects.

The Delft research centre has also produced a variety of unconventional bicycle designs such as a stable rear-wheel-steering bike, a rear-wheel drive recumbent, a steer-by-wire bike that decouples the act of steering from that of balancing, and a powered steer-assist bike that automatically stabilizes itself at slow speeds. While these odd creations may seem like mere mechanical novelties, Ruina sees in them great potential to benefit the world, given the millions of people who depend on bicycles for daily transport:

“With these changes of appearance, one might have bicycles that are easier for old people to ride, bicycles that are easier to maneuver but still feel stable when riding straight, bicycles that have a more comfortable sitting arrangement, or bicycles that have more convenient places for storage or carrying kids.”

But while the Delft team sees endless possibilities for evolution in bicycle design, the bicycle industry has been slow to adopt their findings. Part of this reluctance is practical: despite being born of trial and error, the classic bicycle design is simple, robust, and just plain works. But another factor is organizational: the UCI, the international governing body for cycling sports, has standardized the design of road race bikes along traditional lines, forcing industry to conform to its guidelines. But Arend Schwab is optimistic, stating in a TEDx talk that:

“My vision is that with careful experiments and validated computer models, we can move past this 19th century bicycle evolution, into a 21st-century bicycle revolution.”

And despite the great strides made by the Delft team and other researchers, much about the dynamics of bicycle stability remains a poorly understood, a mystery both frustrating and exciting for researchers such as Mont Hubbard at UC Davis:

“Everybody knows how to ride a bike, but nobody knows how we ride bikes. The study of bicycles is interesting from a purely intellectual point of view, but it also has practical implications because of their ability to get people around

We are all stuck in the nineteenth century, when there wasn’t such a difference between math and physics and engineering. Bicycles are a math problem that happens to relate to something you can see.”

If nothing else, the fact that the bicycle still manages to stump the world’s leading mathematicians and engineers 130 years after its invention is a humbling lesson in how little we still know about the workings of the universe – a lesson perhaps best expressed by quantum physicist Michael Brooks in 2013:

 “Forget mysterious dark matter and the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe; the bicycle represents a far more embarrassing hole in the accomplishments of physics.”

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

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• The Clicky Turn Signal

Expand for References

Sorrel, Charlie, The Bicycle is Still a Scientific Mystery: Here’s Why, Fast Company, August 1, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3062239/the-bicycle-is-still-a-scientific-mystery-heres-why

Borrell, Brendan, The Bicycle Problem that Nearly Broke Mathematics, Nature, July 20, 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-bicycle-problem-that-nearly-broke-mathematics/

Kachur, Torah, Science of Cycling Still Largely Mysterious, CBC News, July 28, 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/science-of-cycling-still-mysterious-1.3699012

Cartwright, Jon, How to Keep a Riderless Bike from Crashing, Science, April 14, 2011, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/04/how-keep-riderless-bike-crashing

Busca, Nick, Your Bike’s Secret to Staying Upright is Actually a Mystery, Bike Radar, October 19, 2016, https://www.bikeradar.com/features/your-bikes-secret-to-staying-upright-is-actually-a-mystery/

The post We Still Don’t Know How Bicycles Work appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - May 04, 2022 at 08:40PM
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What is the Record for Most Languages Spoken By One Person?

If you speak one language, you’re a normal, functioning human being. If you speak two, you’re bilingual. If you speak three, you’re an overachiever and everyone hates you. But what about if you speak 10? Or 20? Or 30? Well, then you’re considered a polyglot or a hyperpolyglot depending on how awesome a word you think you deserve to describe your mastery of the spoken word. (Though if we’re being really technical, while colloquially these two terms are often used pretty interchangeable, a polyglot is usually used to describe someone who speaks more than 6 languages whereas a hyper-polyglot is used to describe someone who speaks over 12. And if you’re wondering, the term polyglot is Greek in origin, coming from the Greek, polyglōttos, roughly translating to “many tongued”, which is probably a killer inclusion in a pick-up line if you’re such an advanced linguist.)

Now you’d think that discovering the person who spoke the most languages would be as simple as searching for it on the Guinness World Records site or a quick Google search, but alas, even the almighty Guinness and Google don’t know the answer to this question, which is perhaps why Patron Kyle posed the question to us in the first place.

So why is this such a difficult question to answer? The problem seems to lie in the fact that the definition of what it takes to be able to “speak” a language varies greatly. Is a person who can hold basic conversation in 100 languages more impressive than a person who has mastered reading and writing in 30? Is being able to speak in 10 different regional dialects the same as being able to speak 10 different languages? How different would those dialects need to be for the distinction to be made?  If someone becomes fluent in over 200 languages in their lifetime, but at any given time can only speak fluently a couple dozen worthy of the crown vs their compatriot who learned and maintained fluency in just 50?

It’s questions like these that make it very unlikely that we’ll ever truly know the identity of the most gifted polyglot in history, but we have a fairly good idea of a handful of people who should at least be considered for the crown

In terms of living people, a candidate for the record holder is Ziad Fazah, who reportedly speaks around 60 languages, though the exact number isn’t clear. That said, in one television appearance, Ziad was stumped by basic questions in several languages he’d previously claimed to be fluent in. That’s not to detract from the fact that Ziad has proven he’s able to speak a pretty ridiculous number of languages and he may have studied and once been fluent in the languages he was stumped in, and simply forgotten them; but it throws into question his claim of being able to currently speak 60 or more languages at this very moment.

A more verifiable living polyglot is one Alexander Arguelles, who has a proven working understanding of around 50. Again, the number isn’t clear, even in interviews, Alexander very rarely puts a hard figure on the number of languages he can speak and understand, stating only that “Now, I can read about three dozen languages and speak most of them fluently, and I’ve studied many more“.

In Alexander’s case, he puts his amazing gift for language down to thousands of hours of study and work. A sentiment that is echoed by other living hyper-polyglots, for example, Timothy Donner, who speaks over 20 different languages. In his case, though, he’s still in his mid-20s, so he has the potential to speak and understand as many, if not more languages than Alexander some day and perhaps become the greatest of all time. It should be noted that Timothy also refuses to bother learning so-called “easy” languages like Spanish, in lieu of learning more difficult ones like Urdu, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish, etc.

Looking historically, in the book, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, the 18th and 19th century Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti is perhaps one of the most accomplished historic polyglots, reportedly being able to speak or understand 72 languages. Again, no one is sure of the exact figures, however. Regardless, Cardinal Mezzofanti’s skills with language were legendary in his time. The reason for the vast difference in the number of languages Mezzofanti was reported to have spoken stems from the fact he spoke many different dialects, which some scholars argue were so different in nature that they should technically count as entirely separate languages, while others aren’t willing to give him the credit. Even discounting his dialects, Mezzofanti was known to be able to speak Turkish, Arabic, German, Chinese, Russian and around two dozen other languages with, to quote the book, “rare excellence”. Considering he lived in 19th century, the fact he even came into contact with this many languages and found adequate books on the subjects to study, let alone learned to speak the languages fluently enough to converse with people in them, is hugely impressive.

A slightly more recent example of a hyper-polyglot is 19^th century born Emil Krebs, who spoke a reported 65 different languages. Fun fact, Krebs took great enjoyment in the fact that he could translate the phrase “kiss my ass” into 40 different languages. When told that it’d be impossible to learn every language on Earth, Krebs asked which language would be the hardest to learn and mastered the hell out of that on principle.  If you’re curious, the language Krebs eventually settled on as the hardest was Chinese. Krebs affinity for language was so great that when he died in 1930, his brain was sent off for scientific study where it presumably exploded into a cloud of foreign expletives the second a researcher cut into it.

Yet another of one of the world’s top polygots was child prodigy William James Sidis who was a child whose famed psychologist father and doctor mother (one of the few women in the world in the 19^th century to hold such a medical degree) used as a bit of a guinea pig to prove his father’s methods of more or less creating a child prodigy from scratch. To help facilitate this, his mother actually quit her medical practice and more or less trained the child with her husband from day 1, including the couple successfully teaching the child the English alphabet by a few months old, and to start speaking in under six months.

His parents were proud of their son, but possibly more proud that his father, Boris’s, techniques in teaching his son were genuinely working, constantly publishing academic papers showing off their successes. By two years old, William was reading the New York Times and tapping out letters on a typewriter from his high-chair – in both English and French. He wrote one such letter to Macy’s, inquiring about toys.

Unfortunately, his time to act like a child had already passed young William by. Studying seven different languages (French, German, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, and one he made up himself – Vendergood) and learning a high school curriculum at seven left Billy precious little time to act his age. His parents wanted the whole world to know about their prodigal son, as well as their participation in all of it.

He was accepted into Harvard at age nine, but the university refused to allow him to attend due to him being “emotionally immature.” His parents took this perceived slight to the media and William was front page news in the New York Times.  This gave William the notoriety and fame he was not prepared for. Tufts College, though, did admit him and he spent his time correcting mistakes in math books and attempting to find errors in Einstein’s theory of relativity.

His parents pressed Harvard further and when William turned eleven, they relented. William Sidis became a student at one of the most prestigious universities on Earth at the age most kids were perfectly content playing stick ball and not worrying about giving a dissertation on the fourth dimension.

Not hyperbole, on a freezing Boston January evening in 1910, hundreds gathered to hear the boy genius William Sidis in his first public speaking engagement, a talk about fourth dimensional bodies. His speech, and the fact that it was over most of the audiences’ heads, became national news.

Reporters followed William everywhere on campus. He rarely had a private moment. He graduated from Harvard at the age of 16, cum laude. Despite his success, Harvard was not a happy experience for young Billy.  According to Sidis biographer Amy Wallace, William once admitted to college students nearly double his age that he had never kissed a girl. He was teased and humiliated for his honesty. At his graduation, he told the gathered reporters that, “I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds.”

After leaving Harvard, society and his parents expected great things from William. He briefly studied and taught mathematics at what later would become known as Rice University in Houston, Texas. His fame and the fact that he was younger than every student he taught made it difficult on him. He resigned and moved back to Boston.

He attempted to get a law degree at Harvard, but he soon withdrew from the program. William, brilliant as he was, struggled with his own self-identity. In May 1919, he was arrested for being a ringleader of an anti-draft, communistic-leaning demonstration. He was put in jail and that’s where he would meet the only woman he would love – an Irish socialist named Martha Foley. Their relationship was rather complicated, mostly due to William’s own declaration of love, art, and sex as agents of an “imperfect life.”

When in court, he announced that he didn’t believe in God, that he admired a socialist form of government, and many of the world’s troubles could be traced back to capitalism.  He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

Fortunately for him, his parents’ influence kept him out prison, but William decided he’d had enough of “crowds” and wanted his “perfect life.” He moved city to city, job to job, always changing his name to keep from being discovered. During this time, it’s believed he wrote dozens of books under pseudonyms (none of which were particularly well read), including a twelve hundred  page work on America’s history and a book entitled “Notes on the Collection of Streetcar Transfers,” an extremely in-depth look at his hobby of collecting streetcar transfers. It was described by one biographer as the “most boring book ever written.”

And just for fun, we’re going to read a small excerpt for a taste… Please don’t click away:

“Stedman transfers: This classification refers to a peculiar type turned out by a certain transfer printer in Rochester, N. Y. The peculiarities of the typical Stedman transfer are the tabular time limit occupying the entire right-hand end of the transfer (see Diagram in Section 47) and the row-and-column combination of receiving route (or other receiving conditions) with the half-day that we have already discussed in detail.”

We’re pretty sure Sidis’ real intent with this book was to once and for all cure insomnia, just the fact that this was his intent went over the rest of us mere mortal’s heads.

In any event, seclusion fit William just fine. He wanted nothing more than him and his genius to be left alone.

In 1924, no longer talking to his parents and out of contact with anyone who truly cared for him, the press caught up to William. A series of articles were printed describing the mundane jobs and the measly living conditions the supposed-genius William Sidis had. Ashamed and distressed, he withdrew further into the shadows. But the public remained infatuated with the former boy wonder’s apparently wasted talents.  In 1937, The New Yorker printed an article titled “April Fool!” which described William’s fall from grace in humiliating detail.

The story resulted from a female reporter who had been sent to befriend William. In it, it described William as “childlike” and recounted a story about how he wept at work when given too much to do. Sidis sued the New Yorker for libel and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, before they eventually settled seven years later. But the damage had been done. William Sidis, for all the potential he showed as a child prodigy, would never become the man he was supposed to be.

On a summer day in July 1944, William’s landlady found him unconscious in his small Boston apartment. He had had a massive stroke, his amazing brain dying on the inside. He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at the age of 46 with a picture of the now-married Martha Foley in his wallet.

So how many languages did he speak? During his life, he became fluent in about 40 languages, though how many he remained fluent in at a given point isn’t clear.

Moving on from the sad tale of Sidis, perhaps the greatest number of languages claimed to be spoken by a single person is over 100. Yes, 100, with two zeroes. This claim was made by one, Sir John Bowring, the 4th governor of Hong Kong. In his life, Bowring was reportedly familiar with 200 languages, and was supposedly able to commune with others in over 100 of them. However, other than the fact that he and others close to him claimed he could speak this many languages, little else has ever been recorded about how proficient he was in any of them at a given point in time. Although, seeing as he lived his entire life as an obsessive student of language and given what his compatriots said of him, it is at least generally accepted he was likely one of the world’s most successful polygots. If claims are true, maybe even the most accomplished in history.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

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Bonus Fact:

Languages obviously need not include the spoken word, with various sign languages being perhaps the first thing people think about when hearing that statement. But it turns out there exists languages entirely made up of whistles.  Perhaps the most talked about one is Silbo Gomero- a whistling language “spoken” on La Gomera in the Canary Islands (which incidentally may have been named after dogs, and certainly wasn’t named after birds as you might have expected from the name Canary Islands).

The language was used by the Guanches—the aboriginal people of the Canary Islands—long before Spanish settlement. It is a whistled form of the original Guanche language, which died out around the 17^th century. Not much is known about that spoken language of those people save for a few words recorded in the journals of travellers and a few others that were integrated into the Spanish spoken on the Canary Islands. It is believed that spoken Guanche had a simple phonetic pattern that made it easily adaptable to whistling. The language was whistled across the Canary Islands, popular on Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and El Hiero as well as La Gomera.

It’s likely that the first Guanches were from North Africa and brought the idea of a whistled language with them, as there are several different whistling languages that have been recorded there.  From the time of Guanche settlement, the language evolved into Guanche whistling, and then to silbo.

Today, silbo is a whistled form of Spanish. It was adopted in the 16^th century after the last of the Guanches adapted their whistled language to Spanish. The language works by replicating timbre variations in speech. One study showed that silbo is recognized in the “language center” of the brain by silbo whistlers, though regular Spanish speakers who were not silbo whistlers simply recognized it as whistling.

As to why such a version of a language would originally be developed at all, it’s thought that silbo was developed as a form of long distance communication. The island of La Gomera is awash with hills, valleys, and ravines. A whistle can travel up to two miles across such a landscape, and the whistler doesn’t have to expend as much energy as he would by hiking or shouting and, in the latter case, the whistled message is heard further away besides. When La Gomera was largely an agricultural island, crops and herds of animals like sheep would be spread out across the hills, and herders would use the language to communicate with one another across these large distances.

Speaking via whistling still saw widespread use as late as the 1940s and 50s. Unfortunately, economic hardship around the 1950s put silbo-speaking in the decline, as most of the whistlers were forced to move to find better opportunities. The introduction of roads and the invention of the mobile phone also contributed to the decline, as they made silbo largely unnecessary. By the end of the twentieth century, the whistled language was dying out.

However, as it is an integral part of the island’s history, there was interest in reviving the language to preserve the culture and today every primary school child on La Gomera is required to learn the whistling language.

The post What is the Record for Most Languages Spoken By One Person? appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Karl Smallwood - May 04, 2022 at 08:05PM
Article provided by the producers of one of our Favorite YouTube Channels!
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Review: Trader Joe's Bamba Puffed Peanut & Corn Snacks with Hazelnut Crème Filling

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Review: Turtle Chips Sweet Bean Flavor

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Low Sugar Gummies by Biobor are Sweet

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by April 20, 2022 at 06:05PM

A Crisis of Minds- The Fascinating Tail of Fixing People By Destroying Their Brain

In November 1941, Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest sister of future American president John F. Kennedy, was admitted to the George Washington University School of Medicine to undergo a radical procedure. The then 23-year-old Rosemary had for many years exhibited erratic behaviour, mood swings, and mild learning difficulties that left her high profile parents exasperated and publicly embarrassed, until her father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr, finally decided to do something about it. But the Rosemary that came out of the hospital was not the same Rosemary that went in. Her mental capacity had been reduced to that of a 2-year-old. Once vivacious and exceptionally charming, she could no longer speak coherent sentences and had become incontinent. Horrified, her parents locked her away in an institution and did not speak of her or her condition for nearly two decades. Rosemary Kennedy had been subjected to one of the psychiatry’s most infamous treatments: the lobotomy. For more than three decades, this crude form of psychosurgery was the go-to method for treating a wide variety of mental illnesses, from depression to schizophrenia, with nearly 40,000 being performed in the United States alone. But it was a horrifically imprecise and dangerous method, which far from curing patients occasionally left them totally incapacitated or even dead. But who invented the lobotomy, and how did such a life-shattering procedure come to be so widely accepted by the medical community and endure for as long as it did despite the occasionally horrific side effects?

In the early 20th Century the field of psychiatry was in crisis. While advances in neurology and the new practice of psychoanalysis had begun to shed some light on the origins of mental illness, the discipline was no closer to finding cures than in the days of bloodletting and ice baths. As their colleagues in other medical fields surged ahead with new discoveries like germ theory, surgical anaesthesia, and antibiotics, psychiatrists remained little more than caretakers, presiding over crowded asylums with few ways of actually treating their patients. Thus, any new breakthrough that promised to change this was met with great enthusiasm- too much in some cases. It is in this climate of desperation that procedures like insulin shock – and later electroshock – therapy emerged – and for more on this please check out our video “Who Invented Shock Therapy and How Does It Work?” But some saw such methods as too indirect, and wondered whether mental illness couldn’t be treated at its source, by cutting directly into the brain.

The first systematic study of psychosurgery was conducted by Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Buckhardt at the Préfargier Asylum in 1888. Like many psychiatrists at the time, Buckhardt believed that individual mental processes were localized in discrete areas of the brain, and that by selectively damaging or removing these areas a patient could be relieved of certain of their symptoms. His results were mixed, to say the least. Of six patients operated on, two remained unchanged, two became quieter, one experienced mild improvement, and one experienced violent epileptic seizures and died shortly after the operation. From there, many of the survivors experienced severe side effects including epilepsy and aphasia – the inability to understand or speak words. Other doctors were horrified by these experiments, and Buckhardt’s work was widely condemned. Thus while sporadic attempts at psychosurgery were made over the following decades by surgeons such as Ludvig Puusepp and Vladimir Bekhterev, it would not be until 1935 that the practice would become mainstream.

In that year, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz developed the leucotomy, a procedure which involved drilling holes ineither side of the skull and making a series of incisions to sever the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain. The frontal lobes had long been suspected to be the seat of personality and behavioural regulation, a fact drastically illustrated by the infamous case of Phineas Gage. On September 13, 1848, Gage, an American railroad labourer, was packing gunpowder into a blasting hole near Cavendish, Vermont, using a metre-long tapered metal rod known as a tamping iron. The metal accidentally struck the rock, creating a spark that ignited the gunpowder and launched the tamping iron directly at Gage’s face. The iron entered Gage’s head just below his left cheek and exited through his left temple, landing some 25 metres away. Amazingly, Gage was not even knocked unconscious, and was able to speak coherently and sit upright as he was transported by oxcart to the local doctor. Over the next seven months Gage made a near-complete physical recovery and regained all his mental faculties, though he was no longer the man he once was. Previously described as a pleasant and genial man, following the accident Gage became, in the words of Harvard Professor H.J. Bigelow, “…gross, profane, coarse, and vulgar, to such a degree that his society was intolerable to decent people.” Indeed his closest friends declared “Gage… was no longer Gage.” While more recent studies have revealed that these personality changes were largely temporary – indeed, following the accident Gage had a long and successful career as a long-distance stagecoach driver in Chile – the case did much to convince psychiatrists of the central role of the frontal lobes in controlling personality and behaviour. This idea was further supported by cases of WWI soldiers who received wounds to the frontal lobes, and patients with large tumours in the same region. An even more dramatic illustration of the principle was an experiment conducted by Yale neuroscientist John Fulton. In the early 1930s Fulton performed frontal lobectomies on a pair of chimpanzees, Beck and Lucy, who exhibited aggressive behavioural tendencies. The results were astonishing, with both animals becoming remarkably placid and cooperative. When Fulton presented his results in 1935 at the Second International Congress of Neurology in London, Egas Moniz, who was in attendance, asked whether the procedure could be applied to humans. Stunned, Fulton responded that while it was theoretically possible, the procedure was “too formidable” an intervention to use on humans.

Moniz was nonetheless inspired, and in November of that year carried out the first leucotomies on psychiatric patients at the Hospital Santa Marta in Lisbon. At first Moniz used targeted injections of ethanol to kill nerve fibres and form a barrier of dead tissue behind the frontal lobes, but soon developed a wire-loop instrument called a “leucotome” which when rotated carved out a 1-centimetre spherical section of brain matter. These initial surgeries were performed on twenty patients suffering from a variety of disorders including depression, mania, schizophrenia, and catatonia, and according to his later report the results were promising, with 35% of patients experiencing significant improvement, 35% mild improvement, and 30% no change. However, “improvement” in this case appears to be a relative term, as the patients experienced a variety of severe side effects including extreme lethargy, confusion, and incontinence, and few were ever actually discharged from the hospital. But as none had died or suffered observable cognitive impairment, Moniz considered the experiment a success and published his findings in 1936. As with Buckhardt before him, Moniz’s work initially received a hostile reception from the medical community, with many decrying the procedure as unnecessarily reckless. But by this time the demand for a method – any method – to pacify patients and alleviate overcrowding in asylums had become so great that leucotomy was gradually adopted throughout the world. In 1949, Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his discovery.

But the heyday of the lobotomy would not come until the 1940s, thanks to one of the most controversial figures in American medicine: Walter Freeman. Born on November 14, 1895, Freeman met Egas Moniz at the same 1935 conference where John Fulton had presented his chimpanzee study, and was instantly taken in by the great neurologist’s genius. It was to prove a fateful encounter. Though he had long pondered the possibilities of psychosurgery, Freeman later claimed that had he not met Moniz in person he would likely never have pursued the subject, informing Moniz  “…having your authority I expect to go ahead.” On his return to the United States, Freeman and his colleague neurosurgeon James W. Watts set out to perfect Moniz’s method, performing the first American leucotomy on September 14, 1936 at George Washington University. Their patient was a 63-year-old Mrs. Hammatt from Topeka, Kansas, who was brought in by her husband suffering from agitated depression and insomnia. According to Freeman’s account, the surgery was a great success:

“She survived five years, according to Mr. Hammatt the happiest years of her life,” Freeman noted in his autobiography. “As she expressed it, she could go to the theatre and really enjoy the play without thinking what her back hair looked like or whether her shoes pinched.”

Encouraged by these results, Freeman and Watts set up a private practice  in D.C. and together performed nearly 1000 leucotomies between 1936 and 1945. But while the “Freeman-Watts” method, which involved drilling six small burr holes across the patient’s skull, was less invasive and more precise than Moniz’s original procedure, to Freeman it was still too elaborate. Freeman had worked at St. Elizabeth’s State Hospital in Washington D.C, and knew from first-hand experience that such institutions were often overcrowded and underfunded and rarely had operating rooms, anaesthesia, or surgeons available. Freeman thus set out to develop a procedure that could be quickly and easily performed on an outpatient basis by non-surgical staff.

Freeman found his answer in the obscure work of Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti, who in 1937 developed a procedure called the transorbital lobotomy in which the brain is accessed through the thin bones of the eye socket. Practicing on grapefruits and then cadavers, in 1945 Freeman adapted and refined Fiamberti’s method. Many of these early experiments were carried out using an ordinary ice pick from Freeman’s kitchen, hence the common name “ice-pick lobotomy” for the procedure.

In Freeman’s version of the transorbital lobotomy, the patient was rendered temporarily unconscious through the use of an electroconvulsive therapy or electroshock machine. Their eyelid was lifted and a long, thin instrument known as an orbitoclast placed between the top of the eyeball and the eye socket. A mallet was then be used to punch the orbitoclast through the thin orbital bone and into the brain. Once the instrument had been driven in around 5 centimetres, it was swept side-to-side, making a 40-degree incision and severing the frontal lobe. The procedure was then be repeated on the other eye socket. Beginning to end, the procedure took no more than 10 minutes to complete.

Freeman carried out his first transorbital lobotomy on January 17, 1946, and soon threw himself into evangelizing the procedure. Driving a van he dubbed “the lobotomobile,” he travelled thousands of miles to more than 55 hospitals across the country to demonstrate and promote his new procedure. A natural showman, Freeman would often show off by performing two lobotomies at once, or using his old kitchen ice pick instead of a proper orbitoclast. He had a reckless disregard for medical procedure, often chewing gum while operating and rarely wearing gloves or washing his hands. On one occasion he even invited the media to watch a procedure which ended in death when Freeman’s hand slipped and plunged the orbitoclast too deeply into the patient’s brain. This cavalier behaviour disgusted his colleague James Watts, causing the two to part ways in 1947. But the psychiatric community was impressed, and the use of lobotomies soared; between 1945 and 1949 the number of lobotomies performed annually in the United States grew from 150 to nearly 5000. The procedure was especially popular in the United Kingdom, where over 50,000 were performed. Lobotomies were prescribed for all manner of psychiatric conditions, however mild, and performed on patients of all ages. Freeman’s youngest-ever patient was 12-year-old Howard Dully of San Jose, California, who underwent the procedure on December 16, 1960. Freeman’s notes describe Dully’s behaviour as follows:

“He is clever at stealing, but always leaves something behind to show what he’s done. If it’s a banana, he throws the peel at the window; if it’s a candy bar, he leaves the wrapper around some place… he does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says, “I don’t know.” He is defiant at times – “You tell me to do this and I’ll do that.” He has a vicious expression on his face some of the time.”

Though diagnosed by Freeman as Schizophrenic, Dully’s behavioural problems were mild and typical of a boy his age, and today would likely be attributed to the sustained abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepmother. Incredibly, though he suffered from mental confusion and drug addiction, spent years in and out of institutions and halfway houses, Dully eventually made a near-complete recovery and suffers few lingering effects from the surgery.

Most others, however, were not so lucky. Though Freeman claimed a success rate of around 50%, many lobotomy patients were reduced to a vegetative or child-like state, unable to care for themselves and requiring life-long institutionalization. Those who retained their faculties often exhibited a “flattening” or “blunting” of affect, becoming passive and apathetic, while others suffered from seizures or other neurological side effects. A lucky few like Howard Dully experienced no change at all. The greatest benefit of the procedure was often not to the patient themselves but their families and hospital staff, as it made patients more docile and easier to handle. As Freeman enthusiastically reported:

“The noise level of the ward went down, ‘incidents’ were fewer, cooperation improved, and the ward could be brightened when curtains and flowerpots were no longer in danger of being used as weapons.”

Disturbingly, the use of lobotomy as a means of social control went even deeper. In all countries where it was adopted, the procedure was performed disproportionately on women, echoing the 19th Century practice of diagnosing difficult or disobedient women with the catch-all disorder of “hysteria.”

But the days of the lobotomy were numbered. By the mid-1950s the vast numbers of patients left permanently disabled by the procedure could no longer be ignored by the medical community, and the use of lobotomy began to taper off, with several countries such as Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union banning it altogether. The introduction of antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine also made such radical surgical interventions increasingly unnecessary, and sparked the mass de-institutionalization of psychiatric patients that Freeman had long dreamed of. But Freeman remained stubbornly devoted to his procedure, and after moving to California in 1954 continued to perform lobotomies both in state hospitals and his own private practice. In 1967, Freeman operated on Helen Mortensen, who had been lobotomized twice before but whose symptoms continued to relapse. During the procedure Freeman accidentally severed a blood vessel in Mortensen’s brain, leading to her death three days later. Herrick Memorial Hospital, where the surgery was performed, revoked Freeman’s surgical privileges; he never performed another lobotomy. Walter Freeman died of cancer on May 31, 1972 at the age of 76, having personally lobotomized 3,439 patients.

The golden age of the lobotomy was brief but tragic. Though the use of the procedure had largely ended by the late 1960s, it continued to be performed in countries such as France well into the 1980s – but only as a last resort when all other interventions had failed. All told, more than 40,000 people were lobotomized in the United States alone, with 490 dying and countless others being permanently disabled. Though born of good intentions and the desire to free the mentally ill from overcrowded hospitals, the lobotomy became the embodiment of social control, institutional abuse, and medical hubris whose dark legacy still haunts the field of psychiatry to this day. Though many experimental psychosurgical techniques have been developed in recent years to treat disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and epilepsy, the looming shadow of Walter Freeman and his cavalier methods has discouraged many researchers from pursuing this line of research – and government institutions from funding it.  As Bart Nuttin, a researcher at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, explains:

“I definitely believe that there is a very important public stigma attached to surgical treatments for psychiatric disorders, and that this is for good reasons. I am convinced that in the past this kind of surgery has been abused. My greatest fear is that some surgeons would start using [new techniques] in a less controlled way than we have. There remains a need for strict official control of this kind of treatment.”

Similarly, according to University of Michigan neuro-psychologist Elliot S. Valenstein:

“I think they’re really concerned about the reaction to the [perceived] notion that the government is supporting brain operations and that there may be a resurgence of lobotomies in this country.”

As for Howard Dully, who suffered so much at the hands of Walter Freeman, his opinion of the controversial doctor is remarkably magnanimous:

“I don’t think Freeman was evil. I think he was misguided. He tried to do what he thought was right, then he just couldn’t give it up. That was the problem.”

If you like this article, you might also enjoy:

• Mind Control: From the Inside Out
• The Curious Case of Terminal Lucidity
• One of the Most Shocking CIA Programs of All Time: Project MKUltra
• Who Started the Lizard People Conspiracy Theory?

Expand for References

Gordon, Meryl, “‘Rosemary: the Hidden Kennedy Daughter’, by Kate Clifford Lawson”, The New York Times, October 6, 2015, https://ift.tt/d4v9xHV

Nicholas, Elizabeth, Rosemary Kennedy and the Legacy of Mental Illness, VICE, October 5, 2015, https://ift.tt/GHJsAqt

Walter Freeman: the Father of Lobotomy, Medical Bag, May 21, 2015, https://ift.tt/HBfKMrh

He Was Bad, so They Put an Ice Pick in His Brain, The Guardian, https://ift.tt/W3PKgme

El-Hai, Jack, The Lobotomist, The Washington Post, February 4, 2001, https://ift.tt/Nnx6wUa

Tan, Siang Yong & Yip, Angela, António Egas Moniz (1874–1955): Lobotomy pioneer and Nobel laureate, Singapore Medical Journal, April 2014, https://ift.tt/CAHtNMp

 

 

The post A Crisis of Minds- The Fascinating Tail of Fixing People By Destroying Their Brain appeared first on Today I Found Out.

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A Corpse an Audacious WWII Plan to Score a Major Victory for the Allies

Winston Churchill once wrote “In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Throughout the Second World War, the subtle art of deception proved time and time again to be among the Allies’ most formidable weapons. Prior to the 1942 Battle of El Alamein, the British disguised their tanks as ordinary trucks in order to move them up to the front line unnoticed, while in the buildup to D-Day, through a combination of phony radio traffic, captured German agents, and fields of wooden planes and inflatable tanks, Allied intelligence managed to conjure an entire army division out of thin air and convince the German that the invasion force would land not in Normandy but the Pas-de-Calais. But perhaps the most audacious and bizarre deception of the war was Operation Mincemeat, a macabre undertaking centred around the drowned corpse of one Major William Martin, a man who never existed.

By the end of 1942 the Allied had pushed the Germans and Italians out of North Africa and were pondering their next move. Winston Churchill favoured an invasion of Italy, which he saw as the “soft underbelly” of the Axis. And the obvious stepping-stone for such an invasion was the island of Sicily. There was only one problem: this route would also be obvious to the Germans, and the mountainous terrain of Sicily strongly favoured the defenders. But another possibility was to invade Sardinia and Greece, which would place Allied forces within striking distance of vital Axis oil facilities in the Balkans. If the Germans could somehow be convinced that the Allies were actually landing in Greece, the invasion of Sicily might have a greater chance of succeeding.

The task of fooling the Germans fell to naval intelligence officer Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu and Squadron Leader Sir Archibald Cholmondley (“Chum-lee”) of the Twenty Committee, an inter-service intelligence organization so-named because “twenty” in Roman numerals is “XX”, or “Double-Cross.” The bizarre deception plan Montagu and Cholmondley cooked up was inspired by a document known as the “Trout Memo” which had been circulated among Allied intelligence personnel in 1939. While attributed to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, it is now believed that the memo was actually written by his assistant Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. In the memo, Fleming compared military deception to fly-fishing, and listed 51 potential deception plans which could be used against the enemy.  Deception number 28, which Fleming described as “not a very nice suggestion” involved planting false documents on a corpse and dropping it over enemy territory. This, in turn, had been inspired by the 1937 novel The Milliner’s Hat Mystery by former police chief and spy catcher Basil Thompson. Montagu and Cholmondeley believed that a suitably disguised corpse would be an ideal vehicle for leaking falsified intelligence to the enemy, and soon began working on an elaborate scheme codenamed Operation Mincemeat.

The task facing Montagu and Cholmondley was formidable, with many intricate details needing to be worked out. At first they considered dropping a corpse into enemy territory on a half-opened parachute, but this was quickly abandoned for a number of reasons. First, no Allied airman would be carrying the highly-secret documents the pair wished to leak. Second, military couriers were not permitted to fly over enemy territory lest they be shot down; and third, any corpse the pair were likely to obtain would be several days old and could never be made to look freshly-deceased. Instead, Montagu and Cholmondley decided to drop the corpse from a submarine off an enemy-held coast, making it look like the body of a man who had crashed at sea and drowned. The pair quickly ruled out disguising the corpse as a naval officer, as this would require a custom-tailored uniform, and instead chose to make him an officer of the Royal Marines, allowing him to be dressed in standard off-the-rack battle dress. Spain was chosen as the insertion point as while the country was nominally neutral, it had pro-German leanings and hosted a well-established network of German spies.

The next order of business was to actually find a suitable corpse. While Britain in WWII had no shortage of bodies, nearly all were already spoken for, and making indiscreet inquiries would have raised undue suspicion. According to Montagu’s 1953 memoir The Man Who Never Was, he and Cholmondley had nearly given up when they happened upon a young man who had died of pneumonia, and convinced the family to release his body on the condition his identity never be revealed. The body was ideal for their purposes, as its fluid-filled lungs would closely resemble those of a man who had drowned at sea. However, in 1996 amateur historian Roger Morgan determined that the corpse actually belonged to one Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welshman who died in an abandoned London warehouse after accidentally eating rat poison. As Michael had no next of kin, Montagu had no trouble convincing Bentley Purchase, coroner of St. Pancras District, to turn over the body and store it in the morgue until needed. Yet still other historians such as Ben Macintyre and Anna Pukas doubt that the corpse could have been Michael’s, arguing that his unhealthy and emaciated body would have been a poor match for a young and fit Marine officer. Instead, they suggest that the corpse belonged to John Melville, a sailor aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Dasher which exploded and sank in the Clyde River on March 27, 1943. However, Montagu dismissed the need for a perfect physical resemblance, stating:

“He doesn’t need to look like an officer – only a staff officer.”

With a body secured, Montagu and Cholmondley set about crafting an identity for their fictitious officer. Time was of the essence, for the body could only be kept refrigerated for three months, after which it would be too decomposed to be convincing.  Glyndwr Michael soon became Captain (Acting Major) William Martin of the Royal Marines, the surname “Martin” being chosen as it was among the most common on the Naval register. This meant that the report of his death could be easily mistaken for that of another, real Major Martin. The rank of Acting Major was also carefully chosen as it high enough to justify him carrying of top-secret documents but not high enough that anyone important would be expected to know him.  The documents Major Martin was to carry included a fake letter written by Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff, to General Harold Alexander in Tunisia, outlining the Allies’ intent to invade Sardinia and Greece. In an inspired bit of subtle spycraft, the letter did not explicitly spell out the Allied plan but rather spoke around it in such a way that the true meaning could not be missed. And in a classic double-feint, the document written to imply that the attack on Sicily – the preparations for which the Germans could hardly have missed – was actually a diversion for the actual invasion. To corroborate this letter, Major Martin also carried a letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations, to Admiral Andrew Cunningham, introducing Martin as an expert in landing craft being loaned to Cunningham’s staff. The letter even contained a joke about sardines being rationed in Britain, a pun so stereotypically British Montagu and Cholmondley believed the Germans would swallow it hook, line, and sinker.

In order to look the part, the corpse was dressed in a standard uniform, a trench coat, and a life preserver. Fearing that the largely Catholic Spaniards would be hesitant to rifle through the corpse’s pockets, Montagu and Cholmondley instead placed the documents in a locked leather briefcase with a chain of the type used by bank couriers, the chain being wrapped through the belt loops of Major Martin’s trench coat to prevent it from floating away.

However, it would take more than just a name and a briefcase of documents to fool German intelligence; For the deception to work, Major Martin had to appear like a formerly living, breathing human being complete with personal interests, relationships, and foibles. And in this Montagu and Cholmondley overlooked no detail, carefully crafting a complete identity through various pieces of litter placed in the corpse’s pockets. Major Martin was made to appear somewhat careless in his personal affairs via angry letters from his creditors, unpaid bills, an overdraft statement from his bank, and a stern letter from his Father regarding his finances. Even his identity card was a temporary replacement for one previously lost. Martin was also given an imaginary girlfriend named Pam, whose photograph – actually of Montagu’s secretary Jean Leslie – he carried in his pocket. Other secretaries also contributed love letters from Pam for added authenticity. The effect was completed by the addition of a St. Christopher’s medal, a matchbook, cigarettes, a bill from Martin’s tailor, a receipt for an engagement ring, keys, theatre ticket stubs, and other odds and ends, all carefully coordinated paint a realistic picture of Major Martin’s last days in London. For his identity card, Montagu and Chomondley first tried to photograph the corpse, but  this proved unconvincing and they instead used a picture of MI5 Captain Ronnie Reed, who bore a passing resemblance to the body.

Major Martin was placed in a specially-designed canister filled with dry ice and carried aboard the Royal Navy submarine HMS Seraph, which departed Britain on May 19, 1943. For security reasons the crew were told that the canister contained an experimental meteorological device, with only the boat’s Captain, Lt. Norman Jewell, and a handful of senior officers being informed of the mission’s true nature. After being accidentally attacked twice en route by British aircraft, on April 29 HMS Seraph surfaced off the coast of Huelva, Spain. In the early hours of the next morning Major Martin’s body was brought on deck, and after a brief ceremony where Lt. Jewell read from the 39th Psalm, was placed in the water, the wash from the submarine’s propellers being used to push him towards the shore. At around 9AM a Spanish fisherman picked up the body and carried it to shore, where it was handed over to the Spanish Admiralty. The game was now afoot.

The Spanish authorities immediately contacted Francis Haselden, the local British consul, and offered to hand over Major Martin’s effects. Strangely, Haselden refused, insisting that the items be submitted through official channels. A frantic exchange of diplomatic cables between Haselden and London ensued, with London urging Haselden to obtain the items as quickly as possible. Of course, this had all been meticulously planned beforehand to convince the Germans of the documents’ authenticity, the British knowing that their diplomatic codes had been broken. Thus the existence of the body and its briefcase came to the attention of two German agents stationed in Spain, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal and Adolf Clauss, who on the instructions of German intelligence chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris attempted to intercept the secret documents. Despite pressure from the Germans the Spanish refused to hand over the briefcase and instead sent it to the naval headquarters at San Fernando. Here the contents were photographed but the letters were not opened. It was not until the briefcase reached Madrid that the Spanish finally acceded to German demands, with a thin metal rod being used to roll up the still-damp letters so they could be removed through the envelope flap without breaking the seal. The letters were then dried, photographed, and re-soaked in salt water before being re-inserted into the envelopes. On May 8 the photographs were passed to Kühlenthal, while on May 11 the briefcase and its contents were returned to Haselden, who forwarded it to London in the diplomatic bag. Meanwhile, Major Martin’s body had been given a cursory autopsy by a Spanish coroner, confirmed to have died of drowning and exposure, and buried in a Huelva cemetery with full military honours.

When the briefcase finally arrived back in London, an examination of the envelopes confirmed that they had been opened by the Germans. Not only did the letters curl up into a cylinder when removed, but an eyelash placed in the envelope by Montagu was conveniently missing. Indeed, Kühlenthal believed the intelligence to be so important that he personally carried it to Berlin, where German intelligence confirmed its authenticity to the High Command. On May 12, Adolf Hitler issued an order declaring:

“Measures regarding Sardinia and the Peloponnese take precedence over everything else.”

Confirmation that the Germans had taken the bait came two days later, when codebreakers at Bletchley Park decoded a German signal indicating that an entire panzer division of 90,000 men had been moved from Sicily to Greece. Montagu sent an urgent telegram to Churchill, then in Washington D.C. for the Trident Conference, reading:

^“Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker by the right people and from the best information they look like acting on it.”

The Allied invasion of Sicily, codenamed Operation Husky, began on July 10, 1943. By August 17 the armies of General George S. Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had taken the island at a loss of only 5,500 killed and 14,000 wounded – far less than Allied planners had feared. The capture of Sicily lead to the collapse of the government of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and provided a springboard for the subsequent Allied invasion of the Italian mainland – and all largely thanks to the valiant actions of a dead man.

What is perhaps most impressive about Operation Mincemeat is how easily the whole thing could have gone wrong. For example, had Major Martin’s corpse been examined by a more experienced coroner, it would have been realized that it was missing many of the hallmarks of a body which had been floating at sea for days, such as crab and fish bites and dull, brittle hair. Fortunately, the Germans were prevented from examining the matter too closely by the need to appear as though they were unaware of the corpse’s existence, and they were thus forced to take the Spanish at their word regarding its authenticity. Also fortuitous for the Allies were the specific German agents involved in the case. Kühlenthal, due to his Jewish ancestry, was overly eager to please the German High Command and had a long history of passing on bad intelligence. The intelligence analyst tasked with examining the documents in Berlin, Alexis Baron von Roenne, also hated Hitler and did everything in his power to sabotage the Nazi war effort. Even Admiral Canaris, head of German Military Intelligence, actively worked against the Nazi regime, meaning it is possible that most involved in the case did not actually believe the ruse at all. But the Mincemeat documents confirmed what Hitler already believed, and whether or not they influenced his decision to move his troops from to Greece, that decision was instrumental in the fall of Sicily.

In life he was Glyndwr Michael, a homeless drifter who died a horrible death alone and forgotten, while in death he became Major William Martin, a war hero who helped secure a vital Allied victory in the Mediterranean. He still lies buried under that name in Nuestra Señora cemetery in Huelva, while on the Welsh war memorial in Aberbargoed he is listed as “Y Dyn Na Fu Erioed”: “The Man Who Never Was”.

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Expand for References

Dead Man Floating: World War II’s Oddest Operation, NPR, June 12, 2010, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127742365

Re: The Man Who Never Was – Operation Mincemeat, Wikileaks, February 19, 2013, https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/12/1233808_re-the-man-who-never-was-operation-mincemeat-.html

Lane, Megan, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Tramp Fooled Hitler, December 3, 2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11887115

Zabecki, David, This Man Pulled off one of the Greatest Deceptions in Military History – After His Death, HistoryNet, November 1995, https://www.historynet.com/this-man-pulled-off-one-of-the-greatest-deceptions-in-military-history-after-his-death.htm

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by Gilles Messier - January 30, 2022 at 11:49PM
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The Real Story Behind Spider-Man

According to an anecdote told by Stan Lee in virtually every interview he’s ever given about Spider-Man, the genesis of the hero began when he saw an insect crawling up a wall while brainstorming ideas and figured that a hero who could stick to walls would be kind of cool. In reality though, the origins of everyone’s favourite friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man are a little less cut and dry.

For starters, Stan Lee himself admitted in his own autobiography, Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee, that the “seeing an insect crawl up a wall” story is one that he has told so often to so many people that he can’t really remember if it’s true or something he came up with as it made a good story to tell the public. Which explains why the story, as consistently as Lee has tried to tell it over the years, has slight variations depending on when and to whom it was being told. For example in some versions Lee saw the insect (usually a fly) while he sat in his office in 1962, and in others he saw it while literally pitching the hero to his boss, and in others it was something he remembered as being cool from many years earlier.

When asked about why he came up with such an obscure power for a hero, in another case, Lee explained that the decision was made partly out of frustration that he thought that he’d pretty much done everything else at that point. In his own words, “The big thing with superheroes is you have to try to do something different. I thought, ‘What superpower could I give him?’. I had already done somebody who was very strong, I did a woman who could turn invisible, I did a guy who could fly. I was thinking, ‘What’s left?”

The heroes referenced by Lee in that quote for non-comic fans who inexplicably decided to view this anyway are The Incredible Hulk, the Invisible Woman and the Human Torch. The latter two heroes are best known for being founding members of Marvel’s first family, The Fantastic Four, co-created by Lee and first introduced in 1961, while the former was introduced in may of 1962 and was also co-created by Lee.

Again, according to another popular anecdote by Lee, before settling on Spider-Man, Lee came up with and rejected several other insect-themed names including Gnat Man, Insect Man, and Mosquito man. Again, this story has been told so many times that there exist multiple variations, but they all say essentially the same thing- that Lee came up with the name “Spider-man” while brainstorming and felt that it just fit, which isn’t really the whole story either.

You see, Lee also stated that he was a huge fan of The Spider, a fictional character hailing from the pulp magazines of the 1930s, and that this character directly influenced the creation of Spider-Man.  In the vein of similar pulp heroes like The Shadow and the Green Hornet, The Spider was a wealthy man who adopted an alter ego to wage a one-man war on crime, often brutally killing criminals and branding their corpses with a spider-shaped mark to serve as a warning to others, hence the name, The Spider.

Save for the use of Spider imagery, The Spider and Spider-Man share virtually nothing else in common, making it fairly obvious that the only facet of the Spider-Man character The Spider influenced was his name. That said, according to Lee, he came up with the name Spider-Man independently, but was convinced that it was the right name when he recalled the name of The Spider’s comic, “The Spider – Master of Men!” And how dramatic he’d found it as a child. As a slight tangent, Spider-Man co-creator, Steve Ditko had claimed that Lee was a big fan of the DC hero Hawkman and has mentioned that he feels that this likely influenced the name “Spider-Man” in some way.

Whatever the case, although Lee liked the name, his publisher to whom he had to pitch the character, Martin Goodman, hated it, reportedly telling him “People hate spiders”. Another aspect of the character Goodman took issue with was Lee’s insistence that he be a teenager, reportedly telling Lee that “teenagers can only be sidekicks”. Lee took particular exception to this as he felt a younger comic character would ultimately be more relatable to teenagers, a rapidly expanding audience for the medium at the time. On a side note, Lee made the conscious decision to buck the trend of referring to a teenage superhero with the suffix “boy”, opting to call his hero Spider-Man to show that he was just as capable as any other hero. Lee has also claimed that Goodman disagreed with him about the idea of Spider-Man struggling with typical teenage issues like girls, homework and bullies alongside being a hero, telling him, “He can’t have personal problems if he’s supposed to be a superhero—don’t you know who a superhero is?”

Again, Lee felt that a hero with personal problems and vulnerabilities would make for a more interesting and ultimately relatable character to young fans and refused to back down.

Goodman eventually relented and gave Lee permission to write a story for the character that was to be published in an issue of a comic series produced by Marvel called Amazing Adult Fantasy… Which in more modern times with the internet having ruined us all, would definitely not feature a teenage superhero… Though a male shooting white sticky stuff would probably be featured…

In any event, as it turns out, the only reason Goodman agreed to let Lee put Spider-Man into the comic was because it was quite literally on the verge of being canned, with the issue featuring Spider-Man slated to be its last. Undeterred, Lee, with the help of artist Steve Ditko, fleshed out the concept and design of the character.

Exactly how much influence Ditko had on the design and backstory of Spider-Man has been the subject of much controversy and debate over the years. This said, it’s largely agreed that Ditko came up with most every aspect of Spider-Man’s costume, including the bold for the time decision to have him wear a mask that covered his entire face. Ditko, in an extended essay about his involvement with the creation of Spider-Man, explained that he did this to cover Spider-Man’s obviously “boyish face” and add a layer of “mystery” to the character. The decision has been widely lauded as brilliant for helping define the character as well as making it easier for children of all ethnicities and backgrounds to relate to the superhero.

In addition to this, Ditko is also said to have expanded upon Lee’s original idea of “a teenager getting bitten by a spider”, though to what extent isn’t clear. We do know that before it was decided that Spider-Man’s powers were apparently going to be caused by the bite of a radioactive spider, it was Lee’s idea to have him get his powers from a magic ring, an idea that was quickly dropped, according to Ditko, because of how similar the idea was to how the powers for the Archie Comics hero, The Fly, worked.

Said idea was apparently partially pitched by another famed comic artist called Jack Kirby, who himself has claimed to have had some input in Spider-Man’s creation. Again, how much influence Kirby had on the character or his backstory isn’t clear, though Ditko has said that Kirby’s involvement was limited to “5 unused pencilled pages of an unfinished story”. That said, these five pages did contain elements that did eventually become part of Spider-Man canon, for example such details as his real name (Peter Parker) and the fact that he lived with his aunt and uncle. Kirby also drafted a version of Spider-Man’s costume that was immediately rejected by Lee because it was essentially identical to the one worn by Captain America at the time. In the end, Kirby involvement with Spider-Man’s debut was limited to the cover, which was colored by Ditko.

Although, as mentioned, the character of Spider-Man was essentially being sent to die in a failing comic book that was slated to be canned after the issue he appeared in, the story was written as if the series was set to continue, with the final pages of the comic noting that “The Spider-man will continue to appear every month”. On top of this, for Spider-Man’s debut, the comic’s title was changed from Amazing Adult Fantasy to simple, Amazing Fantasy to double down on Lee’s assertion that the character would resonate a with younger audience. And, we can only assume, help further solidify the fact that his web shooter was totally family friendly.

And Lee was right because although Amazing Fantasy was cancelled, when Marvel looked at sales figures a few months after its August 1962 release, they realised that the issue had sold more copies than nearly any other comic they’d ever released up to that point. With the popularity of the character now apparent, Marvel began quickly arranged for Spider-Man to get his own series, which began publication of March the following year, starting with The Amazing Spider-Man #1.

Today Spidey is one of Marvel’s most profitable and recognisable heroes, being consistently ranked alongside the likes of Superman and Batman as one of the best fictional characters ever created. Which isn’t bad for a character nobody thought would be popular, originally debuting in a comic that was slated to hit the dustbin of history directly after publication.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• That Time a Major Studio Intentionally Made a Crappy Fantastic Four Movie
• How Did the Whole Stan Lee Cameo Thing Start? (And the Hilariously Awkward Way He Convinced His Future Wife to Go Out With Him)
• Why is Superman Described as Leaping Tall Buildings with a Single Bound When He Can Fly?
• How Hollywood Studios Manage to Officially Lose Money on Movies That Make a Billion Dollars

Bonus Facts:

• An often overlooked aspect of Spider-Man’s name, unless you’re a real stickler for grammar, is that, unlike virtually every other superhero, his name contains a hyphen, being written as Spider-Man in most official media since his first appearance in 1962. According to Lee, this was to differentiate Spider-Man from Superman when the comic was on news-stands.  To ensure that the names were as different as possible from the very beginning, Lee even insisted that Spider-Man’s name be written across two lines on the cover of Amazing Fantasy # 15, the comic featuring his first appearance.
• Within Marvel canon, Spider-Man is noted as possessing an exceptional strong force of will, noted as being “completely free of evil and temptation”.
• The line “With great power comes great responsibility” was first featured in a side panel of Spider-Man’s first story and wasn’t actually uttered or spoken by any character.

Expand for References

• Marvelous Myths: Marvel Superheroes and Everyday Faith
• How Spider-Man Was Born
• STAN LEE TALKS SPIDER-MAN ORIGINS, FILM CAMEOS & CREATIVE PROCESS
• Stan Lee explains how he created Spider-Man
• National Medal of Arts recipient Stan Lee talks about the origins of Spider Man
• Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee
• How Spidey was born; Spider-Man creator Stan Lee explains how the idea for his archnid superhero came from watching a fly walking up a wall
• Peter Parker: Spiderman bursts out of the page
• Stan Lee: Conversations
• Along Came a Spider
• Why the hyphen in Spider-Man?
• Alter Ego, the Comic Book Artist Collection

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by Karl Smallwood - January 27, 2022 at 11:10PM
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