The Canaries in the Submarine

Weight Loss Introduction

0:01If you felt stuck trying to lose weight, you're not alone. Enter Weight Loss by HERS. It's designed to support you in reaching your goals. And HERS now offers access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the WeGovi pill and the WeGovi pen. With WeGovi at HERS, lose up to 20% or more of your body weight when combined with diet and exercise. It helps you regulate your appetite, eat less, and keep weight off. Plus, WeGovi is the first GLP-1 available in a pill, so there are no needles needed.

0:35Everything is 100% online through HERS. You'll connect with a licensed provider who will determine if treatment is right for you. If prescribed, your medication is delivered right to your door, no insurance necessary. And it doesn't stop there. Weight Loss by HERS goes beyond medication by offering access to 24-7 messaging with your care team and tons of in-app lifestyle and nutrition tips, like recipes, meal plans, fitness videos, sleep content, and more. Even better, with a range of affordable GLP-1 options,

1:07HERS makes it simple to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget, if eligible. You'll get a treatment plan personalized to you and unlimited dosage changes as needed. It's weight loss designed to work with your life. Ready to reach your goals? Visit ForHERS.com slash women to get personalized, affordable care that gets you. That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash women. ForHERS.com slash women. Weight Loss by HERS is not available in all 50 states.

1:39WeGovi is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, WeGovi clinical study information, and restrictions, visit ForHERS.com. If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, Sleep Number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event.

2:10Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a Sleep Number store or go to SleepNumber.com. Sleep Number. To a good life's sleep.

Thetis Submarine Disaster

2:24The divers were shocked to the moment they opened the hatch. It was September 1939. A British submarine called the Thetis had sunk near Liverpool. Now the divers had to remove the 99 bodies inside for burial. The divers expected a heart-rending scene, and it was. Colleagues, comrades, all dead. But they did not expect to find many of the men inside naked or nearly so, their clothes in tatters. Why had they shredded their own uniforms?

2:55And the mysteries only deepened from there. Some sailors had nearly bitten their own tongues off. What could cause such agitation? The Thetis was also stocked with emergency underwater breathing devices. And most of the devices were found in perfect working order. So why hadn't more men used them to escape? Plus, from what the survivors said, the British Navy knew a few people had died inside the sub's escape chambers, the water locks that let them exit the sub without flooding the rest of it.

3:26Several sailors had entered the locks with the underwater breathing devices, only to tear the devices off their face and drown. Why would they do that? What had gone so wrong? Solving these mysteries could save other sailors in the future. So the British Navy turned to the best man they could think of, J.B.S. Haldane, also known as Jack. Haldane was a tall, scowling biologist with a bald head and pushbroom mustache. He was not exactly popular. One colleague said he had a persecution complex and a chip on both shoulders.

4:02But the Navy tapped Haldane anyway. Probing the Thetis mysteries would be dangerous in the extreme, and Haldane loved dangerous science. Indeed, he often ran reckless experiments on himself. And just as the Navy expected to figure out what went wrong in the Thetis and save future lives, Haldane proved willing to go to the brink of death.

4:25This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy-turvy, science-y history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

JBS Haldane's Science

4:48J.B.S. Haldane learned science from his father, Dr. John Scott Haldane, who was every bit as smart and every bit as reckless. For one project, the elder Haldane explored how heat affects the human body. He would sit in a closed chamber at 250 degrees for a quarter hour, that is 38 degrees above the boiling point of water, so hot that a raw steak lying next to him eventually baked into shoe leather. In a later experiment, he endured 300 degrees, so hot that his hair singed.

5:18During World War I, Haldane also led a crash project to design gas masks for soldiers. The initial gas attacks had caught British troops in the trenches by surprise. The only effective protection at first involved urinating on handkerchiefs and tying those around their faces. The chemicals in the urine reacted with the chlorine in the gas and spared them. But obviously that was not a good long-term solution, so the elder Haldane designed a gas mask. He first tested it by running wind sprints wearing the mask, to make sure it didn't prevent soldiers from breathing.

5:50Next, Haldane entered an airtight chamber wearing a mask and exposed himself to chlorine. That was wildly dangerous. One mistake, and he would be dead. And mistakes were made. Some of Haldane's assistants took their own shifts in the chamber to test different designs, and their masks leaked. The men endured hacking and gasping, barely able to draw breath. Some were bedridden for weeks after, their burning lungs clogged with mucus. But from this work, Haldane did build an effective rubber gas mask.

6:24To block gases like chlorine, it used gauze smeared with glycerin and sodium thiosulfate. This cheap, effective design saved thousands of lives. Dr. Haldane's most famous work involved accidents in coal mines. In one case, he investigated a blast that killed 57 men. But upon examination, only five died of actual blast wounds. The others suffocated, presumably from lack of oxygen. But that conclusion did not sit right with Haldane. When the bodies of the miners without blast injuries had been retrieved,

6:55the fire lamps next to them were still burning, and flames require steady oxygen. Plus, when people die from too little oxygen, the skin under their fingernails turns blue. The skin beneath these miners' fingernails was bright pink. After thinking things through, Haldane proposed that they had died instead from inhaling so-called fire damp. Fire damp is an odorless mix of gases that can build up in underground chambers. Most dangerously, fire damp includes carbon monoxide, which latches onto the hemoglobin in our blood.

7:28Hemoglobin normally ferries oxygen to our cells. But carbon monoxide is 300 times better at bonding to hemoglobin, so it boxes the oxygen out. This prevents our cells from getting oxygen. To explore carbon monoxide poisoning, Haldane locked himself inside a chamber for a series of tests. Each time, he also brought a mouse. Together, they began breathing carbon monoxide at increasingly high levels. Haldane wanted to document the symptoms he felt, so that miners could recognize them in the future and scurry to safety.

7:59These were not fun experiments. Haldane felt weak and nauseous, and he got sharp headaches. Sometimes, he could barely crawl out afterward. Once, while staggering home after a long session, a policeman detained him for public drunkenness. He was swaying that badly. But as bad as Haldane felt, the mice had it even worse. They always passed out before he felt any symptoms. Then, they usually died. That's because mice have higher metabolisms than humans and breathe in carbon monoxide more quickly.

8:31And that fact gave Haldane an idea. He proposed that coal miners take caged mice down into the shafts with them. If the mice stopped moving, they would know to flee. Haldane later realized that songbirds have even higher metabolisms, so they would provide even better warning. Songbirds such as canaries. Yep, he's the source of the cliché about the canary in the coal mine. Sometimes, Dr. Haldane enlisted his son Jack in his research. Once, the duo was crawling through tunnels in a cave system.

9:02They entered a modest, eight-foot-tall chamber. Now, the elder Haldane knew that fire damp is lighter than air and had probably accumulated in the upper half of this small chamber. So he told Jack to stand up and start reciting the funeral oration from Julius Caesar. You know the one. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them. The good is often turd with their bones. And so on.

9:32Little Jack stood up and started gamely. But after a few lines, he was already dizzy. After five lines, he collapsed. When he came to on the ground, where the air was safe to breathe, they both had a good laugh at the prank. And that was not even the most reckless thing that Dr. Haldane exposed his son to. Once, he took Jack down in a submarine to study breathing in confined spaces. This was back when subs were basically death traps. And then, in August 1906, he took 13-year-old Jack along on a Navy research voyage.

10:04It took place on a torpedo ship named HMS Spanker. And young Jack had a spanking good time aboard. Sleeping on hammocks. Blowing the foghorn. Gaping at the crew's rifles and pistols. One day, the crew showed him how to load a shell into an artillery gun. Before they could say Bob Cratchit, Jack swung the gun around at a nearby ship and pulled the trigger. Boom! Thankfully, they had only loaded a blank. But Dr. Haldane had undertaken the voyage for a serious purpose. To research decompression sickness, also known as the bends.

10:37Divers suffer the bends after breathing in air at high pressure underwater. The pressure causes nitrogen bubbles to dissolve in fatty tissue. If a diver surfaces too quickly, the bubbles rush out into the bloodstream. There, they expand and block vessels off, or cut off blood supply. They can also pinch nerves and cause severe pain. In extreme cases, the bends can paralyze divers, or even kill them. In the early 1900s, every ship had its own rules of thumb for how quickly you could bring divers up safely.

11:08But those hunches and guesses were often fatally wrong. So the British Navy asked Haldane to sail with the torpedo ship and systematically send divers up and down to figure out how to prevent the bends. The divers wore canvas or leather suits. On their heads sat a helmet with a hose connected to the ship. Sailors on deck would hand crank a pump, feeding compressed air to the diver. One man on the voyage reached a depth of 210 feet, a then-world record. As an enthusiastic self-experimenter, Dr. Haldane dove many times himself that week.

11:41He also sent Jack down and almost never saw his son again. If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, Sleep Number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now it's the final days of our Everything's On Sale event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses. Our Memorial Day event ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a Sleep Number store or go to sleepnumber.com.

12:14Sleep Number, to a good life's sleep.

12:19This year, experience the NHL playoffs your way. Want to watch a single? Do or die Game 7. A full week of heavy hitting back and forth series. Then check out Slings 1-3 and 7-day passes. Watch the chase for the cup on ESPN and TNT, starting as low as $4.99. No long-term contracts or overpaying. Just live hockey at home or when you want it. Sling lets you do that. Visit Sling.com to learn more. Young Jack Haldane received virtually no training before his dive.

12:54Just a few minutes in a high-pressure chamber and some instructions on swallowing to equalize the pressure in his ears. Then, time to hit the water. The crew dressed him in the standard suit, with a helmet and weighted boots. The outfit weighed 155 pounds. Unfortunately, the teenage Jack did not weigh much more than that himself. He was pretty scrawny. So his cuffs hung loose, instead of being snug on his wrists. As a result, the instant he splashed in, cold water started rushing in and pooling around his ankles.

13:24By the time Jack hit bottom, it was at his knees. Now, Jack was having too much fun on the bottom to worry much about the rising water in the suit. After all, there were crabs down there, plus sponges and starfish. It was a whole new world. But the situation grew acute on the way up. The water hit his chest, then his neck. Every screaming instinct told him to shoot to the surface. But he kept having to stop at intervals to decompress, for the sake of the experiment. By the time the crew dragged Jack onto the deck, he was practically swallowing water.

13:56He was also shaking violently from cold and fear. But Dr. Haldane had a prescription ready. He gave his 13-year-old son several slugs of whiskey to warm him, and sent him below deck to sleep it off. Overall, this voyage provided the first scientifically proven method of avoiding the bends. In short, Haldane found that rising to the surface in stages, not continuously, worked best. All modern divers use this method. Perhaps to escape his father's shadow, Jack pursued his own path in college, studying classics instead of science.

14:30He also grew politically active, and declared himself a communist. Now, this might have been a pose. Jack liked shocking people. A friend once noted, if everyone had become a communist, Jack would have been a Tory. Regardless, Haldane became an outspoken supporter of Soviet Russia. Still, Jack always remembered his father's experiments fondly, even the ones on him. It was their way of bonding. And eventually, the pull of science grew too strong to resist. So despite his lack of a degree, Jack pursued a career in biology.

15:02He grew fascinated with genetics, and helped reconcile the theories of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. He also kept up his father's physiology work. Jack would do things like gulp down ammonium chloride to turn his blood acidic, then note the symptoms. Or, he would turn his blood basic by choking down baking soda. Overall, Jack inherited from his father a warped sense of how to do science. Both of them experimented primarily on humans, and they always volunteered to go first. Dr. Haldane finally died in 1936, at age 76.

15:34Despite all his reckless experiments, none of them ever harmed his long-term health. The same would not be true of Jack, especially during his investigation into the Thetis submarine disaster. In 1939, the Thetis was a brand new sub, the pride of the British fleet. Its June 1st launch was the Maiden Voyage, and there was something of a party atmosphere on board. In addition to the 53 crew members, dozens of observers came along, mostly other Navy officers and engineers from the firm that built it. There were even caterers on board, serving cold cuts and beer.

16:07Around 3pm, Thetis tried to dive. Embarrassingly, the attempt failed, even though all her tanks for ballast were full of water. The captain determined that the bow was still too buoyant, so he resorted to a trick. He asked the crew to fill the torpedo tubes in the sub's nose with water, to add weight there. No one has ever quite sorted out what happened next, but we do know a few things. Each of the six torpedo tubes had a small door that opened inward to the sub, so sailors could load the torpedo. Each tube also had a hatch that opened outward to the seat, so the torpedo could shoot off.

16:42Obviously, having both the inward door and the outward hatch open at the same time would be dangerous, since water would rush in and flood the sub. So the tubes had gauges that monitored the outside hatch. These gauges were connected to toggle switches inside the torpedo room. These switches told sailors whether an outside hatch was open, and if it was open, they would never ever open the inner door at the same time. Unfortunately, despite being crucial, these switches were poorly designed. Inside the torpedo room, the switches appeared on the wall in two vertical columns of three each.

17:16Now, if I were numbering the switches, I would start with 1, 2 on the top, then 3, 4 in the middle, then 5, 6 on the bottom. Pretty simple. But in the fetus, the switches were numbered 2, 1, 4, 3, 6, 5. No one knows why. To compound the problem, the switches were not consistent. On numbers 2, 4, and 6, when the switch was flipped to the right, that meant the outer hatch was open. But on 1, 3, and 5, left meant open. Overall, it was a terrible user interface, almost begging for mistakes.

17:50There was a backup, though. Each tube had a stopcock on the front, like a spigot. You turned the handle, and if water came out, that meant the outer hatch was open. Pretty straightforward. Except something had happened. To help the torpedoes glide out smoothly, some clever engineers had coated the tube's inner surface with slick enamel paint. Unfortunately, the enamel clogged the stopcock. So even when an outer hatch was open, no water came out. Now, there was a backup to the backup.

18:21Each stopcock had a thin metal rod dangling nearby. If a sailor suspected the stopcock was clogged, he could jam the rod inside and clear out any gunk. Easy enough. Just after 3 p.m., the captain ordered the torpedo tubes filled with water to help Bethetis dive. The responsibility fell to Lt. Frederick Woods. Woods later swore that all the switches were in the shut position when he got to the torpedo room. But given the confusing design, who knows? For what it's worth, when the Thetis was later raised, the switch for tube 5 was open.

18:53Regardless, Woods checked over the switches and was satisfied. Then he turned the handle on each tube's stopcock, and no water came out. He ignored the metal rods. After all, the Thetis was brand new. No reason for the stopcocks to be clogged. Woods then began opening each inner torpedo tube door, checking for possible leaks. Tubes 1, 2, 3, and 4 looked good. Tube 5 did not. For some reason, the outer hatch was open to the sea, and seawater started gushing in at 3.5 tons per second.

19:27Suddenly, the merely embarrassing problem of being unable to dive had flipped into a deadly problem of the sub sinking uncontrollably fast.

Thetis Sinking Mystery

19:36And as we'll hear next week, the sailors inside were about to die in all sorts of mysterious ways.

19:43This is the Disappearing Spoon Podcast. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, or tell friends and family. Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. It costs as little as 7 cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books.

20:15Check out samkeen.com. You can also inquire about booking me as a speaker at your school or event. This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Keen. Thanks for listening. If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes,

20:46Sleep Number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now it's the final days of our Everything's on Sale event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses. Our Memorial Day event ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a Sleep Number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep Number, to a good life's sleep. If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes,

21:16Sleep Number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now it's the final days of our Everything's on Sale event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses. Our Memorial Day event ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a Sleep Number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep Number, to a good life's sleep.