Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for tuning in. Shout out to our super
Speaker 1: producers Casey Pegram, the one and only Max Williams, and
Speaker 1: you know what. Shout out to everyone who is back
Speaker 1: to flying the friendly skies these days. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: you and I both took a couple of little jaunts recently. Um,
Speaker 1: I just got back from Los Angeles and it's not
Speaker 1: as scary as I maybe would have thought. Keeping that
Speaker 1: mask on the whole time, especially on overnight flights a
Speaker 1: little weird. It's hard to sleep in one of those things.
Speaker 1: And I should I should say that I went to
Speaker 1: Philadelphia recently. It was a wonderful trip. Love the city. Uh,
Speaker 1: I'm Ben, your Neel and you You and I once
Speaker 1: went to Philly together. Remember that we did do that thing, Ben,
Speaker 1: We did a show with our other podcast stuff they
Speaker 1: don't want you to know what the World Cafe and
Speaker 1: it was awesome. It was awesome, and we can't wait
Speaker 1: to get back on the road soon. Max. Have you
Speaker 1: hopped on a plane recently? Not yet? I mean I
Speaker 1: was planning to go out to Portland. I had a
Speaker 1: buddy move out there right before the start of the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and I just love that city. So I was like,
Speaker 1: oh man, I'll come see you. And then pandemic has
Speaker 1: been going and then I've been talking to him like, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna come out soon. He's like, well, I'm coming
Speaker 1: to Atlanta pretty soon. Anyways. I'm like, well, zero some game,
Speaker 1: you come see me here in Atlanta, then offline out
Speaker 1: in Portlands, like I don't know with you, and then
Speaker 1: we just hang on in Portland. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: think that that's a good plan. I have a question
Speaker 1: for you guys. What is the longest you have gone
Speaker 1: after a flight where your ears didn't pop back? You
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Like you have that thing where
Speaker 1: you get that muffled kind of like headphones with no
Speaker 1: music on kind of vibe and you kind of like
Speaker 1: you got this feeling in your jaw and you're like
Speaker 1: doing the yawn and trying to make them pop. I
Speaker 1: had I have a horror story about that, but I
Speaker 1: love I'd love to get y'all's perspective. Ben, how about
Speaker 1: how about you. Let's see, it was a very long flight,
Speaker 1: either thirteen or fourteen hours, I want to say, maybe
Speaker 1: a little more, And it was several It took several
Speaker 1: days for my ears to adjust. But also, as you
Speaker 1: could tell just from hearing how long I was in
Speaker 1: the in the sky that time, I had a lot
Speaker 1: going on, you know what I mean. I was like,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna deal with the ear thing later when
Speaker 1: we get back to regular life. If we make it,
Speaker 1: oh totally, you know, I get I get where you're
Speaker 1: coming from. Max. How about you? Any long term ear
Speaker 1: situations resulting from flights, Not that I can think of.
Speaker 1: The longest flight I've ever taken was Seattle, um Atlanta. See,
Speaker 1: I'm afraid of heights and I'm claustrophobics, so flights that
Speaker 1: I do not get along very well. I'll try to
Speaker 1: avoid them at all costs, but I'll probably say, like
Speaker 1: the only a couple of hours afterwards, and then it
Speaker 1: was gone. But it wasn't like it would just go
Speaker 1: away immediately. It was just like slow, Well, you, sir,
Speaker 1: are one of the lucky ones. What about you, Noel,
Speaker 1: What's what's your horror story? Well? Yes, I don't know
Speaker 1: it's the horror story, but it makes me think of
Speaker 1: today's story. This is why I bring it up. I
Speaker 1: once had a flight it was like I think, east
Speaker 1: coast west coast flight where my ears didn't pop for
Speaker 1: the whole duration of my visit. And then I assumed, okay, surely,
Speaker 1: on the return flight, having that change in altitude, you know,
Speaker 1: up and down again, we'll cool knock something loose and
Speaker 1: cause my ears to pop back to normal. But it didn't.
Speaker 1: And I went a whole week after the trip with
Speaker 1: my ears still feeling like they were full of like
Speaker 1: cotton balls. And like you said, Max, it really was
Speaker 1: kind of a gradual process, but for me one that
Speaker 1: was barely perceptible because it was just like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's just my life. Now. You know, today's story it's
Speaker 1: about the opposite. But I couldn't help but think the
Speaker 1: idea of taking flights to cure deafness um around the
Speaker 1: early nineteen twenties, where flights were still in some ways
Speaker 1: a novelty, and they were used for tricks and you know,
Speaker 1: acrobatics and things like that at various fairs, and you
Speaker 1: had m folks doing like all kinds of you know,
Speaker 1: death defying stunts, and this literally became a prescription for
Speaker 1: folks who were hard of hearing, or even other maladies
Speaker 1: that we're gonna get into today. Um, and I assume
Speaker 1: that it has something to do with this like change
Speaker 1: and altitude, but that's actually the least of of what
Speaker 1: has leaned on, at least in the kind of like
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom behind all this stuff in terms of it
Speaker 1: wasn't really a particularly good method, but it has more
Speaker 1: to do with like scaring the condition out of you,
Speaker 1: right right. So I want to step back because we
Speaker 1: are talking a lot about the condition known as deafness today,
Speaker 1: and before we get into this attempt to quote unquote
Speaker 1: cure deafness, we've got to acknowledge that when you're talking
Speaker 1: about understanding deafness, you have to understand that many people
Speaker 1: in the community don't want to be quote unquote fixed.
Speaker 1: This is a pretty controversial issue, and part of it
Speaker 1: is because some people might look at those attempts, however
Speaker 1: well intentioned, as something that is eroding or destroying their community.
Speaker 1: You can read an excellent article on this in The
Speaker 1: Atlantic by Allegra Ringo Understanding Deafness. Not everyone wants to
Speaker 1: be fixed. Highly recommended. If you'd like to learn more
Speaker 1: about this and so the context in which this occurs,
Speaker 1: as you say, early in the nineteen twenties or so
Speaker 1: or early twentie century. Uh. The context here is important
Speaker 1: because different institutions and individuals in the US had attempted
Speaker 1: to cure, cure, or you could say, assimilate deaf people.
Speaker 1: One example comes to us from Stephanie Ane Goldberg writing
Speaker 1: for the smart set dot com, where she describes what
Speaker 1: was called oralism and this is what I mean by
Speaker 1: assimilation or cure, the line between those. When oralism, deaf
Speaker 1: people were forced to speak and lip read rather than
Speaker 1: to use sign language like a sl American sign language.
Speaker 1: So there were also things like putting electricity in people's ears,
Speaker 1: and of course more spiritual treatments like praying. But with
Speaker 1: the novelty of aircraft and the discovery of how air
Speaker 1: pressure changes can affect people's ears, someone decided two see
Speaker 1: whether or not there was a way to give people
Speaker 1: the ability of hearing through exposing them to airplane trips.
Speaker 1: And it really all dates back to something called the
Speaker 1: Wren's Junior incident in one right, that's right, And much
Speaker 1: of this research comes to us from a fantastic article
Speaker 1: in Smithsonian magazine describing this phenomenon of doctors prescribing death
Speaker 1: defying flights to quote unquote cure deafness. In That article
Speaker 1: was written by the incredibly talented Greg Doherty for Smithsonian
Speaker 1: mag dot com on September twenty six, twenty seventeen. The
Speaker 1: event you're referring to, Ben took place in March of
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty one. There was an Army air service plane
Speaker 1: that took off from a military base in Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: And one one of their air fields, and there were
Speaker 1: two men on board, the pilot and a passenger, a
Speaker 1: gentleman by the name of Harry A. Rens, Jr. Who
Speaker 1: was twenty two at the time. Rens was a veteran
Speaker 1: of World War One and had lost his ability to
Speaker 1: speak about eight months before this. Uh this flight took place.
Speaker 1: It's a little unclear in the research and the history
Speaker 1: as to what caused it, if there was a particular
Speaker 1: injury that caused it, whether it was tied to some
Speaker 1: kind of other trauma that he experienced during the war,
Speaker 1: But it is most likely some sort of result of
Speaker 1: his service. So the doctors had tried everything to kind
Speaker 1: of bring his speech back to him. That included some
Speaker 1: kind of dicey sounding surgeries like removing his adnoids and
Speaker 1: his tonsils. It seems like a pretty odd leap there,
Speaker 1: don't you think. Then yeah, you get the feeling that
Speaker 1: maybe they were increasingly moving towards a throwing spaghetti at
Speaker 1: the wall situation. They wanted this guy, it was very
Speaker 1: young guy, to be able to regain the power of speech,
Speaker 1: but they weren't sure how to do it, and and
Speaker 1: after exhausting several options, Rends eventually meets a doctor named
Speaker 1: Charles H. Mcinnerney at the U. S Public Health Service,
Speaker 1: and this doctor says, you know what, Rends, I think
Speaker 1: your problem is psychological and I'm gonna do something a
Speaker 1: little different. You don't need to take pills or have
Speaker 1: any more surgeries. I want you to go on a plane.
Speaker 1: And then he explains this later to a newspaper reporter
Speaker 1: from the time, detailing the psychological aspect. He says, quote,
Speaker 1: when the patient feels himself being taken up to twelve
Speaker 1: thousand or fourteen thousand feet or more, and then suddenly
Speaker 1: the machine does a nose dive or a loop. The loop,
Speaker 1: the sufferer from hysteria is most likely to forget his
Speaker 1: other troubles. I selected the airplane for my work because
Speaker 1: it was the most convenient means at hand. The same
Speaker 1: thing might have been accomplished by tying the patient to
Speaker 1: a railroad track. Hardcore doctor, hardcore whoa, So this is
Speaker 1: literally like, you know, let's terrify this condition out of you, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he couldn't just like wait around a corner, because that's
Speaker 1: what he's describing. I guess he he really wanted it
Speaker 1: to feel like a life threatening situation. And you know,
Speaker 1: what's odd. I don't know if we're going to keep
Speaker 1: this in this episode. What's really odd is, uh, last night,
Speaker 1: I ate some cheese right before I went to bed
Speaker 1: at a late hour, and I had this continual, long
Speaker 1: dream of being in an out of control helicopter but
Speaker 1: I was flying and I couldn't figure out how to
Speaker 1: fly the thing. And it was one of his dreams
Speaker 1: were do you ever wake up and you fall back
Speaker 1: asleep and you're still stuck in the same total as
Speaker 1: one of those, So I I'm feeling this. It's also
Speaker 1: that classic dream scenario of like being unprepared, like, gosh,
Speaker 1: I really should have taken you know, helicopter pilot classes
Speaker 1: before entering this vehicle. That that seems very terrifying and cable.
Speaker 1: Why did I not bring a jet like a parachute
Speaker 1: for or like the far side says, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the fear of going to the lecture and being the
Speaker 1: only one without your duck? Do you guys remember that
Speaker 1: clip or comic? No? But I get I think I
Speaker 1: get where it's going. What was the duck meant to
Speaker 1: be like some sort of safety blanket? Like what what
Speaker 1: is or is that just dream logic? I think it's
Speaker 1: dream logic? Genius? But but you're absolutely right, like this
Speaker 1: does seem clearly a psychological approach, right, I mean the
Speaker 1: guy even uses the H word, which we talked about
Speaker 1: in past up hysteria. That's exactly right, man. It probably
Speaker 1: should be reduced to the H word. Yes, Uh, it
Speaker 1: certainly is a very loaded word, especially when it comes
Speaker 1: to doctors of this era as well, treating women and
Speaker 1: using this as a term of abuse, almost in terms
Speaker 1: of like, oh, she is all in her head. She
Speaker 1: was just hysterical the idea of hysterical women. But it
Speaker 1: can be used for men too, apparently, so uh, equal
Speaker 1: opportunity kind of gas lighters these doctors were. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's really just kind of a more extreme example of
Speaker 1: the idea of like scaring someone to get rid of
Speaker 1: the hiccups. You know, Yeah, that's I think that's a
Speaker 1: really good comparison. And shout out to our own Frank
Speaker 1: Ball Herron, who has this very weird trance like hiccups cure.
Speaker 1: He was on a he was on our show earlier,
Speaker 1: was idiomatic for the people. Yes, are are four part
Speaker 1: series on idioms, so check that out if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more. But got what a good comparisonal In
Speaker 1: Ren's his case, this appears to have some sort of
Speaker 1: efficacy because, again his Dohorty points out in the Smithsonian,
Speaker 1: they're only up in the air for about an hour,
Speaker 1: and when they land, Ren's is walking down the ramp,
Speaker 1: he's getting off the airplane, and his first words were,
Speaker 1: I don't know whether I can talk or not. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not laughing, and it is obviously great great, yeah,
Speaker 1: but but it's like, what, I don't know what happened?
Speaker 1: Like okay, So maybe this does point to the lack
Speaker 1: of the loss of his speech. The Mr Rend's a
Speaker 1: speech as being psychological. If if surgery didn't do the trick.
Speaker 1: These weird, irrelevant seeming surgeries didn't do the trick. And
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden he was just spooked into speaking,
Speaker 1: I guess. And a big part of this too was
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't tell the passenger like, you're in for
Speaker 1: some crazy, you know, areal acrobatics. It was just gonna
Speaker 1: be you know, you're gonna go for this fight that
Speaker 1: we're prescribing you. But really, as we've indicated, the shock
Speaker 1: and awe of it all really was supposedly what you know,
Speaker 1: turned something on or off in the brain. Uh, and
Speaker 1: it would appear that it worked, and the newspapers ran
Speaker 1: with it. Yeah, that's the thing. So again, airplanes are
Speaker 1: nowhere near as common or ubiquitous as they are today
Speaker 1: twenty years old roughly, right. I mean, they still we
Speaker 1: were starting to become more mainstream, but they were still
Speaker 1: somewhat of a fascination. And I do not believe we
Speaker 1: would have had the type of commercial airline situation that
Speaker 1: we would know today. I mean, it's even even newer
Speaker 1: than that. It was. The first controlled like the first
Speaker 1: powered airplane flights occurred December of nineteen o three. December seventeen,
Speaker 1: nineteen o three, so this is less than twenty years old.
Speaker 1: What we're saying is like with a lot of new
Speaker 1: emergent technology, people worked completely sure what it was capable of,
Speaker 1: you know, and this, this could be easily misconstrued as
Speaker 1: a panacea, and all you need is one story that
Speaker 1: appears to indicate this works, and their sample size is
Speaker 1: necessarily so low. According to Jennifer van Vleck, curator of
Speaker 1: Social and cultural history of aviation over the Smithsonian National
Speaker 1: Air and Space Museum, she calls it a technological wild West.
Speaker 1: Everybody had was full of speculation and ideas about what
Speaker 1: airplanes could do both two and four passengers. Yeah, it's funny.
Speaker 1: Then there was a commercial flight that took place in
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen, but it was very much like a historical situation.
Speaker 1: It was the world's first scheduled passenger airline flight that
Speaker 1: took off between St. Petersburg and Tampa of Florida, and
Speaker 1: it was considered kind of like a flash in the
Speaker 1: pan The St. Petersburg Tampa Airboat Line, what was called
Speaker 1: was considered we only lasted for four months, but it
Speaker 1: would have kind of paved the way for what we
Speaker 1: would know today as commercial airlines, but around nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: that I think there were some outside of the US,
Speaker 1: but certainly not to the degree that we see today,
Speaker 1: which you're right then about Jennifer van Vlex comment that
Speaker 1: this would have been the technological wild West. Also, you
Speaker 1: know clearly the psychological and medical wild West. So all
Speaker 1: those things kind of coalesced together to to breathe this
Speaker 1: weird kind of meeting of two three rather disciplines. And
Speaker 1: when this started to hit the wires, Uh, it was
Speaker 1: an absolute sensation, um, because you know, this was a
Speaker 1: burgeoning new industry and hey, if we have another reason
Speaker 1: for people to get excited about taking flights, we should
Speaker 1: go for it. Flying Magazine really put out the call
Speaker 1: to look into this as having quote serious therapeutic value.
Speaker 1: The quote from the magazine is, even from the meager
Speaker 1: details now available, it seems conclusive that the future in
Speaker 1: this field holds tremendous possibilities. May we not predict that
Speaker 1: the aerials, sanatorium, roof and the aero therapist will yet
Speaker 1: have their day? Uh? Yeah, you see why they phrased
Speaker 1: that as a question. The answer will find out is
Speaker 1: that yes, you can predict whatever you wish. In this case,
Speaker 1: your prediction will be incorrect. But let's put ourselves back
Speaker 1: in this time period in the nine twenties. Let's say
Speaker 1: you're someone who has your own speech impediment, right, um,
Speaker 1: perhaps a stutter, just just for an example, and you think, well,
Speaker 1: this might if this could help somebody who was mute,
Speaker 1: if this could help them regain the power of speech,
Speaker 1: perhaps it will help me with my own condition. And
Speaker 1: so other patients started. It started with other people who
Speaker 1: had to be each impediments. They started going on airplanes
Speaker 1: in the hopes that it would ameliorate their condition. But
Speaker 1: then some people who had hearing problems, who are maybe
Speaker 1: hard of hearing or had some other specific condition, they
Speaker 1: started noticing this treatment too, and French doctors even got involved.
Speaker 1: That's right, this was not confined to just the United States.
Speaker 1: The word got out and French doctors were noticing that
Speaker 1: passed this again. This is like, you know, it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where you can say something happens in
Speaker 1: this situation, therefore they must be related. It can show
Speaker 1: kind of the coincidental connection of these two events, but
Speaker 1: not necessarily causation. And in this case that ended up
Speaker 1: being exactly what It was French doctors noticing that passengers
Speaker 1: on long airline flights would fall asleep and and therefore
Speaker 1: they thought maybe air travel might be a treatment for insomnia. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that was reported um in the Paris news. So
Speaker 1: very long leaps of judgment being made, you know, noticing
Speaker 1: something working in one situation, and therefore like you might
Speaker 1: as well, must be some sort of magical cure. All
Speaker 1: so they started to develop a reputation. They actually had
Speaker 1: a name, even though they were being used to treat
Speaker 1: other ailments. They were referred to as death flights, to
Speaker 1: the point where certain stunt pilots I guess, um, who
Speaker 1: would we were trying to get in on the action. Um.
Speaker 1: They would hire themselves out for certain events, and they
Speaker 1: started to add death flights to that list of things
Speaker 1: that they would do. Yeah, now you're not just watching
Speaker 1: aerial daredevils for fun. You're also watching them for a
Speaker 1: good cause. At least you can you can see how
Speaker 1: the marketing works there. A lot of this comes from
Speaker 1: the work of Dr Jay Pritte Verdi, medical historian who
Speaker 1: runs a great website called from the Hands of Quacks
Speaker 1: dot com and in their research on this, Dr Verdy
Speaker 1: talks about the specific stunts these pilots would perform. The
Speaker 1: pilots would ride to ten thousand feet, they would dive suddenly.
Speaker 1: They would even have people jump out of the plane
Speaker 1: in parachutes, and this was often not this important to note.
Speaker 1: It was often not the pilots going yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe do like a little corkscrew and then tell me,
Speaker 1: tell me how you're you know, if you feel like
Speaker 1: you can talk yet. Now, these were recommended by your
Speaker 1: specialists of the day because they knew that changing your
Speaker 1: air pressure can affect ears. But there, just like the
Speaker 1: French doctors, I think what we're really talking about, their
Speaker 1: know is correlation versus causation. One does not necessarily create
Speaker 1: the other. And so they didn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: data or information that could support this idea of aircraft
Speaker 1: restoring hearing or even demonstrating any measurable improvement, Like if
Speaker 1: you did a hearing test before the flight and you
Speaker 1: did it after the flight, you really wouldn't find much there,
Speaker 1: or they hadn't yet, to be completely fair, But that
Speaker 1: didn't that didn't stop the news in the media of
Speaker 1: the time from saying, you know, hey, go look out
Speaker 1: over the sky of your fair metropolis. There's a death
Speaker 1: flight scheduled for Saturday or something like that. What we
Speaker 1: see instead from contemporary media is a little bit of
Speaker 1: cherry picking, like desperately searching for a story that shows
Speaker 1: this appearing to work. Yeah, there there's a few. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are a few anecdotal we we've already heard about
Speaker 1: the you know, the the initial case um with the
Speaker 1: World War One that who said I don't know if
Speaker 1: I can talk or not, which seems like he absolutely
Speaker 1: could talk because he said those words. But there are
Speaker 1: several other examples of the press picked up on and
Speaker 1: the way their cover really does indicate that this is
Speaker 1: like proof positive that this is definitely a excellent method
Speaker 1: in a way of of treating all of these things.
Speaker 1: So September of nine two, you had us report stating
Speaker 1: that a quote hopelessly deaf former soldier named Augustus S.
Speaker 1: Harris had gotten his hearing back after a pilot took
Speaker 1: him up to fifteen thousand feet over the city of Chicago.
Speaker 1: The Chicago Tribune reported that he had been unable to
Speaker 1: hear something, as you know, relatively loud if you put
Speaker 1: it right up to yours the ticking of a watch
Speaker 1: if you stick it right in there, and it's kind
Speaker 1: of hard to miss. But after the flight, he was
Speaker 1: able to have a phone conversation with his mother where
Speaker 1: he was able to seemingly hear just fine, very close.
Speaker 1: Following on this story, um, we had a Lutheran minister
Speaker 1: in San Francisco telling reporters that he had had his
Speaker 1: hearing completely restored after a flight took him up to
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand feet on his doctor's recommendation, plans to take
Speaker 1: three more flights. And uh, it's it wasn't even limited
Speaker 1: to humans. There were some cases of animals being, you know,
Speaker 1: miraculously cured by these these death flights. Yeah. One story
Speaker 1: that BuzzFeed would have loved to cover if it existed
Speaker 1: at the time is the story of a doctor who
Speaker 1: sent his death seven month old Collie puppy up into
Speaker 1: the sky. And we don't know what how the dog
Speaker 1: felt afterwards, but the owner said, quote the dog appeared
Speaker 1: to hear much better after his exciting trip. And this
Speaker 1: wasn't some fringe reporting, this was the Associated press. This,
Speaker 1: this got so much press that celebrities of the day
Speaker 1: started to enter into the conversation. Most notably perhaps the
Speaker 1: famous airman himself, Charles Lindbergh. He hadn't he hadn't made
Speaker 1: his name quite yet as one of the age's most
Speaker 1: famous pilots, but he was in the mix. And what
Speaker 1: was the deal of the Lindbergh baby. That was a
Speaker 1: big kerfuffle. I believe he had it was kidnapped. The
Speaker 1: shot was kidnapped, isn't that right? Yeah, that was gonna
Speaker 1: that was gonna happen. About ten years later, the twenty
Speaker 1: month old son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped in March
Speaker 1: of that year. And I think is Perry Mason based
Speaker 1: on the Perry Mason reboot? No, that's just another that's
Speaker 1: another child kidnapping. But do you watch Perry Mason if
Speaker 1: you get a chance. It's very well done. It is good.
Speaker 1: It's a super well crafted like Noir in the set
Speaker 1: building and the world building of it is fantastic. But Lindbergh,
Speaker 1: you know, you're right. He went on to become this
Speaker 1: probably one of the most famous aviators in American history,
Speaker 1: But at the time he was just kind of trying
Speaker 1: to make his way by, like like we were saying earlier,
Speaker 1: doing these kind of events I guess, or or like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, fairs and carnivals. And he had business cards
Speaker 1: that said, quote fair and carnival exhibition work offering plane
Speaker 1: change in mid air exactly what it sounds like, literally
Speaker 1: hopping from one plane to another, wing walking. Also what
Speaker 1: it sounds like parachute jumping breakaways, which is where I
Speaker 1: believe you'd have like a ladder or some sort of
Speaker 1: rope hanging from the bottom of a plane and you
Speaker 1: climb out of the cockpit. Remember these are like open
Speaker 1: cockpit planes, and climb down and and and um, you know,
Speaker 1: I guess, have a co pilot piloting while you dangled there.
Speaker 1: Um something called night fireworks, which I imagine is what
Speaker 1: it sounds like, smoke trails and death flights. I wonder
Speaker 1: if he penciled that end the end because it was
Speaker 1: such a new phenomenon, right, Perhaps yeah, or maybe it's
Speaker 1: the it's got the honor of being the last thing
Speaker 1: with the end, because that is one that's one thing
Speaker 1: he really wants to stay with people when they read
Speaker 1: the card. But yeah, these are impressive and in some
Speaker 1: cases incredibly dangerous stunts. A biographer of Limburg named A.
Speaker 1: Scott Berg has done some deep digging on this and
Speaker 1: looked into Limburgh's correspondence, and you found in a letter
Speaker 1: to Limburgh's mother, the aviator describes the ins and outs
Speaker 1: of a death flight. He has one client who's been
Speaker 1: hard of hearing or partially deaf for about three decades,
Speaker 1: and he says the following, I took him up seven thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred feet he thinks thirteen thousand feet, and brought
Speaker 1: him down in a twenty eight turned spin. He was
Speaker 1: sure sick and couldn't hear as well as before, but
Speaker 1: the next day his hearing was noticeably improved. What's interesting
Speaker 1: about this is it already seems pretty unscrupulous, right because
Speaker 1: Lindberg's admitting to lying. I was about to ask, yeah,
Speaker 1: why so he's saying the doctor prescribed thirteen thousand feet
Speaker 1: and he only took him to seventy four hundred feet.
Speaker 1: Why would he do that? And why why the yeah,
Speaker 1: why the discrepancy. It's very, very unusual because most of
Speaker 1: these uh quote unquote prescriptions that we're hearing, uh and
Speaker 1: a lot of these uh, these tellents from these pilots
Speaker 1: usually involved going up to you know, double digits at
Speaker 1: the very least. Yeah. And as we look into the
Speaker 1: nuts and bolts of these flights, what we see is
Speaker 1: it's almost like a roller coaster's therapy. Like you could
Speaker 1: have sent somebody to an amusement park and they were
Speaker 1: capitalizing on the fascination with and fear of this new technology.
Speaker 1: These flights were almost like roller coasters would be one
Speaker 1: good example. A haunted house would be another good example.
Speaker 1: You were supposed to be freaking terrified the entire time, right, spins,
Speaker 1: nose dives, they're they're doing loops. You know, if they're
Speaker 1: really trying to scare people, they could do the one
Speaker 1: thing that happened to me, which I still don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether this was a prank or whether
Speaker 1: this was just an accidental hot mic situation. One time
Speaker 1: I was on a flight or I was going to
Speaker 1: Central America. There was a sun dip as we're flying
Speaker 1: in and the pilot gets on the mic and it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, you know that everybody knows the stairs to
Speaker 1: called pilot White. It's like a little bit of turgy warts.
Speaker 1: Uh flying in wind Northwest? Why do they all sound
Speaker 1: the same? They take a class? Is it? Is it
Speaker 1: part of their training to like talk as as like
Speaker 1: innocuously as possible, as like, wait, here's what happens, here's
Speaker 1: uh cross truck clear should have you down? Oh, and
Speaker 1: then he says, oh, he just leaves it off. The
Speaker 1: flight went fine, by the way, it was just a
Speaker 1: little turbulence, which is not uncommon. And I don't know why,
Speaker 1: like what happened in the cockpit that made him sign
Speaker 1: off with oh I still think about that guy. Oh
Speaker 1: you you Oh my god. Yeah, that would not for
Speaker 1: certain people that have like phobia is about flying, Like
Speaker 1: what what's the what? Like I would like I would
Speaker 1: have gotten out of my seat and like, you know,
Speaker 1: like asked for some assurances. But you know, like we said,
Speaker 1: these results were we we we have several examples of
Speaker 1: miraculous cures. We've got friends, we've got the two cases
Speaker 1: we talked about. We've even got the Collie, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, the Collie was the grandson of Calvin Coolidge's
Speaker 1: White House Collie, according to this article in Smithsonian mag
Speaker 1: I thought that was a fun little detail, completely irrelevant
Speaker 1: to the case, but but worth noting, I suppose. So
Speaker 1: we start to see that this is probably not the
Speaker 1: mystical cure all that it's being made out to be
Speaker 1: relatively quickly. I mean, it was a very short lived
Speaker 1: kind of like fad, I guess this whole thing. So
Speaker 1: I imagine people started kind of realizing, hey, it was
Speaker 1: very expensive. Lindbergh would get fifty bucks for one of
Speaker 1: those flights, which inflation calculators to seven hundred American dollars
Speaker 1: and which just you know, no small change for someone
Speaker 1: just trying a shot in the dark, you know, but
Speaker 1: I guess if there's hope, then probably worth it. But
Speaker 1: it starts to feel a little bit hustery, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. Yeah, this it's something that it's similar
Speaker 1: to what we've run into with episodes on faith healing
Speaker 1: was doing when it was working for stuff. Then once
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that we found is
Speaker 1: that people can at times feel temporarily healed or cured
Speaker 1: because they are in an environment that makes them perhaps
Speaker 1: feel pure pressure, perhaps unconsciously nudges them to truly believe
Speaker 1: that something has changed when it has not. And then later,
Speaker 1: you know, after the rush of not dying in a
Speaker 1: plane crash wears off, a lot of people found that
Speaker 1: their conditions had not noticeably changed. And other papers started
Speaker 1: reporting on this. The magazine Variety told the story anecdotal
Speaker 1: about an acrobat who claimed he had regained his hearing
Speaker 1: after a flight, but then a little bit later he
Speaker 1: lost it again because a car near him backfired. In
Speaker 1: the case of Rens, who was unable to speak and
Speaker 1: then was able to speak after the plame flight, this
Speaker 1: improvement appears to have only lasted about four days and
Speaker 1: six weeks later, and goes to more and more specialists,
Speaker 1: and he decides that he's gonna try this flight treatment,
Speaker 1: this aerotherapy one more time, and now we know that
Speaker 1: the second time, it also appears. He also appears to
Speaker 1: have been able to speak afterwards. But there's no record
Speaker 1: of how long this lasted, so hopefully it lasted from
Speaker 1: the rest of his life. But the truth is we
Speaker 1: just do not know. We don't know that. But we
Speaker 1: do know is that this relatively short lived fad did
Speaker 1: have a pretty definitive end point, and it was as
Speaker 1: a result of some tragic events that took place in
Speaker 1: April of h professional pianist in his mid forties who
Speaker 1: was concerned that he was losing his hearing. It's obviously
Speaker 1: a very important thing to have if you're a musician,
Speaker 1: you know, whether a singer like you can't really it's
Speaker 1: hard to have a pitch, you know, if you can't hear. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we know that Beethoven made a pretty good go of it,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly not optimum if that's like what you're
Speaker 1: doing and you're a teacher or a composer. So um,
Speaker 1: this individual decided to go for a round of aerotherapy
Speaker 1: and unfortunately was killed in Eureka, California when the plane
Speaker 1: that he hired did one of those super severe nose
Speaker 1: dives and it caused one of the wings to collapse.
Speaker 1: And and I just want to make sure you're one
Speaker 1: remembers that a lot of the planes that were being
Speaker 1: used in these types of you know, kind of flying
Speaker 1: circus type events or these like stunt routines in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties would have been the kind of planes that
Speaker 1: you think of when you think of like the Red
Speaker 1: Baron and like Charlie Brown, kind of these like biplanes,
Speaker 1: I guess you'd call them, with the stacked wings, you know,
Speaker 1: and oftentimes they were made with kind of like almost
Speaker 1: they were you know, had a foundation. I assume it
Speaker 1: was made of steel or metal of some kind, and
Speaker 1: all of these wires, these kind of tension wires that
Speaker 1: were keeping the stress evenly distributed. And I think sometimes
Speaker 1: the wings were even covered with like a almost like
Speaker 1: a tent type material, like a not burlap, but some
Speaker 1: sort of like heavy fabric like that, And so I
Speaker 1: can imagine that, you know, these were very very dangerous maneuvers.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there's an article I found on history
Speaker 1: dot net called Flying and Dying for Hollywood in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties all about these uh intrepid, you know, stunt
Speaker 1: pilots that were referred to as barn stormers, and how
Speaker 1: many of them lost their lives. It was a very
Speaker 1: very very dangerous business. Yeah. For a specific example, one
Speaker 1: of the most notable planes of this era would have
Speaker 1: been the Spirit of St. Louis, which is one of
Speaker 1: the most famous planes Charles Lindberg flu was a Ryan
Speaker 1: M two and there they look like how you described
Speaker 1: in old They're like a fixed mono plane. The Spirit
Speaker 1: of St. Louis was mainly notable for its pilot and
Speaker 1: the extra fuel tanks that took up most of most
Speaker 1: of the cabin. But yeah, you're right. In plane safety
Speaker 1: and aviation technology has advanced so quickly since nineteen twenty,
Speaker 1: and again we have to remember during these stories that
Speaker 1: we're looking at an industry and a technology that is
Speaker 1: still in a very real way in its infancy. And
Speaker 1: another tragedy occurs. You can read about uh an airplane
Speaker 1: accident involving a six year old boy who was hearing impaired.
Speaker 1: This bad press. These tragedies, coupled with the lack of real, significant,
Speaker 1: quantitative proof of efficacy, they contribute to the decline of
Speaker 1: the fad. Various organizations and experts are starting to look
Speaker 1: more closely into the treatment and they're saying, hey, airplane
Speaker 1: rides may be fun, but you shouldn't you shouldn't assume
Speaker 1: there's any science behind the claim that they can cure,
Speaker 1: you know, all these different conditions. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: the Journal of the American Medical Association called it quote
Speaker 1: usually futile and often fatal. It's not a glowing review. No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a glowing review at all. And there were
Speaker 1: even situations. I believe there is a case where a
Speaker 1: gentleman had a stutter of some kind and another speech
Speaker 1: impediments that we talked about where it actually caused it
Speaker 1: stutter to worsen, you know. So it turns out that
Speaker 1: sometimes if you have a psychological, psychologically driven condition, that
Speaker 1: scaring the absolute crap out of you and putting you
Speaker 1: in a life threatening traumatic situation might actually make things worse, exactly,
Speaker 1: And this leads the overall press to become increasingly skeptical,
Speaker 1: as you said. And then also stunt pilots have found
Speaker 1: other ways to make a little cash, right, especially when
Speaker 1: the Post Office starts using private contractors to carry airmail,
Speaker 1: and that used to, once upon a time be something
Speaker 1: only the military could do. So now now people aren't
Speaker 1: trying to make a buck off this pretty unscrupulous practice,
Speaker 1: but still people were. People were still trying it for
Speaker 1: a while because there were there were people who had
Speaker 1: children that were a hard of hearing or hearing impaired,
Speaker 1: and they wanted those children to hear. And you know,
Speaker 1: if your child is suffering from something, or if you
Speaker 1: feel that they are suffering from something, didn't there's nothing
Speaker 1: you wouldn't do to help your own kids. So that
Speaker 1: that kind of explains why these continued despite the lack
Speaker 1: of scientific evidence. That's true. But even the deaf community,
Speaker 1: or at least you know, one of the primary journals
Speaker 1: or publications surrounding them, the Deaf Mutes Journal, really took
Speaker 1: issue with this pretty, you know, iffy and dangerous method
Speaker 1: of potentially quote unquote curing their children of of deafness,
Speaker 1: and they wrote, or the publishers of of the Deaf
Speaker 1: Mutes Journal wrote that the parents are quote more to
Speaker 1: blame than their deaf children, and if any catastrophe results
Speaker 1: from stunt flying, the responsibility is largely there's We also
Speaker 1: saw just a general turn from the press. You know.
Speaker 1: There's a really great line, I believe in the Smithsonian
Speaker 1: Maga article that we cited earlier, calling some of the
Speaker 1: journalism around it like awe shucks or like gee whizz
Speaker 1: kind of headlines, you know, the idea like this novel
Speaker 1: new thing that's taken the world by stall, you know,
Speaker 1: and just as quickly that crowd can turn on you.
Speaker 1: And they certainly did, and they became much much more
Speaker 1: skeptical and and then looking more at the science or
Speaker 1: lack thereof to back any of this up. And we're printing,
Speaker 1: for example, in a column from the nineteen thirties called
Speaker 1: How's Your Health? The New York Academy of Medicine wrote
Speaker 1: that an experiment that took place in Newark, New Jersey,
Speaker 1: involving six adults chosen from sixty uh like a cohort
Speaker 1: of sixty, that four of them, two men and two women,
Speaker 1: had had deafness um, while the other had a middle
Speaker 1: ear disease, and the sixth subject was a man who stuttered.
Speaker 1: The column reported that after the flights, as I mentioned before,
Speaker 1: the gentleman who stuttered, his stutter had worsened, as had
Speaker 1: the middle ear case. Which makes sense considering what we
Speaker 1: talked about at the top of the show, because a
Speaker 1: middle ear issue um that could certainly be exacerbated by
Speaker 1: what you know, the whole, like you know, changing in
Speaker 1: fluid distribution in your ears that happens when you go
Speaker 1: up to you know, an answer that yeah, save it
Speaker 1: till the end. But yeah, yeah, yeah, this is this
Speaker 1: is all true. It's all adding up. It becomes after
Speaker 1: a point inarguable that the deaf person showed zero improvement
Speaker 1: by the way, right right exactly, And so eventually these
Speaker 1: reports cause a person named Lieutenant Colonel Levy M. Hathaway,
Speaker 1: the chief medical officer of the Army Air Corps at
Speaker 1: the time, to ask a question that I feel like
Speaker 1: many of us have been wondering throughout the course of
Speaker 1: this episode. I certainly have. How could flying be beneficial
Speaker 1: for hearing impairment when flying in general is very bad
Speaker 1: for your hearing at this time, over a long you know,
Speaker 1: over a long period of exposure, the noises are crazy.
Speaker 1: You're changing altitude and therefore atmospheric pressure pretty often if
Speaker 1: you do this at certain extreme thresholds, this can burst
Speaker 1: your ear drums. And there's no like, not only is
Speaker 1: there no scientific basis for the idea that an airplane
Speaker 1: flight can cure hearing impairments or speech impediments, but in
Speaker 1: the case of hearing, the opposite is true in an
Speaker 1: airplane especially Like imagine you're in an open cockpit airplane
Speaker 1: and that's your job, You're a pilot. The ear protection
Speaker 1: technology at the time is not super advanced. Over time,
Speaker 1: it would be like being a drummer in a rock
Speaker 1: band right in the sixties are seventies. Eventually the odds
Speaker 1: are stacked against you in terms of keeping your hearing
Speaker 1: in top shape. Yeah, so, uh, I mean, it's pretty
Speaker 1: much what we indicated just from our own anecdotal experiences
Speaker 1: with going up and down on airplanes that certainly can
Speaker 1: cause problems. Uh, And i'd love to I can't wait
Speaker 1: to hear your explanation for that weird inner ear phenomenon
Speaker 1: that we experience when our ears pop or don't pop
Speaker 1: or maybe never pop again, God forbid. But let's not
Speaker 1: forget about our buddy Charles Lindbergh. You know, after his
Speaker 1: time as a kind of like almost like a flying
Speaker 1: circus performer and aerial stunt pilot, he went on to
Speaker 1: make a legendary flight, long distance flight between New York
Speaker 1: and Paris, uh, May of nineteen seven. So he was
Speaker 1: kind of done with all of that stuff he did
Speaker 1: in his previous life, so there were definitely gonna be
Speaker 1: no more death flights for him. In addition to you know,
Speaker 1: the whole what was it dangling from a rope underneath
Speaker 1: the plant that sounded like absolute nightmare fuel, But he
Speaker 1: became uh and an absolute national hero. Mental Floss has
Speaker 1: a really great article if you're interested in about Charles
Speaker 1: Lindberg in his life and some fascinating facts that you
Speaker 1: might not know about him, um written by Jake Rawson.
Speaker 1: And one of those facts is this the thing that
Speaker 1: we allude to at the top of the show. His
Speaker 1: infant son was kidnapped in two and that case remains
Speaker 1: one of the most kind of head scratching unsolved true
Speaker 1: crime stories of the early twentieth century. Yeah, and here
Speaker 1: ends the tail of playing flights to cure these conditions. Luckily,
Speaker 1: we know that there aren't unscrupulous pilots out there promising
Speaker 1: to cure things they can't cure these days. But if
Speaker 1: you were like many of the other millions of people
Speaker 1: getting back on the road, traveling for work, traveling to
Speaker 1: see family, or just taking a vacation, then you are
Speaker 1: going to run into an ear pop situation. And a
Speaker 1: lot of people knew the regular cures for this, the
Speaker 1: idea that you need to talk or yawn or chew
Speaker 1: gum things that move your jaw to pop your youth
Speaker 1: station two that's legit. Uh, Sucking on candy could also work,
Speaker 1: or you know, drinking something in the act of swallowing.
Speaker 1: Other people will say, you can try a nasal decongestent
Speaker 1: two offset swelling that might occur. But then there's the
Speaker 1: one I always thought was so risky. I knew this
Speaker 1: for years, I didn't know the name of it. Have
Speaker 1: you guys heard of the valsalva maneuver. No tell us
Speaker 1: about it that it sounds like a post rock band,
Speaker 1: but it's it's where you you pinch your no shut
Speaker 1: and then you suck at your cheeks, and while your
Speaker 1: cheeks are still sucked in, you blow air out. I
Speaker 1: tried that, then I tried that. I tried them all.
Speaker 1: How about jamming Q tips in your ear holes? It's
Speaker 1: not good, right, Definitely avoid those the official official Q
Speaker 1: tip stances. Those things don't go in the ear hole.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, I definitely did that. What has it
Speaker 1: been the eustaalst this method vulsulvan man, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I just made up a word. Eustalls this. That's what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call it from now on. Um No, I
Speaker 1: definitely did that. I was desperate and it didn't work.
Speaker 1: I could kind you know what it would do That
Speaker 1: was maddening. Then it would pop back for a second
Speaker 1: and then return back to its muffled um nightmarishness. Uh,
Speaker 1: it really was. I was concerned, like I did I
Speaker 1: do permanent damage to my hearings. This is a time
Speaker 1: where both of us were taking regular flights quite a
Speaker 1: few times a month. Um, your to your point, I
Speaker 1: think all that going up and down and up and
Speaker 1: down really can do a number on you. I'm surprised
Speaker 1: that there's not more information about, like how just taking
Speaker 1: commercial flights. And I mean, I know they pressurized the cabin.
Speaker 1: It's certainly different than being open, you know, in you know,
Speaker 1: in the cockpit like you would these these stunt flying days.
Speaker 1: But it still can't be amazing for you. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's the thing. It's not so much the maximum altitude.
Speaker 1: It's it's how much your altitude varies across I don't
Speaker 1: know why I'm doing miming these gesticulations for you guys,
Speaker 1: this an audio podcast, but it's it's how often did
Speaker 1: it change? You get it, Max, It's how often your
Speaker 1: altitude changes in the course of the flight. With that,
Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed today's show. We'd love to hear
Speaker 1: your tales of ear popping flights. Go ahead and drop
Speaker 1: us a line on Ridiculous Historians, which is our Facebook page.
Speaker 1: Thanks as always to Max Williams thinks as always to
Speaker 1: let's see let's put Jonathan Strickland in the front this time.
Speaker 1: I wonder you know he flies a lot, he does
Speaker 1: He also just had a birthday and I commented on
Speaker 1: this Instagram post and an intrepid listener accused our rivalry
Speaker 1: of being fake. And let me tell you, you know,
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong with a little cordiality, even among the
Speaker 1: most bitter rivals. Yeah, it's like the rules of engagement
Speaker 1: in warfare. You know, you gotta have some kind of
Speaker 1: This is what separates us from the animals, right, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I texted him, I said he had a good run.
Speaker 1: Did you did you put any heavy passive aggressive punctuation?
Speaker 1: And they're like a period at the end of the text.
Speaker 1: Is that heavy? To me? It is? I don't know why.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm the only one. But whenever someone to like
Speaker 1: like punctuates a text correctly, it ends it with a period.
Speaker 1: I think they're definitely mad at me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: I think they're going they're going out of the way,
Speaker 1: you know. But but I could see text messaging itself
Speaker 1: is weird because you're removing two of the biggest components
Speaker 1: of human communication, which sent to nation and body language.
Speaker 1: So it's very easy misery. But we don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about that because odds are one way or another,
Speaker 1: no matter where we go. No matter where we fly,
Speaker 1: the whister will run into us again soon, won't he
Speaker 1: be sure? Will so you know, thanks to him for that,
Speaker 1: I suppose, And happy birthday. Huge thanks to Max Williams
Speaker 1: Alex Williams who composed our theme, Christopher Haciots Here in Spirit,
Speaker 1: Eve's Jeff Coats doing great things out there in the
Speaker 1: podcast world. Check out j dot Ill the podcast The Show,
Speaker 1: which she is very hands on with as an executive producer.
Speaker 1: And the last shout out I'd like to give today
Speaker 1: is to the amazing flight cruise, the pilots, the attendants,
Speaker 1: the people on the ground getting us into the sky,
Speaker 1: especially flight attendants. You have to put up with so much.
Speaker 1: If you're on a flight soon, folks, please just give
Speaker 1: those people some slack. They're they're working hard in crazy circumstances. Totally,
Speaker 1: and uh, don't don't die on the hill of wearing
Speaker 1: the mask on the flight. You know, it's not about you.
Speaker 1: Just just do the thing. It's not gonna be forever.
Speaker 1: It's uncomfortable for everyone, but yeah, bring him stacks that
Speaker 1: we'll see an act that folks. For more podcasts for
Speaker 1: my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.