Zippers!

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. Uh So. Historian Robert Friedell wrote a book about zippers back in which I recently read, and a line in the introduction to that book really struck me, which was, while zippers are used everywhere, they are almost never necessary. And I recoiled initially, we need zippers everywhere, but really you could find an alternate way to do almost everything that a zipper does. But they're so convenient and handy that, of course they have become ubiquitous throughout everyone's wardrobes. But without trying to throw anyone under the bus. That quote, it's kind of how I feel about most write ups about the invention of the zipper, because it's one of those things I of course so a lot. So I have done a lot of thinking about zippers and how they work and wonder where they came from. But if you look at any right up, if you just you know, do an Internet search and say who invented the zipper? You get to maybe three paragraphs, and it's really really glossing over a lot of stuff. Um, there's a lot of story here, So I thought today might be a good time to delve into the oddly arduous creation of this simple thing that we almost all have on our clothes and our handbags and our luggage, etcetera. Zippers. Now that I think about it, they are in so many locations besides just my jeans. Uh. In eighteen fifty one, Alias How, who we talked about forever ago in Our Sewing Machine episode, filed for a patent on an automatic continuous clothing closure. If you look at the patent sketches, it really looks like a zipper, but it's also a little misleading. His vice, which he described as a series of clasps united by a connecting cord, was really more like a spiral drawstring that was pre laced through clasps on either side of that opening that needed to be closed, So when you pulled on the draw string, it pulled the two sides together and closed it up. If you've ever seen a spiral laced corset, it's kind of the same idea, but on a smaller scale. You may recall that at one point in his career, Elias How traveled to England to make machines specifically intended for corset making. That was just a few years before he filed this patent, so it's possible that he was inspired by that connection. We don't really know how didn't pursue the development of this though, because he became too busy working on sewing machines. But to really get into zippers in their origins, we have to talk about a few other men, and the first of those is Whitcomb L. Judson, who was born in Chicago, Illinois, on Marche. We don't have a whole lot of details about his personal life. We have virtually none about his youth. We know that while he was still a teenager, he enlisted with the Union Army and he was part of the Illinois Infantry Regiment in the US Civil War. He earned an undergraduate degree at Knox College, a liberal arts college in Galsburg, Illinois, and his details from there are pretty sparse until he appears in a Minneapolis, Minnesota directory in eighteen eighty six. And in that directory, his profession is simply listed as traveling agent i e. Like a traveling salesman, with no indication as to who his employer was. His story can be pieced together a bit through his business relationship with another man, Harry Earl. In Earl started his own company, Earl Manufacturing Company, and Whitcomb was an employee, working initially as a salesman. Before founding that company, Harry Earl had worked for Pitts Agricultural Works, so it's been theorized that's where the two men met as employees. In any case, once he was working for Harry Earle, Whitcomb Judson started working not just on sales but on inventions, and his first big effort in invention was in designing a pneumatic street railway. He actually received a total of fourteen patents related to the project over the course of just a few years. But he didn't revolutionize urban to suburban transportation as he had hoped because the system just didn't really work that well, and by the time he did start to really make progress on it, electric lines had surpassed what he had hoped to do. But that whole effort, including starting a company called Judson Pneumatic Street Railway Company, gave him a lot of experience in the ins and outs of trying to innovate in a technological space. In Whitcomb Judson invented an item called a clasp blocker. This was intended to be used in shoots, although Judson was clear that it could be applied so many things that needed closures, including mail bags and gloves. This was essentially a set of hooks and eyes that had a slider that moved the hooks into position to fasten them, although exactly how this whole thing is supposed to have worked as a little unclear. The description in the patent mentions clasps which have quote underreaching and overlapping projections or lips at their forward ends, which prevent the engagement or disengagement of the hook portions of the clasps, except when thrown upward, so that the parts stand at an angle to each other of about ninety degrees. I can't really visualize what that means. A little confusing even looking at diagrams, I was like, would come what. It was listed in Scientific American as one of the patents issued on August twenty nine, and it was actually two patents because Judson had refined his idea and submitted a second patent application before the first one was granted, But the two patents ended up being issued on the same day. We don't know what sparked this idea or what inspired his design. He had moved to Chicago at this time from New York, where he and Earl had been working on the pneumatic travel system. We also don't know why he moved. The two men remained close friends and business associates. Though. Yeah, they had seemed so all in on trying to connect like the more populated parts of New York to more rural parts with this travel thing, and then as I think they realized it wasn't gonna happen, Whitcomb moved on. Uh. He did take his fastener to the World's Fair in Chicago that year to show it to the world. It did not really get a lot of buzz there, but Whitcomb Judson felt that there was potential for his fastener, and in four he and Harry Earl founded the Universal Fastener Company along with several investors. Just prior to the company being officially founded, Judson filed two more patent applications for his fastener, one for a more effective slider and one for the fasteners on each side of the closure. Prior to this, the teeth of the fastener were items that were not permanently affixed to the item being closed. They were individual pieces that slid kind of through the buttonholes. But this new patent called for permanently attached clasps and offered a number of ways that they might work to fit together, including alternating from side to side as they fit together with what Judson called pin piles and sockets. This is starting to sound a lot more like a zipper. In the first manufacture efforts of Universal Fastener Company were made in a workshop owned by the Bride and Horseshoe Company. The first working version and working goes in air quotes because it apparently did not work, at least not consistently. First working versions were made affixed to mailbags. If the company could get a government contract, it could fund a larger effort to move into the home consumer goods market. The Postal Service did place an order for twenty bags that had Dunson's closure. There were never any additional orders placed after that, though. That's like the saddest trombone part of this story for me. They had to have felt so excited that they had a government order and then it was like, no, no thanks, that's now these are these are done so they're not really working for us. As Universal Fastener struggled, Harry Earle struck a deal for the company to be acquired by the Allyria Fastener Company in Allria, Ohio. But Wickham Judson had reached a plateau where his proclivities as an inventor couldn't keep up with the knowledge that he needed to actually manufacture these designs, and things went pretty badly. The entire Alliria company ended up being liquidated in nineteen o one, and at that point Harry Earle gained the rights to the Universal Fastener patents, so Earle once again found investor and launched the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company. This new iteration of their business venture, which was based in New Jersey, aggressively advertised the merits of Judson's closure invention, which they simply called the Fastener. They advertised it in print and touted a wider variety of uses than had even been suggested before. They said this could go on everything from corsets to leggings, two shoes, and boots. In nineteen o four, the company re orged under the name Automatic Hook and Eye Company. This reflected another change in the design of the fastener, which then went by the new name of the Cecurity Fastener. That's a sea dash c U r I t y spelling, which is an awkward brand name in my opinion. At this point, the advertising leaned into the women's clothing market, and most of the print material focused on how much easier it was going to be to fasten skirt plackets. That seems like they were onto something, and they were, But the fastener still needed some work, and we will talk about its problems after we paused for a quick sponsor break. While things were moving forward for Judson's invention, there were still some pretty obvious problems. The security fasteners sometimes jammed up. Also, so ASTs needed instructions on how to stitch them into garments, and worst of all, in my opinion, if you wanted to launder the garment, you had to remove the fastener, wash it, and then reinstall that fastener once the skirt or dress was clean, because while they did have a coating, they were still prone to rust. Additionally, these fasteners were expensive. They went to market at thirty five cents at a time when a basic skirt was about seventy seven cents. In the Sears Robot catalog, dressmakers and resellers could get bulk discounts, but even so, a closure for a garment costing one quarter to one half of the value of the overall article of clothing, it was just a lot like For comparison, that would be like purchasing a pair of button fly jeans today for eighty dollars and then having a company tell you that you're already perfectly functioning garment would cost another thirty dollars to modernize to a new closure. Most people would skip that offer, and in the early nine hundreds most people did just that. By nine six, Harry Earle had left the company Whitcom. Judson soon extricated himself from the business as well. These two men had been trying to manufacture and market Judson's bastener for more than a decade. At that point, with several restarts, it was just not happening. Judson had also moved on creatively to working on inventions related to the new technology of automobiles. He was working on an early combustion engine and had decided to move to miss Schigan to be near his son. Skirt closures were just no longer holding his attention. The automatic hook and eye company continued without the two men who had catalyzed its founding, though, and that same year that they left, a new figure entered the picture who was key to the development of the zipper, and that was Gideon Sundback Otto Friedrich. Gideon Sundback was born in small On, Sweden on a Details about his early life are a little sparse. We know he studied engineering at bing In and received his degree in nineteen o three. Once you finished schooling, he moved briefly to Germany before deciding to head to the US. And he was in a good position to do so. The family had money, so moving to a new country wasn't really that much of a gamble. Yeah. One of the books that I read was like, sometimes you will see people acting like this is you know, the classic like poor immigrant story trying to find a new life, and it's like, No, he was a wealthy kid who thought like, oh, I can go make my fortune here in this other place. Not quite the same. He arrived in North American nineteen o five and headed for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was employed as a tracer at Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. That job is exactly what it sounds like he was tracing engineering drawings and schematics to make copies, but he was soon promoted to a draftsman position, and he worked in that role for about a year. Through various contacts, someone mentioned sun Back to Frank Russell in nineteen o six. At the time, Russell was the president of Automatic Hook and Eye Company. The company executive had realized that what they needed to make the security fastener really work in a way that was reliable and affordable was an engineer, and so Automatic recruited Sunback. Reading about this offer and move, it seems almost like people who had looked at Sunback's qualifications and his job at Westinghouse or left scratching their heads about why they would take a position at this flown during company in Hoboken with a fundamentally flawed product background made that kind of a question mark decision. Uh he did take the job, though possibly just for the challenge. There's also been speculation that part of that decision for the move was because he had met a young woman named Elvira Aaronson on his first visit to Hoboken when he toured the factory, and that he had been quite taken with her. And those two did eventually marry, and we know that because her father was involved in Automatic as an executive. Elvira Aaronson was around the company a lot. She actually worked in the factory and she sometimes modeled garments that the company's closures were sewn into. And these two started seeing each other almost immediately after. Sundback moved to New Jersey, and he had Elvira, who he called Vira, help him perfect his English, which was by all accounts already quite good. There's some people that were like, you don't actually need English lessons. So if he had been drawn to the job because of the potential to spend time with her, that absolutely worked out. But the reasoning for his move from Westinghouse is still speculation. We really don't know if he moved to be with her or not. The timing of his hire meant that Sunback was joining Automatic hook and Eye just as Harry Earl and Whitcomb Judson were leaving. There was a brief period of overlap. Gideon later described Whitcomb as a man who invented something every night, but soon he was gone and Sunback settled in to try to understand Judson's invention and where it was going wrong, and he quickly identified a few issues. One, when a woman was wearing a skirt with a security closure on it, the fastener would often pop open if she moved in a way that applied any tension across it. He realized that if just one of the interlocking pieces was moved askew through pretty much more normal motion of the wearer, the whole thing would come undone. So obviously not good at all. It does the work getting Him's first pass at a solution was something he called a placo fastener. This was more flexible, so that a person could bend or twist in a normal day to day way without popping the whole thing apart. This one's a market in nineteen o eight. But the more flexible eyes that sun Back had designed were also bulkier. They could be rendered entirely useless forever if any fabric got caught in them, and then from a production standpoint, they were expensive in part because once a placao had come off the production line, workers had to open and close it repeatedly to primeate. So like wear down any ridges that would cause it to stick. It's not very efficient process. No, that's a lot of man hours just to get one function enclosure out the door. Still, they marketed the heck out of that Placau fastener, and one of the big points in the sales pitch was that at last, a lady could fasten her garments at the back of the waist securely with no help, but they needed help sewing them into clothes. It seemed that everyone had trouble with that step. Complaints became so frequent that the company started offering customers the option to send their garments in with their Placo fastener, which would then be stitched in at the factory and then sent back to that customer ready to wear. That seems like a huge money pit. Now we need a sewing division to fix all these problems. The ongoing issues once again led to financial problems for American Hook and I, and Sunback found himself not only negotiating with creditors on behalf the company, but also expanding their product line and taking side projects just to keep cash coming in. Things became bad enough that the company could not afford to pay Sunback and instead gave him all the patent rights to the various fasteners that the company had. This is another thing that leaves a lot of people going why was this man who had an engineering degree and could have gone almost anywhere he wanted so invested in this company that he would literally take side jobs and be like, yeah, I'll do this engineering as a freelance contractor for you so that I can give that money to my boss. Like it's a little weird. But by nineteen o nine, sunback, it turned out, probably because of that, was really running the company and he did briefly manage to turn around the money situation there. He also sought to expand the company into international markets. He and his at this point father in law, Peter Aaronson, made a move to sell their fasteners in France as Lafirm toute American or American Clothes all but that effort had sputtered out by nine twelve. In the time that the French sales efforts were happening, Gideon, who had married Elvira Errandson in nineteen o nine, welcomed a child. This was a daughter named Ruth Margitte. But though they should have been joyous, this was not a happy occasion. Elvira die not long after Ruth's birth, and Gideon was just devastated, so much so that he could not envision himself raising a child. When Elvira died that aaronsons were in Europe and Gideon had no personal support system and hobookens, so Ruth was sent to Sweden, where Sunback's mother took care of her throughout her childhood. Yeah, there's not a lot of information on their relationship. It appears they did not really reunite until she was at least a teenager, and then he was left kind of explaining like, no, I was grieving not a lot beyond that of what happened with them. Yeah, I read a thing recently about like how common this has been in points in history, especially when like a mother dies with an infant and the father is totally at a loss for what to do, like particularly in this era, and so a different person entirely would wind up raising the child. Yeah. I suspect had Elvira's parents still ben in New Jersey and not working overseas, that would have Benna a means to keep the family a little closer together, but it just wasn't. But by the time of Elvira's death and Ruth's birth, wickcom Judson had also died. He had moved as planned to Muskegan, Michigan, and he died there on December seven, nine nine, at the age of sixty three, so he never got to see the success that eventually came from other inventors building on his idea. His work in the early automotive industry, however, became very profitable, and that ensured that his son, who carried on his father's work in that field, became very very wealthy. In the years that Sunback had been with American Hook and I, other inventors had gotten the idea that they could improve on Judson's design and patent their own slide fastener. A woman named Ida Josephine Calhoun had come up with a design that was very similar to Judson's, but had a slider that separated into two parts to help with some of the jamning problems. Frank camp Field had come up with a slide fastener that eliminated hooks and eyes and instead used a ball in socket closure. Yeah. Those were both interesting didn't ever go to market. But the first version of the closure that came closest to Sundbacks, and which led to some legal issues down the road, was one designed by a woman from Zurich, Switzerland named Katerina kun Moose. She developed her fastener with a partner named en Reforster. Kun Moose and Forrester got patents for their design in Great Britain, France, and Germany. But though the European developed closure worked and was pretty darn close to what we'd easily recognized as a zipper today, it never went into production and those patents were abandoned. We'll talk about the breakthrough that led to the modern zipper after we paused for a quick word from the sponsors that keep the show going. While still leaving his wife, Sundback worked on a new idea which involved small interlocking teeth and was very much what we would recognize as a zipper. This change in design direction had been catalyzed by a deep frustration that he had experienced with trying to make the security fastener and its various problems actually work. He wrote of this shift quote, I was fed up with hooks and eyes, rusting metal and everything pertaining to the fastener, the complaints, as far as our salesmen were concerned. We're here's a scratchy fastener. These hooks are awfully rough and rusted. I decided to turn in an entirely different direction and away from hooks and eyes and get away from the metallic appearance, make something attractive to the wearer, and starting in nineteen twelve he started to do a lot more experimenting with the design. In October of that year he applied for a new patent, and this version used a completely different approach. One side had a row of clamp and the other side had a raised cord, so when the slider moved up, it closed the clamps onto the cord, and the slider moved down, it opened the clamps and the cord edge was released. This worked a lot better than any of the previous designs that Judson or sun Back had worked on. It was consistent, it was quiet, it sure looked a lot nicer than the security fastener, and it was flexible, with no tendency to pop open when a wearer moved around. Sun Back called it the hookless fastener. Not super catchy, but it also conveyed that a main concern about previous fasteners was out of the picture. There was, however, a problem, or more accurately too one. The factory was back in financial hot water. It had to shut down completely temporarily because operational funds for it just did not exist, and sun Back took advantage of the down time to test and refined the hookless fastener that actually revealed the second problem. The cording side of it wore out way too fast for it to be a reliable closure. The cotton used in the courting that which was just what was available at the time, just could not stand up to the opening and closing of the clamps. Ultimately, this version of the fastener never went into production, but it did reinvigorate sent Back and other executives that American Hook and I, so much so that plans were set in motion to move the factory and re establish the company as the hookless Fastener Company. And the decision was made to move to Meadville, Pennsylvania, in part just to give everybody a fresh start. When Louis Walker, a company executive who was a significant driving force behind the business aspects of the various fasteners we've talked about and their development, when he was asked by journalists why the company had chosen to start anew in Meadville, he gave an interesting answer. He mentioned the good community and the good schools and the clean air and water and quote minimum of labor troubles. By autumn nine, the first fasteners were rolling off the production line in Meadville, but they were not the new hookless models. They were the old Placo fasteners the company had made in New Jersey. The new design just wasn't ready because of the where problem Sunback had identified, but they had to sell something, so the company fell back to the old design. The new fastener had been kept under wraps, so nobody outside of a small circle in the company was any the wiser of this. Yeah, and even then, it took a long time for send Back apparently to own up to the fact that, like that, that courted fastener was not gonna last. But it didn't take long for him to make the necessary adjustments to his design that led to a successful product, so successful that it introduced a closure into the world that remains largely unchanged in design. While Sundback claimed that he lost sleep as he thought about endless possible solutions, we don't actually know how he landed at the version of his fastener that would launch an entire industry. But the important element here was the introduction of what we would call zipper teeth. Today, zipper teeth, which are often called scoops on the manufacturing side, have a little bump on one side and a little divot on the other. When you stack these teeth in an alternating pattern, so one tooth bump lands in the divot of a tooth on the opposite side, and you have a lot of them together, you get a surprisingly sturdy closure. This is all described in detail and send Back's patent, which he filed in August of nineteen fourteen. Why he waited until then is unknown. He had the design figured out at the end of nineteen thirteen, but because sent Back didn't really document his process, there has always loomed one question about his fastener breakthrough. Did he know about the one Katerina coon Moose had designed and patented in Europe in nineteen eleven, because the scoop and bump were present in her non produced design. This was enough of a concern that, even though that Coon, Moose and Forster design was not patented in the US, the U S Patent Office, who kept abreast of information on patents around the world, wanted to talk to sun Back about his patent application for what he called a separable fastener because they wanted to make sure he had not copied that European patent. The big distinction was that the design by kud Moose had featured round bumps and scoops. Sunbacks had rectangular divots and bumps. He had determined that round would allow too much movement of the teeth. They would swivel and pop apart, so he came up with a shape to prevent that swiveling motion. So once the teeth were stacked together, they flexed as a unit, but not at each touch point. And this discussion of this difference with the patent office was something that continued on for several years. Gideon Sunback and Hookless Fastener Company actually made their case regarding the different shaping of the connector points repeatedly. They even had versions made in their factory that strictly followed the Coon Moose design, just so they could show that it was very clear that it would not work properly. Simultaneously, as sent Back in his company defended their patent application, other very similar patent applications were filed in the United States, further prolonging the process. Ultimately, the Sundback design was granted a patent, but it took several years and an awful lot of legal back and forth. That patent was finally issued in March of nineteen seventeen, so almost three years after he filed for the Canadian rights, Sundback patented the hookless fastener under his own name, not the companies that had been agreed to with the company, and he also established the Lightning Fastener Company in Canada to manufacture separable fasteners there. The first large scale use of sun Backs invention was in the military. World War One. Uniforms and pack gear made use of the new fastener, but although it saved time and was reliable, it took a long time to catch on with the general population. Zippers were still struggling to be recognized for their utility value. That ease with which they enabled a person to get dressed or undressed led to a bit of panic about the moral decline they might catalyze. They found a use as a closure for tobacco pouches when locktights started buying bulk for the pouches they made, but the garment market was still pretty elusive. But a consumer garment market usage of the separable fastener catapulted Sundbacks Fastener forward in the nineteen twenties. You might have noticed that we have not discussed the origin of the word zipper and when it started to be used, but it is tied to this nineteen twenties product. Sundback did not come up with the word. It was coined by the BF good Rich company because in three be of good Rich started using the hookless fastener in galoshes, and the story goes that an employee there came up with on a mono poetic name, which the company registered as a trademark. In there are some variations to that who actually decided they should call it a zipper, but it's generally agreed that an employee of B. F. Good Rich was the one that came up with it. Lightning Fastener Company challenged the good Rich trademark in nineteen thirty one. That case ended up being dismissed, but good Rich was eventually granted exclusive use of the name zipper boots, not the word zipper on its own. As the nineteen thirties war on the zipper finally started to lose its negative connotations as high profile people started to embrace this new closure. Advertising started touting zippers as a helpful closure for children's clothing because it made them more able to manage getting dressed on their own. The Prince of Wales started opting for zippers instead of buttons and his trousers and four, further improving the image of the zipper. Elsa Schipperelli, who we talked about in our virtual live show, was one of the first fashion designers to start using zippers, and by the late nineteen thirties and France most designers were using them. And as France goes, so goes the world when it comes to fashion. UH. It was Lightning Fastener Company in St. Catherine's, Ontario that first went all in on producing Sunback separable fastener in ninety seven. And when we say all in, what we mean is that it built the first factory that it was exclusively intended to manufacture zippers. Prior to that, it had always been like we're working it into another space. UH. Sundback also designed the machinery that was used for zipper production at that plant. By the time World War Two was over, the zipper was ubiquitous. Through a series of name changes and acquisitions, the company Sundback worked for had evolved into Talent, which continues to exist today. By the end of the nineteen fifties, Talent was turning out five hundred million zippers a year. Levi's first garment to incorporate zippers was a pair of overalls that they sold in nineteen fifty four. That was also the year that Gideon Sunbac died of a heart condition. He had remained in Meadville, Pennsylvania for the rest of his life, although he frequently visited Canada and the factory in St. Catharine's Sundback lived long enough to see the beginning of his inventions widespread acceptance, although he may never have dreamed of the way that it would become so completely ingreened in everyday life that people rarely even give it much thought. He was buried in Meadville's Greendale Cemetery. And because we know you're probably wondering if you've ever looked at a zipper pull and seeing the letters y K K and wondered what they mean, here's the scoop. It is an abbreviation for Yoshida Kodyo, Kibushi Ki Kaisha. That's one of the companies that dominates the market today. So why k K or Yoshida Company Limited was founded in ninety four by Tadao Yoshida. Today, it dominates the zipper market. It makes more than one point five billion zippers each year that's billion with a B in more than seventy countries around the globe. Yoshida Company Limited achieved its success in the zipper market by carefully designing every aspect not just to their product, but of their supply chain. Everything from smelting brass to creating the boxes that the product is shipped in is done under the company's umbrella Zippers Zippers. Tracy, I'm still working through the pile yeah stuff stuff for our our various listener mail and I, um, like I said, I am now hitting things that are very old, but uh, some of them are very charming. So I wanted to talk about in this case too, that are from our same listener who has sent us many cards and notes over the years, and that is our listener Chip. But Chip at Halloween and uh, you'll forgive me. I honestly am not sure which Halloween this was, if this one, but sent us in a May saying Haunted mansion pop up Halloween card cool, which is like dreamy That's great, Um, very very much in my Raby Zone uh and Chipwrights, Deer, Holly and Tracy. Happy October and happy Halloween. Pandemic or no pandemic. My Halloween spirits are high, and I know yours are to. Your episodes about people of the Spiritualist movement are my favorite. So I loved your Madame Blovotsky episode. I too love a good seance. Rumor has it that she knew or at least met past episode subject, the Count of Saint Germain. True or not? The idea that the Count is connected to yet another episode subject is a hoot. As for this Haunted Mansion pop up card, as soon as I saw it, I knew it was a perfect card for the two of you. I hoped you're able to enjoy the changing of the leaves, cider, spooky stories, and everything else about this time of year that brings a smile to your faces. And in case no one has actually said it, thank you for staying on the air despite the challenges of the times we are in. Stay safe and have a very happy Halloween. I will say this, I enjoy all those things you around. It's always Halloween time for me. As we record this, it's the middle of July, which means I am ramping up my Halloween rabies for thee because it is my very favorite. And then I also have another card from CHIP that's a Thanksgiving card, and he wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, congratulations we've made it this far. I know you probably won't get this for a while because you weren't in the office due to the pandemic, and I could send an email instead, but I just love taking the time to send something tangible. Somehow, your episodes have only gotten more exciting and interesting during the pandemic. Your Halloween episodes are a highlight of my October, and your Helen von Tassig and Vivian Thomas, where every bit is captivating. I'm a registered nurse and have worked in cardiac care units for ten years around the country. I've had many a patient who were born with congenital cardiac conditions, and your episodes on the Pioneers of Infant Cardiac Surgery touched me greatly. And this is a Thanksgiving cards, so it's kind of a double We're getting some bookends of CHIP cards, but I wanted to make sure we read that since it talked at an episode you did the primary research on and also I want to say thank you to Chip for working in medicine because it's hard and nurses are miracles in my book. Um, and also more, Halloween is coming very soon and very excited if you would like to write to us. As Chip mentioned, we're not in the office and our office is moving, so don't send us anything physical because I don't even know if the new office can handle it. We're getting into a much smaller space, so I'm thinking we might have to cut off those. As much as I love getting treats from people, Yeah, it will probably never arrive if you send us something and I don't even have an address for it. Yeah. We've had a couple of people asked recently like, hey, I can't find your address, and we are literally in between spaces right now, like Holly and I aren't really working in the office at all, but like the the office has moved out of the old space. New space is not ready for us yet, so there's not an address at this moment. It we don't exist in physical space. Uh, so yes, just keep that in mind. Uh, if you had intention to send us something, you might want to direct that energy elsewhere because I don't want it to go to waste, but you can email us at History podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History And if you have not subscribed to the podcast yet, now it's a great time to do so. You could do that on the iHeart radio app or wherever it is that you're listening to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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