Behind the Scenes Minis: Pens and Dog Radios

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio.

00:00:12
Speaker 2: Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V.

00:00:13
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about pens this week. Is the thing that this reminds me the most of in terms of inspiration for an episode is the one where we talked about poison control.

00:00:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:00:26
Speaker 1: That literally came about because I was reading the back of the cats, flea and tick prevention medicine that said if you ingested it, to call poison control.

00:00:36
Speaker 2: And I was like, huh, how did we get.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: A system in which there's poison control to the point that it's printed on the box, Like that's the thing that the people who made this can take for granted that the people reading it would have access to poison control.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: How do we get to that?

00:00:52
Speaker 1: In this case, We're just sitting around the table, just kind of chatting as we are preparing to start and something ish process of signing paperwork, and I thought, hah, who thought of pens like this? They also were retractable, and we did not talk about retractable pens at all. I don't know when somebody came up with how to retract them? But you know, we're clicking on the retractable pens, and I went, huh, pens, let's talk about that.

00:01:24
Speaker 2: On the show.

00:01:24
Speaker 1: People feel very strongly about pens. I feel incredibly strongly about pens me too. I've never felt more seen. I will once again invoke Bob's Burger's. But there was an episode where someone needed a pen and their daughter Tina. I think it's Linda that needs a pen. Their daughter Tina hands it to her and says, this is my third favorite pen. And then she doesn't hand it back right away. And Tina's like, can I have it back, because, like I said, it's my third favorite pen. And I was like, Tina, I see you and I feel you.

00:01:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:01:59
Speaker 1: So so the part of the episode where we read the thing that was about the person saying that they did not think that this fountain pen would really take off because it felt so much better to write with a quill. I have never written with a quill. However, that really resonated with me, because if I don't like the sensation of writing with a pen, forget it.

00:02:27
Speaker 2: I'm never using that pen again.

00:02:29
Speaker 1: I not that long ago impulse bought some gel pens at the drug store took one out to write with it the first time, and it felt scratchy, and I was like, nope, no, that is the worst sensation. I hate it, especially if it's a pen like a gel pen that normally, like a decent gel pen, has such a smooth hand. Yeah, if it doesn't, if for some reason it's cheaply made and the roller ball that conveys the gel does not smoothly do its job.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: It's like nails on a chalkboard. It's awful. Yeah.

00:03:05
Speaker 1: And the fact that you're not expecting it, because you expect the gel pen to have that smooth feel, was incredibly jarring. I've only written with a fountain pen one time. It is possible that there are fountain pins that I would like, but that one fountain pen, I was like, Nope, feels too scratchy on the page. Many years ago, I was someplace I don't even know where, but the sort of place that sells gifts.

00:03:32
Speaker 2: And knickknacks for your home.

00:03:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it was a glass dip pen that came with a well of ink, and I was like, that is beautiful and I want to own it, and I bought it for myself. And the first time that I actually tried to write with it. It was a glass like a handmade glass pen that you would dip into the well, and the very first time I tried to write with it, it felt so awful to me that that then became just a desk decoration. I have a mixed like Tina, I have different kinds that I like, and I will tell you I am the person who buys the old school Bic crystal ballpoint with purple ink in bulk. I'm like, send me that bulk thing. I want my purple ink. I like the way a big ballpoint rolls. They're pretty consistent. Those are my scribblers.

00:04:33
Speaker 2: And then.

00:04:36
Speaker 1: My next thing is so specific and odd. I have passed through as I'm sure you have many pens over the years where I'm like, this is my current favorite. Right for a long time, I like the pilot thick ink rollerball great, but right now.

00:04:51
Speaker 2: It's so silly.

00:04:52
Speaker 1: And it's been this for a little over like a year and a half. Now. I think there is a pen. I don't know who manufactures it, but it is a Lego Okay light Saber Jel pen that is the one.

00:05:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it is smooth as silk.

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Speaker 1: I have many colors. Anytime I'm in a situation where I can buy one, I buy.

00:05:18
Speaker 2: Five like I love them so much.

00:05:21
Speaker 1: My only criticism is that there's a little screw top on the end of the barrel where the actual like ink stick is inserted, and the threads on that can fail and it can crack, and that makes me bananas. You will find around my house many bodged together pens because I cannot give the pen up even though it has had a structural failure. Oh the Obsession. One of the favorite pens that I had that has now run out of ink.

00:05:53
Speaker 2: One.

00:05:53
Speaker 1: I think the last trip that I took prior to the start of the pandem, not the cruise that I was on when the pandemic started. I've told that story on the show many times, But you and I and several of our coworkers all went on a trip not long before that that was related to an advertiser and the pen that they gave us for free with our little packet of materials. I loved it, wrote really beautifully, It felt.

00:06:30
Speaker 2: Really good in my hands.

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Speaker 1: I was very into it, and when it ran out of ink, if I'm remembering correctly, I sat there studying it trying to figure out, like, what is the source of this pen? Where can I get another one? And I did not figure it out. I was unsuccessful. Did you ever consider and I know this is crazy, but it's the kind of thing I would do reaching out to that advertiser and being like, yo, I got this pen on this little adventure. Do I have a warehouse full of them somewhere? Yeah?

00:07:09
Speaker 2: I did not do that. I did not. I bet they do.

00:07:13
Speaker 1: There is somewhere an admin assessment assistant with the key to the premium's closet who is like, man, let me hook you up. Yeah, I might confirm that I am not conflating it with a different source of pen. This is where I remember that when coming from. But it's always possible to be wrong, to remember things incorrectly after.

00:07:34
Speaker 2: That many years.

00:07:36
Speaker 1: But yeah, anyway, I really like it when a random thing in the world sparks my interest, whether it is pens or the poison control system or a random person who's who you know. I stumble across a historical marker or one little sign in a museum or something like that, and I go, what is that about? And it becomes a whole episode. It's one of my favorite things to happen on the show.

00:08:01
Speaker 2: I feel like that's life. Yeah, do you know what I mean? Like I don't. I'm never not going like where did that come from? What is that? Maya?

00:08:09
Speaker 1: My almost it would be a peeve if it had not become so funny among my friend group. Is when you know you'll be out somewhere and someone will be like, huh, I wonder who invented this style of cheese slicer? And I'm always like, if only there were a magic box in our pocket.

00:08:25
Speaker 2: That can tell us so like I I never want to.

00:08:29
Speaker 1: I never have the I wonder if and look off into space I'm away, was like looking it up, looking it up. When people think I'm walking and texting, I'm probably looking up like what style of flower is that? What kind of thing is this? Who designed this building? Like I'm such an information hound. I never stop looking things up. I've started having this while watching TikTok. People will either reference a thing and I'm like, I don't know what that's about, or there will be mentioned. It will be you know, somebody who's made a video about the history of something, and I don't know if they are correct or not, And I will close TikTok and go start looking stuff up for myself. Yeah yeah, I'm always laughing at giant ostrich plume quills. I mean they're fun, they are very fun. They would be challenging to write with if you were trying to do that because of the air resistance against the big flufy plumage. Yeah yeah, I think we had one of those at our wedding for the guest book.

00:09:35
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, sure, sure, as too many people.

00:09:37
Speaker 1: But it is also like a mythology that is perpetuated by a lot of period film and television where yeah, someone's like, I must sign my name and they whip out a quill pen that's gigantic pill feather plumage, like as far as the eye can see.

00:09:58
Speaker 2: It makes me giggle. But yeah.

00:10:10
Speaker 1: We talked about Edwin Armstrong this week, yep, which ended on a sad note, but also, he's pretty cool. He's gotten so much recognition posthumously within the science community and specifically engineering, even if a lot of lay people don't really know much about him, which is nice to know his colleagues all recognized his brilliance. We didn't talk a lot about one of the things that I thought was really charming about him. We mentioned in the nineteen twenties that he suddenly made a boatload of money, which he spent largely reinvesting in science. But one of the things he did as an indulgence was he went to Europe and bought fast cars, okay, because he really liked cars, And that was just one of the things where he was like, I'm must spend some money on this, and I'm like, I respect it. Yeah, I respect it. This episode and thinking about FM and AM gave me so many memories to growing up when streaming didn't exist.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:11:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mostly had one memory, which is when I was in elementary school, I acquired at what was effectively a yard sale, a toy plush dog that had a radio in its belly and also came with a little brush. Because it was kind of a long haired dog, you can brush the dog's hair. So if you brushed the dog's hair while listening to the AM radio, it was impeded in its belly. It would just make ongoing static in time with the brush strokes of brushing. And there was a true in our backyard that had it had kind of grown out in an angle and it had a place that I like to go up there and sit, and I would go up there and sit with my radio dog and listen to the AM radio and brush its fur with the brush. Okay, because I can't stop myself, I immediately looked up dog plush AM radio. Yeah, there were different breeds you could buy. Oh really, and I'm real tempted to buy a poodle. Okay, Okay, Will I ever listen to the radio on it? Probably not? But oh I like that they're not super pricey either. Pretty exciting. Yeah, yeah, that's very funny though, the idea that you're inadvertently like changing.

00:12:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, creating more static.

00:12:46
Speaker 1: It looked a lot like this one that just came up on eBay with like kind of wild hair.

00:12:52
Speaker 2: So yeah, AM radio is still around.

00:12:55
Speaker 1: There are still people listening to it working for iheartme that. Like when we get newsletters about stuff, sometimes we get newsletters about things that are related to radio, and I remember getting one that was about the requirement for AM radios still to be in new vehicles. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, in part because AM radio is one of the ways that you can get here in the United States broadcasts from the Emergency Broadcast system when there is some kind of emergency and that stuck in my head.

00:13:31
Speaker 2: It was not that long ago.

00:13:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've gotten a kajillion emails about it, which you're probably filtering some of because it is a significant amount.

00:13:40
Speaker 2: There's a lot of emails. Yeah.

00:13:41
Speaker 1: My memories about AM radio and FM radio and radio listening in general are all very tied to my youth, right, Like I remember. The big one is that I remember, for a long time my dad was really into classic cars, so we did not have modern vehicles, which meant all of the radios in the vehicles, and I he would drive me to ballet, initially twice a week and then six days a week because some of us become obsessive, and I remember we would have to be like tuning into AM stations. And when I started ballet at the age of nine, I pretty much let him make those decisions. And as I hit my early teen years, and I had an FM radio at home and I knew what was available musically, I wanted the music that I was into, and I remember trying to tune around all the time and being frustrated as I'll get out at having to like find the AM station that would play contemporary. Yeah, charting music, and I just I it's such a distinct part of my youth that I remember sitting in That's sixty seven Pontiac LeMans futzing with the radio NonStop.

00:14:56
Speaker 2: It's like ingrained in my soul. Yeah.

00:15:00
Speaker 1: Arguing about the songs, Yeah, I think probably would have been tricky because it seems like AM radio is more focused on like talk radio, because it's clearer.

00:15:13
Speaker 2: With spoken voices than music.

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Speaker 1: Right, music does not play great on AM nowadays. It's better than it certainly was when Armstrong was doing his work, But yeah, FM is a clearer sharper that's usually considered the high fidelity. My dad's car had a CBE radio in there, and my grandfather's car. His dad's car also a CBE radio. I never really learned to use the CBE radio. I never really learned much about the like CB slang and lingo and etiquette. But what I do remember is whenever we were on road trips, we would hear the truckers warning each other about where the speed traps were over. That CBEE radio not exactly the same thing as a radio station to listen to. The Other thing I thought about while working on this episode was DeForest as an example of someone who just stumbled into success and then believed himself to be at the same level as people in his field who clearly knew a lot more than him. Yeah, and how infuriating I would have found that to deal with.

00:16:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:16:37
Speaker 1: I found the Supreme Court case frustrating. Yeah, for obvious reasons. And you know, because of parallels to more recent cases where you know, there has been an expert, many experts have written amicus briefs on something, and then the decision goes in the opposite way of those expert opinions. And that was sort of what that reminded me of. And we got to the part about him trying to return his award and everybody like refusing to take the award back. Part of me was like, did you had those people written amicus briefs on his behalf for the Supreme Court cases? How did they feel about that? If so, probably angry, I don't know.

00:17:24
Speaker 2: I do know they were giving There were a lot of.

00:17:26
Speaker 1: People giving statements like to the press about we all know he invented this, we all know listen to the testimony. I mean it really is like, no, the audion is a magical wonder. We haven't figured out what it can do and how it works yet, and then somebody who's like, yes, we can, here's how, here's the circuitry that I had published two years ago about it, here's everything like it. Yah. At that point, it's one of those things where like you shouldn't even need an amicus brief. One of these men understand this science. And one of these men kind of comes off as a ding dong who's like, I don't know you touched the wires together, Like it's really.

00:18:10
Speaker 2: The fact that.

00:18:11
Speaker 1: He describes it as having, you know, this phenomena, as being a wonder that can't be understood, is like, hmm, do you think ghosts are doing this?

00:18:20
Speaker 2: Like what? It's so weird?

00:18:23
Speaker 1: It's the small creatures living in the radio set kind of. I mean, it does feel like that sort of level of like I just don't know, we can never understand.

00:18:32
Speaker 2: It's the unknowable. And it's like, no, we know, we all know. We all know. This guy figured it out, we've tested it, we know, we know.

00:18:38
Speaker 1: And then again, the justice is going do we though I don't think we do know. I think he put the wires in the light bulb first it's his and it's like, oh, so I can understand how they were all super frustrated.

00:18:50
Speaker 2: I do like, though, that the.

00:18:52
Speaker 1: Entire field rallied around him and it didn't in that moment impact his standing. Uh. It certainly, you know, meant that he got cheated out of some money, but he was still very wealthy at that point, so it probably didn't feel as painful other than just his pride.

00:19:11
Speaker 2: Radio. Now, I just keep thinking about alviscostello songs.

00:19:16
Speaker 1: Just what we do anyway, if you're coming up on your weekend, whether you listen to the radio or some other form of entertainment, or maybe you don't get to do any of that, and I'm sorry, but if you do get to do some things for yourself, I hope they are so delightful, super enjoyable, leave you feeling relaxed, rejuvenated, recharged, at peace as much as possible in our very very wild world right now. If you don't have time off, I still hope you get to do something fun and maybe listen to something that you enjoy as you commute, if you commute, or just you know, wherever you can, and that I hope everyone eats something delicious. I hope everyone that loves cake has cake this weekend. That's my wish for the world, and that we all are as kind to each other as we can possibly manage. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we will have something brand new. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.