Bob Smith 0:00
Okay, Marcia, I’m ready anytime you are

Marcia Smith 0:02
okay. What is the fastest muscle in the body?

Bob Smith 0:06
Uh huh. And Marcia, you have made this show a cheese question show for the past. I don’t know how many episodes, that’s a lie. Well, today we’re going to ask Which country is the largest producer of cheese. Which country eats the most cheese per capita. Where was processed cheese invented? And what country has a theme park dedicated to cheese in the cheesiest episode so far of the off ramp, wow, with Bob

Marcia Smith 0:32
and Marcia Smith. I don’t know if I like this. Music.

Bob Smith 0:52
Welcome to the off ramp, a chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy and take a side road to sanity with fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. Well, today I have some cheesy questions. Yes, I do. It’s not gonna overwhelm or over cheese the show. You have a question starting out that has nothing to do with cheese, so let’s

Marcia Smith 1:14
hear it all right. Bob, what is the fastest muscle in the body? How

Bob Smith 1:18
do you describe fastest muscle? It reacts Quicker, quicker than

Marcia Smith 1:22
any other muscle, to something it does for you, okay, reacts

Bob Smith 1:26
quicker than anything else. It’s like it’s, I’m thinking of your back leg. It just kicks in, or something like that,

Marcia Smith 1:33
like your but it’s probably

Bob Smith 1:34
bonus. It’s probably one of your muscles in your inner ear, because it hears things and kicks in and immediately. No,

Marcia Smith 1:41
if I give you the professional name of this, I’ll bet you figure it out. Okay, okay, it’s orbia colaris Oculi. Oculi. Oculi

Bob Smith 1:50
means the eye, so it has something to do with your eye. So I’ll bet it is the iris of your eye that opens and closes your aperture of your

Marcia Smith 1:58
eye. Nope, it’s the muscle that controls your eyelid. Oh, your eyelid. Okay, each one of these muscles can open and close the eyelid in less than 100 milliseconds. Wow, yeah.

Bob Smith 2:10
How can they test that? That’s amazing. That’s the orbicularis

Marcia Smith 2:13
oculi. Wow. We’ll have a spelling on that later.

Bob Smith 2:18
So that is the fastest reacting muscle

Marcia Smith 2:20
in the body. Yeah. It controls your eyelid.

Bob Smith 2:23
How many times do you blink in a minute?

Marcia Smith 2:25
Oh, in a minute? Yeah, up to about 20 times a minute. But that comes to 19,200 times a day. So it adds up. Isn’t

Bob Smith 2:32
that amazing that that muscle does that much work? It’s like the heart, you know, you don’t give yourself credit for having this wonderful thing going on in your body, yeah? And here’s another one with your eyelid. Dad never thought of that, yeah. Okay, Wisconsin. Girl, time for some cheese questions today. Make

Marcia Smith 2:49
it fast and painless. Bob,

Bob Smith 2:50
what country is the largest producer of cheese in the world? What country

Marcia Smith 2:55
I will say Switzerland, Switzerland.

Bob Smith 2:59
I never heard it pronounced that way before Switzerland.

Marcia Smith 3:02
But okay, I was gonna say France.

Bob Smith 3:06
No, it’s not true. It’s us, isn’t it? I was going to give you choices. Oh, please do okay. Switzerland is not one of them, but Spain is okay, Italy, France and the United States.

Marcia Smith 3:17
All right, okay. I think it’s France or the United States? I’ll say France.

Bob Smith 3:22
You’re wrong. France is number three. Really, yeah. Italy, no,

Marcia Smith 3:27
United States. It is the United States. Yes. And I just ignored it. Okay? Of course. We have Wisconsin, we have California, yes, we have all these cow states churning out that cheese. Cow states.

Bob Smith 3:37
How many tons of cheese are produced per year in the world. Do you have any idea? No 22 point 6 million tons of cheese per year. And the United States is the largest cheese producer with 5.5 million tons annually. Second is Germany, 2.7 million tons. And France is the third largest producer of cheese, 1.8 6 million tons production per year. All right, all right, what country eats the most cheese per capita? Marcia. Choices, okay, Italy, United States, Denmark or China?

Marcia Smith 4:13
United States, no,

Bob Smith 4:16
you don’t know anything about cheese, and you’ve lived in Wisconsin your whole life.

Marcia Smith 4:19
Okay? What’s the answer? Except for several years in Michigan and Iowa, you didn’t say France.

Bob Smith 4:24
I didn’t. No, that’s not France. It’s Denmark. Oh, that’s right, they eat more cheese than anybody. The top consumers of cheese in the world happen to be located in colder climates, yeah, probably because cheese is relatively easy to chill and preserve. Denmark is the top spot, and the average citizen there consumes a whopping 62 pounds of cheese each year. That’s enough to make you constipated, isn’t it? Grief,

Marcia Smith 4:48
62

Bob Smith 4:50
pounds.

Marcia Smith 4:51
Imagine how much 62 pounds looks like. Yeah, start nibbling January 1,

Bob Smith 4:56
and then Iceland has 61 pounds per capita. Finland. 60 pounds. So those are the top three countries for cheese.

Marcia Smith 5:03
Those aren’t particularly fat people. So it hasn’t don’t understand

Bob Smith 5:06
that. Do

Marcia Smith 5:07
you? No?

Bob Smith 5:08
All right, more cheese questions coming up, oh geez, no, it’s Oh cheese. Marcia not oh geez,

Marcia Smith 5:12
fine. Okay. Bob in a coin flip, does one side have an advantage over the other?

Bob Smith 5:18
I would imagine the side that’s holding the coin has a better advantage than the one that’s not holding the coin. Or are we talking a referee holding the coin, someone in the middle it

Marcia Smith 5:28
has nothing to do with the person holding it. I’m saying, is it heads or tails? Does either of those have an advantage? Yes, because

Bob Smith 5:35
the coin that has the head size is a heavier part of the coin than the tail size, and it happens to land at a certain rate, different than the other side.

Marcia Smith 5:44
We recently read that, but alas, according to this study, it’s not a coin flip. Returns to its starting position almost 51% of the time. In other words, if you’re saying that’s heads, are tails, and you look and it’s on heads, you have a small chance of it returning to that side. So

Bob Smith 6:05
if it’s heads on your finger, yeah, and then you flip it, yeah, it’s probably going to come back heads. Yeah, huh?

Marcia Smith 6:10
I didn’t know that. Not, not by much. Well, 51% well, almost 51 it’s crazy, but that’s true. That’s from a 2023, study in the University of Amsterdam who flipped 350,757 coins across 46 different currencies. Jeez, yeah. Can you imagine? What are we gonna do today? We’re gonna flip a coin again. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Yes. You know that tradition of coin flipping goes back to, guess what, Roman times. Of course, everything seems to go back there, yes. And they used to settle personal disputes by flipping heads of ships. That’s

Bob Smith 6:47
right, because there was a ship on the backside and then the Roman ruler was on the front side. You got it? Okay?

Speaker 1 6:52
All right. Marcia, we talked about cheese. What country processes the most cheese in a year, the United States. So you would think there’d probably be a lot of very strict laws about cheese in the United States. And there is in which of these states is it illegal to fall asleep in a cheese shop? Why

Marcia Smith 7:09
did you go down some hole on the internet@cheese.com

Bob Smith 7:12
Well, the Swiss cheese holes, yes, I went down there, but I have some other cheeses. So which state makes it illegal to fall asleep in a cheese shop, and I give you choices here, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania,

Marcia Smith 7:28
Wisconsin? No, it’s

Bob Smith 7:29
not Wisconsin. Boy, you don’t know anything about cheese. Sorry, I have been waiting for this moment. Okay, the Illinois sanitary food preparation Act specifies it shall be unlawful for any person to sleep or to allow or permit any person to sleep in any work room of a bake shop, kitchen, dining room, confectionery Creamery, cheese factory, or any place where food is prepared for sale, served or sold.

Marcia Smith 7:58
Why is it specifically cheese and not all?

Bob Smith 8:00
It’s all of these foods. Actually, cheese is one of them. Okay? I just brought it up to show you that falling asleep, any place where cheese is made or sold is illegal in the state of Illinois. So if you see someone napping in an Illinois cheese shop, shake them awake, otherwise you could be charged as an accomplice to their crime of sleeping. Okay,

Marcia Smith 8:20
Bob, why do we describe someone with deeply held beliefs as died in the wool?

Bob Smith 8:26
Died in the wool.

Marcia Smith 8:27
Where does that phrase come from? Well,

Bob Smith 8:30
it must be hard to die wool. So this must be like very, very deep and difficult, and it’s permanent. So if somebody’s died in the wool, it’s gonna be very difficult to make their change their mind. So it must go back to Scotland, where a lot of wool was cultivated back in the day. Well,

Marcia Smith 8:45
you gave that a lot of thought, and I was wrong. No, no, you’re sort of on the right track. Okay, the original meaning of the phrase was applied to the dying of raw wool, which if done in bulk before it’s combed or woven, then it holds its color much longer than it does after the wool is processed. Dyed in the wool means convictions ingrained early during childhood will last the longest. Also,

Bob Smith 9:11
it’s a part of the process you dye it early, early it holds and that’s where they brought the whole wool concept over. Oh, that’s interesting. You hold

Marcia Smith 9:19
the beliefs that you go way back to your childhood sometimes that you grew up with, yeah, and that’s where it comes from. That’s pretty cool. I thought it was interesting. I

Bob Smith 9:28
like those kinds of things. Thanks for bringing that up. Now, more cheese. Marsha, actually, I’ve got another this is another food question, but it’s not cheese, okay, all right, how did porridge help strengthen the Great Wall of China? Well,

Marcia Smith 9:41
I bet you, they used it as grout. They ran out of grout or something. Yeah,

Bob Smith 9:45
the britannica.com says, during the Ming Dynasty, the builders of the Great Wall of China added sticky rice porridge to their lime mortar, and that mixture formed a stronger, more water resistant bond than the regular mortar, so that. Porridge is responsible for helping to hold that wall together for 1000s of years.

Marcia Smith 10:04
Really, that’s some, that’s some heavy duty porridge.

Bob Smith 10:10
I do have another question about cheese. Oh, never mind. We’ll get to that later.

Marcia Smith 10:15
Let’s, let’s hold on to that bouncing off your question, Bob, what food helped ignite the French Revolution.

Bob Smith 10:23
Oh, well, I thought it was bread. Yes, bread riots, wasn’t it? Yeah, they didn’t have enough bread, right? So the peasants were rioting, I guess. And then she said, Let them eat cake. Yeah? And that pissed off everybody.

Marcia Smith 10:35
You don’t need the answer to this at all.

Bob Smith 10:38
Okay, help me out. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 10:40
that’s the answer. Some experts argue that the spark that ignited the revolution might have been bread. France’s rising population, heavily grain based diet, and the country’s inability to keep up with the demand led to a crisis of bread scarcity that bled into popular outrage. The whole story of Les Miserables is about bread being stolen. That’s right, a loaf of bread, right? Yeah, yeah, okay. And that’s the story and the glory of bread in France,

Bob Smith 11:08
we talked about Michelangelo recently. Remember, I talked about him having a death sentence ordered by a pope. I just wanted to make it clear that’s only one of three popes he dealt with in his lifetime. He had a very good track record with Popes. Oh, he did. The middle guy was the problem. Okay? He was a darling of other Popes. For instance, really, in 1508 Pope Julius commissioned him to design and paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Michelangelo worked on it from 1508 to 1512 when it was finished, he became known then as the greatest artist of all time. How old was he when he was called the greatest artist of all time, 3137 so, yes, still young. Oh, by the way, he was paid a princely sum for that work too. In 1508, 3000 ducats. I looked it up today. That’s more than $600,000

Marcia Smith 11:56
Oh, my gosh, today’s money. Oh, my God. So he was that was a good gig.

Bob Smith 12:00
It was a good gig. But then in 1527 he dealt with Pope Clement, that’s the one we talked about, that put him under a death sentence because the Medicis were upset that he was remaining in the city and they were leaving, and he was helping with fortifications. But then the third Pope in his life, Pope Paul the third in 1546 gave him his greatest job. He became the architect for the renovation of St Peter’s Basilica, also in Rome, also at the Vatican. But this was a construction job. He was 71 years old when he got that job. How many years do you think he held it?

Marcia Smith 12:34
I don’t know. I think he lived to his 80s, 88

Bob Smith 12:37
so he had that job for the next 18 years, really? Yes, he

Marcia Smith 12:42
did that when he was 88

Bob Smith 12:43
Can you believe that? I mean, how many architects at the age of 88 are still working on major buildings, and at the time, this was the most high tech building in the world.

Marcia Smith 12:52
Is there anything with cheese related to Michelangelo? We can here’s

Bob Smith 12:56
my Michelangelo cheese question. Marcia, no, no, I don’t have one. Was

Marcia Smith 13:00
his favorite cheese? I think it’s time for AKA, also known as this week’s category is things that come in pairs. Hmm, okay, so if

Bob Smith 13:11
things that come in a fruit called a pear, okay, let’s go. No, that’s not

Marcia Smith 13:15
okay. So if I said baseball mitts, what is it I’m talking about that comes in pairs baseball mitts, fingers. What are those also called? Mitts? Are also gloves? Yes, gloves come

Bob Smith 13:28
in pairs. Yes, dear. Oh, I see when you buy a pair of gloves, okay, I’m thinking of baseball again like No, no, I only had one baseball glove at a time. You’re not going

Marcia Smith 13:37
to do any better with this one drink, drinking cups. Mm, hmm, that’s it. What’s the what’s comes in pairs? Drinking

Bob Smith 13:46
cups in pairs? Yeah,

Marcia Smith 13:47
what’s another name for cups you drink out of? Will you fill up your glasses? Yes, there you go. Because

Bob Smith 13:55
you buy a pair of glasses to see through. Oh my goodness. These are so arcane. You’re taking me into three different areas. Now

Marcia Smith 14:01
they’re all things that come in pairs here. This is my kind of question, dog breaths.

Bob Smith 14:07
Dog breaths come in pairs. Bow, wow.

Marcia Smith 14:11
What are dog breath?

Bob Smith 14:13
Okay, pants. That’s

Marcia Smith 14:14
it. A pair of pants. God, this

Bob Smith 14:17
is terrible, the worst pun in the world. No,

Marcia Smith 14:19
these aren’t puns. These are just,

Bob Smith 14:20
this is a pun quiz,

Marcia Smith 14:21
McCartney’s band,

Bob Smith 14:24
Wings. Wings come in pairs. I get that one.

Marcia Smith 14:29
Okay, cut into cubes.

Bob Smith 14:31
Cheese, cheese cut into cubes. Right

Marcia Smith 14:35
when you cut something into little pieces, what are you doing? You’re

Bob Smith 14:39
cutting it into cubes, dice, dice comes

Marcia Smith 14:43
in pairs. Okay, this is a good one easy piano song, chop sticks. That’s it very good. And lecturers, lecturers, lecturers, they come in pairs. That’s it very good. See you picked up there. At the end, Oh, dear God, time

Bob Smith 15:02
for a break. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We’ll be back in just a moment. See you did. You

Marcia Smith 15:08
started picking up, but the first ones were harder in that one, and you got all the last four. Okay,

Bob Smith 15:12
I got more cheese questions for you. Oh, yes, more cheese questions for you. Okay? We’re back. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We do this each week for the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and its internet radio station, CPL radio. After that, we put it on podcast platforms where it is heard all over the world. Okay? Marcia, okay. Marcia, another question, Where was processed cheese invented? Do you mean American cheese? Well, you could call it that. Was it invented in the United States, England, Switzerland or Austria?

Marcia Smith 15:54
Ah, Marcia, Austria. Oh, your

Bob Smith 15:57
knowledge of cheese is so good today. No, not. Austria, okay? England, Switzerland, United States.

Marcia Smith 16:05
Oh, you mean I get a second chance? Yes, England, no. Marcia.

Bob Smith 16:09
I’m so sorry. No, the Swiss invented processed cheese in 1911 it was Alchemist, Fritz Stettler and Walter Gerber who heated hard cheese with sodium citrate to create a cheese with a longer shelf life and a soft, gooey texture, processed cheese invented by the Swiss, not Americans, all right, Marcia, my last cheese question today, what country has a theme park dedicated to cheese choices? The United States, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Japan or South Korea,

Marcia Smith 16:42
I’ll say, Denmark,

Bob Smith 16:43
well, you’re wrong. Marsh again,

Marcia Smith 16:46
I haven’t got one every I am

Bob Smith 16:49
South Korea, cheese was not a regular part of their diet until the 1950s when a Belgian missionary who raised goats to make his own cheese, introduced it to the people of the Southern imsil region, and the cheese you that’s how it’s known in Korea, C, H, I, J, e, u, quickly grew in popularity, so much so that a theme park devoted entirely to cheese open there in 2004

Marcia Smith 17:13
well, they have rides or what?

Bob Smith 17:16
That’s a lot of things. It’s the imsil cheese theme park. Visitors can make and eat cheese learn about the science behind Casey and culture. That’s the technical term for cheese making. The 32 acre park features cheese shaped buildings and statues and even has a slide that guests can ride into a cheese play land. You should go there. Think that’s something just for you. Marcia, Hey baby, I’ll pass that comes from Atlas

Marcia Smith 17:42
Obscura. Ah, yeah, it is obscura. How many earths could fit in the sun? How

Bob Smith 17:48
many earths could fit into the sun? Yeah, I’ll say, uh, it’s going to be 1000 Earths to make a sun. Yeah, it’s a lot. 10,000 Earths, wow. 100,000 Earths, a million Earths to equal the sun 1.3

Marcia Smith 18:02
million. Isn’t

Bob Smith 18:03
that amazing?

Marcia Smith 18:05
I know.

Bob Smith 18:06
Can that be? Remember those models they used in school? Grade School, the sun wasn’t that big,

Marcia Smith 18:11
not that I recall. Yeah, sun.

Bob Smith 18:13
The sun is as big as the school and the earth is as small as the point on your pen.

Marcia Smith 18:18
Yeah, yeah, the sun is by far the largest thing in our solar system. Some 1.3 million Earths could fit within it. That’s amazing. How many years do you think it takes the sun to complete its own galactic journey?

Bob Smith 18:32
What is it doing?

Marcia Smith 18:34
We go around the sun, right, correct, yeah. And the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Oh, I never thought of that, yeah. Me, either was

Bob Smith 18:42
that take once every 1000 years or something

Marcia Smith 18:45
a little more 250 million years. That’s a long day. Yeah, that’s a long day. It is. Indeed. It travels 450,000 miles per hour to do that, and it takes all those years. By comparison, the Earth travels around the Sun at only 67,000 miles per hour. Wow. How can that be,

Bob Smith 19:05
yeah, especially when you know your hair doesn’t get messed up. I don’t understand that. All right. Marcia, I have a couple states questions. All right, what state is nicknamed for something that’s 277 miles long?

Marcia Smith 19:21
It’s be a river Mississippi. No, that’s longer than 207 what state

Speaker 1 19:25
is nicknamed for something 277 miles long. And here’s the clue, okay, that’s entirely within the state boundaries. Oh, okay, something that’s 277 miles long within the state? Yes, a river created it. Oh, it’s a canyon. It is a canyon. It’s in Arizona, and it is called

Marcia Smith 19:44
the Grand Canyon. Exactly.

Bob Smith 19:47
It lies at the north end of the state, near the Utah border, and it’s the country’s largest canyon. It’s 277 miles long. What was the question? What state is nicknamed for something 270 Seven miles. Nickname.

Marcia Smith 20:00
It’s called the Grand Canyon state. That’s exactly right. Okay, now I get it. Okay,

Bob Smith 20:05
let’s move all right. Speaking of Arizona, what are they the leading producer of I’ll give you clues, okay, besides being known as the Grand Canyon state, is it the timber state, the coal state, the iron state, or the copper state? Cop?

Marcia Smith 20:18
Or what copper? What copper? Yes, I said it three times. And

Bob Smith 20:24
what do you think you can attribute the copper to? What created the copper? It’s

Marcia Smith 20:29
not all those red mountainous things, Red Rocks. No, I don’t know.

Bob Smith 20:33
It’s because of its volcanos. Oh, really, it has many ancient volcanos, and that makes it rich in copper deposits. That led to its copper mining boom in the mid 19th century.

Marcia Smith 20:43
All righty Bob, where is the polar bear? Capital of the World? The

Bob Smith 20:48
polar bear capital of the world? I would assume that would be like Alaska or Russia, maybe Greenland. Let’s call it Greenland, okay,

Marcia Smith 20:59
it’s Churchill, Manitoba. Oh, it’s in Canada. Yeah, it sits on the western coast of the Hudson Bay, and it’s smack dab in the path of polar bears migration routes. Oh,

Bob Smith 21:11
my goodness. So they open up your blinds and look out, and there’s a bunch of polar bears every

Marcia Smith 21:15
summer, but hundreds of bears gather around Churchill as they wait for the bay to freeze solid. So they actually wait around for the water to freeze. Who tests it first to see if it’s frozen enough, the

Bob Smith 21:28
heaviest bear has to taste it.

Marcia Smith 21:30
How did they do that? I

Bob Smith 21:32
don’t know.

Marcia Smith 21:33
Local Guides offer polar bear viewing Safaris in safely enclosed tundra buggies.

Bob Smith 21:38
Oh, my God. It’s just like being on a safari in Africa only you’re in a Tundra buggy. Yeah, it’s a bucket list place to go. Churchill, Manitoba for the polar

Marcia Smith 21:48
bear migration.

Bob Smith 21:49
All right. Marcia, one of your favorite paintings, or one you used to love to show people, was Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, basically it looks like somebody in a panic maybe fearing for their lives. Yes, so what was the screams inspiration? What was the inspiration for this? Oh,

Marcia Smith 22:07
I don’t know. He got his tax bill. No, he

Bob Smith 22:12
was walking at sunset in Christiania, a part of Norway near Oslo, when suddenly the setting sun’s light turned the clouds of blood red, and he said, I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature,

Marcia Smith 22:26
really? Yeah, oh, that’s cool. Interesting. That’s profound. Now

Bob Smith 22:30
there’s another possible explanation for this. Scholars have located the spot depicted as a view from a road overlooking Oslo from the hill of Ekberg. Well, at the time of that painting, monk’s depressive sister Laura Katherine was a patient at the mental asylum at the foot of

Marcia Smith 22:48
Mount Ekberg. Why? Thanksgiving must have been a hoot at that house.

Bob Smith 22:52
Mental illness ran in that family, so it makes you wonder if that agonized face had something to do with her. Yeah, and maybe the sky is deeply depressed. Yeah, I think the whole family was alone anyway. I thought those were two very interesting things. He said it was the scream of nature. In fact, that was the title of the painting in German, originally the scream of nature, but then people are saying his sister was at the asylum down the hill. So call

Marcia Smith 23:16
it The Scream. Well, that’s that’s interesting, either way, it

Bob Smith 23:20
doesn’t sound like a happy inspiration for a painting. Oh, dear. Okay, happier subject. How did the US military inspire McDonald’s restaurants to change and innovate? What did the US military do that inspired McDonald’s restaurants to innovate? The year was 1975 What did 1975 I’ll give you three choices. Oh, thank you. It inspired the invention of the milkshake, the first drive through, or the first Happy Meal. The milkshake the first drive through, or the first Happy Meal. No,

Marcia Smith 23:53
okay, the drive thru. You’re

Bob Smith 23:55
having a bad day today. I love it. Second choice is right. The US military inspired the first McDonald’s drive in window, and it got its start in Sierra Vista, Arizona on january 24 1975 this is interesting. The soldiers from the local Fort Huachuca army base couldn’t leave their cars while in uniform. Oh, really, yeah, for some reason they were not allowed to do that. So learning this, the local McDonald’s decided to open a drive through near the base, installing a window in a wall, no kidding. And soon McDonald’s all over the country started adding drive through service. But that’s where it started, in Arizona, with members of the Fort Huachuca army base. I

Marcia Smith 24:36
always love origin stories. What inspired that first one? And that was a need soldiers need exactly

Bob Smith 24:43
if we’re gonna sell burgers to these guys, we gotta have a window where they can just drive up and

Marcia Smith 24:47
grab it. The first one. Uh huh, Okay, last one before my quotes. Bob, okay. When did the first pay phones appear in the United States? Oh,

Bob Smith 24:57
that’s a good one. The first pay phone. Yes, wow. So the first telephones were in the 1870 76 something like that. It’s

Marcia Smith 25:05
exactly that. How do you remember that 1876 is correct? Well, that was when Alexander Alexandria

Bob Smith 25:11
and Bell had exhibited that at the Philadelphia exposition for the 100th anniversary of the United States. So then, when was the first pay phone. Somebody came up with that pretty quickly. And I think it was because somebody didn’t like their employees using the phone in the office or something like that, so they set up a pay phone, and that was in Connecticut, or somewhere like that.

Marcia Smith 25:32
Oh, for heaven’s sake, is that the answer the Connecticut part is right. Okay, tell me, but it was 19th century Connecticut machinery polisher named William Gray endured a scare when he was unable to access a phone to call a doctor for his sick, sick wife. Oh, that’s right, yeah, the good news his wife recovered, and the experience drove gray to develop a coin operated phone that would be available to the public and not just those who could afford an expensive private subscription service. Yes,

Bob Smith 26:02
he tried to get to a phone, and somebody wouldn’t let them use their home phone, as a family member was suffering. So

Marcia Smith 26:09
the first pay phone appeared in a Connecticut bank in 1889 and by 1902 there were approximately 81,000 such contraptions around the country, that number swelled to 2 million by the end of the century, before reversing itself as cell phones became popular, there are

Bob Smith 26:28
certain generations that will never know about a pay phone. You can’t find them anymore. They just got rid of those. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 26:34
life is going to hell. But,

Bob Smith 26:38
okay. Marcia, what’s your thought for the day two

Marcia Smith 26:40
quotes. First one, Ronald Reagan, okay, if we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost. Wow.

Bob Smith 26:49
Okay, there’s a very contrarian view to a lot of people today on immigration. Very

Marcia Smith 26:54
Yeah. He was very emphatic about that. And here’s one from author Melanie white, Thanksgiving is a time to count your blessings one by one as each relative goes home

Bob Smith 27:09
and takes the excess cheese

Unknown Speaker 27:10
with them and Turkey,

Bob Smith 27:12
oh my goodness. Okay, all cheese aside, it’s time to go join

Marcia Smith 27:16
us next time here on the off ramp. Thank

Bob Smith 27:19
you. Marcia, very good.

The off ramp is produced in association with CPL radio online and the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, visit us on the web at the offramp dot show at.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai