298 Mind Boggling Trivia

Marcia Smith 0:00
What bird is capable of killing a lion?

Bob Smith 0:03
What?

Marcia Smith 0:04
Yeah.

Bob Smith 0:05
Wow.

Bob Smith 0:06
And America’s first great railroad was founded with a very old technology. What? Answers to those and other questions coming up in this half hour of the off ramp with Bob

Marcia Smith 0:18
and Marcia

Bob Smith 0:18
Smith.

Bob Smith 0:35
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, Marcia, America’s first great railroad was the Baltimore and Ohio, and it started off with a very old technology. What?

Bob Smith 0:54
Steam?

Bob Smith 0:54
No.

Bob Smith 0:55
Well,

Bob Smith 0:57
Steam was a new technology.

Marcia Smith 0:58
Wood was the old one. Wood

Bob Smith 1:00
Wasn’t even wood, Marcia.

Marcia Smith 1:03
Coal

Bob Smith 1:03
Wasn’t even coal.

Marcia Smith 1:05
Well, what do you make steam with water?

Bob Smith 1:07
Yeah, wasn’t that

Marcia Smith 1:10
Before wood, there was rock. They made their power with rock.

Bob Smith 1:17
We’re not talking about power generation necessarily

Marcia Smith 1:20
Yeah.

Bob Smith 1:20
Talking about locomotion

Marcia Smith 1:21
Yeah.

Bob Smith 1:22
How did this railroad run?

Marcia Smith 1:24
Did they put horses in the middle and have them run with their feet hanging out?

Bob Smith 1:29
It began with horse drawn carts.

Marcia Smith 1:32
It was like that question I asked about boats the other week. Yeah. I’ll be darned.

Bob Smith 1:36
When the B&O railroad was conceived in 1826, their prospectus to investors, stated that they expected the railroad to operate with horses pulling carts on rails. That was the idea. X

Bob Smith 1:47
I said it as a joke.

Bob Smith 1:48
No, when the first 13 miles opened in May 1830 that’s how it began. The B&O ran with horses. In fact, in the prospectus in 1823, Philip Thomas wrote, “A single horse will draw upon a railway, a load which would require 30 horses on a common road.”

Marcia Smith 2:04
Really?

Bob Smith 2:04
Because it was going to be on these rails, there’s no friction.

Marcia Smith 2:08
Okay?

Bob Smith 2:08
And that was kind of the sales pitch, 30 to one. The Baltimore Patriot reported, the horse upon iron rails moves with a freedom and speed that astonishes.

Marcia Smith 2:18
So how many horses did it take?

Bob Smith 2:20
Per cart, there were one or two horses. The tracks were down the middle, and then there were paths on each side of the tracks, one horse or two horses pulling the cart.

Marcia Smith 2:30
Oh, okay

Bob Smith 2:30
And apparently this is the way it was done in England, before they got to steam locomotives as well.

Marcia Smith 2:35
They didn’t work them to death. Did they?

Bob Smith 2:38
No, because they only worked them for about a year or two, and then they went to steam locomotives. But until that time, the horses pulled the carts on a 13 mile line. But they knew that was too far for one or two horses to pull the train, so about midway, nine miles down the track, they built a relay station, which led to the founding of Relay, Maryland, a town where there was a hotel and a restaurant for the people waiting on the train, as they switched horses out. So they treated the horses well.

Marcia Smith 3:05
Oh, good. I can live with that.

Bob Smith 3:07
All right. Well, I’m glad you’re happy now.

Marcia Smith 3:10
All right, Bob, what bird is capable of killing a lion? It’s a It’s not an uncommon bird. It’s nothing weird.

Marcia Smith 3:17
It’s nothing weird. You mean it’s something we’d find in our backyard. It might be the robin or the Cardinal.

Marcia Smith 3:22
Yeah, right. This is a bird with very strong muscles.

Bob Smith 3:26
Has to be a good sized bird,

Marcia Smith 3:28
It’s some – we’ve talked about before because of its huge eggs.

Bob Smith 3:31
Yeah, and I’ve got a big puppet.

Marcia Smith 3:33
Oh, that’s right, yes, of course,

Bob Smith 3:36
An ostrich can actually kill a lion?

Marcia Smith 3:38
Yes, we talked about a bit before, but the common ostrich is the undisputed heavy weight of the avian world. Adult ostriches typically weigh between 250 and 300 pounds, and can be as tall as nine feet

Bob Smith 3:53
Like they could play football. 250 to 300 pounds, my God. And nine feet tall.

Marcia Smith 3:59
Yeah.

Bob Smith 3:59
They could be nine feet tall!

Marcia Smith 4:01
Yeah, that’s just crazy.

Bob Smith 4:02
That’s scary as hell.

Marcia Smith 4:03
But Ostriches are the world’s fastest animals on two legs, capable of sprinting at 43 miles per hour,

Bob Smith 4:11
Yes.

Marcia Smith 4:11
And maintaining a cruising speed of 30 miles per hour for at least 10 miles.

Bob Smith 4:16
So that’s faster than a human being can go for a long period of time.

Marcia Smith 4:20
And an ostrich’s kick, meanwhile, is so powerful that it can kill a lion.

Bob Smith 4:25
Jeez.

Marcia Smith 4:26
I don’t know how fast lions can run, but it can’t be much faster than 30 miles per hour. Can it?

Bob Smith 4:32
Fast, Fast, fast.

Marcia Smith 4:33
Just give them an old boot in the head, and they’re out of it. So that’s it. The common ostrich can kill a lion

Bob Smith 4:40
Back to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Bob Smith 4:42
Okay.

Bob Smith 4:43
Why was it called the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad? Did you ever think about that? I was thinking about that the other day. I thought, why would they name it that in 1820. Ohio was hardly settled in 1820.

Marcia Smith 4:55
You know, I never did think about that.

Bob Smith 4:58
Okay, here’s another one, the Erie Canal. What was the purpose of the Erie Canal? Now we all know the song the Erie Canal and all this, but I have to admit, I didn’t really understand what the Erie Canal did.

Marcia Smith 5:09
What did it do Bob?

Bob Smith 5:10
It provided a water way between New York City and the Great Lakes. It was one waterway.

Marcia Smith 5:17
Sing me a song.

Bob Smith 5:18
16 miles on the Erie Canal. We pulled our barges to and fro.

Marcia Smith 5:24
All right!

Bob Smith 5:24
Song we used to sing in grade school.

Marcia Smith 5:26
Really?

Bob Smith 5:27
Yeah.

Marcia Smith 5:27
We didn’t sing that.

Bob Smith 5:28
15 miles on the Erie Canal. Well, up in here in Milwaukee, you were way off on the prairie. You didn’t know what was going on in the East back where I was living. Anyway, Baltimore was losing trade to New York City because of the Erie Canal. So the businessmen of Baltimore got together and said, We could build a railway to go straight to the Ohio River and get to all this produce and everything – directly – going through the Alleghenies. So the Baltimore and Ohio, it was an ambitious, aspirational name. They hadn’t gone all the way to Ohio yet. Ohio met the Ohio River, the gateway to the frontier. And so that’s why they built it.

Marcia Smith 5:54
Okay.

Bob Smith 5:55
The horse drawn carts were used for the first five to seven years, until Peter Cooper experimented with a steam locomotive. And then that proved, yeah, this will work. And by 1831 the horses were gone, and the steam locomotives were the method of transportation on the B&O, but it still took them to almost 1850 to reach the Ohio River.

Marcia Smith 6:20
Huh! Wow. Okay, Bob, you dazzled us all last week with your understanding of what certain foods had in common. Do you remember that?

Bob Smith 6:30
That’s right where they were all named after different places.

Marcia Smith 6:35
I’m going to give you seven foods.

Bob Smith 6:37
Okay.

Marcia Smith 6:38
Another seven foods, and you’re going to tell me what they have in common.

Bob Smith 6:41
Okay

Marcia Smith 6:42
Ritz crackers, Twinkies, Stove Top stuffing, coffee mate, pork, Froot Loops and Gatorade.

Bob Smith 6:50
Oh, my God. What do any of those have in common?

Marcia Smith 6:53
Isn’t that a fascinating mash up?

Bob Smith 6:55
Oh dear. Say them again.

Marcia Smith 6:57
Ritz crackers, Twinkies, Stove Top stuffing, coffee made, pork Froot Loops and Gatorade.

Bob Smith 7:04
Wow. Uh, none of them are real food? Is that it? I mean, could that be it?

Marcia Smith 7:10
I have a Twinkie here that my grandmother bought,

Bob Smith 7:13
Twinkie, Gatorade and coffee mate. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Nothing real there.

Marcia Smith 7:18
Well, there’s something to that. So think it through. What would they all have in common? I’ll tell you.

Bob Smith 7:23
Okay, they all have a filling. No, they all have some kind of chemical. I don’t know. What is it?

Marcia Smith 7:29
You’re on the right track. They are all banned in some countries.

Bob Smith 7:32
Oh, no kidding!

Marcia Smith 7:33
Yeah, they all have dyes or trans fats or preservatives or hydrogenated oils that aren’t allowed for health reasons. In other countries.

Bob Smith 7:34
I see, okay,

Marcia Smith 7:39
Eespecially European countries such as Norway, Finland, Austria, they’re a little more touchy than we are. Just pour that red dye down my throat!

Bob Smith 7:54
Well, yeah, when something’s preserved so well, it doesn’t go bad? That’s not good. Except for honey. Honey is naturally that way.

Marcia Smith 8:00
Now, pork, you can guess that some Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia, prohibit the sale of it for religious reasons.

Bob Smith 8:07
That’s true, yeah.

Marcia Smith 8:08
But some of the countries don’t like it because it has ractopamine in it.

Bob Smith 8:12
What does?

Marcia Smith 8:13
Pork? Pork does have it in it – a drug used to increase muscle growth in pigs.

Bob Smith 8:18
Oh, my goodness.

Marcia Smith 8:19
It’s banned in several countries.

Bob Smith 8:22
So we inject that in our pigs?

Marcia Smith 8:23
And then then we go have our Costco hot dog.

Bob Smith 8:25
Oh, dear.

Marcia Smith 8:27
Which we do love.

Bob Smith 8:28
So all these foods that you mentioned, and we’ll mention them one more time. They are banned in many parts of the world for various reasons.

Marcia Smith 8:36
Yeah

Bob Smith 8:36
Some of them health wise, some of them for religious purposes.

Marcia Smith 8:39
Just the pork one

Bob Smith 8:40
Okay, tell me what they are again?

Marcia Smith 8:42
Ritz crackers, Twinkies, Stove Top stuffing, coffee mate, pork, Froot Loops and Gatorade..

Bob Smith 8:49
Wow. All right, I’ll keep that in mind.

Marcia Smith 8:51
All right

Bob Smith 8:52
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad one more time.

Marcia Smith 8:55
God in heaven! Oh man!

Bob Smith 8:57
This is something you may not have known. When American railroad started. Did you know that the rails were wood, not metal? They were long pieces of timber, but fastened on top of them were bars of iron, thin bars of cast iron called strappers. And here’s what happened. As the trains got heavier and faster, the iron straps began to work loose, curl upward and spear through the floors of the cars.

Marcia Smith 9:20
Oh, my God!

Bob Smith 9:21
Injuring or killing passengers.

Marcia Smith 9:23
Bad form.

Bob Smith 9:24
Not necessarily great to try something when it’s brand new and all these steam locomotives.

Marcia Smith 9:29
That’s you and me. Let’s wait and see how this shakes out.

Bob Smith 9:31
I like that steam locomotive, but it’s on those wooden rails. Isn’t that kind of dangerous? Well, yes, it was! So those flying iron strips that kept coming up into the cars and killing people were called snake heads, and they are the reason that once steam locomotives arrived about 1831 wooden rails became unsafe almost immediately. And that forced the B&O and every other early railroad to adopt solid iron rails instead.

Bob Smith 9:56
Okay

Bob Smith 9:57
Okay, no more B&O railroad.

Marcia Smith 9:58
Thank you very much. Oh. Okay, Bob, why has WD 40 never been patented?

Bob Smith 10:04
Why has WD 40 never been patented? Yeah, and WD 40, that was like the 40th try at this lubricant. I think it was, wasn’t it? Yeah, used in rocketry originally. And then they decided, hey, this works for all kinds of things around the house.

Marcia Smith 10:19
You know a lot about it, Bob, but you know it was never patent.

Bob Smith 10:22
No, I didn’t know it was never patented-d-d-d

Marcia Smith 10:24
I can’t say it.

Bob Smith 10:26
I didn’t know it didn’t receive a patent. And why is that?

Marcia Smith 10:28
Well, it’s been said. Bob, you only need two things in life, duct tape if something moves and shouldn’t and WD 40 if it doesn’t move. And should!

Bob Smith 10:38
I like that? That’s good.

Marcia Smith 10:40
WD 40 has been around since?

Marcia Smith 10:43
1946.

Marcia Smith 10:45
53, okay, and has never been patented, so the formula could remain a secret. So –

Bob Smith 10:52
Ohhhh!

Marcia Smith 10:53
You can make your own, but you can’t know what’s in ours.

Bob Smith 10:56
I see. So it’s so proprietary, we are not gonna patent it.

Marcia Smith 11:00
That’s right. WD stands for water displacement. Okay, did you know that?

Bob Smith 11:05
I forgot.

Marcia Smith 11:06
The few people who know the formula all signed a non disclosure agreement, and the ingredient recipe is locked in a vault in San Diego,

Bob Smith 11:14
Just like the Coca Cola one is locked in a vault in Atlanta.

Marcia Smith 11:18
Yeah, isn’t there a special sauce for McDonald’s locked somewhere?

Bob Smith 11:21
Probably.

Marcia Smith 11:22
But who knows.

Bob Smith 11:23
Hey, look to the heavens. I’ve got a question for you. What is the definition of a planet? Never wondered what the definition of a planet is?

Marcia Smith 11:32
No, I never did. It’s not a star.

Bob Smith 11:35
No

Marcia Smith 11:36
Okay, you have to tell me.

Bob Smith 11:37
A planet is a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, so we know that. It has enough mass to be roughly round in shape.

Marcia Smith 11:45
Okay.

Bob Smith 11:46
And has significantly more gravitational attraction than anything else near it. And only eight known celestial bodies qualify as planets in our solar system.

Marcia Smith 11:56
And those are?

Bob Smith 11:57
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Marcia Smith 12:01
Uhhuh, yeah. If any of them were like squares or rectangles, that’ll look weird on the mobile right.

Bob Smith 12:07
And here’s another one. How close are we to shooting stars? I always assume it ended up in a field somewhere near me, right? Yeah. But a meteor known colloquially as a shooting star or a falling star, it’s the visible passage of a glowing body through the atmosphere after being heated to incandescence.

Marcia Smith 12:25
I never thought of it as synonymous – meteor and shooting star. But of course, that makes sense.

Bob Smith 12:30
So when you think of it that way, how high are they? Although a meteor may seem to be a few 1000 feet above the Earth, meteors typically occur in the mesosphere, 250,000 to 330,000 feet above the Earth. There’s only 5000 feet in the mile. So if that’s a long way away, yeah, longer than that field nearby, where you thought that star went.

Marcia Smith 12:51
I think it’s time for a break.

Bob Smith 12:52
Okay, you’re listening to the Off Ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith. We’ll be back in just a moment.

Bob Smith 12:58
We’re back with the shooting stars. That’s you and me. Marsh, we’re the shooting stars. You’re listening to Bob and Marcia Smith and the off ramp. We do this each week for the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Then we put it on podcast platforms, where it’s heard

Marcia Smith 13:13
All over the world.

Bob Smith 13:14
One more question on transportation today.

Marcia Smith 13:18
Sure.

Bob Smith 13:18
Now we were talking about America’s first railway that was the B&O, the Baltimore and Ohio. And it was a surface one. The first underground railway was the Metropolitan Railway of?

Marcia Smith 13:29
Oh, London!

Bob Smith 13:30
London, 1863 that was the world’s first subway. It was launched with a dual design.

Marcia Smith 13:36
Like two layers, two different levels of tracks?

Bob Smith 13:39
No.

Marcia Smith 13:40
Then what?

Bob Smith 13:41
The dual design is. Now, this is another example of something that was initially built to do something different than it does today. Okay? The world’s first subway wasn’t just built for commuters. It was built for cargo too. It was designed as a 24 hour system. By day, it carried passengers, and by night, it transformed into an overnight Express freight artery

Marcia Smith 14:02
Okay, that makes sense.

Bob Smith 14:03
Moved newspapers and mail and meat and produce beneath the sleeping city.

Marcia Smith 14:07
Great idea. What about if you had a night job and had to sit up next to a, you know, a slab of beef?

Bob Smith 14:15
This must have been one of the first times in history that people were working. Number One underground. Number two at night. You know, in mass, tons of people with big trains coming in, unloading things. I must have been so different, but that dual purpose was in the original prospectus to investors in 1860 now, when the New York subway opened in 1904 in New York City, that was just for commuters, because by that time we had trucks and cars and things on the surface, but not in 1863 London, no trucks. There just horses and buggies on the street. The subway had specialized underground freight depots located near or adjacent to the passenger stations where freight could be loaded, unloaded and sorted overnight. And the underground freight depots served as hubs where the newspapers and the mail and the parcels and the media. And the produce were all received and dispatched, and that system operated for almost a century underground in England. Were they

Marcia Smith 15:07
totally different cars, or were they they couldn’t have been the same cars that people would ride in.

Bob Smith 15:12
No, they were different locomotives that they used just at night, carrying things back and forth across the City of London. I think that’s fascinating.

Marcia Smith 15:19
It is okay, Bob, you’ve made me think about where in the world. Okay, so we’ll play that now. Okay, yeah. All right, I’m going to give you three clues to tell me where in the world this location is,

Bob Smith 15:30
and my objective is to get it on the first clue, if you can. All right, let’s try the

Marcia Smith 15:34
original route of the Orient Express ran from Paris to this city,

Bob Smith 15:40
Paris to Budapest, wrong? I’ll wait a minute. No, wait, no, no.

Marcia Smith 15:44
Clue number two, oh god, it’s home of the Grand Bazaar, one of the largest covered markets in the world.

Bob Smith 15:51
It was Constantinople, or what’s it called? Now, yes, that’s the name of the city, right?

Marcia Smith 15:57
Clue three is it was Constantinople at the time, yeah.

Bob Smith 16:01
So I got the answer. Well, I just can’t think of the name of the city now, Istanbul.

Marcia Smith 16:06
Okay, there we go. Yeah. And we were listening to Agatha Christie’s Orient Express the other night, and they were all on their way to Istanbul. That’s right, that’s true, or coming from Istanbul. Okay, here’s another one. Okay. Translated this city’s name means black pool.

Bob Smith 16:22
Black pool, yeah, so it’s not black pool, England, black pool. I don’t know what’s the answer.

Marcia Smith 16:29
Well, I’m giving you another Oops. Okay, okay, the River Liffey flows through the city center. Liffey is L, I, F, F, E, Y, I may be mispronouncing

Bob Smith 16:39
I don’t think I’m gonna get this one, although I think it’s Scandinavia, isn’t it? I’m giving you

Marcia Smith 16:43
one more clue. Just try to jump over these. Okay, might help you. The Guinness brewery is found in this city.

Bob Smith 16:50
Okay, so it’s in Ireland, and it is in Hmm, where is that? Okay, I give up on that one. Dublin. Dublin means black pool. Yeah, Dublin was actually founded by the Vikings, so that was a long time ago. Okay, so maybe to the Vikings, it meant black pool. I don’t know. Who knows?

Marcia Smith 17:07
Oh, who knows. But anyway, you got one out of two. Good for you. Carry on. Okay?

Bob Smith 17:12
Marcia, passage of time. This is one of those questions like, when did the last person who did this die? Okay, when did the last veteran of World War one die. Now, that was a long time ago World War One. World War One ended in 1918 when did the last veteran of World War one die? The last veteran? Yeah, this person had to be young at the time. Yeah, I think, okay. When did this last person die?

Marcia Smith 17:37
I’ll say this 80s,

Bob Smith 17:39
no, when 2012 Yeah, the last veteran of World War One. The veteran was Florence green. She served in Britain’s women’s Royal Air Force during the last two months of World War One. She was 17 at the time, and she was the last surviving World War One veteran when she died at the age of 110 in 2012 amazing.

Marcia Smith 18:05
Okay, Bob, only two people have ever received the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice. Hmm. Who are they?

Bob Smith 18:14
Is this a artist, meaning somebody in the arts could be nope, nope. Okay, not at all. So is it an inventor? No, no. No, is it a military person? One is, one is, gosh, there’s so many people. I was thinking about the guy who ran the Gulf War. There’s Colin Powell. There’s other people. Oh, really, yeah, Colin Powell, yeah. Won it twice. What did he win it twice?

Marcia Smith 18:35
Yes. Powell earned his awards in 1991 and 1993 he received the first from George H W Bush and the second from Bill Clinton. That’s nice, a Democrat and a Republican, okay, both of whom he served under as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Okay, gotcha. He had previously been Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor and later became Secretary of State for Bush, while presenting Powell with his first medal at the end of the Gulf War, the elder President Bush said, your commitment and good counsel, your deep compassion for every one of the 1000s of men women under your command will always be remembered. And the Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian award in America.

Bob Smith 19:19
So he received a civilian Medal for his civilian service after being in the military. Colin Powell, yeah.

Marcia Smith 19:26
Do you know who the other person was? No. Ellsworth bunker.

Bob Smith 19:30
Ellsworth bunker, yeah. Archie Bunker’s uncle,

Marcia Smith 19:33
Ellsworth bunker was a career diplomat who served six different US presidents as the ambassador to Argentina, Italy, India and South Vietnam. He received his honor in 63 and 1967 interesting.

Bob Smith 19:49
Now I do remember that name. I made the joke about him being Archie Bunker’s uncle, yeah, Ellsworth, all right, Marcia, I have a question for you. Okay, this is a government question. Why was. The Post Office ordered to pay $3.6 million for an artist’s work.

Marcia Smith 20:06
$3.6 million it was directed to do that,

Bob Smith 20:09
yes, by a court, really, yes, a court required it to pay $3.6 million to an artist. You know why this is a real big bungle?

Marcia Smith 20:19
Oh, because they put down something like Andy Warhol’s love thing on their stamp or something, and they did use an

Bob Smith 20:26
artist’s work on a stamp without getting approval. Well, here’s what happened. They erroneously published this artist’s work in 2010 the US Postal Service wanted to put an image of the Statue of Liberty on a stamp. How you think that would be easy to do, yeah, but take a picture of it, right? Or go to the government. It’s got pictures instead. Somehow, it mistakenly used a picture of a replica statue at the New York, New York Casino in Las Vegas. And when, when the artist discovered, Hey, that’s my work, a court ordered the agency to pay the replicas artists $3.5 million My God, for using his work.

Marcia Smith 21:04
Wow, he hit VEGAS JACKPOT, huh? I don’t

Bob Smith 21:08
know how that, how was, how did, how many steps did that have to go through? I can’t believe something wouldn’t go through some kind of a process where they would say, Well, where was this? Where did you get this?

Marcia Smith 21:16
Processes have gone by the wayside. Well, that was 2010

Bob Smith 21:21
I’m sure things are better now. Okay, go ahead, okay, Bob,

Marcia Smith 21:26
what was the invention factory?

Bob Smith 21:30
The invention factory that was Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory.

Marcia Smith 21:34
Very good. Thomas Edison’s greatest invention might have been the invention factory. He created the first modern industrial research laboratory. Did we

Bob Smith 21:44
go there? Yes, actually, they recreated it at Greenfield Village. It was

Marcia Smith 21:48
very cool. Yeah, yeah. And what about the one down in Florida? What was that we saw?

Bob Smith 21:52
That was the one he set up to try to synthesize

Marcia Smith 21:56
rubber while on vacation with Henry Ford. That’s what no with Firestone.

Bob Smith 22:01
Harvey Firestone, oh yeah. They live right next to each other, and actually in Greenfield Village in Michigan. Those are the actual buildings that Henry Ford had shipped from New Jersey to Michigan. And I think you can go to Menlo Park in New Jersey and see a replica of the facilities, but the actual buildings are in Michigan now.

Marcia Smith 22:20
Yep, he created the first modern industrial research laboratory to develop and improve many products. Edison himself invented the light bulb, the phonograph, the mimeograph, the dictaphone, and improved the telegraph, telephone and motion picture projector. He holds 1093 US patents and 1000s of other patents in other countries. It was great to put all these people and inventors in one big place and let them have at it. Yeah, brilliant.

Bob Smith 22:48
It is. Okay, Marcia, where can you find the world’s largest butterfly? And how big is it? Now, I’ll give you some clues here. Okay, sure, the Bronx Zoo, Vietnam jungles, Papua, New Guinea or the Ripley’s, believe it or not, museum, I will say New Guinea. That’s exactly right. Turns out that the world’s largest butterfly isn’t all that easy to find. You have to venture to the coastal rain forests there, and it’s the Queen Alexandra bird wing, also known as the bird wing butterfly was named for the King Edward, the seventh of England’s wife. The wingspan of those females can reach a foot wide. Good grief. Yeah. This is a butterfly that’s 50% larger than males and 11 inches wider than an average butterfly. Bird wing caterpillars feed on poisonous vines, making them toxic to predators. These are huge, huge butterflies I’d like

Marcia Smith 23:40
to see one, yeah, flying happily,

Bob Smith 23:43
comes up and slaps your face. My god,

Marcia Smith 23:46
okay, before my Quotes Of The Day, I’m gonna do, aka Okay, also known as great game that we like playing. Okay, today’s category, Bob ice cream flavors. Oh, okay, all right, you should ace this. Okay? The first clue, if I say plain, what’s the flavor?

Bob Smith 24:06
Plain, yeah, plain. Like vanilla, that’s it.

Marcia Smith 24:09
Okay, yeah, exactly like vanilla, Java, coffee, that’s it. Inexperienced, oolong, What?

Bob Smith 24:19
What? What is it? Again,

Marcia Smith 24:21
inexperience, inexperienced Oolong. What is it Oolong? You know what oolong is? Kind of beverage, oolong tea, oolong tea, I don’t know. Okay, this is green for inexperienced. You know, there’s a green tea ice cream. No, I didn’t, I didn’t either. So I didn’t get that one. Okay, okay, Oreos and ointment. Oreos and ointment. What’s the ice cream flavor?

Bob Smith 24:45
Oreos and ointment? Iodine

Marcia Smith 24:49
Oreos. What’s an Oreo? It’s a chocolate cookie. There you go. And ointment. I’m sorry I’m not getting that one. Cookies and cream. Oh. Yeah, it’s when you lie. Oh, dear. Okay, how about this? You should get this. Okay, Balboa Boulevard,

Bob Smith 25:07
Balboa Boulevard, Balboa Boulevard. I don’t know what’s

Marcia Smith 25:12
that one Rocky Road? Oh,

Bob Smith 25:15
really, why

Marcia Smith 25:16
would that be a rocky road? I don’t get it. Balboa. Rocky Balboa. Oh. Rocky, Bob, Bob, yeah.

Marcia Smith 25:25
Sorry, any excuse, right? Yeah, any excuse. Okay, here’s one. What flavor ice cream is this? Hey, Hallie, hey? Is spelled H, A, y, hey, Hallie.

Bob Smith 25:38
Hey, Hallie Berry, yeah, Halle, Berry, ice cream,

Marcia Smith 25:42
hay, H, A, y is also

Bob Smith 25:47
got me, I’m not good on these. Not

Marcia Smith 25:49
today. Strawberry. Oh, strawberry.

Bob Smith 25:53
All right, yeah, you’re really

Marcia Smith 25:55
failing big time. Sorry, I’m failing one more. Oh, margarine, whiskey

Bob Smith 26:01
margarine, whiskey butter, yes, butter, butter, whiskey butter, scotch butterscotch. Okay, gotcha Lead a Horse. Yeah, water’s over here, and the horse apparently isn’t thirsty enough. Okay, thank you, Marshall. That’s it for today, my miserable performance. I hope you join us again next time when

Marcia Smith 26:24
I haven’t done my quotes. Oh, sorry,

Bob Smith 26:27
I wanted to leave so bad with

Marcia Smith 26:29
your humiliation intact.

Bob Smith 26:31
All right, so I have quotes now. Do I have to guess who these are from? No, thank god. Okay.

Marcia Smith 26:38
James Berry said, always be a little kinder than necessary. Okay? Mark Twain said, kindness is the language which the Deaf can hear and the blind can see. That’s nice. Nothing snarky there. That’s interesting. And Sir Winston Churchill, we make living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.

Bob Smith 27:00
Well, those are all kind and benevolent. Yes, I need that now. I definitely needed that soft landing to get out of here. Okay, that’s all for today. We hope you join us next time when we return with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. I’m Bob Smith. I’m Marcia Smith, thanks for listening to us today on the off ramp. God help me. What was wrong with me today? That’s all right.

Bob Smith 27:31
The off ramp is produced in association with the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Visit us on the web at the off ramp. Dot show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai