This is the Technical Difficulties, we’re playing Citation Needed.
Joining me today, he reads books y'know, it’s Chris Joel.
Hullo!
Everybody’s favourite Gary Brannan, Gary Brannan.
I--
Let me get the line out, you b******s!
And standing in for Matt Gray, stand-up mathematician Matt Parker!
Always clear all before an important calculation.
In front of me I’ve got an article from Wikipedia and these folks can’t see it.
Every fact they get right is a point and a ding
and there's a special prize for particularly good answers which is...
And today we are talking about the Flip Flap Railway.
Ay, ah, hah!
- Hmm. Err. Erp. - Wow.
Is this... this is where the word “No”...
if we had an actual railway tunnel,
and there’s a big steam engine coming down the tunnel
with the word, “no” written on the front right now.
You’ll notice that sometimes I have my hand ready over the ding button here.
This is not one of those times.
Er, is it a pneumatic railway?
...in the south of England?
Am I right? Am I wrong? I'm wrong.
He’s wrong.
Both flipping and flapping are things railroads should not do.
Yes.
So this is some kind of disaster...
- No, it’s not a disaster. - Oh!
If you got on this railway expecting a normal ride, something has gone wrong.
Oh, so it’s like a metaphorical railway.
Whoa. I was going to go for, like, theme park or something, but I like that better.
And you’d have got the point. What might the Flip Flap Railway be?
Is it a roller coaster?
Yes, you’re absolutely right.
Is it one of those scenic railways, the 19th century ones where it would,
rather than like a normal rollercoaster now, you’ve got all the bits and bobs underneath exposed,
you’d put big panels on and paint an alpine scene.
So from a distance it would like you were riding a train up and down mountains
and there’s a guy at the back who acts as a brakeman to stop the train.
Gaaah!
The interesting thing about that is:
No.
Can I just say--
But you have successfully got several things later on that we were going to talk about,
without any questions. So, yes, absolutely.
What were those really early rollercoasters called? We’re talking 17th century here.
Pushing someone down a hill.
Yeah!
Yeah, they weren’t called that, but they were giant slides.
The first ones were just park benches going down a…
There’s one in France somewhere, where literally there was a park bench
and you kind of sat on it sideways and then it slid down a hill
and it was terrifyingly dangerous.
The thing is now when we hear the phrase, “a park bench”
we just think of Matt and Tom sliding sideways down a hill on a very poorly fixed one.
Yes, there was a gravity track in Paris in 1812.
- Gravity track! - Ohhhh...
And you said brakeman, this was before that.
Before someone thought of stopping the f***ing thing!
Are you stuck on them forever? Just falling and falling through eternity like Sisyphus
pushing the rock…!
Sorry, wrong meeting.
Er, no.
Well, f***!
What, it wasn’t falling through eternity for ever? Really?
I’m getting sick of his negative attitude this episode.
Push up a hill, drop back down the hill.
The very early ones were called Russian Mountains.
Oh, I just thought you meant some Russian mountains.
Well, this is what they originally were.
Russian sled rides on hills of ice that had been constructed.
So that’s where the name came from, and they would just...
So, up until the point someone went to Russia and saw a mountain that had ice on it,
nobody had had the idea of even sitting on a cart and riding down a steep hill?
Not specially constructing an ice hill 200 feet tall to slide down.
I’ll grant you, that would be difficult in Norfolk.
Then you started getting the scenic railways. Now, you talked about brakemen...
It’s done with a guy at the back who acts as a brakeman
and just puts the brakes on in the right place,
rather than any kind of retarding device that you might have on the wheels,
like you would now.
Oh, brilliant! So if he decides to let it all hang out you get a…
Well if it does that on that height, everyone’s seeing it, let’s face it.
The brakeman is the opposite of a hype-man.
So instead of someone going, “Yeah!” there’s a guy going, “I don’t know.”
“Go steady, or I could make this dead boring for you.”
You’re right, he is the fun-killer of the roller coaster world isn’t he?
“Not that! Too much fun. There we are…”
“No, everybody be calm.”
There is also something here in America that is an early rollercoaster
that is called the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway.
I both trust and utterly distrust that ride.
I’m just trying to imagine who thought the word “chunk” was a good word to put...
Well, that’s the name of the place where it was. This was a nine mile track.
Oh! I don’t know what it is, but we’re going.
- Smash cut right now. - Special!
Is it just some old railway?
It was one of the very first permanent railways in America.
Is it like that bit in Indiana Jones 2?
Go on, press it! Go on, I saw you go…
Yeah, I did, because this is 1827, so what didn’t they have for this railway?
Power!
Harrison Ford!
Just.
Lucasfilm special effects.
Chris gets the point. Yes, they didn’t have that. Obviously, gravity, they can get cars down,
how do they get the cars back up?
Gert big men shoving up.
Er, you’re close...
Whoever’s on the ride next.
You say ride. This, to start off with, was just genuinely a railway to move coal.
Oh, someone would have managed to sneak onto that.
Yes, you’re absolutely right.
When there was down-time people would just sneak onto it and ride the cars down,
but how do they get the cars back up?
I guess it’s not a loaded-car-pulls-down-an-empty-car scenario here?
No, no.
Levitation.
Hosses!
Yes! You’re absolutely right, mules.
But they would send down enough cars and then they would send down the mules...
- In the car? - In the car...
- In the car. - That's very good.
- They get a ride! - And in fact yes, have a point.
- Their little ears… - That’s probably not how they felt about it, Gary.
Yeah, but the first time they’re like “what the hell is all this”,
we all would be, but then they’d be like, “Fantastic.”
They’d be going down and their little ears'd be flapping in the wind, all like that…
I think you’ve chronically misunderstood what it is to be a mule, my friend.
And there’s a bloke halfway down doing a drawing of it
so they can buy it when they get to the bottom as a souvenir of the day.
There’s always the smart mule
who works out where the etching guy is so they can make a face.
I reckon people saw the mules come off going,
“they look pretty excited, I’m having a go on that”.
That is basically what happened.
I don’t think it was the mules there,
but it was people going “this is an exciting ride”.
“This is fun wasted on mules”, basically.
And then someone else went, well, we can charge for this
when there’s not enough coal to move.
Or mules to play with.
Or...
Steady.
Lonely country town, let's say...
That was basically the world’s first roller coaster.
Someone sat on the back of one of the mules as it goes down.
“This is f***ing awesome!”
That is Indiana Jones, just a century too early.
Nah, that’s Slim Pickens riding the bomb!
Dr Strangelove with a mule in the compartment.
Sadly that has now been dismantled.
There is a trail there you can walk down,
but I imagine that’s not the same.
Ironically a trail there you could ride a mule down,
which is worse for all concerned, isn’t it?
You could, or you could ride a mule down on a little wagon with some wheels.
Oh my God, yeah. ...Wagon Wheels?
They’re just going to go squishy.
They’d overheat and get flat spots!
Yes, they’re smaller than they used to be anyway.
You can’t trust a marshmallow bearing.
Can’t, no.
Just overheat and then you’d get decent speed.
Jam lubricant's all well and good up to 50mph, but once you go over that...
Yeah. You’re looking for a stout marmalade aren’t you?
Something fine-cut though.
Oh yeah, you don’t want the bits in it.
You can’t have a coarse shred, it'll get jammed.
Oh absolutely, absolutely.
Marmite is your breakfast lubricant of choice isn’t it?
Yes, but it burns up quickly.
It does and gives off quite the odour.
And woe betide the man who uses Branston!
For breakfast?
Matt, for God’s sake interrupt, you’ve been going like this for about two minutes.
Yeah, but I go, “okay, I think they’re finished”,
Oh no, there’s more. Yes. No, they’ve peaked now. No, they haven’t…
I was just going to say, but then I realised I was going to give actual advice, saying,
“use Maltesers as bearings” then went that’s just a practical….
Oh yes, yes, you could have a race couldn’t you? You could have a bearing race!
I’ve misunderstood this conversation, yes, yes, if you’re actually going to do it…
Yes, Maltesers in.
Chocolate finger, Maltesers…
What’s the outer race though?
Oh, that’s a good point.
Doughnut!
I’m just going to point out for anyone not in the UK that Wagon Wheels
are a type a big chocolate round biscuit, so...
- They look a bit like the wheel off a wagon. - They’re awful.
If your wagon were about yea-high.
No, they’re smaller than that.
Yea-high…
There we go.
So we had the Mauch Chunk Switchback, which is arguably the first rollercoaster…
For donkeys.
We had the Russian mountains which could also be early roller coasters, that sort of thing.
By the point that we had the Flip Flap Railway,
there was this idea that you might want to get in a car that careened down a hill.
What was the Flip Flap Railway adding to that?
Flapping.
Flipping.
It wasn’t an early attempt to do a loop-the-loop or something?
Spot on.
- Oh my god. - It was the first loop-the-loop in America.
And they got the shape wrong?
Yes!
Were they lured in by the easy appeal of a nice circle?
Yes, they were, would you like to tell us some more about this?
Oh, they didn’t think about having a nice, consistent amount of acceleration on their passengers.
And I bet they were either passing out or bleeding from the eyeballs by the time…
Or both! They’re not mutually exclusive.
Those poor donkeys.
You see I thought they’d go too slow and it’d get to the top
and they’d stop and all the donkeys would fall out.
Yes. That’s exactly where I was going next.
No, because the problem is, right, the amount pushing you out as you’re turning...
I’m going to be very careful here, or physics teachers will email me afterwards.
It depends on the rate at which you’re curving,
and so to stop people from falling out at the top,
because the curvature of a circle is pretty consistent,
by the time you get to the top you’ve got to be going bloody fast
to have enough force to keep you in your seat.
Or the mule.
So what you want to actually do is change the rate at which your loop is curving
to give you extra force where required.
And so you don’t have do it all with speed, you can do it with curvature instead.
Whereas they tried to do it all with speed and it didn’t end well.
Yes. They tried... I’ve already given you biscuits for that
but I feel like a round of applause is required for that thing.
No further biscuits will ever be issued. That wins them all, I think.
A circle is too big, so they use an ellipse to get you over the top very quickly.
How many Gs were they roughly pulling on this “centrifugal railway”, as it was called?
Anything above… where does it get painful? It must be over four...
I think modern roller coasters you can briefly pull about 5Gs. Which will...
So they were probably clipping seven or eight,
and that’s going to be very uncomfortable.
Yes, it actually pulled 12Gs.
Oh my God.
Yeah, that’s not good.
Not only is it a circular loop, it’s only a 25 foot circular loop.
That's...!
What were some of the issues with riding this?
Your hat would fly off and you would look ungentlemanly at the end.
Quite the opposite because if anything your hat is going to be quite stuck to your head.
Ah, no, it came off on the little hill down into it, didn’t it?
Er, no, discomfort and neck injuries from whiplash.
I wouldn’t put discomfort first in that list.
“Oh dear...”
Discomfort and now I’m like this, yes.
What did they test this with, by the way?
This is at Sea Lion Park at Coney Island, New York.
- Sea lions? - Sea lions!
No.
Seals!
Irons!
Okay, not donkeys, not people, not sea lions.
Sh... A. N. Other livestock?
Monkeys.
Of course, the monkeys.
Sandbags and monkeys were put down.
Sorry! Sandbag... sandbag... “shall we throw some monkeys in while we’re at it?”
“Ah, g'wan… they’ll enjoy it, the donkeys did.”
Sea Lion Park became Luna Park. Famous names and all that,
but the Flip Flap Railway was not retained, why not?
Was it killing people, perchance?
Because of its unpopularity and reputation, but I will give you the point.
It was not something you got on a second time.
For one reason or another.
No-one got to the end and went, “again!”, y'know?
But there is one last legendary theme park I want to talk about.
Is it Flamingo Land, in...?
No, it is Action Park in New Jersey.
Oh God, this is ringing bells and I have absolutely no idea why. Augh!
Why might it be legendary, for folks who were kids in the 1980s in New Jersey?
Because it killed a million, billion people in their wave pool or something?
It hurt a lot of people, certainly. I’ll give you the point for it.
So, hang on, wait. Your guess was it killed a million, billion people
and you’re like, close enough to “a few people got a bit injured”.
Yeah, like, we're...
The error bars are pretty big on this show, right?
The error bars are massive on this show.
Feel free to chuck some ideas in.
And the reason I mention this in particular,
to do with all the other things we’ve talked about,
is that they had the Cannonball Loop.
Uh oh.
Which is very similar to a few of the things we’ve talked about,
with one important difference.
In a summer park, in a theme park, what did they have that was a loop-the-loop?
They attempted a water-based loop-the-loop.
- Yes, they did. - Oh, s***.
It was at their water park.
How do you do that, isn’t the water just going to fall off at the top?
- Yes. - And be a shower?
The thing about water is, it follows the laws of physics.
Ah.
Yes, you are absolutely right. It was a looping waterslide.
Not the modern kind, there are a couple of modern looping water-slides,
they do an interesting kind of curve that technically takes you over.
This was...
Circle.
That would take off your clothes wouldn’t it?
No, the thing about clothes…
What, it’s really seductive as you go through the loop...
No, but I thought, is that what happens...
“I see you’ve come to join me in the loop.
“How 'bout we get you out of those wet things?”
It would certainly… having had a couple of waterslide incidents,
shall we say, moments of unpleasantness...
No, it doesn’t take your clothes off. Riders were weighed and hosed down with cold water.
What?
And then instructed how to position their bodies to complete the ride.
No. I’m already not getting on this.
You just wanted an excuse to pose, let’s be honest here.
It was a laugh.
But you get on top of the ride and someone,
before you even get on the ride, you’re at a water park.
You’re hoping, I assume, to drop into nice, warm, bath-like water at the end.
The last thing you want is some bloke with a hose pipe
with a little spray gun on the end going, “right, arms up.”
They sent some test dummies down first,
what were the reports on what happened to them?
They didn’t come down in one, is what I’m going to guess.
Yes, that’s absolutely right, they were dismembered on the way down.
And one unfortunate person at the top of the loop, what happened?
Their clothes fell off.
Trousers caught on a nail! Just hanging there in space getting showered on.
It was a closed loop. It was a closed tube.
Oh, they’re in a locked…
You know, this is the first one you’ve described
where I’m still thinking “I want a go on this”.
They got stuck at the top and they had to add a hatch at one point
to remove people who got stuck at the top
and didn’t want to go down the other side.
Yes, because you’re on this surface now,
and as you go down you’re going to have that sheer drop.
Yes, “shump, clunk, dunk”, carry on.
Yes, there had to be “extractions”, as it was put here, which is... not great.
So this person got physically stuck as in they were too large?
No, they just weren’t going fast enough.
Oh my god.
Employees were offered $100 to test it and I’m going to quote,
“100 bucks did not buy enough booze to drown out that memory.”
I’m with Matt, I want a go on this.
At the end of the show, congratulations Matt, you win this week.
Congratulations.
You win a brand new armoured fighting vehicle
that is actually an old fighting vehicle just rebooted to look modern.
It’s a JJ Abrams tank.
Ohhh.
So with that we say thank you to Chris Joel,
to Gary Brannan,
and to Matt Parker.
I’ve been Tom Scott and we’ll see you next time.