Literal Earworms

[00:00] Luckily, we have not only a sub-segment, a long-running segment of this show,
[00:05] but actually has been spun off into its own podcast,
[00:10] The Undo Googables,
[00:12] where we put our brains together
[00:15] to solve problems or answer questions
[00:19] in a way that is better and more true than what Google can give you.
[00:24] That's exactly right. Well done, sir.
[00:27] Thanks.
[00:39] Can we do an Undo Googables?
[00:41] That was the play of it.
[00:43] Super excited.
[00:44] You told us we had to, sir.
[00:46] You said we signed up for it.
[00:51] In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give you.
[00:55] What can we answer for you this week?
[00:57] Well, I do want to remind Pacer Nation to go ahead and subscribe to the Undo Googables feed,
[01:07] because I know you think, oh, well, I've listened to every Undo Beatable episode,
[01:11] so I've heard all of them.
[01:13] That is not true.
[01:14] We're doing novel episodes of The Undo Googables over there,
[01:17] and I'd say probably 15 out of the last 30 have been brand new material,
[01:24] so it's worth checking out.
[01:25] So go ahead and sign up for that.
[01:28] I got a good one here.
[01:29] It seemed kind of appropriate for the week,
[01:32] but also I'm not sure what to do with it.
[01:36] The phrase, down the tubes,
[01:39] why are things down tubes and not pipes or drains or holes?
[01:45] Yeah.
[01:47] That's interesting.
[01:49] Because if I actually thought about something going down the tube,
[01:52] it would be something that I didn't want.
[01:54] But the phrase itself suggests that, yeah, things have taken a poor turn on you.
[02:01] Yeah.
[02:02] Which maybe doesn't suggest indoor plumbing.
[02:07] Right.
[02:08] Also, you wouldn't call.
[02:09] Because in that case, things going down the tubes is a good thing.
[02:12] Aces.
[02:13] Things not going down the tubes would be bad.
[02:17] Things are going down the tubes.
[02:19] And the only thing I could think of off the top of my head
[02:22] was the tubes in your ears.
[02:26] What if something's getting lost in the tube in your ear, that'd be bad.
[02:30] Like if there's a bug going down the tubes, that's uncomfortable.
[02:35] Like in Star Trek II or whatever.
[02:39] Yeah, that's right.
[02:41] The little scorpions in their ears.
[02:44] Yeah.
[02:46] What other type of tubes are there?
[02:48] Well, what about those old pneumatic zippy vacuum tubes?
[02:53] Oh, vacuum tubes.
[02:55] Yeah, like at the bank.
[02:57] Yeah.
[02:58] Things going down the tubes.
[03:00] Things are going down the tubes.
[03:01] That's bad.
[03:03] Yeah.
[03:04] I learned something interesting recently.
[03:06] It used to be that they didn't have cash registers
[03:13] on the floor of retail stores.
[03:16] Like Macy's and that or something akin to that.
[03:20] They would be in a room upstairs.
[03:22] They would zip a receipt up and deal with the money that way.
[03:26] I don't know if this was like, so all the money was not there.
[03:31] They couldn't get held up.
[03:32] I'm not even quite sure.
[03:33] Or maybe the cash machines were just so huge.
[03:36] I don't know.
[03:38] That's great.
[03:39] I mean, it seems slightly inefficient,
[03:41] but you're not getting robbed.
[03:43] But there's vacuum tubes, man.
[03:45] It's the future.
[03:46] It's the future.
[03:49] Well, OK, there's vacuum tubes and TVs, right?
[03:54] Once upon a time.
[03:56] Right, not anymore.
[03:58] But I'm thinking, could there be
[04:00] something be go down that tube?
[04:03] Because we're actually.
[04:04] Were those vacuum tubes or a cathode ray?
[04:08] No, there were.
[04:08] Yeah, there were vacuum tubes, I think, at some point.
[04:13] Not that I know what the heck that
[04:15] how that is different from a cathode ray tube.
[04:17] But yes, they did exist.
[04:23] I mean, to me, there's always this phrase always
[04:27] was connotated with the toilet, like things
[04:30] going down the toilet.
[04:32] And though I understand your perspective,
[04:36] Harper, that things going down the toilet is a good thing.
[04:39] Indoor plumbing is an advanced fit.
[04:42] I don't want to go back from it, right?
[04:47] But the connotation of things going down the toilet
[04:50] is or into the toilet you're going in.
[04:55] Yeah, that's the thing, like this thing's going to crap.
[04:59] But it's not this thing's gone in the toilet.
[05:03] Is that a phrase?
[05:04] But it's like the next step.
[05:05] It's gone in the toilet and it's down the tubes.
[05:08] And the toilet is definitely a phrase.
[05:10] OK, or in the toilet, in the crapper.
[05:13] OK, right.
[05:14] Everything's gone to crap.
[05:15] Everything's in the crapper.
[05:16] OK, so and why they why they chose the term tubes versus pipes
[05:21] versus whatever.
[05:22] Well, that's the thing, because I've always mentally thought
[05:26] of it as a drain, you know, for whatever reason.
[05:29] Just like, yeah, it's gone down the drain.
[05:32] But why is that?
[05:36] Yeah, down the drain is another phrase that is akin, right?
[05:43] Yeah, there's lots of different permutations of this.
[05:45] So maybe it is just an indoor plumbing thing.
[05:47] It's just plumbing.
[05:48] It's just, yeah, just flexible.
[05:51] Gotten rid of the thing.
[05:54] You've got to dump out what the milk has gone bad.
[05:57] So you got to dump it out in the sink.
[05:58] And it's down the tubes.
[06:00] Things have gone down the tubes.
[06:02] But yeah, but it's negative.
[06:04] OK, all right, I'm willing to accept
[06:06] that it's just a we've flushed it
[06:11] or we've rinsed it down the sink or something.
[06:15] But when did this come about then?
[06:18] Were we calling pipes tubes because we
[06:21] had some sort of rubber tubing in houses
[06:24] before we had pipes?
[06:25] That's a good question.
[06:26] I mean, I feel like we had maybe more recently
[06:29] had flexible pipes.
[06:32] Indoor plumbing, when are we getting indoor plumbing?
[06:34] That's like mid 19th century or something?
[06:40] I mean, on some level, the first public sewer systems
[06:43] were in like Samaria or something, right?
[06:46] OK, sure.
[06:48] Technically not indoor plumbing, but there
[06:50] was a mass sewer system at that point, right?
[06:53] So I mean, you could kind of peg anywhere you want.
[06:57] Aqueducts in Rome.
[06:59] Well, I'm thinking, OK, so people
[07:00] were using outhouses on a regular basis,
[07:03] like up until the 1850s.
[07:08] Oh, I would say later.
[07:09] Later than that, I mean, the first indoor toilet
[07:13] would have been in America, would have been 1860s,
[07:18] probably.
[07:20] And that's not even that's just the beginning of it.
[07:23] It's not like every house has a toilet at that point.
[07:26] When are we running water lines into houses?
[07:28] I guess that's a similar question.
[07:32] That's like around the same time, I guess.
[07:38] People are building those big, what do you call those things,
[07:42] that every town has like a water tower.
[07:47] And then doing gravity flow into people's houses.
[07:51] So I mean, I guess my suspicion is,
[07:53] I do think that just from a purely semantic perspective,
[07:56] tube definitely implies something not metal somehow.
[08:01] I don't know why in my brain it does that.
[08:03] It feels rubbery.
[08:04] That makes sense to me.
[08:05] But like PVC piping, we're probably
[08:08] talking closer to a reward.
[08:09] Tube does seem much more modern of a term than pipe.
[08:15] So what do you think, so maybe this
[08:17] is like a 60s term, 70s term, 80s term?
[08:22] Like when do we think is that recent?
[08:24] Is this like a space age thing?
[08:26] Like, are they?
[08:30] I do like the, I don't know.
[08:32] What, yeah, what's the, I like the,
[08:34] since we do the vacuum tube thing with the money,
[08:37] weren't there a lot of, like the Jetsons,
[08:39] weren't they using like things like that
[08:41] where they put it in a tube and it went
[08:43] all over the place and, I don't know.
[08:46] I feel like the Jetsons had a bunch of tubes
[08:48] they sent stuff in.
[08:50] Probably.
[08:53] I don't think it came from the Jetsons.
[08:56] I'm just, I'm trying.
[09:00] If it really came from the Jetsons,
[09:02] I have this like suspicion that this phrase
[09:06] is part of a, you know, a series of phrases, right,
[09:11] that probably goes back a long, long way, right?
[09:14] So it's, yeah, so it's an extension of down the,
[09:20] down the crapper, down the drain pipe, down the pool.
[09:23] Down the drain, yeah.
[09:25] Wasn't the guy who invented the toilet named John Crapper?
[09:30] That sounds like a familiar fact,
[09:32] but I don't know if that's like urban legend, but.
[09:36] Well, we'll sub Google that.
[09:38] Yeah, we'll sub Google that.
[09:39] Okay, so we're saying, we're saying down the tubes
[09:43] is an extension of idioms
[09:50] I guess it's not an idiom, but of down the drain,
[09:54] down the crapper.
[09:56] And it just got sort of morphed to tubes.
[09:59] But it came about later because tubes replaced pipes
[10:06] at some point.
[10:06] We started using PVC.
[10:08] I mean, PVC pipe.
[10:12] So, and I'm saying that the flushable toilets
[10:15] in the United States is 1850s, 1860s.
[10:20] But the phrase came out in the 1950s.
[10:23] I'm pretty sure we had indoor plumbing
[10:25] before that in the United States, but.
[10:29] I don't know, flushable?
[10:30] We had, I don't know.
[10:32] All right, well, we'll find out.
[10:33] All right, let's do it.
[10:35] Thomas Crapper was an English businessman and plumber,
[10:41] sanitary company, so he died in 1910.
[10:46] Born in 1836.
[10:53] Freezes.org.uk, which we've been to many a time
[10:57] on the end of Google's.
[11:00] A strong candidate must be the soil pipes
[11:03] which are connected to laboratories.
[11:06] Phrase is a variant of down the drain
[11:08] and is the American equivalent
[11:10] of the British down the pan.
[11:12] Down the pan.
[11:13] Well, the earliest citations come from US sports reports,
[11:17] notably baseball.
[11:20] The earliest reference to it that I have found
[11:23] is in the Charleston Daily Mail, May, 1954,
[11:27] in an interview with the world record-breaking
[11:31] Perry O'Brien talking about his reaction
[11:33] to an earlier collegiate record of his
[11:36] being broken by Don Vick.
[11:38] Yes, that gave me another incentive.
[11:40] I was proud of that record.
[11:43] Then I had visions of all my records going down the tubes.
[11:49] It says the flush toilet, 1890, that seems too late.
[11:58] Well, so there's certainly a difference
[12:00] between flush toilets and indoor plumbing, right?
[12:03] So indoor plumbing was around for rich people
[12:08] in the early 1800s, probably before.
[12:11] So 1829, Isaiah Rogers built eight water closets
[12:17] in the Tremont Hotel of Boston,
[12:19] which made it the first hotel to have indoor plumbing.
[12:22] And in 1833, the White House became equipped
[12:25] with running water on the main floor.
[12:27] Nice.
[12:31] And yeah, it looks like the poor flush system
[12:37] was around before the, long before the flush toilet.
[12:41] I mean, essentially, it's just dinner.
[12:43] You pour a bucket of water in there, right?
[12:45] Right, and it goes down the drain, right?
[12:47] Goes down the drain.
[12:49] Down's the tubes.
[12:51] Down's the tubes.
[12:51] Down the pan.
[12:52] Down the pan.
[12:56] Well, there you go.
[12:57] Yeah, I mean, that's basically what I can see.
[13:00] We nailed it.
[13:02] The William Elvis Sloan invented the Flush-O-Meter in 1906,
[13:08] which used pressurized water directly to the supply line
[13:11] for faster recycling time between flushes.
[13:14] The Flush-O-Meter is still in use today
[13:16] in public restrooms worldwide.
[13:19] Flush-O-Meter.
[13:22] Flush-O-Meter?
[13:23] Flush-O-Meter, probably.
[13:26] When was it, man?
[13:27] I'm pretty sure it was Flush-O-Meter.
[13:33] Nicely done, team.
[13:36] Good for Thanksgiving, a bunch of toilet talk.