Welcome back to episode 7 of “Giants Helped Me Do It”, the podcast covering the innovations and inventions of the past from cultures all aorund the world.
This time around, we are looking at what one might call the more interesting “dead ends” of history, that of Pykrete, an odd material that was proposed as an alternative to steel during WWII as the resource became difficult to source. All sorts of materials were experimented with, but pykrete was a real “out of the box” idea, comprised of ice and wood pulp. Odd at first, yet there were some solid reasons why this wasn’t simply scrapped as a crazy mans pipe dream. Learn more about it here in this episode! Below you can find a basic example of what the ship with Pykrete would have looked like, if it had gone ahead.
And now to you! What epic secret coded moments from history did I leave out? What is your favourite story about encryption from the past? Let me know in the comments below!
Sources
Ramaseshan, S. Max Perutz (1914–2002). März 2002. dspace.rri.res.in:8080, http://dspace.rri.res.in:8080/jspui/handle/2289/728.
Ice boat sinks at sea. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8034721/Ice-boat-sinks-at-sea.html. Accessed 23. Juli 2021.
Perutz, M. F. „A Description of the Iceberg Aircraft Carrier and the Bearing of the Mechanical Properties of Frozen Wood Pulp Upon Some Problems of Glacier Flow“. Journal of Glaciology, Bd. 1, Nr. 3, ed 1948, S. 95–104. Cambridge University Press, doi:10.3189/S0022143000007796.
Habbakuk: The Iceberg Aircraft Carrier | Online Information Bank | Research Collections | Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/info_sheets_Habbakkuk.html. Accessed 23. Juli 2021.
Collins, Paul. The Floating Island | Paul Collins. https://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7/collins.php. Accessed 23. Juli 2021.
Music credit:
"Return of the Mummy" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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