Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Shriver, I'm sitting here with Anna Chazinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray,
and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
and in no particular order, here we go.
Starting with you, Chazinski.
My fact is that the first item to be sent via New York's pneumatic tube postal system was an artificial peach,
and the second was a live black cat.
An artificial peach, that's the interesting thing.
It was a huge oversized one as well.
It's quite a leap really,
because you would think you'd go from artificial peach to real peach to artificial cat to real cat,
but they just missed out a few steps.
Yeah, they got overconfident, but the cat did survive, bizarrely.
This story comes from the reminiscences of a postal worker called Howard Wallace Connolly.
He self-published an autobiography in 1931,
and he worked for the postal service where New York was building its pneumatic postal delivery system,
which is a system of pneumatic tubes underneath New York,
and so he recounted the big launch of this pneumatic tube, which was an exciting event,
so there's a guy demonstrating the pneumatic tube going, look how great this is.