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The key source for this episode of Cautionary Tales is The Improbable Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and the First Woman to Run for President (2025) by Eden Collinsworth.

It also draws on the following articles, books and websites:

“The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case“, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, vol. 5, no. 7 (2nd November 1872)

“Notorious Victoria: the first woman to run for president” by Eileen Horne, The Guardian, (20th July 2016)
“Moral Pests“, The Dundee Courier (23rd November 1872) “Printing Newspapers 1400-1900: A Brief Survey of the Evolution of the of the Newspaper Printing Press” by Joanna Colclough, Headlines and Heroes: Newspapers, Comics and More Fine Print (21st April 2022)

“Designing Organisations for an Information-Rich World” by Herbert Simon, in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (1971)

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (2016)

www.measuringworth.com

Talented and beautiful, Molly O’Day is a rising star in 1920s Hollywood. But when Molly’s teenage body starts to change and she can no longer fit into the dress she wore when she was 16, the studio wants nothing to do with her. As the scripts dry up and the money runs out, Molly faces a difficult but painfully familiar choice.

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Books

Hollywood and the Rise of Physical Culture (2003) by Heather Addison.

Silent Stars Speak: Interviews with Twelve Cinema Pioneers (2000) by Tony Villecco.

Articles

“Los Angeles, a Miracle City: L.A. in the 1920s” by Danielle Ball, Los Angeles PublicLibrary (28th January 2026).

“Looking Like a Flapper Meant a Diet of Celery and Cigarettes” by Anne Ewbank, Atlas Obscura (20th April 2018).

“The Screen” by Mordaunt Hall, The New York Times (16th August 1927).

 “Cosmetic Surgery on Trial: How the Dujarier Case Impacted its Practice and Structure in France during the Interwar Period” by Yannick Le Hénaff , in Social History of Medicine, Vol. 0, No. 0 (2017), pp. 1-22.

“Molly O’Day; Actress in ‘Our Gang,’ Films” by Myrna Oliver, Los Angeles Times (21st October 1998).

“Starving Back To Stardom: The sad story of Molly O’Day whose career was blighted by ice cream and candy”” by Lois Shirley, Photoplay (August 1928).

“Obituary: Molly O’Day” by Tom Vallance, The Independent (28th October 1998).

“History’s weirdest fad diets” by Denise Winterman, BBC News Magazine (2nd January 2013).

“Easy Come, Easy Go in Movies; Sisters Now Are Bankrupt”, Alburquerque Journal (10th November 1930).

 “Molly has own ‘slogan’ as she plans comeback”, Mansfield News Journal (21st January 1937).

“The Patent Leather Kid”, New York Times (14th August 1927).
 “Surgeon Carved Off Mollie O’Day’s Fat — But It Came Back”, San Antonio Light, (20th January 1929).

 “Molly O’Day, the Girl in ‘The Patent Leather Kid’ to Play Thru Wednesday at the Kettler Theatre”, The Palm Beach Post (4th March 1928).

“Actresses Rushes to Relief of Mothers in New Association”, The News (13th January 1928).

“Wanted — An Irish Moniker”, The Record (18th April 1927).

“3 mos. for 25 lbs.”, Variety (October 1927).

“Sliced Hips And Legs Save Miss Molly O’Day”, Variety (5th September 1928).

“86th Street”, Variety (4th June 1930).

“Molly O’Day”, Variety (7th December 1998).

“Weight-Reducing Molly O’Day Is Losing Out”, Variety (December 1928).

Podcasts

“152: Hollywood’s First Weight Loss Surgery: Molly O’Day” by Megan Koester, You Must Remember This (21st January 2020).

Websites and Blogs
https://thebibliofile.substack.com/p/lux-soap-and-the-americanization

 https://immortalephemera.com/wampas-baby-stars/

For the story of Mary Linnen, the key source was Dispensing with the Truth: The Victims, the Drug Companies, and the Dramatic Story Behind the Battle Over Fen-Phen (2010) by Alicia Mundy. We also drew on several articles.

Articles

“The New Miracle Drug?” by Michael Lemonick, Time Magazine (23rd September 1996).

“How Fen-Phen, A Diet ‘Miracle’, Rose and Fell” by Gina Kolata, The New York Times (23rd September 1996).

“A Little Vanity, a Lot of Corporate Greed: a Killer Combo” by Judy Mann, The Washington Post (6th June 2001).

“Fen-Phen Case Lawyers Say They’ll Reject Wyeth Offer” by Stephanie Saul, The New York Times (17th February 2005).

“AHP Settles Suit Alleging Fen-Phen Death“, Los Angeles Times, (28th January 2000).

 “Diet drugs re-examined after woman’s death”, The Minnesota Daily (7th May 1997).

 “Fen/phen death suit settled”, United Press International (28th January 2000).

It must have been a spectacular sight, with the tallest mast standing almost 50 metres above the water, and the ornately carved stern of the ship towering above the waves as though some baroque cathedral organ had floated out into the Baltic.

None of this lasted for more than a few minutes. Vasa had drifted for about a mile when a gust of wind caught the ship from the side, pushing it into a pronounced lean — pronounced enough, in fact, that some of the gunports dipped below the waterline. The ship shuddered and then swiftly and inexorably sank to the bottom of the harbour, sailors desperately clinging to the masts as they protruded from the surface.

In any other circumstance, nearly 450 men would have drowned. Fortunately, the ship’s crew had not yet embarked, most of the sailors were on the upper decks, and there were plenty of boats nearby to stage a rescue. Nevertheless, about 40 people are thought to have died. The captain, Söfring Hansson, survived and was immediately arrested.

The waters of Stockholm’s harbour — cold, oxygen-starved and brackish — proved to be a safe resting place for the wreck, which was recovered 333 years after sinking. Today, Vasa is the breathtaking centrepiece of one of Stockholm’s most popular museums. Adolphus was out on campaign, and nobody in Stockholm was terribly keen to break the news to him, but eventually the entire privy council got together to send a collective report. Adolphus’s furious reply demanded to know who was responsible.

Even four centuries later, the sinking of Vasa is an instructive affair, although it is important to draw the right lessons. A 2001 paper in The Academy of Management Executive is titled “Vasa Syndrome: Insights from a 17th-Century New-Product Disaster”, and offers various gems — for example, that the shipwrights should have clarified the customer’s goals, which would have revealed a crucial but unstated preference for a ship that floats.

The first lesson I draw is to plan for failure, because in bold new projects it is common. That’s not just business-school pablum — the engineer Henry Petroski, in his book Success Through Failure, describes the tendency of bridge engineers “overconfidently building increasingly longer bridges modelled on successful prior designs”. There is a ratcheting tendency to try ever grander, more challenging structures, in bridges, boats and elsewhere. Correctives come in the form of rare but spectacular failures.

In the case of Vasa, the king demanded an unprecedented number of heavy guns, and the shipwright, Dutch-born Henrik Hybertsson, realised this would require a second gun deck. Hybertsson had never tried to build such a ship and in an excess of caution he over-reinforced the upper decks. The combination of massive guns supported by massive timbers on a high deck made the entire ship top-heavy. Hybertsson died early in the construction process and his deputy, Hein Jakobsson, stuck to the story that he had simply built the design approved by the king. Jakobsson had widened the ship by 17 inches, which presumably made it more stable, but claimed he had been constrained by what had already been agreed and built.

The inevitable inquiry examined a number of possibilities: was the captain drunk? Were the crew drunk? Were the cannons untied and rolling around? The final verdict was probably correct: the ship’s design was unstable from the start and Vasa was always likely to capsize. The late Henrik Hybertsson was to blame. Hybertsson could neither defend himself nor be punished. That state of affairs seemed to suit everyone.

A second lesson is not well known. The “Vasa Syndrome” paper doesn’t mention it, and the otherwise excellent guide at the Vasa museum hadn’t heard of it. But the museum’s head of research, Fred Hocker, notes that the wreck contained four carpenter’s rules, all slightly different lengths. With Dutch shipwrights carrying out a contract in Stockholm, perhaps it is not surprising to find that both the Amsterdam foot (11 Dutch inches) and the Swedish foot (12 Swedish inches) are represented. These feet are, respectively, 283 and 297mm. Probably as a result of this failure to standardise, Vasa was more asymmetric than most ships of the day, giving it a tendency to lean to port — as it did on the day it sank. This can’t have helped. And while it would be hard to imagine a project today failing because nobody could agree how many inches were in a foot, there is no shortage of cases in which apparently trivial technical details were taken for granted.

The third lesson — and to my mind the most tragic — is that disaster could easily have been prevented. The people who decided to set sail knew that Vasa was unstable. A few days before departure, Captain Söfring Hansson arranged a demonstration for his boss, Vice-Admiral Fleming: 30 sailors ran back and forth on the top deck to get the ship rolling. This was a traditional test and the sailors would typically shuttle across more than a dozen times, but the ship rolled so alarmingly that Fleming called off the test after three, muttering that he wished the king were at home.

Had Gustavus Adolphus been in town, the demonstration could have been repeated for his benefit. The ship could have been modified; even with a single deck it would have been formidable, or the upper deck could have been equipped with fewer or lighter cannon. But the king was — as usual — away on campaign, sending letters demanding that Vasa set sail as soon as possible.

Vasa did not sink because the management team failed to clarify that the customer preferred it to float. It sank because basic technical details — such as everyone using the same ruler — were overlooked. It sank because it was a dangerously innovative design, made worse by a shipwright’s attempt to play safe. And above all it sank because Vice-Admiral Fleming decided that, rather than tell the king of his last-minute concerns, he would rather go ahead and hope for the best. From Washington DC to Downing Street, Wall Street to Silicon Valley, it is a lesson that remains uncomfortably relevant.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 July 2026.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Mary Bateman lived in York in the late 18th Century, an age that prized rational thought. Many people still longed to believe in the old ways and Bateman used this to her advantage, selling spells and enchantments to the desperate. Maddy Pelling, co-host of the After Dark podcast and author of Hoax: Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment, joins Tim to tell the tale of the villainous Yorkshire Witch, and just how far she was willing to go.

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The Herald of Free Enterprise is a new class of ferry that allows cars to drive directly into the ship. The doors protecting the ship must be closed before every departure, or the ship sails with a gaping hole at one end. One black night in 1987, on the freezing waters off Zebrugge, Belgium, a single crew member falls asleep at the worst possible time.

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Further Reading

Iain Yardley’s book, Ninety Seconds at Zeebrugge: The Herald of Free Enterprise Story, brings together accounts form survivors. This script also relied on reporting from outlets such as The Times, the BBC, The Independent, Evening Chronicle, UPI, and Kent Online.

Mr Justice Sheen’s report is available online as MV Herald of Free Enterprise Report of Court No. 8074 Formal Investigation. The Herald’s link to James Reason’s thinking is outlined in Good and bad reasons: The Swiss cheese model and its critics by Justin Larouzee and Jean-Christophe Le Coze.

Peter Spooner reflects on the Herald disaster in “Corporate responsibility in an age of deregulation”, Chapter 8 of Hazard Management and Emergency Planning, published by Routledge in 1992. For more on the corporate law reform, see an overview from The Law Commission in 1996, Corporate manslaughter and the company director by Simon Daniels, and The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 – A 10-Year Review by Victoria Roper. 

In February 1912, on a cold Sunday morning, Reichelt persuaded journalists, a camera crew and a small crowd to watch him demonstrate his new wearable parachute. The official story was that Reichelt would throw a dummy from the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, more than 50 metres up. Reichelt, however, had tipped off journalists that he would make the jump himself. Otherwise, one suspects, there would have been fewer spectators.

The parachute is, as it happens, something of a running joke in evidence-based policymaking. In the Christmas 2003 edition of the British Medical Journal, obstetrician Gordon CS Smith and public health researcher Jill Pell published a systematic review of “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge”. They noted, with mock sorrow, that “we were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention” and called for “the most radical protagonists of evidence-based medicine” to organise and participate in a rigorous randomised trial of the parachute.

In case the joke has passed you by, the argument being lampooned is a complaint by advocates of evidence-based policymaking. Many well-established medical practices — along with ideas in policing, criminal justice, education, economics and beyond — have never been seriously tested by the gold standard for evidence: a double-blind, randomised controlled trial (RCT). RCT advocates suggest that this is a scandal. Is it?

Leave that question hanging for a moment, because 15 years later — again in the BMJ Christmas issue — a team of researchers detonated an evidential bombshell. They had run the long-missing randomised trial of the parachute — and found that parachutes were no better at preventing major injury or death than an empty backpack. Anyone surprised at this result need only consult the small print: nobody in the trial had suffered any noteworthy injury at all after jumping from an aircraft, and this is because they did so “at significantly lower altitude . . . and lower velocity”. To be more specific, they jumped out of “small stationary aircraft on the ground”. Another hilarious satire from the BMJ.

There are serious lessons here, for those who can stop sniggering. The first is that, yes, there is no need for a RCT of a technology — such as the parachute — whose benefits are indisputable. The second is that RCTs themselves do not necessarily prove anything: the researchers suggest “cautious extrapolation to high-altitude jumps”.

It is striking how incautious extrapolation can be, particularly in press releases and breathless media summaries. A small study of nursery school children drawing pictures is generalised to be a fully fledged theory of human motivation. Big claims about the benefits or risks of a food additive teeter on the questionable foundation of research on laboratory mice.

Randomisation is neither the only route to knowledge nor a guarantee of eternal truth. But it is a very good idea — which may help to explain why there have been serious randomised trials, even of parachutes. As Andrew Leigh explains in Randomistas (2018), “experiments on parachute efficacy and safety are widespread”. Some of them use crash dummies, while others investigate details of technique or equipment: paratroopers are six times more likely to suffer an ankle sprain if they jump without an ankle brace. So there.

One important reason to use some form of randomisation is that it strips away all kinds of potential confounding. Do small class sizes help students to thrive? You won’t find that out by simply comparing an overcrowded, cash-strapped inner-city academy with a lavishly funded public school: their class sizes may differ, but so does everything else. If you want to learn about learning, run a randomised experiment.

The second reason, still under-appreciated, is that experts know less than they like to think. Doctors embraced bloodletting for 2,000 years before belatedly acknowledging that it is rarely an appropriate treatment. (The Lancet is named after a bloodletting tool.) More recently, as Helen Pearson notes in Beyond Belief (2026), “In 1980s Britain . . . it was standard practice to shave pregnant women’s pubic hair when they were admitted to hospital and to give them enemas.” Episiotomies, too — cuts in the opening of the vagina — were “pretty routine”. None of this was evidence-based. It just seemed to doctors that it would be a jolly good idea.

In the summer of 2020, when the Recovery trial revealed that a cheap steroid, dexamethasone, was hugely beneficial to Covid-19 patients undergoing mechanical ventilation, one doctor told me that this so-called discovery was simple common sense. But Sir Martin Landray, one of the leaders of the trial, recalls the letters that experts had sent to him and to the regulators warning that dexamethasone — which suppresses the immune system — was so dangerous to Covid patients that it was unethical even to test it. When some experts think it’s a parachute, and others think it’s bloodletting, it’s a good idea to run the trial.

What happens when you need a decision urgently, and gold-standard evidence does not exist? One approach is to do what Landray and his colleagues did: move fast. By introducing a simple clinical trial alongside routine care, they were able to get the trial running within 10 days and produce life-saving results within 100.

But what if there is no trial, and no prospect of one? Then, argues Pearson, we need “aluminium standard” evidence. Be as clear as possible about your hypothesis, break it down into a chain of causal links, and get the best data you can — for and against — to test each link in the chain. Gold is better, but aluminium is cheap and lightweight and sometimes sufficient for the job.

Franz Reichelt was a better publicist than parachute designer. His leap from the Eiffel Tower was captured for the ages on Pathé-Journal newsreel. I would advise against watching it. He died of a shattered skull and spine, and — perhaps — of a coronary arrest mid-fall. Wikipedia simply lists his cause of death as “parachute failure”. The self-belief of a pioneer is a powerful thing. Normally, when the experts propose untested solutions, they are not the ones who suffer the consequences.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 24 June 2026.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

Windscale is supposed to be Britain’s big leap into the nuclear Age, bringing science fiction to life in 1950s Northern England. But in the race to catch up with America’s nuclear program, scientists are tinkering with forces they don’t fully understand. When the reactor catches fire, no-one knows how bad it could be, or how to put it out. As the reactor workers scramble to save lives, other eyes on Windscale are much more concerned with containing the political fallout and burying the truth.

This episode was first released to members of the Cautionary Club. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, our monthly newsletter and behind-the-scenes conversations with members of the Cautionary Tales production team, consider joining the Cautionary Club.

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Further Reading

This script relied on two books by Lorna Arnold – Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident, and her autobiography, My Short Century. The BBC’s 2007 documentary, Windscale – Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Disaster, can be found on YouTube. In the same year, Richard Wakeford published The Windscale reactor accident—50 years on in the Journal of Radiological Protection. Bill Penney is remembered in obituaries by The Royal Society and New Scientist.  

In 1717, Lombe brought them back to Derby in England and there, by the fast-flowing Derwent, he and his half-brother, Thomas, built the first large factory in the world. Lombe himself did not live to enjoy the fruits of his entrepreneurship: he died suddenly at the age of 29. Rumour has it that the Piedmontese sent an “artful woman” to the English Midlands to assassinate him.

Whether or not that is true, the protection of trade secrets has long been a game with high stakes. The Venetian island of Murano is famous for its glass and, given its location at a slight remove from La Serenissima, it is sometimes described as the first industrial park. One explanation for the wholesale removal of glassmaking from Venice to Murano in 1291 is it reduced the risk that the furnaces would start a fire, but it may also have been to exert more control over the secrets of glassmaking. Glass masters of Murano had many of the privileges of Venetian nobility, but were not allowed to leave Venice without permission, and to share the secrets of Murano glass with a foreign power would be to invite the death penalty. Needless to say, the secrets did not last for ever. France’s minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was among those who enticed Venetian masters to share them, and by the late 1600s the best French glass was thought to rival that of Venice.

The death penalty no longer applies to those who reveal trade secrets. They may, however, come to wish they were dead. In one notorious case in 1962, a chemical engineer named Donald Wohlgemuth announced his intention to quit the BF Goodrich Company to accept a job at a competitor, the International Latex Corporation. In another, bakery executive Chris Botticella resigned from Grupo Bimbo in 2010 to join Hostess Brands. In both cases, the jilted employers sued, alleging the likelihood that trade secrets would be revealed, causing irreparable harm.

The trade secrets in question? For Goodrich, some of the more arcane techniques involved in making spacesuits for Nasa. For Bimbo, various confidential documents were alleged to be involved, but the spotlight fell on the baking process necessary to produce the celebrated “nooks and crannies” of their brand Thomas’ English Muffins.

After a gruelling legal process, Wohlgemuth eventually started work at Latex. Just because he had the opportunity to spill trade secrets, after all, does not mean that he would do so. The vivid parallel cited in the case was that an employee with secrets was like a dog with teeth — there can be no presumption that the dog is dangerous until it uses them. Every dog has one free bite.

But if Wohlgemuth was chastened, Botticella was distraught. Faced with the prospect of drawn-out legal hearings, Hostess Brands told The New York Times “we have to move on” and withdrew the offer. Botticella lost both jobs — and the prospect of employment elsewhere in the industry — and he later told the Revisionist History podcast, “You will never understand the impact that this had on my personal and professional life.”

It could have been even worse. In 2016 the engineer Anthony Levandowski left Waymo (Google’s self-driving car unit, which he helped to create) to set up a self-driving start-up. It was swiftly acquired by Uber, and soon after Levandowski was accused of stealing Waymo’s trade secrets. Levandowski was given an 18-month prison sentence. Uber agreed to pay a settlement worth almost a quarter of a billion dollars.

These cases have more nooks and crannies than a Thomas’ English Muffin. Did Goodrich really have such a technological lead in spacesuit design? Did Grupo Bimbo actually have a superior product, or were they killing two birds with one stone by making it hard for their employees to join a competitor while burnishing their questionable claims to have something special? (I have never sampled a Thomas’ English Muffin but strongly suspect that no matter how pleasant it may be when toasted and well-buttered, no mass-produced bread is likely to be unique.)

Not that trade secrets are meaningless. One recent study by Albrecht Glitz and Erik Meyersson looked at cold war industrial espionage in the 1970s and 1980s. Glitz and Meyersson concluded that East German informants managed to divulge enough useful information to bring East Germany’s productivity measurably closer to that of West Germany. Tellingly, these efforts were most successful in East German sectors that were already performing tolerably well. (Had Chris Botticella taken the secrets of the ideal muffin to Uber, and Levandowski brought lidar plans to Hostess Brands, it seems likely that the ideas would have fallen on barren ground.)

The spilling of trade secrets, then, will sometimes meaningfully harm the company which loses the secret, and benefit the competitors that acquire it. But as always with intellectual property, there is a balance: too little protection for ideas, and nobody will invest in the know-how to build a self-driving car or bake a perfect muffin; too much protection is a recipe for monopoly power and stifled creativity.

There is a good case for protecting expensive ideas — such as the design of a plane or the formula of a pharmaceutical compound — for a limited period. But that should not be allowed to be an excuse for effectively shackling employees. And whatever the legal merits of the Botticella case, it is hard to see a public policy justification for defending a muffin recipe that Grupo Bimbo boasts is 146 years old.

Fortunately, most trade secrets don’t last. A 1985 study by the economist Edwin Mansfield surveyed 100 US firms, asking how quickly competitors tended to find out detailed information about confidential new products and processes. The answer, Mansfield found, was about a year for products, and about 15 months for more detailed process information. Some secrets — particularly in chemistry and glassmaking — lasted longer, but in general secrets leaked quickly.

Is that a problem? If the technology itself is harmful, perhaps. But from silk to spacesuits to self-driving cars, we should presume that workers will travel, and that even if they cannot copy blueprints or the details of algorithms, they can be expected to take good ideas with them. Silicon Valley itself was built on such movement. The world is generally better off if good ideas do not take too long to spread.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 17 June 2026.

Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.

This episode is available exclusively to members of the Cautionary Club.

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Further Reading

The main sources for this show were Delta Force by Colonel Charles A Beckwith and Donald Knox; The Perfect Colleague? Multidimensional Perfectionism and Indicators of Social Disconnection in the Workplace by Emily Kleszewski and Kathleen Otto; and the research of my friend David Bodanis.

If you tuned in to late-night WOR radio in 1950s New York, you’d enter the secret world of Jean Shepherd. Shepherd’s nonconformist style, off-beat humour and love of pranks gathered a small but loyal following. These “Night People” loved being in on the joke, while the oblivious “Day People” were often the butt of it. Shepherd’s show is long gone, but his spirit lives on in corners of the internet. Today, though, Night People go by a different name.

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Further Reading

This episode relied on Eugene Bergmann’s biography Excelsior! You Fathead: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd, the fan website FlickLives.com, and Matthew Callan’s article in The Awl, The Man Behind The Brilliant Media Hoax Of “I, Libertine”.

Whitney Phillips’ book on 4chan is This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.While the book “I, Libertine” may be a disappointment, a truly explicit and salacious account of sex in the 18th century can be found here.