#106 Games (Part 1)

Oh What A Time...

CBW Productions | Wondery

Comedy, History, Education

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Come with us, as we roll the dice and shoot a podcasting bullseye as today we’re discussing: games. We’ve got a brief history of chess, the game of life (as in, the board game) and.. the word gams dvlopd by a collction of Frnch xperimental writrs in tha 60s.

And why on earth did we as a civilisation take so long to get round to inventing the bicycle? And why were the bicycle prototypes so bad? And has anyone else ever been to the Segway Olympics? Questions we’re desperate for you to answer, which you can do at: [email protected]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What a Time early and ad-free.
0:04.9	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:19.9	Hello and welcome to Oh, What a Time, the history podcast where we contemplate things like this.
0:26.8	This fact that Ellis has inspired me with his cycling and I've refurbished my bicycle, started cycling my son.
0:33.7	Yes!
0:34.8	To nursery, morning and evening, my quads getting. To nursery. Morning. What's a sport.
0:37.8	And evening.
0:39.1	My quads getting thicker every day.
0:42.1	And I can't help but think.
0:43.9	It took us a while to get round to the bicycle, didn't it?
0:46.4	Yeah.
0:46.9	It kind of blows my mind that the ancient Greeks didn't have a bicycle.
0:50.9	Yes.
0:51.7	And also, the tricycle makes so much more sense. Like, when they made the bicycle,
0:58.4	they probably, did they start off for stabilisers? And then someone would have said, I reckon with
1:03.4	enough practice, we only need two wheels. Feels quite counterintuitive. No, no, no, no, no, no. Enough
1:09.1	practice and enough falling off. And then when we get
1:11.0	there, it will, trust me, it'll be worth it. It's also funny that along the way, we went through
1:16.3	the penny farthing as well. That was part of the process. There was a stage where we thought
1:20.2	that's the, that's the way. It took us ages to figure out why don't we have the same wheel
1:25.0	on the front and back? Like, how did we start with massive front wheel, tiny, tiny back wheel?
1:30.8	There was one called something like a bone cruncher or a bone shaker maybe.
	...

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