Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and

it to Jensky and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite

facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go. Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that Paris's first public transport system failed because wealthy passengers bought

all the seats for themselves and then persuaded the government to ban poor people.

Wow, incredible.

But if they were selling all the tickets surely that's not a failure.

Well, then the rich apparently does lost interest and then stopped using it and then no one was

using it. So it was a complete disaster. This is from an article on La Pomme's Quarterly which is

an amazing website. It's really brilliant. It's got so many fascinating things on it and it's

partly based on this brilliant sounding book about buses which is called Engine of Modernity

by Masha Belenky. Andy, have you already moved on from Fennicular Railways then?

I'm afraid so.

So this was called the Carrots and it was set up by Blaise Pascal. So we briefly actually

mentioned before that Blaise Pascal set up the first public transport system in Paris but I

didn't know what happened to it and it was basically a carriage with eight passengers and two

stuff and there were... I'm sorry, when was it? Did you say? Oh, I'm sorry, it was in 1662.

And who was Blaise Pascal again? He was a thinker mathematician, probability dude.

And what's Paris again? I'm sorry, who were you?

Anyway, the point is wealthy riders didn't like sharing with poor people. I think they weren't even...

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