The World's Largest Drum (Entry 144.CO0807)

This is the story of the one. As a procurement manager for a hospital system, she keeps every facility in her network stocked and ready. That's why she counts on Granger to be her single source for thousands of products, from disinfectants to lighting, air filters and more. And with fast, dependable delivery, Granger helps her keep every facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. Hello, we are transmitting to you from our present, which we can only assume is your distant past, the turbulent time that was the early 21st century. Fearing the great cataclysm that will surely befall our civilization, we began this monumental reference of strange and obscure human knowledge. These recordings represent our attempt to compile and preserve wonders and esoterica that would otherwise be lost. Whether you're listening from an advanced civilization or have just reinvented the technology to decrypt our transmissions, this is our legacy to you. This is our time capsule. This is the Omnibus. You have accessed entry 1444.co 0807. Certificate number 31992. The world's largest drum. Hello, Natalie. Hi, John. Welcome to the Omnibus project. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Where are you calling from? I am in Houston, Texas. Are you from there, Houston? Yes. Wow. Wow, so you're used to all manner of indignity, humidity. Oh, gosh, yes. Congestion. Yeah, it's about 70 degrees outside right now. It's currently February. So it is 70 degrees and sunny and humid outside here in Houston. Well, okay. So Natalie, when you appeared, now I know a lot of people listen to this show and don't see it on YouTube. Our YouTube numbers are still dwarfed by people that believe podcasting is an audio medium. But the first thing I noticed when you showed up on Zoom was behind you is an enormous gong. Indeed, a zilchian gong. That's true. It is big. It's also torn. As you can see, it's got a big gash in it. It does. And now is that, but you know, and I would say, oh, is that like a fan gong that you, that you stole off of the stage at a Rush concert, but I see it also has a mallet. So it's not. It does, yeah. You didn't just find this gong. This is a gong that you know. This is a gong that I know. Yes, it's on the wall because it's no longer playable. We had to get a new one. I play taiko, which are Japanese drums. And I play with the group in Houston, Kaminadi Taiko of Houston, and they are big drums. And as part of our ensemble, we have other accessories, lots of metal instruments and other types of instruments, and some of them are gongs. So this was an old gong that we used to have and it got a little tiny tear in it. And once a gong gets a little tear in it, it just sounds like a trash can lid and then it's unplayable and will eventually shred itself like this one has done. And so we took it home. So tell us about the world's largest drum. The world's largest drum. Yes. We'll get to taiko, but the story doesn't start there. The first person in our story is Ulysses G. Leigh. So he was born in Ohio in 1867 and grew up loving drums. His mother bought him a drum when he was seven years old. They used to belong to an old Civil War soldier. And he continued to play drums throughout his whole life. He played in the local band. He was recruited to perform on a traveling band that performed around the country, eventually settled in Indiana. And with his friend, Sam Cooley, they started building drums and selling them out of their apartment. So Leigh was an inventive guy. He got his first patent in 1895, I believe, 1898. He got his first patent in 1898 for a foldable snare drum stand. And from there, yeah, from there, he just continued to invent things. I've carried a lot of those in and out of warehouses. But yeah, okay, so I know who to blame now. Exactly, exactly. It all started in 1898. So Leigh and Cooley formed a manufacturing company to start building drums and related equipment and selling them. So that was Leigh and Cooley. After a few years, they switched it up, Leigh and Cooley dissolved, and Leigh formed a new partnership, the Leigh Manufacturing Company, with Herman Winterhoff and Charles Wanamaker. This corporation went on to invent a number of other instruments. So they invented a foot pedal for snares. I think they had 30 or 40 patents in total. And one of them, Winterhoff, invented the vibraphone. Wow. They invented a few other innovative instruments that did not become quite as popular as the vibraphone. They had a temp bass, which is, if you can imagine, an upright bass, but the body of it is a timpano. So that's got its own sound. They invented the octa marimba, or octa rimba, where it's a marimba, but each bar is actually two bars that are one octave apart. And you have a special little forked mallet, so every note you play is an octave. Oh, so it's like a 12 string guitar except an entire marimba. I imagine that sounds pretty good. Why didn't that become a popular instrument? No idea. I've never seen one. Not as popular as the vibraphone. The Green Brothers Band. I don't know much about them, but they use both of these instruments, the temp bass and the octa marimba in the 30s. So that's the Leedy Manufacturing Company. They are making all kinds of unusual instruments, and by the 1920s, they were the world's largest drum factory. They had 20 different departments. It was a great time for vertical integration. At this moment in history, they had their own lumberyard, they had their own tannery, they had their own chrome plating business. They were making the cases. They did absolutely everything, and they had 900 products at this point in time. Wow. And this was in Indiana. This was in Indiana. The heartbeat of America. Exactly. And I'm correct in saying that at this point, every drumhead was made of animal skin. Yes. All leather. So Leedy, at this point, came across the next character in our story, who is Paul Spots-Emerick. Emerick was the director of the Purdue All-American Marching Band, and he was an innovator in his own way. So he grew up in a family of band directors, and when he was a sophomore at Purdue, he was chosen as the director of the band in 1905, which was the way it was done at the time. They didn't have a permanent band director. They just kind of picked someone every year to direct the band from the students or the faculty, and they thought, Emerick, you've got directing experience that absolutely qualifies you to be the band director. And so he was, and he started innovating right away and did a lot of interesting things. I think the Purdue Band was one of the first marching bands, one of the first prominent college marching bands in the United States. In 1907, Emerick was the first band director to create a picture on the field, something besides just military formation. He invented the Block P, or they just made a P for Purdue. That was the very first one. So the first marching band, first college marching band already was doing funny business on the turf. There wasn't like a, there wasn't 40 years of college marching bands just marching back and forth. There were, I think. I think marching bands had been around for some amount of time, a few decades by this point. And I don't think Purdue was the first band completely. They were just one of the first and one of the early innovators in the marching band space. But they were definitely the first to create this kind of figurative image on the field. So they made a P. Purdue still uses this Block P today. It's one of their classic formations. They've got all kinds of variations on it. They've got a P with two lines, and then they've done it with three lines, go around each other. They've got an Action P, which is Italic P. Sure, Action P. Love the concept of Action P. Yes. Can a regular P become an Action P? It surely could. They could have their normal P. That's one of the features of marching band, right? The figures can morph into one another in really fun ways. Emreck said that he was inspired by seeing geese flying in a V formation. And he thought, if geese can do that, people can do that. He was the first full-time band director. So after he graduated, he came back on the faculty and they said, yes, let's make you the band director for as long as we possibly can. And so I think he eventually served as the band director for something like 50 years. He had a long and storied career. But the part that's important for our story is in 1920-21, Emreck had the idea that he wanted to make the world's largest drum. They had the Block P. He wanted a drum of impossible proportions. He wanted a drum that was larger than the man playing it. So typical bass drums of the time had gotten pretty big. The biggest ones were around four feet in diameter. So that's a pretty big drum already. Yeah, it is. That is a big drum. Yeah, I think we can go big. So he went to Leedy Manufacturing Company, which turned out to be the exact right place to go. It's lucky that these folks were near each other so that they could collaborate. And he asked Leedy to make him this giant drum. And of course, Leedy was excited to do this. And this had no, he wasn't filling in need. This is just like that the world's largest pair of Levi's that you see hanging in a country fair or whatever it wasn't. He didn't say, I need this sound to be heard all the way to Indianapolis. He just wanted the world's largest drum as a bit. Oh yeah. Okay. Just to say, what else can we do? Right. Leedy made a P. We've made an italic P. This P has a big hole in the middle. We're going to need to fill that with something. Right. Which is where they put the drum. They put the drum right in the hole in the P. So Leedy made this drum. And like you were saying at the time, all the drums were made with actual hides. And that was one of the big challenges of creating this drum. You have to make the frame for it, which is a whole thing, but you could see how it could be done. But you also have to find a cow. You actually have to find two cows to make that drum. I would pick multiple cows in the end. Multiple cows. Well, just one per head. Oh really? Oh, yep. Well, for a four foot drum, but not for the world's largest drum, surely. Indeed, for the world's largest drum. Really? There are no seams. Yeah, it is one giant hide on each side. I guess that would make sense. It took them a minute. It took them a minute. These are no ordinary cows. Just a regular cow that you pick out in the field is not going to give you, you know, six, seven, eight foot head. But they worked with a local butchery, king and company. They found two cattle that were the appropriate size and kind of a matching size. These cows weighed over 2,000 pounds each. Possibly they were from Argentina. I couldn't figure out if these cows were from Chicago or from Argentina. Could have been either one. Chicago is where a lot of cows met their end at this time. Even ones from Argentina, probably. So it could be both. Yes, they could be from Argentina by way of Chicago. And so you can stretch a cow hide and you would have to stretch it in order to make it a drum head. But this is something that never occurred to me and it may not have occurred to you. How much can you stretch a cow hide? Can you double the area by patient stretching? It is much more than you would think. I don't know if it's fully double, but this is a key part of making Tykel is stretching the hide. Because it needs to be stretched very, very tight and the stretching process is part of what actually makes it strong and have the right structure that it needs to have a good sound. So I don't know how you make Western bass drums, actually. They have some other stretching process. But for a Tykel, you have the body of the drum and you set it kind of up and down. You stretch the head across the top. The head is soaked so that it's easier to stretch and then you kind of make. Let's see, I can show you. Oh, yeah. Yes. All right. So I've got a visual aid. This is an old drum head that came off the drum. So you soak the hide and then you put it on top of the drum and then you can kind of wrap up the edges of it. And you tie ropes all the way from the top to the bottom. Yeah, it has little places where it seems almost like the curls of a little redheaded girl. Exactly. These are called meanie. It's a meanie. Like ears. Oh, like, yeah, they're like little ears or little dog chew toys almost where the rope has gone around and it's sort of split in order because it's making a circle. And so you would have to have, you couldn't make it a perfect circle. It's kind of open. What is it? It's cut or sliced around the edges. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, you fold it under and then you cut slices so that you can make a little channel to put the rope through. And it'll stay like this and you pull and pull and pull and you twist the ropes around in a certain way to make it tighter and tighter and tighter. And you let it stretch and you do multiple stretches to continue to stretch it out. And while it's being stretched, you have to hit the top of the drum or for very big drums, you stand on them, which is wild to see. But the hides are so unbelievably strong. They're being stretched and you just jump up and down on top of it. And that's part of the stretching you. That's part of the stretching. You have to stretch it. Otherwise, it's not going to sound good. If you just sort of plop it on there and kind of pull on it a little bit and then tack it down. It's going to be a floppy drum. Yeah, blow, blow, blow. So it takes it takes days to stretch it and let it dry and then stretch it and get it fully to where it needs to be. So probably a similar process for a Western drum, but I'm not exactly sure. Well, young people today think things are so easy. But back in the old days, we had to jump up and down on our drums. They still do. They still do today. Probably not at the big drum factories like Tomah and and. Oh, the Western drum factories. No, yeah, probably. The Taiko drum factories. Absolutely. Back to Indiana. So they did make this drum. They found the cows. They made the drum. And this became Purdue's big bass drum. They debuted it in 1921 as the world's largest drum and it was and they painted it right on the head so that everybody would know world's largest drum. One of the first places they took it on the road was to the University of Chicago nearby. And when they were there, there was an alum of the University of Chicago and an alum of the band named Carl D. Greenleaf, who was also the president of CG con, which was an instrument manufacturer. So Greenleaf, president of CG con saw this big bass drum from Purdue and thought, well, we need one of those. And so made one made a second giant. Now we're now we're in a now we're in a drum race. We're in a drum race. So we have two enormous bass drums. So CG con made a second bass drum. Also with giant cows. These ones they did find in the Chicago stockyards. And they made a drum that was approximately the same size or bigger. Hard to say. He also donated a hundred other instruments to the band just to make this the biggest and best band in the world. And University of Chicago nicknamed their drum Big Bertha. Every time there's something really big, it gets named Bertha. It really does. It does. When I was in the YMCA Youth Program as a little kid in Seattle, we had a school bus. It was called Big Bertha. I know there was a cannon in World War One that was called Big Bertha. What is it about Bertha? Yeah, so that's I have a list. I have a list because I was also curious about this. So the cannon in World War One is the original Big Bertha. Oh, that's the first one. Oh, and there was a real Bertha. A Bertha. There is a real Bertha Bertha, of course, because she was German. Yes. So Krupp, the manufacturer of this drum. This was a big siege Howitzer in World War One, 42 centimeters diameter. The Krupp factory at the time was owned by Bertha Krupp, the daughter of the original Krupp. And so the Germans nicknamed this drum Dicke Bertha. The gun, not the drum. The gun. Oh, sorry. That was on the mind. The Germans nicknamed this drum Dicke Bertha. Gun, not drum. Oh my gosh. Let me get that one more try. Okay. I like a little bit of a cool head, but I switched to Miracle Made Sheets. 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And with a 30 day money back guarantee, there's no risk to you. So try Miracle by going to trimiracle.com slash omnibus and use the code omnibus at checkout. Thanks Miracle Made for sponsoring this episode. The Germans nicknamed this gun Dickeberta, which is big Bertha, but even actually like stout Bertha, right? Not just big, but like stout fat, thick Bertha. I wonder how Bertha felt about this. Is she on record as being like thanks a lot? I could not find anything about her particular feelings about the nickname. But yeah, that was that was the German nickname for it. And the Americans actually, once they heard about that, they started calling all of the big German guns Big Bertha. And then from there, it went on and on and on and on to various other things. Yeah, there became a big, a big Bertha race. So what are some other big Bertha's? Some other things. So there's a line of golf clubs. See these Callaway golf clubs with the extra large head, Big Bertha. There's a train engine, a banking engine on the Midland Railway. Right. I know that one. Yeah. Yes. There is a special version of the Vauxhall Victor, which I don't know that much about, but it was an extra super big, super big racing car. They called that one Big Bertha. There was a 19th century Prussian American con woman Bertha Heyman. She was a lady of size and her name was Bertha. She was called a Big Bertha. She scammed a bunch of men by pretending to be wealthy and then inviting them kind of Nigerian Prince style saying, oh, I live in that estate over there. You know, you can see, and I would love for you to come work for me because you are such a special man. But my funds are just tied up at the moment. So I just need the banks since I just need a small advance. If you could help me out with that, then I will set you up for life and just guy after guy felt for this. She scammed her own attorney. She scammed a guy from prison. So she was extremely successful at this lifestyle. One that I really love is there is a cow. Big Bertha. Great cow name. Sure. There is a cow that holds two Guinness World Records. Same cow. This is an Irish cow. She was born on St. Patrick's Day in 1945. So already auspicious. And the first record that she holds is she is the oldest recorded cow to ever live. So she was born in 1945. She died on New Year's Eve 1993. What? I know. Who ever heard of a 50-year-old cow? Incredible. Incredible. I hope they immediately made a drum out of her. Well, they, no, they stuffed her. They did. And she's currently in the corn palace somewhere. She's, I think, at a vineyard on a farm somewhere. Wow. Something like that. Yeah. When she died, they held a wake for her in the local pub where she often visited in life. I'm just going to look real quickly here. Oh, absolutely. How old is the average cow? Which is going to increase. You know, I like my Google results to be really confused. I don't want them to ever really get a hold of me. And how old is the average cow? That's just going to change the algorithm. It says cows can naturally live 15 to 20 years old. But in agriculture, it's much shorter dairy cows. Oh, well, that's because they kill them to make them into other things. But so yeah, 20 years is a normal cow. Normal cow. 48, this one. Almost 49. Big birth. So that's her first Guinness world record. The second world record related. She produced the most calves ever recorded. Do you want to guess how many calves a cow might give birth to in 48 years? 60 calves. Not quite that many. It was 39. Okay, 39. Because I was like, how long does a calf gestate? It's not like a rabbit. She can't have a cow because she can't have a calf like every four months. But is it is it take a whole year? Once a year. Maybe once a year. All right. That makes sense. 39 calves. There's more. There's more. There's a Moongrock collected by Apollo 14. One of the biggest ones, Big Bertha, their computer monitors. This one's kind of wild. There's a Marvel superhero called Big Bertha. I don't know much about this is a minor, minor superhero part of the Great Lakes Avengers. Which I had not heard of before. Wait a minute. There are regional Avengers? Apparently. Oh, wow. Somebody. Well, you know that there's a future lane with heavy duty Marvel lore. Absolutely. I look forward to that. Great Lakes Avengers. Avengers Big Bertha. So her backstory is she is a famous fashion model in Milwaukee. And her superpower is that she can grow her body, alter her body fat at will. And when she is super sized, she has super human strength and is bulletproof. So that's pretty standard superhero stuff. Yeah. But the catches and trigger warning for body dysmorphia. The catch is that when she wants to shrink back down, she has to vomit. Oh, that's terrible. Whose idea was this? Really terrible. This is in the 80s. So even then, kind of inexcusable, I would say. So when she grows to super size, you're not saying she grows 40 feet tall. It's just that she gets obese. I think so, yes. Interesting. Yeah. That was really a choice that somebody made. You know, I don't think at the time there were that many female comic book artists. And that probably plays a role. They were running out of ideas clearly. When you get to Great Lakes Avengers, it feels like you guys, you should go back and make more Wolverine comics. Yeah. What happened? We done. Maybe that's why there's so many sequels these days. Because here's what happens when we try to come up with new ideas all the time. Just do another Spider-Man. Just please. Just start over with that story. Everybody likes it. Exactly. There's one more big birth. I don't know if you've heard of this one. It's a tunnel boring machine that does the Alaskan Way via a duct replacement tunnel under downtown Seattle. Absolutely. That's our primary big birtha now here in the city because big birtha really struggled very early on in her career of digging the tunnel. And it's an enormous tunnel. They had, they put down a pipe to test the, you know, at the beginning of that tunnel. And that's all kind of landfill. It's, they just, it was, used to be a tide flat and to fill it in, they just threw every broken bottle and dead cow and old cart. It was just like, let's throw it all in there and try and fill it up. And so they put a relatively small pipe down there to just test like how far the bedrock was. And then they forgot to take the pipe out. And then big birtha, and she was the size of four locomotives chained together. When she hit this tiny little pipe, it just stopped her in her tracks and they had to dig down from above. And it was really a boondoggle. But anyway, we drive through that tunnel every day. So there you go. Did you know it was named after Birtha Knight Landis? I could know. No, I had no idea. And it's Seattle's first female mayor and I think first female mayor of a major city in the US. Of a major city, that's right. I just assumed that anything big was named its big birtha. I think it was a happy coincidence in this case. Yeah, right. Sure, I mean. We've got a famous birtha. Famous birtha. And she's a very famous birtha around here. That's all the big birthas I've got. Yeah. Well, we can add my YMCA school bus to it. There you go. Put it on the list. Maybe I'll submit it to what you need. All of this named after Birtha Krupp. Yes. I feel like that's marvelous that all the way to the boring machine via Birtha Landis. I guess she probably wasn't named after the cannon. So that breaks the chain of custody. Yes, these are probably contemporaneous birthas. So big birtha was Chicago's drum. And these two drums coexisted for several years, each claiming to be the largest. And Chicago probably played Purdue every year. So the two drums would be it would share a football field and maybe probably. No, if they did, they maybe they did. I haven't seen any reference to that or any pictures of them next to each other. So maybe they didn't travel that much. Right. I'm actually not sure if they met in person at this time. I mean, they would have, college football teams, the whole point of them is to travel around and beat other football teams. You would think. So, yeah, I wonder if an alum of one of those two schools is listening and can go into the school archives and find the picture. Share with us on the, with the future links. Oh, that would be great. It would be great to see them back in the 20s and 30s. So they kept kept going like this until 1939 when Chicago disbanded its football team. Oh, they decided that was football was not necessary for their status and journey as a university. And so they were done with football. And I think the drum may be hung around for a little while after that, but then it was put into storage under the bleachers in stag field. And just a couple of years after that, also under the bleachers in stag field was Enrico Fermi and the Manhattan Project. Do they use the drum in some capacity? No, it just happened to be nearby while they were building the first nuclear chain reaction and made nuclear chain reaction in the world and doing all their experiments there in Deep Dark Secret. And we know for sure that the drums still existed when we entered the era of nuclear power. Oh, for sure. It absolutely did. It was radioactive after this time. Wow. Big birth of us. Yes. It was, it was. So it hung out under stag field for a while just in retirement, getting irradiated casually. I had a few adventures where it was rented out to various places in 1945. It went to New York City to play with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. There was, I think, one big drum or thunder clap at the end of Verdi's Requiem and they said, we need a very large drum and there's one at Chicago. So they put it on a train. They sent it over there. It did not fit through the door. No. So they had to get a different drum. They couldn't do it. That was it. It went back home on the train. Oh, it did. They didn't just leave it out on the sidewalk. That was it. They, yeah, didn't fit through the door. Seems like they could have figured that out before shipping it across the country. You would think. Yeah. You would think. Someone kind of got a tape measure out. Big Bertha also went to New York at a different time to be the cannon fire during the 1812 overture. At that time. I don't know where it performed that time. I don't know. I don't know. They either got it in the door or it was a show outside. Or maybe they just played it from outside and it's loud enough that you could hear it. Then in 1952 there was a film made about John Philip Seuss's life called Stars and Stripes Forever. And this drum was used to advertise for the film and that they put a bunch of poster paper over it advertising for the film. So it doesn't appear in the film. I don't think so. I have not seen the film, but I think it was mostly a big billboard. Which, yes. Not really worthy of its dignity and heritage. We've pivoted to deciding that the world's largest drum was the Chicago drum and that drum is now radioactive and is making the trip across the country. Now multiple times probably irritating everyone that touches it. Possibly. And now it's just because it's suffering the indignity of just being an advertising vehicle. Yeah. They did not agree per due in Chicago. They did not agree that the Chicago drum was larger. They both claimed to be the world's largest drum. And who can say really? I mean it seems like another instance where a tape measure. Seems like you could. Yeah. It seems like you could. But sometimes it's just more fun not to measure these things. That's right. That's right. But the story goes on. That was not the end of Big Bertha's drumming career. Because in 1954 at the University of Texas. In Austin. In Austin. University of Texas. In Austin. The biggest university in the biggest almost state in the nation. Did you know? Did you know? Speaking of that. Did you know that the Texas state song had to be rewritten slightly when Alaska joined the union? Yeah. Well okay. So this is happening in the mid 50s. So it would have still been the largest state in the union. It would have been. Yeah. It would have been the largest state in the union at the time. Yeah. 1954. Biggest and grandest. That's our state song. Now it's boldest and grandest. Boldest. Yeah. Well who could argue with that? Sadly. Boldest. That's for sure. So the at the University of Texas there was a benefactor by the name of David Harold Bird. And he was a big supporter of the UT Longhorn Band. And this guy was a real character. He was a Texas oil man. And he got the nickname. His name was D.H. Bird. He got the nickname Dry Hole Bird. Because he I know he drilled. Well Dry Hole is a well that doesn't produce oil and gas. So he drilled 56 dry holes before he first struck it rich in 1928. So he got that nickname as sort of a bad luck character. And then all in one day 1928. He finally struck it big and made his fortune. He was definitely a character. He once lost a wrestling match with a bear at a carnival. That also checks out. I guess that's refereed. Normally I think you lose the wrestling match with a bear. That's kind of the end of your story. But someone must have pulled the bear off. They probably had mittens on the bear too if I know anything about bears. Yeah. It's amazing. What a great Texas story and a story of American perseverance. Can you imagine drilling your 54th dry well and not being dissuaded to drill that 55th and still nothing? I mean you would think your backers, your wife, a lot of people would be like, dude, come on. Just believe in yourself against all odds. You wouldn't be out in Texas if you wanted to play it safe. But this fellow, this fellow dry hole bird, he also owned the Texas school book depository building when Oswald shot JFK from it. Wow. That was another interesting story from his life. And he actually, after that happened, he took out the window, that specific window, took it out. He didn't want anyone stealing it. So he basically stole it himself and put it in his house as a souvenir. That's like having a Hitler painting. It's a little macabre. In 1941, he co-founded the Civil Air Patrol. I was a member. There you go. Thanks to dry hole bird. Wow, dry hole bird. And Gil Rob Wilson together founded the Civil Air Patrol. Huh. But yeah, so dry hole bird. His whole thing was he thought, okay, Texas needs to have the biggest drum. Of course it does. So he got together with Moten Crockett, who was the director of the Longhorn Band at the time, and they searched the country. And in this search, they came across this Chicago drum, Big Bertha, which by that point was out of the stadium and had been given back to CGCon, the original manufacturer. So it was just hanging out at Con at this point. So they went and they found it. And Moten Crockett went up there and talked to Carl Greenleaf, I think still the president or still in charge of the drum at CGCon. And Greenleaf sold it to him for a dollar. Get this drum out of here. Yes. He says it doesn't fit through any doors. There's no football team. What am I going to do with this thing? Yes. Well, according to Crockett, he said, Greenleaf said, well, the biggest university in the biggest state should have the biggest drum. So I will sell this drum to you for a dollar. So however that happened, Crockett ended up with it. He borrowed a Ford Fairlane, rented a U-Haul, drove the drum back to Texas himself, took him three days, and eventually got it back to Texas. It was in bad shape. It still had the advertising paper all over it. So they had to soak the heads, get that off, you know, do a bunch of repairs to the drum that took a year or so. And in 1955, they debuted it at University of Texas as Big Bertha, and it was back on the field again. Hook'em horns. Hook'em horns. Exactly. Exactly. So it became a member of the Longhorn Band. They got a Big Bertha crew and the Purdue drum had also taken a height as during World War II because the materials that they needed to repair it were also needed for the war effort. So they had to kind of put it in the closet for a while, but it had been revived also around the same time period in the 1950s. So the rivalry was rekindled at this point. You're kidding. Mm-hmm. The two drums are still, and so you have surely seen video of these drums in the, in action in the 50s? Yes. Yes. I, there's been lots of video actually of both of these drums because spoiler, they're both still around today. They are? They are. How am I not seeing these, how have I not seen these, these drums in action? I feel like I'm like missing some crazy, this is just one of those things to tick off. Like, have you been to all 50 states? Yes. Have you seen the Purdue World's Biggest Drum and the, the competing radioactive Big Bertha World's Biggest Drum? That's actually the next point in our story. They were supposed to meet. They were supposed to meet. In 1961, Kappa Kappa Psi, the fraternity, the fraternity of the chapters of this fraternity at each of these two colleges, challenged each other to a measure off. They said, we're going to meet, we're going to bring both of our drums to Wichita, which is where the fraternity's conference was that year. And they had all these rules. They said, you got to push the drum through six different cities on your way there and play it in all six cities. And you got to meet here on this date. And we're going to measure these two drums, put them next to each other. And we're going to see once and for all which drum is bigger. And I've only heard the Purdue side of the story, which is that they were the only ones to show up. Oh. On the appointed date. Oh. I don't know what happened to Big Bertha. I don't know if they didn't make it on time, if they decided not to go. I'm really not sure. But do you think they chickened out? Do you think they knew something and they were like, we don't want to put our drum to the test? I think Bertha really is bigger. I think most of the evidence does point to Bertha being actually bigger. So I don't know. I don't know what the real story is behind that. But this gave Purdue the ammunition that they needed to claim for the next 50 years that they for sure had the world's largest drum. UT couldn't even show up to challenge it. Chronic inflammation. I think about it a lot. The three markers that you need to pay closest attention to are Hs-CRP, which is one of the most clinically validated early warning signs for systemic inflammation. Even small elevations matter. Glucose and insulin, because blood sugar dysregulation and inflammation fuel each other in a cycle most people never break. And third, vitamin D, because low levels are consistently linked to higher inflammatory activity throughout the body. And that's why I use function. Now function tracks 160 or more lab tests every year. So you can actually see inflammation markers, metabolic health, and dozens of other symptoms. Not just guess at them. If something is trending in the wrong direction, you know before it becomes a real problem. That's what owning your health looks like. So check your health the way I do. 160 lab tests a year for just $365. It's a dollar a day. Plus the ability to dive deeper into your results with functions trusted connections to platforms you already use like JetGPT and cloud. Join by going to www.functionhealth.com slash omnibus and use the gift code omnibus25 for a $25 credit toward your membership. That's function health.com slash omnibus. Use the gift code omnibus. Thanks function. And so these drums still exist and are still used. Almost almost. So the Purdue drum still exists and is still used. Yes, it fills the P. Yes, they have new heads in the around in the 60s. They both got synthetic drum heads. That was when Remo first came out with synthetic drum heads and they were able to make some very large ones for these drums. So that made the repairs and maintenance a lot easier on these drums. Right. And the Purdue drum is still still in use. Big Bertha made it to its 100th anniversary in 2022. And at that point they had had it repaired a couple of times. They shipped it off to Remo in California to be repaired. They had a local place in Austin do some repairs on it. But by the time it got to being about 100 years old, it was really getting to a point where they couldn't keep repairing it and repairing it. So what they did was they retired Big Bertha and a shop in Austin, a drum company made a new big Bertha big Bertha too, which is bigger. So now there's a second big Bertha and this Bertha they made sure to make dimensionally the largest drum. Yes, Big Bertha II is for sure larger than the Purdue drum. So they're dimensions. The Big Bertha II is nine and a half feet across. And the Purdue drum is about eight feet across. They're very cagey about the dimensions. And original Big Bertha is also about eight feet across. Are they trotted out on? I mean, I have never been to a University of Texas football game. Is this part of the Texas tradition that this big drum comes out? Yes. So they both both of these drums, a big part of them is the carriage. So that was part of the innovation that Leigh made originally and that they also made it Chicago was you obviously can't carry this size based drum like normally a marching based drum. You've got a harness, right? It's strapped to the front of you. You can't carry these so you do need a carriage. I think the Purdue carriage was built on a model A frame and the Chicago carriage used airplane tires. This was all their 1920s technology and these carriages still exist today. Big Bertha II has its own custom carriage with little long horns on it. And the drum crew is usually about six people. So there's four pushers and two hitters. So the pushers push the drum around and the drum does spins and it does tricks. And on the Purdue one, at least they can kind of push down on one side of the drum and jack the other end up. And people can do little flips and tricks and things on the side of the carriage. So it's a whole production. So one interesting other character in this story is University of Missouri. Also has a giant bass drum that they built in 2012. This drum is called Big Mo. This was nine feet across. So at the time that it was built, it was bigger than clearly bigger than both the Purdue drum and the original Big Bertha. But it did not seem to affect the rivalry at all. They were like, whatever. We've got our own thing going on over here. That's nice. And then Big Bertha II then came in over the top. Also nine and a half feet. Oh, nine and a half. So yeah, Missouri just had to take a back seat. Be clear that this is the biggest drum in the biggest state. And so what is the, just to sort of bring it back around. What is the largest Japanese drum? Hmm. The largest Japanese drum. Well, can I tell you about the Disneyland drum first? Okay. There's one more. There's one more. I'm dying to know. Yes. So one thing I found curious was that Rimo seems to have built a 10 foot drum, 10 foot bass drum for Disneyland in 1961. And none of the marching bands really mentioned this drum, but it seems like it existed. I don't think it currently exists, but I think I've seen video of it being in a parade. Rimo says they made it on their website. They have like videos and pictures of them making it. It looks like it's a real drum that they actually made is actually playable. And Mickey Mouse played it in the parade. So it was at the opening of Magic Kingdom at this 10 foot drum. So Mickey was sitting behind it, kind of an unusual place to play and just kind of hitting it near the rim. But I think that's a bigger bass drum. How could Disney have the biggest bass drum in the world and let it just disappear? I don't know where it is. I mean, someone's got to know. I mean, if anybody has fans as Disney fans. Right. Oh my God. So do you think it could be? I wonder if it's something that's at that scale structurally. A drum can't can't hold its shape and it becomes a singularity. The drum collapses in on itself. Possibly. Yeah. I know the the head, the body kind of gets warped sometimes from all the tension that you have to put on it. So that may be what happened. There is a there is a drum float currently in one of the Disneyland parades, but I don't think it's a real drum. It has light bulbs all over it. I think it's an image of a drum, you know. OK, so what is the world's largest Japanese drum? World's largest Japanese drum. All right, there are a few and many of them are larger than all of these bass drums that are the quote unquote world's largest drum. So the largest taiko in North America or the largest kind of traditionally crafted Nagarō Daiko in North America is one that was built by Asano Taiko in Japan. This is one of the major, you know, 400 year old drum manufacturing companies in Japan. It's currently in North America. It's on loan to Tiffany Tamaribuchi in Sacramento. And this is a huge drum. I don't know the exact dimensions of it, but the drum itself weighs 780 pounds. And it's on a stand that weighs 860 pounds. So this thing is. I can't you probably can't even see my hands, but is you could hardly reach across it. It's enormous. And it is in the same style of this little friend that I have back here for the folks watching the video. So carved from a single log. Yes. Wow. That's the wild thing. So to get a single log, the wood that you use for the largest solid body taiko is either Zelkova, which is a Japanese wood. And it's very hard and it can be carved and it has good resonant properties. There's also Bubinga wood, which is from West Africa, Cameroon usually. Oh, oh, yeah. And so these, yeah, these are both of these kinds of woods are also prized for furniture making. I think because they're very beautiful. They have a nice grain pattern. They're very hard. They have certain properties that work for that. And they also both of these can grow very, very large. So I believe this Asano Taiko drum is is made from Bubinga wood. Several of the large ones are. And, you know, just an enormous tree, eight, ten feet across, at least, that's hollowed out in a single piece. The biggest drum couldn't possibly be just some competition between University of Missouri and University of Texas. Like, where are the, where are the other nations of the world? There are many types of biggest drums. So it also, there also is the question of what is the biggest drum, right? Does it have the biggest diameter head? Does it enclose the biggest volume? Is it the heaviest? In Nigeria, there are a couple of drums that are claiming to be the world's tallest drum. This is a completely different type of drum. It is a Sato drum from different cultures in West Africa. So this is kind of a regular diameter tree trunk, but you take a long section of the tree several feet tall. I think they're normally maybe four or five feet tall, but there are some drum makers who have made gigantic versions of these. And the largest one, I think, was made in 2017. The artist was Femi Koker and it is about 18 feet tall. So it looks like a cannon. We're back to the first one. Yeah, pretty much. You just stand the cannon up on its end and boom. That was created for the African Drum Festival 2017. So that's probably the tallest drum in the world. That's pretty tall. Right. That's the tallest. There are several taiko, Japanese drums in Japan that are very large. So there's a whole group of drums, these Nagarō Daiko style drums also made by Asano Taiko in Japan that are at the Matsuri Nomori Museum in Takayama. And this is a festival forest museum that has a collection of these enormous drums. So these are the largest one is 2.7 meters across. So very big and solid wood. All of each of these is solid wood, a single tree, a single hide that's stretched across. And at the museum, these are played by puppets, kind of these dolls that actually play the drum. Although from time to time humans play them as well. So these are remarkable three enormous drums. The largest one weighs about four and a half tons. So there are drums that are even larger. It's a different style of taiko where the body is made out of wood or made out of different things, but not necessarily carved out of a single piece of wood. The body is a cylinder and you have these heads. It's actually this style. There we go. Oh, I see. So that does feel like an African style where if you squeeze on those ropes, does it tighten the tension on the head? So that's kind of a talking drum thing. This is not that. It does have ropes in a similar way, but you don't squeeze them when you play it. You just tighten them to begin with until it's very tight and then you hit the drum. Right, I see. So this is a very small version of it that's meant super, super light. This is an okadaiko that is meant to be worn across your body and you can walk around with it. Hit it. Here. So that's a shime daiko style where it's tightened with ropes instead of being permanently tacked on. And the old shime drums can get bigger. So there is a town in Akita in Japan called Tsu-zu-reko. And this town has sort of two little hamlets in it. And going back to the 1200s, they have celebrated these large drums in this town, which happens in many places around Japan. There are so many enormous drums. You just go to a random festival in Japan and you will see, you know, a five, six, seven foot drum going down the street on a float. And there's people sitting on top of it playing it. And it's just, you know, this is what we do for festivals. But this town in particular, Tsu-zu-reko, these two towns, they had a difficult time with the rain. And so they were praying for more rain. Of course, you do that by making the sound of thunder. Of course, we need a very big drum to do that. And over time, this evolves into a rivalry between the two towns where originally they were reenacting the battle of Sekigahara. Famous battle in Japanese history from around 1600. And it got very realistic after a while and it was getting to be kind of violent. So they sort of pivoted to a more wholesome rivalry where they would see who could build the biggest drum. You know, we could solve so many human problems if we just stopped having wars and had it be a drum off, right? A drumline competition. Music fight. Music fight. Every fight should be a music fight. Agreed. Yeah, so they just kept building bigger and bigger drums and currently they have four enormous drums that the two towns collectively own. The largest one is 3.8 meters across. 12 and a half feet. Oh, wow. Absolutely huge. Is this the world's biggest drum? No. Go on. It's not. So that you can play six people at a time on each head. Four people sitting on the top and two people on the bottom. Absolutely enormous. So those are huge. The world's largest drum, according to the Guinness World Records, is a drum in South Korea. So this drum was built in 2011 in Simcheon, Maeyon, South Korea. It was built by the Yongdong-gun local government and Siop-jae Lee. So now we're into government-funded drums. Yes, so this drum is honoring Korean traditional music, Gugak, which has many different kinds of drums in it of all different shapes and sizes. And there's Korean temples that have very large drums as well. So those are some of the biggest drums in the world. This particular drum was built at the Yongdong-nangye traditional music center, which is kind of at the center of Korean traditional music in Korea. So they built this entire museum to celebrate it. And as part of that, they built an enormous drum in 2011. So this drum, this drum is 5.4 meters across and weighs 7.5 meters. Good grief. Yes, so it's about 19 feet. Wow, I mean, it seems like it would create a sound that you could hear 10 miles away. I think that big would resonate at a depth that would create waves in the water. It absolutely must. I mean, even an ordinary wine barrel-sized taiko, you can probably hear it a mile away on a good day. Right. This drum has to be absolutely enormous. And I believe if you go there, you can hit it. Oh, I know. It's gonna be a big stick. Right? There's two more. There's two more drums. So I believe that's the world's largest drum. Guinness World Records certainly thinks so. Guinness also has a record for world's largest bronze drum, which is a drum in China. So a different, completely different style of drum, right? Cast bronze, open at one end, no cows involved, zero cows. This was created by Wei Chi-chu in 2018. It is 21 feet across, 9 feet deep, and it weighs 50 tons. So there's no model T-driven cart that's carrying it around. No, this is resting on the back of four stone bowls. Immovable. Well, that must have a completely different sound. How much do I want to hear it now? A lot, I think. Yeah, yeah. I think you can see videos of this one. You hit it with a big mallet and it rings out. Okay. There is, and there's one more, a little bit different. This one is in Canada. So this drum is in the Northwest Territories near the Fort Good Hope. And it is right at the Arctic Circle where the road crosses into the Arctic Circle. And I believe this is the only place in Northwest Territories, possibly, where a road crosses the Arctic Circle. In 2021, they erected this giant metal drum. This is the Kashiogotne people. And it is a metal sculpture of the frame drums that they play, which are, you know, handheld, high, stretched over a frame. Right. So this drum is larger than the Korean drum in diameter. But because it's metal and the actual drums are hides, this is more of a sculpture of a drum than a drum, I would say. It does weigh seven tons. And it's very cool. I don't know. I don't know if we can conclude this episode by saying the world's largest drum is the drum that you had with you the whole time. The drum that lives in your heart. But again, I don't think it's up to us. It can't be up to you and me to determine which of these drums is the world's largest. There's, well, there's, there's one more kind of silly one. Okay. Okay. So if we really want to go bigger, there's one slightly silly drum that is definitely larger than all of these drums. This comes from space plasma physicist and science communicator Martin Archer in the UK, who claims that the largest drum is actually the Earth's magnetosphere. So I think this is a theory that was put forward a while ago. And now we finally have the satellites to test it. This is a real scientific paper that has actually been published. So the theory is there's, there's magnetosphere is a sphere surrounding the earth. It's way, way out there in space, much larger than the earth. And it has a surface and it's been theorized that if you hit the surface that this magnetosphere will resonate with certain frequencies and harmonics in the same way that a drum does. And this happens during solar storms all the time. I'm assuming. Exactly. So that's the kind of impact that you would need. So you'd need an impact like that that has a single, you know, point of impact at a certain point in time. And then you would need the satellites that are spread out that can observe different parts of the magnetosphere and see how it's moving. And so a few years ago, they finally did that study and they did the measurements and they discovered, yes, we do see those vibrations traveling through the magnetosphere. So that could be the world's largest drum, not manmade. Well, we've established on the omnibus many times that British scientists are some of the silliest people and physicists especially are very silly. But this seems to indicate that a planet with an atmosphere of any kind would have this capacity to function as a drum. So I wonder if this has changed the search for planets that have the capacity to sustain life because we would be communicating like drum noises to one another. Like our our UFOs out there like hearing the earth go boom. And they're like, whoa, it's a taboo. Sounds like our son. Yeah. It's actually the magnetosphere. So you need to have a magnetic field. Oh, I see. Which is not that common. Not that common. I believe the only reason that we have a magnetic field is because we have this liquid iron core that can sustain a magnetic field around the earth. A lot of other planets don't have that. But we haven't determined whether it's necessary to have a magnetic field to have an atmosphere. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Those are unrelated. Unrelated. Okay. All right. Well, and so without a magnetic field that that suggests that other life forms might just be undifferentiated goo because the magnets aren't, you know, we don't even know how magnets work. But it may be the magnets are why we are walking around and playing the banjo and making drums and so forth. I think they protect us from cosmic rays. Don't quote me on that. And that concludes the world's largest drum entry one four four four dot co 0807 certificate number three one nine nine two in the omnibus. Future links from our vantage point in your distant past. We all know conclusively that social media is a pure garbage fire, but we recommend that it that the last place you visit before you sign off completely is an omnibus related social media place. And you can find them on Reddit and discord and Facebook. You can visit us and watch this show on YouTube at YouTube dot com slash at the omnibus project. You can email me directly and your email will be answered by Grant, the manager Grant. Email us at the omnibus project at gmail.com. You can visit our website and propose your own show as Natalie has done. You can visit us at omnibus project dot com. Is that correct? I did. Yeah. And submit your submit your proposal to omnibus project dot com slash submit. And you can send physical mail. And finally, if you are one of the millionaires who are going to try and build the world's largest drum, do not make it a sculpture. Do not start a war between the Koreas. And finally, if you are one of the millionaires who are going to try and build the world's largest drum, do not make it a sculpture. Do not start a war between the Koreas. Do not start a war between the Koreas. And before you spend millions on this weird vanity project, donate to our show or rather it's not so much a donation as it is supporting the show with your benefactor. What is the word I'm looking for? Not with your benefactor-ness. As a benefactor? Yeah, as a benefactor. With your benefactorality. Beneficially. Beneficially go to patreon.com slash omnibus project and sign up. There's going to be a lot of bonus content and more and more all the time. I just want to promote the idea of supporting the artists in your community. If you have a taiko group near you, you can go see a taiko show or take a taiko lesson. In the taiko community, we have a great organization started a few years ago called Taiko Ventures that provides a stable income and things like health insurance and tax preparation for taiko artists, full-time taiko artists, which is something that you don't always have as a full-time artist. You do not always enjoy stability or health insurance or things like that. Organizations like these help artists not have to make so many compromises between eating food and making great art, which is always a wonderful thing. So if you want to donate to Taiko Ventures, I support that word. Find any art, any artist in your community and go support them with the literal dollars. It's the best thing that you can do. If you want to get to a show or take a class or buy an album or a book or whatever the artist produces, and that's all of our collective responsibility because the world needs art. Yeah, bravo. Futurelings. From our vantage point in your distant past, we have no idea how long our civilization survived. We hope and pray that the catastrophe we fear may never come. If the worst comes soon, this recording, like all our recordings, may have been our final word. But if Providence allows, we wish you many goods and genes and hope to be back with you soon for another entry in the omnibus. Thank you for watching. That's why he counts on Granger to get everything he needs, from lighting and HVAC parts to plumbing supplies, all in one place. 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