October 23 was the day my high school chemistry teacher used to call Mole Day.
And if I’d done better in the class I could tell you why. (Sorry, Mr. Lewis.)
Still, it’s a chance to tell you the story of the guy known as the “Mole Man” of London, William Lyttle.
If you’ve been listening to our show for a while you might remember an episode about another serious fan of digging: Harrison Dyar, an entomologist who dug tunnels all over his Washington DC neighborhood for “exercise.”
That was in the 1920s; William Lyttle’s story really gets going in the early 1960s.
That’s when Lyttle decided his house in east London needed a wine cellar, and that he could probably just dig one himself.
Only he kept going well beyond anyone’s idea of a wine cellar.
He once said, “I guess I’m a man who enjoys digging.”
After four decades, he had created what one observer called “a giant ant nest.”
By 2006, Lyttle’s tunnels were deep enough to reach the water table, and long enough that they caused the sidewalk in front of the house to cave in.
That’s when the authorities realized just how much digging the Mole Man had done.
That won Lyttle lots of media attention, some fans, and eventually some scorn; an artist who came to document his tunnels described him as “extremely racist, misogynistic and paranoid.”
The immediate problem was structural; people worried the channels Lyttle had cut would cause his house to come down, or destabilize the foundations of nearby buildings.
The city even moved the neighborhood bus stop because they worried that the weight of commuters might cause them to be swallowed up into a hole.
Authorities eventually moved Lyttle out of his house and tried to charge him hundreds of thousands of pounds for the cost of fixing all the structural issues he’d caused, not to mention removing some 33 tons of debris from the property.
For a time, it looked like Lyttle’s house would be torn down and replaced with apartments, but there was a public effort to save it.
The house was eventually restored by artists who have tried to pay tribute to its offbeat history.
As for the Mole Man, the city put him up in an apartment for the last few years of his life.
It was on the top floor, so he wouldn’t be tempted to dig.
Ever wanted your clothes to act like a Theremin?
A pair of researchers from the Intelligent Instruments Lab out of the University of Finland have developed “e-textiles,” or smart fabrics.
They have electronics built into the fabric so that when they’re touched, they can generate sounds.
So you could have a song in your shirt as well as in your heart.
Great London Eccentrics: The Mole Man Of Hackney (Londonist)
e-textiles make sounds like electronic musical instruments when users touch or stretch them (designboom)
