JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, you want to know about my—one of my proudest moments of being a dad?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yeah.

JAD: Happened this morning.

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: So you know how Emil's a little bit of an introvert, right?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And we're sort of worried whether he socializes enough. Well, we were taking him to daycare and we're—he's taking his shoes off, and there's this little boy who's only there two days a week and he's not adjusting well. And every time his mother drops him off, she has to literally pry him off her and he's wailing and you know? So Emil sits down on this little seat to take his shoes off. The mother of this kid puts this little boy next to Emil and he is just crying. Wah! He's distraught. So then what happens is Emil turns to this little boy, looks at him, sticks out his hand and says, "High-five."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: "High-five." Out of nowhere.

JON MOOALLEM: That is amazing. Yeah, because it's like, they're out in their own society, you know?

JAD: Okay, so let's do the introductions. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: This is Radiolab. We're calling this show ...

ROBERT: Patient Zero.

JAD: Yeah. And for this next segment, no more patients.

ROBERT: No more diseases.

JAD: Exactly.

ROBERT: Let's focus instead on invention. On the people who bring new ideas into the world.

JAD: Yeah, the zeros behind the ideas. That doesn't quite sound right. You know what I mean.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And that guy you just heard?

JON MOOALLEM: Hi. My name is Jon Mooallem. I'm a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

JAD: He's got his own high-five story to tell, though it's not about his daughter.

JON MOOALLEM: We have—I think we have kids around the same age.

JAD: Or her first high-five. It's actually about the first high-five ever.

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah.

JAD: Ever?

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah.

JAD: See, one morning a few years ago ...

JON MOOALLEM: 2007 or 2008.

JAD: Jon turned on his computer, opened up his email and found ...

JON MOOALLEM: A press release about the—the true undisputed inventor of the high-five coming, you know, out finally.

JAD: Who was the press release from?

JON MOOALLEM: National High-Five Day, which is a kind of a joke holiday that was invented by a group of high school friends, I think.

ROBERT: And they told the story?

JON MOOALLEM: They told the story of Lamont Sleets. College basketball player at Murray State in Kentucky.

ROBERT: And the story in the press release went something like this. Sleets's father fought in ...

JON MOOALLEM: Vietnam. as part of the 1st Battalion 5th Infantry, which was nicknamed The Five. And they used to greet each other by holding up their hand and saying, "Five" as a kind of prideful thing. And when Lamont was younger, they would all sort of hang out at the house in Kentucky, and he couldn't keep all their names straight. So when they'd walk in the door and they'd go "Five," he would just sort of smack their hand and he'd go, "Hi, Five."

JAD: Oh, like "Hi" like, "Hello, five."

JON MOOALLEM: Hello, Five. Yeah. Hi comma Five. You know, he has small hands, he likes to put them up against the big hands of the Five guys. And it was years later that he started playing college basketball at Murray State and started high-fiving all his teammates. He really never stopped high-fiving, it was just something he did. But when he went around playing away games, other teams picked it up and it sort of spread out. So he was sort of both the inventor of the high-five and the kind of Johnny Appleseed of the high-five at the same time.

JAD: And within a few weeks of Jon getting this press release ...

ROBERT: The story was everywhere.

JAD: Went kind of viral.

JON MOOALLEM: It wound up sort of all over the internet. There were some local newspapers who, you know, picked it up. You know, Murray State suddenly became very proud of the fact that they were the home of the high-five. It became sort of part of the institutional lore in the athletic department there.

JAD: And then you read this and you thought what?

JON MOOALLEM: I thought, how sad.

JAD: How sad? Why how sad?

JON MOOALLEM: Because I knew the story of Glenn Burke.

JAD: Turns out Jon had already been poking around into this question of who invented the high-five, and he had stumbled on this photograph.

JON MOOALLEM: You know, maybe I don't have it.

JAD: Black and white picture.

JON MOOALLEM: Oh, yeah. Here we go.

JAD: Two baseball players facing each other. Afros, huge smiles, and their hands are in the air right about to connect.

JAD: Which one of these is Glenn Burke?

JON MOOALLEM: So Burke's—Burke's the guy in the warm-up jacket. I think he's even got his hat on backwards.

JAD: Glenn Burke was a center fielder for the LA Dodgers in the '70s. Big guy.

JON MOOALLEM: He says he had 17-inch biceps. So I'll take his—I'll take his word for that.

JAD: The other guy in the picture is Dusty Baker. He's an outfielder. But you can tell in the picture just from the way that Glenn is sort of throwing his whole body forward that he's the one initiating the gesture.

JON MOOALLEM: I mean, this is a guy who was, you know, the soul of the Dodgers clubhouse.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He just had that type of charisma.

ROBERT: This is Lutha Burke Davis, Glenn's sister.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: With Glenn it was like he would always be on the stage. I often said he should have been a comedian.

JON MOOALLEM: He was always dancing around in the—in the clubhouse. He used to do Richard Pryor stand-up routines just from memory.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He just genuinely loved people.

ROBERT: So much so she says, that in the year that picture was taken, the Dodgers made him their sort of public face of the team.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He was their Ambassador of Goodwill.

ROBERT: He's the guy they'd send out to all the press events.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: You know, like meet the youngsters, or ...

ROBERT: That sort of thing.

JON MOOALLEM: Here's the story about this picture.

JAD: What was the date?

JON MOOALLEM: October 5th, poetically enough, 1977.

JAD: It's the playoffs. Dodgers versus the Phillies. Game four. Bases are loaded.

JON MOOALLEM: Dusty Baker ...

ROBERT: Steps to the plate ...

JON MOOALLEM: And grand slam.

JAD: Crowd goes nuts.

ROBERT: Baker does his victory lap.

JAD: And just as he's ...

JON MOOALLEM: You know, rounding third, coming to the plate.

ROBERT: Burke comes racing out of the dugout ...

JON MOOALLEM: And he's got his arm really high up, and Baker ...

JAD: Sees him, instinctively raises his arm, and before you know it ...

JON MOOALLEM: Burke and Baker smack hands.

JAD: Bam! There it was.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: The sportscasters that would, you know, announcing the game, said they had never seen that done in sports before.

JON MOOALLEM: And from there on, the Dodgers started high-fiving and everyone else started high-fiving.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: The high-five ...

JAD: Became a thing.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And it all began with that one moment.

JON MOOALLEM: The platonic high-five right there.

ROBERT: Unfortunately, that moment ...

JON MOOALLEM: That was actually both the beginning and also almost the end of Burke's career.

JAD: It's not that he wasn't good. He was actually really good, even in his rookie season.

JON MOOALLEM: He was being talked about as the next Willie Mays by the Dodgers organization.

ROBERT: But ...

JON MOOALLEM: He was gay. And he tried to keep that a secret while he was playing. Dusty Baker actually had kept trying to set him up with his wife's cousins, and Burke never want—never liked any of them. And Baker's completely confused because he knew, you know, these were these were really good-looking women, apparently. So there were rumors circulating, and the rumors reached the front office of the LA Dodgers. And—and one day, Burke was called in by management and they offered him $75,000 to get married.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: $75,000.

JAD: To get married?

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: What is this, like the mob or something?

JON MOOALLEM: Well, exactly. I mean, they didn't regularly offer their players money to get—to get married. And Burke's response apparently was—he said, "I suppose you mean to a woman."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JON MOOALLEM: Shortly after that, the Dodgers traded him to the Oakland A's for a player who everyone acknowledged was completely inferior.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: That was confusing for us, and I know it had to be confusing for him.

JON MOOALLEM: It was shocking to everyone. No one understood why he was traded.

JAD: And you think it was because he was gay?

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah. Yeah.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: You know, baseball is the all-American sport.

JAD: Yeah.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: But, you know, at least he was still gonna be able to play ball. Or at least he thought.

JON MOOALLEM: He ends up in Oakland. Doesn't get very much playing time.

ROBERT: And when he did get on the field, it wasn't very pleasant.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He used to get heckled a lot, you know, from people in the bleachers and ...

ROBERT: And even worse, according to a couple of different people his coach ...

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Billy Martin.

ROBERT: Would often introduce Glenn Burke this way.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: This is Glenn Burke, the faggot.

JAD: Really?

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Yeah.

JON MOOALLEM: And so Glenn Burke retires.

JAD: Wow, and he was only, like, 26 or something, right?

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Yes. He was young.

JON MOOALLEM: Within a year of his rookie season. Just walks away.

JAD: God, that's like a aborted career.

JON MOOALLEM: Exactly. From there, he ends up in the Castro District in San Francisco, which is the big gay neighborhood.

JAD: And things go okay for a while.

ROBERT: But then one day when he's crossing the street ...

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Three teenaged girls in their mother's car ...

JAD: Come barreling down the road.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: And they hit him and broke his leg in three places.

JAD: Oh, man.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: And that kind of ended everything when that happened.

ROBERT: He starts taking painkillers. One thing leads to another.

JON MOOALLEM: He gets hooked on crack. Can't hold a job. He goes broke.

JAD: Ends up living ...

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: On the street.

JON MOOALLEM: And in 1994, Burke is diagnosed with—with HIV or AIDS. I guess AIDS at that point.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: He ended up coming to live with me. A lot of times he didn't sleep well at night, and we would sit up and talk. Put on music. And I danced, and he'd move his arms around because he was in the bed. He was bedridden.

JAD: And so you took care of him 'til he died?

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: Yeah.

JAD: And Glenn Burke died in 1995.

ROBERT: But what he's left with at this point is he's left with the original high-five, right? That's his claim.

JON MOOALLEM: Yes. Yes. That defined him, to some people at least at the end. And he—and he believed it. A reporter had asked him, you know, if it was true about the high-five and he said, "Yeah, think about the feeling you get when you give someone the high-five. I had that feeling before everybody else did."

JAD: Huh. So what did you do when you got this press release?

JON MOOALLEM: So I called National High-Five Day, because I wanted to talk to Lamont Sleets. Even though I was sad, it seemed like okay, here's another person's prideful accomplishment. Let's get his story.

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Hello? Hello?

JAD: Eventually ...

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Hey, there we go.

JAD: He gets this guy on the phone.

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: My name is Greg Harrell-Edge.

JAD: Greg is one of the founders, and he and Jon gets talking. And Jon asks him the sensible first question.

JON MOOALLEM: Is the Lamont Sleets story true?

ROBERT: He figured it was, but he thought he should at least ask. He's a reporter.

JON MOOALLEM: And there was a pause, and he said, "No."

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Frankly, we've been waiting for someone to ask. We thought no one would ever ask.

JON MOOALLEM: It's not true.

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: This is something that we had made up. We wanted to see if the media would— would run with it.

ROBERT: They made the whole thing up.

JON MOOALLEM: They made the whole thing up, and then they just went to go cast their protagonist.

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: So we sat down. We picked Murray State. That's just kind of a great-sounding school. It pops up in the NCAA tournament every few years.

JON MOOALLEM: And they came across this guy Lamont Sleets.

JAD: Why him?

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Well, it was pretty close to random.

JON MOOALLEM: They then told me they had received an email from Lamont Sleets's wife.

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: Absolutely. His wife emailed us and said some of the details that you have are flat out wrong.

JAD: That implies that some of the things you've said are right, though.

JON MOOALLEM: But Lamont thinks he probably did invent the high-five.

JAD: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What about Glenn?

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: I was kind of like, hmm, kind of a bit blown away, you know?

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, you know, here was this guy who is proud of this, and these guys just kind of stripped it away from him?

JAD: Do you feel a little guilty? That I mean like, okay, it's a high-five. It's kind of a silly thing. On the other hand, this guy's life, the way he died. Do you feel like you robbed him?

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: We do feel—we do feel—we wish that we had done things slightly differently in—in putting together this sort of collegiate prank. But we didn't really know of Glenn Burke at that time.

JAD: Greg says they hadn't heard of the Glenn Burke story when they pulled this prank, and now that they know it, they really feel bad. In fact, they're now organizing a charity event they're calling ...

GREG HARRELL-EDGE: The National High-Five-Athon.

JAD: Which will raise money for charity, including one chosen by Glenn Burke's sister Lutha.

LUTHA BURKE DAVIS: I'm very proud. Any time I see somebody do a high-five, it just really makes me happy.

JAD: And that seemed like a good end to the story.

JON MOOALLEM: But ...

ROBERT: No. Because then Jon told us that ...

JAD: If you really honestly want to get to the bottom of who invented the high-five? I mean, we didn't think we wanted to but now there were in it, what the hell. Well, you've got to go beyond Glenn Burke's story.

JON MOOALLEM: I've wanted you to believe that he was a hero at this point, right? So maybe I should tell you a little bit about Derek Smith, right?

ROBERT: Even though Glenn Burke died believing that the high-five was his legacy, at more or less the same moment that he invented it, a guy named Derek Smith, a basketball player for the Louisville Cardinals was at practice ...

JON MOOALLEM: And a guy named Wiley Brown went up to Derek Smith and was going to give him just a ordinary low-five, and Derek Smith looked him in the eye. This is what Wiley Brown told me. Derek Smith looked him in the eye and said, "No. Up high." That year's Louisville team, they were—they were known as the Doctors of Dunk. You know, they're a high-flying team. They played above the rim.

JAD: And Jon says when Louisville played in the 1980 NCAA finals ...

JON MOOALLEM: I haven't seen it, but apparently the broadcaster referred actually to the high-five handshake.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Giving the high-five handshake. High-fives!]

JON MOOALLEM: He felt compelled to explain it to America.

JAD: Wow, and did—at the moment that Derek Smith did it—did an asteroid fall on his head or something?

JON MOOALLEM: Well in 1996, I believe. In the '90s, he had an undiagnosed heart condition and he just died all of a sudden on a cruise ship.

JAD: What?

JON MOOALLEM: Yes, and he said explicitly to Wiley Brown, "This is something I'm gonna be remembered for. You know, our kids and our grandkids are gonna talk about this." And in fact, their kids and grandkids do talk about it.

JAD: And they're probably very proud. But ...

KATHY GREGORY: Hello, it's Kathy.

ROBERT: Then we ran into this one.

KATHY GREGORY: Fire away.

JAD: This is Kathy Gregory. She coached women's volleyball in the 1960s, years before Glenn Burke and Derek Smith. And she says with her girls ...

KATHY GREGORY: Everyone did it. All the time. So I do believe that it was volleyball that first started it.

JAD: And interestingly, she says they would high-five more when a player screwed up.

KATHY GREGORY: Yes. No, no, it isn't just about celebration.

JAD: Because really, when do you need a high-five?

KATHY GREGORY: Of course, it's more when you're down.

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah, it makes people so happy.

JAD: So women's volleyball. There you go.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Breathless: Non, ce n'est pas fini.]

ROBERT: Non, ce n'est pas fini! Because then our producer Lynn Levy also discovered that in the movie Breathless in 1955, at exactly one hour, 18 minutes into the film, you will see two Frenchmen do a very distinct haute cinq.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Breathless: Amigo!]

ROBERT: Right there!

JAD: [laughs] Isn't this all, like, an indication to you that it—it's maybe—it's one of those things that probably was there at the dawn of man?

JON MOOALLEM: Because it, like, gives pleasure?

JAD: Yeah, it's just like a ...

JON MOOALLEM: Like, from an evolutionary point of view?

ROBERT: No, I don't think so. I think—I think this has the feeling of something that was born. See, now we have to decide. We have to confess. Like. who in this room wants the gay guy to be the inventor?

JON MOOALLEM: I want the gay guy.

ROBERT: Me.

JAD: I'll raise my hand. Sure

ROBERT: Yeah. It's the better story of the two. And something in me says just go with the narrative winner, you know?

PAT WALTERS: You don't even have the narrative winner.

ROBERT: [laughs] What are you doing here? Are we doing a thing?

PAT: I was bored at my desk.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: This is Pat Walters, our producer.

PAT: You guys clearly failed at finding the first high-five.

JAD: And you're saying you have the best?

PAT: Yeah.

JAD: There's no such thing as the best.

PAT: Yes, there is. I'm about to tell you what it is.

JAD: [sighs] We've already beaten a dead horse here. All right, what is it? What is it?

PAT: Hello?

TIM HEMMES: Hi.

PAT: Features this guy named Tim.

TIM HEMMES: Tim Hemmes.

ROBERT: This is him?

PAT: Yep.

KATIE SCHAFFER: Hello?

PAT: And that's his girlfriend Katie.

KATIE SCHAFFER: Katie Schaffer.

PAT: And this little mini story begins in 2004, one July evening.

TIM HEMMES: Beautiful night out.

PAT: Tim's out riding his motorcycle.

TIM HEMMES: And about 10 minutes into my ride, the deer jumped out in front of me, and ...

PAT: He slammed on his brakes, and his bike ...

TIM HEMMES: ... and just kind of like, skidded. And there was a mailbox. Just snapped my neck. I woke up, I was laying in the hospital room. And I opened up my eyes and I went to lift my arm up because I had an itchy nose and my arm wouldn't move.

PAT: He was paralyzed from the neck down. And so for seven years, Tim hasn't been able to hug his daughter, or for that matter, his girlfriend.

TIM HEMMES: Yeah, we started to date after my accident. I've never been able to hold her hand or ...

KATIE SCHAFFER: Reach out and touch me.

TIM HEMMES: I mean, I feel that I'm almost in a prison.

PAT: But fast forward a few years, Tim signs up for an experimental procedure at the University of Pittsburgh. Doctors open his skull, connect wires to the part of his brain that would move his arm if his arm worked, and they connect the wires to a robot arm.

TIM HEMMES: And even Katie said or whatever, whenever she saw the wires coming out, she's like, "That just looks weird."

KATIE SCHAFFER: Crazy.

PAT: And there's a video of one of the first times that Tim actually moves this arm. What you see is him sitting in a chair, doctors kind of watching, and his girlfriend Katie is just in front of him off to the left a little bit.

TIM HEMMES: They hooked me up to the arm, and the machine said ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, doctor: Up.]

TIM HEMMES: Up.

PAT: Tim kind of grimaces.

TIM HEMMES: You know, my brain was sending out that specific type of signal that means up.

PAT: Yeah.

TIM HEMMES: And once the computer was able to read that ...

PAT: The arm ...

TIM HEMMES: Started to go up in the air.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, doctor: All right! There you go.]

PAT: Not long after this moment, Katie stands up from the chair that she was sitting in beside Tim and walks over in front of the arm.

TIM HEMMES: And without even talking, she held out her hand.

PAT: And she says ...

KATIE SCHAFFER: Baby, I want to hold your hand.

PAT: And for a moment, there's this, like, stillness in the room. And then the robot arm jerks forward just like a fraction of an inch.

TIM HEMMES: Katie's hand holding up there, that was target to touch her hand.

PAT: And then the arm jerks up a little bit more.

KATIE SCHAFFER: You can see him going from looking at the arm ...

PAT: And then a little bit more.

KATIE SCHAFFER: ... to looking at me and then looking at the arm.

PAT: A little bit more until they're touching.

KATIE SCHAFFER: When I looked at him, like, I just started tearing up. And then he started tearing up.

PAT: And in a way, this high-five, if you can call it that, it was sort of like the first time they ever touched.

TIM HEMMES: In space and time, I was able to put this piece of machinery that looked very similar to a hand on her hand. Not only did I just touch her, but I pushed into her hand.

KATIE SCHAFFER: It was weird, too, because the hand was actually warm.

PAT: The hand was warm?

KATIE SCHAFFER: Yeah. Like, that's the one thing that I just kept saying to people, like, it was warm. It wasn't cold. I don't know, it just—it still kind of, like, boggles my mind when I think about it.

ROBERT: We should say thank you to Pat Walters, who ...

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: That was kind of ...

JAD: Not bad, Pat Walters. Not bad. Not bad.

JON MOOALLEM: But let's remember, we're after the first, we're not after the best. We're looking for the first.

ROBERT: And we're gonna take one big leap before we finish the show and try something really odd.

JONNIE HUGHES: Hi. How you doing?

ROBERT: We met a guy.

JONNIE HUGHES: I'm Jonnie Hughes. I'm a documentary maker from Britain, also a science journalist.

ROBERT: He's an author. He recently wrote a book.

JONNIE HUGHES: Called The Origin of Teepees. And it's about ...

JAD: Teepees. Why?

JONNIE HUGHES: Well, if I'm being honest, it was because it was a sort of pun on The Origin of Species. Nothing much rhymes with species.

ROBERT: Ah! [laughs]

ROBERT: You see, Johnny wanted to write a book about the origins of ideas the same way that Darwin wrote his book about the origin of species.

JONNIE HUGHES: So I went chasing off after teepees.

ROBERT: Which brought him to the USA. And then he ended up driving across the country.

JONNIE HUGHES: Straight across, going west onto the Great Plains.

ROBERT: As he did, the farms gave way to prairie and then to wide open fields. And it was at that point that he noticed something a little different. There was a distinct change in headgear.

JONNIE HUGHES: Yeah, as soon as you get onto the short grass prairie.

ROBERT: Right after Bismarck.

JONNIE HUGHES: There's a very obvious transition from baseball caps to cowboy hats.

ROBERT: And that got him to wondering, like, how did the cowboy hat get to the West? Suddenly, there it is, and he's thinking, who designed it or created it or invented it? And he decided to do some research. And at first, the answers seemed pretty obvious and actually quite simple. So here's his explanation number one.

JONNIE HUGHES: So the answer one to the question, who invented the cowboy hat, it's straightforward.

ROBERT: And it goes like this. 1865. The gold rush. Colorado. Everyone's coming in from all over the world to make their fortune panning for gold. They bring their hats.

JONNIE HUGHES: So there's a sort of mixture of hats from all different parts of the world, from the north, from the south, from the cities. Quite a ridiculous collection of hats, we might say.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JONNIE HUGHES: You've got silk top hats.

ROBERT: No!

JONNIE HUGHES: Seriously.

ROBERT: In Colo—in the gold rush?

JONNIE HUGHES: In the gold rush.

ROBERT: That would be your Abe Lincoln hat.

JONNIE HUGHES: Great in the East Coast cities, pretty useless on the top of Pikes Peak.

JAD: Why? Because it's—because it gets blown off by the wind?

JONNIE HUGHES: Blown off. It gets wet.

ROBERT: So you've got your Abe, but you. also have ...

JONNIE HUGHES: Raccoon skin hats, the sort of Davy Crockett things.

ROBERT: Great in the winter, but come the summer ...

JONNIE HUGHES: They got full of fleas, and they made you really hot as well.

JAD: That's not good.

JONNIE HUGHES: You also had straw hats from the plantations from the South.

ROBERT: Which are, I don't know, kind of flimsy.

JONNIE HUGHES: There would have been some sombreros.

ROBERT: Not bad, actually.

JONNIE HUGHES: Yeah. Keep the sun off your eyes, keep you cool. But they have enormous brims.

ROBERT: The problem is, when it rains ...

JONNIE HUGHES: The water just collects and stays on there.

ROBERT: There you are in Colorado with lots and lots of hats.

JONNIE HUGHES: But none of them were perfect. All of them were slightly unfit.

ROBERT: Enter Mr. John B. Stetson.

JONNIE HUGHES: He was the son of a hatmaker in the East Coast, and he came over looking for his fortune. And the story goes ...

ROBERT: When he landed in Colorado, he looked around and he immediately saw an opportunity.

JONNIE HUGHES: Went back to the east coast, gathered his thoughts.

ROBERT: And in a moment of unnatural and inspired inspiration, if you can be so inspired, he saw ...

JONNIE HUGHES: The fully formed cowboy hat.

JAD: In his head.

JONNIE HUGHES: Yeah, so he had the model in his head.

JAD: And what was it?

JONNIE HUGHES: So his model was it needed to have a wide brim to keep the sun and the rain off your head, but not as wide as a sombrero because that was impractical. But also much wider than, say, a top hat, which was useless.

ROBERT: And it needed to be waterproof.

JONNIE HUGHES: Because he knew that it was wet over in the West.

ROBERT: Needed to have a high dome on top to keep you cool up there.

JONNIE HUGHES: He knew what it ought to be.

ROBERT: So after a little hammering and stretching and cutting, he had the perfect hat, and he called it The Boss of the Plains.

JONNIE HUGHES: Which everyone in the West wanted to be. So picture the scene: Boss of the Plains arrives. It's gorgeous. You want one. You threw away your horrible raccoon thing and you went for one of those. It very quickly became a status symbol.

ROBERT: That is story number one.

JAD: Pretty straightforward.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: It was a guy.

ROBERT: It's a guy.

JONNIE HUGHES: It's JB Stetson. He came up with the idea. He was a genius. He got it sold.

JAD: Okay, what's the problem with that story? That seems fine.

ROBERT: Well, the problem with that, says Jonnie, and he realized that the moment he landed out and he started to look into this.

JAD: Uh-huh?

ROBERT: Close your eyes and imagine, you know, your quintessential cowboy hat.

JAD: You're asking me to do this?

ROBERT: Yeah. Please, just do it.

JAD: Okay. Got it in my head.

ROBERT: Is it a high domed ...

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: ... broad brimmed?

JAD: Very. It's got a dent in the top.

JONNIE HUGHES: Well see, the picture that we have in our heads is not what Stetson invented.

JAD: Really? Why? I mean, what did Stetsons look like?

JONNIE HUGHES: Probably the dullest cowboy hat you could possibly imagine. No rolling at the edge of the brim, no dents on the crown. Had a little ribbon around it.

JAD: A ribbon?

JONNIE HUGHES: Yeah.

JAD: Not very bossy. That's dainty.

JONNIE HUGHES: [laughs]

ROBERT: So Johnny did some more research, and he now comes up—this is coming up now, theory number two to explain who or what designed the hat. Again, 1865. It's Colorado. Gold rush time. People are coming in from all over. JB Stetson shows up, he makes the hat. But the hat was very expensive.

JONNIE HUGHES: You couldn't afford more than one. So from then on, for the next 10 years ...

ROBERT: You would wear it, like, all the time.

JONNIE HUGHES: You'd be picking it up the whole time with the crown, so you'd be pushing these dents into it every time you sort of yee-hawed.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JONNIE HUGHES: And you'd also be sleeping on your hats. You'd be folding over the brim. So within a few years, the cowboy heroes, these guys are turning up at the railhead towns with these, what we might call in Britain, knackered Boss of the Plains hats.

ROBERT: That looked like a completely different hat than the one they bought in the store.

JONNIE HUGHES: They'll be battered.

ROBERT: And, you know, think about this. If you're a young cowboy and you're looking for your first cowboy hat ...

JONNIE HUGHES: You want one that looks like the guy who runs the hardware shop?

ROBERT: Who's got the pretty dainty one.

JONNIE HUGHES: Or do you want the one with the dent in it like your dad, the cowboy?

ROBERT: And so hat makers picked up on this and they began producing pre-dented, crumpled knackered hats.

JONNIE HUGHES: Stetson responded as well. You can look through the kind of order books of Stetson, and you will see the designs change over time.

ROBERT: All of which is to say, if you want to tell the story this way, you can say, yeah, Stetson was there. Stetson played his part. But when it comes to a true cowboy hat, the one we think of when we think of a hat, Stetson really didn't invent it.

JONNIE HUGHES: The cowboys did. The entire population of cowboys were instrumental in choosing the future evolution of the cowboy hat. It's almost like the market's deciding, which in this case is cowboys.

JAD: And can I just plant my flag and say that seems like a very sensible theory.

ROBERT: It does.

JONNIE HUGHES: But, um ...

ROBERT: ... something about this story number two was still nagging Johnny.

JAD: Oh, there's more?

ROBERT: He's gonna go one more round. Do you want to come with him?

JAD: I will go.

ROBERT: Here we go.

JONNIE HUGHES: The third answer to the question who invented the cowboy hat is no one did.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Well, someone did.

JONNIE HUGHES: What I mean is that there were no mindful decisions going on here. Not even a community of people mindfully chose where the cowboy hat was gonna go.

JAD: Mindfully?

JONNIE HUGHES: Yeah. So ...

JAD: What do you suppose he means by 'mindfully?'

ROBERT: This is where you get a little bit of science. You know that if you were, say, a mouse, and you were living in an environment, happily, and then all of a sudden things turn cold. If you have short hair, you're gonna shiver and then maybe die.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: But if another mouse happens to have longer hair ...

JONNIE HUGHES: You know they're gonna do better. They're gonna do better in life. They're gonna have more baby mice.

ROBERT: So over time in this community, you're gonna get more and more and more mice with longer and longer hair.

JAD: Makes sense.

ROBERT: Now these mice, they don't choose the length of their hair. They just have the hair they got. It is the weather, it is the local environment, that's what really shapes these mice. And you could think of the hat in the same way.

JONNIE HUGHES: We're looking at the hat shape itself. The hat shape is changing over time without any forethought.

ROBERT: Thanks to that gold rush in the 1860s, you got a whole bunch of very different hats showing up on the Great Plains. And all those hats show up on heads, and those heads and hats are going to have horribly cold winters, searingly hot summers. They're gonna be in the wind, they're gonna be out of doors, because the main occupation is gonna be moving cattle across the plains.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: In this very competitive hat situation, the hat that's gonna survive is the hat that keeps you comfortable, keeps you cool, keeps you dry. In other words, the cowboy hat. Therefore, in this third version of our story, it wasn't Mr. Stetson, it wasn't the cowboys. According to Johnny ...

JONNIE HUGHES: The environment created the hat.

ROBERT: The wind created the hat. The rain, the sun, the snow, the weather created those hats.

JONNIE HUGHES: Absolutely right.

ROBERT: This hat was just bound to appear in that place in that time.

JONNIE HUGHES: It would have been invented by someone because the habitat was there, the environment was right.

JAD: There's something kind of poetic about the idea that the hat was called The Boss of the Plains, and if your third movie is correct, then it's really the plains were the boss of the hat, or something else.

JONNIE HUGHES: [laughs] Jad, that's brilliant. I like that one.

JAD: But see, on the other hand, I'm not sure I like it, because, like, I'm just thinking about all the edits that we do as storytellers, like, for the pieces in the show. Like, the thing we're always trying to do is kind of get to moments, and we're trying to always atomize everything, get down to the particular person who made the particular decision that resulted in the particular change. That's what we want as storytellers. So in some sense, your scenario three is like the death of story in some sense. It's the anti story.

JONNIE HUGHES: [laughs] Feels less glamorous, doesn't it?

JAD: Well yeah, it runs counter.

JONNIE HUGHES: But you know what? When Darwin came up with the theory—well, when he published his theory of evolution by natural selection, that felt like a death in a way because it felt like you were taking away the creator, this amazing being. You were diminishing life to a sort of mindless process. So a lot of people criticized him for the same thing. It's not as romantic, it's not as—well, it is as awesome. It's just not in the same way.

JAD: Yeah. And come to think of it, we always end up screwing up our stories by—you know, we start to ask questions.

ROBERT: And then all of a sudden you're sucked into this thing.

JAD: Suddenly it's got a little complicated and you have to deal with it.

ROBERT: You have to deal with the everythingness of everything.

JAD: Let's just keep it simple.

ROBERT: Once upon a time, Jad and Robert came into a show and said, "That's the end of it." And you know what? It was. No. See, it's always more complicated than that, isn't it?

JAD: It's true.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: I mean, it's never really the end. Think about it. What is an end? You get the ...

ROBERT: Funding credits and all these things.

JAD: You get some credits ...

[BEATRICE HAHN: Hi, Radiolab, this is Beatrice Hahn. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[DAVID QUAMMEN: This is Quammen. Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole. With help from Jonathan Mitchell, Rachel James and Matt Kielty. Special thanks to Mike Seller, Chris Kondian, Sidney Smith, Ben Feldman ...]

[BEATRICE HAHN: Marva Feltchin and Katie Slocum.]

[DAVID QUAMMEN: That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Okay, you all. Bye-bye.]

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