Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world
Speaker 1: is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an
Speaker 1: open book, all of these amazing tales are right there
Speaker 1: on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the Cabinet of Curiosities. He was a curious child when
Speaker 1: the Great Depression hit in the nineteen twenties. His family
Speaker 1: didn't have a lot of money for the basics, much
Speaker 1: less extras like toys, so young Richard Thompson James had
Speaker 1: to get creative. Then in he stumbled upon and abandoned
Speaker 1: buick at just thirteen. He was determined to fix up
Speaker 1: the car, and after getting it to run, he sold
Speaker 1: it twenty five dollars. The effort sparked a love affair
Speaker 1: with how things worked. By the late nineteen thirties, equipped
Speaker 1: with a mechanical engineering degree, Richard found a job as
Speaker 1: a naval engineer. When World War Two began, he was
Speaker 1: tasked with designing a system to support and stabilize instruments
Speaker 1: for sailing through rough seas. On a muggy day in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty three, he knocked over a spare parts bin.
Speaker 1: As the parts hit the floor, and idea struck him,
Speaker 1: rekindling his curiosity as a child of the depression. He
Speaker 1: spent a year improving upon the concept. He told his
Speaker 1: wife Betty that he was certain he could sell it
Speaker 1: as a toy, and asked her to come up with
Speaker 1: a name for it. While she searched dictionaries for just
Speaker 1: the right word, Richard formed an LLC after securing the
Speaker 1: loan from a friend in ninety six. He made four
Speaker 1: hundred units and marketed them to toy shops. Store after
Speaker 1: store rejected the toy. It was too plain, too simple.
Speaker 1: None of that deterred Richard, though, Instead he set his
Speaker 1: sights even higher. He convinced Gimbal's department store in Philadelphia
Speaker 1: to include the toy in their Christmas display window. As
Speaker 1: the weeks went on, it appeared his simple toy didn't
Speaker 1: stand a chance against the newest dolls and shiny trains.
Speaker 1: Even this didn't stop Richard, though. He told his wife
Speaker 1: to meet him at the department store in a couple
Speaker 1: of hours. He gathered up a few of the toys
Speaker 1: and headed downtown. He set up a display right outside
Speaker 1: the store. He gave the store customers an interactive demonstration.
Speaker 1: By the time his wife arrived, Richards sold all four
Speaker 1: hundred units for a dollar apiece. Lines wrapped around the
Speaker 1: building with customers signing up to buy more. Just before Christmas,
Speaker 1: they sold twenty thousand, and it didn't stop there. A
Speaker 1: couple set up a booth at the American Toy Fair
Speaker 1: in New York the following year. By the end of
Speaker 1: ninety seven, the toy was a national phenomenon. Two years
Speaker 1: after that, they'd sold a million units for a dollar apiece,
Speaker 1: earning one million in revenue that amount to about one
Speaker 1: billion today, But popularity began to decline by the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: One day, Richard confessed to Betty that he had been
Speaker 1: having multiple affairs. Moreover, he announced that he was leaving
Speaker 1: her and their six children to join a cult in Bolivia.
Speaker 1: He told her that he no longer had use for money,
Speaker 1: and gave her two choices, liquidate or become the sole owner.
Speaker 1: Betty took the latter option. She quickly discovered another surprise.
Speaker 1: Though her husband had given away their money to the cult,
Speaker 1: leaving her seven figures in debt for the welfare of
Speaker 1: her children. It was Betty, who now had to get creative.
Speaker 1: She hired a marketing firm to create a jingle. It worked,
Speaker 1: becoming one of the most recognizable jingles of the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies, but rebuilding the company was hard work.
Speaker 1: She put in a lot of hours and was forced
Speaker 1: to leave her kids with a caregiver four days a week.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen seventies, the company made a more
Speaker 1: colorful version of the toy, and popularity sword. Betty went
Speaker 1: on to make the way more successful than her husband
Speaker 1: ever had, selling millions of variations and more than three
Speaker 1: hundred million copies of the original. She sold the company
Speaker 1: for what she described as a boatload of money. She
Speaker 1: had taken a rundown company and turned it around. For
Speaker 1: fifty years, she made the toy a best seller despite
Speaker 1: every new fad and gadget to come along. Betty produced
Speaker 1: enough of the toys to circle the Earth one times,
Speaker 1: and negotiated a deal with Pixar to use the toy
Speaker 1: as a character in toy story, effectively doubling her sales.
Speaker 1: That simple object Betty named in nine and creatively built
Speaker 1: to be one of history's most fun and wonderful toys.
Speaker 1: You might have heard that it walks downstairs alone or
Speaker 1: in pairs. Everyone knows it's slinky. There are a few
Speaker 1: things as traumatic as a house fire. When I was
Speaker 1: growing up, a house directly down the street from my own,
Speaker 1: a house lived in by a classmate of mind from school,
Speaker 1: tragically caught fire one December night, burning the entire structure
Speaker 1: to the ground. Thankfully everyone made it out alive, but
Speaker 1: the devastation was complete. Family heirlooms, wrapped Christmas presents, clothing, toys,
Speaker 1: photo albums, name a precious object, and they lost it.
Speaker 1: And maybe that's why so many of us fear going
Speaker 1: through the same experience. Pull a world history book off
Speaker 1: the shelf and you'll find a number of citywide fires
Speaker 1: listed to The Great Fire of London took place in
Speaker 1: sixteen sixty six, destroying over thirteen thousand houses and making
Speaker 1: some seventy of the people living there homeless. In eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, it was the Great Chicago Fire, taking the
Speaker 1: lives of nearly two fifty people. Rome has burned, as
Speaker 1: as Amsterdam, Munich, Edinburgh, and Moscow, just to name a few,
Speaker 1: And most of the cities on the list burned so
Speaker 1: easily because firefighting was usually sloppy, slow, or just playing
Speaker 1: non existent. But then came Frederick Graff. He was a
Speaker 1: hydraulic engineer born in Philadelphia in seventeen seventy five who
Speaker 1: worked for a long time as a carpenter and a draftsman.
Speaker 1: But it was in seventeen ninety five that he took
Speaker 1: a job as an assistant to a man named Benjamin Latrobe,
Speaker 1: who was an architect. Behind the Center Square water works
Speaker 1: on the side of today's Philadelphia City Hall once stood
Speaker 1: one of his creations, the Pump House. It pulled water
Speaker 1: from the nearby river using steam powered pumps, stored it
Speaker 1: in massive wooden tanks, and then let gravity feeded out
Speaker 1: to nearby houses and businesses using wooden pipes. And Frederick
Speaker 1: Graff was right there beside him, learning and thinking. In
Speaker 1: eighteen o five he was elected to the position of
Speaker 1: superintendent of the water works there, but he and others
Speaker 1: began to notice that the system was just not powerful enough.
Speaker 1: They needed something bigger and better, and by eighteen eleven
Speaker 1: he was guiding the construction of a new facility. Frederick
Speaker 1: was also a fan of forward thinking all over the city.
Speaker 1: The water mains beneath The cobble stones were made of wood,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure they worked for a long while, but
Speaker 1: wood can rot or crack or warp out of alignment.
Speaker 1: So as Frederick made improvements to the old system, he
Speaker 1: began to replace those old wooden mains with new iron ones.
Speaker 1: But that created a new problem. You see, for a while,
Speaker 1: if a fire broke out somewhere in the city, one
Speaker 1: method of fighting it was to pull up the cobble stones,
Speaker 1: tap into the water maine, and then use the water
Speaker 1: to fight the blaze. When they were done, they plugged
Speaker 1: the holes in the maine called fire plugs for obvious reasons,
Speaker 1: and then reburied them. It was smart and inventive, but
Speaker 1: the new iron pipes couldn't be tapped so easily, So
Speaker 1: Frederick went to the drawing boarding came up with the plan.
Speaker 1: At various intervals along the new iron water mains, he
Speaker 1: would install permanent exposed fire plugs basically sealed faucets that could,
Speaker 1: if the need arose, be used by firefighters. I probably
Speaker 1: don't have to say this out loud, but just in
Speaker 1: case you haven't pictured it in your mind, I will.
Speaker 1: Frederick Graph had invented the fire hydrant Today it's a
Speaker 1: common fixture in every neighborhood, both figuratively and literally. But
Speaker 1: when he first proposed the idea, it was revolutionary. As
Speaker 1: metal water mains began to spread to more and more cities,
Speaker 1: so too did this other fresh idea. Today, firefighters everywhere,
Speaker 1: along with dogs with full bladders, have Frederick Graff to
Speaker 1: thank for the tool that makes their job more efficient
Speaker 1: and much more manageable. In an odd twist of faith,
Speaker 1: though it's impossible to say for certain if Frederick Graph
Speaker 1: was indeed the inventor of the fire hydrants. We know
Speaker 1: about his work from other sources, but the actual patent
Speaker 1: for the divice, the document that would make a rock
Speaker 1: solid case for his inventiveness, no longer exists. Why because
Speaker 1: it was kept in the U. S. Patent Office in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Which was destroyed in eighteen thirty six because
Speaker 1: a fire. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
Speaker 1: the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky
Speaker 1: in partnership with How Stuff Works. I make another award
Speaker 1: winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series,
Speaker 1: and television show and you can learn all about it
Speaker 1: over at the world of Lore dot com. And until
Speaker 1: next time, stay curious, Ye