Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. The media is no stranger to spin papers
Speaker 1: and TV channels on the right and the left. Both
Speaker 1: have their agendas. They compete for dollars and eyeballs, pandering
Speaker 1: to audiences with sensationalist headlines and juicy stories. Because it's
Speaker 1: hard to stand out in a crowd, isn't it. When
Speaker 1: one news source outperforms another. It's common for competitors to
Speaker 1: try anything for a bigger slice of the pie. And
Speaker 1: you know what it's going on. Since before the age
Speaker 1: of twenty four hour news networks, way before at the
Speaker 1: turn of the twentieth century, America declared war against Spain.
Speaker 1: Cuba had been fighting for independence from Spanish rule since
Speaker 1: eight and the news being reported at the time was
Speaker 1: being filtered through interpreters and hearsay, most of which was
Speaker 1: pro revolution. Journalists didn't fact check what they were being told,
Speaker 1: they simply reported what they had heard and moved on
Speaker 1: to the next story. Nowhere was this more prominent than
Speaker 1: in The New York World, a newspaper owned by Joseph Pulitzer,
Speaker 1: and The New York Journal, which was owned by William
Speaker 1: Randolph Hurst. The owners didn't only compete at the news stand,
Speaker 1: Hearst and Pullitzer shamelessly carried out their rivalry in public,
Speaker 1: most often within the pages of their respective newspapers. The
Speaker 1: ethical codes that today's modern journalists lived by didn't exist
Speaker 1: at the time, so the papers were hotbeds of shoddy journalism,
Speaker 1: driven by a philosophy of whatever it takes. For exact ample,
Speaker 1: the USS Maine, an American battleship that had been stationed
Speaker 1: in Havana, exploded on February fifteenth. Over two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty men were killed in the blast, and reporters swooped
Speaker 1: in to cover the story. Though the military put out
Speaker 1: a public statement claiming that the explosion had been an
Speaker 1: accident caused by a spontaneous fire, the Journal and the
Speaker 1: World came up with their own stories. They invented sources
Speaker 1: and made up facts. Each paper had its own agenda,
Speaker 1: which they pushed by any means necessary. Hurst even promised
Speaker 1: a fifty thousand dollar reward of the person who brought
Speaker 1: those responsible for murdering two hundred fifty eight American sailors
Speaker 1: to justice. Anything, of course, to sell a paper, However,
Speaker 1: filling pages and column inches with brand new reporting each
Speaker 1: day was a herculean task. Sometimes the news was slow,
Speaker 1: other times what was available to report wasn't exciting enough.
Speaker 1: It wasn't uncommon for one paper to steal a headline
Speaker 1: or even an entire story from another, adding fuel to
Speaker 1: their feud, and it happened often. The situation came to
Speaker 1: a head after Hurst had gotten tired of seeing his
Speaker 1: papers copy in Pulitzer's New York World, so he decided
Speaker 1: to take the fight right to them with a story
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be able to refuse. It involved Austrian artillerist
Speaker 1: Colonel refilpe w fen News. The colonel had been fighting
Speaker 1: on behalf of the Cubans when he was killed in battle.
Speaker 1: The journal story was a reverent encapsulation of the colonel's
Speaker 1: contributions to the war effort, and it was taken almost
Speaker 1: word for word and reprinted in the New York World.
Speaker 1: Hirst didn't even have to read the whole article to
Speaker 1: know it. All he had to do was see the
Speaker 1: colonel's name printed in Pullitzer's paper, right there in black
Speaker 1: and white. Because reflip a w than news didn't really exist,
Speaker 1: Hurst made him up in an effort to catch Pullezer
Speaker 1: red handed. Even the name was a dead giveaway. It
Speaker 1: was a nanagram that unraveled into the phrase we pilfer
Speaker 1: the news. Of course, Pullitzer didn't have the moral high
Speaker 1: ground either. His papers were just as guilty of plagiarism
Speaker 1: as Hearst's. In retaliation for Hurst's dirty trick with the Colonel,
Speaker 1: The New York World published a story featuring the name
Speaker 1: lister A Raw, which inevitably wound up in Pulitzer's paper.
Speaker 1: The media magnate had no idea that he had been
Speaker 1: had lister A Raw wasn't real. His name, like the colonel's,
Speaker 1: had been in anagram, the letters of which rearranged into
Speaker 1: the words first a liar. Inspiration can strike from anywhere,
Speaker 1: whether it's in the shower, while cooking dinner or mowing
Speaker 1: the lawn. We never know when we're going to be
Speaker 1: hit with the next big idea. People watched birds sore
Speaker 1: through the sky for generations as they devised contraptions to
Speaker 1: give themselves the power of flight. Wales provided the inspiration
Speaker 1: for submarines, and chemist Roy Plunkett was researching CFC refrigerants
Speaker 1: for du Pont when his tetra flora ethylene gas accidentally
Speaker 1: hardened into a powder. It turned out that the powder
Speaker 1: was heat resistant and made a great lubricant. With a
Speaker 1: few more tweaks, polytetra flora ethylene, otherwise known as teflon
Speaker 1: was born. Of course, inspiration doesn't always drop out of
Speaker 1: the sky or rise from the deep, nor fall like
Speaker 1: snowflakes into our laps. Sometimes it hits us like a
Speaker 1: blast of lightning. Militaries all over the world have spent
Speaker 1: thousands of years looking for an advantage on the battlefield.
Speaker 1: Weaponry has advanced considerably in the days of swords and arrows.
Speaker 1: Today we have guns, missiles, and all sorts of weapons
Speaker 1: designed to damage the human body in ways we could
Speaker 1: never imagine. In two thousand eighteen, China claim did had
Speaker 1: developed a handheld rifle capable of firing a laser beam
Speaker 1: strong enough to set clothes on fire. The beam could
Speaker 1: also penetrate glass and even shoot through a fuel tank
Speaker 1: to cause an explosion. The US military, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: already has a non lethal energy weapon that can heat
Speaker 1: any surface it's pointed at, including human skin. It was
Speaker 1: designed as a way to control unruly crowds and contain
Speaker 1: prison riots. There had even been talks to develop a
Speaker 1: device that would make someone think they were hearing voices
Speaker 1: in their head. It would have fired short bursts of
Speaker 1: r F energy, capable of carrying words straight to a
Speaker 1: person's ears. Such an instrument could have been used to
Speaker 1: plant thoughts into a target's head or make them feel
Speaker 1: as though they were losing control of their mind. It
Speaker 1: had also been conceived as a method for contacting hostages
Speaker 1: in order to provide them with instructions given no other
Speaker 1: way to reach them. However, one weapon was nearly borne
Speaker 1: from one of the most unlikely places, and due to
Speaker 1: its intended effects, it was also one of the most unethical.
Speaker 1: According to a declassified army document released around two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: the military was planning on constructing a weapon that would
Speaker 1: have disrupted a person's brain activity using electro magnetic pulses,
Speaker 1: in other words, by rapidly flashing light into someone's eyes.
Speaker 1: The Army would have been able to trigger a seizure
Speaker 1: in anyone. The technology had also been planned to be tuneable,
Speaker 1: meaning it could have caused anything from loss of basic
Speaker 1: motor functions to full on epileptic episodes, depending on the
Speaker 1: speed of the pulses being fired and where did they
Speaker 1: get the idea to build such a weapon. A children's
Speaker 1: television show Pokemon, an episode of the Japanese cartoon, was
Speaker 1: blamed for sending seven hundred people to the hospital for
Speaker 1: something called photic seizure induction. The flashing red and blue
Speaker 1: lights had triggered seizures in victims ranging from three years
Speaker 1: old all the way up to fifty eight and older.
Speaker 1: Two hundred viewers remain hospitalized for days due to epileptic symptoms.
Speaker 1: Pokemon stopped airing for four months, but reports of the
Speaker 1: cartoons effects made their way back to the United States,
Speaker 1: where they stirred up public debate as well as military
Speaker 1: research and development. Parents were their children would also begin
Speaker 1: convulsive if they watch Pokemon, while Army scientists and engineers
Speaker 1: started drafting plans for a new kind of weapon, one
Speaker 1: that was non lethal but could incapacitate anyone over a
Speaker 1: distance of hundreds of meters. Like many of the devices
Speaker 1: described before, this seizure gun was never actually built. However,
Speaker 1: it's one rock among a mountain of evidence that the
Speaker 1: world's armies are constantly dreaming up new ways to hurt
Speaker 1: and even kill anyone they perceive as a threat, and
Speaker 1: that their inspiration can come from anywhere, be it nature,
Speaker 1: a scientific breakthrough, or even something benign as a children's
Speaker 1: cartoon about superpowered animals. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided
Speaker 1: tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting
Speaker 1: Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me
Speaker 1: Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make
Speaker 1: another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
Speaker 1: book series, and television show, and you can learn all
Speaker 1: about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
Speaker 1: And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,