Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey'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 right there on display, just
Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighteen, civil engineer Sir William Cubitt invented a
Speaker 1: form of torture. It didn't drip water, nor did it
Speaker 1: stretch its victims to uncomfortable lengths. It didn't even draw
Speaker 1: a single drop of blood, but it did cause a
Speaker 1: lot of sweat and pain. He designed the device for
Speaker 1: use in prisons as a means to reform criminals. If
Speaker 1: incarceration wasn't incentive enough. He believed his method would surely
Speaker 1: deter prisoners from becoming repeat offenders, and before long, prisons
Speaker 1: across Britain installed their own, and they called it the
Speaker 1: Eternal staircase. Prisoners were forced to climb the thin spokes
Speaker 1: of a paddle wheel repeatedly. It was effective too. In fact,
Speaker 1: the British Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline published
Speaker 1: a guideline and rules for the House of Corrections and Penitentiaries,
Speaker 1: in which Cubit's staircase was listed as a way for
Speaker 1: prisoners to earn an honest day's work. You see, the
Speaker 1: repetitive motion of climbing the large paddle wheel created enough
Speaker 1: power to crush grains for mills or pump water. Up
Speaker 1: to twenty four convicts climbed the large spokes at one
Speaker 1: time for up to eight hours a day. The Surrey
Speaker 1: House of Correction, home to one of the first devices,
Speaker 1: turned a profit grinding corn, and that made the prison
Speaker 1: mill system popular when it came to punishment. The guards
Speaker 1: claimed the device terrorized prisoners by sheer monotony. Those who
Speaker 1: endured the experiences often said they were scarred for life,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't an exaggeration. Irish novelist Oscar Wilde, who
Speaker 1: had been incarcerated for two years, never recovered from the cruelty,
Speaker 1: passing away three years after his release. Though less common
Speaker 1: in America, one institution did follow in Britain's footsteps, New
Speaker 1: York's Bellevue Hospital. There, the machine developed a notorious reputation,
Speaker 1: not so much as a medieval torture device. It wasn't
Speaker 1: an iron maiden or Iraq. After all, no patients reported
Speaker 1: the repetition of a pointless act was pure torture. Finally,
Speaker 1: in British courts deemed cubits invention inhumane and abolished its
Speaker 1: use in prisons. The labor was deemed too hard and
Speaker 1: the psychological trauma too great. Decades later, in ninety nine,
Speaker 1: flatter form of the device was patented by man named
Speaker 1: John Richards as a means to exercise dogs, but that
Speaker 1: also turned out to be a failure. The apparatus res
Speaker 1: urpist again for human use just after the end of
Speaker 1: World War Two, when a researcher at the University of
Speaker 1: Washington needed a way to test cardiac function. The doctor
Speaker 1: added a motor to the nineteen thirty nine dog walker
Speaker 1: and hooked up test subjects to an e k G.
Speaker 1: Aside from testing the patient's heart, other medical uses soon emerged.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen sixties, Army and Air Force physician Dr
Speaker 1: Kenneth Cooper used it to measure oxygen consumption in pilots.
Speaker 1: Both Cooper and the cardiologist were able to find hidden
Speaker 1: heart conditions, although given the device's history, their work remained controversial.
Speaker 1: The medical community said that stressing healthy people's hearts was
Speaker 1: reckless that it endangered lives. Cooper disagreed, though, stating that
Speaker 1: Americans had become far too sedentary. As a runner, he
Speaker 1: believed people could benefit from regular, strenuous activity. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, he published a book on fitness, detailing the
Speaker 1: benefits from yoga to aerobics, along with his favorite exer,
Speaker 1: size running. Before long running became exceptionally popular, people everywhere
Speaker 1: took up the activity. Winters, though, presented a problem, so
Speaker 1: a mechanical engineer named Bill Straub came up with a solution.
Speaker 1: The same cardiovascular devices the doctors had used. Too big
Speaker 1: and bulky for homes, the apparatus slowly found its way
Speaker 1: into gym's that previously focused exclusively on weights. Straub called
Speaker 1: the device the PaceMaster and sold it for four hundred
Speaker 1: dollars roughly d dollars today, and it's fair to say
Speaker 1: that the device worked. When Strab passed away in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, he was nineties six years old. Along the way,
Speaker 1: dozens of companies had emerged as competition. Sales reached nearly
Speaker 1: one billion in two thousand seventeen. Today, approximately fifty three
Speaker 1: million of Straub's devices are inside people's homes. Others flocked
Speaker 1: to Jim's paying to use what once was a torture device,
Speaker 1: and admittedly we still have a love hate relationship with them.
Speaker 1: We no longer call them the Eternal staircase or Pacemasters. No,
Speaker 1: the modern day version is simply known as the treadmill.
Speaker 1: Ask anyone to rattle off a list of inventors and
Speaker 1: their inventions, and you'll get plenty of replies. Edison and
Speaker 1: the lightbulb, bell and the telephone, and the right brothers
Speaker 1: and airplanes, just to name a few. And while some
Speaker 1: inventors like Tesla were considered ahead of their time, there
Speaker 1: were others lost to time. Such was the case for
Speaker 1: Cornelius Drebble in he married and the couple went on
Speaker 1: to have six children. To support his growing family, he
Speaker 1: held down several jobs as a painter and engraver, although
Speaker 1: he also dabbled in alchemy. The family moved to England
Speaker 1: in sixteen o four by the invitation of King James
Speaker 1: the First. The new King sought out explorers, alchemists and
Speaker 1: economists for his court, and it was there under the
Speaker 1: King's employ that Drebble demonstrated his newest invention, A perpetual
Speaker 1: motion device that told the time, the season, and the weather.
Speaker 1: The device not only impressed the king, but also caught
Speaker 1: the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, escalating Drebbel's reputation
Speaker 1: as one of the most influential inventors in Europe. He
Speaker 1: was prolific, creating things like moving statues for the Renaissance court,
Speaker 1: along with harpsichords that played on their own using solar energy.
Speaker 1: And art wasn't the inventor's only love. With an educational
Speaker 1: background in chemistry and alchemy, he soon set to work
Speaker 1: on other technologies for farming. He built an incubator for
Speaker 1: hatching chicken eggs, and he created a regulator for use
Speaker 1: with the portable stove. And it was that work with
Speaker 1: incubators and stoves that led him to create early versions
Speaker 1: of thermometers and a functional air conditioning system. Oh and
Speaker 1: during his work with regulator, he accidentally discovered a new
Speaker 1: scarlet dye by dropping chemicals onto a tin window cell.
Speaker 1: A bright red color became an instant hit. The exact
Speaker 1: chemicals and mixture of it, though, were kept secrets. Although
Speaker 1: Drebble himself did not make a lot of money from
Speaker 1: the die, his two daughters and their husbands did, operating
Speaker 1: a prosperous business making the formula. There were more inventions too.
Speaker 1: He created fountains that delivered fresh water, the first camera obscura,
Speaker 1: and a method for grinding lenses for telescopes and microscopes.
Speaker 1: And he also created the first lantern magica or magic lantern,
Speaker 1: a device much like a projector using concave glass and
Speaker 1: a mirror to project light onto a wall. He created
Speaker 1: the first compound microscope with two convex lenses, although a
Speaker 1: Dutch spectacle maker claimed that Drebble stole the idea from him.
Speaker 1: Later in six four, an Italian scientist loved the lenses
Speaker 1: so much that he improved upon Drebble's work his name Galileo.
Speaker 1: But Drebble's best work was the stuff he saved for
Speaker 1: the King. He worked on secret weapons, mostly bombs and
Speaker 1: other methods of detonation. His floating bomb was a failure,
Speaker 1: but in sixteen twenty he was hired to work with
Speaker 1: the King's navy and began work on another invention that
Speaker 1: became one of his biggest obsessions ever. He designed a
Speaker 1: boat made with a wooden frame and then covered it
Speaker 1: with greased leather to make it more water proof. The
Speaker 1: first rendition had a basic rudder and four oars. Excited
Speaker 1: by the possibilities, Drebble built two more, each larger than
Speaker 1: the one before it. The final version of the boat
Speaker 1: carried sixteen people at a time. The King's Navy viewed
Speaker 1: the ship as an oddity, though as it carried no
Speaker 1: cargo other than men. There were no cannons either. The
Speaker 1: main purpose, according to Drebble, was to allow the King's
Speaker 1: men to sneak up on their enemies. The idea of
Speaker 1: such a covert vessel was not an original idea. William
Speaker 1: Bourne had drawn up similar designs in fifteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: but Drebble had improved a on them enough to make
Speaker 1: an actual working prototype. He named the craft after himself,
Speaker 1: the Drebble, and organized a demonstration for the King and
Speaker 1: the Navy right there in London on the Thames. Having
Speaker 1: quite a reputation for his inventions, thousands of excited Londoners
Speaker 1: flanked the river banks to see what Drebble had in store.
Speaker 1: Absence of large sails and masts, the Drebble maintained a
Speaker 1: low profile. There was very little deck to speak of either,
Speaker 1: and the boat swam more than it sailed as it
Speaker 1: made its way from Westminster to Greenwich and back. The
Speaker 1: entire trip took the ship three hours. On one leg
Speaker 1: of the trip, it said that King James himself rode
Speaker 1: as a passenger. But although the boat had set out
Speaker 1: to do what its inventor intended, the King and the
Speaker 1: Royal Navy remained less than impressed. It would take another
Speaker 1: few centuries before any military saw the value in using
Speaker 1: a drebble, but they finally did catch on today, though
Speaker 1: we call them by a different name, submarines. I hope
Speaker 1: you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about
Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
Speaker 1: was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the World
Speaker 1: of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,