Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
Speaker 1: the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
Speaker 1: of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting
Speaker 1: for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: You ever get that feeling you meet somebody at a
Speaker 1: party or sit down with a new colleague, and for
Speaker 1: some reason you can't help but think that they seem familiar,
Speaker 1: and at some point you just have to ask, don't
Speaker 1: I know you from somewhere? For nineteen year old Bobby Schaffron,
Speaker 1: it seemed everyone at Sullivan County Community College had that
Speaker 1: same feeling. It was moving day in nineteen eighty and
Speaker 1: a dozen people had welcomed him back to school, which
Speaker 1: was very nice, but a little odd because Bobby was
Speaker 1: a brand new student. And another thing. Some people were
Speaker 1: greeting Bobby and they kept calling him by the wrong name, Eddie. Finally,
Speaker 1: one of the other students asked him a strange question,
Speaker 1: was he adopted? When Bobby replied yes, the student grew excited. Bobby.
Speaker 1: He said, I think that you might have a twin.
Speaker 1: It turned out that Bobby Schaffering looked exactly like Eddie Galland,
Speaker 1: another student who attended the college the year before. When
Speaker 1: Bobby met Eddie face to face, the similarities were unmistakable.
Speaker 1: They had both been born on July twelfth of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty one, They were both adopted through the Louise Wise
Speaker 1: adoption agency, and they looked exactly alike. Now, long lost
Speaker 1: twins finding each other is already an amazing story right.
Speaker 1: In fact, it got Bobby and Eddie on the front
Speaker 1: page of several New York newspapers. But the truly miraculous
Speaker 1: twist happened several days later when the boys got a
Speaker 1: call from a guy named David Killman. Bobby and Eddie
Speaker 1: looked exactly like him. They weren't long lost twins, they
Speaker 1: were triplets, and these three men were carbon copies of
Speaker 1: each other. They all had the same curly hair and
Speaker 1: big smiles. They were all adopted by Jewish families in
Speaker 1: New York, and each had an adopted sister who was
Speaker 1: two years older. But the similarities didn't stop there. They
Speaker 1: had big, gregarious personalities. They all liked Chinese food, smoked
Speaker 1: Marlboroughs and wrestled in school. They had never met before,
Speaker 1: but they felt like the oldest of friends. In the
Speaker 1: years after Bobby, Eddie and David found each other, they
Speaker 1: became minor celebrities. They headlined every major talk show and
Speaker 1: were fixtures on the club circuit. They opened a restaurant
Speaker 1: called of Course, Triplets. They even landed a cameo in
Speaker 1: a Madonna movie. But still, the trio had some burning questions.
Speaker 1: For instance, why did they have to find each other
Speaker 1: in the first place. It wasn't common for adoption agencies
Speaker 1: to split up siblings, let alone keep their existence a
Speaker 1: secret from each other. Why had the Louise Wise agency
Speaker 1: lied to the three boys and their families at the
Speaker 1: same time? And the Triplets were asking these questions, so
Speaker 1: was a journalist, Lawrence Wright. He'd been working on a
Speaker 1: story about twins separated at birth, and in his research
Speaker 1: he found references to an obscure study. A psychologist, doctor
Speaker 1: Peter Neubauer, was studying the effects of nature versus nurture. Basically,
Speaker 1: Neubauer wanted to know what had a bigger effect on
Speaker 1: someone's life, their genetics or the environment that they grew
Speaker 1: up in. To find out doctor Neubauer purposely separated sets
Speaker 1: of twins and had them adopted by different families and
Speaker 1: the adoption agency that he used for his experiment the
Speaker 1: Louise Wise Agency where Bobby, Eddie and David had been
Speaker 1: adopted from. So when Lawrence Wright reached out to the
Speaker 1: triplets with this revelation, at first they couldn't believe it,
Speaker 1: and then they started comparing notes. All three remembered strangers
Speaker 1: coming to their houses throughout their childhoods. These people would
Speaker 1: film the boys and ask them questions. They'd tested their coordination,
Speaker 1: their cognitive development, even their IQ and their parents had
Speaker 1: been told that it was just part of a study
Speaker 1: on how adopted children adjusted to their new homes. But
Speaker 1: each boy never knew that he had two identical brothers
Speaker 1: just a few miles away. Bobby, Eddie, and David were
Speaker 1: devastated by this revelation. It felt like every aspect of
Speaker 1: their lives had been tightly controlled for some experiment. Even
Speaker 1: their families were carefully selected. David was purposely placed into
Speaker 1: a working class family, Bobby's parents were middle class, and
Speaker 1: Eddie grew up upper class. The pressure of fame coupled
Speaker 1: with the discovery was a lot for the brothers to bear.
Speaker 1: For Eddie, it appeared to be too much. He took
Speaker 1: his own life in nineteen ninety five at the age
Speaker 1: of thirty three. The two remaining brothers, Bobby and David,
Speaker 1: are still looking for answers, namely why this unethical study
Speaker 1: was carried out in the first place and what the
Speaker 1: results were. Unfortunately, answers have not been forthcoming. Doctor Peter Nubauer,
Speaker 1: who ran the study, died in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: He donated all of his materials to Yale University on
Speaker 1: under one condition that all of his notes would be
Speaker 1: sealed until twenty sixty six. Perhaps one of the saddest
Speaker 1: parts of the whole tale is that there are some
Speaker 1: Neubauer study subjects who have never been found, People who
Speaker 1: have lived their whole lives without knowing about their twins,
Speaker 1: just like Bobby, Eddie and David. Who knows if there
Speaker 1: are other yous wandering around out there. It's enough to
Speaker 1: make you do a double or even a triple take.
Speaker 1: There have been a lot of crazes over the years.
Speaker 1: The nineteen sixties saw Beatlemania. The nineties had kids collecting
Speaker 1: little cardboard discs called pugs, and the nineteen seventies had
Speaker 1: the pet rock. But before mop tops and slammers and
Speaker 1: caged minerals, there were balloons. Not the kind that can
Speaker 1: lift a house in a Disney movie. I'm talking about
Speaker 1: the big one, hot air balloons. It all started in
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty three. That year, the Montgofier brothers launched their
Speaker 1: two man hot air balloon over Paris. It flew five
Speaker 1: and a half miles in just under half an hour,
Speaker 1: with a rooster, a sheep and a duck in tow,
Speaker 1: and when it landed the world was changed. Ballooning took
Speaker 1: off in Europe like nothing else before. No pun intended
Speaker 1: the idea of floating in a giant gas field sphere
Speaker 1: was too powerful to ignore. Lots of people with grand
Speaker 1: ideas about air travel flocked to cities like London and
Speaker 1: Paris to show off their creations. This led to the
Speaker 1: formation of flying circuses that would draw large crowds to
Speaker 1: watch them from the ground. Strangely enough, this was not
Speaker 1: where Monty Python got their name. That's a curiosity for
Speaker 1: another day. But not everyone was enthralled. Some believe this
Speaker 1: new age of aviation would be the downfall of society.
Speaker 1: In a letter to a contemporary of his, art historian
Speaker 1: Horace Walpole wrote, I hope these new mechanic meteors will
Speaker 1: prove on any playthings for the learned and the idol.
Speaker 1: He believed that they were nothing more than a fad,
Speaker 1: and that the obsession with hovering above the clouds would
Speaker 1: eventually pass, but the ballooning community showed no signs of
Speaker 1: slowing down. In fact, things escalated quickly. Some balloonists, like
Speaker 1: Vincenzo Lunardi, had to push the envelope by flying higher
Speaker 1: and farther. He was known as the Daredevil aeronaut. On
Speaker 1: September fifteenth of seventeen eighty four, he launched a balloon
Speaker 1: from Finsbury, England, with over two hundred thousand spectators watching,
Speaker 1: including the Prince of Wales. Along for the ride were
Speaker 1: a cat, a dog, and a pigeon. Unfortunately, the cat
Speaker 1: suffered under the intense cold at such a high altitude.
Speaker 1: Lunardi touched down and released it before ascending once again.
Speaker 1: He then landed one last time in a clearing about
Speaker 1: twenty four miles away. He planned another launch in seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty five over the city of Chester, but he was
Speaker 1: incapacitated due to a severe injury. Instead, he allowed a
Speaker 1: local enthusiast named Thomas Baldwin to rent his balloon and
Speaker 1: carry out his own flight. Baldwin had been obsessed with ballooning.
Speaker 1: He didn't see this flight as just a demonstration of
Speaker 1: engineering prowess. He had a scientific mind and planned a
Speaker 1: series of experiments to conduct while thousands of feet in
Speaker 1: the air. For one, he brought a bunch of different
Speaker 1: foods on board to see if they tasted different at
Speaker 1: higher altitudes. He also packed drafting tools like pencils and paper,
Speaker 1: along with a map. Oh, and one last thing another pigeon.
Speaker 1: Pigeons must have been a popular ballooning experiment back then.
Speaker 1: Once he reached the proper altitude, Baldwin did his taste
Speaker 1: tests and also experimented with the air pressure. He spent
Speaker 1: about two hours up there admiring the views below. There
Speaker 1: were the roads that snaked through town and the lush
Speaker 1: trees dotting the landscape. And when he finally planted his
Speaker 1: two feet back on the ground, he had a new
Speaker 1: goal in mind to show the rest of the world
Speaker 1: what he had seen. He sketched the winding roads and
Speaker 1: opened clearings as they had appeared from the air. He
Speaker 1: even included the clouds below him, which obscured part of
Speaker 1: his ground view. We might laugh about it today, but
Speaker 1: this was the next best thing to a photograph, which
Speaker 1: wasn't available at his time, and these were the first
Speaker 1: aerial maps that were created as a result of hot
Speaker 1: air ballooning. Some are colored in while others were left
Speaker 1: black and white, but all of them were as detailed
Speaker 1: as possible. Baldwin even included directions on how to look
Speaker 1: at them. He instructed viewers to roll up the map
Speaker 1: into a tube shape and peer through the center to
Speaker 1: get the full effect. Thanks to his desire to convey
Speaker 1: the Earth from the heavens, people were able to get
Speaker 1: a bird's eye view of the planet in a way
Speaker 1: that no one had ever seen before. Military strategists could
Speaker 1: now plan their attacks by seeing the terrain that lay
Speaker 1: miles ahead of them, Titans of industry could plot the
Speaker 1: optimal areas in which to build their factories, and even
Speaker 1: the average citizen was able to look at an aerial
Speaker 1: map and see just how big the world really was,
Speaker 1: and probably find the straightest route to the market, as straight,
Speaker 1: of course, as the pigeon flies. I hope you've enjoyed
Speaker 1: today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for
Speaker 1: free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show
Speaker 1: by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created
Speaker 1: by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
Speaker 1: a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
Speaker 1: learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com.
Speaker 1: And until next time, stay curious.