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 are right there on display,
Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Human psychology has been an important topic of
Speaker 1: study for centuries. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians had their
Speaker 1: schools of thought on it, as did the people in
Speaker 1: ancient India and China. It wasn't until the nineteenth century, though,
Speaker 1: when psychological research turned from the philosophical to the experimental.
Speaker 1: German psychologist Gustav Fechner started testing the human brains response
Speaker 1: to various stimuli around eighteen thirties. From their experts such
Speaker 1: as Herman Ebbinghouse went on to study other functions of
Speaker 1: the mind, from memory to introspection to classical conditioning. Psychology
Speaker 1: became a bustling industry of experimentation. Eventually, scientists didn't just
Speaker 1: want to learn the limits of the brain. They wanted
Speaker 1: to understand what made people tick. Why were some individuals
Speaker 1: able to say no while others were more pleasers. Stanley
Speaker 1: Milgram of Yale University tested this in his famous Milgram
Speaker 1: experiment in nineteen sixty one. He invited participants to administer
Speaker 1: electric shocks to someone in another room. As the shocks
Speaker 1: increased in power, the screams of the unknown party got
Speaker 1: louder and more intense until they stopped completely. But don't worry,
Speaker 1: nobody died. The electric shocks weren't even real, but the
Speaker 1: effects on the subjects pushing the buttons certainly were. Milgram
Speaker 1: wanted to test how far a person would go in
Speaker 1: following orders from an authority figure, even if those orders
Speaker 1: involved hurting or and killing someone else. He based his
Speaker 1: experiment on the actions of the Nazis during World War Two.
Speaker 1: The Stanford Prison Experiment of nineteen seventy one took things
Speaker 1: further by placing college students in a simulated prison environment.
Speaker 1: The purpose was to study how power affected one psychological state.
Speaker 1: One group of students was given the title of guard,
Speaker 1: while another subset was placed in the prisoner role. Three
Speaker 1: guards were pulled out of the experiment early after demonstrating
Speaker 1: what we're described as genuine sadistic tendencies. The prisoners also suffered.
Speaker 1: They were referred to by numbers rather than their names.
Speaker 1: They were stripped, naked and sprayed with a hose. In short,
Speaker 1: they were humiliated. The two week experiment was terminated after
Speaker 1: just six days. Still, despite the prison experiments failings, researchers
Speaker 1: wanted to understand how people thought and why they slid
Speaker 1: into certain roles instead of others. Well. One man thought
Speaker 1: that he could find the answer, and in order to
Speaker 1: get there, he had to think bigger by thinking smaller.
Speaker 1: John Calhoun was born in Tennessee in nineteen seventeen. He
Speaker 1: spent his years in college studying rats. In nineteen forty six,
Speaker 1: he started working at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on
Speaker 1: something called the rodent Ecology Project. This involved monitoring a
Speaker 1: colony of rats in a ten thousand square foot pen
Speaker 1: behind his house. Calhoun believed the rats with thrive, with
Speaker 1: five females capable of producing up to five thousand pups
Speaker 1: over the two years. Yet, as he watched over his
Speaker 1: little rat metropolis, he noticed something. The numbers never got
Speaker 1: that high, nowhere close. Once the population reached about two hundred,
Speaker 1: they stopped reproducing. The rats soon became agitated. They fought
Speaker 1: with each other and segregated themselves into dozens of colonies,
Speaker 1: each comprised of twelve rats. He found that they couldn't
Speaker 1: live peacefully in higher numbers. Calhoun decided to expand his operation.
Speaker 1: He constructed a new rat city, this time on the
Speaker 1: second floor of a are and where his lab was located.
Speaker 1: This new enclosure was comprised of four rooms, each ten
Speaker 1: ft by fourteen feet clustered together. The rooms were then
Speaker 1: subdivided further into quarters by two foot walls, and the
Speaker 1: rats inside were viewable via a window in each room's ceiling.
Speaker 1: These rats had much more room to move and were
Speaker 1: never at a loss for food or drink, Yet they
Speaker 1: still ran into the same problems as in the original experiment.
Speaker 1: As populations filled the space, they inevitably collapsed. Calhoun attempted
Speaker 1: one more time to see what would happen if a
Speaker 1: group of rodents were given free rein over a large
Speaker 1: property in night. With assistance from the National Institute of
Speaker 1: Mental Health, he constructed a nine foot square habitat measuring
Speaker 1: four and a half feet high. There were tunnels made
Speaker 1: of wire mesh along the sides of the enclosure that
Speaker 1: led to the feeding and drinking stations. As well as
Speaker 1: the living quarters. He called this space universe. This time,
Speaker 1: Calhoun performed his study on mice rather than rats, and
Speaker 1: the results were promising. At first, every two months the
Speaker 1: number of mice would double. Ten months in his initial
Speaker 1: population of eight mice now totaled six hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: and just as before, the faster they reproduced, the faster
Speaker 1: everything spiraled downward. Older mice had trouble finding mates. They
Speaker 1: also found themselves displaced in the community. Lone females occupied
Speaker 1: nesting boxes by themselves, far from the rest of the group,
Speaker 1: while mateless males congregated at the feeding stations. They became
Speaker 1: hostile and anxious. Mouse families, on the other hand, saw
Speaker 1: their neighborhoods struggling and moved their families to better areas,
Speaker 1: sometimes more than once. And, just as had happened with
Speaker 1: the rats, reproduction stopped, Calhoun's mouse utopia quickly devolved into
Speaker 1: a full blown dystopia. The findings worried him. If rats
Speaker 1: and mice couldn't handle high population density, how are humans
Speaker 1: going to deal with overcrowding in their cities and towns.
Speaker 1: An area with no job prospects or potential mates couldn't
Speaker 1: sustain itself. But others didn't agree with his findings. Medical
Speaker 1: historian and professor Edmund Ramsden noted that rats lack the
Speaker 1: ability to cope the way that humans could in a
Speaker 1: similar environment. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman determined that it wasn't the
Speaker 1: lack of mates or social rules, but a lack of
Speaker 1: personal space that had done the rodents in. Those who
Speaker 1: had been able to secure their own corners of universe
Speaker 1: twenty five away from everyone else hadn't turned hostile at all.
Speaker 1: Regardless of Calhoun's results, there was one other important byproduct
Speaker 1: of his work, a book. It was about a group
Speaker 1: of rats who had learned to read and build machines
Speaker 1: they'd been experimented on at the National Institute of Mental
Speaker 1: Health before living free in the wild. Published in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one, Mrs Frisbee and the Rats of Nim by
Speaker 1: Robert C. O'Brien was inspired by Calhoun's research. It went
Speaker 1: on to become a popular film in nineteen eighty two
Speaker 1: called The Secrets of Nim. John Calhoun did his best
Speaker 1: to show that rats and humans were cut for him
Speaker 1: the same cloth, and in a lot of ways we
Speaker 1: are in the end, though he also proved that humans
Speaker 1: aren't part of a rat race. No matter what's thrown
Speaker 1: at us, we often persevere, but of course we both
Speaker 1: love cheese. Losing something important can throw off your whole day.
Speaker 1: Misplace your keys and suddenly you're off to work ten
Speaker 1: minutes later than you thought. You're stuck in traffic and
Speaker 1: half an hour late for work, and a missing receipts
Speaker 1: can be the difference between a refund at the store
Speaker 1: and getting stuck with something that you ended up not wanting.
Speaker 1: Losing a set of keys may feel like the end
Speaker 1: of the world at the time, but it really isn't.
Speaker 1: Losing a couple of atomic bombs, however, that might actually
Speaker 1: be the end of the world, or at least the
Speaker 1: Eastern Seaboard. Following the close of World War Two, the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties saw the eyes of a brand new front,
Speaker 1: the Cold War. America and the Soviet Union were at
Speaker 1: odds over various political and economic philosophies, putting the one
Speaker 1: time allies on opposing sides. In the United States, schools
Speaker 1: practiced air raid drills, and anticipation of the Big One,
Speaker 1: children were told to hide under their desks, believing it
Speaker 1: would protect them from a nuclear blast. Meanwhile, a nuclear
Speaker 1: arms race was underway. It was fairly common for US
Speaker 1: Air Force planes to carry bombs and bomb parts across
Speaker 1: the ocean from one base to another, and on July
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven, a C one four Globe Master in
Speaker 1: Delaware was loaded up with three Mark five nuclear bombs
Speaker 1: and one nuclear capsule. The bombs themselves were safe to fly.
Speaker 1: They had been placed in c AF or complete assembly
Speaker 1: for fairy condition, which meant each bomb lacked the core
Speaker 1: necessary for a nuclear explosion, although they still retained a
Speaker 1: significant amount of explosives inside their casings. Once the cores
Speaker 1: were eventually inserted and the bombs dropped, the explode sims
Speaker 1: would compress the cores and kick off a nuclear reaction.
Speaker 1: The C one twenty four was also known as Old Shaky,
Speaker 1: not the best name for an airplane carrying nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: Despite the humorous nickname, it was a solid vessel, weighing
Speaker 1: in at one seventy five thousand pounds and powered by
Speaker 1: four massive piston engines. Old Shaky took off from Dover
Speaker 1: Air Force Base on a routine trip to deliver the
Speaker 1: three bombs to another base in Europe. Unfortunately, it ran
Speaker 1: into trouble almost immediately. Shortly after takeoff. Two of the
Speaker 1: c engines failed. The other two engines were running at
Speaker 1: full power, enough to prevent the plane from plummeting into
Speaker 1: the ocean, but it was a losing battle. It was
Speaker 1: just too heavy to stay up, and even with the
Speaker 1: bombs lacking a nuclear core, there was still enough explosive
Speaker 1: power inside them to cause severe damage, especially since the
Speaker 1: nuclear capsule was on board with them. The crew had
Speaker 1: to jettison weight fast. They most likely ejected the excess
Speaker 1: fuel they would have needed for their transatlantic flight. Luckily,
Speaker 1: there was a naval air station in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
Speaker 1: where they could land. Yet, even with most of their
Speaker 1: fuel gone, they were still too heavy. A crew in
Speaker 1: such a situation might have tried making a crash landing
Speaker 1: in the ocean. Had the Sea One two attempted that,
Speaker 1: though it could have killed everyone on board and set
Speaker 1: off the bombs, they made a drastic call and decided
Speaker 1: to drop one of the Mark five bombs. It hit
Speaker 1: the water from a height of forty feet, about seventy
Speaker 1: five miles off the coast of New Jersey. Even that
Speaker 1: wasn't enough though they jettisoned another bomb at feet the
Speaker 1: plane still sinking in altitude. This last one landed fifty
Speaker 1: miles offshore. Old Shaky stopped shaking that even doubts, and
Speaker 1: the crew was able to maintain altitude all the way
Speaker 1: to the air station. Despite dropping both bombs from significant heights,
Speaker 1: neither one exploded Once word of the plane's mishap got out,
Speaker 1: though recovery teams were assembled immediately to search for the
Speaker 1: missing weapons, but the bombs were never found. For over
Speaker 1: sixty years, they have resided just off the coast of
Speaker 1: the Jersey Shore, waiting to be discovered. Residents of Atlantic
Speaker 1: City weren't worried, though they'd had no idea the incident
Speaker 1: had taken place at all. The military kept it under
Speaker 1: wraps for over twenty years. The bombs eventually showed up
Speaker 1: as line items on a list of broken arrows or
Speaker 1: lost nuclear weapons published by the government in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: And there's an important lesson there, because when it comes
Speaker 1: to unexploded nuclear weapons, no news is always good news.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple podcasts, or learn
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television
Speaker 1: show and you can learn all about it over at
Speaker 1: the World of Lore dot com. And until next time,
Speaker 1: stay curious. Yeah,