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 are right there on display, just
Speaker 1: waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: Stop me if this sounds familiar. You are sitting at school,
Speaker 1: paying attention to, or struggling to pay attention to, your teacher,
Speaker 1: not really taking notes. Your hands wander across your desk,
Speaker 1: feeling its edges, and then without thinking, sliding underneath the drawers.
Speaker 1: Almost immediately, you find a lump down there, hard as
Speaker 1: a rock, stuck firmly to the lacquered wood, like a
Speaker 1: barnacle on the hull of a ship. It's a piece
Speaker 1: of chewing gum that some other student planted there after
Speaker 1: it lost its flavor. Maybe as recently as earlier this week,
Speaker 1: or as long ago as the start of the semester,
Speaker 1: you aren't really sure, but whatever the case, you are disgusted.
Speaker 1: Chewing gum is just one of those things. It's commonplace,
Speaker 1: but if you see it outside of its wrapper, it
Speaker 1: immediately goes from being a candy to a nuisance. It
Speaker 1: sticks to the bottom of your shoes, gets caught in
Speaker 1: the grooves of your cars tire.
Speaker 2: The fact that it inspired a.
Speaker 1: Whole term of phrase, gumming up the works, says everything
Speaker 1: we need to know about chewing gum's reputation. But if
Speaker 1: chewing gum is an annoyance to us, it has been
Speaker 1: a public menace to others. In nineteen eighty three, in Singapore,
Speaker 1: the Minister of Foreign Affairs raised this problem before their
Speaker 1: local government. It seemed that leftover gum was everywhere they
Speaker 1: looked in the country, on mailboxes, street signs, public restroom,
Speaker 1: to the point where it started to take a toll
Speaker 1: on the very infrastructure of Singapore itself. The largest problem
Speaker 1: occurred in Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit or MRT. Occasionally, chewing
Speaker 1: gum stuck to the door sensors of MRT trains would
Speaker 1: cause the doors to fail to close and the whole
Speaker 1: train would be stuck at the station until someone removed it.
Speaker 1: And even after it was removed, the residue would cause
Speaker 1: problems of its own. Beyond that, chewing gum on elevator
Speaker 1: buttons in public buildings also became a smaller version of
Speaker 1: the same problem. It prevented people from going to their
Speaker 1: destination unless they were willing to endure the indignity of
Speaker 1: touching someone else's used gum.
Speaker 2: Throughout the nineteen.
Speaker 1: Eighties, the government of Singapore started to take measures to
Speaker 1: control the literal and figurative spread of chewing gum. The
Speaker 1: Singapore Broadcasting Corporation largely stopped showing advertisements for gum shops
Speaker 1: near schools were instructed not to sell gum to students anymore.
Speaker 1: But that was not enough, which is why on January
Speaker 1: third of nineteen ninety two, almost a decade after the
Speaker 1: Foreign Affairs Minister's proposal, chewing gum was officially banned in Singapore.
Speaker 1: Anyone caught with it would be fine, and those who
Speaker 1: manufactured or sold it could face jail time. Convenience store
Speaker 1: owners had to get rid of all of their remaining stock.
Speaker 1: And you probably don't need me to tell you that
Speaker 1: this legislation provoked an immediate backlash. The public understandably felt
Speaker 1: like this was an overreaction. Many people suggested that there
Speaker 1: should just be harsher fines but no ban, but the
Speaker 1: law remained on the books. In spite of the controversy,
Speaker 1: though the law does seem to have worked.
Speaker 2: In a year, average reported.
Speaker 1: Cases of chewing gum vandalism went down from five hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty five each day to just two, and because
Speaker 1: of this, the band held firm from nineteen ninety two
Speaker 1: until two thousand and four, where it underwent a sudden revision.
Speaker 1: As part of a new trade agreement with the United States,
Speaker 1: the government of Singapore agreed to relax the chewing gum ban.
Speaker 1: Now there were carve outs for gum that had medicinal benefits.
Speaker 1: This included a wide range of gums, anything between sugar
Speaker 1: free dental hygiene gum and nicotine gum, but any approved
Speaker 1: gum had to be approved by a doctor or a dentist,
Speaker 1: and the chewing gum law remains in place to this day.
Speaker 2: In its revised.
Speaker 1: Form, Now it only really affects sellers of the product,
Speaker 1: rather than those who just happened to be possessing chewing
Speaker 1: gum or bubblegum. Tourists coming to the country with a
Speaker 1: small amount of gum won't face any prosecution so long
Speaker 1: as they dispose of it safely and not in a
Speaker 1: public space. So if you're planning to go to Southeast
Speaker 1: Asia anytime soon, Just keep this in mind. What you
Speaker 1: may think of as a harmless candy might change legal
Speaker 1: status on the plane over, transforming from a treat to
Speaker 1: a public sanitation menace in waiting. Just a little something
Speaker 1: for you to chew on. In February of twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: five finished divers were preparing to do the unthinkable. They
Speaker 1: were standing on the ice at Pleura Lake in Norway,
Speaker 1: cutting a hole in the surface and diving down below.
Speaker 1: They weren't fishing or looking for treasure, though, they were
Speaker 1: cave divers who wanted nothing more than to explore the
Speaker 1: subterranean caverns connected to the lake. Now, before we move on,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of difficult to pronounce finish names
Speaker 1: in this story, and so to make it easier on
Speaker 1: me and also on you to keep track of everyone,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to refer to them by their first names, Patrick, Yari,
Speaker 1: h Vesa, Yari, You and Kai. Now they were a
Speaker 1: group of male friends with many diving hours under their belts.
Speaker 1: In fact, Patrick and Kai had been the first to
Speaker 1: discover the very caves that they were now about.
Speaker 2: To act floor.
Speaker 1: So they cut a hole in the ice with chainsaws,
Speaker 1: checked their masks and oxygen canisters, and began the freezing plunge.
Speaker 1: Patrick and Yari h went first. The others wouldn't follow
Speaker 1: them for two whole hours, and this was to prevent
Speaker 1: traffic jams in the caves and also allowed time for
Speaker 1: any silt that was kicked up by the first two
Speaker 1: to settle so that the following divers visibility wouldn't be reduced.
Speaker 1: Patrick and Yari made their way through the two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty meter first passage of the cave.
Speaker 2: This was the easy part.
Speaker 1: Eventually the water gave way to air pockets where magnificent
Speaker 1: limestone caves rose above the divers. They took it all
Speaker 1: in and then prepared for the worst part. You see
Speaker 1: now they would have to dive deeper than ever, a
Speaker 1: straight vertical drop of one hundred and thirty two meters
Speaker 1: below where they had started on the lake surface. They
Speaker 1: dove down, and down and down. Eventually they reached the bottom.
Speaker 1: At this point, the cave turns and begins to rise
Speaker 1: back up, but the diver's ascent had to be very controlled.
Speaker 1: If they rose too quickly, they would risk decompression sickness.
Speaker 1: The effect where nitrogen bubbles build in the bloodstream when
Speaker 1: pressure drops too quickly. But at these low depths, the
Speaker 1: body is also working harder to maintain equilibrium, so carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide is building in the bloodstream as well. Divers have
Speaker 1: to remain very calm so that they don't breathe too
Speaker 1: fast and increase the build up. Patrick and yari H
Speaker 1: rose slowly, but after a few minutes, Patrick turned around
Speaker 1: to realize yari H was no longer behind him. He
Speaker 1: swam back and found that some of his equipment had
Speaker 1: gotten stuck on the cave wall. The two divers were
Speaker 1: staring into each other's eyes, trying to communicate. Yarih was panicking,
Speaker 1: breathing too fast and using up his oxygen. Patrick tried
Speaker 1: to give him more, but as yuri H swapped his mouthpiece,
Speaker 1: he took in big gulps of water. Patrick watched in
Speaker 1: horror as his friend drowned. Even more disturbing. He now
Speaker 1: had to remain calm, acting like nothing happened, or else
Speaker 1: risk his own demise. He had to continue the slow
Speaker 1: journey to the surface another cave on the opposite side
Speaker 1: of the tunnel that opened back up onto dry land.
Speaker 1: Patrick eventually reached safety and waited anxiously for the.
Speaker 2: Other divers to surface. First was Vesa.
Speaker 1: He saw yari H's body and was able to squeeze past.
Speaker 1: He didn't know what had happened to the others. Vesa
Speaker 1: had risen too fast and was now suffering the effects
Speaker 1: of decompression sickness. They had no choice but to head
Speaker 1: back down to their camp. After waiting for what felt
Speaker 1: like an eternity, they finally saw a headlamp emerge through
Speaker 1: the dark and snow. It was Kai, diver number four,
Speaker 1: but yari You wasn't with him. Yari U, diver number five,
Speaker 1: had seen yari H dead in the tunnel, panicked himself
Speaker 1: and also become stuck, and now both Yari's were dead.
Speaker 1: Kai had turned around and come back up through the
Speaker 1: cave entrance. Patrick was devastated. He refused to leave his
Speaker 1: friend's bodies behind. The Norwegian authorities forbade him from going
Speaker 1: back down, and in fact banned diving in the caves altogether.
Speaker 1: But forty six days later Patrick arrived with a team
Speaker 1: of dozens of support divers and his other expert diver
Speaker 1: friend Sami. They set up camps on both sides of
Speaker 1: the cave so that they could attempt the body rescue simultaneously.
Speaker 1: They spent days before having support divers leave gas canisters
Speaker 1: at different depths, and they also set up a decompression
Speaker 1: chamber six meters down on one side. It was an
Speaker 1: airtight chamber where they could rest and even eat underwater safely.
Speaker 1: Patrick entered from the lakeside, diving down and finding Yarih,
Speaker 1: the friend that he wished he could have saved. He
Speaker 1: cut him loose and attached his body to a small
Speaker 1: propulsion vehicle, and then continued the journey that Yarih would
Speaker 1: have in life to the other side of the cave.
Speaker 1: The next day, Sami entered from the other side, finding
Speaker 1: yari You. He sent him to the surface as well
Speaker 1: and retrieved any remaining diving equipment. It was a curious
Speaker 1: case of friendship loyalty. In places like Mount Everest's bodies
Speaker 1: are left behind all the time, but these Finnish friends
Speaker 1: prove that amongst their countrymen, no one is left behind.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. This show was created by me Aaron Manke
Speaker 1: in partnership with iHeart podcasts researched and written by the
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild team and produced by Jesse Funk. Learn
Speaker 1: more about the show and the people who make it
Speaker 1: over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities. You'll also find
Speaker 1: a link to the official Cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book,
Speaker 1: available in bookstores and online, as well as ebook and audiobook.
Speaker 1: And if you're looking for an ad free option, consider
Speaker 1: joining our Patreon. It's all the same stories, but without
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Speaker 1: sign up over at patreon dot com slash Grim and Mild,
Speaker 1: and until next time, Stay curious, m HM.