Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and we have a special
Speaker 1: episode for you today. Uh. This is a live recording
Speaker 1: from C to E two the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo.
Speaker 1: We were just there a couple of weeks ago. We
Speaker 1: presented this a wonderful talk where we talked about the UH,
Speaker 1: the the Columbian Exposition there in Chicago. We talked about
Speaker 1: the UH, the origins of the Ferris Wheel, the Parliament
Speaker 1: of World Religions, and of course the H. H. Holmes
Speaker 1: murder House. Now, just a word of warning, the audio
Speaker 1: is a little crisp here because this is a live recording.
Speaker 1: But the the episode is great that the discussion is wonderful,
Speaker 1: so we definitely wanted to share it with you. But
Speaker 1: if it's not your cup of tea, don't fret. The
Speaker 1: next episode we'll be back to the studio recording process
Speaker 1: as usually usual. Alright, so without further ado, let's go
Speaker 1: to the live show. All right. Well, hey, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb,
Speaker 1: and I'm Christian Saga and I'm Joe McCormick, and we
Speaker 1: are the hosts of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a
Speaker 1: podcast about science, culture, the human mind, and the weirdness
Speaker 1: of reality. So I want to start off with a question.
Speaker 1: How many people here are from out of town not
Speaker 1: from Chicago? Okay, So we've got a good amount of people,
Speaker 1: all right, like maybe half. We're gonna keep you in
Speaker 1: mind for later. This is going to be important because
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about Chicago's hotel past. Well when
Speaker 1: we're honored to be here at C two e two
Speaker 1: and they asked us, they said, hey, maybe you could
Speaker 1: put something together that's a little bit Chicago theme. So
Speaker 1: we thought about it, and uh, you know, we decided, well, okay,
Speaker 1: Chicago World Fair, that's gonna that's gonna be what we
Speaker 1: want to focus in on here. And uh, we decided
Speaker 1: that to really dive into this topic, though, we need
Speaker 1: to take a paleo futurist journey into the past of
Speaker 1: this city. Right, So I guess we need to start
Speaker 1: by thinking about Chicago as a city. Um, and I
Speaker 1: want to put forward that the history of American population
Speaker 1: growth as this country has increased in numbers over the
Speaker 1: centuries is a history of urbanization um and that rapidly
Speaker 1: accelerated in the eighteen hundreds. For example, in eighteen forty,
Speaker 1: the U. S population was about seventeen million people. About
Speaker 1: eighty nine percent of those people at that time were rural,
Speaker 1: living out in the country on farms, not in cities.
Speaker 1: Only about ten percent we're living in cities. Just about
Speaker 1: fifty years later, in nine the U. S population sixty
Speaker 1: three million, and by then thirty five percent of Americans
Speaker 1: are living in cities. So over the course of the
Speaker 1: century we see a rapid uptick in the way people
Speaker 1: are are moving in to crowd into dense quarters and
Speaker 1: come to where a lot of the new jobs are
Speaker 1: the new jobs made available by technology and manufacturing and
Speaker 1: by transportation like steam power. But Chicago is a particularly
Speaker 1: crucial part of this urbanization story. I want to go
Speaker 1: back to those years eighteen forty and eighteen nine, eighteen forty.
Speaker 1: Anybody want to guess what the population of Chicago was, Uh,
Speaker 1: ten thousand people. Let the people guess. Shout him out,
Speaker 1: Let the people speak one point five million. We've heard
Speaker 1: it was. Chicago in eighteen forty had forty people in it.
Speaker 1: Wrigley Field as a seating capacity of about forty one thousand,
Speaker 1: so it could fit about nine eighteen forty Chicago's in it.
Speaker 1: Or to give you, to give you like a context,
Speaker 1: that's here and now, right now at C two E two,
Speaker 1: there's between twenty and forty thousand people in this building.
Speaker 1: So we've got eighteen forty Chicago beat. By eighteen eighty,
Speaker 1: population of Chicago is up to five thousand. By eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety it's up to one million. And you have to
Speaker 1: imagine what it does to a place when the population
Speaker 1: and the population density increases that rapidly. But by eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: Chicago would become the second biggest city in America, finally
Speaker 1: beating out Philadelphia, but still behind New York. And by god,
Speaker 1: Chicago wanted to be number one. Those of you from Chicago,
Speaker 1: do you do you have New York hatred? Do you
Speaker 1: have New York? Yeah? Like do you hate your piece? Uh?
Speaker 1: And so I want to put forward that stepping into
Speaker 1: Chicago in the eighteen nineties, if you were, say a
Speaker 1: country farmer coming out of the rural areas and stepping
Speaker 1: into Chicago in the eighteen nineties would have been kind
Speaker 1: of like walking into the city or if we were
Speaker 1: to walk into the city in Blade Runner. Uh. The
Speaker 1: so part of this population explosion in the nineteen century
Speaker 1: was fueled by immigration from all over Europe. So you
Speaker 1: have Chicago flooded with people of diverse ethnic origins. Um
Speaker 1: and this this may be very alien to people who had,
Speaker 1: you know, never met people from all over Europe. Then
Speaker 1: also you've got to think about technology. I would say
Speaker 1: that Chicago at this time was a sort of techno
Speaker 1: punk hallucination where you had this steam powered transport hub
Speaker 1: and most importantly a center of industrialized meat production. So
Speaker 1: so so was it like Blade Runner in that you
Speaker 1: could buy like cloned animals on the street. Wouldn't that
Speaker 1: be great? You know, we were talking on the way
Speaker 1: over here. Another aspect of it is the sort of
Speaker 1: layers of the city. How you see this vertical depth
Speaker 1: in Blade Runner. This is more apparent in Chicago of today.
Speaker 1: But like with the L train and UH and and
Speaker 1: the way, when you're downtown, you you can almost feel
Speaker 1: like you're inside when you're outside. Yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: it's more prevalent here than about any other city I
Speaker 1: can think of off off in my head that I've
Speaker 1: been to. Yeah, and in the Blade Runner analogy I
Speaker 1: think is especially apt when anytime we're looking back in
Speaker 1: time and we're trying to especially the last couple of centuries,
Speaker 1: and trying to figure out what it was like, uh
Speaker 1: to live in in that day, you you have to
Speaker 1: think of it almost in sci fi terms, because the
Speaker 1: only way to really get a handle on the fact that, yeah,
Speaker 1: this was the this is the bleeding age, this was
Speaker 1: this was this was this was the modern age. It
Speaker 1: was it was the bleeding edge, literally and that it
Speaker 1: was covered in pig blood um because it was the
Speaker 1: city where hogs were slaughtered in process, but it was
Speaker 1: also covered in cold dust, smog, steam, uh and rapidly electrifying.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a time when electricity is going
Speaker 1: from a sort of rarefied novelty to being dispersed all
Speaker 1: over urban areas. And so this is going to be
Speaker 1: a crucial part of the story we tell today about
Speaker 1: the World's Fair. But another thing is that Eastern cities
Speaker 1: at the time would have looked back on Chicago in
Speaker 1: the eighteen nineties as a sort of effed up backwater
Speaker 1: like there there was there was a very snooty attitude
Speaker 1: towards Chicago. That's like looking at it like like it
Speaker 1: was just pumped up, like ban on technology and cash
Speaker 1: and and pig blood and all of that great stuff,
Speaker 1: but that it didn't really have the refined character and
Speaker 1: culture makes an American city great. Bin with a backpack
Speaker 1: full of pig blood just being injected into his body,
Speaker 1: that sounds great. This is not the brain you carn't understand.
Speaker 1: It's the it's the old band with the getting pumped up.
Speaker 1: Uh So, rapid urbanization had factors that people found both
Speaker 1: alluring and repulsive. And I want to explore one of
Speaker 1: the people who found it repulsive. So in eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: the French writer and publisher Octavouzon wrote a letter to
Speaker 1: the periodical The American Architect and Building News, and he
Speaker 1: was reporting on a recent visit he made to Chicago.
Speaker 1: He'd actually been visiting the eighteen nine World's Fair that
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about. And in talking about Chicago,
Speaker 1: he he was writing about the prospect of leaving the city.
Speaker 1: And this is an abridged quote. Built upon a mud
Speaker 1: flat on the shore of a somber verdure less lake.
Speaker 1: It was the noisy, furious, impulsive, brutal life which their
Speaker 1: maneuvers its battalions, a life without soul and ideal business
Speaker 1: business business. Is this not the real burden of the
Speaker 1: raven and Pose poem? I don't believe it is. I think,
Speaker 1: I think, probably think that he died in the street. Yeah, Baltimore, though,
Speaker 1: Baltimore is a city with character. It's got old school class,
Speaker 1: or at least they thought. But continuing us, quote, he's
Speaker 1: on the train leaving Chicago, and he's very happy to
Speaker 1: be leaving, he says. The next morning, raising the shade
Speaker 1: of my compartment, I saw behind the glass a smiling
Speaker 1: country unroll itself before nature, thus peaceful in sight of
Speaker 1: the light mists, these mosses, these flowers opening in the sun.
Speaker 1: I forgot the frightful nightmare of the departure from Chicago.
Speaker 1: That Gordian city, so excessive, so satanic, so so yeah,
Speaker 1: this was like hell raiser for this guy from France,
Speaker 1: basically Chicago. Yeah, pin Head lived here. I really like
Speaker 1: Gordian City. I don't. I don't. I think you guys
Speaker 1: should embrace that here in the same way that a
Speaker 1: lot of take it back, a lot of people from
Speaker 1: Atlanta embraced Terminus, as is our alternate title. I think
Speaker 1: that's only after the Walking Dead. But yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know if that actually works out that well, because to
Speaker 1: be Gordian, I would think it would be hard to navigate.
Speaker 1: So far, I found Chicago much easier to navigate than
Speaker 1: most cities. Right, y'all, this is smart. Y'all have a grid.
Speaker 1: Guys have great public transportation. We're from Atlanta. Try to
Speaker 1: find your way around in Atlanta. Yet, well, they're all
Speaker 1: little cattle trails that got convert anyway. I'm just saying
Speaker 1: it's a great name. I'm that's not saying you're gonna
Speaker 1: get lost. Okay, we got to make it to the fair. Okay. So,
Speaker 1: as cities gathering, urbanization cities gathering, they tend to grow
Speaker 1: up because where you're going to fit all those people, right,
Speaker 1: You've got to expand into three dimensions. So uh so
Speaker 1: driving into three dimensions. The urbanization trend was also tightly
Speaker 1: linked to the development of high rise architecture and and
Speaker 1: this new class of architects to design these tall buildings
Speaker 1: that would pack in all these people in the new cities.
Speaker 1: And this new class of architects included the people Daniel
Speaker 1: Burnham and John Wellborn Route, who were also responsible for
Speaker 1: buildings like the twenty one story Masonic Temple building in
Speaker 1: Chicago pretty good name Satanic, Yeah, and the Rookery Building,
Speaker 1: which is still standing today. I went and saw it yesterday. Robert,
Speaker 1: you saw it, Christian? Did you see it yet? I
Speaker 1: haven't been yet. I'm gonna try to go tomorrow. Well,
Speaker 1: it's if you're in town. It's beautiful. You should go
Speaker 1: in there. Take a look at the lobby. It's got
Speaker 1: this non representative artistry on the architecture inside the lobby
Speaker 1: that makes it look kind of like a mosque. It's
Speaker 1: very beautiful. I love it. Um But anyway, so they
Speaker 1: were designing these new type types of buildings, buildings that
Speaker 1: went up into the sky, stuff people have never seen before.
Speaker 1: And being a high rise architect in Chicago was a
Speaker 1: difficult job because I don't know if anybody here has
Speaker 1: ever tried to build in Chicago. Apparently the soil here
Speaker 1: is just junk. It's uh, it's like a mud flat
Speaker 1: that sinks down, and when you try to build, your
Speaker 1: buildings will sink into the mud and shift. So they
Speaker 1: had to come up with new technologies to build new
Speaker 1: types of foundations that would anchor these buildings. They didn't
Speaker 1: start leaning over halfway through construction. Um, so this really
Speaker 1: is It's we don't often think about buildings as technological
Speaker 1: organisms today, but they really are. These high rise buildings
Speaker 1: were a monstrous achievement of science and technology. So we
Speaker 1: get to eighteen ninety, we're getting to the fair. The
Speaker 1: US Congress votes to host a World's Fair in eighteen
Speaker 1: it's in celebration of does anybody want to guess Columbus
Speaker 1: that guy because it's the Columbian right, Yes, So it
Speaker 1: would be the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landing in
Speaker 1: the New World. And who's going to get to host
Speaker 1: the city? There's a big competition between cities. You have
Speaker 1: New York wants to host it. All these cities want
Speaker 1: to host I think St. Louis did, but wouldn't you
Speaker 1: know it, Chicago, this satanic building building, the satanic city
Speaker 1: built on quicksand gets to host the fair. And that,
Speaker 1: I mean that's pretty cool to imagine, like, oh, this
Speaker 1: city all these people thought was just a hellhole. Um,
Speaker 1: and now we're going to bring the entire world there
Speaker 1: and show them what's up. Show them what America can do.
Speaker 1: So this is probably a good place to acknowledge one
Speaker 1: of our key resources in researching this episode, which is
Speaker 1: Eric Larson's excellent two thousand three nonfiction book White City.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you haven't read it. That is a great book,
Speaker 1: absolutely fabulous and one of one of the Mikey resources
Speaker 1: and working in this And one of the points Eric
Speaker 1: Larson made is that it's hard for us today, even
Speaker 1: we got some cheers earlier for hating New York, but um,
Speaker 1: it's hard for us today to understand the depth of
Speaker 1: location based pride in the eighteen nineties that people, when
Speaker 1: the reputation of their city was on the line, they
Speaker 1: took that so seriously. And so fair is coming, you
Speaker 1: gotta make it good. So there was an absolutely frantic
Speaker 1: design and construction phase, and the fair opened finally in
Speaker 1: May one. It began with a horrible flot because it
Speaker 1: coincided almost perfectly with the panic of eighteen ninety three.
Speaker 1: So imagine starting this World's Fair where you want to
Speaker 1: bring everybody and show what your country can do, and
Speaker 1: right then you get a depression. It's like if you're
Speaker 1: at C two E two in two thousand eight, in
Speaker 1: the economy. It is completely plummeted, and you couldn't buy
Speaker 1: cosplay costumes right or worse, maybe worse. So in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, you could look at the fair as
Speaker 1: kind of a financial failure, but in other ways, I
Speaker 1: think we should look at it as one of the
Speaker 1: coolest and most important events in American history. It was
Speaker 1: this romantic, ecumenical, insane, science fiction assemblage of the spirit
Speaker 1: of the American city, especially the soul of Chicago and
Speaker 1: everything that Chicago embodied, everything angelic, everything satanic, And I mean,
Speaker 1: how cool is this? They built a city within a city.
Speaker 1: They built a city within a city on the shore
Speaker 1: of Lake Michigan, and it lived for a year. It
Speaker 1: was throughout the summer season while people came to the fair,
Speaker 1: and then it disappeared into history, you know. And we've
Speaker 1: been talking about this amongst ourselves as we've been researching it. Like,
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, those of you who are from Illinois, did
Speaker 1: you learn about the White City as you're growing up?
Speaker 1: Was this like a point of pride from the various
Speaker 1: places that we grew up in. I didn't hear about
Speaker 1: it until I was until I read double in the
Speaker 1: White City and this is this amazing thing in American
Speaker 1: history that seems to get glossed over. Yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: like you tend to learn more about your own states
Speaker 1: world thing, right, Yeah, then you do about the about
Speaker 1: You know, everyone wants to celebrate their own party, not
Speaker 1: the great party of it. For me, it was the
Speaker 1: tea party, but the old one. Uh, for us growing
Speaker 1: up in Tennessee, what did we learn more like the
Speaker 1: mini versatile uses of corn chips. Well, and of course
Speaker 1: in Knox Fill we have the big golden globe with
Speaker 1: the wigs in it. Yeah, with the wig tower. Was
Speaker 1: that real? Or was that just the Simpsons? That? What?
Speaker 1: The wig tower? There, wigs in it, the buildings there,
Speaker 1: you have ruined reality for me. Okay, So each of
Speaker 1: the three of us is going to focus on one
Speaker 1: major aspect of the fair that we want to talk
Speaker 1: about that we found especially interesting. But before we get
Speaker 1: into that, we just wanted to give you a little
Speaker 1: bit of the texture of the fair so you can
Speaker 1: know what all is going on there. There's absolutely no
Speaker 1: way we could explore everything that was happening at the
Speaker 1: fair because it was I mean, it was the the
Speaker 1: whole world in a in a in a single place,
Speaker 1: it would be a possible, but to try to give
Speaker 1: you a quick picture, one of the first things you'd
Speaker 1: notice if you walk into the fair is probably the architecture. Now,
Speaker 1: they had landscape architecture right from Frederick Law Olmstead, the
Speaker 1: guy who designed Central Park in New York and a
Speaker 1: lot of I mean a lot of times. If you
Speaker 1: go to a city and you find a beautiful park
Speaker 1: with greens and nice sloping contours and uh tastefully selected
Speaker 1: plants and all that, you look it up designed by Olmstead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so are our big park back in our hometown of Atlanta.
Speaker 1: Piedmont Park is an Olmstead park. That's pretty cool. It
Speaker 1: is pretty cool. It's best when it's full of dogs,
Speaker 1: exactly when they get away from their owners and they
Speaker 1: come and get your hot dog. I'm not speaking from experience,
Speaker 1: I don't, but yeah, but also building architecture, so um.
Speaker 1: The person who is selected to head up the fair,
Speaker 1: to be the czar of the fair and control all
Speaker 1: of its machinations was Daniel Burnham. The architect I mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier was responsible for the rookery uh, and he also
Speaker 1: wanted the fair to be about building architecture. And this
Speaker 1: is what led to the White City. We had the
Speaker 1: image up earlier. It seems to be gone now, uh,
Speaker 1: But this was this was a city built on the shore.
Speaker 1: It was in Jackson Park on the shore of Lake Michigan,
Speaker 1: and he invited architects from all over the place, all
Speaker 1: the best architects in the country to come together and
Speaker 1: build a city in the neo classical architecture style. So
Speaker 1: if you're trying to picture that, think I think like
Speaker 1: ancient Rome. Think columns and cornices and sort of like
Speaker 1: the design you would find in the US capital, uh
Speaker 1: and things like that. It suggests stateliness, power, pride, empire
Speaker 1: uh and other various beautiful and evil things all wrapped
Speaker 1: into one. But because they were on a really tight schedule,
Speaker 1: they've been thinking about what are we going to paint
Speaker 1: all the buildings that they just went all white, just
Speaker 1: everything white. It just painted all white. Basically, it's like
Speaker 1: they put the primer on it. It's like they got
Speaker 1: their miniatures ready for the big game and they had
Speaker 1: time for the primer, but not to really paint the army.
Speaker 1: But hey, you know, you gotta that's a game. You
Speaker 1: got a game that's a good way to think about
Speaker 1: the White City, like a big game of Warhammer. Warhammer,
Speaker 1: I guess it would. It's the future. The future is
Speaker 1: those the emphasis here, right. Okay, So you've got the
Speaker 1: White City and you're walking in there, and you try
Speaker 1: to imagine going to this on like a hot summer
Speaker 1: day with the sun beating down and all these white
Speaker 1: buildings and then the sun reflecting off the lake. It
Speaker 1: would be not only beautiful but probably literally hurt your eyes. Uh,
Speaker 1: just all this is all this light, but you're so bright.
Speaker 1: You gotta wear shades. Man, oh man, I'm like that
Speaker 1: was the slogan at my college graduation. No way they
Speaker 1: made us wear sunglasses. It was real silly. Anyway, who
Speaker 1: embarrassing personal history? We don't do that enough. Anyway. By night,
Speaker 1: you would you would witness another one of the fairest marvels,
Speaker 1: which is electric lighting. Now, electric lighting was had already
Speaker 1: existed at this point, but it wasn't fully adopted everywhere,
Speaker 1: and so they had enormous amounts of electric light going
Speaker 1: on at this fair more than a hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand incandescent electric lamps, seven thousand arc lights. George Westinghouse
Speaker 1: the guy who held the rights to Nicola Tesla's Alternating
Speaker 1: Current was the one who got the contract to electrify
Speaker 1: the Fair, and this actually played a big role in
Speaker 1: getting Alternating Current AC accepted as the new standard over
Speaker 1: Edison's d C. I'm sure y'all we got fans of
Speaker 1: the current wars out here. Yeah, we have. We have
Speaker 1: a couple of episodes about that stuff. These guys in particular,
Speaker 1: did a really great episode about the uh, the religious
Speaker 1: aspects of electricity. Yeah, if you want to go check
Speaker 1: that out in our back catalog. What is it called
Speaker 1: Early Days of Electricity. It's about how a lot of
Speaker 1: people used to think electricity was magic and holy and
Speaker 1: they wrote poems about it and then it got really boring.
Speaker 1: Around the same time they started electrocuting people in the
Speaker 1: electric chair. So the Fairy used three times as much
Speaker 1: electricity as the entire city of Chicago. This is definitely
Speaker 1: a technological revolution. Um. More random curiosities from the Fair.
Speaker 1: I just want to mention a few real quick. The
Speaker 1: future of weaponry. The largest artillery gun ever built up
Speaker 1: to that time, by the Fritz, by the Fritz, by
Speaker 1: the German gun. Yeah, while he was the Fritz. He
Speaker 1: was Fritz Krupp, the German gun god who made artillery weapons.
Speaker 1: So this was the biggest one, every twenty seven tons.
Speaker 1: It was capable of shooting a one ton shell. Krupp
Speaker 1: claimed up to a range of sixteen miles, and people
Speaker 1: nicknamed it Krup's baby or Crup's monster. And I think
Speaker 1: this is interesting because you get a kind of preview
Speaker 1: of some of the carnage that's going to come with
Speaker 1: the changing technological world. And just I guess with twenty
Speaker 1: five years from then, once we get to World War One,
Speaker 1: the first really true artillery campaign. So this is like
Speaker 1: the moat up of their time, the what the moab?
Speaker 1: The mo Yeah pretty much. Yeah. And then didn't they
Speaker 1: like that you told me this. They would fire the
Speaker 1: shells at targets here in Chicago, right, so they could
Speaker 1: demonstrate its power. Thankfully, they did not try to fire
Speaker 1: the gun inside the city. They had these destroyed targets.
Speaker 1: It was almost like warnings. They had these destroyed targets
Speaker 1: to be these sheets of eighteen inch thick steel that
Speaker 1: are just blown to smithereens by the gun. Uh, they
Speaker 1: claimed the gun had done this. No nobody really saw it. Happen.
Speaker 1: I guess we have to assume it worked. But the
Speaker 1: fair had a Hall of Electricity. Apparently there was just
Speaker 1: an ungodly noise inside. Can you imagine all this nineteenth
Speaker 1: century electricity uh display? So Nicola Tesla had all these
Speaker 1: devices there to show off how electricity worked, induction motors, um,
Speaker 1: you know. Can you imagine the whirring and the clattering
Speaker 1: and the static discharge crashing like there's lightning and screaming
Speaker 1: all in the building. I'm sure it would have been cool.
Speaker 1: It sounds like here kind of Also about the hall
Speaker 1: of like tricity, they had a Benjamin Franklin statue in
Speaker 1: Michael Angeloyd glory, except he was clothed boring. What was
Speaker 1: he wearing standard Benjamin Franklin crap? I don't know even
Speaker 1: they shared that coat with the spectacles. Think he had
Speaker 1: his spectacles on. But to go for the real thing,
Speaker 1: they should have had him nude, like the David with
Speaker 1: the arm back holding a kite. Yeah. One last thing
Speaker 1: I want to mention is the cultural displays of the fair.
Speaker 1: So the fair had a midway with these international cultural
Speaker 1: displays from all over the world. For example, the Street
Speaker 1: of Cairo where they would recreate the architecture of Egypt.
Speaker 1: So they had like a mosque because they had a
Speaker 1: mosque rebuilt there. Uh. They had the replica of the
Speaker 1: luxe Or Temple, and supposedly one of the obelisks in
Speaker 1: their replica luxe Or Temple I have read had Grover
Speaker 1: Cleveland's name President Grover Cleveland inscribed in hyrid affix. Who
Speaker 1: knows if that's true? How would you even spell that?
Speaker 1: Did they anyway? Um? But then also uh, to to
Speaker 1: pair with the futurists, been to the fair. Westinghouse put
Speaker 1: together a second Egyptian temple, except this one was an
Speaker 1: electrical temple with electrified lights, almost just to mess with
Speaker 1: people like, oh you saw that other Egyptian temple. Huh,
Speaker 1: how about one that will shock you? And they had
Speaker 1: mummies there, Oh yeah, wax mummies. They had replicas of mummies.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't it be great if they had real mummies? Electric
Speaker 1: electric electric mummies. That's a good that's a good band name.
Speaker 1: You can imagine Tesla and Westinghouse would like come up
Speaker 1: with the machine. A machine makes sixteen mummies an hour. Um.
Speaker 1: But one more thing about the street of Cairo was
Speaker 1: the street itself, and this was actually the more popular
Speaker 1: aspect of the the international things. In the Midway. You
Speaker 1: would have things like donkey rides for the kids. People
Speaker 1: actually came from places all around the world to show
Speaker 1: off what their culture looked like. Now we don't know
Speaker 1: always how acurate it would have looked as depicted at
Speaker 1: the fair, but they'd have, you know, a street that's
Speaker 1: supposed to be filled with people from Cairo showing what
Speaker 1: they do in Cairo, having a donkey and camel rides
Speaker 1: for the kids, and coffee and Egyptian exotic dancers for
Speaker 1: mom and dad, and that this is like the Epcot
Speaker 1: center of it. It's hard not to think of of
Speaker 1: Disney World. Yea, when when when when? When thinking how
Speaker 1: much cosplay was going on there, that is a good question.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that had caught on yet, but
Speaker 1: like so you'd have people from Chicago or maybe from
Speaker 1: rural Illinois showing up dressing as the street of Cairo
Speaker 1: or mummies as Yeah. Uh so when I think about this,
Speaker 1: I think about like the cultural display is coming together.
Speaker 1: I think it's confounding because I sense different different spirits
Speaker 1: in the interest people had in this. In one sense,
Speaker 1: I sense a kind of crass orientalism, right, like Americans
Speaker 1: just wanting to look at what those backward foreigners are,
Speaker 1: like a kind of puerile curiosity, maybe also hoping there
Speaker 1: might be some nudity and seeing some foreign dances. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, I also since there there's a
Speaker 1: layer of genuine, admirable interest in other cultures, and that's
Speaker 1: a cool thing to see too in the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: and I think should help transition to what you wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about, right, Robert, Yes, this really interesting thing
Speaker 1: that we're seeing during the World's Fair, this like idea
Speaker 1: of embracing diversity, and so that included religion, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So this was the the auxiliary was in charge of
Speaker 1: all cultural matters because you know, this is not only
Speaker 1: a celebration of of what we are, you know, and
Speaker 1: what what cult where culture was at the time, but
Speaker 1: it was about history where how far had we come?
Speaker 1: And uh, and there was this really cool thing that
Speaker 1: was going on there the the Parliament of World Religions. Now,
Speaker 1: I know what what you're gonna ask you. You want
Speaker 1: to know is how funky is it? No, it's not.
Speaker 1: I wanted to know if it's a literal parliament, like
Speaker 1: they bring God in for question time and they can
Speaker 1: you fill a buster? The Presbyterians say, where wigs? Now,
Speaker 1: maybe that's where all those wigs from Tennessee went. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be. Basically, the idea of the Parliament of
Speaker 1: World Religions was, let's let's send out these invites to
Speaker 1: all of these these major religions. And yes, most of
Speaker 1: them are gonna end up being English speaking Protestant religions,
Speaker 1: but let's have everybody come in. We'll celebrate what we
Speaker 1: have in common. We'll give everyone a chance to not
Speaker 1: so much to to boast about the religion and push
Speaker 1: down other faiths, but rather to to say, hey, this
Speaker 1: is what we have worked out. This is how we
Speaker 1: bring out the best men people, and this is how
Speaker 1: we can address the concerns of our world. Right, because,
Speaker 1: as Joe is mentioning, you had all these pressures converging
Speaker 1: on not just Chicago but America at the time, right, industrialism, immigration,
Speaker 1: people were freaked out. Yeah, and it's with all of this,
Speaker 1: really every aspect of the of the of the fair here.
Speaker 1: You I mean, you look at it and you know
Speaker 1: what's going to happen in the twentieth century. You know
Speaker 1: about the revolutions, the civil wars, the nationalism, the world wars,
Speaker 1: the Great Depression, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons though, the whole
Speaker 1: nine yards, so stuff everybody's I don't know, but the thing.
Speaker 1: But at the same at the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: we we did have a lot of really positive stuff
Speaker 1: to come out of the twentieth century. I mean, civil
Speaker 1: rights movements, triumph of non violent protests, human space exploration,
Speaker 1: and large extent I'm sorry, Lade Runner, well, of course
Speaker 1: the Blade runner um, but to a to a large extent,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of effort that was made to
Speaker 1: to understand other religions, to promote religious tolerance. And we
Speaker 1: can really look back to the Parliament of World Religions
Speaker 1: in ere and see sort of a beginning there. So
Speaker 1: you could say that in the eighteen nineties this was
Speaker 1: something that was also very needed, right, Yes, So what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna explain it describe now, and I'm very much
Speaker 1: jumping off of what Joe said earlier. A lot of
Speaker 1: this is gonna sound hauntingly familiar. Okay, so we have
Speaker 1: to go back to the climate of eighteen nineties America
Speaker 1: and uh, an author by the name of Catherine Marshall.
Speaker 1: She wrote a wonderful piece in the Interfaith Observer in
Speaker 1: tiften and she she did a great job driving home
Speaker 1: some of the key areas where religious and cultural tensions
Speaker 1: were were brewing. So a flood of mostly poor immigrants,
Speaker 1: many of them Jewish refugees from Russia, were entering the
Speaker 1: country and as a result, you had this surge in
Speaker 1: xenophobic and nativist attitudes, and this inspired the founding of
Speaker 1: the Immigration Restriction League, as well as anti immigrant laws
Speaker 1: such as eighteen eighty two's China Exclusion Act. And on
Speaker 1: top of that, you had changes in immigration policies that
Speaker 1: that favored educated Northern European immigrants over pretty much everybody else. Yes,
Speaker 1: this sounds scarily familiar. Yeah, but again you have to
Speaker 1: you have to look at this this world. You see
Speaker 1: what's going on and on in in in In addition
Speaker 1: to all the immigration, you have these globalizing elements that
Speaker 1: were taking place, right you had you had this surge
Speaker 1: and technological achievement. So this is where again the the
Speaker 1: the World Religious Parliament comes into play. One of the
Speaker 1: key individuals here and uh and I'm going to go
Speaker 1: into detail about him because it's kind of interesting to
Speaker 1: to look at him. Is one of the roots of
Speaker 1: it here. Um. His name was Charles Carroll Bonnie, and
Speaker 1: he was a Chicago lawyer, a judge, a teacher, president
Speaker 1: of the World's Congress Auxiliary. They're the ones who did
Speaker 1: a lot of the cultural and religious stuff for this celebration.
Speaker 1: And he was charged with highlighting the intellectual and more
Speaker 1: moral progress of the civilized world. And uh, he was
Speaker 1: also a member of a new religious movement known as
Speaker 1: the sweden Borgian Church. Oh boy, how many of you
Speaker 1: have heard of the Swedenborgian Church before? Okay, I see,
Speaker 1: like four hands, all right, there's a fifth. We may
Speaker 1: even have some Swedenborgians in the audience, maybe any Swedenborgians.
Speaker 1: Well okay, maybe not, but we got one maybe. Al right,
Speaker 1: well all right, well hope this is named after a person, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is named after an individual by the name of
Speaker 1: Emmanuel Swedenborg. What a name. Okay, hold on a second.
Speaker 1: This guy is Swedish and his name is sweden Borg.
Speaker 1: So that'd be like if my name was Christian America Borg.
Speaker 1: You should consider it. I mean, I think that's the one.
Speaker 1: Heck of mind. Yeah, maybe I'll change it for the show.
Speaker 1: That's the name of a project deep under the ground
Speaker 1: in the Pentagon Christian American. It's an electric mummy. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk a little more about the Swedenborgians in
Speaker 1: just a second. But first, new religious movements. What is
Speaker 1: a new religious movement, Robert, be straight with me. It
Speaker 1: is the same thing as a cult. All right, This
Speaker 1: is the way I listen to this pause, Well, okay,
Speaker 1: this is the way I like to look at it.
Speaker 1: You have cults over here, and there's a certain certain
Speaker 1: list of criteria for cults, and you have a new
Speaker 1: religious movements over here, and there are certain criteria. Sometimes
Speaker 1: these two things overlap. I think you can sort of
Speaker 1: look at like like any young religion is kind of
Speaker 1: like a like a teenager. You know, they're they're just
Speaker 1: figuring out who they are and uh, maybe they're a
Speaker 1: little impulsive. They have a lot of growing up to do, uh,
Speaker 1: and that will come in time if they survive. And
Speaker 1: they don't always get invited to world parliaments like teenagers.
Speaker 1: So another way to look at it at new religious movements,
Speaker 1: very much in keeping with the fair, is that these
Speaker 1: are they're almost always rooted in ancient religious traditions, but
Speaker 1: it's someone has taken those religious traditions, or rather picked
Speaker 1: up the shards of them and reform them into something
Speaker 1: that appeals to modern believers. That that it tackles modern problems.
Speaker 1: It's been it's something that's taken the old and remade
Speaker 1: it into something new. This is the principle of syncretism.
Speaker 1: In fact, this is how we get I would say,
Speaker 1: most religions that exist in the world you can see
Speaker 1: as being sort of built out of the pieces of
Speaker 1: older religions. Yeah, if you've ever listened to our podcast before,
Speaker 1: this actually comes up quite a bit, and sometimes we
Speaker 1: refer to it as the lunch tray method of religion,
Speaker 1: where you can just pick different versions that will be
Speaker 1: your meal. Yeah, though generally at this time you're talking
Speaker 1: about someone else saying, all right, here is your new meal.
Speaker 1: I've I've picked up what you don't need anymore. I've
Speaker 1: decided that we're just having corn. That's sort of thing.
Speaker 1: But it's corner of the ky what or it's corn
Speaker 1: with the quor. You know, it's interesting to talk about
Speaker 1: religion while we're we're here it's E two E two
Speaker 1: because we we have passed episodes where we talked about
Speaker 1: hyper real religions, the idea that a lot in many
Speaker 1: cases fandoms and various five properties. Fantasy properties like these
Speaker 1: can take on the power of religion for modern people.
Speaker 1: And we have some examples where people tend to take
Speaker 1: that to a literal extent, such as Jedi is um
Speaker 1: any jedi Ists in here or jedis there. There are
Speaker 1: people who literally claim to have Jedi as their religions.
Speaker 1: Consider the one way were wondering about was postapharianism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if there are any of those folks here, we'll think
Speaker 1: about all of this religious in some places. So as
Speaker 1: we continue, Yeah, if you're having trouble connecting to the
Speaker 1: religious idea, just replace the religion with with whatever your
Speaker 1: favorite fandom happens to be. Now, as far as real
Speaker 1: um a new religious movements, just a two quick examples
Speaker 1: because these will come into play. That you had eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.
Speaker 1: That's a perfect example of not only a new religious movement,
Speaker 1: but a frontier and new religious movement, one that was
Speaker 1: was very much coming out of a place and time
Speaker 1: and the needs of the people there and deeply American
Speaker 1: in character. And then you also had the Christian Scientist
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy nine. They were both founded prior to the
Speaker 1: Colombian Exposition, but only one of them was invited. And
Speaker 1: I'll touch that on that in a minute. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna tell us which one, Okay, I'll go ahead, and
Speaker 1: all right, you can try and figure it out. But
Speaker 1: more recent examples, of course, would be like Rastafari scientology
Speaker 1: and follow him gong. Okay, so we've we've established that Swedenborgianism,
Speaker 1: or rather the New Church Swedenborgian Church. This was basically
Speaker 1: the idea that the Second Coming had occurred and we're
Speaker 1: all living in the New Jerusalem and uh, and we
Speaker 1: need to focus on making the world a better place.
Speaker 1: That's that's just a very brief breakdown of that. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's like later seasons of Battlestar Collector. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: was a pretty big deal. I mean, Johnny Appleseed was
Speaker 1: a member of the New Church. Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed,
Speaker 1: Helen Keller, William Blake, and there was one other who
Speaker 1: was Rubber Frost. So so they were cool with cider then,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, the American side are hard on like
Speaker 1: the Swedenborgian Avengers. Yeah yeah, b B B b b
Speaker 1: B one thing we didn't even say. But you've got
Speaker 1: to have in mind thinking about the World's Fair in
Speaker 1: the eighteen nineties. Behind everything, there is a rabid temperance
Speaker 1: movement that wants influence on whatever you're doing. So anybody
Speaker 1: who wanted to have drinks going on wherever, they were
Speaker 1: always fighting the temperance movement. All right, So back to
Speaker 1: this world, this Parliament of religions, how does a good
Speaker 1: rolling Well, Bonnie appoints the first Presbyterian clergyman, John Henry Barrows,
Speaker 1: to admit that minister this thing. He ends up writing
Speaker 1: about this a lot. There's a book that you can
Speaker 1: find of his online at archive dot org where he
Speaker 1: just goes into exhaustive detail about the whole deal. But basically,
Speaker 1: they send out these invitations. He and a bunch of
Speaker 1: sixteen other people that put together these invitations send them
Speaker 1: out three thousand copies of the preliminary address, uh to
Speaker 1: religions around the world to participate. Uh So not everybody
Speaker 1: was crazy about it. The Presbyterians didn't like it, The
Speaker 1: Church of England, European Roman Catholics, the Sultan of Turkey,
Speaker 1: various American even a Gelicles disapproved, but a number of
Speaker 1: other people were really into the idea. Now, not everybody
Speaker 1: got an invite. I don't want to make it sound
Speaker 1: like this was just super inclusive. The Church of Latter
Speaker 1: day Saints were snubbed from the event despite really uh
Speaker 1: that they were really interested in attending, but they ended
Speaker 1: up not taking of the controversy of polygamy at the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it just but it does just go to show
Speaker 1: that there was some favoritism. Like even it's eight so
Speaker 1: even in the name of like bringing all these religions together,
Speaker 1: there's still some closed mindedness about about some new religious movements,
Speaker 1: like the right kind of new religious movements, like the
Speaker 1: Christian Scientists are invited, but but but not the Morment.
Speaker 1: We're having a religion party. No Mormons allowed, all right,
Speaker 1: So the party takes place and it is it's it's
Speaker 1: quite a success. So talk in terms of who attended,
Speaker 1: one fifty two out of one nine papers were English
Speaker 1: speaking Christians, but you still saw twelve Buddhist, eleven Jewish presenters,
Speaker 1: eight Hindu to Islamic, two Zoroastrians to Shinto to Confucians,
Speaker 1: to Dallast and uh one Janus. So that's a pretty
Speaker 1: good Amountain. You also had a Christian scientist and a theosoficet.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a pretty good representation to me. I mean,
Speaker 1: went the more I hear about this more, the more
Speaker 1: I wonder, like, would this be possible today? Well, we'll
Speaker 1: get to that. So the inaugural celebration began with an
Speaker 1: interfaith ceremony, drawing in some four thousand people. Reported five
Speaker 1: thousand assembled to hear a speech by Hindu monk Swami Vivicananda,
Speaker 1: who's widely regarded as being the guy who introduced Hinduism
Speaker 1: and yoga to the Western world. So if you did
Speaker 1: yoga today, thanks Swami Vivicananda. We have our hotel has
Speaker 1: yoga mats in the closets all thank to Swami Vivcana.
Speaker 1: It's awful. And oh yeah, nineteen women spoke at the
Speaker 1: at at the Congress as well, which I think was,
Speaker 1: you know, pretty good for the day. So the Parliament
Speaker 1: didn't attempt to unify religion. They again, they approached it
Speaker 1: more as a platform for everyone to share their light.
Speaker 1: And yet there were those who managed to throw a
Speaker 1: few elbows into other religions to sort of talk here
Speaker 1: and there about you know, false religions. Uh. There was
Speaker 1: a few people in in particular who kind of use
Speaker 1: battle royal darwinnus of Um language to describe it as
Speaker 1: if this whole party was just one big battle and
Speaker 1: at the end there can be only one. I like
Speaker 1: the Yeah, it's like Highlander, but they're all wearing like
Speaker 1: Japanese school girl outfits fighting over religions. Yeah, and McLeod
Speaker 1: is a Presbyterian. Yeah, which one is a clancy Brown
Speaker 1: with his leather jacket? I don't know Christian scientists Kgan.
Speaker 1: Let's see, he's Church of England, all right. So everyone
Speaker 1: comes together, they share stuff about the religion, and everyone's
Speaker 1: patting themselves on the bag. But I know what you're
Speaker 1: you're you're asking yourself. You're thinking ahead to the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: you're thinking ahead to now, and you're saying, did any
Speaker 1: of this accomplish anything? Did any good come out of it?
Speaker 1: Or is it just kind of like those uh, you know,
Speaker 1: those kitchens of the future that you see footage job
Speaker 1: from the fifties and sixties where you look back and
Speaker 1: you know you say, well, well, that's great, but we
Speaker 1: never had flying toast. There's no one ever had a
Speaker 1: had had a refrigerator like that. You know, they didn't
Speaker 1: have the Internet of Things yet. But so wait, did
Speaker 1: this have a continuing influence or not? Well it did,
Speaker 1: but I mean part of it is that in the
Speaker 1: in the era to follow, interfaith cooperation was not a priority.
Speaker 1: You know. Um, you might say that there were a
Speaker 1: number of different interfaith groups that sprang up right at
Speaker 1: of the Parliament. Not all of them lasted, They weren't
Speaker 1: necessarily all that focused. After the Second World War you
Speaker 1: saw more localized focus on inter religious efforts, and eventually
Speaker 1: you did. You did see some really major groups come
Speaker 1: out of this, such as International Association for Religious Freedom
Speaker 1: in nineteen hundred, the World Council of Churches in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight. You also had groups that were not expressly religious,
Speaker 1: but but did you know, we did entail some some
Speaker 1: religious discussions, such as John D. Rockefeller the Thirds Asia
Speaker 1: Society founded in nineteen fifty six. You also saw various
Speaker 1: religious groups becoming more open at least to talking about
Speaker 1: other religions, um, the Catholic Church, for instance. Following the
Speaker 1: Second Vatican Council in the nineteen sixties. And I imagine
Speaker 1: like anybody out there who grew up in a church,
Speaker 1: I mean everybody's If you grew up in a church,
Speaker 1: everybody's church upbrings a little different. But you might be
Speaker 1: able to think back to some at least mild mid level,
Speaker 1: you know, interfaith discussion that went on. What do you
Speaker 1: think Mel Gibson thinks about this? Why would you go there?
Speaker 1: We should probably ask him next time he's in the studio. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well we'll have him on to talk about interfaith communication
Speaker 1: to go get the Grengo. But a number of these
Speaker 1: these groups are still around, and the World Parliament of
Speaker 1: Religions lives on what what what? You're still having this?
Speaker 1: They are They reconvened once more in so that's their
Speaker 1: their centennial wow right here in Chicago, and they still
Speaker 1: hold events every few years. Ironically enough, the most recent
Speaker 1: US meeting took place in Salt Lake City, so they
Speaker 1: had to invite the Mormons. Yeah, so there's some come
Speaker 1: up in there. You know. Now we're hosting the party,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, you can suck it. I guess,
Speaker 1: you know what with this kind of parliament coming together
Speaker 1: fostering mutual understanding. It makes me think that the people
Speaker 1: who would be most likely to attend are the people
Speaker 1: who need it the least. You know. Yeah, like, you're
Speaker 1: not going to get the Westboro Baptist Church to show
Speaker 1: up at the Parliamental World Religions, or if they do that,
Speaker 1: they're going to be just making a ruckus. Well, I
Speaker 1: think it's it's kind of like any conference, right, you know.
Speaker 1: The people who are super interested and motivated or even
Speaker 1: like bound by career to it, those are the ones
Speaker 1: that show up. But hopefully they get something, they bring
Speaker 1: it back, they bring back the spirit of the thing,
Speaker 1: and they share it with everyone else. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe everyone here plans to do the same. You're
Speaker 1: gonna get just filled up with the spirit of your
Speaker 1: favorite fandom. You bring it home, and you just inflicted
Speaker 1: on everyone. That's the way. That's why they make them
Speaker 1: peace bond those Hey. So all right, let's say I
Speaker 1: have attended the Parliament of World Religions, right, and I
Speaker 1: need to walk outside for a smoke break, and you
Speaker 1: need a new God, yeah yeah, And so I go
Speaker 1: outside and I look up and there's this huge gigantic
Speaker 1: wheel in front of me. Do you start worshiping it?
Speaker 1: Is this much? Exactly? Is that my new God? Yes,
Speaker 1: of course you do, cause I want to talk about
Speaker 1: the Colossus of Chicago as I would call it, or
Speaker 1: Chicago's Eiffel Tower. Uh So, in eighteen ninety three, getting
Speaker 1: ready for the fair, Chicago had what we might call
Speaker 1: Paris envy um, and the Freudian centerpiece of Paris Envy
Speaker 1: is Eiffel envy. So the Eiffel Tower was created by
Speaker 1: the engineering company of Gustav Eiffel, and it was for
Speaker 1: a previous World's fair, the Paris World's Fair in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, and uh it was. It was ridiculed by
Speaker 1: some people at the time, is what's this hideous, gigantic
Speaker 1: iron monstrosity. It's not in keeping with the surrounding architecture whatever.
Speaker 1: But a lot of other people looked at that and
Speaker 1: they said, wow, that's really something, And a lot of
Speaker 1: architects look at looked at it and said wow that yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an it's a new kind of romantic modernism. It's grand,
Speaker 1: it's inspiring, and furthermore, it ties in with the technological
Speaker 1: change theme because it's visual evidence that France was claiming
Speaker 1: to have edged out the United States in iron and
Speaker 1: steel working, and the people of Chicago did not like that.
Speaker 1: I'm assuming all these architects were men. Well, actually all
Speaker 1: the main architects leading the fair weremen, but they did. Um,
Speaker 1: they did have a women's building at the fair that
Speaker 1: was designed by a female architect. Um. But it probably
Speaker 1: wasn't very phallic like the Eiffel Tower. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 1: know the degree in which it was phallic. Uh, alright,
Speaker 1: we needn't measue. Yeah, we need like a scale of fellicism.
Speaker 1: But they were trying to out Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower.
Speaker 1: So that's literally a lot of tower designs. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Daniel Burnham, the tsar of the World's Fair, and his associates,
Speaker 1: they were obsessed with this. They were obsessed with finding
Speaker 1: an architectural centerpiece for the fair, something like a new
Speaker 1: Eiffel tower. They wanted to literally, as you say, out
Speaker 1: Eiffel Eiffel um. And they got a bunch of proposals
Speaker 1: they solicited from architects all over the place, give us
Speaker 1: ideas for what we could do. Uh. And these are
Speaker 1: all documented in Larson's book as well. So one of
Speaker 1: the purpo posals. Uh well, actually, first I should say
Speaker 1: I think you can think about basically the proposals fall
Speaker 1: into two categories. There's boring and there's insane. Eiffel himself,
Speaker 1: the guy who designed the Eiffel Tower, offered to design
Speaker 1: them a centerpiece, and Burnham was like, yeah, okay, let's
Speaker 1: see what you got, and Eiffels like here, here, here,
Speaker 1: sit down, sit down. Another Eiffel tower, a little bit
Speaker 1: bigger than the first one. Burnham wasn't really into it.
Speaker 1: He was like, no, I think we need something weirder,
Speaker 1: more shocking. That's something that's fresh and new. So let's
Speaker 1: look in the fresh and new category. One proposal they
Speaker 1: got put forward by an inventor named JB. Mccomber, was
Speaker 1: a tower that would be eight thousand, nine hundred and
Speaker 1: forty seven ft tall. For reference, the tallest building in
Speaker 1: the world today, the Birch Khalifa in Dubai is twenty
Speaker 1: dred feet tall, So totally in this in the eight nineties,
Speaker 1: so there might have been varying levels of taking it
Speaker 1: seriously among the architects here. But yeah, so the top
Speaker 1: of this tower would serve as a station for elevated
Speaker 1: railways that would connect to major cities like New York
Speaker 1: and Boston. Almost think about nineteenth century hyper loop where
Speaker 1: when you're done at the fair, you take an elevator
Speaker 1: up to the top of this nine thousand foot tower
Speaker 1: and then you ride downhill all the way back to
Speaker 1: Baltimore wherever you came from. But it's like a it's
Speaker 1: like a sled. Yeah. I got another one that This
Speaker 1: one's pretty good, uh. Proposal put forward by guy named
Speaker 1: CF Ritchell of Connecticut. It was a tower with three
Speaker 1: nested levels. You might think of it kind of like
Speaker 1: a nested ziggurat, and it would have a base that's
Speaker 1: a hundred feet tall, then a second tower nested within
Speaker 1: the first one, and then a third tower nested within
Speaker 1: the second, and then it would harness hydraulic power slowly
Speaker 1: over the course of several hours, extend the tower to
Speaker 1: full height, and then shrink it back down. Can you
Speaker 1: picture this, by the way, So it just goes from
Speaker 1: two messes to flacidity, exactly flacidity. You know, we just
Speaker 1: recorded an episode for next week about H. R. Giger.
Speaker 1: So every time I hear you talking about this, you
Speaker 1: can only imagine it as designed by now that would
Speaker 1: have been cool. But then you gotta add he this
Speaker 1: is my Eiffel tower. Uh. Well, getting back to the
Speaker 1: Freudian elements here, but yeah, they wanted to have a
Speaker 1: restaurant by the way right at the tip um one more. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is good. So an inventor wanted to design a
Speaker 1: tower that would be four thousand feet tall. Remember our
Speaker 1: Birch Khaliphs again, so this is still taller than the
Speaker 1: tallest building in the world today. Uh. And at the
Speaker 1: top there's a car that seats two hundred people. You
Speaker 1: get into the car, it's like a train car. And
Speaker 1: this car would be attached to the top of the
Speaker 1: tower by a two thousand foot long rubber cable. And
Speaker 1: you see where we're going with this. The design proposal
Speaker 1: specifies best rubber good, none of that cheapo rubber for this.
Speaker 1: And then they push you off the top of the
Speaker 1: tower and you bungee until you come to a halt.
Speaker 1: But but you're in a train car. Yeah, so one
Speaker 1: would hope that the rubber is sufficiently elastic. I mean,
Speaker 1: if it didn't stretch enough, you basically you have a
Speaker 1: car full of soup at the yeah, right, like they
Speaker 1: opened the doors at the bottom and everybody just spills out.
Speaker 1: This just makes me think of various like Kaiju movies
Speaker 1: where the monster picks up a train car and just
Speaker 1: takes it until everybody is presumably liquefied inside. Right, just
Speaker 1: that would just have to be the result of this
Speaker 1: horrific design. It's a shame they didn't build it. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Uh. Then we get to the very last
Speaker 1: alternate proposal, my favorite one for lovers of Abraham Lincoln,
Speaker 1: of the log cabin lore. You've got the log tower
Speaker 1: basically Eiffel Tower rip off, except have underfeet taller, entirely
Speaker 1: made of logs instead of iron, just logs, and at
Speaker 1: the top there's a log cabin where you can get
Speaker 1: some drinks and refreshment and I don't know, maybe getting
Speaker 1: a camp fire with that. Yeah. I think we were
Speaker 1: talking earlier how this would this could have been like
Speaker 1: the first burning there. Yeah, exactly, gone for it. You
Speaker 1: missed out all the people who misbehaved. The fair had
Speaker 1: its own police force, by the way, so you should
Speaker 1: think about that. The fair basically had a private army,
Speaker 1: and so for all the people who misbehave at the fair,
Speaker 1: they could just put him at the top of the
Speaker 1: log tower and then a wicker man it up at
Speaker 1: the end of the day. So none of these ideas
Speaker 1: are really getting it now. They're sort of we might
Speaker 1: call it junk um. So Daniel Burnham is not happy.
Speaker 1: The Chicago Fair needs a colossus. You know, it's something
Speaker 1: that's got to be this distinctive physical feature that's gonna
Speaker 1: inspire wonder, not hilarity or terror um. And he was
Speaker 1: bored with towers. So enter a young engineer from Pittsburgh
Speaker 1: who's the proprietor of a steel inspecting company, and he'd
Speaker 1: been sitting in on a meeting of engineers that Burnham
Speaker 1: was heading up. Burnham standing at the top of the
Speaker 1: room yelling at everybody, you idiots, why you can't why
Speaker 1: can't you come up with something good? And farett. This
Speaker 1: guy his name is George Ferris, and he's sitting in
Speaker 1: the room and he's thinking, you know, we are idiots,
Speaker 1: but I've got an idea, and this is how we
Speaker 1: got the world's first Ferris wheel. So essentially he was like, well,
Speaker 1: let's let's do an Eiffel tower, but let's make an
Speaker 1: Eiffel tower that didn't move. It's a live right, perfect. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's like a walking Eiffel Tower. They're like, you build
Speaker 1: a giant iron tower. I'll make one that rolls around
Speaker 1: the place. You can get in. It's take up their
Speaker 1: statue of liberty and Ghostbusters too. Man. Uh. I don't
Speaker 1: know what music played at the first Ferris Wheel. I'd
Speaker 1: love to know if it was like that that happy
Speaker 1: beat that makes statue dance. Yeah. Um so so Ferris
Speaker 1: Wheels kind of mundane to us. Right, you get in,
Speaker 1: you go up to the top, you spit on your friends.
Speaker 1: Um but you have to you have to put yourself
Speaker 1: in the mindset of an eight nine three farmer showing
Speaker 1: up to the fair and seeing this giant revolving wheel.
Speaker 1: I mean, this thing is huge, probably bigger than the
Speaker 1: standard wheels you would have gotten in today. Ferris Wheels,
Speaker 1: I have to think of it as something like a
Speaker 1: steam punk creation. It's like something you'd see in one
Speaker 1: of the BioShock games. You like, libertarian monsters on it
Speaker 1: that are injecting themselves with with Well there may have been, okay,
Speaker 1: so here's how to picture it. Instead. It didn't have benches.
Speaker 1: You know you've been on the ones that have benches.
Speaker 1: That's like a two person bench you go up around. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: that that's that's small junk. Okay, this, Uh, you have
Speaker 1: to imagine this giant spind lee steel wheel carrying thirty
Speaker 1: six individual train cars two and sixty four ft up
Speaker 1: into the sky and back. And it's usually reported that
Speaker 1: each of the thirty six cars held forty passengers. But
Speaker 1: actually that's I read this book by Stanley apple Bomb.
Speaker 1: The forty passenger load is just for who could sit
Speaker 1: in the plush chairs. Uh, that it could hold sixty
Speaker 1: passengers in each car overall. So that's a capacity of
Speaker 1: two thousand, one hundred and sixty passengers on this Ferris wheel,
Speaker 1: which is more than the number of passengers who died
Speaker 1: in the sinking of the Titanic and getting close to
Speaker 1: the full capacity of the Titanic. So this is this
Speaker 1: is a rolling Spindlee Titanic wheel spider at the fair.
Speaker 1: The axle shaft a loan is forty five ft long
Speaker 1: with forty six tons. At the time, it was believed
Speaker 1: to be the biggest piece of steel ever forged in
Speaker 1: America up to that time. Um and so the Ferris
Speaker 1: wheel wasn't finished until about six weeks after the fair open,
Speaker 1: but it ended up being arguably one of the most
Speaker 1: successful aspects of the World's Fair, probably the most success
Speaker 1: full aspect if you don't count Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show,
Speaker 1: which I think is worth a mention. Buffalo Bill. You know,
Speaker 1: Buffalo Bill Cody. He wanted to run his Wild West
Speaker 1: show inside the fair. Uh. They wouldn't give him a pass,
Speaker 1: citing incongruity, which to me reads as tackiness. Um. But
Speaker 1: so he was like, okay, he won't let me in
Speaker 1: the fair. Well, he bought a parcel of land right
Speaker 1: outside the gate of the fair and caught people on
Speaker 1: the way in. A lot of people went to the
Speaker 1: wild West Show thinking it was the fair. Uh, and
Speaker 1: he made a killing or like where's the wheel? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this lasso so uh yeah, this this World's Fair
Speaker 1: has a lot of shooting. I didn't expect so much
Speaker 1: more exciting. It's like a fast and furious movie. But yeah.
Speaker 1: So the Ferris Wheel opens June one, more than a
Speaker 1: month and a half after the fair began, and it
Speaker 1: was generally considered safe. The authority said it was safe,
Speaker 1: the steel inspectors said it was fate safe. But people
Speaker 1: look dot it and thought that doesn't look right. It
Speaker 1: looks too frail. There's a nice mismatch between how physics
Speaker 1: really works and our intuitive grasp of it of it
Speaker 1: because you you looked at it, and people just thought
Speaker 1: that thing looks like it's gonna collapse. And a wonderful
Speaker 1: story to go along with this. When they first ran
Speaker 1: it for for a test run for the press, people
Speaker 1: got into these cars and they the wheel starts to
Speaker 1: move for the first time. The engines are turning it
Speaker 1: and they start going up to the top and people
Speaker 1: start hearing hail on the roof of their car going
Speaker 1: to the top of the ferris wheel, like, what is
Speaker 1: it hailing outside? Now it was nuts and bolts raining
Speaker 1: down on the roof of the ferris wheel car. Because
Speaker 1: this ties into I think the way I always feel
Speaker 1: when I get on a on a ferris wheel. Instead
Speaker 1: I am I'm not concerned. Yeah I'm a little terrified,
Speaker 1: but it's not because of this like epic construction. It's
Speaker 1: about the people that they put it together, like trying
Speaker 1: to imagine like did they sleazy car? Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like the instructions aside, the island wrench doesn't fit
Speaker 1: whatever I'm just getting in with my finger and then
Speaker 1: and then it's just gonna fall apart when I'm up there.
Speaker 1: So the question is would the wheel hold up? And
Speaker 1: we actually got a pretty strong test of that. On
Speaker 1: Sunday July nine, the Ferris wheels having a huge day.
Speaker 1: People were climbing in. By the way, I read this
Speaker 1: one great account from a guy named Rice, Luther Rice
Speaker 1: who sent a telegram when they first opened the fair saying,
Speaker 1: we need extra guards to keep people from like mobbing
Speaker 1: into this thing. Can you imagine that? So it's like,
Speaker 1: I have a new invention that will carry you hundreds
Speaker 1: of feet into the sky, and you're like mobbing to
Speaker 1: get inside when people are telling you not to. I
Speaker 1: don't know, but yeah. So, so you've got all these people,
Speaker 1: more than a thousand passengers in this walking Eiffel Tower
Speaker 1: or this rolling Titanic, And sometime in the afternoon of
Speaker 1: Sunday July nine, you start to feel the pressure dropping,
Speaker 1: and the sky turns a little dark, and the clouds
Speaker 1: roll in and then you spot it, a funnel cloud
Speaker 1: coming straight at you, and you are in the Ferris
Speaker 1: wheel at the top. Okay, it moves pretty slow. We
Speaker 1: should mention. So if you're at the top, you're it's
Speaker 1: gonna be a while before you can get out, and
Speaker 1: the wheels continuing to turn. And there's another fact that
Speaker 1: you told me. They put mesh over the windows so
Speaker 1: people wouldn't jump out, right. Yeah, they were afraid people
Speaker 1: would be like panicking and trying to jump out the windows,
Speaker 1: which ties into something I'll get to in just a second.
Speaker 1: So they had to like have this great over all
Speaker 1: the windows to be like no suicides. Now. Um, so
Speaker 1: there's a funnel cloud heading for the ferris wheel and
Speaker 1: people are in it. Uh. There There was actually an
Speaker 1: engineer who was aboard the ferris wheel who wrote to
Speaker 1: the journal Engineering News who said that, you know, people
Speaker 1: started to panic and it took two people to brace
Speaker 1: the doors shut as the winds picked up. But then ultimately,
Speaker 1: uh uh, this engineer riding in let's see, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to find this well anyway, said that all the people
Speaker 1: felt in the end was a small vibration and it
Speaker 1: blew the wheel maybe an in chine and a half
Speaker 1: to the side. So but they did get treated to
Speaker 1: the image of a nearby hydrogen balloon floating out over
Speaker 1: the lake, which was completely obliterated by the storm. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so this should be this should be a testament
Speaker 1: to what an amazing feat of steampunk engineering this wheel was.
Speaker 1: It totally defied common sense and yet it withstood this
Speaker 1: powerful storm. Yeah, that's one last story on this. There
Speaker 1: was a great story about a time when a man
Speaker 1: got in the ferris wheel. They were taking him up
Speaker 1: to the top and he starts panicking. He's like, I
Speaker 1: gotta get out. I don't know if the logic works
Speaker 1: on that, because you're getting to the top, you're panicking.
Speaker 1: You're like, getting out doesn't really help you. Um, but
Speaker 1: you know, he was panicking, he wasn't wasn't being rational.
Speaker 1: So he's like, I gotta get out, and he's trying
Speaker 1: to open the doors and jump out, and nobody could.
Speaker 1: People were trying to restrain him, they couldn't stop him.
Speaker 1: And it finally was one passenger on the car with
Speaker 1: him who was resourceful enough to figure out how to
Speaker 1: stop him. It was a woman who removed her skirt
Speaker 1: and threw it over his head and hooded him like
Speaker 1: a horse, you know, like when you put blinders on
Speaker 1: a horse, and that calmed him down. He couldn't see anymore,
Speaker 1: and he made it back down to the bottom. Okay,
Speaker 1: but but the fairs will worked, never collapsed, never turned over,
Speaker 1: and made it to the end of the fair and
Speaker 1: it was a big success. So that's one way to
Speaker 1: calm a madman at the fair. But but now Christian's
Speaker 1: gonna talk about another madman that was that was in play. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: as far as I know, no one threw a skirt
Speaker 1: over this guy's head. I imagine many of you are
Speaker 1: familiar with H. H. Holmes, the first American serial killer,
Speaker 1: or at least recorded, as Robert likes to say, is
Speaker 1: the first one that got caught. Yeah, I'm glad we
Speaker 1: have some murder fans and the audience. So also disclaimer
Speaker 1: if there's any children here, this is about to get
Speaker 1: a little graphic. Uh So I asked you earlier, how
Speaker 1: many of you from out of town. I imagine you're
Speaker 1: staying in hotels, right. What if you went back to
Speaker 1: your hotel room tonight and the door locks behind you
Speaker 1: and you go to sleep, and the room fills with
Speaker 1: gas while you're a sleeping asphyxiates you to death, and
Speaker 1: then the home the hotel owner comes in, he takes
Speaker 1: your body, he drops it down a shoot into the
Speaker 1: basement and dumps it into a Vada acid. Then he
Speaker 1: sells your skeleton to a local medical school. That's what
Speaker 1: was going on with H. H. Holmes purportedly. Now wait, Christian,
Speaker 1: did you ask what if that happened? Like, what would
Speaker 1: what would do? What? I've been thinking about it in
Speaker 1: our hotel. Our hotel is a little creepy. Um, it's
Speaker 1: got these We'll tell you guys just afterwards. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: but so this is gonna be a brief look into
Speaker 1: the science behind H. H. Holmes Murder Castle. Uh. At
Speaker 1: least six people were killed there, maybe more. Dirt ring
Speaker 1: the World Fair The Devil in the White City is
Speaker 1: going to be a big source for us here. But actually,
Speaker 1: there is this fantastic e book that Mysterious Chicago put
Speaker 1: out that is called The Murder Castle of H. H. Holmes,
Speaker 1: The Expanded Edition by Adam Seltzer, and it was incredibly
Speaker 1: helpful because he pulled together all these primary resources from
Speaker 1: the time about what was actually going on. Uh. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do a brief intro on H. A. Holmes
Speaker 1: for those of you who aren't familiar. But really we're
Speaker 1: not gonna have the time to go into all of
Speaker 1: his exploits, but mainly we're gonna talk about how he
Speaker 1: designed this murder castle from the ground up, specifically to
Speaker 1: dispose of victims with science. In fact, one of the
Speaker 1: investigators involved in this case referred to Homes as a
Speaker 1: scientific criminal, and he said he would never think of
Speaker 1: engaging in a burglary or shooting a person in cold blood.
Speaker 1: So there's that, you know. I think that's interesting to
Speaker 1: think about this being the age of a scientific criminal
Speaker 1: because right right around the same times when we got
Speaker 1: the Jack the Ripper killings. Yeah, and in fact, a
Speaker 1: lot of people were speculating that they were the same person.
Speaker 1: And this might be for the scientific aspects. I mean,
Speaker 1: Holmes himself was a physician. He was He was a doctor,
Speaker 1: had a degree in surgery, and he operated as a pharmacist.
Speaker 1: Uh So his actual name was Herman Webster Mudget, so
Speaker 1: you can see why he changed it to H. H.
Speaker 1: Holmes Henry Howard. Uh. Like I said, he was trained
Speaker 1: as a surgeon. He changed his name when he moved
Speaker 1: to Chicago, and he operated as a totally legitimate pharmacist
Speaker 1: here in town. Uh Now, the question is usually how
Speaker 1: many people did this guy kill? This is all during
Speaker 1: the World's Fair. Supposedly he killed visitors who rented rooms
Speaker 1: in this hotel of his, and they were especially plentiful
Speaker 1: as people were coming into town. They're like varied numbers.
Speaker 1: Some people say it's up to two hundred people, but
Speaker 1: that estimate doesn't really seem to have any hard evidence
Speaker 1: to back it up. More likely either tall tales that
Speaker 1: are just springing out of something that's already a grizzly situation.
Speaker 1: He admitted, however, to killing twenty seven people, but the
Speaker 1: confession is totally dubious because some of the people he
Speaker 1: admitted to killing killing came forward and we're like, I'm alive.
Speaker 1: I don't know what he's talking about. Yeah, yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: I confuse you with that other person killed that other
Speaker 1: person I killed. But then on the on the gallows
Speaker 1: right before they hung him, he said, no, I only
Speaker 1: killed two people. So it's all over the place, what
Speaker 1: we but we know he killed more than two. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: at least in the Murder Castle, five to six people
Speaker 1: were killed, if not more. Uh. And he was eventually
Speaker 1: arrested in Boston for his crimes. He killed his accomplice
Speaker 1: and three of his children. It was this part of
Speaker 1: this insurance scam that went wrong. He was hung in
Speaker 1: six This is something. Uh. He asked to have his
Speaker 1: body buried in ten ft deep of concrete so nobody
Speaker 1: could get ahold of his body and put it on
Speaker 1: a dissection table. So yeah, he was real charmer. So
Speaker 1: you mentioned his insurance scam. I think we got to
Speaker 1: mention this because this is one of the most fun
Speaker 1: things about Holmes, if anything is fun. Holmes was doing
Speaker 1: these insurance scams his whole life. What would you do
Speaker 1: if somebody came up to you and said, Hey, I've
Speaker 1: got a great idea. I'm going to take out an
Speaker 1: insurance policy, a life insurance policy on you with me
Speaker 1: is the beneficiary. I'll give you a little bit of money. Hey,
Speaker 1: And for a lot of the people who met Holmes
Speaker 1: were like, yes, okay, we'll do that. So this Murder Castle,
Speaker 1: it's in there. It was in Englewood, Illinois, just southeast Chicago,
Speaker 1: on the corner of Wallace and sixty third Street. Apparently
Speaker 1: the construction of the building was finished in eighteen ninety.
Speaker 1: The blueprint plans for this building included fifty one doorways
Speaker 1: that just opened up into brick walls and a hundred
Speaker 1: windowless rooms. So some people go, how do you build
Speaker 1: a how do you build something like that? Christian? I
Speaker 1: want to build him herder castle like a pyramid. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: during construction, he made sure that no workmen stayed on
Speaker 1: the job for more than a week. And the way
Speaker 1: he did this was he would just claim all their
Speaker 1: work was second rate and he refused to pay them.
Speaker 1: They walk off the job, they'd hire somebody else. So
Speaker 1: he was the only one who knew the exact layout
Speaker 1: of this building. It was three stories tall, it was
Speaker 1: one block long. He referred to it as the World's
Speaker 1: Fair Hotel. The idea was the World's Fair was going
Speaker 1: to be coming to town. He would use it not,
Speaker 1: you know, not publicly, to murder people. People would rent
Speaker 1: rent rooms there. It was kind of like an airbnb. Uh,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really a hotel in the modern sense either.
Speaker 1: There wasn't like a front desk or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It was mainly like long term rentals. Um. So here's
Speaker 1: some features of this building. It had trap doors, secret compartments,
Speaker 1: and hidden stairways. The halls were designed like mazes. Some
Speaker 1: of the stairs led to nowhere, which is what our
Speaker 1: hotel that we're staying and has in common. Uh. The
Speaker 1: upper floor rooms were soundproofed and airtight, and they were
Speaker 1: sealed in line with s best us and they were
Speaker 1: hooked up to these gas lines so he could pump
Speaker 1: in gas and either asphyxiate people or some people speculate
Speaker 1: that he burned people of death and they're like he
Speaker 1: would roast them. The evidence on that's a little weird.
Speaker 1: But there were like gas valves on the other sides
Speaker 1: of these walls. It's like a late seventies Dungeons and
Speaker 1: Dragons module. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If only he could just
Speaker 1: played Dungeons and Dragons, I think we could have saved
Speaker 1: a lot. All. You could also look at it as
Speaker 1: like a Winchester mystery house that kills you very much. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there were seveny one guest bedrooms. He had some
Speaker 1: of them rigged up so they had alarms so he
Speaker 1: would know if the occupant was trying to escape. Um
Speaker 1: and some of the some of the reporters who investigated
Speaker 1: this case, they like gave the rooms these fancy names.
Speaker 1: These weren't like Holmes names for them. The Black Closet,
Speaker 1: the Room of the three corpses, and the hanging secret chamber.
Speaker 1: That's the room I'm staying. Um. But they were all
Speaker 1: just made up, you know. They weren't even by people
Speaker 1: who worked in Chicago. This is like newspapers in New York.
Speaker 1: They would get ahold of diagrams and they'd go, oh cool,
Speaker 1: we gotta come up with fun names for these when
Speaker 1: And that's something to keep in mind through all of it, right,
Speaker 1: because it's not just what happened, but it's what people
Speaker 1: are layering over what happened exactly. Yeah. So his bathroom,
Speaker 1: his personal bathroom, had a trap door in it that
Speaker 1: led to a hidden stairwell down to a windowless cubicle
Speaker 1: between the floors, and then from here there was a
Speaker 1: shoot that dropped to the cellar. And it wasn't just
Speaker 1: like a fun slide, it was you know, for purposes.
Speaker 1: And he also had an exit so he could basically
Speaker 1: like get away if something was going on. Just right
Speaker 1: out into the street. Next to his office, there was
Speaker 1: a vault, and when they investigated the vault, the impression
Speaker 1: of a wounded woman's footprint was found on the inside
Speaker 1: of the door, and it was described as being big
Speaker 1: enough only for a person to stand in. So how
Speaker 1: does he get rid of all these bodies? Well, this
Speaker 1: is where the basement comes in. That shoot dimension goes
Speaker 1: straight down to the basement. And here's some fun thing
Speaker 1: that we're supposedly in the basement. Uh, that's of acid
Speaker 1: quicklime pits. And there was a furnace in his office
Speaker 1: on the upper floors. Uh. Most people have furnaces in
Speaker 1: their office. Uh. And in the basement there was also
Speaker 1: supposedly a dissecting table, his surgeon tools. It was also
Speaker 1: rumored that there were these like apparatus is that looked
Speaker 1: like medieval torture devices everywhere, but their purpose was never explained.
Speaker 1: A lot of this is really alleged, especially like when
Speaker 1: you read that Seltzer book, because the police at the
Speaker 1: time that we're investigating in the journalists who are reporting
Speaker 1: on it were really like kind of hysterical about the
Speaker 1: whole thing, and it took on some hyperbolee. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: gotta sell some newspapers, folks. So what's the best way
Speaker 1: to get rid of body? How do you guys get
Speaker 1: rid of bodies? Oh? Quicklime? Quicklime is one way, but
Speaker 1: in a lot of people, you know, if you've read
Speaker 1: Detective stories. You're like, oh, yeah, I've heard of alligator
Speaker 1: lime MESSI alligators in the murder basement, pitt crabs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those would be great too. I just don't think he
Speaker 1: had those as options. But there were supposedly these quicklime pits.
Speaker 1: Now what's quicklime? We hear that and we go, oh, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: that's the way to get rid of a body. Quicklimes
Speaker 1: this chemical compound known as calcium oxide. It's made through
Speaker 1: the thermal decomposition of limestone. Uh and it basically it's
Speaker 1: anything that contains calcium carbonate. If you heat it up
Speaker 1: to a high temperature, it reacts uh and uh. It
Speaker 1: reacts a CEO two specifically, so it can create heat, energy,
Speaker 1: and light. They used to actually use it for fireworks.
Speaker 1: That's what lime light is. Uh. So in twenties, well,
Speaker 1: this fun group of researchers got together and they said,
Speaker 1: let's see how well quicklime gets rid of a body.
Speaker 1: And they took six dead pigs and they buried them
Speaker 1: in pits of quicklime with this in Chicago, No, it
Speaker 1: was in Europe actually, uh. And they they found that
Speaker 1: when they recovered these pig bodies six months later, instead
Speaker 1: of disposing of the bodies. The quicklime actually del laid
Speaker 1: the decay of the carcasses, so it's better not to
Speaker 1: dispose of a body or destroy it. But it it
Speaker 1: was really used to keep putrification at bay so that
Speaker 1: animals wouldn't be attracted to bodies. And it was historically
Speaker 1: used in plague burials. So maybe it wasn't quicklime he
Speaker 1: had in his basement, maybe it was live ah. Now,
Speaker 1: in the past, Robert and I did an episode about
Speaker 1: Hollywood acid dissolving people, and one of the things we
Speaker 1: came to in that episode was about how you know,
Speaker 1: if you if you want to dissolve a body, it
Speaker 1: might be better to use a strong base rather than
Speaker 1: a strong acid. Yeah, Lie's sodium hydroxide, and you know,
Speaker 1: purportedly drug cartel assassins use it to dispose of bodies
Speaker 1: in several outer hours. UM in Chicago actually is the
Speaker 1: first instance of somebody being recorded as using it to
Speaker 1: dispose of a body. A guy by the name of
Speaker 1: Adolph Lutgert dumped his wife into a boiling vat of
Speaker 1: lie in. Then they burned what was left, but the
Speaker 1: police found the bone fragments. Uh. And a key component
Speaker 1: here seems to be water, So you have to add
Speaker 1: water to LIE to make it really work pretty well.
Speaker 1: So maybe homes had these pits. He put LIE in them.
Speaker 1: Lies really easy to get ahold of, and he filled
Speaker 1: them up with water. We don't know. Uh. Then there's
Speaker 1: supposedly this acid, right, how does that work? Well? A
Speaker 1: lot of you are probably thinking about breaking bad right now. Uh,
Speaker 1: we don't know what kind of acid he had, but
Speaker 1: typically acid dissolves a body more completely than LIE, but
Speaker 1: it takes way longer. And the fumes are also supposed
Speaker 1: to be intolerable. They're really toxic. Uh. So it's easier
Speaker 1: to get LIE. It's safer to use LIE. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not safe. It's like you think of fight club
Speaker 1: when they're like putting the stuff on their hands and
Speaker 1: burning their hands. That's basically LIE. But acids are also
Speaker 1: monitored for bomb making nowadays, so it's not that easy
Speaker 1: to use. But if you're thinking breaking bad, they used
Speaker 1: hydrofluoric acid in that, and it takes silicon oxide and
Speaker 1: types of glass and metals and plastic and just ripped
Speaker 1: through them. That's why you've got that infamous tub scene.
Speaker 1: Another thing they found in the basement a wooden tank
Speaker 1: filled with strange chemicals and workman later excavating it. They
Speaker 1: lit a match to see what was in there in
Speaker 1: the accident, accidentally ignited it. Nineties investigation techniques, y'all, yeah,
Speaker 1: if we set it on fire, he'll see. They never
Speaker 1: quite figured out what was in there, but they think
Speaker 1: it might have been like a combination of crude petroleum
Speaker 1: and gasoline or benzene, and that might have been what
Speaker 1: was in the vault with one of his potential victims.
Speaker 1: So we locked her in there, placed some of the
Speaker 1: substance in there. It suffocated her, and then the residue
Speaker 1: was left behind from her footprint on the door. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there's another question. This furnace. Okay, so he's got
Speaker 1: this furnace in his office. Now, the police at the
Speaker 1: time said, oh, yeah, we found a human rib and
Speaker 1: a heck of long hair in the furnace, But then
Speaker 1: like a couple of years later, they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: actually it was some stove lining. Uh So, so it
Speaker 1: was actually pointed out in the papers of the time.
Speaker 1: To destroy a human torso like that in this furnace
Speaker 1: would have been totally impossible to cremate a body. Now,
Speaker 1: I mean, you need a furnace that can burn at
Speaker 1: fourteen d eighteen hundred degrees and it still takes two
Speaker 1: to three hours to burn a body at that level.
Speaker 1: And the first modern cremation chamber wasn't presented until eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy three in France and then eighteen seventy six here
Speaker 1: in the US. So yeah, that was before Holmes was active,
Speaker 1: But it's not likely that he had one of these
Speaker 1: furnaces in his office. So the way the story ends
Speaker 1: of the Old Murdoch Castle is it gets set on
Speaker 1: fire a bunch of times. Holmes himself sets on fire
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety three, then he gets arrested, uh four
Speaker 1: more times eight nineteen o three and nineteen o seven,
Speaker 1: is finally officially torn down in ninety eight. Uh. Story goes.
Speaker 1: A post office currently occupies the plot. Anybody here from
Speaker 1: town been to this post office? Yeah yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: hear they're lingering smells. There's like ghost tours. Uh oh
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, Well actually I was reading that you can
Speaker 1: still access homes basement. Oh you have to email yourself exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they just dump you down the shoot the shoots
Speaker 1: still there. Um, here's the creepy thing. And this is
Speaker 1: what I'll leave you with. What most people who write
Speaker 1: about H. H. Holmes don't know or fail to mention,
Speaker 1: is that he actually owned several other properties around town,
Speaker 1: and those weren't investigated as much as the murder Castle.
Speaker 1: So if he had any associates in the area, they
Speaker 1: totally could have gone in and cleaned up the evidence
Speaker 1: while everybody was looking at this murder castle. Uh. And specifically,
Speaker 1: he had a glass bending factory that was in an
Speaker 1: isolated area and when the police got there, all they
Speaker 1: found were junk, except there was a diagram showing that
Speaker 1: a massive furnace had recently been removed from there. So
Speaker 1: maybe there's more victims. What kind of names would they
Speaker 1: have given these other places, like murder Hut, because you
Speaker 1: can can't all be murder Castle, right, Yeah, murder Factory,
Speaker 1: murder the murder pad. So that's the science of the
Speaker 1: weird white City of Chicago. Yeah. What I love about
Speaker 1: this is that all these examples we looked at, you
Speaker 1: can see just these like these burning stars just gathering
Speaker 1: mass based on all of all of what's going on
Speaker 1: in the culture. Although the momentum of the century in
Speaker 1: the case homes is kind of like the dark angel
Speaker 1: of the festivities, and then we have the mechanical God,
Speaker 1: and then we have people trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: we all get along while talking about other gods as well.
Speaker 1: It's really kind of the birth of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: You know, you've got like industrialism, psychopaths, and religious in fighting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, So there you have it. Once again, we're
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind. I'm Robert I'm America Christian
Speaker 1: Board all right. Uh, and I'm Joe McCormick. Again. You
Speaker 1: can find it a stuff to bow your mind dot com.
Speaker 1: We'll blow the mind on the most social media. I
Speaker 1: think they're probably gonna kick everybody out of here, but
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Speaker 1: come chat with us. Uh, you know, I've got nowhere
Speaker 1: to go. Thanks everybody. All right, So there you have it,
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