1
00:00:04,080 --> 00:00:07,520
Speaker 1: Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I

2
00:00:07,600 --> 00:00:14,240
Speaker 1: Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full

3
00:00:14,320 --> 00:00:17,960
Speaker 1: of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,

4
00:00:18,239 --> 00:00:21,640
Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

5
00:00:22,000 --> 00:00:27,560
Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

6
00:00:27,840 --> 00:00:38,520
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. When you grow up on the Jurassic Coast,

7
00:00:38,640 --> 00:00:41,080
Speaker 1: it seems written in the stars that you'll be spending

8
00:00:41,120 --> 00:00:44,600
Speaker 1: your life among the bones of dinosaurs. Mary was born

9
00:00:44,640 --> 00:00:47,120
Speaker 1: in just such a place. And while she was raised

10
00:00:47,120 --> 00:00:49,959
Speaker 1: in a time of conflict, with the war between Napoleon

11
00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:52,640
Speaker 1: and the British regiing, and her own family full of

12
00:00:52,680 --> 00:00:56,640
Speaker 1: poor Protestant dissenters, she's still found time to dig, thanks

13
00:00:56,640 --> 00:00:59,440
Speaker 1: in part to her father, a cabinet maker and amateur

14
00:00:59,480 --> 00:01:03,680
Speaker 1: fossil elector who needed a sidekick. While most women her

15
00:01:03,720 --> 00:01:06,959
Speaker 1: age were being raised to be delicate wives to future husbands,

16
00:01:07,280 --> 00:01:10,440
Speaker 1: Mary was learning proper fossil cleaning techniques from her father

17
00:01:10,760 --> 00:01:13,199
Speaker 1: as they dug along the beach for relics to sell

18
00:01:13,240 --> 00:01:17,920
Speaker 1: alongside his cabinetree. However, when he died suddenly of tuberculosis

19
00:01:17,920 --> 00:01:21,240
Speaker 1: in eighteen ten, those fossils became a means of helping

20
00:01:21,280 --> 00:01:24,840
Speaker 1: meet her family's needs. It didn't take long for Mary

21
00:01:24,880 --> 00:01:28,679
Speaker 1: to strike gold or strike bone, I guess. While digging

22
00:01:28,720 --> 00:01:31,360
Speaker 1: with her brother Joseph, the two happened upon a skull.

23
00:01:31,680 --> 00:01:34,160
Speaker 1: Joseph left Mary to unearth the rest of the fossil, and,

24
00:01:34,200 --> 00:01:37,120
Speaker 1: through a painstakingly lung process that began to garner the

25
00:01:37,160 --> 00:01:40,720
Speaker 1: attention of everyone in town, she revealed a seventeen foot

26
00:01:40,760 --> 00:01:44,039
Speaker 1: skeleton that was referred to by scientists as a crocodile

27
00:01:44,360 --> 00:01:47,280
Speaker 1: and by citizens as a monster today, though we know

28
00:01:47,360 --> 00:01:51,280
Speaker 1: it as the Eccleosaurus. By eighteen twenty three, at just

29
00:01:51,360 --> 00:01:53,840
Speaker 1: twenty four years old, she became the first human to

30
00:01:53,920 --> 00:01:57,639
Speaker 1: discover a complete plesiosaurus, being that Mary was a woman.

31
00:01:57,680 --> 00:01:59,760
Speaker 1: Though news began to spread that it was a fake,

32
00:02:00,160 --> 00:02:03,800
Speaker 1: noted French naturalist George Cuvier disputed the discovery all on

33
00:02:03,840 --> 00:02:06,440
Speaker 1: his own, and even held a meeting at the Geological

34
00:02:06,480 --> 00:02:09,760
Speaker 1: Society of London, a meeting that Mary was not invited to,

35
00:02:09,840 --> 00:02:12,640
Speaker 1: by the way, But that meeting didn't go Cuvier's way,

36
00:02:12,880 --> 00:02:16,639
Speaker 1: and he ended up admitting his mistake. Yet, despite Mary's

37
00:02:16,639 --> 00:02:21,320
Speaker 1: continuous breakthroughs, she remained severely unrecognized for her work. In

38
00:02:21,400 --> 00:02:23,880
Speaker 1: order to support her family, she was often forced to

39
00:02:23,919 --> 00:02:26,959
Speaker 1: sell the fossils that she had worked so hard to find, clean,

40
00:02:27,160 --> 00:02:30,320
Speaker 1: set and identify, and the men who bought them rarely

41
00:02:30,360 --> 00:02:34,360
Speaker 1: credited her with the find and even when scientific journals

42
00:02:34,360 --> 00:02:37,360
Speaker 1: and articles cited her ichtheos or discovery at the right

43
00:02:37,440 --> 00:02:39,920
Speaker 1: age of twelve, they did not cite her by name,

44
00:02:40,160 --> 00:02:43,320
Speaker 1: and the reputed Geological Society of London, the very place

45
00:02:43,320 --> 00:02:46,640
Speaker 1: that Cuvier had failed to convince of her reportedly fake fine,

46
00:02:46,919 --> 00:02:49,640
Speaker 1: wouldn't admit her to their ranks. In fact, they wouldn't

47
00:02:49,639 --> 00:02:53,280
Speaker 1: start admitting any women until nineteen o four. But Mary

48
00:02:53,480 --> 00:02:57,360
Speaker 1: wasn't done breaking ground or barriers just yet. She began

49
00:02:57,440 --> 00:03:02,120
Speaker 1: pioneering the study of copper lights or fossilized dinosaur droppings,

50
00:03:02,160 --> 00:03:05,280
Speaker 1: and by eighty eight she had another first to add

51
00:03:05,280 --> 00:03:08,760
Speaker 1: to her resume. After discovering a baffling collection of bones.

52
00:03:08,880 --> 00:03:12,280
Speaker 1: The scientific world was a buzz from London to Paris

53
00:03:12,560 --> 00:03:15,639
Speaker 1: discussing how they would all connect. Mary did the hard

54
00:03:15,639 --> 00:03:19,160
Speaker 1: work for them, putting together the first pterodactyl ever discovered

55
00:03:19,200 --> 00:03:22,519
Speaker 1: outside of Germany, the largest flying creature to have ever

56
00:03:22,600 --> 00:03:25,440
Speaker 1: lived at a time when fossils were the talk of

57
00:03:25,440 --> 00:03:28,680
Speaker 1: the scientific world, Mary was at the top, even if

58
00:03:28,720 --> 00:03:32,240
Speaker 1: no one wanted to acknowledge her. Specimen shows popped up

59
00:03:32,280 --> 00:03:36,800
Speaker 1: all over major cities, housing countless bones that Mary herself discovered,

60
00:03:37,160 --> 00:03:41,040
Speaker 1: and still her name was purposely left out among Jurassic talks.

61
00:03:41,880 --> 00:03:44,440
Speaker 1: But those who knew her understood what she was doing

62
00:03:44,480 --> 00:03:47,800
Speaker 1: for the world. Mary's childhood friend, Harry de la Beesh,

63
00:03:47,920 --> 00:03:51,960
Speaker 1: painted his famous A More Ancient Dorset, a painting inspired

64
00:03:52,000 --> 00:03:54,840
Speaker 1: by her Ichtheosaur find. It was the first painting to

65
00:03:54,960 --> 00:03:59,400
Speaker 1: use fossil evidence to create realistic representations of creatures from

66
00:03:59,480 --> 00:04:03,600
Speaker 1: millennia past, and dear Harry sold Prince to a ravenous

67
00:04:03,680 --> 00:04:07,120
Speaker 1: public in order to raise funds for Mary. At the

68
00:04:07,160 --> 00:04:10,800
Speaker 1: time of her young death in eight Mary Anning was

69
00:04:10,840 --> 00:04:15,320
Speaker 1: still in dire straits financially, despite the countless prehistoric species

70
00:04:15,360 --> 00:04:18,240
Speaker 1: she had discovered, identified and shared with the world. It

71
00:04:18,240 --> 00:04:21,719
Speaker 1: would take another century before her legacy was restored to

72
00:04:21,800 --> 00:04:24,960
Speaker 1: its rightful place. Today, her finds can be seen proudly

73
00:04:25,000 --> 00:04:28,640
Speaker 1: displayed at the Natural History Museum in London, and while

74
00:04:28,640 --> 00:04:31,680
Speaker 1: it's still hotly debated among historians, there are some who

75
00:04:31,680 --> 00:04:34,320
Speaker 1: believe that Mary is the she at the center of

76
00:04:34,320 --> 00:04:38,640
Speaker 1: that famous old tongue twister. She sells seashells on the

77
00:04:38,680 --> 00:05:02,760
Speaker 1: seashore a curious life. Indeed, everyone has problems, a bad boss,

78
00:05:02,960 --> 00:05:05,719
Speaker 1: a noisy kid, or a train that's always late, and

79
00:05:05,800 --> 00:05:07,880
Speaker 1: we deal with them the best we can. Sometimes all

80
00:05:07,880 --> 00:05:11,440
Speaker 1: it requires is a candid conversation, sending the offending children

81
00:05:11,480 --> 00:05:14,000
Speaker 1: to their room to settle down, or leaving for work

82
00:05:14,040 --> 00:05:17,919
Speaker 1: a little earlier, or if you're a math professor. Alexander Abian,

83
00:05:18,200 --> 00:05:21,720
Speaker 1: you just blow up the moon. Alexander was born in Tabriz,

84
00:05:21,960 --> 00:05:25,440
Speaker 1: Iran in nineteen three. He grew up there, earning his

85
00:05:25,520 --> 00:05:28,440
Speaker 1: undergraduate degree there before coming to the US to pursue

86
00:05:28,480 --> 00:05:31,320
Speaker 1: his master's in nineteen fifty. From there, he went on

87
00:05:31,360 --> 00:05:34,320
Speaker 1: to the University of Cincinnati for his PhD with a

88
00:05:34,320 --> 00:05:38,719
Speaker 1: focus in mathematics. Alexander held a variety of teaching jobs

89
00:05:38,760 --> 00:05:41,720
Speaker 1: all over the country, moving from Tennessee to New York,

90
00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:46,000
Speaker 1: then to Pennsylvania, and finally to Ohio, before eventually taking

91
00:05:46,040 --> 00:05:48,760
Speaker 1: a job as a math professor at Iowa States in

92
00:05:48,839 --> 00:05:51,599
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, where he stayed for the rest of

93
00:05:51,640 --> 00:05:56,080
Speaker 1: his career until retiring in nineteen Not much is known

94
00:05:56,120 --> 00:05:58,680
Speaker 1: about his time at the university other than that it

95
00:05:58,760 --> 00:06:01,920
Speaker 1: was uneventful for the twenty five years, at least when

96
00:06:01,960 --> 00:06:06,200
Speaker 1: compared to what happened in that year. Alexander published a

97
00:06:06,240 --> 00:06:10,159
Speaker 1: piece in the university's newspaper with a wild claim, one

98
00:06:10,200 --> 00:06:13,560
Speaker 1: that eventually spread beyond the campuses, borders and into the

99
00:06:13,560 --> 00:06:17,159
Speaker 1: mainstream press. The professor had been watching what was going

100
00:06:17,200 --> 00:06:21,920
Speaker 1: on around the world forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, and blizzards,

101
00:06:22,200 --> 00:06:25,880
Speaker 1: all brought on by one common culprit, the Moon, and

102
00:06:25,920 --> 00:06:29,000
Speaker 1: Alexander believed it had to go. He claimed that if

103
00:06:29,000 --> 00:06:31,359
Speaker 1: the Moon was blown up, our seasons like summer and

104
00:06:31,440 --> 00:06:36,120
Speaker 1: spring would disappear, taking almost all the natural disasters with them.

105
00:06:36,160 --> 00:06:39,880
Speaker 1: How would he have accomplished this feat with nuclear weapons,

106
00:06:39,920 --> 00:06:42,640
Speaker 1: of course. His plan was to drill a hole into

107
00:06:42,680 --> 00:06:45,640
Speaker 1: the surface of the Moon, drop an atomic bomb inside,

108
00:06:45,920 --> 00:06:49,600
Speaker 1: and detonate it remotely. The explosion would break the Moon apart,

109
00:06:49,960 --> 00:06:52,520
Speaker 1: saving the Earth from the perils that have only gotten

110
00:06:52,560 --> 00:06:56,240
Speaker 1: worse over the years with climate change. Unfortunately, not everyone

111
00:06:56,279 --> 00:06:59,240
Speaker 1: agreed with his plan. A few NASA employees believed it

112
00:06:59,279 --> 00:07:01,839
Speaker 1: was impossible, to say the least, for one, they knew

113
00:07:01,880 --> 00:07:04,680
Speaker 1: that the Moon was responsible for many phenomena both on

114
00:07:04,880 --> 00:07:08,240
Speaker 1: and around the Earth. The tides, for example, are controlled

115
00:07:08,240 --> 00:07:10,520
Speaker 1: by the Moon, as is the tilt of the Earth.

116
00:07:10,920 --> 00:07:13,520
Speaker 1: Without our Moon, our planet would tilt so severely it

117
00:07:13,520 --> 00:07:16,600
Speaker 1: would leave one hemisphere in eternal darkness while the other

118
00:07:16,800 --> 00:07:21,200
Speaker 1: burned beneath a blazing sun all day. Secondly, exploding the

119
00:07:21,200 --> 00:07:24,760
Speaker 1: Moon would cause a worldwide extinction event as debris entered

120
00:07:24,760 --> 00:07:28,160
Speaker 1: the Earth's atmosphere and increase the planet's temperature, not to

121
00:07:28,200 --> 00:07:30,080
Speaker 1: mention the chance that a big chunk of it could

122
00:07:30,120 --> 00:07:32,560
Speaker 1: hit the Earth with such force it would wipe out

123
00:07:32,600 --> 00:07:37,280
Speaker 1: everyone on the planet. But all of those situations were hypothetical. Anyway,

124
00:07:37,320 --> 00:07:40,520
Speaker 1: to destroy the Moon, a single atom bomb wasn't enough.

125
00:07:40,960 --> 00:07:45,480
Speaker 1: Such an explosion would only damage the surface, but nothing below. Instead,

126
00:07:45,800 --> 00:07:48,600
Speaker 1: miners would have to drill down hundreds of miles into

127
00:07:48,640 --> 00:07:52,600
Speaker 1: the Moon's surface and deposit six hundred billion nuclear bombs

128
00:07:52,640 --> 00:07:56,080
Speaker 1: in order to blow it all up. Alexander's idea was

129
00:07:56,120 --> 00:07:58,760
Speaker 1: dismissed by many as a pipe dream, but the man

130
00:07:58,880 --> 00:08:02,120
Speaker 1: himself wasn't so were He equated his detractors with the

131
00:08:02,160 --> 00:08:05,520
Speaker 1: people who wrote off Galileo hundreds of years before, and

132
00:08:05,680 --> 00:08:08,840
Speaker 1: as time moved on and the Internet took hold his

133
00:08:09,000 --> 00:08:13,000
Speaker 1: theory exploded across the globe. No pun intended, I swear

134
00:08:13,440 --> 00:08:18,880
Speaker 1: suddenly everyone was getting ideas of their own. Unfortunately, Alexander

135
00:08:18,880 --> 00:08:21,840
Speaker 1: Abian died in nineteen nine. He never got to see

136
00:08:21,880 --> 00:08:25,000
Speaker 1: his plan fully realized. That is, unless he happened to

137
00:08:25,040 --> 00:08:27,920
Speaker 1: see a similar story occur. During the summer of nine

138
00:08:29,240 --> 00:08:32,360
Speaker 1: that year, a team of experienced oil drillers took a

139
00:08:32,360 --> 00:08:35,600
Speaker 1: shuttle into space to put Alexander's idea to the test.

140
00:08:36,080 --> 00:08:38,720
Speaker 1: Except instead of drilling into the Moon, they drilled into

141
00:08:38,720 --> 00:08:41,320
Speaker 1: an asteroid the size of Texas that was headed straight

142
00:08:41,320 --> 00:08:44,080
Speaker 1: for the Earth. It took some doing, but the miners

143
00:08:44,080 --> 00:08:46,480
Speaker 1: managed to blow up the asteroid before it reached the

144
00:08:46,520 --> 00:08:51,040
Speaker 1: atmosphere using a nuclear bomb, a global extinction event had

145
00:08:51,040 --> 00:08:54,280
Speaker 1: been avoided. Of course, this wasn't a real event. It

146
00:08:54,400 --> 00:08:58,520
Speaker 1: was the action movie Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck,

147
00:08:59,120 --> 00:09:01,520
Speaker 1: a film with the plot that was just as implausible

148
00:09:01,600 --> 00:09:06,559
Speaker 1: as Alexander Abian's idea, but certainly a lot more entertaining.

149
00:09:10,920 --> 00:09:13,640
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet

150
00:09:13,640 --> 00:09:17,520
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn

151
00:09:17,600 --> 00:09:22,160
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.

152
00:09:22,200 --> 00:09:25,720
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership

153
00:09:25,800 --> 00:09:29,079
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show

154
00:09:29,200 --> 00:09:33,000
Speaker 1: called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television

155
00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:35,240
Speaker 1: show and you can learn all about it over at

156
00:09:35,320 --> 00:09:38,800
Speaker 1: the World of Lore dot com. And until next time,

157
00:09:39,440 --> 00:09:41,200
Speaker 1: stay curious. Ye