Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales right
Speaker 1: there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Anna Kingsford was an iconoclass
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighties England, an activist, an independent spirit even,
Speaker 1: one of the first women in the country to obtain
Speaker 1: her medical degree, and she was also a spiritualist of sorts. Once,
Speaker 1: while on a fox hunt, Anna had a vision that
Speaker 1: allowed her to see the world through the eyes of
Speaker 1: the fox. Soon after, she became a fierce advocate for
Speaker 1: animal rights as well as a vegetarian. Her experience also
Speaker 1: influenced her opinion of the popular medical practice known as vivisection.
Speaker 1: Teachers and medical researchers would often cut open living animals
Speaker 1: for research purposes. They believed it was a necessary evil
Speaker 1: to advance medical progress, and Anna hated it. In fact,
Speaker 1: she didn't just hate it, she fought against it. She
Speaker 1: first encountered it in Paris, where physiologist Claude Bernard would
Speaker 1: operate on live dogs in front of his students. He
Speaker 1: wanted to better understand the inner workings of the body
Speaker 1: and what better way to do it than to look
Speaker 1: at it up close. Despite the growing backlash against it
Speaker 1: from the public, vivisection was seen within the medical community
Speaker 1: as the only way to truly understand how the body functioned,
Speaker 1: and though Bernard's own wife divorced him after using the
Speaker 1: family pet as a test subject, the school supported his
Speaker 1: work without question. Anna, however, knew that something had to
Speaker 1: be done and decided to tackle the practice head on.
Speaker 1: She enrolled as a student in Bernard's class, something that
Speaker 1: once again set her apart from the crowd. She was
Speaker 1: derided and humiliated daily to the male students as well
Speaker 1: as Bernard. Women didn't belong in medicine. Sometimes he wouldn't
Speaker 1: even acknowledge her presence as a student, But she continued
Speaker 1: to attend classes and wrote articles about the horrors being
Speaker 1: perpetrated for newspapers back home. The screams and cries coming
Speaker 1: from the labs would haunt her at night. She'd recall
Speaker 1: her memory of the fox, how she'd felt so helpless
Speaker 1: and scared, and that empathy would turn to anger, Anger
Speaker 1: for the animals savaged in the name of science, Anger
Speaker 1: toward the doctors who had sworn to do no harm.
Speaker 1: Anger toward Claude Bernard and his relentless pursuit of the
Speaker 1: truth by any means necessary. During one particularly brutal session,
Speaker 1: Dr Bernard was performing painful experiments on live animals as
Speaker 1: a way to study body heat. Anna leapt from her
Speaker 1: chair and screamed at him, calling him a murderer. That night,
Speaker 1: she prayed for his death to spare all the innocent
Speaker 1: animals at the university. When the time came for her
Speaker 1: to attend her next class, she arrived at the medical
Speaker 1: building to find a note fastened to the locked gate.
Speaker 1: Claude Bernard had passed away. Anna felt an odd combination
Speaker 1: of shock and joy at the man's demise. His reign
Speaker 1: of terror was finally over. But more importantly, her prayers
Speaker 1: had been answered. Although prayer might be the wrong word here,
Speaker 1: Anna didn't ask God to smite her professor for his misdeeds.
Speaker 1: She took up the task herself. According to a biography
Speaker 1: written by a close friend, Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford had
Speaker 1: tapped into her supernatural powers from childhood. She had summoned
Speaker 1: what she called a spiritual thunderbolt to strike the man down.
Speaker 1: In fact, one year later she would do it again
Speaker 1: when Paul Burt, another staunch vivisectionist, would drop dead at
Speaker 1: her psychic insistence. This happened to occur at a time
Speaker 1: when interest in the occult and mysticism were at their
Speaker 1: highest levels. Mediums had regular seances at the homes of
Speaker 1: wealthy elites looking to speak to dead loved ones. Books
Speaker 1: on spiritualism in life after death flew off of bookstore shelves,
Speaker 1: not literally, mind you, but Anna's own titles managed to
Speaker 1: find their way into the hands of influential figures such
Speaker 1: as Mahatma Gandhi, who had also followed her work as
Speaker 1: a vegetarian. Years later, her superability to kill men with
Speaker 1: her mind would lead her to the lab of a
Speaker 1: scientist revered today for his work in extending the shelf
Speaker 1: life of our favorite foods, Louis Pasteur. He was known
Speaker 1: throughout Paris as a prominent supporter of vivisection and someone
Speaker 1: that Anna had come to loathe. She never got a
Speaker 1: chance to avenge her furry friends, though. On her way
Speaker 1: to his laboratory, she was caught in a rainstorm and
Speaker 1: soon developed pneumonia. She passed away a short time later
Speaker 1: from complications from the illness, and at the same time,
Speaker 1: her legacy to medicine, animal rights, and women's rights were lost. Today,
Speaker 1: modern history, using her biography as the primary source, has
Speaker 1: stripped her of all the good she's done, and that's
Speaker 1: because of her friend, Edward Maitland, who resented her for
Speaker 1: rejecting his advances during the time that he knew her.
Speaker 1: As such. He used the letters, books, articles, and research
Speaker 1: that she'd written to paint a wholly different picture of
Speaker 1: a woman who revolutionized medical education, and once the damage
Speaker 1: was done, he burned all the evidence to the contrary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what a gem. As for her powerful mind, experts believe
Speaker 1: it was only used to heal the sick and advance
Speaker 1: the medical profession. Paul Birds had apparently died of dysentery
Speaker 1: he had contracted while visiting Vietnam, and Claude Bernard had
Speaker 1: never been known to be a well man. His poor
Speaker 1: health had finally caught up with him. Anna's vision of
Speaker 1: a spiritual thunderbolt being an unfortunate coincidence. Although there's much
Speaker 1: we don't know about the spiritual world, is it possible
Speaker 1: to communicate with the dead? Can a human be so
Speaker 1: empathetic that they can see the world from an animal's
Speaker 1: point of view, can one person kill another simply by
Speaker 1: imagining it? Sadly we may never know. Of course, if
Speaker 1: anyone at the time had been interested in testing her powers,
Speaker 1: there was always one simple way to find out. All
Speaker 1: they had to do was pick up a scalpel. One
Speaker 1: thing reinventor knows is that the status quo doesn't stay
Speaker 1: that way for long. There's always something better, simpler, more
Speaker 1: efficient way to accomplish the thing that we've been doing
Speaker 1: for a long time. The steam engine was used to
Speaker 1: power machinery and various modes of transportation for hundreds of
Speaker 1: years before the internal combustion engine made its debut. The
Speaker 1: first functioning submarine appeared during the Civil War, and as
Speaker 1: technology progressed, it was able to dive deeper and carry
Speaker 1: more passengers. Such innovations further advanced how wars were fought
Speaker 1: all over the world. I mentioned these two inventions for
Speaker 1: a very specific reason, because one man also saw a
Speaker 1: way to carry the hot technology of his day into
Speaker 1: the future. His name was Joseph Papp, and he had
Speaker 1: a vision. Born in Hungary in the nineteen thirties, it's
Speaker 1: unclear when he first came to America, but he had
Speaker 1: no problem making a name for himself in the world
Speaker 1: of theoretical physics. Joseph had ideas ideas he believed so
Speaker 1: much in that he secured several United States patents for
Speaker 1: them in the nineteen sixties, one of which was for
Speaker 1: a new type of engine. The internal combustion engine of
Speaker 1: the time relied on gasoline to trigger tiny explosions to
Speaker 1: power motor vehicles and large machines. Joseph, however, saw a
Speaker 1: different way, a less expensive way. Rather than gasoline, Joseph's
Speaker 1: engine ran on a mixture of noble gases, including helium, neon,
Speaker 1: and argon. His engine claimed to run at only fifteen
Speaker 1: cents per hour and generated no heat, negating the need
Speaker 1: for fuel lines, carburetors, spark plugs, and any other equipment
Speaker 1: that the more limited combustion engines still required. They produced
Speaker 1: twice as much power at half the size. He spent
Speaker 1: years developing his engine at the California Institute of Technology
Speaker 1: before finally showing it off for his fellow colleagues include
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. Feynman and several others looked
Speaker 1: on as Joseph fired up his new engine for the
Speaker 1: first time. However, what should have been a Eureka moment
Speaker 1: for the optimistic engineer quickly turned into tragedy. The engine
Speaker 1: didn't work, that much was clear. What's worse is that
Speaker 1: it exploded, killing one bystander in the lab Instantly. The
Speaker 1: university fired Joseph and settled with him out of court
Speaker 1: for the accidental death of his colleague, but that didn't
Speaker 1: stop the reckless inventor from pursuing his dreams. He eventually
Speaker 1: ceased work on the Path engine to focus his efforts
Speaker 1: on another project, one that would take him deeper than
Speaker 1: his noble gas engine ever would. Literally. In the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, Joseph pap built a submarine in his garage,
Speaker 1: capable of carrying one passenger across great distances using very
Speaker 1: little fuel. It was conical like a torpedo, which allowed
Speaker 1: a layer of air to form between the water and
Speaker 1: the sub The pilot would lay on his back and
Speaker 1: look up through a periscope to see where he was going.
Speaker 1: Path had estimated the craft's top speed at three hundred
Speaker 1: miles per hour, achieved using an underwater jet engine that
Speaker 1: he had designed himself. Nobody ever saw the submarine he
Speaker 1: obsessively kept all plans and prototypes under wraps away from
Speaker 1: prying eyes. Many didn't even believe that it existed. After
Speaker 1: the debacle with the Path engine, Feynman labeled Joseph of fraud,
Speaker 1: claiming the engine was never intended to work. But Joseph
Speaker 1: was determined to prove his former colleagues all wrong. Perhaps
Speaker 1: it was out of desperation or maybe guilt, but in
Speaker 1: August of nineteen sixty six, Joseph took his cone shaped
Speaker 1: submarine out for its made in voyage, using himself as
Speaker 1: a guinea pig. Thirteen hours after launching from the shores
Speaker 1: of Canada, he was picked up by a fishing boat
Speaker 1: off the coast of France. They found Joseph bobbing in
Speaker 1: the water, decked out in a flight suit, complete with
Speaker 1: helmet and goggles. Barely able to speak, he told them
Speaker 1: his name was Joseph pap and that he just completed
Speaker 1: a journey across the Atlantic in a submarine of his
Speaker 1: own design. Due to a malfunction, he had been forced
Speaker 1: to eject and let the submarine sink into the depths below.
Speaker 1: Joseph's story captivated the media, and he used his newfound
Speaker 1: celebrity to write a book about his journey, titled The
Speaker 1: Fastest Submarine. It detailed how he built the water craft
Speaker 1: and completed his trek from the Canadian coast all the
Speaker 1: way to Europe in under a day, and not a
Speaker 1: single person believed him. The media weren't captivated as much
Speaker 1: as they were skeptical. They ripped him apart in the
Speaker 1: newspapers and called him a fraud. It didn't help that
Speaker 1: his submarine was never found. Folks just didn't believe his story,
Speaker 1: and rightly so. It turns out that when the fishing
Speaker 1: boat had pulled him out of the water, they found
Speaker 1: two plane tickets in his pocket, one for his trip
Speaker 1: to France and one for the return home. It seems
Speaker 1: that Richard Feynman had been right all along. In the end,
Speaker 1: Joseph's career had been nothing but a load of pap.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
Speaker 1: called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television
Speaker 1: show and you can learn all about it over at
Speaker 1: the world of Lore dot com. And until next time,
Speaker 1: stay curious.