Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Throughout history, wartime has brought countless innovations that
Speaker 1: have trickled down into our daily lives. When metallurgist Harry
Speaker 1: Brearley coated iron and chromium to keep guns from rusting
Speaker 1: in World War One, he inadvertently created stainless steel. Years later,
Speaker 1: Nestley used the same technology that made penicillin possible during
Speaker 1: World War Two to bring its freeze dried coffee to
Speaker 1: store shelves everywhere. If we get to enjoy many of
Speaker 1: today's conveniences thanks to the discoveries of military scientists and
Speaker 1: engineers from all over the world, however, that door swings
Speaker 1: both ways, quite a few civilian inventions have also gone
Speaker 1: on to revolutionize how wars are fought. In one, for example,
Speaker 1: barbed wire was created to keep cattle from wandering off,
Speaker 1: long before it was used to impede enemy movement. Cameras
Speaker 1: also made the jump from family portraits to the front
Speaker 1: lines during World War One, when they were fastened to
Speaker 1: planes and used to gather photographs of enemy territories. In fact,
Speaker 1: one average citizen did quite a lot to change the
Speaker 1: face of war all on his own. During his sixty
Speaker 1: seven years on earth. He became known as one of
Speaker 1: the most brilliant engineers in the world, drafting vehicle and
Speaker 1: weapon designs he expected to be used by the militaries
Speaker 1: of his time. His tank concept, for example, bore a
Speaker 1: cone shape and was made of wood. Inside. Eight men
Speaker 1: would crank gears to turn the wheels, which would then
Speaker 1: carry them across the battlefield. The angled exterior your meant
Speaker 1: arrows and other projectiles would simply deflect off the sides
Speaker 1: or fall away. Portholes along the sides allowed for the
Speaker 1: tanks operators to fire at enemies without putting themselves in danger.
Speaker 1: Another unique vehicle came in the form of a chariot.
Speaker 1: Unlike the chariots of old, where horses pulled someone standing
Speaker 1: in a carriage, these new designs featured interesting upgrades. For one,
Speaker 1: the writer didn't stand in a carriage at the rear.
Speaker 1: He rode atop the horse, which was situated in the
Speaker 1: middle for whirling. Blades at the front would mow down
Speaker 1: the opposing forces, while blades at the back prevented rear attacks.
Speaker 1: He called it the scythed chariot. The engineer didn't limit
Speaker 1: himself only to modes of transportation, though, he also invented
Speaker 1: impressive weapons, such as an early machine gun. As with
Speaker 1: all of his creations, this too was made of wood.
Speaker 1: It boasted thirty three barrels arranged in a triangular frame.
Speaker 1: While one side of eleven barrels filled, another side would
Speaker 1: be loaded up as the third side cooled down. He
Speaker 1: was a man ahead of his time, and his blueprints
Speaker 1: proved it. His plans for a crossbow predated the handheld
Speaker 1: models used today. It was designed to be rolled into
Speaker 1: battle by two men who could cock it back with
Speaker 1: a massive projectile loaded into the cradle before pulling a
Speaker 1: release and letting it fly into a crowd. His notebooks
Speaker 1: and files were full of plans for vehicles and weapons
Speaker 1: no one had ever seen before. There was a cluster bomb,
Speaker 1: designed to wipe out pockets of enemy soldiers. He also
Speaker 1: invented a double hulled ship that could stay afloat if
Speaker 1: the outer hall was ever punctured, a concept seen today
Speaker 1: on oil tankers and submarines. And though he was so
Speaker 1: skilled in the art of wartime weaponry, in reality he
Speaker 1: hated it. He would rather have been building flying machines
Speaker 1: or perpetual motion machines, or doing what he was known
Speaker 1: best for, painting. This engineer and inventor was one of
Speaker 1: the finest artists of the sixteenth century, and his works
Speaker 1: are still studied in museums and classrooms to this day.
Speaker 1: There's no proof that any of his designs for his
Speaker 1: machine gun or his tank were ever actually built, yet
Speaker 1: their influence can be seen in today's modern equivalence. Had
Speaker 1: they been brought to life, as he'd feared, he might
Speaker 1: have been remembered as a monster, a man who chose
Speaker 1: to celebrate violence rather than peace. Fortunately that's not the case.
Speaker 1: The world instead associates him with the portrait of a
Speaker 1: young woman smiling now displayed in the Louver, as well
Speaker 1: as his painting of the final meal between Jesus and
Speaker 1: his disciples. He's not known as a merchant of death,
Speaker 1: but as the master artist behind the mona Lisa Leonardo
Speaker 1: da Vinci Evan paid for the tower himself. It wasn't
Speaker 1: really about him, though, No, the tower was a monument
Speaker 1: to the Viking explorer Leif Ericsson. It wouldn't be strange
Speaker 1: to build a monument to the man. He had been
Speaker 1: celebrated in all kinds of ways since the year one
Speaker 1: thousand when he was sailing the Atlantic. The strange thing
Speaker 1: was where Evan built that. You see the tower cast
Speaker 1: its long shadow over the Charles River, just inland from
Speaker 1: the city of Boston. What's even stranger is the huge
Speaker 1: inscription stretching across the front of the tower, saying that
Speaker 1: the land was discovered by leaf ericson one thousand a d.
Speaker 1: But there's more. It says that at this very spot
Speaker 1: in what is now Massachusetts, there was once a Viking
Speaker 1: city with docks and walls and dams that controlled the land,
Speaker 1: stretching from Rhode Island to the south, all the way
Speaker 1: up to St. Lawrence River up in Canada. Now, maybe
Speaker 1: this would have been safely ignored when Evan built the
Speaker 1: tower in eighty nine, but he wasn't a nobody quite
Speaker 1: the opposite. In fact, Evan Horsford was a retired Harvard
Speaker 1: professor the dean of Harvard's Science School and a very
Speaker 1: successful businessman. And what's more, he wasn't the only Bostonian
Speaker 1: who thought the city had once been the home of Vikings. Actually,
Speaker 1: he was riding in the coat tails of some of
Speaker 1: Boston's most famous and most powerful nineteenth century citizens. It
Speaker 1: all started in the eighteen thirties when Boston's famous poet,
Speaker 1: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had traveled to Denmark. Someone convinced him
Speaker 1: that Vikings had once landed in New England. When he
Speaker 1: got home to Boston, he retold that story to anyone
Speaker 1: who would listen for years. By the eighteen seventies, some
Speaker 1: of the most important New England gentry had hatched a
Speaker 1: plan to tell it to the world. They got together
Speaker 1: and decided to build a statue in Boston of Leif Ericsson,
Speaker 1: and then they put the word out to raise the money.
Speaker 1: That's where Eben Horsford comes in. None of those Boston
Speaker 1: gentlemen would live to see just how deeply Eban fell
Speaker 1: in love with their plan, But if fall he did.
Speaker 1: After their death, Eben Horsford carried their idea forward and
Speaker 1: put everything he had into the project. He built their
Speaker 1: statue of Leif Ericson in Boston, and you can still
Speaker 1: see it today rising in the Back Bay neighborhood. After all,
Speaker 1: Eban was no stranger to building in Boston. He was
Speaker 1: part of the group that had planned for the defense
Speaker 1: of Boston Harbor during the Civil War. But he did
Speaker 1: a lot more too. Evan was so convinced that he
Speaker 1: wrote seven books arguing that Leif Ericsson had discovered Massachusetts
Speaker 1: before Columbus ever reached the hemisphere. Evan did his best
Speaker 1: to survey the land and thought that he found the
Speaker 1: spot where Leif Ericson's house had been. He had a
Speaker 1: plaque installed there, and then in nine Evan built that
Speaker 1: tower on the Charles River. Like the other Bostonians before him,
Speaker 1: Evan was trying to convince the world that Boston was
Speaker 1: the place where America began, complete with its first white
Speaker 1: adventurers and even its first Christian bishop. It was, to
Speaker 1: put it mildly, all about putting people like him on
Speaker 1: a pedestal. Today we know that Leif Ericson actually landed
Speaker 1: much farther north at lance All Meadows at the tip
Speaker 1: of Newfoundland, at the Canadian site. Archaeologists have recently discovered
Speaker 1: and identified bronze cloak pins, iron nails and rivets, and
Speaker 1: what may even be a kiln for smelting iron from
Speaker 1: bog Ore. They are the kinds of things that Eban
Speaker 1: searched for all around Boston but could never find. So
Speaker 1: it's a good thing that the message of all Evan's
Speaker 1: monuments has mostly been forgotten. After all, the story they're telling,
Speaker 1: the history that they want to teach, it's just wrong.
Speaker 1: But despite all that, Eban Horsford's legacy is still influencing
Speaker 1: us today, and it keeps rising up in homes across
Speaker 1: America because despite being quite a bad historian, Eban was
Speaker 1: actually a great chemist, and in the late eighteen fifties
Speaker 1: he started selling double acting baking powder. It's sold like hotcakes.
Speaker 1: He even sold it to the Union Army during the
Speaker 1: Civil War, which is where he really started to make
Speaker 1: his fortune. Eban began by culling his invention, Horsford's Bread Preparation,
Speaker 1: but when he died and his manufacturing company wanted to
Speaker 1: give up their name, they rebranded it. In fact, they
Speaker 1: named it after Evan's position at Harvard, where he was
Speaker 1: the Rumford Professor for Applied Sciences, today, Evans Invention is
Speaker 1: still in stores, proudly declaring that it has been trusted
Speaker 1: since eighteen fifty nine. And if you've ever used Rumford
Speaker 1: baking powder, then you've cooked with Evan's real discovery. And
Speaker 1: even if you don't know it, you've seen him too.
Speaker 1: The red container is marked with the black silhouette of
Speaker 1: a man set in a white oval, the long shadow
Speaker 1: cast by the man himself. I hope you've enjoyed today's
Speaker 1: guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
Speaker 1: visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
Speaker 1: me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I
Speaker 1: make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
Speaker 1: book series, and television show, and you can learn all
Speaker 1: about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
Speaker 1: And until next time, stay curious.