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Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Benky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of

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Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is

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Speaker 1: full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,

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Speaker 1: all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

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Speaker 1: just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

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Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Giovanni Casselli wanted nothing more than to talk

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Speaker 1: to people. His only problem is that the people he

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Speaker 1: wanted to talk to lived very far away. Perhaps that

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Speaker 1: was why he became a Catholic priest, so he could

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Speaker 1: have a direct line to someone else very far away.

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Speaker 1: Born in Seattle, Italy, in eighteen fifteen, Casselli may have

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Speaker 1: arrived a few hundred years too late for the Renaissance,

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Speaker 1: but he certainly grew into quite the Renaissance man. In

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Speaker 1: addition to getting ordained in eighteen thirties six, he also

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Speaker 1: studied history, science and literature. Casselli eventually transitioned from being

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Speaker 1: a student to being a teacher. He tutored Italian aristocrats

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Speaker 1: in Parma for several years before his exile to Florence

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Speaker 1: for political activism. He soon took a job as a

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Speaker 1: physics professor at the university. There, Casselli soon became entranced

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Speaker 1: by the sciences. His own teacher, Leopoldo Nobili, taught him

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Speaker 1: about subjects like electro magnetism and electro chemistry. Casselli took

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Speaker 1: it upon himself to adapt those lessons into a journal

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Speaker 1: he called The Recreation, which was meant to distell such

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Speaker 1: complicated science into a more accessible form. One particular topic

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Speaker 1: struck Casselli during his tenure at the university, electricity, specifically

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Speaker 1: its use in transmitting signals from one place to another.

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Speaker 1: When he wasn't teaching, Casselli was researching how to send

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Speaker 1: messages across long distances over wire. Now, the telegram, which

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Speaker 1: sends electrical pulses across a vast network of wires, had

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Speaker 1: existed since the eighteen forties. Casselli didn't want to send

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Speaker 1: beeps and blips, though, he wanted to send words and

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Speaker 1: even pictures. Unfortunately, he was limited by the technology at

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Speaker 1: the time. Sending messages from one location to another required

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Speaker 1: a lot of power and a method of synchronization between

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Speaker 1: the transmitter and the receiver. After many years, though, he

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Speaker 1: finally cracked it in the eighteen fifties with his invention

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Speaker 1: he called the pan telegraph. It was six ft tall,

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Speaker 1: shaped like a giant wishbone, and was powered by massive batteries.

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Speaker 1: On one side, two curved metal plates were situated next

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Speaker 1: to each other, a transmission plate and a receiving plate.

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Speaker 1: The transmission plate held the message to be sent, which

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Speaker 1: was written in a non conductive ink. To send it,

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Speaker 1: a stylist would travel across the plates in parallel lines

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Speaker 1: until the message had been scanned. The information gathered from

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Speaker 1: the conductive plate and the non conduct if inc was

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Speaker 1: then sent over telegraph lines to another Pan telegraph set

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Speaker 1: up elsewhere. A pen fixed over the receiver plates on

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Speaker 1: that device would write or draw the incoming transmission on

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Speaker 1: a new piece of paper. To solve his syncretization problem,

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Speaker 1: Casselli used a fairly low tech solution, a pendulum clock

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Speaker 1: known as a regulating clock. The pendulum would swing back

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Speaker 1: and forth, completing and breaking the circuits over and over again,

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Speaker 1: keeping both the transmitter and receiver in sync. He first

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Speaker 1: demonstrated his device in eighteen fifty six to Leopold, the

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Speaker 1: second Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Duke was in awe

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Speaker 1: of what Casselli had accomplished. And provided funding for his

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Speaker 1: other experiments and inventions for some time. Eventually, though, the

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Speaker 1: Duke grew bored waiting for the next big thing from

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Speaker 1: the physicist. Seeing the writing on the wall, Caselli packed

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Speaker 1: up and headed to Paris, where he showed off his

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Speaker 1: pan telegraph to Napoleon the Third, and like the Duke,

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Speaker 1: Napoleon was hooked. Casselli conducted a test of his device

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Speaker 1: between Paris and Amia, a distance of almost ninety miles.

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Speaker 1: The machine passed without a single hiccup. Another message was

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Speaker 1: set nearly five hundred miles from Paris to Marseilles. Napoleon

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Speaker 1: was convinced. In eighteen sixty four, the pen telegraph became

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Speaker 1: an official and legally authorized method of transmitting written messages

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Speaker 1: across long distances. It didn't last long though. While impressive

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Speaker 1: and relatively fast, the device was not the most reliable

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Speaker 1: method of sending information from one place to another. Eventually,

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Speaker 1: Casselli walked away from it entirely and went back to

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Speaker 1: Italy to live out in the rest of his days.

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Speaker 1: Eleven years later, an inventor named Alexander Graham Bell would

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Speaker 1: receive the patent for a little device known as the telephone.

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Speaker 1: It goes without saying that the telephone changed the way

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Speaker 1: people communicated all over the world. But it was Giovanni

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Speaker 1: Casselli who went down in history is the man who

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Speaker 1: gave us something even more impressive, the very first facts machine.

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Speaker 1: Wilmur McLean wasn't just as simple farmer. He had moved

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Speaker 1: with his wife to her plantation near Manassas, Virginia, a

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Speaker 1: home they called Yorkshire. Unsurprisingly, McLean was an outspoken supporter

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Speaker 1: of the Confederacy, like most of his Virginia neighbors. That

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Speaker 1: was probably why Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard

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Speaker 1: had chosen McLean's farm to be his base of action.

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Speaker 1: Signs of a major conflict had been evident for months,

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Speaker 1: as more and more states seceded from the Union. Following

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Speaker 1: the capture of Fort Sumter by South Carolina troops back

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Speaker 1: in April, Abraham Lincoln enlisted tens of thousands of volunteer

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Speaker 1: soldiers to prepare for war. Wilmer fled his home with

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Speaker 1: his family on July seventeenth, eighteen sixty one. Beauregard had

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Speaker 1: arrived that day with his staff to commandeer the land,

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Speaker 1: the house, and the barn as his headquarters. Thirty five

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Speaker 1: thousand Union troops had marched for two days in the

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Speaker 1: blistering summer heat, finally arriving at bull Run, while roughly

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Speaker 1: thirty two thousand Confederate soldiers had taken over Manassas Junction

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Speaker 1: and the surrounding areas. On the evening of July eighth,

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Speaker 1: Beauregard was sitting in Wilmur's home waiting for his dinner,

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Speaker 1: when out of nowhere, a visitor came tearing through the

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Speaker 1: front door and landed in the fireplace. It was a cannonball.

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Speaker 1: Dinner may have been canceled, but the Battle of bull Run,

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Speaker 1: and in a way, the Civil War itself, had officially begun.

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Speaker 1: For four years, brother fought brother, father fought son. When

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Speaker 1: the fighting had finally stopped, seven hundred and fifty thousand

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Speaker 1: souls had been lost, about two point five percent of

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Speaker 1: the country's population, and almost half of the bodies were

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Speaker 1: never identified. Wilmer had been too old for the front lines. However,

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Speaker 1: he did find ways to support the South. He made

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Speaker 1: money as a sugar broker and smuggler, bringing it to

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Speaker 1: the Confederate Army through Union black aides. A year after

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Speaker 1: Beauregard had taken control of his home and turned his

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Speaker 1: barn into a field hospital. Wilmer came back to the

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Speaker 1: plantation to help out in other ways. The house had

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Speaker 1: seemed quite a bit in his absence. As you might imagine,

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Speaker 1: the wood had splintered where cannon fire and bullets had

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Speaker 1: gone through its walls. It was no longer the place

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Speaker 1: where he and his wife had hoped to raise their family.

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Speaker 1: It had become a war torn shell of its former self.

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Speaker 1: Even so, this had been his home, and Wilmur chose

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Speaker 1: to stay for the winter as a quartermaster to support

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Speaker 1: the troops. When the snow started to melt and budding

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Speaker 1: flowers blossomed, the fighting between the North and the South

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Speaker 1: grew more heated as well. Wilmer decided that he'd had enough.

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Speaker 1: He and his family traveled over a hundred miles away

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Speaker 1: to another tiny village in Virginia, far from the blood

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Speaker 1: stained fields and air choked with gunpowder. He used his

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Speaker 1: money to buy a new house, a converted tavern that

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Speaker 1: had been built in eighteen forty eight by a man

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Speaker 1: named Charles Rain. Rain's family sold it to Wilmer in

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Speaker 1: eighteen sixty three, and the one time farmer breathed a

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Speaker 1: sigh of relief, believing that he had left the violence

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Speaker 1: of war of his previous home in the past. Unfortunately,

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Speaker 1: he would not be so lucky. On April nine of

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Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five, Wilmer was greeted on the street by

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Speaker 1: Charles Marshall, a Confederate colonel who randomly stopped the first

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Speaker 1: man he saw to ask a simple question. Was there

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Speaker 1: a home nearby where General Ulysses S. Grant of the

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Speaker 1: Union Army could meet peacefully with Confederate commander General Robert E. Lee.

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Speaker 1: Wilmer took Marshall on a tour of an old brick

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Speaker 1: house he thought might work, but Marshall told him no,

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Speaker 1: it had to be nicer, somewhere quiet and respectable, where

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Speaker 1: the two men could sit down and talk things out.

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Speaker 1: Wilmer hesitated before eventually suggesting his own home as a

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Speaker 1: possible meeting place right there in the village of Appomattox

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Speaker 1: Courthouse and Marshall accepted. Lee and Grant sat across from

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Speaker 1: each other in Wilmer's lavish parlor as the Confederate general

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Speaker 1: through in the town. The war was over and the

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Speaker 1: South had lost the Union officers and attendance, hooted and hollered,

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Speaker 1: getting downright rampunctious as they tore the house up, looking

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Speaker 1: for any and all souvenirs to mark the momentous occasion.

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Speaker 1: They cut strips of fabric out of Wilmer's furniture. They

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Speaker 1: took silverware and candlesticks, and even a doll belonging to

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Speaker 1: his young daughter. They paid for the damage with money

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Speaker 1: they practically forced into the man's pockets before leaving with

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Speaker 1: their keepsakes, and Wilmur McLean became the only man in

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Speaker 1: history with the right to say that the Civil War

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Speaker 1: had started in his backyard and ended in his front parlor.

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Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet

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Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn

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Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.

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Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership

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Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show

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Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,

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Speaker 1: and you can learn all about it over at the

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Speaker 1: World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.

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Speaker 1: Yeah h