Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Nke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 2: is an open book, all of these amazing tales right
Speaker 2: there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome
Speaker 2: to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: I think it's fair to say that Superman is an
Speaker 1: American icon, so much so that his influence goes beyond fiction.
Speaker 1: In fact, there was one curious moment in history where
Speaker 1: Superman actually helped to defeat some real life villains. It
Speaker 1: was nineteen forty six and Florida Borne Southern nurse Stetson
Speaker 1: Kennedy had reached a dead end in his fight against
Speaker 1: the klu Klux Klan. It would be an understatement to
Speaker 1: say that he hated them with a passion. He grew
Speaker 1: up in the South seeing the promise of the reconstruction
Speaker 1: era destroyed by the KKK through their implementation of segregation.
Speaker 1: He saw his black neighbors harassed, robbed, assaulted, and lynched
Speaker 1: by this white supremacist gang. Stetson also had an uncle
Speaker 1: who was actually in the clan, which made him deeply
Speaker 1: ashamed his family tree included men who signed the constitution.
Speaker 1: He saw having a relative in the clan as a
Speaker 1: stain on his family's reputation, so Stetson did everything that
Speaker 1: he could to stop them. He and his friend John
Speaker 1: Brown infiltrated the clan's headquarters in Atlanta, posing as white supremacists.
Speaker 1: They attended meetings and learned as much as they could.
Speaker 1: They learned the silly greetings and the handshakes that they used.
Speaker 1: They learned that wealthy business owners were paying them to
Speaker 1: violently break up union rallies. They learned that they were
Speaker 1: targeting anti clan journalists by jumping them in the streets
Speaker 1: and whipping them. And they learned how leadership charged new
Speaker 1: members twenty five dods for their robes. They even sold
Speaker 1: them useless insurance policies. It became clear that the KKK
Speaker 1: was no more than a racket where wealthy white men
Speaker 1: took advantage of poor white men and directed their anger
Speaker 1: at minorities. Stetson passed information onto local unions, warning them
Speaker 1: whenever the Klan planned to attack. He shared information on
Speaker 1: the clans violent activities with the Georgia Attorney General, hoping
Speaker 1: that they would be prosecuted, and he also wrote to
Speaker 1: the governor of Georgia pointing out that the KKK was
Speaker 1: registered as a nonprofit to avoid taxation, when in fact
Speaker 1: it was profiting in several ways. However, none of these
Speaker 1: attacks seemed to stick. The problem was that many of
Speaker 1: the people in power in the South secretly approved of
Speaker 1: the KKK. Either they were white supremacists themselves, or they
Speaker 1: were profiting off of the KKK's union busting activities. Stetson
Speaker 1: sat in a park in Atlanta one day, dejected, trying
Speaker 1: to think of how he could bring the clan to justice.
Speaker 1: He saw children and it occurred to him that maybe
Speaker 1: he would have to reach them if the adults wouldn't listen,
Speaker 1: and he knew just the way to do it. Throughout
Speaker 1: the previous few decades, radio had become the primary source
Speaker 1: of entertainment and news for most Americans, and one of
Speaker 1: the most popular shows was The Adventures of Superman, a
Speaker 1: weekly fifteen minute program that adapted adventures from the comic books.
Speaker 1: Stetson reached out to the Anti Defamation League, who worked
Speaker 1: to fight against hate groups like the KKK. In turn,
Speaker 1: they reached out to the producers of The Adventures of
Speaker 1: Superman and began to collaborate on a storyline for the
Speaker 1: series where Superman exposed and fought the KKK. The storyline
Speaker 1: ended up being called the Clan of the Fiery Cross
Speaker 1: to avoid the potential legal consequences of actually depicting the
Speaker 1: KKK by name, but despite the name change, it was
Speaker 1: very clear that the group was the KKK. They wore white,
Speaker 1: pointy headed robes, they burned crosses, and they follow many
Speaker 1: of the same practices that Stetson covered. In the storyline,
Speaker 1: a young white boy named Chuck is playing baseball when
Speaker 1: a young Asian American boy named Tommy accidentally hits him
Speaker 1: with the ball. Chuck's uncle, Matts immediately accuses Tommy of
Speaker 1: trying to purposely harm Chuck and takes Chuck to a
Speaker 1: meeting of the Clan of the Fiery Cross, where he
Speaker 1: pressures Chuck into misrepresenting the accident with Tommy. During the scene,
Speaker 1: the clan is depicted as using a strange two finger salute,
Speaker 1: something that stets In potentially shared with the producers. In
Speaker 1: the storyline, the clan attacks Tommy and his family, which
Speaker 1: prompts none other than the Daily Planet reporters Jimmy Olsen
Speaker 1: and Clark kent to investigate Chuck's uncle. Matt is also
Speaker 1: shown climbing up the ranks of the clan until he
Speaker 1: meets the leader, who reveals that the white supremacist angle
Speaker 1: of the clan is all a cynical ploy to get
Speaker 1: its members to buy robes. In the end, once Clark
Speaker 1: uncovers the truth, he changes into his Superman costume and
Speaker 1: beats up and arrests the members of the Klan. The
Speaker 1: storyline was a huge hit. The radio show received accolades
Speaker 1: in the press and from groups such as the National
Speaker 1: Conference of Christians and Jews. The Adventures of Superman got
Speaker 1: the ball rolling on a sea change in the United States.
Speaker 1: Soon enough, the KKK was seen as the strange, pathetic,
Speaker 1: dishonest thugs they actually are. Politicians who were once privately
Speaker 1: supporting them began to publicly denounce them. Within just a
Speaker 1: few years, the klans membership had sharply declined. Stetson had
Speaker 1: been successful in his mission to hurt the KKK. Curiously, though,
Speaker 1: the reason he was successful was because he realized that
Speaker 1: oftentimes fiction is more convincing than reality. On the outskirts
Speaker 1: of Paris, six floors beneath the cobblestone city streets. Four
Speaker 1: people moved swiftly and silently through a long, narrow corridor.
Speaker 1: The precise constant chill of this floor crept into their bones,
Speaker 1: making each movement a little stiff. Finally, though the four
Speaker 1: arrived at their destination, a gleaming triple padlocked vault, one
Speaker 1: of the four stepped forward the first of the three keyholders,
Speaker 1: all present for this momentous occasion. With each key, another
Speaker 1: of the three silver pistons retracted from the lock, until
Speaker 1: the door swung open to reveal the priceless treasure inside.
Speaker 1: Not a painting, not a diamond, not a stack of
Speaker 1: money or gold. It was a kilogram. Technically, it was
Speaker 1: called LaGrand kilogram or lagran k, a small cylindrical weight
Speaker 1: made of ninety percent platinum and ten percent iridium, and
Speaker 1: even inside this vault it was also protected by three
Speaker 1: glass clutches shaped like nested bells. But lagran k wasn't
Speaker 1: an ordinary kilogram. It was the kilogram standardized, inarguable and exact,
Speaker 1: the object around which all other international units of mass
Speaker 1: are fixed. It might be hard to see why such
Speaker 1: a thing would be necessary, but the idea actually came
Speaker 1: as a solution to injustice. You see, during the French Revolution,
Speaker 1: units of measurement were locally decided on and very imprecise,
Speaker 1: as traveling and trading became more common, though this created
Speaker 1: real problems. A pound of flour in Leone might be
Speaker 1: equivalent to two pounds of flour in Sant Dotienne. People
Speaker 1: understandably were resenting pain more for less, particularly at a
Speaker 1: time when economic injustice was enough to fan the flames
Speaker 1: of all out war. So in seventeen ninety one, the
Speaker 1: French National Assembly came up with a solution to all
Speaker 1: of this chaos. Three agreed upon units, the meter, the leader,
Speaker 1: and the kilogram. For this last measurement, they would keep
Speaker 1: a definitive weight for posterity. Water, clean or dirty, weighed
Speaker 1: the same everywhere and was accessible to everyone. So the
Speaker 1: National Assembly agreed that they would store one leader of
Speaker 1: water inside a vault. That one leader of water would
Speaker 1: equal one kilogram. But storing exactly one leader of water
Speaker 1: for all time proved to be challenging. Water evaporates when
Speaker 1: it's too hot, and it freezes when it's too cold,
Speaker 1: It leaks, it spills, it's messy. So in eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: the plan changed. One leader of water would still be
Speaker 1: a kilogram, but instead of storing the water, they would
Speaker 1: store this platinum iridium sphere of equal weight inside. Problem
Speaker 1: solved right, well, not so fast. You see, when lagron
Speaker 1: K was forged in eighteen eighty nine, France sent out
Speaker 1: national prototypes to several other countries. These were official copies
Speaker 1: that were meant to garner international cooperation through a single
Speaker 1: standardized weight, and every few decades these copies were compared
Speaker 1: to the original. The grand K stayed in an artificial
Speaker 1: environment six floors down in the International Bureau of Weights
Speaker 1: and Measurements in Paris. Everything from humidity and temperature to
Speaker 1: air pressure and dust particles were controlled for in the vault.
Speaker 1: Exactly one century after lagron K was forged, in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, four individuals made their way down through all
Speaker 1: those levels of security to measure lagron K, and they
Speaker 1: discovered something shocking. Lagron K was shrinking lighter than the
Speaker 1: other copies by a whopping fifty micrograms, about the same
Speaker 1: weight as a fly's wing. Q International panic lagron K
Speaker 1: is by definition the kilogram, which would mean that everything
Speaker 1: we thought was one kilogram would actually be slightly heavier
Speaker 1: than a kilogram, all because the kilogram was shrinking, as
Speaker 1: you'd imagine, scientists scrambled for an explanation. After all, lagron
Speaker 1: k was meticulously kept and maintained. Any change, even one
Speaker 1: as small as a fly's wing, was seen as unacceptable. So,
Speaker 1: for example, had the highly vetted cleaning process damaged the
Speaker 1: sample somehow. Alternatively, some physicists theorized the issue with something
Speaker 1: called outgassing, where solid objects release microscopic amounts of water, vapor,
Speaker 1: or cleaning solvents when exposed to a low pressure environment. Eventually,
Speaker 1: the best explanation they could come up with was that
Speaker 1: all physical objects absorb molecules from the air, and they
Speaker 1: lose atoms when touched. And yes, atoms are small, but
Speaker 1: multiply that over the course of a century, and that
Speaker 1: could explain the difference of fifty micrograms. After widespread attempts
Speaker 1: to find a solution, which included a perfectly round silicone sphere,
Speaker 1: physicists had enough. Why should global science depend on a
Speaker 1: physical object that could be damaged or lost. Remember, the
Speaker 1: origins of lagron k came from a need for a
Speaker 1: weight that everyone had access to, and so On November
Speaker 1: sixteenth of twenty eighteen, representatives from sixty nations voted to
Speaker 1: retire lagron K. Today, mass is defined by the plank
Speaker 1: constant using a kibble balance, which measures weight via electromagnetic force, which,
Speaker 1: of course everyone knows right. Legrand k is still in
Speaker 1: its vault in Paris Preserve for future research on changes
Speaker 1: in mass. While its loss as the definitive kilogram weighs
Speaker 1: heavily on some of the scientific community, there is comfort
Speaker 1: in knowing that this new definition actually holds water. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1: This show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
Speaker 1: with iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the Grim and
Speaker 1: Mild team, and produced by Jesse Funk. Learn more about
Speaker 1: the show and the people who make it over at
Speaker 1: Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities. You'll also find a link
Speaker 1: to the official Cabinet of Curiosity's hardcover book, available in
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Speaker 1: until next time, stay curious,