Speaker 1: Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
Speaker 1: 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. We've all heard of planking. It took over
Speaker 1: the internet a while back. Then there was the rather
Speaker 1: short lived ice Bucket challenge, where friends challenge each other
Speaker 1: to film themselves dumping a bucket of ice water over
Speaker 1: their heads and of course then posted on social media.
Speaker 1: Social media has a knack for making fads blow up,
Speaker 1: after all, humanity becomes a much different species when put
Speaker 1: in front of an audience. But social media didn't make
Speaker 1: trends happen. No long before the days of TikTok and Instagram,
Speaker 1: there were examples of human beings doing ridiculous, pointless things
Speaker 1: solely for the sake of saying that they had done it. Consider,
Speaker 1: for instance, phone booth surfing. People took photos as they
Speaker 1: crammed as many friends as possible into phone booths, with
Speaker 1: a record being a seemingly impossible But there is another fad,
Speaker 1: likewise pointless, that unnecessarily grabbed everyone's attention way back in
Speaker 1: nineteen nine. It started, as these things often do, with
Speaker 1: a bet. A Harvard freshman by the name of Lowthrip
Speaker 1: Whittington Jr. Bragged to his friends that he had once
Speaker 1: eaten a live fish. Being good college friends, they doubted
Speaker 1: him and bet him ten whole dollars that he could
Speaker 1: not do it again. Not wanting to be shamed at failing,
Speaker 1: Whittington practiced for days, swallowing life tadpoles and baby goldfish.
Speaker 1: After all, practice makes perfect right. The moment of truth
Speaker 1: came on March three of nine, inside a building of
Speaker 1: the revered Harvard University. The student was encircled by his
Speaker 1: friends and by Boston reporters, and there he did what
Speaker 1: fate determined he had to do. He swallowed the goldfish whole,
Speaker 1: after which he brushed his teeth, and then sat down
Speaker 1: to a dinner of fried file at with tartar sauce.
Speaker 1: Had this been in the modern era, the video would
Speaker 1: have been liked and shared thousands of times, criticized for
Speaker 1: its grossness, and undoubtedly blown up and spread to the
Speaker 1: far corners of the Internet. But in the absence of
Speaker 1: social media, all it did was well blow up and
Speaker 1: spread to the far corners of the globe. Remember there
Speaker 1: were reporters there, the social media of the day. Just
Speaker 1: a month later, Marie Henson, a journalism student at the
Speaker 1: University of Missouri, became the first woman to engage in
Speaker 1: the goldfish swallowing craze. At the University of Pennsylvania, a
Speaker 1: student swallowed twenty five all on his own, but not
Speaker 1: long after a student in m I t became the champion,
Speaker 1: taking down forty two. His reign was short lived, though,
Speaker 1: as a Clark University students swallowed eighty nine goldfish in
Speaker 1: April eighty nine, Goldfish Down the hatch. Rivalries developed between schools,
Speaker 1: like sporting events played out on fields and rinks. Students
Speaker 1: overcame intercollegiate obstacles by swallowing more live goldfish than their
Speaker 1: rival college and universities, proving once and for all that
Speaker 1: they were the superior institution. Of course. Life magazine even
Speaker 1: picked it up on their March ninety nine issue, making
Speaker 1: this fad a piece of American culture for all eternity.
Speaker 1: It didn't take long before a Massachusetts States Senator, Drew
Speaker 1: up a bill to and quote preserve the fish from
Speaker 1: cruel and wanton consumption. And it worked. The ridiculous activity
Speaker 1: had been thoroughly shut down, and all wayward attempts to
Speaker 1: reignite it were punished as well. Let's just say the
Speaker 1: stupid acts they were. As the old saying goes, give
Speaker 1: a man of fish, and you'll feed him for a day,
Speaker 1: But teach him to swallow one alive and whole. And well,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how that one ends. All I know
Speaker 1: is it's more than a little curious. By the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union had permeated nearly all of American pop culture, from
Speaker 1: books like Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegutt to films like
Speaker 1: Dr Strangelove, there was no escaping the threat of mutually
Speaker 1: assured nuclear destruction. In nineteen seventy six, author Clive Kustler
Speaker 1: published a thriller about a mission to the bottom of
Speaker 1: the Atlantic Ocean, where there existed a rare mineral that
Speaker 1: could advance America's defense capabilities during the Cold War. The
Speaker 1: only problem was that the mineral had been kept aboard
Speaker 1: the Titanic, and so a plan was devised, per the
Speaker 1: title of the book, to raise the Titanic. Mind you,
Speaker 1: the book came out about a decade before Robert Ballard
Speaker 1: found the ship and discovered it had actually split into
Speaker 1: two when it sank. It was a wild, implausible scheme
Speaker 1: to return one of the most well known shipwrecks to
Speaker 1: the surface. The thing was, Kostler's idea wasn't far fetched,
Speaker 1: at least not to Howard Hughes and the c i A.
Speaker 1: It started back in March of nineteen sixty eight, six
Speaker 1: years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets had deployed
Speaker 1: a fleet of ships and aircraft to the Pacific Ocean.
Speaker 1: They seemed to be looking for something. After some research
Speaker 1: done by the U. S Office of Naval Intelligence, it
Speaker 1: was believed that they were looking for a missing submarine.
Speaker 1: The K one captain had stopped reporting in with updates,
Speaker 1: and after three weeks without any word, the Russians feared
Speaker 1: the worst. The vessel had been a Soviet ballistic missile
Speaker 1: submarine carrying three nuclear warheads, each capable of reaching a
Speaker 1: distance of up to nautical miles. The Russians looked for months,
Speaker 1: assuming the Americans had sunk it, but they couldn't prove
Speaker 1: their involvement. Then, even worse, they couldn't find their own
Speaker 1: missing sub. Eventually, they gave up and assumed that it
Speaker 1: was gone for good. What they didn't know was that
Speaker 1: the Americans had been listening. American intelligence had detected an
Speaker 1: implosion about fifteen hundred miles up the coast of Hawaii
Speaker 1: on March eight, and they knew the location. It was
Speaker 1: clear that the missing nuclear sub had been found. All
Speaker 1: that was left to do was go down there and
Speaker 1: get it. Unfortunately, it was in over sixteen thousand feet
Speaker 1: of water. For comparison, the Titanic currently rests at about
Speaker 1: twelve thousand, six hundred feet a roughly two point five
Speaker 1: miles below the surface of the ocean. This K one
Speaker 1: was another three quarters of a mile under that, and so,
Speaker 1: just as the fictional US government had done in raised
Speaker 1: the Titanic, the real US government started coming up with
Speaker 1: options for recovering the Russian sub, including in one idea
Speaker 1: that involved inflating giant gas balloons beneath it. Unfortunately, everything
Speaker 1: they drafted up seemed impossible, so they turned to the
Speaker 1: one man who knew all about making the impossible possible
Speaker 1: Howard Hughes, but first the CIA needed to make up
Speaker 1: a reason for the project. To the outside world. Hughes
Speaker 1: would seem interested in mining the seabed for manganese, hence
Speaker 1: the need for his new six and eighteen foot ship,
Speaker 1: the Glomar Explorer. In reality, Hughes was going to pull
Speaker 1: off the greatest heist in the world. He was going
Speaker 1: to steal a Russian sub full of nukes. After testing
Speaker 1: wrapped up in nineteen seventy four, a giant claw was
Speaker 1: delivered to the Glomar Explorer via a fifty one thousand
Speaker 1: ton barge. The plan was to have the claw mounted
Speaker 1: under the ship, reached down and bring the sub back
Speaker 1: to the surface, where it could be stowed in a
Speaker 1: hollow moon pod in the lower decks. The recovery would
Speaker 1: take place entirely underwater, too far from the prime eyes
Speaker 1: of Soviet ships and airplanes. Unfortunately, the recovery didn't go
Speaker 1: quite as planned. Hughes team worked for weeks to bring
Speaker 1: up pieces of the sub while being observed by two
Speaker 1: Soviet vessels in the area. Most of the sub was lost,
Speaker 1: including the engine room and the control room. Pieces of
Speaker 1: the claw arm broke as it was bringing the sub
Speaker 1: to the surface, and what fell away was destroyed when
Speaker 1: it hit the floor again. But he did manage to
Speaker 1: salvage the torpedo compartment and its full array of nuclear weapons,
Speaker 1: so the plan, dubbed Project as ore In, wasn't a
Speaker 1: total loss. The Glomar explorer was able to bring up
Speaker 1: several crew members as well, who were given official burials
Speaker 1: at sea. At least that's the story the CIA told.
Speaker 1: In fact, we wouldn't even know it all happened if
Speaker 1: it hadn't been for a robbery at one of Hughes's
Speaker 1: companies a while later, where the files for the project
Speaker 1: were being stored. The story leaked and hit the press
Speaker 1: soon after. Despite its partial failure, Howard Hughes had done
Speaker 1: what nobody thought possible. He saved part of a Russian
Speaker 1: submarine by treating it like a giant arcade claw machine game.
Speaker 1: Who knows what would have happened if he had been
Speaker 1: the one to find the Titanic. Maybe Kussler's novel wouldn't
Speaker 1: have seemed so far fetched after all. I hope you've
Speaker 1: enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
Speaker 1: for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
Speaker 1: show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was
Speaker 1: created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
Speaker 1: a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
Speaker 1: learn all about it over at the World of Lore
Speaker 1: dot com. And until next time, stay curious.