Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
Speaker 1: right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Few rulers stick out
Speaker 1: from the pages of history like Queen Victoria. She was
Speaker 1: almost larger than life, so much so that the time
Speaker 1: period she lived in took on her own name, the
Speaker 1: Victorian Era, and what a time it was. During her
Speaker 1: sixty two year reign, the world changed dramatically. The British
Speaker 1: Empire expanded around the globe, and the modern constitutional monarchy
Speaker 1: as we know it today took shape and matured. The
Speaker 1: world saw the first powered flight, the invention of the telephone,
Speaker 1: and went from paintings and restrawn carriages to photography and automobiles.
Speaker 1: Queen Victoria impacted Europe in a very particular way too.
Speaker 1: She and Prince Albert had nine children and between them
Speaker 1: were forty two grandchildren, and that family tree spread wide Today.
Speaker 1: Five European countries have monarchs that are descended from Victoria,
Speaker 1: including Queen Elizabeth the Second. Clearly, she left her mark
Speaker 1: on the world. Victoria and Albert were a beloved couple,
Speaker 1: and it was hard to blame the public for that.
Speaker 1: Prince Albert was a man that leaned toward the progressive
Speaker 1: side of the political scale. He helped influence reforms in
Speaker 1: the areas of welfare, slavery, and education, along with the
Speaker 1: ever expanding world of manufacturing. And of course, what royal
Speaker 1: family would be complete without multiple palatial homes to live in.
Speaker 1: There was Kensington, of course, and everyone knows Buckingham Palace.
Speaker 1: But in eighteen fifty one the Queen added one more
Speaker 1: house to that list, down on the northern tip of
Speaker 1: the Isle of Wight. They called it the Osborne House,
Speaker 1: and it served as a summer home, but summer turned
Speaker 1: to winter. In eighteen sixty two, at the age of
Speaker 1: just forty two, Prince Albert died, leaving Victoria all alone.
Speaker 1: What happened over the next four decades has sometimes been
Speaker 1: described as the birth of a culture of death. She
Speaker 1: wore the black of mourning for the rest of her
Speaker 1: life and made sure that the servants never stopped taking
Speaker 1: care of Albert's daily needs, even though he was no
Speaker 1: longer alive or even in the house. When her children
Speaker 1: eventually married, each of them posed for wedding photographs that
Speaker 1: included a bust of Albert. She never slept in a
Speaker 1: bed that didn't have a photo of him beside it,
Speaker 1: and kept a plaster cast of his hand so that
Speaker 1: she could hold it. In fact, when she passed away
Speaker 1: in nineteen o one, that hand was placed inside her coffin.
Speaker 1: It's fair to say that Albert's death altered her completely,
Speaker 1: and not in a healthy way. The most interesting obsession
Speaker 1: of her later years, though, was not discovered until after
Speaker 1: her death, when Osborne House fell into the hands of
Speaker 1: her son and heir, King Edward the Seventh. He explored
Speaker 1: the areas of the house that had been off limits
Speaker 1: to anyone other than his mother, and there, behind locked doors,
Speaker 1: he found an unusual display hundreds of photographs that covered
Speaker 1: generations of people Victoria had known, portraits of people who
Speaker 1: had been important to her, right there in the house,
Speaker 1: where she could visit whenever she wanted. Despite the fact
Speaker 1: that these photographs spanned decades and each one showed the
Speaker 1: face of a different friend or family member, there was
Speaker 1: one common feature tying them all together. None of the
Speaker 1: subjects were alive. Queen Victoria's secret gallery was a morbid
Speaker 1: tour of the most haunting and final moment months of
Speaker 1: each person's life their funeral. Transatlantic ocean liners have been
Speaker 1: around since the early nineteenth century. Back in those days,
Speaker 1: they were powered by steam. It was the steamship S S.
Speaker 1: Savannah that made the first steam powered Atlantic crossing in
Speaker 1: eighteen nineteen, reaching Liverpool in just twenty seven days. The
Speaker 1: trouble was they only used the steam engine for about
Speaker 1: seventy two hours, managing the majority of the crossing with
Speaker 1: their sales. In eighteen thirty three, the Royal Edward used
Speaker 1: steam power for seventy of their crossing, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: until four years later when the S. S Serious tried
Speaker 1: to top the record. They made the crossing in just
Speaker 1: eighteen days, which was amazing, but they used up all
Speaker 1: of their coal in the process. In fact, they ran
Speaker 1: out before they reached New York and had to break
Speaker 1: up wooden furniture to burn to keep the engine running.
Speaker 1: All of these were relatively small ships. They carried passengers,
Speaker 1: just not a lot of them. But as the decades
Speaker 1: ticked by, everything advanced the engines, the passenger capacity, even
Speaker 1: the communication technology. By the eighteen seventies, companies like the
Speaker 1: White Star Line were building massive ocean liners. That's about
Speaker 1: the time when crossing the ocean became a luxury trip.
Speaker 1: To those first white star liners were decked out with
Speaker 1: first class cabins, running water, electricity, you name it. And
Speaker 1: yet while there was a lot of promise and hope
Speaker 1: for these growing palaces of the waves, there was also
Speaker 1: a lot of risk. Oceans were unpredictable and temperamental. After all,
Speaker 1: a lot could go wrong somewhere along the way. They
Speaker 1: built the big One. Now I'm going to give you
Speaker 1: some numbers so you can put it into perspective. This
Speaker 1: ship was eight hundred feet long and had a displacement
Speaker 1: of forty five tons. Those who bragged about her said
Speaker 1: that she was unsinkable. And I get the hint behind
Speaker 1: a claim like that. It's meant to give future passengers
Speaker 1: ease of mind. But it's certainly smacks of hubrists, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: I mean, no ship is truly unsinkable, maybe because of oversight,
Speaker 1: or perhaps because of that grand claim of unsinkable nous
Speaker 1: builders didn't outfit the ship with enough lifeboats. And that's
Speaker 1: the sort of thing you do if you want to
Speaker 1: tempt fate, isn't it. So it's going to come as
Speaker 1: no surprise when I inform you that this unsinkable ship
Speaker 1: didn't survive her maiden voyage. On a cold April night,
Speaker 1: about four hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland, the
Speaker 1: ship was cruising through the dark Atlantic waters at about
Speaker 1: twenty knots when it struck an iceberg. The massive block
Speaker 1: of ice tore a hole in the side of the ship,
Speaker 1: and then the unthinkable happened to the unsinkable It sank.
Speaker 1: The loss of life was devastating, perhaps made even more
Speaker 1: painful in light of that prideful claim about the ship's safety.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't the most surprising thing about this nautical tragedy. No,
Speaker 1: that mantle falls to one other piece of information that will,
Speaker 1: pardon the pun, sink your expectations. You see, this event
Speaker 1: never happened in real life. That is because this ocean
Speaker 1: liner was nothing more than the setting for a novella
Speaker 1: written by an American author named Morgan Robertson, which probably
Speaker 1: fooled you, didn't it, because you were assuming I was
Speaker 1: talking about the Titanic this entire time. You know, the
Speaker 1: unsinkable ocean liner that struck an iceberg in the North
Speaker 1: Atlantic and sunk to the bottom of the ocean in
Speaker 1: April of nineteen twelve. Nope, and now I fooled you
Speaker 1: with the bit of fiction. But there's more, and it's
Speaker 1: less funny than it is bizarre, because you need to
Speaker 1: know two other things about Robertson's fictional ocean liner. First,
Speaker 1: it was named the titan Crazy right. Second, though, and
Speaker 1: most amazingly of all, his story was published in fourteen
Speaker 1: years before the tragedy of the real ship called the Titanic.
Speaker 1: I know it's cliche, but every now and then, even
Speaker 1: the worst cliche proves itself true. Sometimes life really does
Speaker 1: imitate art. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
Speaker 1: the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky
Speaker 1: in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award
Speaker 1: winning show called Lore, which is a podcast book series,
Speaker 1: is end television show and you can learn all about
Speaker 1: it over at the World of Lore dot com. And
Speaker 1: until next time, stay curious. H