Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosity is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world
Speaker 1: is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an
Speaker 1: open book, all of these amazing tales are right there
Speaker 1: on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the Cabinet of Curiosities. Everyone loves a good invention, something
Speaker 1: that took time to design. An engineer to solve a
Speaker 1: particular problem, come up with an idea that scratches an itch,
Speaker 1: and people will line up to buy it in droves.
Speaker 1: Some are novel, like liquid paper or the super soaker,
Speaker 1: while others change the world, like the television or the
Speaker 1: printing press. But some inventions aren't inventions at all. They're
Speaker 1: simply ingenious. Way is to use existing products, And even
Speaker 1: though nobody spent thousands of dollars building a prototype, that
Speaker 1: doesn't make these products any less useful. Perhaps no one
Speaker 1: knows the utility of a common, everyday item better than
Speaker 1: Ed Low. Low was born in nineteen twenty in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Several years later, his family up and moved everyone to Kassopolis, Michigan,
Speaker 1: just over the border from Indiana. When he was in
Speaker 1: his twenties. Low enlisted to serve in World War Two
Speaker 1: and returned home in nineteen forty six to work for
Speaker 1: his father, Henry, who owned a company that sold blocks
Speaker 1: of ice and absorbents such as sawdust to local customers.
Speaker 1: The company sold another kind of absorbent as well. It
Speaker 1: was called Fuller's Earth, a type of clay used to
Speaker 1: clean up oil and grease. In some cases, it has
Speaker 1: been used to save people from being poisoned, as the
Speaker 1: clay is able to mop up and break down certain
Speaker 1: chemical agents in the stomach. One day in January of
Speaker 1: ninety seven, a friend of Lowe's named Cage Draper approached
Speaker 1: him with a problem. She had a roommate who went
Speaker 1: to the bathroom in a tray lined with ashes. When
Speaker 1: the roommate was finished doing their business, they tracked throughout
Speaker 1: the house, leaving footprints everywhere. She asked low for sand
Speaker 1: to fill the pan instead. She had her own, but
Speaker 1: it had been so cold outside that her sandpile had
Speaker 1: frozen salad. It had been her reason for switching to
Speaker 1: ashes in the first place. Unfortunately, sand presented its own
Speaker 1: set of issues. It would track everywhere too, and be
Speaker 1: just as messy as the ashes that she was currently using,
Speaker 1: so instead, Low suggested that she used Fuller's Earth. The
Speaker 1: clay material was far more absorbent and wouldn't leave a
Speaker 1: residue all over her floors. He gave her a bag
Speaker 1: of it from the trunk of his car and then
Speaker 1: didn't think anything more about it. Mrs Draper returned sometime
Speaker 1: later and asked for another bag. The first had worked,
Speaker 1: wonders her roommate no longer left her floors soot stained
Speaker 1: or sandy. You see, k Draper's roommates was a cat,
Speaker 1: and ed Lowe had just given her the first ever
Speaker 1: bag of kitty litter. He had originally tried to market
Speaker 1: it as a type of poultry litter that was more
Speaker 1: sanitary than the usual stuff, which was made of feathers,
Speaker 1: chicken feces, excess feed, and other bedding material. Like the
Speaker 1: chickens it was meant to help. However, that product really
Speaker 1: didn't fly, but Mrs Draper saw how useful it was
Speaker 1: for her. Once low realized that he had a hit
Speaker 1: product on his hands, he bagged up more clay, wrote
Speaker 1: the words kitty litter across the front of each bag,
Speaker 1: and took them to a local store to sell. The
Speaker 1: shop owner refused, no one was going to pay sixty
Speaker 1: five cents for a five pound bag of clay when
Speaker 1: they could spend a penny on a bag of sawdust,
Speaker 1: and said, but Low was sure that what he had
Speaker 1: was better than sawdust. He told the owner to give
Speaker 1: away the bags to his customers. It didn't take long
Speaker 1: for those same customers to come back clamoring for more,
Speaker 1: and sixty cents was just fine to them. Despite selling
Speaker 1: out at one store, Low's product was anything but an
Speaker 1: overnight success. He didn't cross a million dollars in sales
Speaker 1: until eight years later. Eight years of trade shows, convention halls,
Speaker 1: and good old face to face marketing as a traveling salesman,
Speaker 1: but it eventually got him over that hump. He even
Speaker 1: went to cat shows and volunteered to clean the litter
Speaker 1: boxes with his own product, just to show how absorbent
Speaker 1: it was and how it killed odors. Eventually, his kitty
Speaker 1: litter became a nationwide phenomenon. He secured hundreds of patents, trademarks,
Speaker 1: and copyrights and single handedly created an industry worth almost
Speaker 1: three billion dollars today. It may have started out as
Speaker 1: just a pile of clay, but ed Lowe managed to
Speaker 1: turn his product into the Cat's Pajamas. If you tell
Speaker 1: people that you're going to do something, it's expected that
Speaker 1: you do it. Right to try and fail means that
Speaker 1: you've at least put in the attempt, even if it
Speaker 1: didn't turn out the way that you hoped to. Never
Speaker 1: make a try at all makes you a disappointment in
Speaker 1: the eyes of those who supported you. But to lie
Speaker 1: about your accomplishment, to make people think that you've done it,
Speaker 1: when in reality you haven't done anything at all, well
Speaker 1: you better hope they never find out. Donald Crowhurst told
Speaker 1: people that he was going to sail around the world.
Speaker 1: What actually happened it was far stranger. Crowhurst lived in
Speaker 1: British India until he was fifteen years old, when his
Speaker 1: family left to return to England. It had been a
Speaker 1: rough childhood for him. His father died one year after
Speaker 1: returning to England, and for the next five years Crowhurst
Speaker 1: served as the apprentice to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, after
Speaker 1: which he became a pilot for the Royal Air Force.
Speaker 1: For unknown reasons, though he left the r a F
Speaker 1: to pursue a career in the army but that didn't
Speaker 1: last long either, as he was implicated in an incident
Speaker 1: involving a stolen car. By nineteen sixty two, he had
Speaker 1: started his own electronics business and married a woman named
Speaker 1: Claire O'Leary. It seems the high jinks of his youth
Speaker 1: were behind him and he had settled down to become
Speaker 1: a family man. On the weekends, he would go sailing
Speaker 1: and build small gadgets to help him on the water.
Speaker 1: One such device was called the Navigator, which relied on
Speaker 1: radio signals to pinpoint a boat's location. Crowhurst used it
Speaker 1: on his own vessel and thought that it might be
Speaker 1: a big seller among the wider sailing market. Unfortunately, it
Speaker 1: didn't take off the way he had hoped, and the
Speaker 1: money he desperately needed to keep himself and his business
Speaker 1: afloat just wasn't coming in. But an opportunity soon presented
Speaker 1: itself that would lip the struggling entrepreneur out of the
Speaker 1: red and into the history books. It was a race
Speaker 1: sponsored by the British Sunday Times that pits sailing experts
Speaker 1: and amateurs against each other their goal to circumnavigate the
Speaker 1: globe single handedly. The grand prize was five thousand pounds
Speaker 1: about seventy five thousand American dollars by today's standards. Competitors
Speaker 1: had to begin their voyage anytime between June one and
Speaker 1: October thirty one of nineteen sixty. Crowhurst had a boatyard
Speaker 1: in Norfolk build his boat, a forty ftlaw trimaran dubbed
Speaker 1: the Tenmouth Electron. Sponsorship money was meager and the deadline
Speaker 1: to leave was closing in, so corners were cut to
Speaker 1: finish the boat on time. He finally set out on
Speaker 1: the last day possible according to the rule book, but
Speaker 1: his rushing and his lack of funds meant that many
Speaker 1: of the boat's safety features just weren't completed. He departed
Speaker 1: on Halloween from the seaside town of ten Mouth in Devon, England.
Speaker 1: Right away it was clear that he was not cut
Speaker 1: out for a trip around the world, especially by himself.
Speaker 1: His pace was dismal. He was traveling at half the
Speaker 1: speed necessary to keep up with the other contestants, and
Speaker 1: he was still fixing things as he was going, including
Speaker 1: leaks in the boat itself. Based on his logs from
Speaker 1: the event, Crowhurst believed that even then he had a
Speaker 1: fifty fifty shot at even finishing the race alive, let
Speaker 1: alone winning, he had to come up with a plan
Speaker 1: and fast, otherwise he was liable to die on board
Speaker 1: within the next several weeks. After more than two months
Speaker 1: without any updates that left his family desperate for a
Speaker 1: glimmer of hope that he was okay, Crowhurst radioed in
Speaker 1: that he had covered two and forty three nautical miles
Speaker 1: in a single day. It was a record, just not
Speaker 1: a real one. He had come up with an elaborate
Speaker 1: ruse early in his trip, one that had him turning
Speaker 1: off his radio and hanging out in the South Atlantic
Speaker 1: for just a few months. After some time, he would
Speaker 1: show up in England as though he had completed the
Speaker 1: whole trip. He didn't expect to win. In fact, he
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure of it, as his falsified logs
Speaker 1: wouldn't be looked at too closely if he came in
Speaker 1: at last place. But Crowhurst put about as much thought
Speaker 1: into fabricating his navigation logs as he did into the
Speaker 1: preparation for the race itself. His times and dates were
Speaker 1: all wrong, claiming that he was sailing to certain locations
Speaker 1: much more quickly than could reasonably have been expected. But
Speaker 1: he didn't care. In one of his last transmissions, he
Speaker 1: told his family and race officials that he was near
Speaker 1: the southern tip of Africa, and then in July of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, the truth came out. His boat was
Speaker 1: discovered drifting in the mid Atlantic by another ship. Almost
Speaker 1: everything was still on board, including his maps, navigational charts,
Speaker 1: and the doctored logs that he had left behind. Crowhurst, however,
Speaker 1: was nowhere to be found. It's believed that he took
Speaker 1: his own life at sea. His logs were filled with
Speaker 1: the words of a man who, according to some biographers,
Speaker 1: could not live with the guilt of committing fraud nor
Speaker 1: the reality of coming clean and losing everything. He wrote
Speaker 1: rambling diet tribes and imaginary arguments between himself and God,
Speaker 1: signs that his mental state was crumbling the closer he
Speaker 1: got to the end of the race. Donald crowhurst body
Speaker 1: was never found. The last thing he said to his
Speaker 1: son before he left on that fateful day in October
Speaker 1: was look after your mother. As if he'd known all
Speaker 1: along that he wasn't coming home. He just wanted to
Speaker 1: show the world and his family that he could do
Speaker 1: what he set his mind to do. Instead, he was
Speaker 1: swallowed whole by his own stubbornness, allowing the ocean to
Speaker 1: claim one more poor soul. 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.