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March 26, 2020 9 mins

Surprises come in all shapes and sizes, but the most surprising things in the world tend to be people. Today we'll introduce you to a couple of them.

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. It might be a

(00:28):
blur in the sky or a strange round craft zooming
by that captures the attentions of people on the ground.
The authorities try to pass them off as weather balloons
and military training exercises, but not Everyone can be dissuaded
so easily. They know what they've seen. The problem is
while everyone is looking up, they miss what's going on
down below them. You see not all unidentified objects. Why.

(00:53):
In eighteen oh three, Japanese fishermen off the coast of
Hitachi Province notice something floating adrift in the ocean. It
was a ship of some kind, though it didn't resemble
any ship they'd ever seen before. It was about eleven
feet tall and eighteen feet wide. It resembled a giant
wooden pot more than a boat. It was also fitted
with rectangular crystal windows around its rosewood top half. The

(01:16):
bottom half was coated in copper plates. The fisherman hooked
it and brought it to shore, with them. Now that
they could get close enough, they were able to peek inside.
Strange writing had been scribbled on the inner walls of
the vessel. There were also bedsheets, some meat, a bit
of cake, and a bottle of water. And there was
also a woman. She was around twenty years old, they said,

(01:39):
pale and small, just under five feet tall, with long
red hair. Within her hair, she had weaved streaks of
white fur, and she wore long, flowing clothes, unlike anything
the fisherman had ever seen before. The woman looked up
at them through the window and spoke, but her language
was foreign to them, and she could not understand them either.

(02:01):
She emerged from the vessel clutching a box roughly twenty
four inches in size. No one else was allowed near
the box, and she would not open it under any circumstances.
Villagers had their theories about where the girl had come from,
of course, and what she was carting around in that box.
One possibility was that she was a queen from a
far away land who had been unfaithful to her husband.

(02:21):
Her lover had been executed for his misdeeds. The young
woman was exiled from her country, set afloat in the
wooden vessel with enough food to last for a few days.
Whatever happened to her afterward would be left to fate
and the box well. One reason why she might not
have wanted anyone to touch it is that because it
held the head of her lover. Though the box could

(02:42):
also have contained any number of untold objects, like a
that the virus, or a powerful weapon. No one knew
for sure, and no one in the village could communicate
with a girl to find out the truth. All of
these unknowns put the villagers on edge, so to spare
them of a potential threat, they placed her back in
her round vessel, sealed her inside, and then set her
adrift again on the ocean. Today, there are three prominent

(03:07):
versions of this legend. These stories have been passed down
for hundreds of years, but each one varies only slightly
from the other. Sometimes place names are different, or certain
descriptions are changed, but each iteration always has the same
basic characteristics. A young girl, far from her homeland is
found in possession of a box that no one is
meant to open. Scholars have attempted to explain the legend

(03:30):
as a simple folk tale meant to highlight a time
when Japan was isolated from the rest of the world.
There are even ancient stories that could have served as
the basis for this tale. However, the lack of variation
among the three versions tells us a different story of
an encounter with a being from another world. Given the
roundness of the girl's vessel, the strange text written on

(03:50):
its walls, and her unknown language, some people believe that
she was a visitor not from another country, but from
another planet, and a craft she i'ved in was one
of the first recorded cases of a UFO and unidentified
floating object. They say that necessity is the mother of invention.

(04:23):
Entrepreneurs and inventors come up with all manner of devices
to make our lives easier. The incandescent light bulb brought
a safe form of light into every home. The steam
engine revolutionized multiple industries, including travel and textiles. Even something
as ubiquitous as paper was once considered a seismic change
in how people communicated. We remember people like Guttenberg and

(04:45):
his printing press, or Marconi and his wireless radio, and
of course Thomas Edison's moving camera. But there's one person
who predates all of them, and he's kind of a
hero to inventors everywhere. Literally, his name was here on
Hero for short, and he wore a variety of hats. Mathematician, engineer,
and professor. He was also a student of the greats

(05:07):
that came before him, taking their teachings and using them
as a springboard for his own work. Hero's interests varied
as widely as his professions. He wrote extensively about topics
like physics and pneumatics, and was among the first to
discuss how animals and machines communicated with each other, known
today as the study of cybernetics. But above all else,

(05:29):
Hero like to experiment using simple technology. From his day,
he would build complex machines to accomplish different tasks. For example,
he developed a kind of steam engine called an aola pile,
which stored water in an enclosure vented on two opposite sides.
When the water was heated, steam would escape through the
vents and spin the enclosure like a rocket engine. This

(05:50):
knowledge led to another engine that used water heated to
pull ropes and open doors. If there was a way
to simplify daily life, Hero searched high and low for it.
One of his devices was a large box with a
slot in the top, a silver coin could be inserted
and would land on a plate inside the box. The
weight of a coin on the plate tripped a lever
that would open a valve and allow holy water to

(06:12):
flow from a small spout inside. As the plate continued
to tilt, the coin would slide off and the plate
would rise up and turn off the lever, closing the valve.
With his box, Hero had invented the first vending machine.
There was also an organ which utilized a large wheel
of paddles that spun as they caught the wind. The

(06:33):
wheel would share in a pump that forced air through
the organs pipes to create music. Hero had been the
first person in history to harness the power of the wind.
He brought his ingenuity to the theater, too, where he
incorporated advanced mechanics to create an automated puppet show. Sand
would flow from one central chamber through holes into different
weights that pulled levers and turned wheels attached to the

(06:55):
puppets on stage. They'd move and perform for the audience
for up to ten minut it's at a time. But
Hero didn't stop there. His creations benefited the public in
ways beyond entertainment and vending machines. He developed a fire engine.
It's attached pump used compressed air to shoot streams of water.
There was also an endless cup of wine, a goblet

(07:17):
attached to a reservoir of wine that automatically refilled as
the person drank from it. And unlike inventors who patented
their creations to make money, Hero made all of the
instructions for building his inventions public. Over a dozen volumes
on topics ranging from pneumatics to mechanical engineering to automata
were published. The principles behind his inventions are still used

(07:40):
today in their modern counterparts. Jet engines, vending machines that
dispense candy, bars and soda, and big red fire trucks
can all trace their origins to this one man and
his amazing mind. Perhaps even more amazing, though, was that
Hero didn't develop any of these things during the twenty century,
or the nineteenth century, or even the eighteenth century. Hero

(08:02):
lived between ten a d and seventy a d. During
the period when Rome controlled Egypt. He also taught at
the Great Library of Alexandria, home to tens of thousands
of texts from cultures all over the world before fires
and war reduced it to rubble. Here On of Alexandria
was a man way ahead of his time, though he'd

(08:22):
laid the groundwork for devices that made our lives easier
and faster. Today, very few know his name, making him
truly an unsung hero. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided
tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on
Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting

(08:44):
Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me
Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make
another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News

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