April 21, 2020 • 11 mins
Humans can be inventive creatures, and some of those moments of triumph can be fantastic additions to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. 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
(00:28):
of Curiosities. It's not often that art imitates life. In
his essay The Decay of lyne Oscar Wild penned the
phrase life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
(00:48):
To Wild, art had the power to alter our view
of the world around us. Even our choices and behavior
can be informed intentionally or not by the art we consume.
For example, when a criminal is placed under house arrest
and is forced to wear an ankle monitor, they can
thank Spider Man. A judge in New Mexico got the
idea while reading a Spider Man comic strip in nineteen
(01:10):
seventy seven. He noticed the wall Crawler was wearing a
tracking beacon on his arm thanks to one of his enemies.
The judge took the idea to an engineer who helped
develop the first ankle monitor for law enforcement. The British
version of the show House of Cards, as well as
the novel that inspired it, took place in a world
after Margaret Thatcher had resigned from office. The novel was
(01:31):
released in nineteen eighty nine, while Thatcher was still in power.
The television show came out a year later, and Thatcher
herself resigned as Prime Minister only months after that. Some
think it struck a bit too close to home. Alexander's
story was different. He was born in Scotland in sixteen
seventy six, and from a young age he liked to fight.
(01:53):
He got in trouble with the Church on several occasions
for misbehaving. But more than fighting, Alexander had a passion
for the open sea. By seventeen o three, he had
already put in quite a bit of time on board
various ships, so when he met William damp Here, an
explorer headed to the South Pacific, Alexander joined him. His
job was to serve as the sailing master on board
(02:13):
the sinc Ports, its sister ship, which was being led
by Captain Thomas Stradling. They sailed for months, navigating through
storms and battling other ships for their supplies. One particular
fight left the sinc Ports badly damaged. Strand Ling no
longer wanted to follow damp here and insisted that they
sailed south to an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile.
(02:35):
Once off the ship, Alexander assessed the damage. It was
so extensive that he didn't trust it to get them
safely home without some repairs first, but Straddling wouldn't have it,
so rather than risk his life on a broken ship,
Alexander stayed behind on the island. He took some supplies
with him, though, including a musket, a knife, a hatchet,
cooking pot, a bible, some blankets, and the clothes on
(02:59):
his back. At first, he'd tried to live on the shore,
fishing for his food and keeping an eye out for
passing ships who might save him. But it wasn't until
he moved inland when he realized what he'd been missing.
There were goats there for him to eat, and milk
left behind by previous visitors, as well as countless fruits
and vegetables growing under foot. Alexander turned out to be
(03:20):
surprisingly skilled at solo island life. Rather than build a
ramshackle home for himself out of twigs and leaves, he
constructed two huts using pepper trees. One became his kitchen
where he prepared all of his meals and he slept
inside the other one. He also made his own clothes
out of goat hides, which he's handed himself. When the
rat situation got out of control, he tamed wild cats
(03:42):
to chase them and keep them away from his home.
For four years, Alexander lived on an island by himself.
He did much more than survive, though. He hunted for
his own food, made his own clothing, and forged his
own weapons. In early February of seventeen o nine, his
salvation finally arrived i'd in the form of the Duke,
a ship captain by none other than William Dampier. Apparently
(04:04):
Alexander had made the smart choice by not getting back
on the sinc Ports, because not long after leaving him
on the island, it sank. Straddling and his remaining crew
had surrendered to Spanish troops passing by, and ended up
becoming imprisoned for years. Alexander, though, was finally rescued upon
his return to the civilized world. The story of how
(04:25):
he survived on an island alone for four years took
England by storm. One of the crew members that had
worked with him even wrote a book about their travels together.
In its he included a section about Alexander's isolation and
in a clear example of art imitating life. Another book
was written about a decade later, in seventeen nineteen. It
was about a man clad in tanned goat skins trying
(04:47):
to survive on a deserted island all on his own,
and its author had been inspired by Alexander Selkirk's Tale
of Survival. The book Daniel Dafoe's classic, The Life and
Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The biggest dreams often start
(05:17):
as a series of small goals. Swimming laps in the
community pool can eventually turn into an Olympic gold medal.
A piano recital can one day become a sold out
performance at Carnegie Hall, And for David Han of Royal Oak, Michigan,
a simple love of science turned into the scariest day
of his life. David was born in nineteen seventy six
to an average middle class family and lived an average
(05:40):
middle class life. It wasn't until his grandfather gave him
a book on chemistry experiments when his life changed course.
From then on, he devoted every waking hour to science.
He devoured any science related book he could get his
hands on, including his father's college textbooks. As he got older,
his taste matured with him. He built himself a laboratory
(06:00):
and started stocking his shelves with books on handling hazardous materials.
It didn't take him long to develop a recipe for nitroglycerin.
From there, he started thinking bigger. David took various jobs
at fast food restaurants and grocery stores to help fund
his work, but none of them really stuck. His primary
focus was whatever was blowing up in his lab, quite literally.
(06:22):
For example, one time he showed up to a meeting
bright eyed and orange faced. He'd been trying out different
forms of artificial tanning using a natural pigment, but it
had unfortunately exploded in his face. He also almost blinded
himself after pounding red phosphorus with a screwdriver. It ignited
and blew up, causing shards of the plastic container that
(06:43):
he'd been keeping it in to embed themselves in his eye.
It took months of regular sessions with an opthalmologist before
all the pieces were removed, But these experiments were just
the tip of the iceberg. David had a much larger
plan to build his own breeder reactor. A breeder reactor
used a fertile material like uranium to thirty eight to
(07:03):
create nuclear fuel. It was not something an average citizen
should have been able to build, but there was nothing
average about David. He lacked the resources of a government
funded nuclear program, but he was resourceful. By posing as
a high school physics teacher, he sent letters to every
scientific organization he could find who might have information on
creating nuclear material. They sent him books, pamphlets, and detailed
(07:27):
outlines on how to isolate radioactive elements. They also sent
him a list of places where he could buy those
elements himself. One easily obtainable substance was amrassium to forty one,
which was readily available in all smoke detectors. He contacted
a supplier who sold him a hundred broken units for
a dollar each, no questions asked. He also managed to
(07:49):
find radium to twenty six in antique clocks and thorium
to thirty two in gas powered lanterns. After welding all
of the amrassium from the smoke detectors together, with a
blow torch. He dropped the whole thing into a hollowed
out lead block and poked a hole in the side
to let the alpha rays out. Then he slid a
piece of aluminum in front of the hole to absorb
the alpha rays and emit neutrons. David had built himself
(08:12):
his own neutron gun. However, he still needed uranium to
complete his reactor. A company informer Czechoslovakia that was known
to sell to colleges sold him black or with uranium
traces in it after David wrote them a letter pretending
to be a professor with a nuclear laboratory. He purified
his materials by pounding them with hammers and passing them
through coffee filters, then blasted them with his neutron gun.
(08:36):
By the time he was finished, he had created fissionable
uranium two thirty three, which he combined with the radium
he'd scraped off the antique clocks. Before he knew it,
his labs started to glow for weeks. He watched as
the concoctions got stronger and more potent. He tried to
offset the radiation with cobalt, which was supposed to absorb
the neutrons, but it wasn't enough. At a certain point,
(08:57):
his Geiger counter could detect the radiation come from his
lab up to two hundred feet away. David quickly realized
he'd gone too far. He dismantled his reactor and separated
the components into different boxes, but it was too late.
Someone had tipped off the police. In the early morning
hours of August thirty one, authorities searched his car and
(09:18):
discovered a bunch of random metals, as well as a
lock toolbox wrapped in duct tape. David told them what
it was. Within hours, the Michigan Police were on the
phone with every federal organization that dealt with radioactive materials,
including the E p A and the Department of Energy.
Around Thanksgiving of that year, his makeshift lab was rated
to make sure all other irradiated substances were properly removed
(09:41):
and disposed of. Months later, a cleanup finished the job
by cutting up his lab and placing the pieces into barrels.
The barrels were then carted off to the desert, where
they were buried with radioactive materials from other facilities. David's
poor mother suffered the most out of the whole ordeal.
Not only had her son nearly turned their town into
a radioactive waste land. She had also lost her potting shed.
(10:04):
That's what David had used as his lab. His breeder
reactor hadn't been the failed experiment of a seasoned scientist.
It had been a misguided attempt by an eager seventeen
year old. All David Han had wanted was to earn
his Atomic Energy Merit badge and eventually make Eagle Scouts,
which thankfully he did. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided
(10:28):
tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on
Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting
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
(10:50):
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious, Ye
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. 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
(00:28):
of Curiosities. It's not often that art imitates life. In
his essay The Decay of lyne Oscar Wild penned the
phrase life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
(00:48):
To Wild, art had the power to alter our view
of the world around us. Even our choices and behavior
can be informed intentionally or not by the art we consume.
For example, when a criminal is placed under house arrest
and is forced to wear an ankle monitor, they can
thank Spider Man. A judge in New Mexico got the
idea while reading a Spider Man comic strip in nineteen
(01:10):
seventy seven. He noticed the wall Crawler was wearing a
tracking beacon on his arm thanks to one of his enemies.
The judge took the idea to an engineer who helped
develop the first ankle monitor for law enforcement. The British
version of the show House of Cards, as well as
the novel that inspired it, took place in a world
after Margaret Thatcher had resigned from office. The novel was
(01:31):
released in nineteen eighty nine, while Thatcher was still in power.
The television show came out a year later, and Thatcher
herself resigned as Prime Minister only months after that. Some
think it struck a bit too close to home. Alexander's
story was different. He was born in Scotland in sixteen
seventy six, and from a young age he liked to fight.
(01:53):
He got in trouble with the Church on several occasions
for misbehaving. But more than fighting, Alexander had a passion
for the open sea. By seventeen o three, he had
already put in quite a bit of time on board
various ships, so when he met William damp Here, an
explorer headed to the South Pacific, Alexander joined him. His
job was to serve as the sailing master on board
(02:13):
the sinc Ports, its sister ship, which was being led
by Captain Thomas Stradling. They sailed for months, navigating through
storms and battling other ships for their supplies. One particular
fight left the sinc Ports badly damaged. Strand Ling no
longer wanted to follow damp here and insisted that they
sailed south to an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile.
(02:35):
Once off the ship, Alexander assessed the damage. It was
so extensive that he didn't trust it to get them
safely home without some repairs first, but Straddling wouldn't have it,
so rather than risk his life on a broken ship,
Alexander stayed behind on the island. He took some supplies
with him, though, including a musket, a knife, a hatchet,
cooking pot, a bible, some blankets, and the clothes on
(02:59):
his back. At first, he'd tried to live on the shore,
fishing for his food and keeping an eye out for
passing ships who might save him. But it wasn't until
he moved inland when he realized what he'd been missing.
There were goats there for him to eat, and milk
left behind by previous visitors, as well as countless fruits
and vegetables growing under foot. Alexander turned out to be
(03:20):
surprisingly skilled at solo island life. Rather than build a
ramshackle home for himself out of twigs and leaves, he
constructed two huts using pepper trees. One became his kitchen
where he prepared all of his meals and he slept
inside the other one. He also made his own clothes
out of goat hides, which he's handed himself. When the
rat situation got out of control, he tamed wild cats
(03:42):
to chase them and keep them away from his home.
For four years, Alexander lived on an island by himself.
He did much more than survive, though. He hunted for
his own food, made his own clothing, and forged his
own weapons. In early February of seventeen o nine, his
salvation finally arrived i'd in the form of the Duke,
a ship captain by none other than William Dampier. Apparently
(04:04):
Alexander had made the smart choice by not getting back
on the sinc Ports, because not long after leaving him
on the island, it sank. Straddling and his remaining crew
had surrendered to Spanish troops passing by, and ended up
becoming imprisoned for years. Alexander, though, was finally rescued upon
his return to the civilized world. The story of how
(04:25):
he survived on an island alone for four years took
England by storm. One of the crew members that had
worked with him even wrote a book about their travels together.
In its he included a section about Alexander's isolation and
in a clear example of art imitating life. Another book
was written about a decade later, in seventeen nineteen. It
was about a man clad in tanned goat skins trying
(04:47):
to survive on a deserted island all on his own,
and its author had been inspired by Alexander Selkirk's Tale
of Survival. The book Daniel Dafoe's classic, The Life and
Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The biggest dreams often start
(05:17):
as a series of small goals. Swimming laps in the
community pool can eventually turn into an Olympic gold medal.
A piano recital can one day become a sold out
performance at Carnegie Hall, And for David Han of Royal Oak, Michigan,
a simple love of science turned into the scariest day
of his life. David was born in nineteen seventy six
to an average middle class family and lived an average
(05:40):
middle class life. It wasn't until his grandfather gave him
a book on chemistry experiments when his life changed course.
From then on, he devoted every waking hour to science.
He devoured any science related book he could get his
hands on, including his father's college textbooks. As he got older,
his taste matured with him. He built himself a laboratory
(06:00):
and started stocking his shelves with books on handling hazardous materials.
It didn't take him long to develop a recipe for nitroglycerin.
From there, he started thinking bigger. David took various jobs
at fast food restaurants and grocery stores to help fund
his work, but none of them really stuck. His primary
focus was whatever was blowing up in his lab, quite literally.
(06:22):
For example, one time he showed up to a meeting
bright eyed and orange faced. He'd been trying out different
forms of artificial tanning using a natural pigment, but it
had unfortunately exploded in his face. He also almost blinded
himself after pounding red phosphorus with a screwdriver. It ignited
and blew up, causing shards of the plastic container that
(06:43):
he'd been keeping it in to embed themselves in his eye.
It took months of regular sessions with an opthalmologist before
all the pieces were removed, But these experiments were just
the tip of the iceberg. David had a much larger
plan to build his own breeder reactor. A breeder reactor
used a fertile material like uranium to thirty eight to
(07:03):
create nuclear fuel. It was not something an average citizen
should have been able to build, but there was nothing
average about David. He lacked the resources of a government
funded nuclear program, but he was resourceful. By posing as
a high school physics teacher, he sent letters to every
scientific organization he could find who might have information on
creating nuclear material. They sent him books, pamphlets, and detailed
(07:27):
outlines on how to isolate radioactive elements. They also sent
him a list of places where he could buy those
elements himself. One easily obtainable substance was amrassium to forty one,
which was readily available in all smoke detectors. He contacted
a supplier who sold him a hundred broken units for
a dollar each, no questions asked. He also managed to
(07:49):
find radium to twenty six in antique clocks and thorium
to thirty two in gas powered lanterns. After welding all
of the amrassium from the smoke detectors together, with a
blow torch. He dropped the whole thing into a hollowed
out lead block and poked a hole in the side
to let the alpha rays out. Then he slid a
piece of aluminum in front of the hole to absorb
the alpha rays and emit neutrons. David had built himself
(08:12):
his own neutron gun. However, he still needed uranium to
complete his reactor. A company informer Czechoslovakia that was known
to sell to colleges sold him black or with uranium
traces in it after David wrote them a letter pretending
to be a professor with a nuclear laboratory. He purified
his materials by pounding them with hammers and passing them
through coffee filters, then blasted them with his neutron gun.
(08:36):
By the time he was finished, he had created fissionable
uranium two thirty three, which he combined with the radium
he'd scraped off the antique clocks. Before he knew it,
his labs started to glow for weeks. He watched as
the concoctions got stronger and more potent. He tried to
offset the radiation with cobalt, which was supposed to absorb
the neutrons, but it wasn't enough. At a certain point,
(08:57):
his Geiger counter could detect the radiation come from his
lab up to two hundred feet away. David quickly realized
he'd gone too far. He dismantled his reactor and separated
the components into different boxes, but it was too late.
Someone had tipped off the police. In the early morning
hours of August thirty one, authorities searched his car and
(09:18):
discovered a bunch of random metals, as well as a
lock toolbox wrapped in duct tape. David told them what
it was. Within hours, the Michigan Police were on the
phone with every federal organization that dealt with radioactive materials,
including the E p A and the Department of Energy.
Around Thanksgiving of that year, his makeshift lab was rated
to make sure all other irradiated substances were properly removed
(09:41):
and disposed of. Months later, a cleanup finished the job
by cutting up his lab and placing the pieces into barrels.
The barrels were then carted off to the desert, where
they were buried with radioactive materials from other facilities. David's
poor mother suffered the most out of the whole ordeal.
Not only had her son nearly turned their town into
a radioactive waste land. She had also lost her potting shed.
(10:04):
That's what David had used as his lab. His breeder
reactor hadn't been the failed experiment of a seasoned scientist.
It had been a misguided attempt by an eager seventeen
year old. All David Han had wanted was to earn
his Atomic Energy Merit badge and eventually make Eagle Scouts,
which thankfully he did. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided
(10:28):
tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on
Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting
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
(10:50):
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious, Ye
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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