Landing Gear

Human inventions aren't always as helpful as we would believe them to be, as today's tour through the Cabinet will show.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky'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

(00:27):
of Curiosities. When actors performed together, they become like family.
Spending hours a day for months on set together tends
to bring them closer many experiences they have or shared,
which turn into stories told in interviews and memoirs if

(00:50):
they get to live that long, that is. John Wayne
was known as a tough guy, the king of the
Western who starred in films like Red River, The Searchers,
and True Grit. Throughout his career, he battled outlaws, Nazis,
and Vietnamese soldiers. Off camera, he battled something much worse.
It started in nineteen sixty four with a lung cancer

(01:11):
diagnosis that required his left lung to be removed. Wayne
was known for smoking five packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day,
so it wasn't exactly a surprise when he got the news.
A little over a decade later, though, Wayne contracted stomach
cancer and died a short while later. Another actor of
the time, Susan Hayward, had made a name for herself,

(01:31):
starring in films alongside legendary performers like Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergmann,
and Gregory Peck. She won numerous awards and had a
very successful career spanning over three decades. In March of
nineteen seventy two, Hayward visited her doctor, where it was
discovered that she had a tumor in her lung. One
year later, she suffered a seizure which revealed the terminal

(01:52):
diagnosis of brain cancer. She died in nineteen seventy five
at only fifty seven years old. In fact, a num
ber of actors, directors, and Hollywood crew members died of
cancer between nineteen sixty and nineteen eighty. Agnes moorehead of
Bewitched fame, passed away at seventy three years old in
April of nineteen seventy four. She had been diagnosed with

(02:13):
uterine cancer. Actor and director Dick Powell died in nineteen
sixty three after battling aggressive form of cancer that had
developed in his neck and chest. He was only fifty eight,
and these weren't random occurrences either. Every person on this
list was connected by one individual. Howard Hughes uses keen
business sense had earned him an incredible wealth, but his

(02:35):
true passion was filmmaking. His early films were flops, yet
he always looked for waste to outdo himself in movies
like Hell's Angels, which used real airplanes and pilots for
the dog fight scenes. In the nineteen fifties, Hughes made
another big budget picture. It was set in thirteenth century
Asia at a time of great unrest. Genghis Khan, the

(02:56):
violent chief of the Mongolian army, had fallen in love
with the daughter of a riot a leader, which would
spark a great war between two sides. It was called
The Conqueror, and Hughes decided to film it at one
area of the midwestern United States. He shot much of
the film in St. George, Utah, using its canyons and
deserts to stand in for the Asian landscape. Hughes spent

(03:17):
weeks there with his cast and crew, even going so
far as to dig up sixty tons of soil from
the filming location to send back to Hollywood. He wanted
things to look as close as possible when it came
time to do reshoots. Except Hughes didn't direct this film
the way he had others. He was merely a producer.
He hired Dick Powell to direct for him instead. For
his leading lady, he cast Susan Hayward, and alongside her

(03:40):
Agnes Moorehead Genghis Khan was played by none other than
John Wayne himself. But unlike other Hollywood tragedies, their deaths
were not due to a curse or a strange coincidence.
You see, Howard Hughes had made a grave mistake when
scouting for locations. St. George, Utah, was only one thirty
seven miles downwind of the Neve at a national security site,

(04:02):
a nuclear testing area used heavily. During nineteen three, a
few years before filming started, eleven nuclear weapons were detonated
at that site. The fallout traveled all the way to St. George,
where it sat for years. Out of the two d
and twenty people Hughes had hired to work on the
film eventually contracted some type of cancer. Of them, forty

(04:24):
six passed away. Hughes was so upset about what he
had done he spent twelve million dollars, buying up every
copy of the film and storing it in his vault.
Toward the end of his life, when he locked himself
in his home theater and grown his hair and fingernails
two epic proportions. Hughes allegedly watched only two films the
entire time I stationed Zebra and the Conqueror. For most

(04:49):
of the people involved, the real conqueror of the film
wasn't John Wayne's grossly miscast Genghis Khan. It was an
invisible threat, more deadly and more fearsome than they could
ever I've imagined one that didn't go away when the
director yelled cut. Ask any child what superpower they'd love

(05:20):
to have, and most will probably give you the same answer.
Flight to soar above the trees and then come to
a safe landing is the dream of comic book fans
and aspiring heroes everywhere. One man also had that dream,
and he came very close to achieving it, And even
though he didn't quite succeed, he certainly left his mark

(05:40):
on this world. France was born in Austria but spent
most of his life in Paris, France. He was a tailor,
by trade and opened a successful dressmaking shop in the city.
He spent over a decade catering to wealthy tourists from
his homeland, watching the world change around him. Over in
the at It states, something miraculous was happening. Franz wanted

(06:03):
to be a part of it too. Some years earlier,
two brothers had taken their motorized airplane on its first
successful flight in North Carolina. From that point forward, Man's
goal would be to fly higher and farther than he
ever had before. Unfortunately, the dawn of the aviation age
also brought with it numerous accidents and fatalities. The parachutes
that had been developed worked only under specific circumstances. No

(06:27):
one had built one that could be deployed after the
person had already jumped out of the plane, especially at
lower altitudes. But France had an idea. Rather than a
big balloon light canopy that opened overhead, he would make
a suit. It would have an ample amount of silk
fabrics sewn around the person, like a kind of webbing.
As the pilot leapt from a tall enough height, the

(06:48):
wind would catch within the fabric and allow the pilot
to glide safely to Earth, so France got to work
on a prototype, testing it on dummies by tying the
one five pound massive silk around and then launching them
from the fifth floor of his apartment building. In his
initial experiments, his homemade parachutes worked well, floating the dummies

(07:08):
softly to the ground. He then took his design to
the local Aero Club, a precursor to a regulated commercial
flight organization. If France's parachute suit didn't pass their sniff test,
it wouldn't be allowed in any airplane. Sadly, they told
him it wasn't strong enough to support a full grown
adult and encouraged him to go back to what he
did best, making dresses. Undeterred, France continued to work on

(07:32):
his suit by strengthening the canopy and conducting more tests
with his dummies, but none of those tests proved fruitful.
His big chance to prove himself would come the following year,
when the Aero Club would announce a competition to develop
a workable parachute for pilots. The only rule they had
was that it had to be light, no more than
fifty five pounds, so France went back to work. He

(07:54):
cut much of the weight of his original design while
stretching it out to be wider, thus collecting more air
on the way down. It still didn't work, though, whenever
he launched a dummy into his building's courtyard, it would
plummet to the ground with a thud. He even tried
testing it himself, jumping from a height of ten feet
into a pile of straw below. Good thing he'd placed

(08:14):
the straw there too, as his parachute suit was of
no use. Afterward, he thought maybe the problem was that
he hadn't climbed high enough for the parachute to expand.
He took a few dummies to the first level of
the Eiffel Tower and gave them a push, but it
still wasn't good enough. In order to test the viability
of his invention, he would have to test it from

(08:34):
the top of the tower. He received permission from Paris
authorities in late nineteen eleven, and by February of nineteen
twelve he was finally ready. He showed up at the
tower on the morning of February four with his suit,
which looked very much like mechanics overalls with a large
hump on the back. It was much cleaner than his
original design and weighed only twenty pounds, well within the

(08:57):
competition's guidelines. Cinematographers had also come to film the attempt.
One remained on the ground, while another followed France up
to the top of the tower. In the film, it's
clear that the inventor is hesitant as he wavers at
the edge, debating his decision. In the end, though, he
chose to pour every ounce of faith into his parachute,

(09:17):
much to the surprise of French police, who had no
idea that he would be performing the jump himself. They
had only authorized the test on the grounds that he
would be using dummies, and perhaps he should have. France
Raquelt jumped off the top of the Eiffel Tower and
extended his arms. His parachute, though didn't work the way
he had expected, rather than open up behind him, wrapped

(09:40):
itself around his body as he plummeted to the earth below.
He was declared dead at the scene, and ever since
his story has served as a cautionary tale for other
amateur inventors, reminding them to test their creations thoroughly and
not to fly too close to the sun. I hope

(10:02):
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 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

(10:24):
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.