December 24, 2020 • 9 mins
Two things we take for granted. Two amazing stories. Naturally, both belong in the Cabinet of Curiosities.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manky'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. Everyone needs to unwind after a long week
at the office, dealing with constant demands of emails, meetings,
and phone calls. It's nice to take a little time
to kick off one's shoes, lean back, and enjoy some
(00:48):
peace and quiet. Now the way we relax is up
to personal preference. Where one person might play video games
well into the night. Someone else may pour themselves a
cup of tea or scotch and curl up with a
good book. Still, others unwind by engaging their brains by
attending trivia nights, or playing card games, or perhaps honing
their mental acuity with a puzzle. Those were the people
(01:11):
Arthur was interested in. Born in England in eighteen seventy one,
Arthur seemed destined to work for a newspaper. After all,
his father had been the editor of the Liverpool Mercury
for many years. In when Arthur was twenty years old,
he came to the United States looking to establish a
name for himself. He found his place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
and while his father may have been the editor of
(01:32):
a local paper back home, Arthur would have to work
his own way up at the much larger Pittsburgh Press.
There's was not a modest operation. In fact, it only
lagged behind the Philadelphia inquir the most popular newspaper in
Pennsylvania at the time. The Press served as the perfect
springboard for Arthur's rise to fame. By thirteen, he had
(01:52):
moved on from Pennsylvania to Cedar Grove, New Jersey, where
he took a job at another newspaper called The New
York World. Now The World was owned by the Pulitzer family,
and they were in need of material for their Fun section,
an area of the paper where puzzles and games were
often published to keep readers entertained. Arthur, though, didn't want
to repurpose something someone else had made. He knew of
(02:13):
all kinds of puzzles that would have worked within the
World's pages, but rather than limit himself to a common
brain teaser that might have been found in a children's
activity book, Arthur created his own, and he designed it
with adults in mind. He borrowed an idea from the
word square, a puzzle in which letters of random words
were arranged in a square shape so that they were
read the same horizontally and vertically. Except instead of a square,
(02:37):
Arthur laid out small boxes into a diamond shape, with
the word fun already filled in across the top three squares.
The rest of the boxes had small numbers printed in
their corners and a list of clues underneath. It was
the reader's job to read each clue and fill in
the corus boding answer and the puzzle, with each letter
occupying a single square. His creation became an overnight sensation.
(03:00):
Within a few years, his unique word puzzles were being
adapted and printed in newspapers all over the country, including
Arthur's old stomping grounds, the Pittsburgh Press. Of course, as
the puzzles continued to gain popularity, newspapers started altering the
original design. That first diamond shape went through a number
of iterations until it became standardized into the now common
(03:21):
square shaped layout. In order to separate the clues and
make the answers more readable black boxes were also added.
Puzzle addicts were solving them everywhere, on subway trains, in cafes,
and on park benches. The New York Public Library found
itself policing the use of its dictionaries as the children
who needed to use them were being turned away by
fervent puzzle solvers. And as with all popular pastimes, Everyone's
(03:46):
latest obsession also attracted its fair share of critics. One
writer for The New York Times called it a primitive
form of mental exercise, which is pretty funny considering that
today The New York Times is home to one of
the most popular and wide be solved puzzles in the world.
Published every Monday through Saturday, there's measures and even fifteen
by fifteen squares. However, on Sunday it balloons to an
(04:09):
impressive squares because when something is popular, people just want more.
Arthur Wins silly game took the world by storm. Originally
called a word cross, the element of its name got rearranged,
much like the squares on the page, into something more
timeless and classic, the crossword puzzle. When it comes to
(04:42):
notable events in American history, New Jersey tends to stand
out above the rest it was the location of more
revolutionary war battles than any other colony. The boardwalk in
Atlantic City was not only the first one ever built,
it was also the longest in the world, and founding father,
Alexander Hamilton's was famously killed in a duel there by
Aaron Burr in eighteen o four. Speaking of Hamilton's, he
(05:04):
had great plans for New Jersey. He believed that the
town of Paterson was destined to become the start of
a new revolution, and it was Hamilton's insisted the United
States needed to focus on industry. The rest of the
world was moving ahead and the new nation he'd helped
create was at risk of falling behind. Patterson became the
first planned industrial city in the country, and though its
(05:25):
future was hampered by events like the Great Depression and
the end of World War Two, it's intended greatness rippled
out to other parts of the state, namely nearby Hawthorne,
New Jersey. In nineteen fifty seven, two engineers from Hawthorne,
American Alfred Fielding and Swiss chemist Mark Chavon were working
to disrupt an industry they thought had fallen pretty flat. Literally,
(05:46):
they wanted to create a new kind of wallpaper, specifically
one that was three dimensional. Among their many attempts, one
involved two shower curtains, which they adhered together with a
heat ceiling machine. Their plan hit a snag, though, when
they found air bubbles trapped between the curtains. Yet, even
though it wasn't what they had anticipated, Fielding and Chavon
had achieved their goal a wholly unique kind of wallpaper.
(06:08):
It's puffy texture was different from the boring and flat
two dimensional wallpapers people were already familiar with, so they
pressed forward, but it didn't catch on. Customers couldn't see
the benefit of having padded walls in their homes. Even
the beat Nicks they were targeting with their hip new
invention didn't want it. Fielding and Chavon didn't quit, though
they piloted their air filled shower curtains to another industry,
(06:32):
building installation, specifically for greenhouses. Sadly, horticulturalists didn't care much
for it either. While it did provide some benefit to
greenhouse owners, it wasn't enough to justify the cost. It
seemed nobody wanted to install this new breed of covering
on their walls, regardless of whether they were made of
plaster or glass. It wasn't until three years later, when
(06:53):
Frederick W. Bowers got ahold of it, that things started
to turn around. Bowers was a marketing whiz, and he
saw a burgeoning opportunity for Fielding and Chavon in the
technology space. It was October of nineteen fifty nine and
IBM was getting ready to launch their new fourteen oh
one data processing system, comprised of three components, a card
read punch about the size of a bedroom dresser, the
(07:15):
processing unit, which looked a lot like a squat refrigerator,
and the massive printer. Together these pieces cost a month
to rent roughly two dollars today. They required large trucks
to transport them, and Bowers believe the puffy wallpaper that
he was selling would be perfect for making sure the
fourteen oh ones got to their destination safely and securely.
(07:38):
IBM thought so too. After a brief demonstration, they contracted
Bowers Company to wrap their new computers in it before
rolling them out the door and onto the new trucks.
The original design for Fielding and chavan was tweaked to
include more air pockets for better protection, and Alfred Fielding's
five year old son also seemed to like it. One day,
while playing with a sheet of the stuff, the little
(07:59):
boy popped one of the pockets in his hands. It
went off with a bang. He didn't cry, though. He
reached for another one and popped it, and then another,
and then another. The IBM deal was the beginning. The
discovery that had failed to fulfill its first and second
intended purposes, had found new life as an ideal packaging material.
It was a rousing triumph and one more feather in
(08:21):
New Jersey's prolific cap of successful inventions. Today, Bowers Company
Sealed Air sells about half a billion dollars worth of
the would be wallpaper each year under its more popular
name bubble Rap. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(08:43):
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 about it
over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
(09:04):
next time, stay curious. Yeah h
Welcome to Aaron Manky'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. Everyone needs to unwind after a long week
at the office, dealing with constant demands of emails, meetings,
and phone calls. It's nice to take a little time
to kick off one's shoes, lean back, and enjoy some
(00:48):
peace and quiet. Now the way we relax is up
to personal preference. Where one person might play video games
well into the night. Someone else may pour themselves a
cup of tea or scotch and curl up with a
good book. Still, others unwind by engaging their brains by
attending trivia nights, or playing card games, or perhaps honing
their mental acuity with a puzzle. Those were the people
(01:11):
Arthur was interested in. Born in England in eighteen seventy one,
Arthur seemed destined to work for a newspaper. After all,
his father had been the editor of the Liverpool Mercury
for many years. In when Arthur was twenty years old,
he came to the United States looking to establish a
name for himself. He found his place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
and while his father may have been the editor of
(01:32):
a local paper back home, Arthur would have to work
his own way up at the much larger Pittsburgh Press.
There's was not a modest operation. In fact, it only
lagged behind the Philadelphia inquir the most popular newspaper in
Pennsylvania at the time. The Press served as the perfect
springboard for Arthur's rise to fame. By thirteen, he had
(01:52):
moved on from Pennsylvania to Cedar Grove, New Jersey, where
he took a job at another newspaper called The New
York World. Now The World was owned by the Pulitzer family,
and they were in need of material for their Fun section,
an area of the paper where puzzles and games were
often published to keep readers entertained. Arthur, though, didn't want
to repurpose something someone else had made. He knew of
(02:13):
all kinds of puzzles that would have worked within the
World's pages, but rather than limit himself to a common
brain teaser that might have been found in a children's
activity book, Arthur created his own, and he designed it
with adults in mind. He borrowed an idea from the
word square, a puzzle in which letters of random words
were arranged in a square shape so that they were
read the same horizontally and vertically. Except instead of a square,
(02:37):
Arthur laid out small boxes into a diamond shape, with
the word fun already filled in across the top three squares.
The rest of the boxes had small numbers printed in
their corners and a list of clues underneath. It was
the reader's job to read each clue and fill in
the corus boding answer and the puzzle, with each letter
occupying a single square. His creation became an overnight sensation.
(03:00):
Within a few years, his unique word puzzles were being
adapted and printed in newspapers all over the country, including
Arthur's old stomping grounds, the Pittsburgh Press. Of course, as
the puzzles continued to gain popularity, newspapers started altering the
original design. That first diamond shape went through a number
of iterations until it became standardized into the now common
(03:21):
square shaped layout. In order to separate the clues and
make the answers more readable black boxes were also added.
Puzzle addicts were solving them everywhere, on subway trains, in cafes,
and on park benches. The New York Public Library found
itself policing the use of its dictionaries as the children
who needed to use them were being turned away by
fervent puzzle solvers. And as with all popular pastimes, Everyone's
(03:46):
latest obsession also attracted its fair share of critics. One
writer for The New York Times called it a primitive
form of mental exercise, which is pretty funny considering that
today The New York Times is home to one of
the most popular and wide be solved puzzles in the world.
Published every Monday through Saturday, there's measures and even fifteen
by fifteen squares. However, on Sunday it balloons to an
(04:09):
impressive squares because when something is popular, people just want more.
Arthur Wins silly game took the world by storm. Originally
called a word cross, the element of its name got rearranged,
much like the squares on the page, into something more
timeless and classic, the crossword puzzle. When it comes to
(04:42):
notable events in American history, New Jersey tends to stand
out above the rest it was the location of more
revolutionary war battles than any other colony. The boardwalk in
Atlantic City was not only the first one ever built,
it was also the longest in the world, and founding father,
Alexander Hamilton's was famously killed in a duel there by
Aaron Burr in eighteen o four. Speaking of Hamilton's, he
(05:04):
had great plans for New Jersey. He believed that the
town of Paterson was destined to become the start of
a new revolution, and it was Hamilton's insisted the United
States needed to focus on industry. The rest of the
world was moving ahead and the new nation he'd helped
create was at risk of falling behind. Patterson became the
first planned industrial city in the country, and though its
(05:25):
future was hampered by events like the Great Depression and
the end of World War Two, it's intended greatness rippled
out to other parts of the state, namely nearby Hawthorne,
New Jersey. In nineteen fifty seven, two engineers from Hawthorne,
American Alfred Fielding and Swiss chemist Mark Chavon were working
to disrupt an industry they thought had fallen pretty flat. Literally,
(05:46):
they wanted to create a new kind of wallpaper, specifically
one that was three dimensional. Among their many attempts, one
involved two shower curtains, which they adhered together with a
heat ceiling machine. Their plan hit a snag, though, when
they found air bubbles trapped between the curtains. Yet, even
though it wasn't what they had anticipated, Fielding and Chavon
had achieved their goal a wholly unique kind of wallpaper.
(06:08):
It's puffy texture was different from the boring and flat
two dimensional wallpapers people were already familiar with, so they
pressed forward, but it didn't catch on. Customers couldn't see
the benefit of having padded walls in their homes. Even
the beat Nicks they were targeting with their hip new
invention didn't want it. Fielding and Chavon didn't quit, though
they piloted their air filled shower curtains to another industry,
(06:32):
building installation, specifically for greenhouses. Sadly, horticulturalists didn't care much
for it either. While it did provide some benefit to
greenhouse owners, it wasn't enough to justify the cost. It
seemed nobody wanted to install this new breed of covering
on their walls, regardless of whether they were made of
plaster or glass. It wasn't until three years later, when
(06:53):
Frederick W. Bowers got ahold of it, that things started
to turn around. Bowers was a marketing whiz, and he
saw a burgeoning opportunity for Fielding and Chavon in the
technology space. It was October of nineteen fifty nine and
IBM was getting ready to launch their new fourteen oh
one data processing system, comprised of three components, a card
read punch about the size of a bedroom dresser, the
(07:15):
processing unit, which looked a lot like a squat refrigerator,
and the massive printer. Together these pieces cost a month
to rent roughly two dollars today. They required large trucks
to transport them, and Bowers believe the puffy wallpaper that
he was selling would be perfect for making sure the
fourteen oh ones got to their destination safely and securely.
(07:38):
IBM thought so too. After a brief demonstration, they contracted
Bowers Company to wrap their new computers in it before
rolling them out the door and onto the new trucks.
The original design for Fielding and chavan was tweaked to
include more air pockets for better protection, and Alfred Fielding's
five year old son also seemed to like it. One day,
while playing with a sheet of the stuff, the little
(07:59):
boy popped one of the pockets in his hands. It
went off with a bang. He didn't cry, though. He
reached for another one and popped it, and then another,
and then another. The IBM deal was the beginning. The
discovery that had failed to fulfill its first and second
intended purposes, had found new life as an ideal packaging material.
It was a rousing triumph and one more feather in
(08:21):
New Jersey's prolific cap of successful inventions. Today, Bowers Company
Sealed Air sells about half a billion dollars worth of
the would be wallpaper each year under its more popular
name bubble Rap. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(08:43):
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 about it
over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
(09:04):
next time, stay curious. Yeah h
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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