January 5, 2021 • 10 mins
Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. Either way, the important thing is to leave your mark on the world. Thankfully, both individuals on display today managed to do just that.
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Episode Transcript
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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 right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:37):
We don't often think about the origins of the symbols
we see every day. For example, the amper sand which
we use in place of the conjunction, and is comprised
of the letters in the Latin word at, which translates
to and in English. The AT symbol or the A
with a circle around it in an email addressed today,
was once used by accountants to mean at the rate
(00:58):
of It was invented by monks centuries ago to help
them transcribe books much faster by reducing the number of
pen strokes. However, there are more modern symbols that have
permeated our culture as well. There's the mermaid in the
Starbucks cup, the Nordic letters for H and B that
make up the Bluetooth logo, and another symbol with an
unexpected origin. It all started with a man in Roland,
(01:24):
Roland was born on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in eighty two.
His Quaker family could actually trace their roots back to
one of the nine original English families that came to
Nantucket in the mid seventeenth century, and just as his
forefathers had left England to explore their freedom, so too
did Roland. He set out on a whaling ship called
the Emily Morgan when he was fifteen years old. He
(01:47):
didn't like it much, though. All it took was for
him to get lost at sea one time to turn
him off from whaling for good. When it happened, Roland
followed a single star in the night sky to help
him find shore, and once safe, marked the experience by
getting a tattoo on his arm. With his wailing days
behind him and five dollars of hard earned money in
(02:07):
his pocket, Roland stayed put. He took a job helping
his father operate their famili's needle and thread shop in Boston.
The experience taught him a lot about running a business,
which came in handy after the store went bankrupt in
eighteen forty four. A few years later, Roland opened his
own dry goods shop in Harrol, Massachusetts. It too closed
(02:27):
rather quickly. He made ends meet by working in a
store owned by his brother in law, but decided to
try his luck out west Well he and the thousands
of others chasing the dream of the California gold rush.
It seemed like there was a curse following Roland. Wherever
he went, the stores he'd worked in and owned kept
going belly up, and he didn't turn up any gold
(02:48):
on the West coast either. Discouraged but not defeated, Roland
returned to Massachusetts to join his brother in a new
dry goods store in Haril. Unlike his other ventures, this
shop did well before eventually closing. Like all the others,
Roland's next door, however, opened up more than its doors.
It opened up its eyes. To keep things fresh, he
(03:09):
would travel to Boston and New York every two months
and bring the latest trends and fashions back to his shop,
and soon enough the trips made him realize that he
needed to expand. New York was so different from harl
It was big, it was bustling, and it was growing fast.
Roland moved there in eighteen fifty eight and opened a
new dry goods store on Sixth Avenue and fourteen streets.
(03:32):
This one, however, was different than his previous businesses, as
it featured a unique logo. He wanted something big, something
people could look at as a beacon among all the
other shops on the street, and it worked. Roland Store
continued to grow over the next twenty years. It went
from one employee to fifteen two hundreds. During the holidays,
(03:52):
he started a trend by employing a store Santa Claus,
to draw families inside. He also set up elaborate window
displays with and themed scenes. Roland's shop went from one
storefront to several, gobbling up neighboring properties, until it eventually
outgrew the block in nineteen o two, twenty five years
after his death. In eighteen seventy seven, the new owners
(04:15):
of the store, Brothers Is a Door and Nathan Strauss,
moved the shop to a much larger and visible spot
in Harold Square. Emblazing across the front of the building
was the symbol that had been inked onto Roland's own arm,
a representation of the light that had guided him home
from the sea and all the way to New York City,
a red star, and underneath it the surname of the
(04:37):
man who had built the biggest department store in the world,
a true miracle on thirty four Street. Roland's last name Macy.
(04:58):
John Castle was fury us someone had ripped off his
invention and they were selling their knockoff in the store too.
All his advertising was going to waste. His customers were
buying his invention from someone else, Mr Samuel Boyd. You see,
John Castle was a printer and merchant in London, and
Samuel Boyd well, he was a druggist in Dublin. Somehow
(05:20):
Mr Boyd had gotten John's recipe for a new lamp oil.
After all, John had advertised the oil far and wide.
That was the printer side of his business, and as
creative as he was at inventing new things, it was
his new ideas for printing that were really paying off
for him. He would go on to pioneer the serial novel.
The printed word would take over his life. Maybe that's
(05:42):
because in the early eighteen sixties John would learn a
hard lesson about the power of words. That's when he
started selling his new lamp oil and advertising it in
all the papers he could find. A safe, pleasant, economical,
and most brilliant illuminating agent. He wrote with perfect safety
from day of explosion and free from any objectionable smell.
(06:04):
Sold by dealers throughout the Kingdom. John wanted everyone to
know that his lamp oil was equally suitable for use
in drawing rooms, parlors and cottages. Of course, the process
for refining the new oil wasn't completely John's invention. He
had learned part of it from a French chemist and
acquired a new resource from America Petroleum, also known at
(06:24):
the time as American crude. But if there was something
that John knew well, it was bringing in goods from
far off places and selling them to British buyers. After all,
most of his work as a merchant had been convincing
people to drink coffee and tea instead of liquor. American
crude was only the latest product from the edges of
the British Empire that was going like gangbusters when it
(06:45):
got to London, and once John had put American crude
through the French refining process, it caught on soon. He
had orders flying in from all over Britain and Ireland,
and especially in Ireland, the number of orders was growing
and growing like he had never seen before his previous
tea and coffee business had been good, but never this good.
(07:05):
It seemed that the new lamp oil was going to
keep him afloat until he would later say, those orders
from Ireland fell off to a considerable degree, so fast,
in fact, that it surprised John and made him suspicious too.
So he started asking questions, and that's when he learned
about Samuel Boyd. John learned that, along with a few
(07:25):
other oil merchants, Samuel Boyd had begun selling what John
called a spurious article, but his customers thought they were
buying the original product because Samuel was using the name
that John had invented for the new oil. So Irish
customers had stopped ordering from John and started buying from
Samuel instead. After all, they thought they were getting the
authentic fuel, so why shouldn't they. So John sprang into action.
(07:50):
He wrote a letter to Mr Boyd to set things straight,
stopped selling his lamp oil and using the name that
he invented, But no answer ever arrived. That wasn't going
to stop John. He set sail for Dublin and headed
for Mary Street, where he found the shop of Samuel Boyd.
When he stepped inside, he found exactly what he expected.
He asked a shop assistant for the oil, and they
(08:11):
were only too happy to hand him a bottle. John
looked down and saw that his original name for the
product was printed right there on the label. But there
was something else. Someone had used a pen to turn
the sea on each bottle into a g As if
that solved the branding problem, John Castle wasn't having it.
He took Samuel Boyd to court. What followed would make
(08:32):
any printer and inventor blow his lid. The first thing
Boyd said to the accusations was that he had never
sold any lamp oil with John's name on it. Then
he said that he had ordered labels from a Manchester
printer and they simply got it wrong. And finally Samuel
said that he was the one who had been inspired
by a French invention, a product that he said was
called Gaza jene. It was all preposterous, and John won
(08:55):
his day in court. The magistrate scolded Samuel Boyd. Where
John Castle had fab bricaded a new and useful product,
Samuel Boyd had fabricated a web of lies to cover
for ripping it off. The magistrates condemned the practice of
counterfeiting trademarks. In fact, he said it made the whole
city of Dublin look bad. But if James Castle won
his day in court, it didn't stop the counterfeit name
(09:17):
of the new lamp oil from catching on. Samuel Boyd's
knockoff name starting with a G would win out. Soon enough,
lamps around the world would burn the oil. In England
and then throughout Europe. It would eventually be called by
a different brand name altogether coined in eight seventy petrol
ironically patented by a man named Eugene Carlos in the
(09:40):
United States, John Castle's lamp oil fueled car culture in
the most confusing way because that liquid oil would eventually
be called gas slang for the knockoff name of the
knockoff oil. That's because the lamp oil that James Castle
had invented was named after him castline and hopefully now
at every time you buy gas, it's a little reminder
(10:02):
of the time that John Castle won in court but
lost the name to his new invention, gasoline. 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 Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
(10:24):
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,
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 right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:37):
We don't often think about the origins of the symbols
we see every day. For example, the amper sand which
we use in place of the conjunction, and is comprised
of the letters in the Latin word at, which translates
to and in English. The AT symbol or the A
with a circle around it in an email addressed today,
was once used by accountants to mean at the rate
(00:58):
of It was invented by monks centuries ago to help
them transcribe books much faster by reducing the number of
pen strokes. However, there are more modern symbols that have
permeated our culture as well. There's the mermaid in the
Starbucks cup, the Nordic letters for H and B that
make up the Bluetooth logo, and another symbol with an
unexpected origin. It all started with a man in Roland,
(01:24):
Roland was born on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in eighty two.
His Quaker family could actually trace their roots back to
one of the nine original English families that came to
Nantucket in the mid seventeenth century, and just as his
forefathers had left England to explore their freedom, so too
did Roland. He set out on a whaling ship called
the Emily Morgan when he was fifteen years old. He
(01:47):
didn't like it much, though. All it took was for
him to get lost at sea one time to turn
him off from whaling for good. When it happened, Roland
followed a single star in the night sky to help
him find shore, and once safe, marked the experience by
getting a tattoo on his arm. With his wailing days
behind him and five dollars of hard earned money in
(02:07):
his pocket, Roland stayed put. He took a job helping
his father operate their famili's needle and thread shop in Boston.
The experience taught him a lot about running a business,
which came in handy after the store went bankrupt in
eighteen forty four. A few years later, Roland opened his
own dry goods shop in Harrol, Massachusetts. It too closed
(02:27):
rather quickly. He made ends meet by working in a
store owned by his brother in law, but decided to
try his luck out west Well he and the thousands
of others chasing the dream of the California gold rush.
It seemed like there was a curse following Roland. Wherever
he went, the stores he'd worked in and owned kept
going belly up, and he didn't turn up any gold
(02:48):
on the West coast either. Discouraged but not defeated, Roland
returned to Massachusetts to join his brother in a new
dry goods store in Haril. Unlike his other ventures, this
shop did well before eventually closing. Like all the others,
Roland's next door, however, opened up more than its doors.
It opened up its eyes. To keep things fresh, he
(03:09):
would travel to Boston and New York every two months
and bring the latest trends and fashions back to his shop,
and soon enough the trips made him realize that he
needed to expand. New York was so different from harl
It was big, it was bustling, and it was growing fast.
Roland moved there in eighteen fifty eight and opened a
new dry goods store on Sixth Avenue and fourteen streets.
(03:32):
This one, however, was different than his previous businesses, as
it featured a unique logo. He wanted something big, something
people could look at as a beacon among all the
other shops on the street, and it worked. Roland Store
continued to grow over the next twenty years. It went
from one employee to fifteen two hundreds. During the holidays,
(03:52):
he started a trend by employing a store Santa Claus,
to draw families inside. He also set up elaborate window
displays with and themed scenes. Roland's shop went from one
storefront to several, gobbling up neighboring properties, until it eventually
outgrew the block in nineteen o two, twenty five years
after his death. In eighteen seventy seven, the new owners
(04:15):
of the store, Brothers Is a Door and Nathan Strauss,
moved the shop to a much larger and visible spot
in Harold Square. Emblazing across the front of the building
was the symbol that had been inked onto Roland's own arm,
a representation of the light that had guided him home
from the sea and all the way to New York City,
a red star, and underneath it the surname of the
(04:37):
man who had built the biggest department store in the world,
a true miracle on thirty four Street. Roland's last name Macy.
(04:58):
John Castle was fury us someone had ripped off his
invention and they were selling their knockoff in the store too.
All his advertising was going to waste. His customers were
buying his invention from someone else, Mr Samuel Boyd. You see,
John Castle was a printer and merchant in London, and
Samuel Boyd well, he was a druggist in Dublin. Somehow
(05:20):
Mr Boyd had gotten John's recipe for a new lamp oil.
After all, John had advertised the oil far and wide.
That was the printer side of his business, and as
creative as he was at inventing new things, it was
his new ideas for printing that were really paying off
for him. He would go on to pioneer the serial novel.
The printed word would take over his life. Maybe that's
(05:42):
because in the early eighteen sixties John would learn a
hard lesson about the power of words. That's when he
started selling his new lamp oil and advertising it in
all the papers he could find. A safe, pleasant, economical,
and most brilliant illuminating agent. He wrote with perfect safety
from day of explosion and free from any objectionable smell.
(06:04):
Sold by dealers throughout the Kingdom. John wanted everyone to
know that his lamp oil was equally suitable for use
in drawing rooms, parlors and cottages. Of course, the process
for refining the new oil wasn't completely John's invention. He
had learned part of it from a French chemist and
acquired a new resource from America Petroleum, also known at
(06:24):
the time as American crude. But if there was something
that John knew well, it was bringing in goods from
far off places and selling them to British buyers. After all,
most of his work as a merchant had been convincing
people to drink coffee and tea instead of liquor. American
crude was only the latest product from the edges of
the British Empire that was going like gangbusters when it
(06:45):
got to London, and once John had put American crude
through the French refining process, it caught on soon. He
had orders flying in from all over Britain and Ireland,
and especially in Ireland, the number of orders was growing
and growing like he had never seen before his previous
tea and coffee business had been good, but never this good.
(07:05):
It seemed that the new lamp oil was going to
keep him afloat until he would later say, those orders
from Ireland fell off to a considerable degree, so fast,
in fact, that it surprised John and made him suspicious too.
So he started asking questions, and that's when he learned
about Samuel Boyd. John learned that, along with a few
(07:25):
other oil merchants, Samuel Boyd had begun selling what John
called a spurious article, but his customers thought they were
buying the original product because Samuel was using the name
that John had invented for the new oil. So Irish
customers had stopped ordering from John and started buying from
Samuel instead. After all, they thought they were getting the
authentic fuel, so why shouldn't they. So John sprang into action.
(07:50):
He wrote a letter to Mr Boyd to set things straight,
stopped selling his lamp oil and using the name that
he invented, But no answer ever arrived. That wasn't going
to stop John. He set sail for Dublin and headed
for Mary Street, where he found the shop of Samuel Boyd.
When he stepped inside, he found exactly what he expected.
He asked a shop assistant for the oil, and they
(08:11):
were only too happy to hand him a bottle. John
looked down and saw that his original name for the
product was printed right there on the label. But there
was something else. Someone had used a pen to turn
the sea on each bottle into a g As if
that solved the branding problem, John Castle wasn't having it.
He took Samuel Boyd to court. What followed would make
(08:32):
any printer and inventor blow his lid. The first thing
Boyd said to the accusations was that he had never
sold any lamp oil with John's name on it. Then
he said that he had ordered labels from a Manchester
printer and they simply got it wrong. And finally Samuel
said that he was the one who had been inspired
by a French invention, a product that he said was
called Gaza jene. It was all preposterous, and John won
(08:55):
his day in court. The magistrate scolded Samuel Boyd. Where
John Castle had fab bricaded a new and useful product,
Samuel Boyd had fabricated a web of lies to cover
for ripping it off. The magistrates condemned the practice of
counterfeiting trademarks. In fact, he said it made the whole
city of Dublin look bad. But if James Castle won
his day in court, it didn't stop the counterfeit name
(09:17):
of the new lamp oil from catching on. Samuel Boyd's
knockoff name starting with a G would win out. Soon enough,
lamps around the world would burn the oil. In England
and then throughout Europe. It would eventually be called by
a different brand name altogether coined in eight seventy petrol
ironically patented by a man named Eugene Carlos in the
(09:40):
United States, John Castle's lamp oil fueled car culture in
the most confusing way because that liquid oil would eventually
be called gas slang for the knockoff name of the
knockoff oil. That's because the lamp oil that James Castle
had invented was named after him castline and hopefully now
at every time you buy gas, it's a little reminder
(10:02):
of the time that John Castle won in court but
lost the name to his new invention, gasoline. 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 Curiosities podcast dot com. The show
(10:24):
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
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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