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July 1, 2021 9 mins

Let's explore a few more of our more inventive forebearers, with a tour through the playful and the practical.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosity is 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

(00:27):
the Cabinet of Curiosities. He was a curious child when
the Great Depression hit in the nineteen twenties. His family
didn't have a lot of money for the basics, much
less extras like toys, so young Richard Thompson James had

(00:47):
to get creative. Then in he stumbled upon and abandoned
buick at just thirteen. He was determined to fix up
the car, and after getting it to run, he sold
it twenty five dollars. The effort sparked a love affair
with how things worked. By the late nineteen thirties, equipped
with a mechanical engineering degree, Richard found a job as

(01:10):
a naval engineer. When World War Two began, he was
tasked with designing a system to support and stabilize instruments
for sailing through rough seas. On a muggy day in
nineteen forty three, he knocked over a spare parts bin.
As the parts hit the floor, and idea struck him,
rekindling his curiosity as a child of the depression. He

(01:31):
spent a year improving upon the concept. He told his
wife Betty that he was certain he could sell it
as a toy, and asked her to come up with
a name for it. While she searched dictionaries for just
the right word, Richard formed an LLC after securing the
loan from a friend in ninety six. He made four
hundred units and marketed them to toy shops. Store after

(01:53):
store rejected the toy. It was too plain, too simple.
None of that deterred Richard, though, Instead he set his
sights even higher. He convinced Gimbal's department store in Philadelphia
to include the toy in their Christmas display window. As
the weeks went on, it appeared his simple toy didn't
stand a chance against the newest dolls and shiny trains.

(02:15):
Even this didn't stop Richard, though. He told his wife
to meet him at the department store in a couple
of hours. He gathered up a few of the toys
and headed downtown. He set up a display right outside
the store. He gave the store customers an interactive demonstration.
By the time his wife arrived, Richards sold all four
hundred units for a dollar apiece. Lines wrapped around the

(02:37):
building with customers signing up to buy more. Just before Christmas,
they sold twenty thousand, and it didn't stop there. A
couple set up a booth at the American Toy Fair
in New York the following year. By the end of
ninety seven, the toy was a national phenomenon. Two years
after that, they'd sold a million units for a dollar apiece,

(02:57):
earning one million in revenue that amount to about one
billion today, But popularity began to decline by the nineteen sixties.
One day, Richard confessed to Betty that he had been
having multiple affairs. Moreover, he announced that he was leaving
her and their six children to join a cult in Bolivia.
He told her that he no longer had use for money,

(03:18):
and gave her two choices, liquidate or become the sole owner.
Betty took the latter option. She quickly discovered another surprise.
Though her husband had given away their money to the cult,
leaving her seven figures in debt for the welfare of
her children. It was Betty, who now had to get creative.
She hired a marketing firm to create a jingle. It worked,

(03:40):
becoming one of the most recognizable jingles of the nineteen
sixties and seventies, but rebuilding the company was hard work.
She put in a lot of hours and was forced
to leave her kids with a caregiver four days a week.
In the early nineteen seventies, the company made a more
colorful version of the toy, and popularity sword. Betty went
on to make the way more successful than her husband

(04:01):
ever had, selling millions of variations and more than three
hundred million copies of the original. She sold the company
for what she described as a boatload of money. She
had taken a rundown company and turned it around. For
fifty years, she made the toy a best seller despite
every new fad and gadget to come along. Betty produced

(04:23):
enough of the toys to circle the Earth one times,
and negotiated a deal with Pixar to use the toy
as a character in toy story, effectively doubling her sales.
That simple object Betty named in nine and creatively built
to be one of history's most fun and wonderful toys.
You might have heard that it walks downstairs alone or

(04:46):
in pairs. Everyone knows it's slinky. There are a few
things as traumatic as a house fire. When I was

(05:06):
growing up, a house directly down the street from my own,
a house lived in by a classmate of mind from school,
tragically caught fire one December night, burning the entire structure
to the ground. Thankfully everyone made it out alive, but
the devastation was complete. Family heirlooms, wrapped Christmas presents, clothing, toys,
photo albums, name a precious object, and they lost it.

(05:30):
And maybe that's why so many of us fear going
through the same experience. Pull a world history book off
the shelf and you'll find a number of citywide fires
listed to The Great Fire of London took place in
sixteen sixty six, destroying over thirteen thousand houses and making
some seventy of the people living there homeless. In eighteen

(05:53):
seventy one, it was the Great Chicago Fire, taking the
lives of nearly two fifty people. Rome has burned, as
as Amsterdam, Munich, Edinburgh, and Moscow, just to name a few,
And most of the cities on the list burned so
easily because firefighting was usually sloppy, slow, or just playing
non existent. But then came Frederick Graff. He was a

(06:16):
hydraulic engineer born in Philadelphia in seventeen seventy five who
worked for a long time as a carpenter and a draftsman.
But it was in seventeen ninety five that he took
a job as an assistant to a man named Benjamin Latrobe,
who was an architect. Behind the Center Square water works
on the side of today's Philadelphia City Hall once stood
one of his creations, the Pump House. It pulled water

(06:40):
from the nearby river using steam powered pumps, stored it
in massive wooden tanks, and then let gravity feeded out
to nearby houses and businesses using wooden pipes. And Frederick
Graff was right there beside him, learning and thinking. In
eighteen o five he was elected to the position of
superintendent of the water works there, but he and others

(07:00):
began to notice that the system was just not powerful enough.
They needed something bigger and better, and by eighteen eleven
he was guiding the construction of a new facility. Frederick
was also a fan of forward thinking all over the city.
The water mains beneath The cobble stones were made of wood,
and I'm sure they worked for a long while, but

(07:21):
wood can rot or crack or warp out of alignment.
So as Frederick made improvements to the old system, he
began to replace those old wooden mains with new iron ones.
But that created a new problem. You see, for a while,
if a fire broke out somewhere in the city, one
method of fighting it was to pull up the cobble stones,

(07:41):
tap into the water maine, and then use the water
to fight the blaze. When they were done, they plugged
the holes in the maine called fire plugs for obvious reasons,
and then reburied them. It was smart and inventive, but
the new iron pipes couldn't be tapped so easily, So
Frederick went to the drawing boarding came up with the plan.
At various intervals along the new iron water mains, he

(08:05):
would install permanent exposed fire plugs basically sealed faucets that could,
if the need arose, be used by firefighters. I probably
don't have to say this out loud, but just in
case you haven't pictured it in your mind, I will.
Frederick Graph had invented the fire hydrant Today it's a
common fixture in every neighborhood, both figuratively and literally. But

(08:28):
when he first proposed the idea, it was revolutionary. As
metal water mains began to spread to more and more cities,
so too did this other fresh idea. Today, firefighters everywhere,
along with dogs with full bladders, have Frederick Graff to
thank for the tool that makes their job more efficient
and much more manageable. In an odd twist of faith,

(08:49):
though it's impossible to say for certain if Frederick Graph
was indeed the inventor of the fire hydrants. We know
about his work from other sources, but the actual patent
for the divice, the document that would make a rock
solid case for his inventiveness, no longer exists. Why because
it was kept in the U. S. Patent Office in Washington,

(09:10):
d C. Which was destroyed in eighteen thirty six because
a fire. 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 was created by me Aaron Manky

(09:34):
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, Ye

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News

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