Dream Weaver

There are a lot of things we take for granted today that started with passion. And the two individuals on our tour today had a curious amount of it, for sure.

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Episode Transcript

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

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Dreams can tell us a lot about ourselves,
our fears, are worries, and our hopes for the future.
In fact, the link between dreams and the future is
stronger than we might think. Before a landslide of coal

(00:49):
waste buried a school in Wales in nineteen sixty six,
the students had reported dreaming about dying just days before
it happened on Sixteen children and twenty eight adults were
lost in that disaster. Perhaps the most famous precognitive dream
occurred in eighteen sixty five. President Abraham Lincoln told his

(01:10):
wife and some associates about a dream he'd recently had
where he'd seen his own dead body laying before him
in the White House. Two weeks later, the casket holding
his real corpse was placed in the exact same spot.
But dreams don't always tell us when we're going to die,
sometimes they can spark inspiration, likely did for Elias. How

(01:32):
Elias's legacy is far more generous than he probably deserves.
He's often described as a Civil War hero, a brilliant inventor,
and a cherished native of Connecticut. In reality, he was
a Union private at the age of forty who lost
credit on many of his inventions, and was actually born
in Massachusetts. But he never considered himself a failure, nor

(01:53):
did he let his shortcomings stop him from continuing to
pursue his goals. One of his main focuses had been
to improve the mechanical sewing machine, which had been growing
in popularity during the mid nineteenth century. Now, others before
him had iterated on the device, dating all the way
back to Charles Frederick Wisenthal in seventeen fifty five, and
Thomas Saint, an English inventor, was said to have designed

(02:17):
the sewing machine as we know it today, but it's
not clear if he ever built a working model. Over
the years, numerous other inventors took a stab at enhancing
the sewing machine, changing everything from the types of stitches
they made to the variety of fabrics one could pass
through them. However, Alias didn't get complacent. He innovated in
his own ways and was awarded a patent in eighteen

(02:39):
forty six for his version that used a lock stitch design.
In fact, Alias's design included three additions that are still
found on sewing machines today. A shuttle that passed back
and forth beneath the fabric to accomplish the lock stitch,
and he also added an automatic feeder too. Then the
third and final feature was a bit of a miracle
that least to Alias. He'd been trying to figure out

(03:02):
how to improve the needle of his machine, wondering where
to place the eye. It's usual position at the rear
of the shaft wouldn't do, so he went back to
the drawing board. Well, actually, he went to sleep. One night,
Alias dreamed that he had been captured by a mysterious tribe.
Their king had tasked him with building a sewing machine
in the span of just twenty four hours. I guess

(03:25):
even in his dream, he was faced with the same
problem where to put the eye of the needle, except
this time if he couldn't complete the machine on schedule,
he'd be killed. Twenty four hours passed in his dream
at least, and he'd still gotten no closer to figuring
out the needle conundrum. The king was displeased and ordered
Elias to be executed. But as the inventor was being

(03:47):
escorted to his fate, he caught a glimpse of the
spears being carried by the warriors around him. All of
them had holes near the spear points in his dream.
Alias begged for just a little more time to finish
his machine, but by then it was too late. He
woke up grateful although he hadn't been killed by his captors,
he had been struck with a brilliant new idea. He

(04:10):
immediately got out of bed and headed into his workshop.
Five hours later he was done with it. Elias Howe
had created a sewing machine needle with an eye in
its point. Unfortunately, the dream had failed to inspire him
to change his poor sales and marketing tactics. His revolutionary
new machine did not perform well in the marketplace. He
got caught up in defending his patent and tried charging

(04:32):
an exorbitant licensing fee that no one wanted to pay. Meanwhile,
other inventors were moving ahead with their own sewing machine designs.
Leaving Alias and his holy needle in the dust. It's
possible his failure to sell his brilliant new idea hindered
his future inventions as well. In eighteen fifty one, Alias
filed a patent for what he called an automatic continuous

(04:56):
clothing enclosure. It's a shame he didn't try harder to
mark at it. Had he done so, it might be
his name listed as the inventor of something else we
all find helpful, the zipper. We've all had a bad day.

(05:23):
Some of us experienced days or even weeks that just
feel darker and more hopeless as time goes by. It's normal,
and if that's you, you're not alone. However much you
might feel like that right now. I can't guarantee when
it will get better, but it does. But what I
can guarantee is that Willem would have sympathized with you. Why, well,

(05:45):
he was having a really bad time. Honestly, by our
modern standards, he was pretty much a complete failure. And
however depressing it might be. I want to tell you why.
William was born in the early eighteen fifties and what
would one day become a large family. His father was
a minister, and over the years, more and more siblings
were added to his daily life. Sometimes that pushes the

(06:08):
oldest child to become a leader or at the very
least dominant. Other times it forces them to retreat from
the chaos. For Willem, it was certainly the letter. His
early years are a bit of a fog to historians,
but we do know that he hopped around for a bit,
from one school to another, and then around the age
of sixteen, he landed his first job. A family connection

(06:30):
earned him a place inside a retail business of sorts,
and for a while it seemed like maybe the work
would stick. The job ended up giving him a much
broader view of the world too. In eighteen seventy three
he followed the work to London, and then two years
later it was Paris. But Willem wasn't in love with
his job. He felt a calling that his father had

(06:50):
and began to throw himself deeper and deeper into religious studies,
so deep, in fact, that he was fired from the
store in eighteen seventy six. A few months later, he
settled into a place in Holland and gave his religious
pursuits one percent of his attention In fact, his own
sister would later describe him as daffy with piety. It

(07:10):
seems young Willem was a bit of an outsider, although
he couldn't care less about what others thought of him.
In eighteen seventy eight, at the age of just twenty five,
he left for a school that would train him for evangelism,
certain that he had found his place in the world finally.
Yet just three months later he failed out, and there
he was a man who had been fired from his

(07:30):
job and kicked out of school. It seems that poor
young Willem was really only good at one thing, failing,
but his passion for religious work was a fire that
couldn't be extinguished. Later on, in eighteen seventy eight, he
packed up and headed to Belgium with plans to work
as a lay preacher minister without the proper training, in

(07:51):
a sense, hoping his enthusiasm would make up for his
lack of education. Now, the place he headed to was
a poor coal mining area. Lie if there was rough
for the people around him, and that filled his heart
with compassion. He helped buy them food and clothing. And
when there is an accident in one of the near
my mind shortly after he arrived. Willem was one of
the first people there to help, putting himself in danger

(08:13):
to care for those who were hurt, and it was
that event that earned him the acceptance of the people
around him. They had seen his compassion for them in
their darkest hour, and so they decided his spiritual message
was worth listening to. Despite his complete lack of training
and the language barrier, he became their shepherd. But even
that wouldn't last long. In July of eighteen seventy nine,

(08:36):
just a few months after arriving and earning the trust
of a community, the regional religious authority sent a representative
to see how he was doing. What they found was
a young man with barely a penny to his name,
dressed in rough clothing sewn from sackcloth, and when this
representative asked him where all his money had gone, Willem
shyly admitted that he had spent it all on the

(08:58):
miners around him. Furious that Willem hadn't followed the typical
example of the church at the time, that is to
live well and stay clean from the filth around him,
he was fired from his position, and with that, I
think all those years of failure finally caught up with him.
Here he was just twenty six years old and a

(09:18):
complete and total failure. It wasn't long after that, however,
when Willem saw something that inspired him. It was an
old miner straining under the weight of a sack full
of coal, and he felt a deep desire to capture
that image. So he pulled an old envelope out of
his pocket and quickly sketched out the shape and form
of the laboring man. It was the first step out

(09:41):
of darkness, and it also hearkened back to his days
in retail, working as a dealer of goods for his uncle,
a dealer of art. Over the years to come, Willem
would devote himself to his art with as much passion
as he had his work as a preacher, and in
the process he carved his name into the page is
of history as one of the greatest there ever was.

(10:04):
Of course, you know his work, but not his earliest stories.
Because Willem was actually his middle name, most people both
then and now, just called him Vincent Vincent van Gogh.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities, subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn

(10:27):
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 next time, stay curious.

(10:51):
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