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History is marked by many unusual achievements. Some are delightful, and others are sad. Today we'll look into examples of both.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm 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 of Curiosities.

(00:36):
All of history's biggest events have hidden dimensions, from achievements
in art and literature, to great scientific discoveries to the
founding and fall of nations. There are stories behind the
stories we tell. I love digging deeper into historical events
and finding tales that go beyond the headlines. That's the
kind of story I want to share with you today.

(00:56):
It starts on a chilly afternoon in Massachusetts in the
mid night nineteen sixties. A thirty something woman named Margaret
knew she was going to have to stay late at work.
Her husband was busy taking law classes at Harvard, so
Margaret had no choice but to bring their young daughter, Lauren,
up to the office with her. While Margaret worked, Lauren
played astronaut. She toddled around Margaret's office pretending to be

(01:18):
wearing a spacesuit. Lauren took huge bounding steps, like she
was walking in zero gravity. Then she ran over to
Margaret's computer and did what kids do. She started pressing
random buttons. Suddenly, Margaret's computer short circuited the simulation she'd
been running crashed, But she wasn't upset with her daughter.
She was actually grateful because Lauren had just helped her

(01:40):
identify a flaw in her system. You see, Margaret was
a computer software engineer, one of the very first in
the world. She actually coined the term software engineer decades
before Silicon Valley was a wash with tech startups. Margaret
was doing pioneering work at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, overseeing tea
team of engineers working on writing and debugging computer software.

(02:04):
Her young daughter, Lauren had just helped her realize something important.
No matter how perfect a computer seemed to be, there
was always room for error. Someone could press the wrong
button accidentally or on purpose, and throw everything into chaos,
which made Margaret think computers should be well smarter. Now,
this was way before the idea of smartphones or artificial intelligence.

(02:26):
The computers at MIT were huge and clunky. They took
up entire rooms, and a lot of them didn't even
have screens. Margaret and her team couldn't just type their
software code onto a keyboard. They had to put software
information onto paper punch cards, which they then ran physically
into the giant room sized computing machines they worked on.
It was some serious, rudimentary stuff by today's standards, but

(02:48):
back in the nineteen sixties it was cutting edge technology.
So after her daughter crashed the system, Margaret focused on
creating a software program that would be able to self
identify and self correct errors. If someone clicked the wrong button,
the computer could fix itself without human intervention. If something
went disastrously wrong, the computer could shut down some parts

(03:08):
of itself while keeping the most vital parts up and running. Basically,
it could prioritize certain tasks and make sure one small
mistake didn't blow the whole thing up. It took years,
not to mention, thousands of pages of handwritten and hand
punched software code, but Margaret's program worked, and it came
in handy in a big way. You see. The lab

(03:28):
that Margaret worked at in MIT had a contract with NASA.
Their software was used on board spacecrafts. During one NASA mission,
Margaret and her team were standing in the monitoring room
at MIT when they got an emergency error message. The
computer on board the spacecraft was overloaded. If it couldn't
be fixed, the craft would crash. But Margaret and her

(03:48):
team didn't need to panic. The software she pioneered worked perfectly.
The spacecraft's computer was able to shut down the parts
of the system that were malfunctioning while keeping the rest
up and running. And that's spacecraft well. On July twentieth
of nineteen sixty nine, it landed on the Moon. Neil
Armstrong stepped out of the ship, put a foot on
the lunar surface and said the quote we probably all

(04:11):
know by heart. That's one small step for man, one
giant leap for mankind. Too bad he didn't mention women.
Margaret was in charge of the software for the Apollo
eleven mission. Her full name was Margaret Hamilton, and you
might have seen a picture of her in her sixty
style dress standing next to a stack of paperwork that
is taller than she is. That's the software code that

(04:31):
she wrote, the same code that sent astronauts to the moon.
Margaret is a living legend, but the contributions that she
made to software engineering are often overlooked. Maybe that's because
even though her code was fundamental to the creation of
computer technology, it's considered pretty basic these days. And those
room sized computers that sent astronauts to the moon there

(04:53):
are millions of times less powerful than the phones that
we all carry in our pockets today. If you've ever

(05:13):
studied world history, you know that civilizations tend to pop
up along waterways like oceans, lakes, and rivers. Water is
central to life, and that's never more apparent when we
can't get enough of it. Take the summer of twenty eighteen,
for example, Central Europe experienced the most severe drought in
decades and have the highest temperatures ever recorded in the region.
The water levels of various lakes and rivers decreased, and

(05:35):
the lack of humidity caused extremely dry air conditions. This
had measurable negative impacts on wildlife populations, trade routes, and
the ability to grow food and access water. So droughts
are not fun to say the least, but the effects
of that twenty eighteen droughts actually revealed some fascinating historical artifacts.
You see, there's this waterway in Central Europe called the

(05:57):
Elbe River. It runs from the mountains of Czech down
through Germany and into the North Sea. Historically, the river
has been an important resource for people along its shores.
During that dry summer, though, water levels in the Elbe
River lowered drastically. Locals in the Czech town of Dutchin
were exploring sections of the dried up riverbed when they
stumbled upon a rock, or more accurately, a boulder. It

(06:20):
was large, kind of brownish gray, and its edges had
been worn smooth by centuries of erosion, and carved into
the surface was a message that said, if you see me,
weep and to make things even creepier. This rock was
just one of many. Another said and I quote we cried,
we cry, and you will cry now. Many of these

(06:43):
rocks had dates carved into them. Some were from as
recent as eighteen ninety three, and some went back as
far as the fifteenth century. The oldest year referenced came
from a rock carved with this message, if you will
again see the stone, so you will weep. So shallow
was the water in the U fourteen seventeen. These rocks
are what historians call hunger stones. They're actually somewhat common

(07:06):
throughout Central Europe. And specifically in the Elbe River. They
offer important insight into the history of droughts in the
region because they mark where the shoreline was at certain
times throughout history. The further the shoreline went out, the
worst the drought was. So these stones are a very
tangible historical record of European water levels, which is really

(07:27):
cool in a way, but it's also kind of unsettling
because ideally we wouldn't be seeing hunger stones at all.
They're harbingers of drought and suffering warnings from people who
lived four, five, six hundred years ago that when the
water levels get this low, bad things happen. There's only
so much that we can do to counteract droughts, though
anthropogenic climate change is a factor, but it's not the

(07:50):
only one. If these hunger stones teach us anything, it's
that people have suffered through extreme conditions for centuries and
that people today are fascinated by the messages our ancestors
left behind. You see some hunger stones in the Elb
River are permanently visible due to dams in the area.
A few are actually macab tourist attractions. You can walk

(08:11):
right out and touch the carvings that were made hundreds
of years ago. They attract thousands of visitors every year.
But not all of these stones are quite what they seem.
The one, which was carved in the nineteen thirties says,
don't cry, girl, don't whine, spray when the field is dry,
which sounds like a nice encouraging message for when your
crops are getting thirsty, right. Well, it would be except

(08:34):
for the fact that this was actually the slogan for
Sigma Lutine, a check brand that sold water pumps to farmers.
Apparently whoever headed up advertising for the business thought that
it would be a good idea to make a hunger
stone billboard. That hey, maybe it was, because here we
are today talking about it, almost one hundred years later.

(08:59):
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 Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,

(09:22):
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldoflore dot com and Until next time, stay curious,