Captain's Orders

Clever thinking has led to some curious stories, as these two tales demonstrate for us today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Mankey'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. When a vital organ, such as the heart,
needs to be replaced, doctors utilize a complicated device known
as a CPB or cardio pulmonary bypass machine. The CPB
circulates blood and oxygen throughout the body during surgery, essentially

(00:51):
acting as a temporary replacement for one's heart and lungs,
hence its other name, the heart lung machine. Although the
CPB sounds like modern science, something that must have only
existed for a handful of years, right, in reality, it
dates back to eighteen eighty five. An Austrian German physiologist
named Maximilian von Frey built one, although that was only
a prototype. Then around ninety six, a Russian scientist named

(01:15):
Sergey Bruconenko took things a few steps further. In May
of that year, he attended a conference where he showed
off what he had been working on, he had created
his own heart lung machine, which he called the auto jector.
When he hooked up an organ, it would extract the blood,
warm it in a glass container, oxygenated, and then pump
it back into the body. Except he didn't do this
with a heart or a pair of lungs. He used

(01:38):
a dog's head instead. Brucon Enko was able to keep
a dog's head alive for over an hour and a
half before the blood clotted and could no longer be pumped.
The auto injector was a leap in medical technology and
became the talk of the medical community. Doctors and scientists
imagine a world where the human body, limited by organs
that broke down over time, could probably live forever with

(02:00):
the help of one of these devices. About ten years later,
in California, another doctor named Robert E. Cornish conducted similar
experiments with dogs. Not only did his techniques differ from
bruco Enko's, but so did his intended results. He didn't
want to just keep an organ from dying. He wanted
to reanimate the already dead. Cornish believed that if a

(02:22):
corpse was strapped to a large teeter totter and moved
up and down, quickly. The force of the movement would
circulate the blood inside. Meanwhile, a breathing tub would be
inserted into the mouth, while a mixture of adrenaline, anticoagulants,
and other ingredients would chemically shock the body into returning
to life. And just like his Russian counterparts, he looked
to the canine family for help. Now, Cornish was known

(02:45):
for having strange ideas. For example, he once invented a
pair of reading glasses meant for use underwater. However, he
didn't believe himself to be a mad scientist. No, he
felt he was doing the world favor, so he started
testing his theories on fox terriers that he named last Risk,
a reference to the gospel story about a man Jesus
race from the dead. After three unsuccessful attempts, Cornish finally

(03:07):
started making progress. His fourth test subject, Lazarus the Fourth,
was resurrected after five minutes and let out a small bark.
The dog did suffer serious side effects like blindness and
brain damage, but was functioning normally after about a week.
Lazarus the Fifth came back to life after thirty minutes dead,
having been deceased longer than any of his predecessors and

(03:29):
with fewer problems afterward. Unfortunately, Cornish was only one of
a few people interested in this research. Honestly, other scientists
just felt like his experiments were vulgar. But in seven
Cornish was finally able to apply his Frankenstein like methods
to something a bit bigger than a terrier, an adult
human cadaver, or at least that was the plan. Thomas

(03:52):
mcmonagle had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death,
and he reached out to Cornish about these experiments. He
wanted the doctor to revive him after his execution at
sam Quentin Prison. However, the idea was almost immediately shut down. First,
mcmonagle was to be executed via gas chamber and his
body could not be recovered until the room was clear

(04:12):
of toxic gas, which would take an hour or more,
far too long for the body to remain viable. And Secondly,
the warden fought against the planned tooth and nail. There
was no way he was going to allow his prisoner
to be resurrected after death. Cornish's work, as well as
that of Brukonnenko's, led to further investigation well into the
nineteen fifties, the Soviet Union performed countless experiments on animals, limbs,

(04:36):
and organs in an effort to not just cheat death,
but maybe put death out of business. The U. S
Military even had its own department dedicated to reviving the dead,
which ran into the late nineteen sixties. Since then, the
idea has mostly well died out due to the ethical
dilemma it presents. There may come a day when the
body can exceed its lifespan through the use of external

(04:59):
machines or cybernetic enhancements, or even a complete upload of
our brains to the cloud. The question is will any
of us live to see it. There isn't much you

(05:22):
can do when the cards are stacked against you, and
that was certainly the case for Wilhelm Voight, who was
born into a poor Mennonite family in the city of
Tilsit near Berlin. As the son of a cobbler, he
was destined to follow in his father's shoes. No pun intended,
I swear. Gainful employment and career advancement didn't exactly exist
at the turn of the twentieth century, at least not

(05:44):
for someone like Wilhelm. So he did what any child
might do in a world where nothing seems within grasp,
he stole at the age of fourteen, Wilhelm earned his
first prison sentence, serving two weeks for theft, but the
crimes didn't end there. In fact, they escalated so much
so that he was denied residency papers in Prussia, which
made it impossible to work in the country. With nothing

(06:06):
left to do, Wilhelm continued on the path he had
set for himself, this time landing his largest sentence yet,
fifteen years in prison for fraud. He was promptly kicked
out of Prussia entirely, and that's when Wilhelm had an
idea that would change the course of his life, a
plan that carried with it an ingenuity that had evaded
him in his younger days of crime. Now a veteran

(06:27):
of fifty seven years, you might say that he saved
his best act for last. It started by him sneaking
back into Berlin, where he wasn't allowed to be. He
made his way through various second hand clothing shops and
acquired for himself a full Prussian Army captain's uniform, piece
by piece. After completing his costume on October sixteenth of

(06:47):
nineteen oh six, he walked right into the local army
barracks and ordered a small company of soldiers to come
with him. Seeing his captain's uniform, they willingly obeyed. As
Captain Wilhelm White passed firing range, he gathered even more troops,
and as his entourage grew, you can bet he began
to feel his grand master plan coming to fruition. With

(07:08):
his small army in tow, Wilhelm marched them twenty five
miles to Copennick with a very specific goal in mind.
He wanted to get a passport, which in turn would
allow him to get a job. Upon arriving in town,
he told his men that the mayor and the accountants
were both guilty of some financial indiscretions against Prussia, a lie,

(07:28):
but one they all believed. Then Wilhelm split his forces,
sending half to escort the new prisoners to the guard
house in Berlin, while the other half were to guard
the town hall. Unfortunately for Wilhelm, there was no passport
in the building, so rather than go home empty handed,
he relieved the town hall of its cash reserves and
then fled the scene. However, Wilhelm couldn't keep his mouth

(07:49):
shut about what he'd done. He told numerous friends about
his little adventure, and ten days later he was arrested
by a rather irritated Prussian army. He was sentenced to
four years in prison. Just when it seemed like his
life was over, fortune struck again, well, laughter struck more
like it. You see, the story of this little adventure
made it all the way up to the stern Kaiser, Wilhelm,

(08:10):
the second Emperor of Prussia, who found the whole story
so amusing that he granted him a personal pardon. Void's
name lit up the headlines the next day, the papers
calling him the man who made the Kaiser laugh. Never
want to miss an opportunity, Wilhelm began to sell photos
of himself to his new adoring fans. Six days after

(08:30):
his relief, Berlin's famous waxwork show unterd and Lynden had
not one but two Wilhelm voids in their midst, one
posing with the other. His fame became so widespread that
even Barnum and Bailey Circus helped out funding his tour
around Germany, where he reprised his role as captain. In
the end, Wilhelm even received his Holy Grail a passport,

(08:52):
although it wasn't from Germany, but rather Luxembourg, where he
would live out the rest of his days until his
death in nine two. He even after he was gone,
though Wilhelm voids, legend and likeness has lived on his
wax sculpture. It made its way to the famous Madame
Tussau's in London, and a statue was even built of
him in Copaeck, proving once again that if you try

(09:12):
hard enough, even a lie can become the truth. 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 in partnership with how

(09:35):
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.