November 2, 2023 • 9 mins
Steam and fire put history under a lot of pressure today on our tour through the Cabinet.
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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 right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
Flashback to twenty twenty COVID nineteen lockdowns had a stuck
at home scrolling the Internet for hours on end, baking
sour dough bread and looking up the newest recipes to
try in the instant pot. Now, if you're anything like
a lot of folks, I know, the pressure cooker fad
didn't end when the vaccines came out. Instant pot meals
are still a pretty common occurrence. And it turns out
the technology behind this twenty first century cookwear can be
(00:58):
traced back almost four hundred years. It all started in
the sixteen seventies and what is arguably still the culinary
capital of the world, Paris, France. A recent medical school
graduate named Dennis Poppine had just moved to the city
in search of work, but before he could land a
job at a hospital, he met a Dutch man named
Christian Huygens. Christian was doing some research that caught Dennis's attention.
(01:21):
You say Christian was experimenting with air pumps, which I
know it doesn't sound particularly exciting, but in the seventeenth
century it certainly was. In fact, it was so exciting
that Dennis gave up a promising career as a doctor
to work with Christian. Together, they created a new type
of air powered pump called a gunpowder engine. Essentially, they
lit gunpowder inside of a metal cylinder and the contained
(01:43):
explosion created a high powered vacuum. A few years later,
in sixteen seventy four, Dennis moved to England to work
with the famous Irish inventor named Robert Boyle. And that's
when Dennis's medical background came in handy. He and Robert
studied blood chemistry and respiration, and Dennis looked for a
way to combine his knowledge of biology with his interest
(02:03):
in engineering. Thus the steam digester was born. And I
regret to inform you it is as gross as it sounds.
Simply put, the steam digester was the world's first pressure cooker.
It was made of two chambers, an inner chamber where
you put food and an outer chamber where steam collected,
so that it could pressure cook whatever you put inside. Importantly,
(02:24):
the machine also featured a safety valve that could let
steam out when the pressure got too high, which was
great for preventing deadly explosions. So what made it gross? Well,
the steam Digester's primary person was to soften bones, and
this had a dual benefit. The softened bones could either
be used for certain medical studies, or they could just
be eaten. To give you an image of what that
(02:45):
might look like, I'm going to read you a quote
from the diary of John Evelyn, a member of the
Royal Society of London and a die hard steam digester fan.
He wrote, and I quote, the hardest bones of beef
itself and mutton were made as soft as cheese, producing
an incredible quantity of gravy. And for close of all,
a jelly made of the bones of beef the best
(03:05):
for clearness and good relish, and the most delicious that
I had ever seen or tasted. And that's pretty high praise. Right. Clearly,
Dennis was onto something here. Over time, other engineers tinkered
with the design for the steam digester, and it gradually
became the pressure cookers that we know today. It was
the blueprint for our beloved instant pot. But the steam
(03:26):
digester was not Dennis Poppin's most important invention, far from it.
In sixteen ninety he combined his ideas for the steam
digester and the gunpowder engine to create a design for
a new prototype. Dennis theorized that a machine could be
powered by water. Basically, water could be heated into steam,
which would expand and move a piston forward. Then that
(03:47):
steam could be cooled and condensed, which would allow the
piston to move it back. If this process could happen
fast enough and repeat over and over, it could create
an extremely powerful engine. Dennis had dreamed up the steam engine,
only he didn't actually make it. He just drew the blueprints.
Dennis died some years later, and a different inventor, Englishman
Thomas Neukoman, brought his idea to life. The steam engine
(04:10):
was first used to pump water out of mines, but
soon it became integral to the functioning of trains, ships
and factories. It ushered in the Industrial Revolution, completely changing
the course of human history. And who would have thought
that a twenty first century cooking fad would tie back
to the steam powered locomotives of the industrial era. It
just goes to show you that everything is connected in
(04:32):
the most curious of ways. As technology advances more and
more each day, the fear of a global blackout grows exponentially.
(04:54):
Some believe a complete collapse of our digital infrastructure is
eventually on the horizon, from the Internet to international commerce
to our national defense systems. It's scary to think about
what might happen in the event that were sent back
to the Stone Age. But in the summer of eighteen
fifty nine, the world did experience something like that. Between
September first and second of that year, everything went silent,
(05:15):
and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it except
look up. Americans along the West coast noticed strange lights
in the sky around midnight. On that first night. A
group of campers in the Colorado Rockies had settled into
sleep beneath the stars. When they watched those same stars
disappear before their eyes. They'd been obscured by swirling lights
(05:35):
so bright gold miners awoke and started cooking breakfast. They
thought the morning had come early. Meanwhile, a reporter at
the San Francisco Herald described what he saw as an
aurora that turned the sky into and I quote, something
like a field of grain in a high wind. People
came out of their homes to witness the sky illuminated
by beautiful light, an unusual phenomenon for that part of
(05:58):
the country. Typically, auras were seen at the polls, not here,
and they lit up the streets with perpetual daylight. Sleep
patterns were thrown off, and songbirds stayed up well past
their bedtime. But the incident was not limited to North America.
It was watched by a number of people all over
the world. One of them happened to be an amateur
astronomer named Richard Carrington. Now Richard lived just outside of London, England.
(06:23):
His father had owned a brewery and intended his child
to enter the church after graduating from university, but Richard
had other plans. He attended a number of lectures at
Trinity College by noted astronomer Professor James Challis. These talks
peauked Richard's scientific interests so much so that he abandoned
his plans to join the clergy. He eventually joined England's
(06:43):
University of Durham as an observer, but found that their
facilities and their scope of focus to be lacking. He
decided to pour his efforts into the study of the
stars and star zones instead, a field in which he
hoped to excel beyond his peers. Richard left Durham in
eighteen fifth and soon built himself a home and observatory
on Furz Hill in Surrey. He was able to do
(07:05):
much more substantial work there than he'd performed at Durham,
including identifying solar flares and developing a system to count
the Sun's rotations, a system that is still used today
by scientists. So back to our lights in the sky.
Around noon on September first, he was monitoring a growing
number of sun spots on the Sun's surface when a
burst of light blinded him for several minutes. He later
(07:27):
said that it looked like a white light flare. What
he witnessed was a coronal mass ejection or CME. This
occurs when plasma mass and magnetic field are discharged from
the Sun's corona into its heliosphere, causing a type of
solar flare. And this flash was also noticed by another
English astronomer by got named Richard Hodgson. Both men submitted
(07:49):
reports of their findings independently to a peer reviewed scientific journal,
which published them together that November, giving the public a
much better understanding of what had happened. But the flare
was only the beginning. It had also caused the auroras
spotted over much of the globe that night, and it
led to something even bigger. Over the next several hours,
the planet experienced a massive geomagnetic storm, which resulted in
(08:11):
the world's telegraph systems Malfunctioning stations were unable to send
or receive messages as the auroras sparkled overhead. Worldwide communication
had all but stopped, save for a few lucky stations.
Some telegraph operators suffered from electric shocks while pylons sparked
as a result of the current caused by the geomagnetic field.
(08:33):
In fact, two stations, one in Portland, Maine, and the
other in Boston, Massachusetts, were able to carry on a
conversation for two hours after disconnecting the batteries that powered
their telegraphs. The current caused by the aurora had been
strong enough to carry their messages over the lines, and
there you go. Richard Carrington quickly figured out that the
flare had caused the storm an observation that had not
(08:55):
been made by scientists before. His work led to the
incident being called the Carrington event and prove that this
amateur astronomer's success was much more than just a flash
in the pan. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(09:16):
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, and you can learn all about it
over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time,
(09:39):
stay curious.
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 right there on display, just waiting
for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
Flashback to twenty twenty COVID nineteen lockdowns had a stuck
at home scrolling the Internet for hours on end, baking
sour dough bread and looking up the newest recipes to
try in the instant pot. Now, if you're anything like
a lot of folks, I know, the pressure cooker fad
didn't end when the vaccines came out. Instant pot meals
are still a pretty common occurrence. And it turns out
the technology behind this twenty first century cookwear can be
(00:58):
traced back almost four hundred years. It all started in
the sixteen seventies and what is arguably still the culinary
capital of the world, Paris, France. A recent medical school
graduate named Dennis Poppine had just moved to the city
in search of work, but before he could land a
job at a hospital, he met a Dutch man named
Christian Huygens. Christian was doing some research that caught Dennis's attention.
(01:21):
You say Christian was experimenting with air pumps, which I
know it doesn't sound particularly exciting, but in the seventeenth
century it certainly was. In fact, it was so exciting
that Dennis gave up a promising career as a doctor
to work with Christian. Together, they created a new type
of air powered pump called a gunpowder engine. Essentially, they
lit gunpowder inside of a metal cylinder and the contained
(01:43):
explosion created a high powered vacuum. A few years later,
in sixteen seventy four, Dennis moved to England to work
with the famous Irish inventor named Robert Boyle. And that's
when Dennis's medical background came in handy. He and Robert
studied blood chemistry and respiration, and Dennis looked for a
way to combine his knowledge of biology with his interest
(02:03):
in engineering. Thus the steam digester was born. And I
regret to inform you it is as gross as it sounds.
Simply put, the steam digester was the world's first pressure cooker.
It was made of two chambers, an inner chamber where
you put food and an outer chamber where steam collected,
so that it could pressure cook whatever you put inside. Importantly,
(02:24):
the machine also featured a safety valve that could let
steam out when the pressure got too high, which was
great for preventing deadly explosions. So what made it gross? Well,
the steam Digester's primary person was to soften bones, and
this had a dual benefit. The softened bones could either
be used for certain medical studies, or they could just
be eaten. To give you an image of what that
(02:45):
might look like, I'm going to read you a quote
from the diary of John Evelyn, a member of the
Royal Society of London and a die hard steam digester fan.
He wrote, and I quote, the hardest bones of beef
itself and mutton were made as soft as cheese, producing
an incredible quantity of gravy. And for close of all,
a jelly made of the bones of beef the best
(03:05):
for clearness and good relish, and the most delicious that
I had ever seen or tasted. And that's pretty high praise. Right. Clearly,
Dennis was onto something here. Over time, other engineers tinkered
with the design for the steam digester, and it gradually
became the pressure cookers that we know today. It was
the blueprint for our beloved instant pot. But the steam
(03:26):
digester was not Dennis Poppin's most important invention, far from it.
In sixteen ninety he combined his ideas for the steam
digester and the gunpowder engine to create a design for
a new prototype. Dennis theorized that a machine could be
powered by water. Basically, water could be heated into steam,
which would expand and move a piston forward. Then that
(03:47):
steam could be cooled and condensed, which would allow the
piston to move it back. If this process could happen
fast enough and repeat over and over, it could create
an extremely powerful engine. Dennis had dreamed up the steam engine,
only he didn't actually make it. He just drew the blueprints.
Dennis died some years later, and a different inventor, Englishman
Thomas Neukoman, brought his idea to life. The steam engine
(04:10):
was first used to pump water out of mines, but
soon it became integral to the functioning of trains, ships
and factories. It ushered in the Industrial Revolution, completely changing
the course of human history. And who would have thought
that a twenty first century cooking fad would tie back
to the steam powered locomotives of the industrial era. It
just goes to show you that everything is connected in
(04:32):
the most curious of ways. As technology advances more and
more each day, the fear of a global blackout grows exponentially.
(04:54):
Some believe a complete collapse of our digital infrastructure is
eventually on the horizon, from the Internet to international commerce
to our national defense systems. It's scary to think about
what might happen in the event that were sent back
to the Stone Age. But in the summer of eighteen
fifty nine, the world did experience something like that. Between
September first and second of that year, everything went silent,
(05:15):
and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it except
look up. Americans along the West coast noticed strange lights
in the sky around midnight. On that first night. A
group of campers in the Colorado Rockies had settled into
sleep beneath the stars. When they watched those same stars
disappear before their eyes. They'd been obscured by swirling lights
(05:35):
so bright gold miners awoke and started cooking breakfast. They
thought the morning had come early. Meanwhile, a reporter at
the San Francisco Herald described what he saw as an
aurora that turned the sky into and I quote, something
like a field of grain in a high wind. People
came out of their homes to witness the sky illuminated
by beautiful light, an unusual phenomenon for that part of
(05:58):
the country. Typically, auras were seen at the polls, not here,
and they lit up the streets with perpetual daylight. Sleep
patterns were thrown off, and songbirds stayed up well past
their bedtime. But the incident was not limited to North America.
It was watched by a number of people all over
the world. One of them happened to be an amateur
astronomer named Richard Carrington. Now Richard lived just outside of London, England.
(06:23):
His father had owned a brewery and intended his child
to enter the church after graduating from university, but Richard
had other plans. He attended a number of lectures at
Trinity College by noted astronomer Professor James Challis. These talks
peauked Richard's scientific interests so much so that he abandoned
his plans to join the clergy. He eventually joined England's
(06:43):
University of Durham as an observer, but found that their
facilities and their scope of focus to be lacking. He
decided to pour his efforts into the study of the
stars and star zones instead, a field in which he
hoped to excel beyond his peers. Richard left Durham in
eighteen fifth and soon built himself a home and observatory
on Furz Hill in Surrey. He was able to do
(07:05):
much more substantial work there than he'd performed at Durham,
including identifying solar flares and developing a system to count
the Sun's rotations, a system that is still used today
by scientists. So back to our lights in the sky.
Around noon on September first, he was monitoring a growing
number of sun spots on the Sun's surface when a
burst of light blinded him for several minutes. He later
(07:27):
said that it looked like a white light flare. What
he witnessed was a coronal mass ejection or CME. This
occurs when plasma mass and magnetic field are discharged from
the Sun's corona into its heliosphere, causing a type of
solar flare. And this flash was also noticed by another
English astronomer by got named Richard Hodgson. Both men submitted
(07:49):
reports of their findings independently to a peer reviewed scientific journal,
which published them together that November, giving the public a
much better understanding of what had happened. But the flare
was only the beginning. It had also caused the auroras
spotted over much of the globe that night, and it
led to something even bigger. Over the next several hours,
the planet experienced a massive geomagnetic storm, which resulted in
(08:11):
the world's telegraph systems Malfunctioning stations were unable to send
or receive messages as the auroras sparkled overhead. Worldwide communication
had all but stopped, save for a few lucky stations.
Some telegraph operators suffered from electric shocks while pylons sparked
as a result of the current caused by the geomagnetic field.
(08:33):
In fact, two stations, one in Portland, Maine, and the
other in Boston, Massachusetts, were able to carry on a
conversation for two hours after disconnecting the batteries that powered
their telegraphs. The current caused by the aurora had been
strong enough to carry their messages over the lines, and
there you go. Richard Carrington quickly figured out that the
flare had caused the storm an observation that had not
(08:55):
been made by scientists before. His work led to the
incident being called the Carrington event and prove that this
amateur astronomer's success was much more than just a flash
in the pan. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(09:16):
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, and you can learn all about it
over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time,
(09:39):
stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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