July 5, 2022 • 10 mins
Curious moments frequently happen when expectation is flipped on its head.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky'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. Few of us performed the same jobs for
our entire lives. Some may go from stocking shelves as
teens to selling stocks when we're older. We may even
change careers entirely later in life. No one is defined
(00:48):
by what they do for a living. It's just a
piece of who we are, along with our families, our friends,
and the hobbies we enjoy in our free time. But
for one woman, her job didn't just come to define her.
It changed the way that we see the entire universe.
Born in Dundee, Scotland, in eighteen fifty seven, Wilhelmina eventually
became a teacher and was married at twenty to an
(01:09):
accountant named James Orr Fleming. In eighteen seventy eight, mister
and Mrs Fleming emigrated to the United States, settling in Boston,
where they had a son Edward. Sadly, Wilhelmina's life took
a dark turn sometime later when her husband up and
left the family. Forced to find work outside of the house,
she took a job as a maid for a man
named Edward Charles Pickering. He ran the Harvard College Observatory
(01:32):
with the staff of several male assistants for clerical work
such as classifying stars. But one day, Pickering, upset with
the quality of work being done by his assistance, shouted,
my Scottish maid could do better well. His wife agreed
and encouraged him to bring Fleming on as an assistant,
and Wilhelmina excelled, transitioning from dustine and changing diapers to
(01:54):
studying the data coming into the observatory. Pickering even taught
her how to analyze how light or spectra broke down
from the stars. She then viewed this spectra on photographic
plates provided to her by him. He obtained these images
by positioning a prism in front of the telescope's lens,
which split the light into a spectrum of dark and
light bands, much like a fingerprint. Each array was unique,
(02:18):
and it was Fleming's job to examine them and record
any anomalies, and she did cataloging the stars based on
the amounts of hydrogen present in their spectra. Now, her
official title might be confusing to folks today. It was computer,
which was what typists and analysts were called back then.
She even started a group at the college called the
Harvard Computers, made up entirely of women who worked for Pickering,
(02:41):
doing jobs just like hers. But she didn't stop there.
Wilhelmina went above and beyond, earning a spot on a
new project called the Henry Draper Catalog. It was being
funded by Mary Anna Draper, whose late husband, Henry, had
been an astronomer and the first person to take a
photograph of the Moon using a telescope. Wilhelmina was appointed
the leader of the project, but wound up budding heads
(03:04):
with her colleague and fellow astronomer and Tonia Maury. Maury
wanted to classify the stars using their temperatures, size, and
the strength of their spectra. It was a more complicated
way of organizing the data, whereas Wilhelmina chose to utilize
a simple alphabetical method for classifying the stars instead. Eventually,
Wilhelmina's system was improved by another computer, Annie jump Canon,
(03:26):
who organized the stars based on their surface temperatures. This
became known as the Harvard System of Spectral classification and
is still used to this day. The Henry Draper Catalog
was completed in eighteen ninety and contained over ten thousand stars,
many of which had been classified by Wilhelmina herself. Her
work eventually earned her the position of Curator of Astronomical
(03:48):
Photographs at Harvard, the first woman to step into such
a role. But perhaps her most recognized accomplishment occurred two
years before the publication of the Henry Draper Catalog. In
eighteen eighty eight, Wilhelmina was examining a photo grammatory plate
given to her by William Pickering, Edward's brother. She noted
a nebula among the constellation Orion, with a semi circular
(04:11):
indentation five minutes in diameter thirty minutes south of Zeta. Orionis.
To the average stargazer, it looked just like a horse,
hence its name, the horsehead Nebula. She also went on
to identify the first white dwarf star, although her name
was left off of almost every one of her discoveries.
Almost all of them had been attributed to the Pickerings.
(04:31):
It would be another twenty years before she'd get the
credit that she rightly deserved. Willemina Fleming started out her
career as a maid, an important job for sure, but
one that seriously underutilized her talents. She went down in
history as a prolific astronomer, a staunch supporter of women
in science. It turned out that Edward Pickering was right
(04:52):
all along. His Scottish maid could do better. Humankind is
no stranger to atrocity. Look throughout history and it's clear
(05:13):
that there isn't much humanity to be found within humanity,
and few horrors measure up to what the Nazi regime
carried out during the Second World War. They murdered millions
and performed countless acts of torture on men, women, and
children from all over Europe. At the center of it
all was the Nazis belief that the world should be
rid of inferior races and populated with only the finest
(05:35):
aryan offspring children who were deemed what they called racially
pure and of pure blood. And so in nineteen thirty five,
the lebans Born Project was started. It was the brainchild
of Heinrich Himler, Hitler's second in command and one of
the main drivers behind the Holocaust. Laban's Born or Fount
of Life, became a primary endeavor for Himler in his
(05:56):
pursuit of eugenic supremacy for the Nazis. It was originally
centered around providing support for families who were of the
proper lineage with big sarcastic air quotes here in the
recording booth trust me. This also meant caring for wards
of the state and single mothers if they were of
the correct racial and biological makeup. Single pregnant women who
(06:18):
needed help could come to a Laban's More maternity home
and give birth without facing judgment from their family. But unfortunately,
the initiative grew into more than a welfare system for
down on their luck German women. The goal was to
increase the birth rate, and so women were often recruited
to partner with s S officers in order to give
birth to the next generation of Nazi soldiers, and the
(06:38):
program wasn't just confined to Germany either. By ninety nine,
numbers were not growing fast enough, so more extreme measures
needed to be taken. The Nazis kidnapped children from other
countries such as Norway and Russia, and the native populations
of those countries also gave birth to hap German offspring,
the father's being Nazi soldiers. One of those children, born
(07:00):
in November of ninety was Annie Freed sinny Lnshtad. She
was born in Balingen, Norway, where she lived with her father,
a Wehrmacht sergeant, and her mother and grandmother. After the war,
her father went back to Germany, though, leaving Annie Freed
and her family behind. However, they didn't stay there for long.
Afraid that they might be attacked for helping the Nazis,
(07:21):
Annie Frieda and her grandmother fled to Sweden, while her
mother stayed back in Norway to work, reuniting with them
a few years later. After the tragic passing of her
mother to kidney failure at the young age of twenty one,
young Annie Freed and her grandmother moved around Sweden before
settling down in ninety. She had a lonely upbringing, but
spent many of her summers with her aunts and uncle
(07:42):
back in Norway, giving her a connection to her home country,
and when she returned to Sweden, her grandmother was there
to welcome her back. Annie Fried's grandmother often sang old
Norwegian songs around the house, instilling a love of music
and her granddaughter. This passion blossomed as she grew up.
She perform armed in school and around town for others,
but her first real foray into professional entertainment came when
(08:05):
she was a teenager, kicking off her career by singing
with a fifteen piece big band. She trained on jazz
standards and came to idolize the vocal stylings of American
singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. As she got older,
Anna Freed went on television and won a record deal
after her first appearance. This ultimately led to her first album,
titled Frieda, after her nickname growing up. It was released
(08:29):
in nineteen seventy one and produced by Benny Anderson, her
fiance at the time. Benny was friends with another married couple,
Agnetha and her husband Biorn, who performed as backup singers
on one of Frieda's hit songs. They sounded good together too,
and over the next few years the foursome began singing
under the name Biorn and Benny. Agnetha and Annie Freed,
(08:50):
which didn't exactly quite fit on any marquees. It wasn't
until nineteen seventy three when the band's manager, Stig Anderson
helped them find their new identity t He'd been referring
to them with the shorthand version of their names for
a while and decided to just make it official. From
that point on, Bjorn and Benny, Agnetha and Annie Freed
were no more using just their initials. He combined them
(09:13):
together into a single word, and the rest was musical history.
World War Two led to some truly horrendous crimes by
some of the worst people on the planet, but out
of that horror came a voice, one that went on
to define a generation, the Voice of Aba. I hope
(09:37):
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
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
(09:59):
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious
yeah h
Welcomed Aaron Manky'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. Few of us performed the same jobs for
our entire lives. Some may go from stocking shelves as
teens to selling stocks when we're older. We may even
change careers entirely later in life. No one is defined
(00:48):
by what they do for a living. It's just a
piece of who we are, along with our families, our friends,
and the hobbies we enjoy in our free time. But
for one woman, her job didn't just come to define her.
It changed the way that we see the entire universe.
Born in Dundee, Scotland, in eighteen fifty seven, Wilhelmina eventually
became a teacher and was married at twenty to an
(01:09):
accountant named James Orr Fleming. In eighteen seventy eight, mister
and Mrs Fleming emigrated to the United States, settling in Boston,
where they had a son Edward. Sadly, Wilhelmina's life took
a dark turn sometime later when her husband up and
left the family. Forced to find work outside of the house,
she took a job as a maid for a man
named Edward Charles Pickering. He ran the Harvard College Observatory
(01:32):
with the staff of several male assistants for clerical work
such as classifying stars. But one day, Pickering, upset with
the quality of work being done by his assistance, shouted,
my Scottish maid could do better well. His wife agreed
and encouraged him to bring Fleming on as an assistant,
and Wilhelmina excelled, transitioning from dustine and changing diapers to
(01:54):
studying the data coming into the observatory. Pickering even taught
her how to analyze how light or spectra broke down
from the stars. She then viewed this spectra on photographic
plates provided to her by him. He obtained these images
by positioning a prism in front of the telescope's lens,
which split the light into a spectrum of dark and
light bands, much like a fingerprint. Each array was unique,
(02:18):
and it was Fleming's job to examine them and record
any anomalies, and she did cataloging the stars based on
the amounts of hydrogen present in their spectra. Now, her
official title might be confusing to folks today. It was computer,
which was what typists and analysts were called back then.
She even started a group at the college called the
Harvard Computers, made up entirely of women who worked for Pickering,
(02:41):
doing jobs just like hers. But she didn't stop there.
Wilhelmina went above and beyond, earning a spot on a
new project called the Henry Draper Catalog. It was being
funded by Mary Anna Draper, whose late husband, Henry, had
been an astronomer and the first person to take a
photograph of the Moon using a telescope. Wilhelmina was appointed
the leader of the project, but wound up budding heads
(03:04):
with her colleague and fellow astronomer and Tonia Maury. Maury
wanted to classify the stars using their temperatures, size, and
the strength of their spectra. It was a more complicated
way of organizing the data, whereas Wilhelmina chose to utilize
a simple alphabetical method for classifying the stars instead. Eventually,
Wilhelmina's system was improved by another computer, Annie jump Canon,
(03:26):
who organized the stars based on their surface temperatures. This
became known as the Harvard System of Spectral classification and
is still used to this day. The Henry Draper Catalog
was completed in eighteen ninety and contained over ten thousand stars,
many of which had been classified by Wilhelmina herself. Her
work eventually earned her the position of Curator of Astronomical
(03:48):
Photographs at Harvard, the first woman to step into such
a role. But perhaps her most recognized accomplishment occurred two
years before the publication of the Henry Draper Catalog. In
eighteen eighty eight, Wilhelmina was examining a photo grammatory plate
given to her by William Pickering, Edward's brother. She noted
a nebula among the constellation Orion, with a semi circular
(04:11):
indentation five minutes in diameter thirty minutes south of Zeta. Orionis.
To the average stargazer, it looked just like a horse,
hence its name, the horsehead Nebula. She also went on
to identify the first white dwarf star, although her name
was left off of almost every one of her discoveries.
Almost all of them had been attributed to the Pickerings.
(04:31):
It would be another twenty years before she'd get the
credit that she rightly deserved. Willemina Fleming started out her
career as a maid, an important job for sure, but
one that seriously underutilized her talents. She went down in
history as a prolific astronomer, a staunch supporter of women
in science. It turned out that Edward Pickering was right
(04:52):
all along. His Scottish maid could do better. Humankind is
no stranger to atrocity. Look throughout history and it's clear
(05:13):
that there isn't much humanity to be found within humanity,
and few horrors measure up to what the Nazi regime
carried out during the Second World War. They murdered millions
and performed countless acts of torture on men, women, and
children from all over Europe. At the center of it
all was the Nazis belief that the world should be
rid of inferior races and populated with only the finest
(05:35):
aryan offspring children who were deemed what they called racially
pure and of pure blood. And so in nineteen thirty five,
the lebans Born Project was started. It was the brainchild
of Heinrich Himler, Hitler's second in command and one of
the main drivers behind the Holocaust. Laban's Born or Fount
of Life, became a primary endeavor for Himler in his
(05:56):
pursuit of eugenic supremacy for the Nazis. It was originally
centered around providing support for families who were of the
proper lineage with big sarcastic air quotes here in the
recording booth trust me. This also meant caring for wards
of the state and single mothers if they were of
the correct racial and biological makeup. Single pregnant women who
(06:18):
needed help could come to a Laban's More maternity home
and give birth without facing judgment from their family. But unfortunately,
the initiative grew into more than a welfare system for
down on their luck German women. The goal was to
increase the birth rate, and so women were often recruited
to partner with s S officers in order to give
birth to the next generation of Nazi soldiers, and the
(06:38):
program wasn't just confined to Germany either. By ninety nine,
numbers were not growing fast enough, so more extreme measures
needed to be taken. The Nazis kidnapped children from other
countries such as Norway and Russia, and the native populations
of those countries also gave birth to hap German offspring,
the father's being Nazi soldiers. One of those children, born
(07:00):
in November of ninety was Annie Freed sinny Lnshtad. She
was born in Balingen, Norway, where she lived with her father,
a Wehrmacht sergeant, and her mother and grandmother. After the war,
her father went back to Germany, though, leaving Annie Freed
and her family behind. However, they didn't stay there for long.
Afraid that they might be attacked for helping the Nazis,
(07:21):
Annie Frieda and her grandmother fled to Sweden, while her
mother stayed back in Norway to work, reuniting with them
a few years later. After the tragic passing of her
mother to kidney failure at the young age of twenty one,
young Annie Freed and her grandmother moved around Sweden before
settling down in ninety. She had a lonely upbringing, but
spent many of her summers with her aunts and uncle
(07:42):
back in Norway, giving her a connection to her home country,
and when she returned to Sweden, her grandmother was there
to welcome her back. Annie Fried's grandmother often sang old
Norwegian songs around the house, instilling a love of music
and her granddaughter. This passion blossomed as she grew up.
She perform armed in school and around town for others,
but her first real foray into professional entertainment came when
(08:05):
she was a teenager, kicking off her career by singing
with a fifteen piece big band. She trained on jazz
standards and came to idolize the vocal stylings of American
singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. As she got older,
Anna Freed went on television and won a record deal
after her first appearance. This ultimately led to her first album,
titled Frieda, after her nickname growing up. It was released
(08:29):
in nineteen seventy one and produced by Benny Anderson, her
fiance at the time. Benny was friends with another married couple,
Agnetha and her husband Biorn, who performed as backup singers
on one of Frieda's hit songs. They sounded good together too,
and over the next few years the foursome began singing
under the name Biorn and Benny. Agnetha and Annie Freed,
(08:50):
which didn't exactly quite fit on any marquees. It wasn't
until nineteen seventy three when the band's manager, Stig Anderson
helped them find their new identity t He'd been referring
to them with the shorthand version of their names for
a while and decided to just make it official. From
that point on, Bjorn and Benny, Agnetha and Annie Freed
were no more using just their initials. He combined them
(09:13):
together into a single word, and the rest was musical history.
World War Two led to some truly horrendous crimes by
some of the worst people on the planet, but out
of that horror came a voice, one that went on
to define a generation, the Voice of Aba. I hope
(09:37):
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
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
(09:59):
you can learn all about it over at the World
of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious
yeah h
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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