Spark

Our 500th episode will give you the sort of tour the Cabinet of Curiosities has become famous for: the unlikely stories behind some everyday objects we all take for granted. Enjoy, and thanks for all the support!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio
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 of Curiosities. An

(00:36):
idea is like a spark, a flash of light in
our mind that illuminates our subconscious and those sparks have
led to some brilliant discoveries. The traffic light, the telephone,
and even liquid paper all come from people who've been
struck by the right idea at the right time. Soldiers
during the late sixteen hundreds had also experienced their own
light bulb moments, emphasis on the light part. Back then,

(01:00):
soldiers carried muskets into battle. They used flint and gunpowder
to fire a little metal ball from a barrel of
their rifle. But they quickly realized that the spark created
when the real struck flint could be used for other things.
Broken muskets and pistols weren't of much use as weapons,
but they could certainly help the men see in the dark.
Early on, a soldier would fill the barrel of a

(01:21):
malfunctioning gun with tinder, such as dried out pieces of
wood or brush, and then they'd fire the gun as usual.
The spark that resulted would light the tinder inside and
create a kind of torch. What they didn't realize at
the time was that they had invented the world's first lighters. Eventually,
gun manufacturers started taking their old, broken pistols and converting

(01:41):
them into flintlock lighters for home use. These devices looked
like guns with candle holders affixed to the top. One
pull of the trigger and a flame would spark into
a small reservoir at the front. A candle could then
be tipped for the flame before placing it inside the
holder on top of the lighter. It wasn't until eighteen
twenty three, though, when one man found a less violent

(02:03):
way to create a steady flame. His name was Johann
Wolfgang dober Reiner, and he designed a jar that combined
three things, hydrogen gas with a platinum sponge and oxygen.
The chemical reaction caused the hydrogen to ignite, creating a flame,
and he called his creation a dober Reiner's lamp. They
became quite popular with over a million sold over the

(02:24):
next several years. But three years later another inventor started
working on his own method for starting impromptu fires. John
Walker was a chemist and druggist from England who had
a passion for combustion, but not in a creepy, destructive way.
He wanted to find the right mixture of chemicals that
would provide a flame that would burn slowly on a
stick of wood. He'd been working with various concoctions when

(02:47):
he accidentally struck a wooden stick against his hearth. The
stick had been dipped in Walker's special brew, and it
produced a flame instantly. It was at that moment he
realized that he had done it. Walk began coating wooden
sticks in sulfur before dipping them in a combination of
potassium chlorates, gum arabic and sulfide of antimony. He called

(03:08):
his invention friction lights, although today we know them better
as matches. The concept of the match, though, dates back
to ancient China, where people would soak pinewood sticks with
sulfur and bring them close to a flame so that
they had something to light their lamps with. But these
were not friction matches that we know today. For those
we can thank John Walker. Unfortunately, a man named Charles

(03:30):
Souria from France changed the formula. He substituted white phosphorus
for the antimony sulfide. This caused two big problems. First,
these new matches didn't only light when struck against a
rough surface. If they weren't stored properly, they could spontaneously
ignite and start a massive blaze. The other problem was
that white sulfurus was very toxic. There were numerous deaths

(03:53):
attributed to white phosphorus poisoning during the mid nineteenth century,
and those who manufactured the matches were affected by a
condition known as Fossey jaw, or a phosphorus necrosis of
the jaw. It wasn't until the eighteen fifties when white
phosphorus was replaced with a red variety and moved from
the head of the match to the striking surface on

(04:14):
the side of the box. These new matches were called
safety matches, and by nineteen twenty five, almost every country
had either outlawed the use of white phosphorus or taxed
it so heavily that it just wasn't worth incorporating. Looking back,
it's interesting to see how our mind play tricks on
us because the idea of a match is simple, a
stick of wood dipped in some chemicals. It's far less

(04:36):
complicated than a contraption filled with metal and gas and
moving parts. It may be hard to imagine, but the
lighter predates the fiction match by a few hundred years,
and just thinking about that gets me all fired up.

(05:04):
Trust is not easy to build, especially as a new business.
It could take a long time, even years, before a
customer's loyalty is earned. But one misstep early on and
it could spell the end of something great before it
has a chance to truly grow. And just like what
happened to Nicholas a pair Born in France in seventeen
forty nine, Nicholas was a sort of middle child in

(05:25):
his massive family. He was the ninth of eleven children,
then worked at his parents in until he was twenty.
He then spun off on his own with one of
his brothers to open a brewery together. Nicholas had always
been drawn to the culinary arts. From seventeen eighty four
to seventeen ninety five he worked as a chef and
confectioner in Paris, but it was in that final year

(05:46):
as a chef when he started exploring something new and exciting,
food preservation. He began storing things like jellies, soups, and
vegetables in glass jars, which he sealed with cork and
wax before dunking them in boiling water to cook them.
Historians claimed that this technique was not new at the time,
but Nicholas was the first to do it on a

(06:06):
wide scale. It took a few years, but by the
early nineteenth century, the entrepreneur had opened the world's first
factory dedicated to bottling and preserving food. He eventually graduated
from jellies and jams to more substantial foods like beef
and eggs. Even full dishes could be preserved using Nicholas's method.
His technique of ceiling and boiling each jar was given

(06:28):
the name appetization, but it cost a lot of money
to preserve food. The equipment was expensive, and Nicholas himself
was lousy at business. Only two years after his factory opened,
it closed down and the father of food science was bankrupt.
But his idea lived on, and people continued to store
their fruits and vegetables using Nicholas's ceiling method. Of course,

(06:51):
there was still the problem of the jars themselves. Nicholas
had started with champagne bottles before moving on to thicker,
wider mouthed bottles that could accommodate larger food items. It
wasn't until eighteen fifty eight, fifty two years after the
Apport factory closed down, when a new idea hit the market.
It had been invented by a New Jersey man named
John Landis. No not the director of Animal House. This

(07:14):
John was an inventor. He had gotten his start as
a tinsmith before pattenting a new kind of product, one
that would take canning and food preservation to a whole
new level. Rather than rely on cork and wax to
seal canning jars as Nicholas a pair had done, John
created a jar with a metal lid that could be
screwed on instead. It was originally made with the zinc

(07:35):
cap that had been lined with milk glass, a type
of colored glass used in everything from pottery to clock faces,
and just below the lip of the jar sat a
rubber gasket that would help seal everything once the lid
was tightened over the top. It was a game changer,
and others continued to improve its design over the next
fifty years. For example, a man named Alexander Kerr created

(07:57):
lids that had rubber seals set around their rim rather
than on the jars themselves. In nineteen fifteen, he introduced
the lid that separated into two pieces. Since the lined
center of the lid would wear out faster than the rim,
canners no longer had to toss out the whole lid.
They only had to replace the middle portion, a design
that endures to this day. John eventually sold his patents

(08:20):
to Lewis R. Boyd's Sheet Metal Screw Company in eighteen
fifty nine. Twelve years later, John and Boyd went into
business together and license their jars to other glassmakers, But
because he had not patented any of his improved designs
over the years, the courts ruled that he had forfeited
his patent due to abandonment. From that point on, other
companies were free to create their own jars just like John's. Today,

(08:43):
though one company stands tall as the largest manufacturer of
glass canning jars, the Ball Corporation, based in Broomfield, Colorado.
Thanks to the work of Nicholas Apear and later John
Landis Mason, the Mason Jar remains the gold standard for
long term food preserve and all it took to make
it was a little know how and a can do attitude.

(09:10):
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,

(09:32):
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Loore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.