May 18, 2023 • 8 mins
Whether brief or long-standing, these two curiousities have left a lasting impact on the world.
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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 are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
We've all had to make them at some point in
our lives. We grab a shoebox, some glue and construction
paper and we build a little tableau inside for a
school project. Maybe it depicts a particular scene from a
book that we've read, or an important moment in history.
And when we're done, we stand in front of the
class and tell everyone about what we've made. And honestly,
(00:57):
it can't be over fast enough. Kennet, there is little
l that's more awkward than telling your classmates about the
action figures and paper trees that you've glued inside of
a shoe box. But from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries,
people used to make a living with their tiny dioramas.
Folks would flock to their stands in the streets to
have a look for themselves, but they weren't called dioramas.
Back then, they were called raris. The origin of the
(01:20):
word rarey most likely stems from the word rarity. They were,
in a sense, tiny cabinets of curiosities, but these weren't
collections of disparate objects. Those who operated them back then
called them peep shows, long before that term gained a
more risque definition. During the fourteen hundreds, Italian artist Leon
Battista Alberti painted beautiful pictures which he placed inside a box.
(01:43):
The viewers would look through a small aperture on the
outside and see sunny day scenes turn into night scenes
with the moon and stars in the sky. Scholars today
believe the images may have been partially transparent, whereas certain
parts of the pictures would appear while others would be hidden,
depending on how they were lit inside the box. In fact,
it's also possible that Alberti's box is one of the
earliest types of projectors or magic lanterns, which would shine
(02:07):
light through a lens onto a glass slide with a
picture on it in order to project it onto the wall.
But raries were a little different. They were comprised of
ornate wooden boxes which were subdivided into compartments inside and
within each little box was a scene. Sometimes it was
an illustrated picture of a landscape or a notable event.
Other times the cell held a three dimensional tableau constructed
(02:31):
of paper and other materials. On the exterior of the boxes,
there were viewing holes through which spectators could watch as
the rarey operator would pull a string and move the
pictures around. He also told stories to breathe life into
these static images. Before we had nickelodeons and motion pictures,
we had rares. These kinds of peep shows actually became
(02:52):
most popular in Holland during the sixteen hundreds. Some artists
went so far as to place biconvex lenses over the
viewing holes to exis exaggerate the depth of the images inside. Eventually,
glass slides and translucent illustrations were melded with candlelight. Suddenly,
scenes set during the day could change tonight simply by
moving the candle in a certain way. This was how
(03:14):
raris gave way to magic lantern shows. Later on, during
the early nineteen hundreds, Japan even got in on the
rarey craze with boxes they called appropriately Holland machines. Rare's
had actually been in Japan since these sixteen forties, after
the Dutch had gifted one to the showgun of the time,
but they didn't gain steam with the Japanese artists until
around the eighteenth century, after the Chinese had started working
(03:36):
with them as well. But not everybody enjoyed the whimsy
of the rari. According to an article in a British
newspaper from eighteen oh three, a soldier had paid a
halfpenny to take a peek inside a rareri that had
been set up on a Lancaster bridge in Stockport. As
he gazed upon pictures of beautiful cities from all over
the world, the showman explained what he was seeing. He said,
(03:57):
there is the famous city of Paris. You can see
the gray Bonaparte haranguing his troops for the invasion of England.
The soldier was incensed. He loathed Napoleon and his men.
In a fit of anger, he hoisted the rary box
and hurled it over the bridge. The showman, though, did
not skip a beat and continued to say, there and
now you see Bonaparte and his troops drowning, and be
(04:20):
damned to them. I guess everyone's a critic curious, isn't
it It's hard to know what a job is going
(04:41):
to be like until you start working there. An interview
isn't enough, and either is reading online reviews. To really
get a feel for a company and its culture, you
have to punch the clock. In eighteen sixty one, a
young man named Sam thought that he had found a
job that would fulfill him and give him purpose. Instead,
he quickly realized that it was nothing but a waste
of time and a death sentence. Sam was from Missouri,
(05:03):
a border state that facilitated both sides of the Civil War,
but it was also a slave state, and its governor,
Claiborne Fox Jackson, was decidedly pro slavery. He'd been born
into a wealthy family of slaveholders and had worked to
push Missouri towards a session against the Union. As for Sam, well,
he hadn't planned on taking any part in the Civil War.
At first. He been a riverboat captain navigating the Mississippi
(05:27):
until Union forces eventually shut it down. With no job,
he went back home to figure out what was next
for him. He was almost drafted by the Union one day,
while he and his friends had been relaxing near their hometown, Levy.
They had been stopped by Union soldiers who brought them
to Saint Louis for the purpose of piloting ships up
the Missouri River. The district commander had been giving the
boys the rundown when he suddenly left to attend to
(05:48):
two young ladies who were waiting nearby. Sam and his
friends snuck outs while nobody was looking and ran straight
back to their hometown of Hannibal. Now at home and safe,
Sam soon read the governor's call for volunteers in his
local paper. Fox wanted young men to join the Confederate
army and take on the Union forces that were invading
Missouri and that included Sam's hometown, and so Sam signed
(06:10):
up along with fourteen other men looking to support their
governor and their state from the Union invasion. In the
summer of eighteen sixty one, Sam loaded up a mule
with a valleys, two blankets, a carpet bag, a quilt,
a rifle, twenty yards of rope, a frying pan, and
an umbrella before heading out to meet Colonel John Rawls,
a veteran of the Mexican American War. Rawls was a
(06:31):
true and tried Confederate who gave Sam and his companions
an impassioned speech about duty and honor, and then made
them swear on a bible to defend Missouri to the death.
But his words fell on deaf ears. These were kids
barely in their twenties who had signed up thinking that
they would be heroes. Instead, they were more like college freshmen,
let loose on their own for the first time in
their lives. They shunned responsibility and flought over chores. Whenever
(06:55):
they heard that Union troops might be in the area,
they hid from battle. One night, when they finally got
the killer instinct Colonel Rowles had been hoping for. A
stranger had come into their camp, hidden by the darkness,
Sam shot him. His fellow troops soon followed. When the
gunpowder had cleared, they realized that they hadn't killed a
Union soldier. They'd murdered an innocent, unarmed man. The boys
(07:17):
continued to camp and patrol the area, almost coming face
to face with a formidable regiment commanded by none other
than Ulysses S. Grant, but they quickly retreated and decided
that war just wasn't for them. Sam ran off to
Saint Louis, where his sister lived, and stayed there until
his brother came calling with the job opportunity out west.
He needed someone to help him with his new duties
(07:38):
as Secretary to the Governor of the Nevada Territory, a
position that had been appointed by President Lincoln himself. Sam
jumped at the chance and high tailed it out of
Missouri until the end of the war. By then, he'd
been long forgotten, at least under his given name of
Samuel Clemons. Soon everybody would know him as humorist and
author Mark Twain, but they wouldn't know that for two
(08:00):
fu awful weeks in eighteen sixty one, the beloved writer
from Missouri had coseplayed as a Confederate soldier. 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
(08:23):
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, 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 are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
We've all had to make them at some point in
our lives. We grab a shoebox, some glue and construction
paper and we build a little tableau inside for a
school project. Maybe it depicts a particular scene from a
book that we've read, or an important moment in history.
And when we're done, we stand in front of the
class and tell everyone about what we've made. And honestly,
(00:57):
it can't be over fast enough. Kennet, there is little
l that's more awkward than telling your classmates about the
action figures and paper trees that you've glued inside of
a shoe box. But from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries,
people used to make a living with their tiny dioramas.
Folks would flock to their stands in the streets to
have a look for themselves, but they weren't called dioramas.
Back then, they were called raris. The origin of the
(01:20):
word rarey most likely stems from the word rarity. They were,
in a sense, tiny cabinets of curiosities, but these weren't
collections of disparate objects. Those who operated them back then
called them peep shows, long before that term gained a
more risque definition. During the fourteen hundreds, Italian artist Leon
Battista Alberti painted beautiful pictures which he placed inside a box.
(01:43):
The viewers would look through a small aperture on the
outside and see sunny day scenes turn into night scenes
with the moon and stars in the sky. Scholars today
believe the images may have been partially transparent, whereas certain
parts of the pictures would appear while others would be hidden,
depending on how they were lit inside the box. In fact,
it's also possible that Alberti's box is one of the
earliest types of projectors or magic lanterns, which would shine
(02:07):
light through a lens onto a glass slide with a
picture on it in order to project it onto the wall.
But raries were a little different. They were comprised of
ornate wooden boxes which were subdivided into compartments inside and
within each little box was a scene. Sometimes it was
an illustrated picture of a landscape or a notable event.
Other times the cell held a three dimensional tableau constructed
(02:31):
of paper and other materials. On the exterior of the boxes,
there were viewing holes through which spectators could watch as
the rarey operator would pull a string and move the
pictures around. He also told stories to breathe life into
these static images. Before we had nickelodeons and motion pictures,
we had rares. These kinds of peep shows actually became
(02:52):
most popular in Holland during the sixteen hundreds. Some artists
went so far as to place biconvex lenses over the
viewing holes to exis exaggerate the depth of the images inside. Eventually,
glass slides and translucent illustrations were melded with candlelight. Suddenly,
scenes set during the day could change tonight simply by
moving the candle in a certain way. This was how
(03:14):
raris gave way to magic lantern shows. Later on, during
the early nineteen hundreds, Japan even got in on the
rarey craze with boxes they called appropriately Holland machines. Rare's
had actually been in Japan since these sixteen forties, after
the Dutch had gifted one to the showgun of the time,
but they didn't gain steam with the Japanese artists until
around the eighteenth century, after the Chinese had started working
(03:36):
with them as well. But not everybody enjoyed the whimsy
of the rari. According to an article in a British
newspaper from eighteen oh three, a soldier had paid a
halfpenny to take a peek inside a rareri that had
been set up on a Lancaster bridge in Stockport. As
he gazed upon pictures of beautiful cities from all over
the world, the showman explained what he was seeing. He said,
(03:57):
there is the famous city of Paris. You can see
the gray Bonaparte haranguing his troops for the invasion of England.
The soldier was incensed. He loathed Napoleon and his men.
In a fit of anger, he hoisted the rary box
and hurled it over the bridge. The showman, though, did
not skip a beat and continued to say, there and
now you see Bonaparte and his troops drowning, and be
(04:20):
damned to them. I guess everyone's a critic curious, isn't
it It's hard to know what a job is going
(04:41):
to be like until you start working there. An interview
isn't enough, and either is reading online reviews. To really
get a feel for a company and its culture, you
have to punch the clock. In eighteen sixty one, a
young man named Sam thought that he had found a
job that would fulfill him and give him purpose. Instead,
he quickly realized that it was nothing but a waste
of time and a death sentence. Sam was from Missouri,
(05:03):
a border state that facilitated both sides of the Civil War,
but it was also a slave state, and its governor,
Claiborne Fox Jackson, was decidedly pro slavery. He'd been born
into a wealthy family of slaveholders and had worked to
push Missouri towards a session against the Union. As for Sam, well,
he hadn't planned on taking any part in the Civil War.
At first. He been a riverboat captain navigating the Mississippi
(05:27):
until Union forces eventually shut it down. With no job,
he went back home to figure out what was next
for him. He was almost drafted by the Union one day,
while he and his friends had been relaxing near their hometown, Levy.
They had been stopped by Union soldiers who brought them
to Saint Louis for the purpose of piloting ships up
the Missouri River. The district commander had been giving the
boys the rundown when he suddenly left to attend to
(05:48):
two young ladies who were waiting nearby. Sam and his
friends snuck outs while nobody was looking and ran straight
back to their hometown of Hannibal. Now at home and safe,
Sam soon read the governor's call for volunteers in his
local paper. Fox wanted young men to join the Confederate
army and take on the Union forces that were invading
Missouri and that included Sam's hometown, and so Sam signed
(06:10):
up along with fourteen other men looking to support their
governor and their state from the Union invasion. In the
summer of eighteen sixty one, Sam loaded up a mule
with a valleys, two blankets, a carpet bag, a quilt,
a rifle, twenty yards of rope, a frying pan, and
an umbrella before heading out to meet Colonel John Rawls,
a veteran of the Mexican American War. Rawls was a
(06:31):
true and tried Confederate who gave Sam and his companions
an impassioned speech about duty and honor, and then made
them swear on a bible to defend Missouri to the death.
But his words fell on deaf ears. These were kids
barely in their twenties who had signed up thinking that
they would be heroes. Instead, they were more like college freshmen,
let loose on their own for the first time in
their lives. They shunned responsibility and flought over chores. Whenever
(06:55):
they heard that Union troops might be in the area,
they hid from battle. One night, when they finally got
the killer instinct Colonel Rowles had been hoping for. A
stranger had come into their camp, hidden by the darkness,
Sam shot him. His fellow troops soon followed. When the
gunpowder had cleared, they realized that they hadn't killed a
Union soldier. They'd murdered an innocent, unarmed man. The boys
(07:17):
continued to camp and patrol the area, almost coming face
to face with a formidable regiment commanded by none other
than Ulysses S. Grant, but they quickly retreated and decided
that war just wasn't for them. Sam ran off to
Saint Louis, where his sister lived, and stayed there until
his brother came calling with the job opportunity out west.
He needed someone to help him with his new duties
(07:38):
as Secretary to the Governor of the Nevada Territory, a
position that had been appointed by President Lincoln himself. Sam
jumped at the chance and high tailed it out of
Missouri until the end of the war. By then, he'd
been long forgotten, at least under his given name of
Samuel Clemons. Soon everybody would know him as humorist and
author Mark Twain, but they wouldn't know that for two
(08:00):
fu awful weeks in eighteen sixty one, the beloved writer
from Missouri had coseplayed as a Confederate soldier. 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
(08:23):
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, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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