Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
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. It was just a simple advertisement,
(00:29):
and for a game, no less. There was absolutely nothing
illegal or dangerous about it, and yet here they were
sitting across the table from a pair of FBI agents.
The product in question was a pretty simple dice game,
and with the Christmas season approaching, the company had decided
to run a few ads in the biggest city in America,
(00:50):
all of them scattered throughout one single issue of The
New Yorker. All of them were small and square, sort
of like an Instagram post, and each one told interest
admirers to refer to the main advertisement on page eight six.
The game had been created by a company called Monarch Publishing,
and the ad had been written by one of their executives,
a man named Roger Paul Craig. He and his wife
(01:13):
had spent hours trying to craft the text of the
main ad, which touched on the approaching holiday season and
all of the things people might have to do to
be ready. The trouble wasn't in the text, though it
was in the artwork. At the bottom of the large
ad on page eighty six was the big, bold title
of the game, the Deadly Double. Beneath it was an
(01:35):
emblem of a bird with outstretched wings, four talents, and
two heads. It's what's known as an armorial device, a
sort of coat of arms used for identifying individuals and groups.
This particular symbol was the spitting image of the double
eagle used by the Byzantine Empire, Ivan the Terrible and
more recently Nazi Germany. Add in the fact that the
(01:59):
title of the ad in included the German word oktung,
which means danger, and it was a curious pairing for sure,
and that's probably what drew the attention of the investigators.
But it certainly wasn't the only thing they were worried about.
The bigger problem, it seems, was inside each of the
smaller ads. Each of those were identical, and they showed
(02:19):
a pair of dice in action. It's hand drawn and
has a classy tone, but the items in the ad
are a bit more mysterious. One of the die showed
three sides, revealing three distinct numbers twelve and the Roman numeral.
The other die showed the reader five zero and seven.
(02:40):
So as Roger Paul Craig and his wife sat across
the table from the FBI agents, they were starting to
get nervous. The numbers, according to the investigators, were significant,
and that wasn't a good thing, they said, was awfully
close to the latitude line where Pearl Harbor sat. The
twelve and seven looked a lot like December seven, the
(03:02):
date of that infamous attack, and the O five could
very well have been oh five hours the original planned
start time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But so
what It wasn't illegal to place historical details in an advertisement. Yes,
it would be in poor taste. Sure, over lives were
lost in the Battle of Pearl Harbor, so it's probably
(03:24):
not the best subject matter for a dice game looking
for gangbuster Christmas sales. But the trouble wasn't the subject matter.
It was the timing. You see, the ad that Monarch
Publishing placed in The New Yorker was published in November
on the two, in fact November of nineteen sixteen, days
(03:45):
before Pearl Harbor was attacked. It's easy to take computers
for granted, these days, they do so much for us.
(04:06):
They allow us to break barriers and create new forms
of art and expression and take selfies with birds flying
around our heads. Important stuff, clearly, But they haven't always
been so small. Take the Apollo Guidance computer. It was
built by M I. T and used by NASA in
nineteen sixty nine for their Apollo eleven mission, and that's
(04:27):
the one that put the first humans on the Moon.
Each one weighed fifty pounds and was the size of
a piece of carry on luggage. But they worked. We
landed people on the freaking Moon after all. As crazy
as am I sound, though, the mobile phone in your
pocket is more powerful than that NASA computer thirty two
thousand times faster. In fact, you see, computers have a
(04:49):
tendency to get smaller and more powerful over time. Go
back far enough, and some of the earliest electrical computers
were massive and slow. Eniac is a great example. It
filled up an entire room, but in ninety six it
was a supercomputer. There's another old computer worth mentioning, though
(05:10):
it's not electrical. But by definition, computers are nothing more
than machines that can be programmed to carry out specific tasks. Calculators, calendars,
counting devices, that sort of thing. Charles Babbage is the
big name in that field, thanks to the calculator he
built in eighteen twenty two. It was all gears and levers,
but it did its job nicely, and so did this
(05:31):
other one. Like a lot of old computers, it's not
in the best of shape today, but when it was
brand spanking new, it focused on astronomy. I want to
know when the next eclipse was going to be. This
computer would tell you the lunar cycle you're covered. People
could even program it to track the time between special,
regular occurring social events. It was brilliant. But here's where
(05:55):
it gets weird. This computer is older than babbage Is
eighteen two device, and yet it's smaller than NASA's Apollo
guidance computers, which seems to fly in the face of
how useful and advanced it really was for at the time.
You see, this computer wasn't crafted in the workshop of
an English mechanic or in an M. I. T. Lab.
(06:16):
It was built so long ago that we forgot about
it in the first place. But in nineteen hundred some
men found it and handed it over to people who
might know what to do with such a powerful device.
Those men were sponge divers. They found the computer underwater,
just off the coast of the Greek island of Antikathera,
(06:37):
and it hadn't been there since the eighteen hundreds or
even the seventeen hundreds. According to the archaeologists who have
studied it over the course of the past century, this
computer is much older. It was built over two thousand
years ago. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
(06:58):
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, and you can learn all about it
(07:20):
over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious.