Dr. Data

Creations are on display today! Sometimes it takes a village, and other times it's just a matter of available materials. Either way, the results are amazing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
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. The Bubonic plague, also

(00:29):
known as the Black Death, was a particularly devastating sickness
in the hundreds that caused fevers, seizures, gang green and
eventually death. When the plague tour through Europe, it killed
millions across multiple countries as people fled from one contaminated
area to another looking for safety. While the epidemic only

(00:51):
lasted four years, it was known to crop up again
in various cities later on. London, Vienna, Marseilles, Russia all
saw recurrences of the disease throughout the sixteen and seventeen hundreds.
It was during a particularly bad outbreak in sixteen thirty
three when the residents of a small village in Bavaria

(01:13):
were struggling. The plague had been ravaging the neighboring area
and the villagers of Oberammergu were terrified of its spreading
to their small town, so they turned to the only
one they could think of for help. God. They prayed
long and hard for salvation, and in the process they

(01:33):
made a kind of deal with God. If he would
spare them from the bubonic plague that had wiped out
the nearby towns, they would put on a play about
the life and Death of Jesus every ten years as
a way of saying thanks. I know it might sound
strange to do nothing but pray for help with such
a threat looming over them. When the plague typically showed

(01:55):
up in a town, it became a waiting game to
see who would be taken next, and biotics wouldn't be
developed for another three years. But the people needed help,
and they had nowhere else to turn except to the
one place where they had gone looking for peace so
many times before. For some faith is a light that
frightens away the darkness, and a certainly described these villagers.

(02:19):
So they decided to shed a little light on their
current problem. But they needed a sign. Only one person
out of every thousand died from the plague in October
of sixteen thirty two, but that number rose to twenty
by March of sixty three, and the disease was spreading fast.
The villagers put their plan to work and prayed for guidance.

(02:43):
The following July, the number of deaths plummeted back down
to just one out of a thousand. It seemed their
prayers had been answered. Ober ahm ergu immediately went to
work putting their play into production. The Passion Play, as
it was called, took almost an entire day to perform
all sixteen of its acts, beginning with Jesus driving the

(03:06):
money changers from the temple and ending with his death
and resurrection. It became such a spectacle that people started
coming in from all over the world to see it.
In seventeen ninety, the town began charging admission, also creating
package deals that combined tickets with stays at local inns
and hotels. The Passion Play had become a once in

(03:29):
a decade event not to be missed. Through it all,
the winds of rumor would often carry news to the
villagers of a fresh outbreak of the plague each time
it happened, though it would fade away before it ever
reached their borders, and as the plague became less and
less of a threat over the centuries, the need for

(03:49):
that elaborate performance. The villager's end of the bargain so
to speak became less and less over a Mergou hasn't
seen the plague since the sixteen hundreds, so maybe their
idea worked. Perhaps God really did honor their agreement, or
maybe it just faded away on its own. Regardless of
what stopped it, the town has continued to put on

(04:11):
the Passion Play every decade for the last three hundred
and seventy seven years. Over two thousand people now work
to produce the show, which spans one hundred days of
live performances. The number of visitors to the village has
averaged half a million since nineteen and a special theater
has even been constructed to house the production. For many,

(04:33):
science and medicine have upstaged faith, while others believe their
faith provided the best defense against the darkness. One thing
is certain, though, when it comes to handling a deadly outbreak,
it certainly takes a village. M NASA is known for

(05:04):
making the impossible possible, from launching astronauts into space and
landing on the Moon to sending a robot to Mars
to gather data on the planet's soil. NASA is at
the forefront of space exploration. It's been that way ever
since President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the organization in with
a goal of sending America's best and brightest out to

(05:26):
explore the farthest reaches of space, and in order to
perform such explorations, the people going up there were required
to wear state of the art space suits to regulate
pressure and temperature, allow them to communicate with mission control,
and to collect surface samples. Space suits are complicated feats

(05:47):
of engineering that need to be tested rigorously, otherwise one
flaw can spell disaster for the person wearing it, and
as we all know, in space, no one can hear
you scream. NASA as all sorts of ways to test
a space suit. The one such method is the vacuum test,
where engineers wear the suit and enter a chamber that

(06:08):
has all the air sucked out of it. The suits
are hooked up to life support systems while the engineers
monitor performance and stability. It's a great way to mimic
the demands of space. Other tests are a little simpler,
and they involve an astronaut simply wearing the suit and
letting a team of scientists know how it feels. Can
they move freely? Is there any resistance? Such a test

(06:32):
depends on the person inside the suit and any number
of factors, including how they feel on that particular day
and their state of mind. An astronaut with a pulled
muscle might unintentionally cause a change to the design that
could fail at the worst possible moment. NASA doesn't want
anecdotal data clogging up their research. If they miscalculate based

(06:53):
on one person's experience, the rest of the suits may
be compromised, so engineers have sought more objective methods and
testing their suit designs. One such method is K six
five zero one. Not really a catchy name, I know,
but what else do you call a six ft tall
robot designed by some of the best scientists in the world.

(07:14):
I'm not sure a name like Phil would work in
this situation. K six five zero one is a custom
designed android that is able to grow from five ft
five to six ft two and cover a wide range
of body types. The wires and tubes that fill its
body are like our own arteries, but instead of pumping blood,

(07:34):
they pump electricity and hydraulic fluid in order to move
its aluminum skeleton. K six five zero one is more
than just a glorified mannequin. Though it can shake hands,
lift small objects, and balance itself without any assistance, all
of which comes in pretty handy when testing the viability
of a suit designed without relying on a human subject. Unfortunately,

(07:59):
K six five zero one has one small problem. Well,
it's more like a bunch of small problems that add
up to one bigger problem. He leaks. At least he
did when he was first built and tested, but it's
been over fifty years since then built in NASA's Android
was the first victim of the materials at the time.

(08:22):
It's hydraulic system required ten thousand pounds of fluid force
to move its arms and legs. The tubing couldn't take
the pressure, and one leak had the ability to destroy
a space suit that today would be worth three quarters
of a million dollars. Imagine that. At a time when
resources were strained as they worked to put a man
on the Moon, NASA invented a metal man who could

(08:45):
have helped them build the perfect space suit, But the
risk was too great and the costs were too high,
so NASA scrapped the project. They went back to their
tried and true method of testing human guinea pigs for
their space suits but don't work. You can still see
K six five zero one on display at the National
Aeronautics and Space Museum in Washington, d C. Or you

(09:09):
can look up. If you squint hard enough, you just
might see its descendant, robinot To, assisting the humans on
board the International Space Station. It runs in the family,
after all, Like father, like son. I hope you've enjoyed
today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for

(09:33):
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 over at the World of Lore

(09:54):
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.