Clumpy

Crappy situations often lead to curious endings.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosity is 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

(00:27):
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Everyone loves a good invention, something
that took time to design. An engineer to solve a
particular problem, come up with an idea that scratches an itch,
and people will line up to buy it in droves.

(00:47):
Some are novel, like liquid paper or the super soaker,
while others change the world, like the television or the
printing press. But some inventions aren't inventions at all. They're
simply ingenious. Way is to use existing products, And even
though nobody spent thousands of dollars building a prototype, that
doesn't make these products any less useful. Perhaps no one

(01:09):
knows the utility of a common, everyday item better than
Ed Low. Low was born in nineteen twenty in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Several years later, his family up and moved everyone to Kassopolis, Michigan,
just over the border from Indiana. When he was in
his twenties. Low enlisted to serve in World War Two
and returned home in nineteen forty six to work for
his father, Henry, who owned a company that sold blocks

(01:31):
of ice and absorbents such as sawdust to local customers.
The company sold another kind of absorbent as well. It
was called Fuller's Earth, a type of clay used to
clean up oil and grease. In some cases, it has
been used to save people from being poisoned, as the
clay is able to mop up and break down certain
chemical agents in the stomach. One day in January of

(01:53):
ninety seven, a friend of Lowe's named Cage Draper approached
him with a problem. She had a roommate who went
to the bathroom in a tray lined with ashes. When
the roommate was finished doing their business, they tracked throughout
the house, leaving footprints everywhere. She asked low for sand
to fill the pan instead. She had her own, but
it had been so cold outside that her sandpile had

(02:15):
frozen salad. It had been her reason for switching to
ashes in the first place. Unfortunately, sand presented its own
set of issues. It would track everywhere too, and be
just as messy as the ashes that she was currently using,
so instead, Low suggested that she used Fuller's Earth. The
clay material was far more absorbent and wouldn't leave a

(02:36):
residue all over her floors. He gave her a bag
of it from the trunk of his car and then
didn't think anything more about it. Mrs Draper returned sometime
later and asked for another bag. The first had worked,
wonders her roommate no longer left her floors soot stained
or sandy. You see, k Draper's roommates was a cat,
and ed Lowe had just given her the first ever

(02:57):
bag of kitty litter. He had originally tried to market
it as a type of poultry litter that was more
sanitary than the usual stuff, which was made of feathers,
chicken feces, excess feed, and other bedding material. Like the
chickens it was meant to help. However, that product really
didn't fly, but Mrs Draper saw how useful it was
for her. Once low realized that he had a hit

(03:20):
product on his hands, he bagged up more clay, wrote
the words kitty litter across the front of each bag,
and took them to a local store to sell. The
shop owner refused, no one was going to pay sixty
five cents for a five pound bag of clay when
they could spend a penny on a bag of sawdust,
and said, but Low was sure that what he had
was better than sawdust. He told the owner to give

(03:41):
away the bags to his customers. It didn't take long
for those same customers to come back clamoring for more,
and sixty cents was just fine to them. Despite selling
out at one store, Low's product was anything but an
overnight success. He didn't cross a million dollars in sales
until eight years later. Eight years of trade shows, convention halls,

(04:02):
and good old face to face marketing as a traveling salesman,
but it eventually got him over that hump. He even
went to cat shows and volunteered to clean the litter
boxes with his own product, just to show how absorbent
it was and how it killed odors. Eventually, his kitty
litter became a nationwide phenomenon. He secured hundreds of patents, trademarks,

(04:23):
and copyrights and single handedly created an industry worth almost
three billion dollars today. It may have started out as
just a pile of clay, but ed Lowe managed to
turn his product into the Cat's Pajamas. If you tell

(04:50):
people that you're going to do something, it's expected that
you do it. Right to try and fail means that
you've at least put in the attempt, even if it
didn't turn out the way that you hoped to. Never
make a try at all makes you a disappointment in
the eyes of those who supported you. But to lie
about your accomplishment, to make people think that you've done it,
when in reality you haven't done anything at all, well

(05:11):
you better hope they never find out. Donald Crowhurst told
people that he was going to sail around the world.
What actually happened it was far stranger. Crowhurst lived in
British India until he was fifteen years old, when his
family left to return to England. It had been a
rough childhood for him. His father died one year after
returning to England, and for the next five years Crowhurst

(05:32):
served as the apprentice to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, after
which he became a pilot for the Royal Air Force.
For unknown reasons, though he left the r a F
to pursue a career in the army but that didn't
last long either, as he was implicated in an incident
involving a stolen car. By nineteen sixty two, he had
started his own electronics business and married a woman named

(05:53):
Claire O'Leary. It seems the high jinks of his youth
were behind him and he had settled down to become
a family man. On the weekends, he would go sailing
and build small gadgets to help him on the water.
One such device was called the Navigator, which relied on
radio signals to pinpoint a boat's location. Crowhurst used it
on his own vessel and thought that it might be

(06:14):
a big seller among the wider sailing market. Unfortunately, it
didn't take off the way he had hoped, and the
money he desperately needed to keep himself and his business
afloat just wasn't coming in. But an opportunity soon presented
itself that would lip the struggling entrepreneur out of the
red and into the history books. It was a race
sponsored by the British Sunday Times that pits sailing experts

(06:37):
and amateurs against each other their goal to circumnavigate the
globe single handedly. The grand prize was five thousand pounds
about seventy five thousand American dollars by today's standards. Competitors
had to begin their voyage anytime between June one and
October thirty one of nineteen sixty. Crowhurst had a boatyard

(06:57):
in Norfolk build his boat, a forty ftlaw trimaran dubbed
the Tenmouth Electron. Sponsorship money was meager and the deadline
to leave was closing in, so corners were cut to
finish the boat on time. He finally set out on
the last day possible according to the rule book, but
his rushing and his lack of funds meant that many
of the boat's safety features just weren't completed. He departed

(07:19):
on Halloween from the seaside town of ten Mouth in Devon, England.
Right away it was clear that he was not cut
out for a trip around the world, especially by himself.
His pace was dismal. He was traveling at half the
speed necessary to keep up with the other contestants, and
he was still fixing things as he was going, including
leaks in the boat itself. Based on his logs from

(07:42):
the event, Crowhurst believed that even then he had a
fifty fifty shot at even finishing the race alive, let
alone winning, he had to come up with a plan
and fast, otherwise he was liable to die on board
within the next several weeks. After more than two months
without any updates that left his family desperate for a
glimmer of hope that he was okay, Crowhurst radioed in

(08:04):
that he had covered two and forty three nautical miles
in a single day. It was a record, just not
a real one. He had come up with an elaborate
ruse early in his trip, one that had him turning
off his radio and hanging out in the South Atlantic
for just a few months. After some time, he would
show up in England as though he had completed the

(08:25):
whole trip. He didn't expect to win. In fact, he
wanted to make sure of it, as his falsified logs
wouldn't be looked at too closely if he came in
at last place. But Crowhurst put about as much thought
into fabricating his navigation logs as he did into the
preparation for the race itself. His times and dates were
all wrong, claiming that he was sailing to certain locations

(08:47):
much more quickly than could reasonably have been expected. But
he didn't care. In one of his last transmissions, he
told his family and race officials that he was near
the southern tip of Africa, and then in July of
nineteen sixty nine, the truth came out. His boat was
discovered drifting in the mid Atlantic by another ship. Almost

(09:07):
everything was still on board, including his maps, navigational charts,
and the doctored logs that he had left behind. Crowhurst, however,
was nowhere to be found. It's believed that he took
his own life at sea. His logs were filled with
the words of a man who, according to some biographers,
could not live with the guilt of committing fraud nor

(09:27):
the reality of coming clean and losing everything. He wrote
rambling diet tribes and imaginary arguments between himself and God,
signs that his mental state was crumbling the closer he
got to the end of the race. Donald crowhurst body
was never found. The last thing he said to his
son before he left on that fateful day in October
was look after your mother. As if he'd known all

(09:50):
along that he wasn't coming home. He just wanted to
show the world and his family that he could do
what he set his mind to do. Instead, he was
swallowed whole by his own stubbornness, allowing the ocean to
claim one more poor soul. I hope you've enjoyed today's

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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 you can learn all

(10:33):
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.