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Sometimes life doesn't go as planned, and you have to make adjustments. Often with curious results.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grim & Mild.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
William was fascinated by lying. As a Harvard Law student
in the mid-1910s, he wondered if it would be possible
to invent a machine that could discern whether someone was
telling the truth with 100% accuracy. That would make the
whole need for criminal lawyers and lengthy trials obsolete. This
search for truth would lead him down a road with

(00:56):
a completely unpredictable destination. He invented a machine known as
a systolic blood pressure deception test, which recorded changes in
the user's blood pressure which he believed showed if they
were lying or not. He began to promote the machine
in the halls of justice, while also gaining a doctorate
in psychology. While at school, he met his wife, Elizabeth,

(01:18):
who got her own law degree in an era when
that was very difficult for women. Both William and Elizabeth
were strongly influenced by the feminist movement of the 1910s,
which advocated for a new woman who could do anything
that a man could do. In 1922, Williams sought to
prove the accuracy of his machine by using it on
an accused murderer then on trial. He believed the accused

(01:42):
was innocent based on the machine's results, but lack of
acceptance of the machine in the scientific community led the
judge to throw out this testimony. It was a huge embarrassment,
and adding insult to injury, he was also fired from
his professorship shortly after. He eventually got a new job
as a professor at Tufts University in Boston, where he

(02:02):
met a young woman named Olive Byrne. He was immediately
taken by her heights and her good looks, and the
two began an affair. And he still tried promoting his
lie detector machine wherever he could, including at Olive's sorority parties,
where girls would put each other through strange initiation rituals,
including tying each other up, wrestling, and submitting to William's

(02:23):
lie detector test. And look, there's a lot that wasn't
good about William. Obviously, he wasn't faithful, that much is clear.
But he was also bold. And so when he came
clean to his wife Elizabeth about the affair, he told
her that Olive could either move in with them, or
he could just leave and start a new life with her.
And Elizabeth, ever the new woman, agreed to the arrangement. Now,

(02:45):
from that point on, the three lived together. William even
had two children with Elizabeth and two with Olive. They
just told the public that Olive was their live-in nanny
and William and Olive couldn't legally marry, but he did
give her some gold bracelets as a sign of his love.
But while this unconventional home life had settled down, his
career was still full of ups and downs. He sold

(03:08):
his services to various motion picture companies, claiming he could
use his machine to gauge whether audiences were entertained by
a movie or not. But ultimately, the studios preferred other,
more reliable machines. His career remained a mess, but a
huge break was about to come his way, one that
would change his life and American culture forever. Maxwell Gaines

(03:30):
was the boss at All American Publications, one of the
companies that would eventually become DC Comics. Its affiliated publishing
line was already dominated by male heroes like Superman and Batman,
but the company was coming under fire, as was the
entire comics medium. Concerned parents thought that comics full of murder, kidnapping,
and torture weren't suitable for their children. Gaines insisted that

(03:54):
the stories were about good triumphing over evil, and that
his characters set a moral example. But he needed a
professional to help him sell that angle. And so he
hired William to act as a psychological consultant, using his
expertise to make sure the comics had a positive impact.
He just never expected what form William's consulting would take.

(04:16):
William's advice was that the company should publish a comic
with a female character, one who could soften their image
and distract from the blood-curdling masculinity of other comics. Gaines
thought that this was as good an idea as any,
but he wanted William to write the comic. Not once
who ever turned on a job, William got to it,
crafting a character who he thought would actually serve as

(04:37):
propaganda to make American citizens more comfortable with the new
type of new woman that he was married to. His
character had Elizabeth's curves, but Olive's heights and gold bracelets.
She hailed from Paradise Island, which was inhabited only by women.
She used a lasso of truth, which, unlike William's test,
always worked. And she sometimes used the lasso to tie

(04:59):
up her enemies, just like those sorority girls that Williams
had met. Oh, and that character's name? Suprema, the Wonder Woman. Ultimately,
his editor suggested that he just shorten it to something
more familiar and easy to say. Wonder Woman. And of course,
the rest is history. William Moulton Marston contracted polio in 1945.

(05:20):
Cancer soon followed, and he died in 1947. Curiously, Elizabeth
and Olive continued sharing a home until Olive's death in 1990,
having raised their four children together. They were the real-life
women who helped inspire an icon. Deep underground in Missouri,

(05:52):
nestled inside cold, dark limestone caves, lies a treasure trove
of some of the most precious resources owned by the U.S. government.
These caves are lined with shelves and shelves of solid
golden blocks of American cheese. Yes, actual cheese. More than
a billion pounds of it, kept reasonably fresh by industrial refrigeration.

(06:14):
The question of why the government has so much cheese
stockpiled in underground caves is has a very complicated answer,
and it goes all the way back to the 1970s
when the government had to clean up some of its
own spilled milk. In 1977, the dairy industry was struggling,
and there were shortages of milk products all across the nation.

(06:34):
To address this problem, President Jimmy Carter poured $ 2 billion
into helping dairy farmers increase their production. And it worked.
A little too well. Suddenly, dairy farmers were producing far
more milk than the American public knew what to do with.
If the farmers couldn't sell all this milk to someone,
their revenue would tank and the industry would be in

(06:56):
even deeper trouble. So the U.S. government had no choice
but to buy up the extra dairy themselves. What exactly
does a national government do with hundreds of millions of
pounds of milk? Well, no one was quite sure. To
buy themselves some time to figure it out, they processed
the milk into cheese— so that it would have a
longer shelf life, and then tucked it away in warehouses

(07:18):
all over the country. But soon, there was also too
much cheese. The government had no idea where to put it,
much less what to do with it. It was produced
for efficiency, not taste, and its slimy texture and questionable
flavor made it too unpalatable for any consumers to actually
want to buy. And so the government began giving it

(07:38):
away to the elderly and low-income families in the country.
who literally couldn't afford to turn it down. Government cheese
quickly became a staple in urban housing projects and struggling
small towns alike. A whole generation of working-class children grew
up on the five-pound orange blocks that materialized, as if
by magic, at their local food banks. But no matter

(08:01):
how fast the government gave it away, the stockpiles were
barely going down. They needed a storage solution before it
all went moldy, and they found it in an unlikely place.
You see, there are more than 7,000 underground limestone caves
in the Midwest, primarily in Missouri. As an Illinois boy,
I distinctly remember going on a family trip to Merrimack

(08:22):
Caverns in Missouri. Many of them had been formerly used
as mines, but were now sitting vacant with plenty of
space to store the metric tons of cheese that had accumulated.
And these caves were easily converted into massive refrigerated warehouses.
And even after the initial cheese surplus waned in the 1990s,
The caves continued to be used to store the government's

(08:44):
excess dairy, as well as food products for a variety
of commercial companies. Today, the U.S. has 1.4 billion pounds
of cheese stockpiled, although there is no public data on
exactly how much of it is currently stored in underground caves.
If a national dairy shortage were ever to occur again,
you can rest assured we've got milk. I hope you

(09:10):
enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This
show was created by me, Aaron Manke, in partnership with
iHeart Podcasts, researched and written by the Grim & Mild team,
and produced by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show
and the people who make it over at grimandmild.com slash curiosities.
You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of

(09:32):
Curiosities hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well
as ebook and audiobooks. And if you're looking for an
ad-free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's all the same stories,
but without the interruption for a small monthly fee. Learn
more and sign up over at patreon.com slash grim and mild.
And until next time, stay curious.