February 26, 2019 • 12 mins
Two amazing individuals are on display in the Cabinet today, and both are know for amazing claims that had unexpected endings. Buckle up for a curious ride.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
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. Anna Kingsford was an iconoclass
(00:30):
in eighteen eighties England, an activist, an independent spirit even,
one of the first women in the country to obtain
her medical degree, and she was also a spiritualist of sorts. Once,
while on a fox hunt, Anna had a vision that
allowed her to see the world through the eyes of
the fox. Soon after, she became a fierce advocate for
(00:52):
animal rights as well as a vegetarian. Her experience also
influenced her opinion of the popular medical practice known as vivisection.
Teachers and medical researchers would often cut open living animals
for research purposes. They believed it was a necessary evil
to advance medical progress, and Anna hated it. In fact,
(01:14):
she didn't just hate it, she fought against it. She
first encountered it in Paris, where physiologist Claude Bernard would
operate on live dogs in front of his students. He
wanted to better understand the inner workings of the body
and what better way to do it than to look
at it up close. Despite the growing backlash against it
(01:35):
from the public, vivisection was seen within the medical community
as the only way to truly understand how the body functioned,
and though Bernard's own wife divorced him after using the
family pet as a test subject, the school supported his
work without question. Anna, however, knew that something had to
be done and decided to tackle the practice head on.
(01:58):
She enrolled as a student in Bernard's class, something that
once again set her apart from the crowd. She was
derided and humiliated daily to the male students as well
as Bernard. Women didn't belong in medicine. Sometimes he wouldn't
even acknowledge her presence as a student, But she continued
(02:18):
to attend classes and wrote articles about the horrors being
perpetrated for newspapers back home. The screams and cries coming
from the labs would haunt her at night. She'd recall
her memory of the fox, how she'd felt so helpless
and scared, and that empathy would turn to anger, Anger
for the animals savaged in the name of science, Anger
(02:40):
toward the doctors who had sworn to do no harm.
Anger toward Claude Bernard and his relentless pursuit of the
truth by any means necessary. During one particularly brutal session,
Dr Bernard was performing painful experiments on live animals as
a way to study body heat. Anna leapt from her
(03:01):
chair and screamed at him, calling him a murderer. That night,
she prayed for his death to spare all the innocent
animals at the university. When the time came for her
to attend her next class, she arrived at the medical
building to find a note fastened to the locked gate.
Claude Bernard had passed away. Anna felt an odd combination
(03:24):
of shock and joy at the man's demise. His reign
of terror was finally over. But more importantly, her prayers
had been answered. Although prayer might be the wrong word here,
Anna didn't ask God to smite her professor for his misdeeds.
She took up the task herself. According to a biography
(03:45):
written by a close friend, Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford had
tapped into her supernatural powers from childhood. She had summoned
what she called a spiritual thunderbolt to strike the man down.
In fact, one year later she would do it again
when Paul Burt, another staunch vivisectionist, would drop dead at
her psychic insistence. This happened to occur at a time
(04:08):
when interest in the occult and mysticism were at their
highest levels. Mediums had regular seances at the homes of
wealthy elites looking to speak to dead loved ones. Books
on spiritualism in life after death flew off of bookstore shelves,
not literally, mind you, but Anna's own titles managed to
find their way into the hands of influential figures such
(04:31):
as Mahatma Gandhi, who had also followed her work as
a vegetarian. Years later, her superability to kill men with
her mind would lead her to the lab of a
scientist revered today for his work in extending the shelf
life of our favorite foods, Louis Pasteur. He was known
throughout Paris as a prominent supporter of vivisection and someone
(04:53):
that Anna had come to loathe. She never got a
chance to avenge her furry friends, though. On her way
to his laboratory, she was caught in a rainstorm and
soon developed pneumonia. She passed away a short time later
from complications from the illness, and at the same time,
her legacy to medicine, animal rights, and women's rights were lost. Today,
(05:17):
modern history, using her biography as the primary source, has
stripped her of all the good she's done, and that's
because of her friend, Edward Maitland, who resented her for
rejecting his advances during the time that he knew her.
As such. He used the letters, books, articles, and research
that she'd written to paint a wholly different picture of
(05:39):
a woman who revolutionized medical education, and once the damage
was done, he burned all the evidence to the contrary. Yeah,
what a gem. As for her powerful mind, experts believe
it was only used to heal the sick and advance
the medical profession. Paul Birds had apparently died of dysentery
(06:01):
he had contracted while visiting Vietnam, and Claude Bernard had
never been known to be a well man. His poor
health had finally caught up with him. Anna's vision of
a spiritual thunderbolt being an unfortunate coincidence. Although there's much
we don't know about the spiritual world, is it possible
to communicate with the dead? Can a human be so
(06:23):
empathetic that they can see the world from an animal's
point of view, can one person kill another simply by
imagining it? Sadly we may never know. Of course, if
anyone at the time had been interested in testing her powers,
there was always one simple way to find out. All
they had to do was pick up a scalpel. One
(06:59):
thing reinventor knows is that the status quo doesn't stay
that way for long. There's always something better, simpler, more
efficient way to accomplish the thing that we've been doing
for a long time. The steam engine was used to
power machinery and various modes of transportation for hundreds of
years before the internal combustion engine made its debut. The
(07:21):
first functioning submarine appeared during the Civil War, and as
technology progressed, it was able to dive deeper and carry
more passengers. Such innovations further advanced how wars were fought
all over the world. I mentioned these two inventions for
a very specific reason, because one man also saw a
(07:41):
way to carry the hot technology of his day into
the future. His name was Joseph Papp, and he had
a vision. Born in Hungary in the nineteen thirties, it's
unclear when he first came to America, but he had
no problem making a name for himself in the world
of theoretical physics. Joseph had ideas ideas he believed so
(08:03):
much in that he secured several United States patents for
them in the nineteen sixties, one of which was for
a new type of engine. The internal combustion engine of
the time relied on gasoline to trigger tiny explosions to
power motor vehicles and large machines. Joseph, however, saw a
different way, a less expensive way. Rather than gasoline, Joseph's
(08:27):
engine ran on a mixture of noble gases, including helium, neon,
and argon. His engine claimed to run at only fifteen
cents per hour and generated no heat, negating the need
for fuel lines, carburetors, spark plugs, and any other equipment
that the more limited combustion engines still required. They produced
(08:47):
twice as much power at half the size. He spent
years developing his engine at the California Institute of Technology
before finally showing it off for his fellow colleagues include
Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. Feynman and several others looked
on as Joseph fired up his new engine for the
first time. However, what should have been a Eureka moment
(09:10):
for the optimistic engineer quickly turned into tragedy. The engine
didn't work, that much was clear. What's worse is that
it exploded, killing one bystander in the lab Instantly. The
university fired Joseph and settled with him out of court
for the accidental death of his colleague, but that didn't
stop the reckless inventor from pursuing his dreams. He eventually
(09:34):
ceased work on the Path engine to focus his efforts
on another project, one that would take him deeper than
his noble gas engine ever would. Literally. In the mid
nineteen sixties, Joseph pap built a submarine in his garage,
capable of carrying one passenger across great distances using very
(09:55):
little fuel. It was conical like a torpedo, which allowed
a layer of air to form between the water and
the sub The pilot would lay on his back and
look up through a periscope to see where he was going.
Path had estimated the craft's top speed at three hundred
miles per hour, achieved using an underwater jet engine that
(10:15):
he had designed himself. Nobody ever saw the submarine he
obsessively kept all plans and prototypes under wraps away from
prying eyes. Many didn't even believe that it existed. After
the debacle with the Path engine, Feynman labeled Joseph of fraud,
claiming the engine was never intended to work. But Joseph
(10:37):
was determined to prove his former colleagues all wrong. Perhaps
it was out of desperation or maybe guilt, but in
August of nineteen sixty six, Joseph took his cone shaped
submarine out for its made in voyage, using himself as
a guinea pig. Thirteen hours after launching from the shores
of Canada, he was picked up by a fishing boat
(10:58):
off the coast of France. They found Joseph bobbing in
the water, decked out in a flight suit, complete with
helmet and goggles. Barely able to speak, he told them
his name was Joseph pap and that he just completed
a journey across the Atlantic in a submarine of his
own design. Due to a malfunction, he had been forced
(11:19):
to eject and let the submarine sink into the depths below.
Joseph's story captivated the media, and he used his newfound
celebrity to write a book about his journey, titled The
Fastest Submarine. It detailed how he built the water craft
and completed his trek from the Canadian coast all the
way to Europe in under a day, and not a
(11:41):
single person believed him. The media weren't captivated as much
as they were skeptical. They ripped him apart in the
newspapers and called him a fraud. It didn't help that
his submarine was never found. Folks just didn't believe his story,
and rightly so. It turns out that when the fishing
boat had pulled him out of the water, they found
(12:04):
two plane tickets in his pocket, one for his trip
to France and one for the return home. It seems
that Richard Feynman had been right all along. In the end,
Joseph's career had been nothing but a load of pap.
(12:24):
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 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
(12:46):
show and you can learn all about it over at
the world of Lore dot com. And until next time,
stay curious.
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. Anna Kingsford was an iconoclass
(00:30):
in eighteen eighties England, an activist, an independent spirit even,
one of the first women in the country to obtain
her medical degree, and she was also a spiritualist of sorts. Once,
while on a fox hunt, Anna had a vision that
allowed her to see the world through the eyes of
the fox. Soon after, she became a fierce advocate for
(00:52):
animal rights as well as a vegetarian. Her experience also
influenced her opinion of the popular medical practice known as vivisection.
Teachers and medical researchers would often cut open living animals
for research purposes. They believed it was a necessary evil
to advance medical progress, and Anna hated it. In fact,
(01:14):
she didn't just hate it, she fought against it. She
first encountered it in Paris, where physiologist Claude Bernard would
operate on live dogs in front of his students. He
wanted to better understand the inner workings of the body
and what better way to do it than to look
at it up close. Despite the growing backlash against it
(01:35):
from the public, vivisection was seen within the medical community
as the only way to truly understand how the body functioned,
and though Bernard's own wife divorced him after using the
family pet as a test subject, the school supported his
work without question. Anna, however, knew that something had to
be done and decided to tackle the practice head on.
(01:58):
She enrolled as a student in Bernard's class, something that
once again set her apart from the crowd. She was
derided and humiliated daily to the male students as well
as Bernard. Women didn't belong in medicine. Sometimes he wouldn't
even acknowledge her presence as a student, But she continued
(02:18):
to attend classes and wrote articles about the horrors being
perpetrated for newspapers back home. The screams and cries coming
from the labs would haunt her at night. She'd recall
her memory of the fox, how she'd felt so helpless
and scared, and that empathy would turn to anger, Anger
for the animals savaged in the name of science, Anger
(02:40):
toward the doctors who had sworn to do no harm.
Anger toward Claude Bernard and his relentless pursuit of the
truth by any means necessary. During one particularly brutal session,
Dr Bernard was performing painful experiments on live animals as
a way to study body heat. Anna leapt from her
(03:01):
chair and screamed at him, calling him a murderer. That night,
she prayed for his death to spare all the innocent
animals at the university. When the time came for her
to attend her next class, she arrived at the medical
building to find a note fastened to the locked gate.
Claude Bernard had passed away. Anna felt an odd combination
(03:24):
of shock and joy at the man's demise. His reign
of terror was finally over. But more importantly, her prayers
had been answered. Although prayer might be the wrong word here,
Anna didn't ask God to smite her professor for his misdeeds.
She took up the task herself. According to a biography
(03:45):
written by a close friend, Edward Maitland, Anna Kingsford had
tapped into her supernatural powers from childhood. She had summoned
what she called a spiritual thunderbolt to strike the man down.
In fact, one year later she would do it again
when Paul Burt, another staunch vivisectionist, would drop dead at
her psychic insistence. This happened to occur at a time
(04:08):
when interest in the occult and mysticism were at their
highest levels. Mediums had regular seances at the homes of
wealthy elites looking to speak to dead loved ones. Books
on spiritualism in life after death flew off of bookstore shelves,
not literally, mind you, but Anna's own titles managed to
find their way into the hands of influential figures such
(04:31):
as Mahatma Gandhi, who had also followed her work as
a vegetarian. Years later, her superability to kill men with
her mind would lead her to the lab of a
scientist revered today for his work in extending the shelf
life of our favorite foods, Louis Pasteur. He was known
throughout Paris as a prominent supporter of vivisection and someone
(04:53):
that Anna had come to loathe. She never got a
chance to avenge her furry friends, though. On her way
to his laboratory, she was caught in a rainstorm and
soon developed pneumonia. She passed away a short time later
from complications from the illness, and at the same time,
her legacy to medicine, animal rights, and women's rights were lost. Today,
(05:17):
modern history, using her biography as the primary source, has
stripped her of all the good she's done, and that's
because of her friend, Edward Maitland, who resented her for
rejecting his advances during the time that he knew her.
As such. He used the letters, books, articles, and research
that she'd written to paint a wholly different picture of
(05:39):
a woman who revolutionized medical education, and once the damage
was done, he burned all the evidence to the contrary. Yeah,
what a gem. As for her powerful mind, experts believe
it was only used to heal the sick and advance
the medical profession. Paul Birds had apparently died of dysentery
(06:01):
he had contracted while visiting Vietnam, and Claude Bernard had
never been known to be a well man. His poor
health had finally caught up with him. Anna's vision of
a spiritual thunderbolt being an unfortunate coincidence. Although there's much
we don't know about the spiritual world, is it possible
to communicate with the dead? Can a human be so
(06:23):
empathetic that they can see the world from an animal's
point of view, can one person kill another simply by
imagining it? Sadly we may never know. Of course, if
anyone at the time had been interested in testing her powers,
there was always one simple way to find out. All
they had to do was pick up a scalpel. One
(06:59):
thing reinventor knows is that the status quo doesn't stay
that way for long. There's always something better, simpler, more
efficient way to accomplish the thing that we've been doing
for a long time. The steam engine was used to
power machinery and various modes of transportation for hundreds of
years before the internal combustion engine made its debut. The
(07:21):
first functioning submarine appeared during the Civil War, and as
technology progressed, it was able to dive deeper and carry
more passengers. Such innovations further advanced how wars were fought
all over the world. I mentioned these two inventions for
a very specific reason, because one man also saw a
(07:41):
way to carry the hot technology of his day into
the future. His name was Joseph Papp, and he had
a vision. Born in Hungary in the nineteen thirties, it's
unclear when he first came to America, but he had
no problem making a name for himself in the world
of theoretical physics. Joseph had ideas ideas he believed so
(08:03):
much in that he secured several United States patents for
them in the nineteen sixties, one of which was for
a new type of engine. The internal combustion engine of
the time relied on gasoline to trigger tiny explosions to
power motor vehicles and large machines. Joseph, however, saw a
different way, a less expensive way. Rather than gasoline, Joseph's
(08:27):
engine ran on a mixture of noble gases, including helium, neon,
and argon. His engine claimed to run at only fifteen
cents per hour and generated no heat, negating the need
for fuel lines, carburetors, spark plugs, and any other equipment
that the more limited combustion engines still required. They produced
(08:47):
twice as much power at half the size. He spent
years developing his engine at the California Institute of Technology
before finally showing it off for his fellow colleagues include
Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. Feynman and several others looked
on as Joseph fired up his new engine for the
first time. However, what should have been a Eureka moment
(09:10):
for the optimistic engineer quickly turned into tragedy. The engine
didn't work, that much was clear. What's worse is that
it exploded, killing one bystander in the lab Instantly. The
university fired Joseph and settled with him out of court
for the accidental death of his colleague, but that didn't
stop the reckless inventor from pursuing his dreams. He eventually
(09:34):
ceased work on the Path engine to focus his efforts
on another project, one that would take him deeper than
his noble gas engine ever would. Literally. In the mid
nineteen sixties, Joseph pap built a submarine in his garage,
capable of carrying one passenger across great distances using very
(09:55):
little fuel. It was conical like a torpedo, which allowed
a layer of air to form between the water and
the sub The pilot would lay on his back and
look up through a periscope to see where he was going.
Path had estimated the craft's top speed at three hundred
miles per hour, achieved using an underwater jet engine that
(10:15):
he had designed himself. Nobody ever saw the submarine he
obsessively kept all plans and prototypes under wraps away from
prying eyes. Many didn't even believe that it existed. After
the debacle with the Path engine, Feynman labeled Joseph of fraud,
claiming the engine was never intended to work. But Joseph
(10:37):
was determined to prove his former colleagues all wrong. Perhaps
it was out of desperation or maybe guilt, but in
August of nineteen sixty six, Joseph took his cone shaped
submarine out for its made in voyage, using himself as
a guinea pig. Thirteen hours after launching from the shores
of Canada, he was picked up by a fishing boat
(10:58):
off the coast of France. They found Joseph bobbing in
the water, decked out in a flight suit, complete with
helmet and goggles. Barely able to speak, he told them
his name was Joseph pap and that he just completed
a journey across the Atlantic in a submarine of his
own design. Due to a malfunction, he had been forced
(11:19):
to eject and let the submarine sink into the depths below.
Joseph's story captivated the media, and he used his newfound
celebrity to write a book about his journey, titled The
Fastest Submarine. It detailed how he built the water craft
and completed his trek from the Canadian coast all the
way to Europe in under a day, and not a
(11:41):
single person believed him. The media weren't captivated as much
as they were skeptical. They ripped him apart in the
newspapers and called him a fraud. It didn't help that
his submarine was never found. Folks just didn't believe his story,
and rightly so. It turns out that when the fishing
boat had pulled him out of the water, they found
(12:04):
two plane tickets in his pocket, one for his trip
to France and one for the return home. It seems
that Richard Feynman had been right all along. In the end,
Joseph's career had been nothing but a load of pap.
(12:24):
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 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
(12:46):
show and you can learn all about it over at
the world of Lore dot com. And until next time,
stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.