Master at Arms

These inventive individuals made a few mistakes along the way. But thankfully their work was curious enough to earn them admission into the Cabinet.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, 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 the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. Throughout history, wartime has brought countless innovations that
have trickled down into our daily lives. When metallurgist Harry
Brearley coated iron and chromium to keep guns from rusting
in World War One, he inadvertently created stainless steel. Years later,

(00:51):
Nestley used the same technology that made penicillin possible during
World War Two to bring its freeze dried coffee to
store shelves everywhere. If we get to enjoy many of
today's conveniences thanks to the discoveries of military scientists and
engineers from all over the world, however, that door swings
both ways, quite a few civilian inventions have also gone

(01:13):
on to revolutionize how wars are fought. In one, for example,
barbed wire was created to keep cattle from wandering off,
long before it was used to impede enemy movement. Cameras
also made the jump from family portraits to the front
lines during World War One, when they were fastened to
planes and used to gather photographs of enemy territories. In fact,
one average citizen did quite a lot to change the

(01:35):
face of war all on his own. During his sixty
seven years on earth. He became known as one of
the most brilliant engineers in the world, drafting vehicle and
weapon designs he expected to be used by the militaries
of his time. His tank concept, for example, bore a
cone shape and was made of wood. Inside. Eight men
would crank gears to turn the wheels, which would then

(01:56):
carry them across the battlefield. The angled exterior your meant
arrows and other projectiles would simply deflect off the sides
or fall away. Portholes along the sides allowed for the
tanks operators to fire at enemies without putting themselves in danger.
Another unique vehicle came in the form of a chariot.
Unlike the chariots of old, where horses pulled someone standing

(02:17):
in a carriage, these new designs featured interesting upgrades. For one,
the writer didn't stand in a carriage at the rear.
He rode atop the horse, which was situated in the
middle for whirling. Blades at the front would mow down
the opposing forces, while blades at the back prevented rear attacks.
He called it the scythed chariot. The engineer didn't limit

(02:38):
himself only to modes of transportation, though, he also invented
impressive weapons, such as an early machine gun. As with
all of his creations, this too was made of wood.
It boasted thirty three barrels arranged in a triangular frame.
While one side of eleven barrels filled, another side would
be loaded up as the third side cooled down. He

(02:59):
was a man ahead of his time, and his blueprints
proved it. His plans for a crossbow predated the handheld
models used today. It was designed to be rolled into
battle by two men who could cock it back with
a massive projectile loaded into the cradle before pulling a
release and letting it fly into a crowd. His notebooks
and files were full of plans for vehicles and weapons

(03:20):
no one had ever seen before. There was a cluster bomb,
designed to wipe out pockets of enemy soldiers. He also
invented a double hulled ship that could stay afloat if
the outer hall was ever punctured, a concept seen today
on oil tankers and submarines. And though he was so
skilled in the art of wartime weaponry, in reality he
hated it. He would rather have been building flying machines

(03:41):
or perpetual motion machines, or doing what he was known
best for, painting. This engineer and inventor was one of
the finest artists of the sixteenth century, and his works
are still studied in museums and classrooms to this day.
There's no proof that any of his designs for his
machine gun or his tank were ever actually built, yet

(04:02):
their influence can be seen in today's modern equivalence. Had
they been brought to life, as he'd feared, he might
have been remembered as a monster, a man who chose
to celebrate violence rather than peace. Fortunately that's not the case.
The world instead associates him with the portrait of a
young woman smiling now displayed in the Louver, as well
as his painting of the final meal between Jesus and

(04:24):
his disciples. He's not known as a merchant of death,
but as the master artist behind the mona Lisa Leonardo
da Vinci Evan paid for the tower himself. It wasn't

(04:50):
really about him, though, No, the tower was a monument
to the Viking explorer Leif Ericsson. It wouldn't be strange
to build a monument to the man. He had been
celebrated in all kinds of ways since the year one
thousand when he was sailing the Atlantic. The strange thing
was where Evan built that. You see the tower cast
its long shadow over the Charles River, just inland from

(05:12):
the city of Boston. What's even stranger is the huge
inscription stretching across the front of the tower, saying that
the land was discovered by leaf ericson one thousand a d.
But there's more. It says that at this very spot
in what is now Massachusetts, there was once a Viking
city with docks and walls and dams that controlled the land,

(05:33):
stretching from Rhode Island to the south, all the way
up to St. Lawrence River up in Canada. Now, maybe
this would have been safely ignored when Evan built the
tower in eighty nine, but he wasn't a nobody quite
the opposite. In fact, Evan Horsford was a retired Harvard
professor the dean of Harvard's Science School and a very
successful businessman. And what's more, he wasn't the only Bostonian

(05:57):
who thought the city had once been the home of Vikings. Actually,
he was riding in the coat tails of some of
Boston's most famous and most powerful nineteenth century citizens. It
all started in the eighteen thirties when Boston's famous poet,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had traveled to Denmark. Someone convinced him
that Vikings had once landed in New England. When he

(06:18):
got home to Boston, he retold that story to anyone
who would listen for years. By the eighteen seventies, some
of the most important New England gentry had hatched a
plan to tell it to the world. They got together
and decided to build a statue in Boston of Leif Ericsson,
and then they put the word out to raise the money.
That's where Eben Horsford comes in. None of those Boston

(06:39):
gentlemen would live to see just how deeply Eban fell
in love with their plan, But if fall he did.
After their death, Eben Horsford carried their idea forward and
put everything he had into the project. He built their
statue of Leif Ericson in Boston, and you can still
see it today rising in the Back Bay neighborhood. After all,
Eban was no stranger to building in Boston. He was

(07:01):
part of the group that had planned for the defense
of Boston Harbor during the Civil War. But he did
a lot more too. Evan was so convinced that he
wrote seven books arguing that Leif Ericsson had discovered Massachusetts
before Columbus ever reached the hemisphere. Evan did his best
to survey the land and thought that he found the
spot where Leif Ericson's house had been. He had a

(07:23):
plaque installed there, and then in nine Evan built that
tower on the Charles River. Like the other Bostonians before him,
Evan was trying to convince the world that Boston was
the place where America began, complete with its first white
adventurers and even its first Christian bishop. It was, to
put it mildly, all about putting people like him on

(07:45):
a pedestal. Today we know that Leif Ericson actually landed
much farther north at lance All Meadows at the tip
of Newfoundland, at the Canadian site. Archaeologists have recently discovered
and identified bronze cloak pins, iron nails and rivets, and
what may even be a kiln for smelting iron from
bog Ore. They are the kinds of things that Eban

(08:06):
searched for all around Boston but could never find. So
it's a good thing that the message of all Evan's
monuments has mostly been forgotten. After all, the story they're telling,
the history that they want to teach, it's just wrong.
But despite all that, Eban Horsford's legacy is still influencing
us today, and it keeps rising up in homes across

(08:26):
America because despite being quite a bad historian, Eban was
actually a great chemist, and in the late eighteen fifties
he started selling double acting baking powder. It's sold like hotcakes.
He even sold it to the Union Army during the
Civil War, which is where he really started to make
his fortune. Eban began by culling his invention, Horsford's Bread Preparation,

(08:49):
but when he died and his manufacturing company wanted to
give up their name, they rebranded it. In fact, they
named it after Evan's position at Harvard, where he was
the Rumford Professor for Applied Sciences, today, Evans Invention is
still in stores, proudly declaring that it has been trusted
since eighteen fifty nine. And if you've ever used Rumford

(09:09):
baking powder, then you've cooked with Evan's real discovery. And
even if you don't know it, you've seen him too.
The red container is marked with the black silhouette of
a man set in a white oval, the long shadow
cast by the man himself. I hope you've enjoyed today's
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free

(09:32):
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
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.

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