June 21, 2022 • 9 mins
Some folks get lots of attention for bad ideas, while those who make an impact get forgotten. The world of science is certainly curious.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky'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. When you grow up on the Jurassic Coast,
it seems written in the stars that you'll be spending
your life among the bones of dinosaurs. Mary was born
in just such a place. And while she was raised
in a time of conflict, with the war between Napoleon
(00:50):
and the British regiing, and her own family full of
poor Protestant dissenters, she's still found time to dig, thanks
in part to her father, a cabinet maker and amateur
fossil elector who needed a sidekick. While most women her
age were being raised to be delicate wives to future husbands,
Mary was learning proper fossil cleaning techniques from her father
(01:10):
as they dug along the beach for relics to sell
alongside his cabinetree. However, when he died suddenly of tuberculosis
in eighteen ten, those fossils became a means of helping
meet her family's needs. It didn't take long for Mary
to strike gold or strike bone, I guess. While digging
with her brother Joseph, the two happened upon a skull.
(01:31):
Joseph left Mary to unearth the rest of the fossil, and,
through a painstakingly lung process that began to garner the
attention of everyone in town, she revealed a seventeen foot
skeleton that was referred to by scientists as a crocodile
and by citizens as a monster today, though we know
it as the Eccleosaurus. By eighteen twenty three, at just
twenty four years old, she became the first human to
(01:53):
discover a complete plesiosaurus, being that Mary was a woman.
Though news began to spread that it was a fake,
noted French naturalist George Cuvier disputed the discovery all on
his own, and even held a meeting at the Geological
Society of London, a meeting that Mary was not invited to,
by the way, But that meeting didn't go Cuvier's way,
and he ended up admitting his mistake. Yet, despite Mary's
(02:16):
continuous breakthroughs, she remained severely unrecognized for her work. In
order to support her family, she was often forced to
sell the fossils that she had worked so hard to find, clean,
set and identify, and the men who bought them rarely
credited her with the find and even when scientific journals
and articles cited her ichtheos or discovery at the right
(02:37):
age of twelve, they did not cite her by name,
and the reputed Geological Society of London, the very place
that Cuvier had failed to convince of her reportedly fake fine,
wouldn't admit her to their ranks. In fact, they wouldn't
start admitting any women until nineteen o four. But Mary
wasn't done breaking ground or barriers just yet. She began
pioneering the study of copper lights or fossilized dinosaur droppings,
(03:02):
and by eighty eight she had another first to add
to her resume. After discovering a baffling collection of bones.
The scientific world was a buzz from London to Paris
discussing how they would all connect. Mary did the hard
work for them, putting together the first pterodactyl ever discovered
outside of Germany, the largest flying creature to have ever
(03:22):
lived at a time when fossils were the talk of
the scientific world, Mary was at the top, even if
no one wanted to acknowledge her. Specimen shows popped up
all over major cities, housing countless bones that Mary herself discovered,
and still her name was purposely left out among Jurassic talks.
But those who knew her understood what she was doing
(03:44):
for the world. Mary's childhood friend, Harry de la Beesh,
painted his famous A More Ancient Dorset, a painting inspired
by her Ichtheosaur find. It was the first painting to
use fossil evidence to create realistic representations of creatures from
millennia past, and dear Harry sold Prince to a ravenous
public in order to raise funds for Mary. At the
(04:07):
time of her young death in eight Mary Anning was
still in dire straits financially, despite the countless prehistoric species
she had discovered, identified and shared with the world. It
would take another century before her legacy was restored to
its rightful place. Today, her finds can be seen proudly
displayed at the Natural History Museum in London, and while
(04:28):
it's still hotly debated among historians, there are some who
believe that Mary is the she at the center of
that famous old tongue twister. She sells seashells on the
seashore a curious life. Indeed, everyone has problems, a bad boss,
(05:02):
a noisy kid, or a train that's always late, and
we deal with them the best we can. Sometimes all
it requires is a candid conversation, sending the offending children
to their room to settle down, or leaving for work
a little earlier, or if you're a math professor. Alexander Abian,
you just blow up the moon. Alexander was born in Tabriz,
Iran in nineteen three. He grew up there, earning his
(05:25):
undergraduate degree there before coming to the US to pursue
his master's in nineteen fifty. From there, he went on
to the University of Cincinnati for his PhD with a
focus in mathematics. Alexander held a variety of teaching jobs
all over the country, moving from Tennessee to New York,
then to Pennsylvania, and finally to Ohio, before eventually taking
(05:46):
a job as a math professor at Iowa States in
nineteen sixty seven, where he stayed for the rest of
his career until retiring in nineteen Not much is known
about his time at the university other than that it
was uneventful for the twenty five years, at least when
compared to what happened in that year. Alexander published a
(06:06):
piece in the university's newspaper with a wild claim, one
that eventually spread beyond the campuses, borders and into the
mainstream press. The professor had been watching what was going
on around the world forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, and blizzards,
all brought on by one common culprit, the Moon, and
Alexander believed it had to go. He claimed that if
(06:29):
the Moon was blown up, our seasons like summer and
spring would disappear, taking almost all the natural disasters with them.
How would he have accomplished this feat with nuclear weapons,
of course. His plan was to drill a hole into
the surface of the Moon, drop an atomic bomb inside,
and detonate it remotely. The explosion would break the Moon apart,
(06:49):
saving the Earth from the perils that have only gotten
worse over the years with climate change. Unfortunately, not everyone
agreed with his plan. A few NASA employees believed it
was impossible, to say the least, for one, they knew
that the Moon was responsible for many phenomena both on
and around the Earth. The tides, for example, are controlled
by the Moon, as is the tilt of the Earth.
(07:10):
Without our Moon, our planet would tilt so severely it
would leave one hemisphere in eternal darkness while the other
burned beneath a blazing sun all day. Secondly, exploding the
Moon would cause a worldwide extinction event as debris entered
the Earth's atmosphere and increase the planet's temperature, not to
mention the chance that a big chunk of it could
hit the Earth with such force it would wipe out
(07:32):
everyone on the planet. But all of those situations were hypothetical. Anyway,
to destroy the Moon, a single atom bomb wasn't enough.
Such an explosion would only damage the surface, but nothing below. Instead,
miners would have to drill down hundreds of miles into
the Moon's surface and deposit six hundred billion nuclear bombs
(07:52):
in order to blow it all up. Alexander's idea was
dismissed by many as a pipe dream, but the man
himself wasn't so were He equated his detractors with the
people who wrote off Galileo hundreds of years before, and
as time moved on and the Internet took hold his
theory exploded across the globe. No pun intended, I swear
(08:13):
suddenly everyone was getting ideas of their own. Unfortunately, Alexander
Abian died in nineteen nine. He never got to see
his plan fully realized. That is, unless he happened to
see a similar story occur. During the summer of nine
that year, a team of experienced oil drillers took a
shuttle into space to put Alexander's idea to the test.
(08:36):
Except instead of drilling into the Moon, they drilled into
an asteroid the size of Texas that was headed straight
for the Earth. It took some doing, but the miners
managed to blow up the asteroid before it reached the
atmosphere using a nuclear bomb, a global extinction event had
been avoided. Of course, this wasn't a real event. It
was the action movie Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck,
(08:59):
a film with the plot that was just as implausible
as Alexander Abian's idea, but certainly a lot more entertaining.
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.
(09:22):
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. And until next time,
stay curious. Ye
Welcomed Aaron Manky'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. When you grow up on the Jurassic Coast,
it seems written in the stars that you'll be spending
your life among the bones of dinosaurs. Mary was born
in just such a place. And while she was raised
in a time of conflict, with the war between Napoleon
(00:50):
and the British regiing, and her own family full of
poor Protestant dissenters, she's still found time to dig, thanks
in part to her father, a cabinet maker and amateur
fossil elector who needed a sidekick. While most women her
age were being raised to be delicate wives to future husbands,
Mary was learning proper fossil cleaning techniques from her father
(01:10):
as they dug along the beach for relics to sell
alongside his cabinetree. However, when he died suddenly of tuberculosis
in eighteen ten, those fossils became a means of helping
meet her family's needs. It didn't take long for Mary
to strike gold or strike bone, I guess. While digging
with her brother Joseph, the two happened upon a skull.
(01:31):
Joseph left Mary to unearth the rest of the fossil, and,
through a painstakingly lung process that began to garner the
attention of everyone in town, she revealed a seventeen foot
skeleton that was referred to by scientists as a crocodile
and by citizens as a monster today, though we know
it as the Eccleosaurus. By eighteen twenty three, at just
twenty four years old, she became the first human to
(01:53):
discover a complete plesiosaurus, being that Mary was a woman.
Though news began to spread that it was a fake,
noted French naturalist George Cuvier disputed the discovery all on
his own, and even held a meeting at the Geological
Society of London, a meeting that Mary was not invited to,
by the way, But that meeting didn't go Cuvier's way,
and he ended up admitting his mistake. Yet, despite Mary's
(02:16):
continuous breakthroughs, she remained severely unrecognized for her work. In
order to support her family, she was often forced to
sell the fossils that she had worked so hard to find, clean,
set and identify, and the men who bought them rarely
credited her with the find and even when scientific journals
and articles cited her ichtheos or discovery at the right
(02:37):
age of twelve, they did not cite her by name,
and the reputed Geological Society of London, the very place
that Cuvier had failed to convince of her reportedly fake fine,
wouldn't admit her to their ranks. In fact, they wouldn't
start admitting any women until nineteen o four. But Mary
wasn't done breaking ground or barriers just yet. She began
pioneering the study of copper lights or fossilized dinosaur droppings,
(03:02):
and by eighty eight she had another first to add
to her resume. After discovering a baffling collection of bones.
The scientific world was a buzz from London to Paris
discussing how they would all connect. Mary did the hard
work for them, putting together the first pterodactyl ever discovered
outside of Germany, the largest flying creature to have ever
(03:22):
lived at a time when fossils were the talk of
the scientific world, Mary was at the top, even if
no one wanted to acknowledge her. Specimen shows popped up
all over major cities, housing countless bones that Mary herself discovered,
and still her name was purposely left out among Jurassic talks.
But those who knew her understood what she was doing
(03:44):
for the world. Mary's childhood friend, Harry de la Beesh,
painted his famous A More Ancient Dorset, a painting inspired
by her Ichtheosaur find. It was the first painting to
use fossil evidence to create realistic representations of creatures from
millennia past, and dear Harry sold Prince to a ravenous
public in order to raise funds for Mary. At the
(04:07):
time of her young death in eight Mary Anning was
still in dire straits financially, despite the countless prehistoric species
she had discovered, identified and shared with the world. It
would take another century before her legacy was restored to
its rightful place. Today, her finds can be seen proudly
displayed at the Natural History Museum in London, and while
(04:28):
it's still hotly debated among historians, there are some who
believe that Mary is the she at the center of
that famous old tongue twister. She sells seashells on the
seashore a curious life. Indeed, everyone has problems, a bad boss,
(05:02):
a noisy kid, or a train that's always late, and
we deal with them the best we can. Sometimes all
it requires is a candid conversation, sending the offending children
to their room to settle down, or leaving for work
a little earlier, or if you're a math professor. Alexander Abian,
you just blow up the moon. Alexander was born in Tabriz,
Iran in nineteen three. He grew up there, earning his
(05:25):
undergraduate degree there before coming to the US to pursue
his master's in nineteen fifty. From there, he went on
to the University of Cincinnati for his PhD with a
focus in mathematics. Alexander held a variety of teaching jobs
all over the country, moving from Tennessee to New York,
then to Pennsylvania, and finally to Ohio, before eventually taking
(05:46):
a job as a math professor at Iowa States in
nineteen sixty seven, where he stayed for the rest of
his career until retiring in nineteen Not much is known
about his time at the university other than that it
was uneventful for the twenty five years, at least when
compared to what happened in that year. Alexander published a
(06:06):
piece in the university's newspaper with a wild claim, one
that eventually spread beyond the campuses, borders and into the
mainstream press. The professor had been watching what was going
on around the world forest fires, hurricanes, heat waves, and blizzards,
all brought on by one common culprit, the Moon, and
Alexander believed it had to go. He claimed that if
(06:29):
the Moon was blown up, our seasons like summer and
spring would disappear, taking almost all the natural disasters with them.
How would he have accomplished this feat with nuclear weapons,
of course. His plan was to drill a hole into
the surface of the Moon, drop an atomic bomb inside,
and detonate it remotely. The explosion would break the Moon apart,
(06:49):
saving the Earth from the perils that have only gotten
worse over the years with climate change. Unfortunately, not everyone
agreed with his plan. A few NASA employees believed it
was impossible, to say the least, for one, they knew
that the Moon was responsible for many phenomena both on
and around the Earth. The tides, for example, are controlled
by the Moon, as is the tilt of the Earth.
(07:10):
Without our Moon, our planet would tilt so severely it
would leave one hemisphere in eternal darkness while the other
burned beneath a blazing sun all day. Secondly, exploding the
Moon would cause a worldwide extinction event as debris entered
the Earth's atmosphere and increase the planet's temperature, not to
mention the chance that a big chunk of it could
hit the Earth with such force it would wipe out
(07:32):
everyone on the planet. But all of those situations were hypothetical. Anyway,
to destroy the Moon, a single atom bomb wasn't enough.
Such an explosion would only damage the surface, but nothing below. Instead,
miners would have to drill down hundreds of miles into
the Moon's surface and deposit six hundred billion nuclear bombs
(07:52):
in order to blow it all up. Alexander's idea was
dismissed by many as a pipe dream, but the man
himself wasn't so were He equated his detractors with the
people who wrote off Galileo hundreds of years before, and
as time moved on and the Internet took hold his
theory exploded across the globe. No pun intended, I swear
(08:13):
suddenly everyone was getting ideas of their own. Unfortunately, Alexander
Abian died in nineteen nine. He never got to see
his plan fully realized. That is, unless he happened to
see a similar story occur. During the summer of nine
that year, a team of experienced oil drillers took a
shuttle into space to put Alexander's idea to the test.
(08:36):
Except instead of drilling into the Moon, they drilled into
an asteroid the size of Texas that was headed straight
for the Earth. It took some doing, but the miners
managed to blow up the asteroid before it reached the
atmosphere using a nuclear bomb, a global extinction event had
been avoided. Of course, this wasn't a real event. It
was the action movie Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck,
(08:59):
a film with the plot that was just as implausible
as Alexander Abian's idea, but certainly a lot more entertaining.
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.
(09:22):
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. And until next time,
stay curious. Ye
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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