Over a Barrel

People are always trying to push the barriers of what's possible. How those stories end, however, is always more than a little curious.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Benky'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. Niagara Falls isn't the tallest waterfall in the world.
There are roughly five others that are taller, but Niagara
stands out from all of them for a few specific reasons. First,
it turns a lot of water, with over six million

(00:50):
cubic feet going over the crest line every minute, and
with it also goes sixty tons of minerals that are
dissolved into a fine powder, giving the water it's unique
green color. Though over eight million people visit the falls
each year, it's much more than just a tourist site.
The Niagara River provides drinking water and hydro electricity to

(01:10):
over a million people in both the United States and Canada.
The falls draw many people to their majestic and breathtaking waters.
These are folks who come to admire what the Earth
has naturally created and what has endured for thousands of years.
But Niagara also attracts attention seekers who want nothing more
than to go down in history for dangerous and foolish stunts,

(01:32):
and down is exactly where many end up, including one
Charles Stevens. Stevens was born in eighteen sixty two and
he was from Bristol, England, where he worked as a
barber to support his wife Annie and their eleven children. However,
despite his steady employment and family obligations, the haircutter longed
for fame and fortune. When he wasn't in his barbershop,

(01:54):
the fifty eight year old Stevens could often be found
leaping from tall points with a parachute on his back,
or high diving into a pool of water. His nickname
the Demon Barber of Bristol, most likely due to his
dare devilish nature and not because he liked to kill
clients with straight razors or anything like that. Eventually, England
felt like small potatoes for the kind of stunts that

(02:16):
Stevens wanted to perform. He needed bigger, more exciting places
with bigger, more exciting audiences, and so in nineteen twenty
he packed his things and hopped across the pond to America,
where a new opportunity awaited him. You guessed it, Niagara Falls.
His plan was simple. Stevens was going to travel down
the Niagara River in a barrel until he reached the

(02:37):
Horseshoe Falls, where he would go over the edge and
emerge from below victorious. Of course, he wouldn't have been
the first person to accomplish this. That honor belonged to
Annie Taylor, who had performed her own version of the
stunt two decades earlier. In nineteen eleven, Bobby Leech did
it in a metal barrel of his own design. This time, however,
Stevens was going to do it his way. He would

(02:59):
travel over the fall is in a modified Russian oak barrel.
Bobby Leach tried to advise him, telling the would be
daredevil that he shouldn't attempt the drop until his barrel
design was just right. Stevens ignored him, however, believing Leech
just didn't want him to have any of the spotlight.
Leech then reached out to another performer named William Hill Senior,
who went by the nickname Red and had traversed the

(03:21):
Niagara River in a steel barrel himself. Red knew the
falls well, and encouraged Stevens to literally test the waters
with an empty version of his Russian oak barrel to
see how it would fare. The demon barber still wouldn't listen. Instead,
at eight fifteen in the morning on July eleven of
nineteen twenty, Charles Stevens loaded himself into his barrel. It

(03:42):
had been outfitted with arm straps so that he could
brace himself inside. He also tied an anvil to his
feet for better steering, and despite his protests, he agreed
to take along with him a portable oxygen tank. Forty
minutes later, after traveling down the river, the barrel went
over the edge of the falls. Bobby Leach left just
before it did, choosing not to witness the inevitable. The

(04:06):
barrel hit the water hard and sent the anvil, still
tied to Steven's feet, straight to the bottom. The barrel
had blown apart. A rescue team looked for any sign
of the daredevil, but couldn't find him. Instead, they found
one of his arm straps that had been affixed to
the inside of the barrel. How did they know that
it had belonged to Steven's because they also found his

(04:27):
arm still attached to it, burying a tattoo that read
forget me not Annie. My guess is that she never did.
It's probably safe to say that nobody who witnessed Charles
Stevens go over the falls that day would have forgotten
him either. Air travel has often been positioned as a

(04:56):
way to get people from one place to another as
quickly and as safe as possible. Of course, some people
don't see it that way. For those brave souls, airplanes
are meant for endurance. Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh made
waves for their transatlantic solo flights, and the current record
holders for the longest endurance flight traveled around the world
in nine days on a single tank of gas. But

(05:19):
one airplane had them all beat. It was designed to
spend as much time in the air as possible without
ever having to land, a feat that was seen as
a gamble, which was probably why one man decided to
try it in the first place. It started back in
the late nineteen fifties, while Bob tim was working at
the Hacienda Casino in Las Vegas. He repaired slot machines

(05:40):
during a time when the Hacienda was fairly unpopular compared
to other places on the Strip. It had positioned itself
as a family friendly resorts amid a sea of mobster
run hotels and casinos. The Hacienda lacked glitz, it lacked glamour,
and most of all, it lacked customers. There was a
reason it had earned the nickname the a Seed Heaven.

(06:01):
The owners, Judy and Doc Bailey, were often on the
hunt for new ways to drum up business, and they
were not particular about where those ideas came from. If
anyone at the Hacienda, be at the cooks or the maids,
came up with a decent plan, the Bailey's were always
ready to hear it. Tim had been a pilot in
the Army and brought an idea to Doc. What if

(06:22):
the Hacienda sponsored a record setting endurance flight. At the time,
the record was held by two former Navy pilots who
managed to stay in the air for forty six days
in Tim thought that he could do better. Bailey was
worried that the flight would be viewed unfavorably in the press,
given that it was being done on behalf of a

(06:42):
Las Vegas casino. Instead, he promised him that he would
fund the whole project. Under the condition that any money
had generated go to a cancer fund instead. Bailey even
came up with the way to let people get in
on the action. Donors could mail their checks along with
a guess as to how many days the plane could
stay airborne. The person who guessed the closest would win

(07:03):
ten thousand dollars and the hacienda would get some much
needed attention. So Tim brought on a copilot and a
mechanic and the three of them got to work modifying
Assessna one seventy two Skyhawk. The one seventy two came
as a four seat, single engine plane, but it's paltry
fuel tank only capable of carrying about forty seven gallons

(07:23):
of fuel, needed some serious help. Tim affixed a ninety
five gallon tank to the plane's belly, bringing the total
capacity to one two gallons. The men also tweaked the
engine system to allow for midair oil and filter changes
as necessary. They then removed much of the interior to
reduce weight and install the platform on one side that
allowed the copilot better access to the gas tank when refueling.

(07:47):
In fact, the refueling process was the trickiest part of
the whole plan. It had to be done while the
plane was still in the air. Landing was out of
the question, so the men rigged up a hook attached
to a rope that they could lower to a gas
truck driving below. Someone would attach a hose to the hook,
which was then winched up to the plane so that
the co pilot could fill it. The hook was also

(08:09):
used to bring up other things like food and a
change of oil. The two pilots had basically built a
flying treehouse. Unfortunately, their first few attempts to stay in
the air were met with turbulence, The engine suffered exhaust problems,
the men got on each other's nerves, and constant mechanical
issues meant the Cessna could only stay in the air
for a handful of days at a time. Meanwhile, to

(08:32):
other pilots, Jim Hef and Bill Burkhardt had made news
by keeping their Cessna airborne for fifty days, breaking the
original record by four days. Tim and his crew made
a few more modifications to the plane, and the co
pilot was replaced with a man named John Wayne Cook,
thirty three year old pilot and mechanic, not a bad
combination to have on a long haul flight. One year

(08:55):
had passed since Tim had started on the project. Finally,
on December four, nineteen fifty eight, the Cessna took off
from mccaren field, just across the way from the Hacienda.
Meals for the pilots were made at the hotel each
day by the cooks there. The food had to be
chopped into small pieces, though, and poured into thermoss before
being sent up to the plane. When the men had

(09:16):
to go to the bathroom, they relied on a portable
travel toilets and plastic bags, which were then dropped over
the Nevada Desert. The plane also featured a sink so
men could shave and brush their teeth. They bathed outside
the plane, standing on the refueling platform and washing themselves
with the bottle of water. Tim and Cook didn't fly
across the country or even around the world. Their test

(09:39):
was not of distance but of length, so they spent
their time over Nevada close to home. By the time
they finally landed on February seven of nineteen fifty nine,
sixty four days later, they had clocked over one hundred
fifty thousand miles, performed one d twenty eight mid air refuelings,
and broken the endurance record set months earlier. Today, the

(09:59):
hus Cienda Resort and casino is long gone, but the
plane that put it on the map is still around,
on display at Harry Read International Airport in Nevada. It
used to be called McCarron International Airport, and before that
it was just known as McCarron Field, the same runway
that launched two pilots in straight into the record books.

(10:24):
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 show,

(10:46):
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.