Sky Fall

Today’s tour through the Cabinet offers a good variety: a tale of mystery, and a tale of achievement. Both of them, though, leave us with the same sense of wonder—perfect for the Cabinet of Curiosities.

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Episode Transcript

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. Listen, pay attention, tune your

(00:31):
ear to the world around you, and you'll hear music everywhere.
In the rhythm of a footstep on its hile floor,
or in the chime of an elevator in the lobby,
a baby's cry, a squeaky break, anything can become a
song with a keen ear and a little imagination. A
stonemason from Keswick, England, possessed such an ear, and it

(00:54):
took him quite far. In eighteen forty, Joseph Richardson had
been wandering around near a mountain five miles from his
home when he struck one of the rocks along the
mountain side. Surprisingly, it rang out with a clear, crisp tone,
and it gave Joseph an idea. He took the rock
home and stored it away. It had been the first

(01:15):
step in a journey that would take him thirteen years
to complete. He returned to the mountain over the course
of those thirteen years, over and over again. In search
of more rocks, known as horn fells. Just like the first,
he hit each one to hear its tone, and he
did this until he had amassed over sixty of them.
His goal was to compile them into a musical instrument

(01:36):
known as a lithophone. Now, the lithophone wasn't too different
from a xylophone. It consisted of carefully assembled tiers of
rocks arranged like piano keys. When struck, each rock elicited
a specific tone on the musical scale. His first lithophone
had too small, arranged to play most songs of the time,

(01:57):
but a second version was so large it could reach
eight octaves, and Joseph was obsessed with building the instrument,
spending most of his time and money on its construction.
The effort nearly bankrupted his family, but don't worry, he
had a plan to earn it all back. With a
special set of mallets and his children by his side,

(02:17):
Joseph took his lithophone on a European tour. He and
his sons toured Germany, France, Italy and other European countries,
playing for all kinds of crowds. Audiences were in awe
of the unique sound of his lithophone. The concerts proved
so successful, in fact, that the Richardson's didn't return home
for three years. He even performed for the Queen at

(02:38):
Buckingham Palace. The papers reported that his Stones sounded like
the warble of a lark at its upper register, and
like the bellowing toll of a funeral bell at the
lower end. Others described the music as haunting. It sounded
like a relic from an ancient era, not a modern
musical instrument. As Joseph traveled and put war into are

(03:00):
on his creation, he modified it with steel bars for reinforcements.
He also added bells and other pieces to produce additional
sounds during performances. However, all that travel had exacted a
heavy toll on his children too. They'd grown tired, and
his youngest son had caught pneumonia. On the night before
a plan trip to America. The boy passed away. Grief

(03:22):
was too much for Joseph and his two other children,
and so they ended the tour, and that was the
end of the Richardson family band. It's not known whether
Joseph ever performed with the Stones again after that, but
we do know that they stayed in the family. In
nineteen seventeen, more than sixty years after Joseph's death, his
great grandson donated the lithophone to the Keswick Museum and

(03:45):
Art Gallery in his hometown, where it still resides today.
Its sound has been recorded and converted digitally too, so
today's musicians can incorporate its ethereal notes into their modern compositions.
Joseph Richardson can tributed to the world of music in
a powerful way over the course of thirteen years. He
built his influence one stone at a time, with blood,

(04:08):
sweat and a lot of tears, and even though the
record books might not agree, one might say he also
had a pretty big claim to fame. After all, he
did create the world's first rock band. Plane crash survivors

(04:34):
have told incredible stories of the fear they overcame when
facing what they thought was certain death. A man who
had been on a US Airways flight that crashed in
two thousand nine discussed reading the emergency instructions while his
plane was nose diving over water. A woman on a
small chartered flight in found herself lost in the congo

(04:55):
when the pilot lost control over a mountain range. She
made it out of the wreckage, but eventually lost her
legs to frostbite. We have their stories to help us
understand what it's like to be part of an experience
that most people do not survive. But what happens when
those stories can't be told. I'm not talking about a
lack of survivors. I'm talking about a lack of any

(05:17):
evidence at all. What do you do when you know
there's been a crash but there's no proof. It's hard
to imagine such a thing happening. A large metal aircraft
falling from the sky, the sound of the impact, an explosion,
the smell of burning fuel. There would be pieces of
the plane left over, or a crater, or down trees.

(05:39):
And yet despite eyewitness reports of airplanes disappearing into wooded
areas or over the ocean, there's no proof they ever happened.
And the planes often seen are vintage models from the
nineteen thirties and forties, usually aircraft used for bombings or
personnel transport. For example, in the spring of nineteen Tony

(06:00):
Ingle from Derbyshire, England, watched as a large airplane with
enormous propellers silently fell into an open field where sheep
had been grazing Tony hurried to the site, expecting death
and destruction, hoping someone had radioed for help that would
soon be on its way, but no help came. It
wasn't needed. The sheep were still there, safely eating, without

(06:21):
any trace of a crash. No smoke, no fire, and
no plane. And that wasn't the only phantom crash seen
over Derbyshire. One year earlier, the local police received hundreds
of frantic calls about a World War Two bomber gliding
at a dangerously low altitude. Many observers thought that it
was moments away from crashing, so the authorities dispatched a

(06:43):
full search team to hunt for the wreck, only to
find nothing. The plane had just disappeared. Even as recently
as two thousand eighteen, Derbyshire citizens took the social media
with claims of another ghost plane cruising low overhead. Some
had peg the vessel as a Douglas Dakota, a transport
model that had crashed in the area during the war.

(07:05):
It moved without making a sound, an impossible feat for
something so large being powered by four giant propellers. It
should come as no surprise that Derbyshire, England was an
unfortunate victim of the Second World War. Having been subjected
to countless bombings and attacks, much of the area was
reduced to rubble. In fact, an old oak tree in

(07:26):
the northeast Derbyshire town of Duckmanton is honored every year
for taking a direct hit from a German parachute bomb
in The bomb had been meant for the local railway station,
but instead hit the tree, sparing not only the station
but also hundreds of lives and a nearby school. That
doesn't explain why phantom airplanes continue to plague the townspeople there, though,

(07:48):
and Derbyshire isn't the only place where they've been seen.
A loud roar startled the people of Berkshire, just west
of London on the evening of October two thousand eleven.
They ran to their win knows and into the street
to check on the commotion. When they looked up, there
was a commercial airliner streaking past them, headed for a
nearby wooded area. The Civil Aviation Authority reported no distress

(08:12):
calls that night from any passenger aircraft. The woods were
also a dead end if the plane was real and
hadn't made a hard landing or resulted in a crash,
it's simply vanished in the end. Perhaps we shouldn't be
asking where these planes come from or where they go
when they vanish. Instead, maybe we should be asking ourselves

(08:35):
a better question. If a plane falls in the woods
and it doesn't leave a trace, was it ever really
there at all? Either way, I'd call that curious. I
hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about

(08:57):
the show by visiting Curiosities podcast asked dot com. The
show was created by me Aaron Mankey 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.