Sticky Fingers

Things are lifted on this tour of the Cabinet. The outcome, however, is more than curious.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio
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 of Curiosities. It's

(00:36):
one of the most coveted substances on Earth. It's responsible
for five hundred and fifteen million dollars worth of one
country's gross domestic product and has been the target of
several illegal operations over the years. It's completely natural and
widely available, and yet its production and distribution have been
controlled by a single cartel since the nineteen sixties. This

(00:59):
dark discus liquid is trafficked all over the world in barrels,
and between two eleven and two twelve, over nine thousand,
five hundred of those barrels went missing, resulting in one
of the biggest heists in history. It all started hundreds
of years ago when the indigenous people of Canada's Eastern
woodlands harvested this substance for themselves, cooking with it and

(01:21):
boiling it down for long term storage. Eventually European colonists
from France arrived and found out what they were doing.
They learned how to extract it for themselves and studied
their preservation techniques, and unsurprisingly, they soon pushed the indigenous
people out and built a whole industry around the product
to make themselves rich. Then, in nineteen sixty six, a

(01:42):
group of individual producers from Quebec got together and came
up with a plan. They would combine their efforts to
market and sell this lucrative merchandise, thereby creating a cartel
or federation, and it would control pricing and distribution for
the next sixty years. Several years ago, a single barrel
cost over thirteen hundred dollars, that's twenty six times more

(02:05):
than the cost of a barrel of crude oil, and
people paid those prices because what the cartel was selling
was pure. Knockoffs were found everywhere but couldn't compare to
the experience of consuming the real thing. But a tightly
controlled industry, as it often does, soon leads to the
creation of a black market, a place to pedal discount

(02:25):
product and convincing fakes when people can't or just don't
want to pay full price. Around twenty twelve, a worker
for the cartel was in a storage warehouse when he
noticed that something was a miss. His job was to
take yearly inventory of the reserves, climbing up mountains of
barrels filled with the liquid gold that kept the cartel
at the top of the economic food chain. Except this

(02:49):
time there was something wrong. He got to the top
and felt one of the barrels. It moved, but it
shouldn't have. When filled, each barrel should have weighed over
six hundred pounds, but this time it weighed almost nothing.
He knocked it down and listened as it led out
a hollow sound. Upon hitting the floor, he opened it
up to find it empty. So was the next barrel

(03:11):
and the one after that. Some were even filled with
water to throw cartel employees off. Hundreds of people were
brought in for questioning, and after a brief investigation, two
things came to light. First, over twelve percent of the
cartel's reserve had been stolen, and secondly, the operation had
been an inside job. Whoever had taken the product had

(03:33):
managed to get out of Quebec and into places like
New Brunswick and even the United States. They'd passed it
off in small batches to sellers who had no idea
where it came from. So how had the thieves done it?
While they'd snuck the barrels out on trucks to a
facility where they were drained of their precious contents and
refilled with water. The water filled barrels were then replaced

(03:54):
in the warehouse, and the cartel had been none the wiser,
Although after some time the thieves stopped putting water in
them all together and simply left the barrels in the warehouse.
And that decision to cut corners is what brought about
their downfall in the end. So the cartail got the
cops involved, who managed to track down the criminals using
good old fashioned police work. They interviewed sellers, employees and

(04:17):
anyone else who might have had access to either the
warehouse or the goods inside. In the end, seventeen people
were arrested, Some paid fines while others went to jail.
But what was so valuable in those barrels that people
went to such lengths to steal it? It wasn't oil,
and it wasn't drugs. It was one of Canada's biggest exports,

(04:37):
maple syrup Canada. You see is responsible for seventy five
percent of the global maple syrup market, so it's no
surprise that certain unscrupulous parties wanted a taste of that sweet,
sweet money. It's been said that the way to a
man's heart is through his stomach. Well that may be true,
but in Canada it's also the way to his wallet.

(05:12):
When someone is tilting at windmills, it means that they're
looking at a problem that's not very important. It's a
common idiom that comes from the story of Don Quixote,
published in the early sixteen hundreds by Miguel de Cervantes,
about a so called knights with delusions of grandeur, and
in one particular scene, don Quixote goes up against a
group of windmills, which he perceives as enormous knights on

(05:34):
the attack. But they aren't knights. They're just windmills. They
aren't really a problem, although one man did happen to
tilt at actual windmills much later on, and in the
process he helped revolutionize air travel. His name was Juan
de la Sierva born in Mercia, Spain in eighteen ninety five.
Wand came from money and would spend his allowance on

(05:54):
aircraft related items. He and his friends once pulled their
funds together to buy the wreckage of a crashed They
took the parts and managed to build a plane of
their own. They even used an old wooden countertop to
make the propeller. One went on to study civil engineering
in college. It was a degree that he channeled into
a project that he would eventually become known for, a

(06:15):
safe way to fly at low speeds. He started it
in nineteen twelve, developing all sorts of models with different
types of motors and propeller systems. In nineteen nineteen, though,
he realized a rotor based design was the way to go,
and to help him achieve liftoff, he looked to windmills.
Juan had been in the audience for a production of

(06:35):
Don Quixote when the inspiration struck. As he watched the
windmills turn on stage, their blades rotating on their own,
it hit him he had to use an auto rotating
rotor in his aircraft. A normal helicopter rotor would have
been powered by a motor, but an auto rotating version
used the air passing around the blades to turn them,

(06:55):
keeping the vessel in the sky. He called his creation
an autogyro, and Juan's autogyro used a standard propeller for
thrust while the rotor managed lift and descent. But it
was a long road to success. Early versions of the
autogyro had trouble achieving liftoff and he was forced to
modify the vessel's design a number of times. But after

(07:17):
the rotor was finalized and a special flap was installed
to address a lift related issue, he managed to get airborne.
The autogyros made in flight took place in nineteen twenty
three at Spain's Haitafie Aerodrome, and it was just the beginning.
He continued to develop the autogyro throughout the nineteen twenties,
even showing it off to the Air Ministry for the
United Kingdom for potential use by the Royal Air Force,

(07:39):
and they loved it. Jan moved his operations to the UK,
where he founded the Sierva Autogyro Company Limited. His company
made rotors, while more seasoned aircraft manufacturers made the frames
that they were installed within. So what exactly was an autogyro.
It was an aircraft similar to a helicopter, though the
early Sierrava models looked more like lanes with chopper blades

(08:01):
whirrying overhead. As they became more advanced in the nineteen
fifties and sixties, the autogyros or gyro planes were made smaller,
with some only carrying one or two people. Looking at
an autogyro today, one might believe it to be dangerous,
maybe more dangerous than a regular plane, but not one.
He trusted his designs implicitly. In fact, he probably should

(08:22):
have flown one when he traveled to Amsterdam in December
of nineteen thirty six. On the morning of the ninth
of that month, he boarded a Douglas DC two, a
large twin engine liner able to hold fourteen passengers plus crew.
Visibility was low that day due to heavy fog, but
at ten thirty am the pilot was given the all clear.
The DC two took off into the nebulous gray skies,

(08:44):
hoping things would become clearer on the other side. Yet
it never made it. Shortly after takeoff, the plane collided
with a house and exploded, killing fifteen of the seventeen
people on board one included, but his legacy lives on today.
Autogyros are still flown by the military and law enforcement agencies.
All over the world. A German couple even piloted several

(09:07):
between two thousand and nine and two ten as they
used them to fly around the globe. But perhaps the
most well known autogyro was made by Ken Wallace in
nineteen sixty one. Wallace was a former wing commander with
the Royal Air Force and designed his aircraft to hold
just the pilot. It was immortalized on screen in nineteen
sixty seven when Sean Connery jumped into the cockpit as

(09:28):
British Superspy James Bond in the film You Only Lived Twice.
Ron de la Sierva is responsible for one hundred and
eleven years of aviation history, a history that still persists today,
all because one man had a problem and he decided
to spend a little extra time tilting at windmills to

(09:49):
solve it. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts.
Learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Manke in partnership
with How Stuff Works. I make another award winning show

(10:11):
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.