June 11, 2019 • 10 mins
Today's tour is all about time. Some wish they could go back and change their past, while others never give up on making their dreams come true no matter how late in the game it may be.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
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. We all have regrets
(00:29):
something we said or did that we wish we could
go back and change. If only there was a way
to travel back to that point in time and fix
what we messed up. Unfortunately, there's no trash powered DeLorean
or flying phone booth that can help us with our mistakes.
Time traveling is one of those concepts relegated to summer
blockbusters and classic novels. But what if there was something else,
(00:53):
Not a way to travel through time, but to see
it like a television one could tune in any period
and get a glimpse of the way things were. In short,
what if someone built a window into the past. A
fictional version of such a device was written about by
sci fi author T. L Shared in his seven story
(01:14):
E for Effort. In it, the main character Ed sees
a silent film depicting the conquest of the Aztec Empire
by Hernan Cortez. It's incredible, with acting and sets that
looked just like the real thing, except for one thing.
That event took place in fifteen nineteen, almost four hundred
years before the birth of the movie camera. Ed learns
(01:37):
that the person who made the film he was watching
has invented a special time viewer capable of recording the past.
Ed and the inventor's greed gets the better of them,
and they are eventually taken into custody by the U. S. Government.
I won't spoil the end, but the heroes don't fare
too well. That said, the device was not always the
(01:58):
fictional maguffin of a creative author. Back in the nineteen fifties,
a device called the Chronovisor was being developed by a
team of scientists backed by an unlikely organization, the Vatican.
Like the novel's literary device, the Chronovisor would allow viewers
to see historical events on a television screen and even
(02:18):
captured them in photographs. Allegedly, the screen was so powerful
it had the ability to see the future as well.
The team was led by an Italian priest named Father
Pellegrino Maria Ornetti. Assisting him in the endeavor were two others,
Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and an actual rocket scientist. This
(02:39):
project was no joke, at least not according to the Vatican.
Ernetti had gotten the idea for his time TV not
from a science fiction novel, but from listening to Gregorian
Chance at a university in Milan. He and another priest,
father Augustino Gamelli, were engrossed in the performance when a single,
clear voice ing out above all the others. It was
(03:02):
that of father Gamelli's own father, who had long since
passed away. Ernetti believed that the voice was not a ghost,
but a moment from the past that had been preserved
in time and was waiting for the right frequency to
be discovered again. He and the other scientists working on
the chronovisor allegedly managed to build a working model, but
(03:22):
the whole project went underground for twenty years until Italian
newspapers got wind of it again. They printed articles poking
fun at Hernetti's silly little machine, which he not only
claimed existed but worked as advertised. He told the papers
he'd seen Napoleon Bonaparte, performances of lost plays by Roman poets,
(03:43):
the Fall of Sodom and Go Mora, and perhaps the
most historical event of all time, Christ's Crucifixion. When asked
to provide a demonstration as proof, Ornettie objected. He said
he couldn't since he had destroyed the Chronovisor out of
fear it would be used for evil. The Vatican never
admitted to having funded the creation of the device, but
(04:04):
they did state that anyone caught using anything like that
would be excommunicated. But don't let that fool you into
thinking Ernettie was some sort of fraud ster. He was
respected within the church as a scholar and a clergyman,
a man who was able to combine his scientific curiosity
with his faith to a great success. He had already
performed comprehensive research on religious music and the acoustics of
(04:27):
churches and cathedrals before he ever started working on a
time viewer. Ernettie passed away in swearing with his dying
breath that the Chronovisor was real and it did work,
and he might have been right. One theoretical physicist from
the University of Connecticut has spent his life trying to
build a time machine in order to reunite with his
(04:48):
late father. He claims it's possible, and though he hasn't
been successful yet, he's certain someone somewhere will eventually build one,
or maybe they already have of far off in the
distant future. If so, we'll never know it, but to
those watching, it will most likely be an instant classic.
(05:22):
Some athletes become legends for a reason. Olympic gold medalist
Usain Bolt is widely considered to be the fastest man alive.
Tennis icon Serena Williams is the winner of twenty three
major singles titles, an Open Era record, and Jim Thorpe
born in eight seven, was the first Native American to
win a gold medal for the United States when he
(05:43):
competed in the nineteen twelve Olympics. He's also considered the
greatest athletes of the first half of the twentieth century.
They poured their lives into their passions. Their hard work
and determination earned them worldwide fame. Children look up to them,
aspiring Olympians idolize them. However, not all legends are born
(06:04):
out of sweat and gold. Some don't work as hard
as the others. Some stumble onto the pages of history
without doing anything at all. Frank Hayes was born in
Brooklyn in one year after Jim Thorpe, and he got
his start working around horses. He tried his hand at
jockey to no success, so eventually became a stable hand
(06:27):
for a local horse breeder. Work was work, after all,
and he wasn't about to look a gift horse in
the mouth. Frank's boss saw potential in him, though, but
not as a jockey. Instead, he wanted Frank to train
his thoroughbreds to race, and Frank was a natural. Despite
never winning a race of his own, he went on
to train several champion steeds, earning him respect from all
(06:49):
over the sport of horse racing. Still, Frank never forgot
about his first passion. He was a jockey at heart,
and he dreamed of the day when he would once
again mount up and ride one of his trained horses
to victory, and that day eventually arrived. In June of nineteen,
he had been training a particular horse named sweet Kiss
(07:12):
for a steeple chase at New York's Belmont Park. A
steeple chase is different from a regular horse race in
that it involves jumping over obstacles such as fences and ditches. Unfortunately,
with the event only days away, Frank found that riders
were in short supply, of course, he was only too
happy to volunteer his services for the event and hopefully
(07:34):
the horse's owner would agree. The owner, however, didn't want
him to compete, claiming his weight would slow the horse down.
But time was running out and there were no other jockeys.
If sweet Kiss was going to compete at Belmont, they
had to rely on Frank to do the job. He
went on a severe diet to lose the weight needed
to qualify, and on the day of the race, Frank
(07:56):
Hayes got his wish. He was thrilled, of course, finally
someone had taken a chance on the thirty five year
old stableman and he wasn't going to throw it away.
Even the other jockeys could see how excited he was
to compete. It didn't matter that the odds were stacked
against him literally too. At twenty to one, Frank climbed
(08:16):
a top Sweet Kiss at the starting line and waited
for the signal. The starter waved the flag and the
race was begun. Frank and Sweet Kiss took off like
a rocket, jumping over hurdles around two miles of track,
leaving the other horses in the dust. As they pulled
into the final turn. It was just the two of
them galloping toward the finished line. Frank hunkered down, leaning
(08:38):
into Sweet Kiss, the wind whipping overhead. The audience roared.
They stood to watch the underdogs, this horse and it's jockey,
who hadn't a chance of winning minutes before, about to
win the competition. They crossed the finished line to deafening cheers,
and Sweet Kiss gradually slowed to a stop. Over another
hundred yards, Frank Hayes had won his first race after
(09:02):
years of staying off the track. The horse's owners and
the people in the stands all ran down to meet
him to congratulate him for what he had accomplished. The
place was a buzz with the joyful chaos of celebration,
but as they got closer, it was clear something had
gone wrong. Frank fell off the horse and landed face
down in the dirt. Almost immediately, Doctor John Vorhees, the
(09:26):
track physician, hurried over to see what had happened, and
the news he delivered to the others was bad. Apparently
Frank's excitement got the better of him during the race.
He had suffered a heart attack, but somehow managed to
hold on. By the time the horse finally crossed the
finish line. Frank was nothing more than cargo hitchen a
(09:47):
ride on its back. It's ironic. I know Frank Hays
had wanted to be a jockey his entire life, but
in the end he turned out to be nothing more
then dead weight. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(10:08):
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
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
(10:30):
next time, stay curious.
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. We all have regrets
(00:29):
something we said or did that we wish we could
go back and change. If only there was a way
to travel back to that point in time and fix
what we messed up. Unfortunately, there's no trash powered DeLorean
or flying phone booth that can help us with our mistakes.
Time traveling is one of those concepts relegated to summer
blockbusters and classic novels. But what if there was something else,
(00:53):
Not a way to travel through time, but to see
it like a television one could tune in any period
and get a glimpse of the way things were. In short,
what if someone built a window into the past. A
fictional version of such a device was written about by
sci fi author T. L Shared in his seven story
(01:14):
E for Effort. In it, the main character Ed sees
a silent film depicting the conquest of the Aztec Empire
by Hernan Cortez. It's incredible, with acting and sets that
looked just like the real thing, except for one thing.
That event took place in fifteen nineteen, almost four hundred
years before the birth of the movie camera. Ed learns
(01:37):
that the person who made the film he was watching
has invented a special time viewer capable of recording the past.
Ed and the inventor's greed gets the better of them,
and they are eventually taken into custody by the U. S. Government.
I won't spoil the end, but the heroes don't fare
too well. That said, the device was not always the
(01:58):
fictional maguffin of a creative author. Back in the nineteen fifties,
a device called the Chronovisor was being developed by a
team of scientists backed by an unlikely organization, the Vatican.
Like the novel's literary device, the Chronovisor would allow viewers
to see historical events on a television screen and even
(02:18):
captured them in photographs. Allegedly, the screen was so powerful
it had the ability to see the future as well.
The team was led by an Italian priest named Father
Pellegrino Maria Ornetti. Assisting him in the endeavor were two others,
Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and an actual rocket scientist. This
(02:39):
project was no joke, at least not according to the Vatican.
Ernetti had gotten the idea for his time TV not
from a science fiction novel, but from listening to Gregorian
Chance at a university in Milan. He and another priest,
father Augustino Gamelli, were engrossed in the performance when a single,
clear voice ing out above all the others. It was
(03:02):
that of father Gamelli's own father, who had long since
passed away. Ernetti believed that the voice was not a ghost,
but a moment from the past that had been preserved
in time and was waiting for the right frequency to
be discovered again. He and the other scientists working on
the chronovisor allegedly managed to build a working model, but
(03:22):
the whole project went underground for twenty years until Italian
newspapers got wind of it again. They printed articles poking
fun at Hernetti's silly little machine, which he not only
claimed existed but worked as advertised. He told the papers
he'd seen Napoleon Bonaparte, performances of lost plays by Roman poets,
(03:43):
the Fall of Sodom and Go Mora, and perhaps the
most historical event of all time, Christ's Crucifixion. When asked
to provide a demonstration as proof, Ornettie objected. He said
he couldn't since he had destroyed the Chronovisor out of
fear it would be used for evil. The Vatican never
admitted to having funded the creation of the device, but
(04:04):
they did state that anyone caught using anything like that
would be excommunicated. But don't let that fool you into
thinking Ernettie was some sort of fraud ster. He was
respected within the church as a scholar and a clergyman,
a man who was able to combine his scientific curiosity
with his faith to a great success. He had already
performed comprehensive research on religious music and the acoustics of
(04:27):
churches and cathedrals before he ever started working on a
time viewer. Ernettie passed away in swearing with his dying
breath that the Chronovisor was real and it did work,
and he might have been right. One theoretical physicist from
the University of Connecticut has spent his life trying to
build a time machine in order to reunite with his
(04:48):
late father. He claims it's possible, and though he hasn't
been successful yet, he's certain someone somewhere will eventually build one,
or maybe they already have of far off in the
distant future. If so, we'll never know it, but to
those watching, it will most likely be an instant classic.
(05:22):
Some athletes become legends for a reason. Olympic gold medalist
Usain Bolt is widely considered to be the fastest man alive.
Tennis icon Serena Williams is the winner of twenty three
major singles titles, an Open Era record, and Jim Thorpe
born in eight seven, was the first Native American to
win a gold medal for the United States when he
(05:43):
competed in the nineteen twelve Olympics. He's also considered the
greatest athletes of the first half of the twentieth century.
They poured their lives into their passions. Their hard work
and determination earned them worldwide fame. Children look up to them,
aspiring Olympians idolize them. However, not all legends are born
(06:04):
out of sweat and gold. Some don't work as hard
as the others. Some stumble onto the pages of history
without doing anything at all. Frank Hayes was born in
Brooklyn in one year after Jim Thorpe, and he got
his start working around horses. He tried his hand at
jockey to no success, so eventually became a stable hand
(06:27):
for a local horse breeder. Work was work, after all,
and he wasn't about to look a gift horse in
the mouth. Frank's boss saw potential in him, though, but
not as a jockey. Instead, he wanted Frank to train
his thoroughbreds to race, and Frank was a natural. Despite
never winning a race of his own, he went on
to train several champion steeds, earning him respect from all
(06:49):
over the sport of horse racing. Still, Frank never forgot
about his first passion. He was a jockey at heart,
and he dreamed of the day when he would once
again mount up and ride one of his trained horses
to victory, and that day eventually arrived. In June of nineteen,
he had been training a particular horse named sweet Kiss
(07:12):
for a steeple chase at New York's Belmont Park. A
steeple chase is different from a regular horse race in
that it involves jumping over obstacles such as fences and ditches. Unfortunately,
with the event only days away, Frank found that riders
were in short supply, of course, he was only too
happy to volunteer his services for the event and hopefully
(07:34):
the horse's owner would agree. The owner, however, didn't want
him to compete, claiming his weight would slow the horse down.
But time was running out and there were no other jockeys.
If sweet Kiss was going to compete at Belmont, they
had to rely on Frank to do the job. He
went on a severe diet to lose the weight needed
to qualify, and on the day of the race, Frank
(07:56):
Hayes got his wish. He was thrilled, of course, finally
someone had taken a chance on the thirty five year
old stableman and he wasn't going to throw it away.
Even the other jockeys could see how excited he was
to compete. It didn't matter that the odds were stacked
against him literally too. At twenty to one, Frank climbed
(08:16):
a top Sweet Kiss at the starting line and waited
for the signal. The starter waved the flag and the
race was begun. Frank and Sweet Kiss took off like
a rocket, jumping over hurdles around two miles of track,
leaving the other horses in the dust. As they pulled
into the final turn. It was just the two of
them galloping toward the finished line. Frank hunkered down, leaning
(08:38):
into Sweet Kiss, the wind whipping overhead. The audience roared.
They stood to watch the underdogs, this horse and it's jockey,
who hadn't a chance of winning minutes before, about to
win the competition. They crossed the finished line to deafening cheers,
and Sweet Kiss gradually slowed to a stop. Over another
hundred yards, Frank Hayes had won his first race after
(09:02):
years of staying off the track. The horse's owners and
the people in the stands all ran down to meet
him to congratulate him for what he had accomplished. The
place was a buzz with the joyful chaos of celebration,
but as they got closer, it was clear something had
gone wrong. Frank fell off the horse and landed face
down in the dirt. Almost immediately, Doctor John Vorhees, the
(09:26):
track physician, hurried over to see what had happened, and
the news he delivered to the others was bad. Apparently
Frank's excitement got the better of him during the race.
He had suffered a heart attack, but somehow managed to
hold on. By the time the horse finally crossed the
finish line. Frank was nothing more than cargo hitchen a
(09:47):
ride on its back. It's ironic. I know Frank Hays
had wanted to be a jockey his entire life, but
in the end he turned out to be nothing more
then dead weight. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
(10:08):
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
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
(10:30):
next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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