When Pigs Fly

Some curiosities are serious business, while others are worth a good chuckle. Here's a matching set!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Mankey'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. Stoicism has become a popular topic today for entertainers, executives,
and people who feel out of control of their lives.
Stoicism can be an anchor to help them get through
the day. It teaches them to focus on what they

(00:48):
can directly control. But it's not a new concept. In fact,
stoicism dates all the way back to ancient Greece. When
we think of the ancient Stoic philosophers such as Marcus
Aurelius or epic Us, we imagine serious thinkers, men and
women who pondered the great questions of the universe and
wrote long treatises on how to navigate life. What we

(01:09):
don't imagine is their sense of humor, and that's because
they didn't write about it. Plato wrote a paragraph about
humor here and there, usually in the midst of discussing
another topic entirely, but he shunned laughter. He considered it,
in his words, a certain kind of evil. But not
everyone felt that way. In fact, one philosopher loved to laugh,

(01:29):
maybe a bit too much. His name was Chrysippus, born
in two se b C in a part of the
world that is now present day Turkey. But Chrysippus didn't
start out as a philosopher. You see, when he was younger,
his lean frame made him a formidable long distance runner.
Over time, he endured some hardships in life, such as
the loss of property that he inherited from his father,

(01:51):
which was claimed by the king. With little to his name,
Chrysippus moved to Athens to study under the tutelage of
Stoic philosopher Cleanthes. He be came a true student of Stoicism,
learning as much as he could and even teaching the
philosophy to himself. He became an expert, and upon Cleanthe's death,
it was Chrysippus who took his place at the head
of the Stoic school in two thirty BC. On top

(02:15):
of his ambitious educational regimen, he also wrote at least
five hundred lines of work each day Throughout his lifetime,
Chrysippus authored over seven hundred texts, never afraid to play
devil's advocates or occasionally plagiarized the works of his contemporaries. Sadly,
very little remains of his body of work. Only about
four hundred and seventy five fragments still exist, but his

(02:36):
influence on stoicism can still be felt to this day.
For example, he believed that living a happy life was
the equivalent of living a virtuous life, and that vice
led to unhappiness. And when it came to stoicism, the
buck stopped with Chrysippus. But he wasn't just all about
serious writings and debates. He also enjoyed having a good time.

(02:57):
When he was seventy three years old, for example, Chrysippus
attended the one forty three Olympiad, a four year period
where athletes competed in various games of strength and skill.
The Olympiad is where our modern Summer Olympics come from.
At some point during this Olympiad, Chrysippus caught a donkey
eating his figs. The site tickled him so much that
he broke out into a laughing fit. He shouted, now

(03:20):
give the donkey a pure wine to wash down the figs.
The laughter continued until he collapsed, still laughing, after which
he seized and began foaming at the mouth. By the
time the incident was over, Chrysippus had died. It was
believed that he had died from laughter, a strange concept,
but not entirely unfounded. In the fifth century BC, another

(03:42):
man met a similar fate. His name was Xusis, a
painter from Greece who had been working on a painting
of Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, except rather than depict her,
as most did, a beautiful young woman, he chose to
go a different route. Zusis painted Aphrodite as an old hag,
an act that caused him to break out into spontaneous,
uncontrollable laughter. Well. As with Chrysippus, Zeusis died mid laugh,

(04:07):
and those who found him believe that he had been
punished by the gods for what he had done. But
did these men really die from laughing too hard? Well,
it's possible. It's a real condition called laughter induced syncope,
and it's caused by a rapid decrease in blood pressure.
Usually the person merely passes out, but sometimes the patients
actually dies. There was even a case of laughter induced

(04:29):
syncope when a sixty two year old man died laughing
during an episode of the TV show Seinfeld. It's certainly
a scary thought that a well timed joke or a
funny story could be a case of life and death.
But I will say this, whoever coined the phrase laughter
is the best medicine probably should have consulted a doctor first.

(05:05):
The modern conveniences that we'd enjoyed today had to start somewhere. Automobiles, smartphones,
and televisions started as clunky, complicated contraptions, but have evolved
over generations in the core parts of our daily lives. However,
one technology hasn't changed much over the years because two
brothers in eighteenth century France got it right the first
time and didn't chicken out when it mattered most. Joseph

(05:28):
Michelle and Jacques Eetagnier Montgolfier were born in the seventeen forties,
five years apart. They were two of sixteen children, all
part of a family that had made its fortune manufacturing
paper since the mid fifteen hundreds. Joseph, the older of
the two brothers, had grand ideas for how his life
should go. He was an inventor at heart, but lacked
a business oriented mind. He wasn't good with money either. Jacques,

(05:51):
on the other hand, was the opposite. He was the
rational brother who had planned on becoming an architect, that
is until their oldest sibling, Raymond, passed away, forcing Jacques
to take over the paper company instead, and Jacques brought
the company into the modern age with cutting edge advancements
adapted from the Dutch, who were making serious strides in
the science of paper production. Joseph, on the other hand,

(06:12):
had his head in the clouds. Literally. When he was
thirty five, the aspiring inventor made his own parachute, which
he tested himself by jumping off the roof of his house. However,
it was clean laundry that gave him a glimpse at
what was aeronautically possible. He had been sitting in front
of a fire a fresh load of laundry strung over
the flames to dry, when he noticed how the warm

(06:33):
air filled the fabrics. Catching the hot air, they filled
and lifted like sails on a ship. Joseph believed that
the smoke was what caused them to rise specifically a
gas inside the smoke. He dubbed it the Montoulfaire gas.
The side of the cloth reminded Joseph of the stories
of Gibraltar, whose fortified city was all but impenetrable. Enemies

(06:53):
approaching could not breach a single gate nor scale its walls.
He imagined soldiers floating over head instead, attacking from above,
hoisted by the powerful force of the Mount Goulfire gas.
So Joseph set out to test his theory in seventeen
two by building a three foot tall wooden box, topping
it with a taffeta cover. He dropped a few pieces

(07:14):
of crushed up paper and set them ablaze, and watched
as the box floated upward on the heat. That was
all he needed to see. He wrote a letter to
his brother Jacques, urging him to purchase taffeta and rope
in bulk. Together, the brothers produced a similar box, but
three times as large as the first. They launched it
into the air by igniting a pile of hay and
wool that was inside the box. It drifted for some

(07:36):
time before crash, landing a mile away by June of
seventeen eighty three. Just a year later, the Mount Gulfaire
Brothers had created something special. It wasn't a box anymore,
but a balloon, a massive one made of sackcloth and
coated with paper on the inside. Despite its rudimentary construction,
the Mount Goulfire brothers version looked very similar to the

(07:58):
hot air balloons we fly today, with a globe like
shape on the top that narrowed down to a funnel
towards the bottom. In front of a group of distinguished
guests from all over France, the brothers demonstrated the balloon's
capabilities in a maiden flight that covered a range of
roughly one point two miles and reached a maximum altitude
of just over six thousand feet, and it was a

(08:20):
roaring success. Jacques started touring the country to showcase the
balloon to other cities and officials, establishing the brothers as
the Orville and Wilbur rights of their generation. But unmanned
flights were only part of the equation. What people really
wanted to see was a person piloting that balloon. After all,
the true success of the invention was in whether it

(08:40):
could transport people from one place to another, and so
in September of that year, a new balloon was unveiled.
This was made of tafata and covered in a chemical
compound called alum, which helped it withstand the fire, and
attached to the bottom was a large basket. King Louis
the sixteen, unsure of whether a living creature would survive
such a flight, suggested putting a few criminals inside it

(09:03):
to test it. The brothers, though, took a different route.
They instead loaded the balloon with a rooster, a duck,
and a sheep. Why well, to understand it, you have
to think like an eighteenth century European. The duck could
already fly, so it was chosen as a control subject,
while the rooster, which almost never flew, would be observed

(09:23):
in relation to the duck, and the sheep was selected
due to the belief that its physiology was similar to
that of a human. On September nineteen seventy three, at
the Palace of Versailles, Jacques and Joseph sent the tiny
Noah's Ark soaring into the blue. An audience of thousands
came to witness the event. As dead, King Louis and

(09:44):
the Queen Marie Antoinette. They watched the balloon take off
at reach an altitude of fifteen hundred feet. They drifted
for almost two miles before landing somewhere in the woods
eight minutes after launch. The animals were fine, although probably
traumatized by the incidents, but they paid the way for
hum in trials, which began a few months later. From there,
the sky literally was the limit. The Montgolfier brothers changed

(10:08):
the world of aviation, that much is clear, and they
did it by betting the farm on a sheep, a duck,
and a rooster. 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

(10:30):
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, and you can learn all about it
over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious.